Trump

Hunger has a funny way of concentrating the attention.

The cost of food and cutbacks in the provision of food for those who need it have been drivers of mass protest throughout much of history:

• One of the events initiating the French Revolution was the Women’s March on Versailles, which began among women in the marketplaces of Paris protesting the high price and scarcity of bread. Their demonstrations quickly became intertwined with the activities of those who were seeking an end to autocracy and had just issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
• The 2008 Egyptian general strike over rising food costs provided inspiration for the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak three years later.
• In 2022 in Sri Lanka, rising food prices among other grievances led to protests that culminated in the overthrow of the ruling regime.

Recent months have seen the emergence of a powerful movement-based opposition to President Donald Trump and MAGA, manifested in the 7 million participants in No Kings Day and the unprecedented on-the-ground opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and National Guard occupations of American cities. At the same time, the price of food for Americans of every class has soared: A survey this summer by the Associated Press and NORC found the cost of groceries has become a major source of stress for just over half of all Americans—outpacing rent, healthcare, and student debt.

What are sometimes belittled as “pocketbook issues” like the cost of food, housing, and medical care have become critical issues for a majority of Americans. So far, the hundreds of millions suffering from inflated prices have not found a way to organize themselves and fight back. Nor has the movement-based opposition taken up their cause. But a rarely remembered consumer boycott half a century ago indicates how such self-organization against high food prices might emerge.

“America’s Largest Protest”

Ann Giordano, 33, described herself as “just a housewife.” She recalled that she was never particularly conscious of food prices; her Staten Island kitchen didn’t have enough shelf space for her to buy in large quantities. But one day when she had put the groceries away there was still space left on the shelf. She vaguely wondered if she had left a bag of food at the store. Next time she came home from shopping, she looked in her wallet and concluded that she had accidentally left a $20 bill behind. When she went back to the supermarket and found out how much her food really cost, she suddenly realized where the shelf space had come from and where the money had gone.

It was early spring in 1973. Inflation was rising, food prices were soaring, and millions of shoppers nationwide were having similar experiences. Mrs. Giordano called some of her friends and discussed the idea of a consumer boycott—an idea that was springing up simultaneously in many places around the country in response to rising food prices. Soon a substantial network of women was calling homes all over Staten Island, spreading word of the boycott. They called a meeting at a local bowling alley to which over one hundred people came on two days’ notice. They named themselves JET-STOP (Joint Effort to Stop These Outrageous Prices) and elected captains for each district. Within a week they had covered the island with leaflets. picketed the major stores, and laid the basis for a highly effective boycott.

Mrs. Giordano and her friends were typical of those who gave birth to the 1973 consumer meat boycott, “a movement which started in a hundred different places all at once and that’s not led by anyone.” As a newspaper account described it:

The boycott is being organized principally at the grassroots level rather than by any overall committee or national leadership. It is made up mainly of groups of tenants in apartment buildings, neighbors who shop at the same markets in small towns, block associations, and—perhaps most typical—groups of women who meet every morning over coffee. All have been spurred into action by the common desire to bring food prices back to what they consider a manageable level.

The 1973 consumer meat boycott was undoubtedly the largest mass protest in American history. A Gallup poll taken at the end of the boycott found that over 25% of all consumers—representing families with 50 million members—had participated in it. Large retail and wholesale distributors reported their meat sales down by one-half to two-thirds. The boycott was strongest among what the press referred to as “middle income” families—those with incomes around the then-national average of $10,000 to $12,000 a year. It represented, in the words of one reporter, “an awareness that, for a whole new class of Americans like themselves, push has finally come to shove.”

In low-income neighborhoods, sales fell less during the boycott, largely because, as retailers pointed out, the residents, who couldn’t afford much meat at any time, had been cutting back for weeks due to high prices. As one Harlem merchant said, “How much can these people tighten their belts when they don’t have too much under their belts in the first place?”

Some advocates of the boycott made the dubious argument that it would bring meat prices down by reducing the demand for meat. Most participants, however, saw the movement as a protest, a way of communicating to politicians and others what they felt about the rising cost of living.

President Richard Nixon responded by putting a freeze on meat prices, but his move was met by scorn among many boycotters, who felt that prices were already far too high (“They locked the barn door after the cow went through the roof,” commented one housewife).

“We Ain’t Buying It!”

The meat boycott did not prove to be an effective tactic for combating high prices. Lacking a further strategy for meeting its participants’ needs and failing to hook up with the other mass insurgencies of the time, the movement soon lost momentum. Participants stopped coordinating their activity and returned to more individual strategies. But it did show the tremendous capacity of ordinary people to organize themselves on a massive national scale around issues of mutual concern—in this case the price of food.

Recent months have seen the emergence of the consumer boycott as a powerful vehicle for combating the Trump regime and undermining its “pillars of support.” Today’s boycotts are far more effectively targeted on specific institutions and realizable demands. For example, when the “Tesla Takedown” challenged Elon Musk’s role demolishing federal agencies and jobs, sales plunged and company stocks fell 13% in three months. A boycott campaign against Target initiated in January by the local Black community in Minneapolis over its reversal of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies has now cut sharply into its sales, helping lead to its stock falling 33%, a $20 billion loss in shareholder value, and replacement of its CEO. When Disney took late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air over comments he made following the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, the Working Families Party helped put together a toolkit that explained how to cancel a Disney subscription. The Wall Street Journal reported that customers ditched Disney+ and Hulu at double the normal rates in September. Disney brought Kimmel back within days, and Hulu soon followed suit.

The 1973 meat boycott illustrates the way what are sometimes dismissed as “pocketbook issues” can be drivers of self-organization and massive outpourings of public discontent.

Today’s boycotts are also much better aligned with other forces. For example, in the days following Thanksgiving, major organizations that had backed the millions-strong national No Kings and MayDay2025 days of action, including Indivisible, 50501, and MayDayStrong, swung behind the boycotts of Target, Amazon, Home Depot, and other major corporations. Some national coordination was provided by a group that called itself “We Ain’t Buying It.”

This action is taking direct aim at Target, for caving to this administration’s biased attacks on DEI; Home Depot, for allowing and colluding with ICE to kidnap our neighbors on their properties; and Amazon, for funding this administration to secure their own corporate tax cuts.

These groups and many others are backing the boycott in support of striking Starbuck’s workers under the slogan, “No contract, no coffee!”

Like the Tesla Takedowns, these boycotts are coordinated with and often spearheaded by demonstrations and other forms of direct action at physical locations. And they are finding ways to stimulate other forms of pressure on their targets: The Amazon protest group Athenaforall, for example, is encouraging local groups to demand an end to local contracts with Amazon, permission for Amazon expansions, and public subsidies for Amazon.

Today’s boycott actions are better targeted and better allied than the 1973 meat boycott, but so far, they have not drawn in much of the population that is directly harmed by Trump and his corporate backers. The 1973 meat boycott shows that pocketbook issues, such as inflation and most notably food prices, can be a basis for self-organization and action beyond the electoral arena among the wide swath of people they affect.

The 1973 meat boycott illustrates the way what are sometimes dismissed as “pocketbook issues” can be drivers of self-organization and massive outpourings of public discontent. Such examples from the past are unlikely to provide us the specific programs or tactics we need to meet today’s food crises. But they do demonstrate the power that people can mobilize when they are driven by food deprivation.

Food Facts

The US currently has two overlapping food crises. One is the elimination of food programs for the poor. According to the Center for American Progress:

Project 2025 and the Republican Study Committee budget envisioned a transformative dismantling of federal nutrition assistance programs. In January, the Trump administration chaotically froze federal funding, leaving farmers reeling and nonprofits serving the needy worrying about steady access to support from SNAP and Meals on Wheels. In March, the administration cut more than $1 billion of funding from two programs that supply schools and food banks with food from local farms and ranches. These cuts affected schoolchildren and small farmers in all 50 states.

Despite the end of the government shutdown, millions face cutoff of food assistance right now. The GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed earlier this year, cuts SNAP by roughly 20%. The cuts may affect people in every state. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the addition of new work requirements alone will cause 2.4 million people to lose benefits in an average month.

There is also another food crisis that affects everyone—poor and less poor—the fast-rising cost of food.

As you may have noticed, the price of food in American supermarkets has soared. As surveys indicate, the cost of groceries has become a major source of stress for American consumers.

Many consumers compare food prices now to five years ago. According to the Department of Agriculture, five years ago the average cost of groceries for a family of two working adults and two children ranged between $613 and $1,500 per month. In 2025, such a family is spending between $1,000 and $1,600 per month at the grocery store.

Food prices have continued rising through Trump’s presidency. In September 2025, banana prices were up 7% from a year before, ground beef had risen 13%, and roasted coffee rose 19%, according to the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) data available. (At that point the Trump administration stopped releasing CPI data—perhaps on the theory that no news is good news, or that what you don’t know won’t starve you.) As of September, the average cost of a pound of ground beef was $6.30, according to Federal Reserve data—the highest since the Department of Labor started tracking beef prices in the 1980s and 65% higher than in late 2019. The average retail price of ground roast coffee reached a record high of $9.14 per pound in September, more than twice the price in December 2019 when a pound of ground coffee cost just over $4.

Discontent over inflation was a principal cause of Trump’s 2024 election victory. It was also a principal cause of the Republican rout in 2025. But there is little public confidence that either Democrats or Republicans will rectify it. And neither has much in the way of a program to fix it—beyond each blaming the other.

The Fight for Food

In the 1973 meat boycott, households with 50 million members found a way to protest high food prices without waiting for elections. Today, the hundreds of millions of victims of exorbitant food prices may be enraged, but they have not yet found a way to organize themselves and fight back. Nor has the movement-based opposition that has challenged Trump’s galloping autocracy yet found a way to address food and other affordability issues. Food deprivation presents an opportunity for the movement to defend society against Trump’s depredations to bring a new front—and a new constituency—into that struggle.

While food inflation has multiple causes, our current food crises are in considerable part a result of actions by Trump and MAGA’s would-be autocracy. For example, Trump’s tariffs, a significant cause of rising food prices, represent an unconstitutional usurpation of the exclusive authority of the legislative branch to levy taxes. The violent attacks by ICE on immigrant workers—especially on farm workers—have driven workers from the fields, leading to farm labor shortages and rising food prices. And of course the cuts in SNAP and other food support programs make food immensely more expensive for tens of millions of people. While long-term solutions to food prices and food security will require major reforms in agricultural and other policies, reversing Trump’s tariff, anti-immigrant, and anti-SNAP policies could help a lot right now.

The anti-autocracy movement has the opportunity to raise the issues of food and other consumer prices as a fundamental part of the way MAGA autocracy is hurting ordinary people. The message can be: The destruction of democracy is hurting you. This can open a way to the convergence of “pocketbook” concerns and the “No Kings” struggle for democracy. The movement-based opposition can serve as an ally to help people organize themselves and fight for themselves—as households with 50 million members did in the 1973 meat boycott.

While food inflation has multiple causes, our current food crises are in considerable part a result of actions by Trump and MAGA’s would-be autocracy.

The 1973 meat boycott grew out of the daily life conditions of millions of people; mass response to today’s food crises will similarly depend on the experiences, feelings, reflections, discussions, and above all experimental action of those suffering their consequences. But one of the limits on the meat boycott’s success was the difficulty it had formulating concrete demands and a program which could actually realize its objectives. Today, there are proposals “in the wind” to bring down food prices that are well worth discussing and testing. They include:

End all tariffs on food: Trump’s tariffs contribute significantly to the high cost of meat, coffee, bananas, and other groceries—tariffs on Brazilian beef imports are more than 75%, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Whatever the Supreme Court decides about current challenges to the constitutionality of Trump’s tariff programs, he will almost certainly try to continue his tariff powers using different legal justifications—and the impact on consumers will continue. Yet his recent reduction of some tariffs on food shows how politically vulnerable he is on this issue—and indicates that pressure could force even more reductions.

The Yale Budget Lab recently estimated that tariffs will cost households almost $2,400 a year. In a recent poll, three-quarters said their regular monthly household costs have increased by at least $100 a month from last year. Respondents identified the tariffs as the second biggest threat to the economy. Only 22% supported Trump’s tariffs. A demand to end all tariffs on food might win quick and massive support—and find allies among the public officials and corporate leaders who are turning against Trump’s tariffs. Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada recently introduced the No Tariffs on Groceries Act, saying, “Donald Trump lied to the American people when he promised to bring prices down ‘on day one.’ His reckless tariffs have done the opposite, raising grocery costs and making it harder for hardworking families to put food on the table.”

Restore all food programs: The hunger-producing cuts in nutrition programs like SNAP are immensely unpopular. In October, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, of all people, introduced two bills to reinstate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and critical farm programs during the government shutdown. Despite the end of the government shutdown, cuts in SNAP and other nutrition programs are burgeoning. A campaign to cancel all cuts in all food programs would have wide popular support and could be spearheaded by those who have lost or will lose their benefits. Legislation to do so was introduced in Congress in late November.

Provide free school meals: Free school lunch programs represent a widely accepted form of support for all families—without demeaning means tests. In Colorado voters just passed statewide ballot measures which would raise $95 million annually for school meals by limiting deductions for high income taxpayers. The measures will support Healthy School Meals for All, a state program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their family’s income level. Excess receipts can be used to compensate for the loss of federal SNAP funds. Nine states and many cities already provide free meals for all students. Such programs can directly reduce the money families have to pay for food.

Expand SNAP to all who need it: A proposal by food insecurity expert Craig Gunderson would provide SNAP benefits to all those with incomes up to 400% of the poverty line. If benefits were also expanded by roughly 25%, it would reduce food insecurity by more than 98% at a cost of $564.5 billion. While such a program is not likely to be instituted all at once, the demand to expand SNAP eligibility could win wide popular support and directly benefit tens of millions of people. According to Gunderson, states can and have set higher eligibility thresholds of up to 200% of the poverty line. Given the wide public outrage over the soaring wealth of the wealthy, surely a tax on high-income people to pay for such a program could win popular support.

Support community gardens, local farms, and food mutual aid: The Trump administration has eliminated two programs that provided schools and food banks $1 billion to buy food from local farms. This has directly impacted food banks, schools, and farmers by cutting off a key market for local produce and reducing the amount of fresh food available to those in need. People don’t have to wait for government programs to start growing their own food to fight hunger—in fact, they are doing so already, for example, through community gardens. But state and municipal programs can provide essential support for expanding these efforts.

Open public grocery stores: New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has proposed a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, rather than on making a profit. They would buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.

“Don’t Starve—Fight”

Historically it has often been hard to find the levers of power to affect food prices. The 1973 meat boycott was powerful enough to bring about token action by President Richard Nixon. But it was unable to parlay participation by families with 50 million members into an effective way to reduce food prices. Around the world food riots have often been more successful in bringing down governments than in bringing down the price of food.

Targeted boycotts have recently proved effective where they could seriously affect a powerful target—witness the Tesla Takedown causing Elon Musk to withdraw from his DOGE disaster and Disney’s rapid rehiring of Jimmy Kimmel. Targets might include food companies that have supported Trump.

Today’s boycotts are highly effective at generating new and creative tactics: Consider the anti-ICE activists in Los Angeles, Charlotte, and elsewhere who swelled long lines to buy 17-cent ice scrapers, then again swelled long lines to return them—to send a message to Home Depot “to scrape ICE out of their stores.”

A movement against the failure to bring down high food prices could be a natural ally for the emerging movement to defend society against Trump and MAGA.

Boycotts are only one vehicle that could be used for food protests. Local demonstrations and “hunger marches” can be vehicles for dramatizing the issue and mobilizing people around it. Food banks, unions, churches, and other local institutions are in a strong position to initiate such actions. There is no way to know in advance what actions will achieve traction, but that is a good reason to start “testing the waters.”

Under public pressure, many states are stepping up to replace SNAP funding to compensate for federal cuts. A special session of the New Mexico legislature, for example, authorized $20 million weekly to provide state nutrition assistance benefits to the 460,000 New Mexicans who rely on SNAP.

But states will only be able to fill in for the federal government for a limited period of time. The New Mexico program, for example, only provides funding through the week of January, 19, 2026. At some point, even Republican governors and legislators may well begin demanding “re-federalization” of food programs.

Such a dynamic can be seen in the federalization of relief in the early days of the Great Depression. The entire American establishment, led by President Herbert Hoover, abhorred the idea of federal help for the poor and hungry, maintaining it was exclusively the responsibility of local governments and charities. But “hunger strikes” and other protests, often under the slogan “Don’t Starve—Fight!” created disruption and fear of social upheaval. In response, many cities and states created emergency relief programs, but soon many of them were on the verge of bankruptcy. Once-conservative city and state leaders began trooping to Washington to ask for federal support. As Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven put it, “Driven by the protests of the masses of unemployed and the threat of financial ruin, mayors of the biggest cities of the United States, joined by business and banking leaders, had become lobbyists for the poor.”

Under such pressure, the Hoover administration developed a program of loans to states to pay for relief programs. With the coming of the New Deal, this became an enormously expanded program of federal grants. The New Deal also began to buy surplus commodities from farmers and distribute them to families with low income.

While the details are different, this basic dynamic of pressure from people to cities and states to the federal government is still relevant today. Pressure to expand local and state programs is not an alternative to federal programs, but a step to forcing their expansion.

One weakness of the 1973 meat boycott was its isolation from the other burgeoning movements of the time, including the civil rights movement; the movement against the Vietnam War; and the large-scale wave of strikes, many of them wildcats. This made it less powerful than it otherwise might have been. A food movement today would have the opportunity for powerful alliances. Like consumers, farmers are being devastated by Trump’s tariffs and would benefit from expanded food programs. Like food consumers, farmers are also being hurt by the ICE policies driving farm workers away from the fields.

Food inflation might seem to be a middle-class issue, but poor people spend a substantially higher proportion of their total income on food, so rising food prices affect them even more. In 2023, the fifth of the population with the lowest incomes spent nearly 33% of their income on food; the highest-income fifth spent barely 8%. The rising cost of food means the poor can buy even less with whatever small funds they have. So low-income and better-off food consumers are natural allies.

High food prices were an important reason for Donald Trump’s election; he promised to reduce prices on “day one” of his presidency. Spooked by rising consumer anger at high food prices, on December 6 Trump established two task forces to investigate “whether anti-competitive behavior, especially by foreign-controlled companies, increases the cost of living for Americans.” An accompanying fact sheet stated, “President Trump is fighting every day to reverse Biden’s inflation crisis and bring down sky-high grocery prices—and he will not rest until every American feels the relief at the checkout line.” The task forces are instructed to report their findings to Congress within 180 days and present recommendations for congressional action within a year.

A movement against the failure to bring down high food prices could be a natural ally for the emerging movement to defend society against Trump and MAGA—what I have called “Social Self-Defense.” Conversely, the emerging movement-based opposition to Trump and MAGA has everything to gain by encouraging the development of a movement that allows millions of people to fight, not starve.

President Donald Trump's devoted MAGA loyalists aren't shy about trying to get his image into as many places as possible, from silver Trump coins to proposing that his image be added to Mt. Rushmore alongside famous images of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that America the Beautiful passes for national parks would include a Trump image. But according to SFGate report Sam Mauhay-Moore, Colorado-based watercolor artist Jenny McCarty found a way to cover Trump's face on the passes.

In an article published on December 14, Mauhay-Moore reports that McCarthy announced she is "selling stickers that cover up the controversial and allegedly illegal new designs on the front of the passes, which include Trump's face next to a painted rendering of George Washington."

"McCarty's stickers are adorned with her own artwork of landscapes and animals at various parks," Mauhay-Moore explains. "One features a pika standing at the famous Rock Cut overlook in Rocky Mountain National Park with an alpine flower in its mouth; another shows a wolf howling on the banks of the Snake River with the Teton Range looming in the background; the third is of a grizzly bear looking out over a vast expanse in Denali National Park and Preserve."

According to Mauhay-Moore, more than 100 orders for the stickers were placed during a two-day period — which McCarty wasn't expecting.

McCarty told SFGate, "I'm definitely surprised, and we're a small business. So it is going to be a lot of volunteer hours dedicated to packaging everybody’s order, but it's all for a good cause…. So worst-case scenario, you could remove your parks pass and show that it hasn't been altered in any way, but it covers up the image that people maybe don’t want to see."

Read Sam Mauhay-Moore's full article for SFGate at this link.

Trump gave what was billed as a “Christmas speech” in rural Pennsylvania this past week that began with his “wishing each and every one of you a very merry Christmas, happy New Year, all of that stuff” and boasting that now, under his presidency, “everybody’s saying ‘merry Christmas’ again.”

Then he claimed — contrary to the experience of nearly everyone in the crowd — that he had gotten them “lower prices” and “bigger paychecks.” And asserted that anyone having difficulty making ends meet should just cut back on buying stuff. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils … Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two,” he said, adding, “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.”

It’s rich — Trump preaching austerity while raking in billions from his crypto investments and bribes: a luxury jetliner from Qatar, gold bar from Apple, wealth from the Saudis, gold Rolex clock from Switzerland, and so much more.

“The only thing that is truly going up big, it’s called the stock market and your 401(k)s,” Trump continued, apparently unaware that 92 percent of the stock market is owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans while most Americans own no stock at all. (Just over a third have even a 401(k), 403(b), 503(b) or Thrift Savings Plan.)

He was supposed to talk about affordability, but Trump’s malignant narcissistic brain seemed incapable of the minimal empathy needed to understand the public’s angst over the cost of living. So he veered off affordability to attack Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar, ridicule windmills, mock transgender people, and call Joe Biden a son of a bitch.

Small wonder that most voters have had it with Trump. Even the MAGA faithful are starting to have second thoughts.

In Miami this week, voters delivered the mayor’s office to a Democrat for the first time in nearly 30 years and rebuffed the Republican candidate, whom Trump endorsed — by a whopping 59 percent to 41 percent. Miami’s new mayor-elect, Eileen Higgins, said the city is “at the tip of the spear” of affordability concerns in America.

In Indiana this week, Republican senators rejected a redistricting plan that Trump had tried to bully them into accepting. He threatened to primary legislators who didn’t go along and even whipped up supporters to pressure them — including so-called swatting of their homes (hoax reports to provoke a police response) and death threats.

It didn’t work. Twenty-one senators from the Republican majority in the Indiana Senate and all 10 Senate Democrats voted it down.

Even congressional Republicans are starting to desert him as they see that the wannabe emperor has no clothes: His ability to hurt or help them in next year’s midterms is rapidly diminishing.

They’ve rejected his demand to end the filibuster, rebuked his incipient health care plan, forced him to cave on the Epstein files, won’t approve his bonkers $2,000 tariff checks for Americans, want more say over his boat strikes off the coasts of Central and South America, and are in open rebellion against his handpicked speaker of the House.

Trump won’t steal Christmas, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Christmas will steal Trump.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Donald Trump went out to give a rally for the first time in months, speaking this week in a swing district in Pennsylvania. The White House hyped it to be a speech on affordability, but he instead attacked “affordability” as a “hoax” and veered into his usual viciously racist attacks.

Democrats couldn’t wish for a better scenario.

Trump is reminding everyone, every day, that his presidency is a disaster. And Tuesday after Tuesday, in elections all across the country, people have been responding by voting against him and the GOP. This past Tuesday Eileen Higgins became the first Democrat to win the Miami’ mayor’s race in 28 years.

She won by 19 points, while Kamala Harris won Miami only by a point in 2024, as Trump made inroad with Latinos, who make up a majority of registered voters in Miami. The Republican on the ticket is Latino himself, former city manager Emilio González, and was endorsed by Trump. But Trump’s support has crashed in the Latino community, driven by his economic chaos and his mass deportations.

Trump, who said in the Pennsylvania speech that “tariff” is his favorite word, just keeps giving people reasons to vote against him even if they previously supported him.

And as he stumbles, he’s bringing more attention to his mental decline and his physical health. The media haven’t nearly covered Trump’s health in the way they covered President Biden’s mental and physical competency.

But not to worry, Trump will remind you of it himself. He’s the one who blurted out on Air Force One that he’d had an MRI in his second physical in the summer, claiming it all was great. But that just raised a thousand questions, as no one gets an MRI as a routine screening. The speculation hasn’t died down, even as the White House has put out further very vague information. And it raises more questions about his swollen angles and bruised hands, which are there for all to see.

When The New York Times finally did a story on how Trump has slowed down, not doing rallies on the road and not having many events inside the White House—and raised his health—Trump went ballistic. He could have just let it be, but no, he had to write a massive Truth Social post that accused the paper of being “seditious” and “treasonous” because no one should be question Dear Leader.

Those are his favorite lines of attack, which only once again highlight his aspirations to be a dictator or a king. It’s outrageous and dangerous, but it also is yet another example of Trump bringing attention to the very thing he doesn’t want anyone paying attention to. We always hear about Trump trying to distract—and that’s true—but he also has a habit of making sure everyone’s laser-focused the thing he’s most afraid of. The rest of the media covered it for the next day, and the Times responded, getting more attention to the issue.

Trump couldn’t resist though because being seen as frail and weak is horrifying to him—and that’s because it’s true. For all the reasons I’ve written here about in recent weeks, Republicans are pushing back on him as MAGA is cracking up. So he can’t help but go on the attack, but then only brings more attention to the story rather than distracting from it.

And that’s what happened with his “affordability” speech, as he only underscored that he doesn’t understand the issue, couldn’t care less about people’s pain and has actually caused that pain with his tariffs.

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said in an interview a few days ago that they’d be putting Trump on the road in mega-rallies next year—though Trump, who seems exhausted, hasn’t been told yet.

“I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again,” Wiles told The Mom VIEW, a MAGA show produced by the group Moms for America.

Then she literally said they’re going to “put him on the ballot” in the midterm elections for Congress all across the country:

Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House; you localize the election. And you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot.

Bring it on! Again, Democrats could not ask for more.

President Donald Trump's MAGA movement might still seem strong on the surface, as former Republican columnist David French explained on Thursday, it's actually "bleeding numbers" and "pulling apart at the seams" if you look deeper, and there are two key reasons why.

French is a former attorney and National Review commentator who currently works as a columnist for The New York Times. On Thursday, he appeared on The Bulwark Podcast to discuss one of his most recent pieces about the dissolution of the MAGA movement, titled "This Is What It Looks Like When Your Coalition Is Coming Apart at the Seams."

During the discussion with host Tim Miller, French explained that Trump's political movement is falling apart despite the occasional appearance of success, as evidenced by recent blowout Democratic election wins. To explain this, he cited two reasons behind the dwindling voter support for the GOP: Trump's exit from the ballot and changing perceptions of Democrats.

"The thing that has kept the Republicans together... was really two things," French explained. "One was a shared affection for Trump. I mean, nobody should say that virtually any Republican now is holding their nose to vote for Trump. Very, very few... So even the core normie Republicans like Donald Trump. So they had a shared affection for Trump, and [secondly] they had a shared antipathy against the left, specifically sort of the view that the Democratic party was far, far left."

He continued, explaining that Trump no longer being on the ballot going forward and the increasing radicalisation of Republican politicians relative to Democrats are the key changes causing the MAGA coalition to be "bleeding numbers."

"Well, two things are happening at once here," French said. "One is Trump's not on the ballot anymore. So that shared affection for Trump is not holding the coalition together as much. And then number two, the Democratic Party isn't the same party as it was in 2020, and the Republican Party is getting more extreme. And so the Democratic party has been moderating as the Republican party has been radicalising. And so a lot of that means that normie Republicans are now facing worse treatment and more vicious treatment from MAGA Republicans than they've ever experienced from Democrats.

"And while you still have a coalition that's hanging together, you can see it's bleeding numbers. My goodness. I mean, did you see some of these election results from earlier this week? Just remarkable. And so I think what has happened is while a lot of the Republican disunity has been obscured by the continued affection of partisan Republicans for Trump, you go one layer below that, just one layer, and the whole thing is starting to pull apart at the seams. This coalition is not a stable coalition of people."

Although Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election wasn't the "landslide" he claims it was — he won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — it showed how resilient he is as a politician. Trump was facing four criminal indictments at the time, yet he not only won the popular vote for the first time — he also made gains among Latinos, Generation Z, tech bros, swing voters and independents.

Now ten and one-half months into his second presidency, Trump is being dogged by low approval ratings. And the economy — especially inflation — is a key factor, according to polls.

During an appearance on The New Republic's "The Daily Blast" podcast, The Bulwark's Will Saletan argued that the more Trump trashes the gains he made in 2024, the more unhinged he becomes.

Saletan told host Greg Sargent, "There's now a lot of numbers to back up the thesis that the shift of ethnic minorities, of Blacks and Latinos in particular, to Donald Trump in 2024 has reversed. In the exit polls, which we have in New Jersey and Virginia from last month, you can just see massive shifts…. Compared to 2024 in Virginia, Blacks and Latinos shifted 13 and 15 points. So 15 points, a little bit under for the two groups, towards the Democrats away from Trump. So that's in the 2025 gubernatorial election in Virginia versus the 2024 presidential in that same state."

Saletan continued, "In New Jersey, it was twice that. It was a 24-point shift among Latinos, 28-point shift among Blacks — again, away from Trump in the New Jersey governor’s race."

Saletan noted that "Republican candidates down the ballot are paying the price" for Trump's flawed messaging on the economy. And the more Trump talks about the economy, the Bulwark journalist stressed, the worst things become for his party.

Saletan told Sargent, "I watch everything this guy says. I know that's insane and masochistic. I watch everything he says; I have notes on it. I can't count the number of times that he has said.... since he's been back in power, that prices are coming down, that he's bringing prices down. Specifically, things like groceries. I mean, you don't have to look farther than the Consumer Price Index and the all-government reports on grocery prices to know that that's just BS, right? But he lies about the numbers. And then, the problem is Americans, of course, who actually go to grocery stores and buy things, are like, 'Actually, that doesn't seem to be true.' So they think things are getting worse."

Listen to the full podcast at this link or read the transcript here.

President Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP doesn’t appear to extend to Indiana, if Thursday’s events are any indication, writes CNN’s Aaron Black in a Friday column.

That evening, the Indiana Senate, where Republicans hold a dominant majority, rejected Trump’s push to force a mid-decade redrawing of the state’s congressional map that would have eliminated its two Democratic-held seats.

Trump seems to recognize the looming danger of the 2026 midterm elections for Republicans. Rather than promoting policies that appeal to most voters, he has leaned on GOP-led states to engineer maps that disenfranchise Democratic voters. However, Indiana Republicans refused to go along with the plan, despite an intense pressure campaign and threats of primary challenges from Trump allies.

Blake wrote that Trump “chose very wrongly” and that his effort to reassert his “dominance over his party” backfired.

"In the end, the situation in Indiana demonstrated quite the opposite of what Trump intended. Indeed, the state Senate’s rejection of his redistricting push wound up being one of the most significant GOP rebukes of Trump to date, and at a particularly inauspicious time for him," Blake said.

The good part, Blake wrote, is that Trump's hold over the GOP "appears weaker than at virtually any other point in his two presidencies. Not weak, period, but weaker."

Blake said it wasn’t just that Trump lost; the vote “didn’t wind up even being close.” Indeed, the measure failed 31–19. Trump couldn’t even win over a majority of Republican senators, with 21 GOP members voting against him.

This came despite an all-out effort: the vice president made two trips to Indiana, Trump’s son visited, and House Speaker Mike Johnson weighed in, but none of it moved enough votes.

"Perhaps most significantly, all this pressure manifested itself in a very ugly series of threats – threats that touched around one-fourth of state Senate Republicans, that we know of. (Law enforcement officials have not linked the threats to any group or campaign)," Blake added.

The vote ended with Republican state Sen. Michael Young, who supported the redistricting measure, saying he expects most of his colleagues would no longer be in office in the future.

“And that takes courage to give up your seat," he said.

"And for Trump, it’s merely the latest signal that his grip on his party is softening," Blake closed.

Read the full column here.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump claimed to have pardoned an ally serving a prison sentence related to his efforts to contest the 2020 election results, in a move Colorado Democrats called "meaningless" due to his lack of authority. Now, her lawyer has backed the use of military forces to help get his client out of prison, per a report from The Independent.

Tina Peters, 70, is a former Colorado election official currently serving out a 9-year prison sentence on state-level charges, having been convicted by a Mesa County jury in August 2024. Peters was found guilty of facilitating a security breach after she let prominent election denier and MyPillow salesman, Mike Lindell, enter a secure room and download data containing Colorado's 2020 election results, as part of his effort to find evidence of fraud and contest Joe Biden's defeat of Trump.

Following a series of federal pardons and dropped cases, Peters is now the only person serving prison time for actions related to Trump's denial of the 2020 election results. Despite Trump claiming to have pardoned her this week, the president is only capable of commuting federal charges, and Colorado officials have dismissed the possibility of releasing Peters from custody at his command. Appearing on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, agreed with Bannon's assertion that Trump should dispatch the 101st Airborne Division to free Peters from prison.

“Do I think it should be done? For who I am, yeah – I’d love to see that happen," Ticktin said.

Ticktin had previously issued pleas for Trump to pardon his client, despite the president lacking the necessary authority. In response to the earlier pleas, Phil Weiser, the Democratic Attorney General for Colorado, said any attempt by Trump to pardon Peters “will not hold up.”

“One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government,” Weiser said.

Shad Murib, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, also said that Trump “has no legal authority” to facilitate Peters' release from prison, and called the notion of a pardon from him "meaningless."

“We’re not surprised by President Trump shouting into the wind and issuing a meaningless pardon for his friend and fellow election denier Tina Peters,” Murib said.

Though some state governors lack complete pardon powers for state-level charges, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, does have complete pardon power, and has not indicated that he has any intention to pardon Peters.

As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.

The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.

In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.

China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.

These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.

“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.

Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.

African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”

The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.

But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.

In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/2025-trump-climate-change-paris-agreement-china/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org