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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's handpicked board of trustees voted on Thursday to add Trump's name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, while allegedly muting the objections of Democratic members of the board and likely in violation of federal law that named the Kennedy Center by statute.

Democratic lawmakers reacted to the news with disgust and dismissal, telling Raw Story the rename will not stick and will be reversed swiftly when they retake power in Washington.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had one of the most forceful reactions, speculating MAGA allies will eventually try to rebrand the White House.

"Well, I mean, he appointed all the sycophants to the board," she said. "So I mean, they're going to name the White House — they're going to try to name the White House after him before we're done with this, and then we're going to take the White House back and we're going to fix it all. Enjoy having two years of that."

Asked for comment, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) mockingly claimed that the Longworth House Office Building will have his name added to it because he says so.

Boyle added, "Everything's about him, the plaques that he actually put up, plaques with his, with his nonsense" — a reference to a series of juvenile plaques installed below various former presidents' pictures written by Trump himself.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) took a similar position to Ocasio-Cortez.

"An infinite ego. You know, I mean, I just, it makes Stalin look humble. The board that he handpicked, it's embarrassing and, and it won't last very long."

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders’ refusal to consider extending Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end is weird, according to at least one senior GOP senator, after the issue erupted and fueled high drama in the House this week.

“It's just strange,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, told congressional reporters.

“We had the vote last week, and … now the House passed [its own measure], and we're going to have a vote, and of course, that’s not going to go anywhere.

“There could have been a one-year extension. Maybe there was a chance to have enough votes … we need 60 votes here. I want to vote on something that can actually pass, and I don't know why that's not our plan.”

No one really knows what Republicans’ plan is — other than to craft a plan.

While swing-state Republicans have been freaking out — especially the four endangered moderates who crossed Speaker Mike Johnson when they formally crossed party lines Wednesday — GOP leaders have, basically, shrugged off widespread fears of Obamacare subsidies expiring on New Years, leaving millions of Americans bracing for brutal rate hikes.

Most Republicans remain unmoved, even after Democrats have successfully raised alarm bells about the unaffordable rate hikes for months, including by using the issue as fuel for the longest government shutdown in history.

Just last week, the GOP-led Senate failed to pass dueling health-care bills. In response to a Democratic measure to extend COVID-era insurance subsidies another three years, rank-and-file Republicans cobbled together a last-minute measure aimed at promoting health savings accounts over Obamacare exchanges.

Both failed by a vote of 51-48 in the chamber where 60 votes are needed to pass most bills.

Then the four moderate House Republicans dramatically crossed the aisle, joining a Democratic-led discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic measure that would extend subsidies for three years.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY) , Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) were the members who chose to cross Speaker Johnson, underlining the Louisianan’s lack of control of his party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring health-care credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.

“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected ... Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”

The Democratic proposal will now get a vote in the new year — but only after subsidies lapse.

Observers noted that in July, three of the four Republican rebels voted for the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the GOP budget measure which contained massive cuts to spending on Medicaid, another key health-care resource for millions of Americans. Fitzpatrick said no then too.

This week, the picture grew more confusing still, as a separate House GOP health bill passed.

Seen as barely even a bandaid, as it doesn’t address the expiring subsidies, it has no chance of gaining 60 votes in the Senate, according to South Dakota Sen. Rounds.

‘24 million people’

Gridlock aside, it seems most everyone on Capitol Hill loves a bit of political drama — even at the end of a year of relentless chaos.

“This is huge,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) marveled to Raw Story after learning that a fourth Republican had signed off on the discharge petition.

“This is, like, huge for my district.”

The member of the progressive “Squad” of lawmakers was far from alone.

“I think it's a big victory, and it's a victory for the American people,” former House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story.

“We need to pass that, put it over in the Senate and see whether they have the courage to do what's right.”

Securing a House vote does nothing to dislodge Republicans on the other side of the Capitol, though.

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune is insulated from House rules, including on discharge petitions.

There are Senate Republicans who like their moderate House colleagues fear the electoral repercussions of failing to extend subsidies, but nowhere near enough to buck leaders and secure an extension.

Still, with the 2026 midterms just around the corner, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) and other Democrats are celebrating the four Republican moderates’ decision to buck Speaker Johnson and force a vote on extending health insurance subsidies.

Like Sen. Rounds, Ivey also marveled at the larger GOP’s continued opposition to helping so many Americans, however dire their need.

Despite “24 million people” facing a financial cliff when ACA subsidies expire, Ivey told Raw Story, “Republican leaders weren't listening to that.

“I don't know what they were listening to. I just don't understand what they're doing, and in the Senate they’re saying they’re not going to move something forward anyway.

“So I'm like, ‘Worst of all possible worlds, from a Republican standpoint.’

“We hit 218 so we got the votes to move [the discharge petition], but they don't want to bring it to the floor, and then the Senate Republicans want to block it. It's crazy.”

Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.

There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.

Wednesday night’s speech demonstrated it. He didn’t need to trash-talk Joe Biden, or try to claim that the country was “dead” when he came into office, or exaggerate his accomplishments, or lie about the state of things. None of that was necessary.

He didn’t need to put depreciating comments under the pictures of prior presidents in the White House, or replace Joe Biden’s picture with a autopen.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength.

These are the kind of things junior high school boys do. And not even most junior high school boys; just the really dysfunctional ones. The bullies. The ones who are desperate to be part of the in crowd, but always on the outside looking in. The ones no one wants as friends.

This man is sick. And he’s inflicting his sickness on our country. And he’s surrounded himself with sick people, or at least with people willing to tolerate his mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness.

As well as people who share his sickness: There’s also clearly something wrong with man-children like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kash Patel.

With these men, it goes beyond the normal sellout type of person willing to do anything for wealth and power, the kind of behavior we see in people like Pam Bondi or the administration members who’ll swear that the 2020 election was stolen.

There’s a deep cruelty combined with a pathological insecurity and a level of hate and intolerance for others that’s shocking. Anybody who’s ever played any sort of role in leadership is looking at this administration aghast. The leaders of the rest of the rest of the world must be in shock.

There’s a deep sickness at the head of this government. The childishness. The violence. The bloodlust that we see off the coast of Venezuela. The willingness to sanction rape and murder and land grabs in Ukraine. The enthusiasm to bring our country to the brink of war. Plastering gold-painted geegaws all over the White House.

And then Wednesday night Trump goes off for 20 minutes quite literally shouting at the country like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn. Ranting about Black Somalis. Bragging about nonexistent victories and peace deals. Just making s--- up.

No president of the United States has ever behaved this way. Probably no governor or mayor has ever gotten away with this kind of psychopathology and obscene behavior.

It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating America.

It’s setting a terrible example for our young people. Children who were just entering the early years of public school when Trump first ran based on a racist rant in 2015 are now graduating from high school thinking that this is normal.

That, in and of itself, is a disaster for their and America’s future.

And now he has an “armada” poised off the coast of Venezuela trying to provoke a war with that nation.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that he was right in the middle of it all with Jeffrey Epstein, and is now frantically trying to avoid questions about the teen modeling agency and talent show he owned back in those days.

He’s gutted America’s principal agencies of soft power, the Voice of America and USAID, strung Ukraine along for almost an entire year as their people get slaughtered, and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of naked bribes from foreign autocrats and American business leaders.

He’s deployed masked, secret police into our cities who are gleefully brutalizing brown-skinned people and anybody who tries to document their hugely unAmerican activity.

He kowtows before Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi, and embraces murderous dictators who’ve ordered the killing of an American journalist and routinely cut the heads off of their own people. He tore down the East Wing of the White House in defiance of federal and local law, history, and respect for “The People’s House.”

It’s reached the point where we’re now confronted with a hard truth: This isn’t about left versus right anymore or even politics as usual. It isn’t about tax policy or border policy or whose yard sign we prefer.

This is now about whether we’re willing to normalize sickness in power.

Whether we tell ourselves comforting stories because confronting the actual reality in front of us is frightening.

Whether we allow cruelty, lying, and instability to become the cultural baseline simply because calling it out makes dinner conversations awkward or costs us friends or clicks or donors.

Turning points in history don’t usually announce themselves with marching bands. They creep in while decent people look away, hoping the fever will break on its own.

But it never does. Fevers break only when the body fights back. Democracies survive only when citizens decide that character still matters, that truth still matters, that children deserve better examples than tantrums and threats and gold-plated vulgarity.

Silence is not neutrality: It’s consent.

If you’re reading this, you still have agency. Use it. Talk to your neighbors. Support journalists and organizations willing to tell the truth. Show up, vote, organize, refuse to laugh it off, refuse to excuse it, refuse to become numb.

Demand leaders who are adults, not bullies. Who are steady, not sick. Who see power as a responsibility, not a toy.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength. When we remember that democracy is not self-executing; it requires citizens who are awake, engaged, and unwilling to surrender their moral compass for the illusion of order.

We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to be brave enough to say: this is wrong, and we will not accept it.

The future is watching us right now, and one day our children will ask what we did when it mattered. Let’s make sure we have an answer we can live with.

The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”

And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.

Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.

The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.

Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)

Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.

Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:

“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”

The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin

“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land

Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.

All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.

As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. And America’s Founders believed it.

Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”

And we get there through voting.

This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.

But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.

“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.

With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51 percent threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Dr. Tim Roper told me:

“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic:

“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“

Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.

When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).

It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.

This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.

As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.

WASHINGTON — A rebel House Republican openly questioned top Trump administration officials on Thursday about their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files after House Democrats released dozens of new photos from Epstein's estate, amid anticipation for a Justice Department file dump on Friday.

These images included disturbing quotes from Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" written on a woman's body, alongside other unclear-context photos of Epstein and redacted women. The novel contains the theme of an adult man's obsession with a 12-year-old girl, mirroring allegations against Epstein.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Robert Garcia spoke to reporters on Thursday about the case.

"I think they will be [released]. We'll see," he said of the files expected to be released by the Justice Department on Friday. "It'll be interesting if they're not."

Fifteen days after Friday's release, the Justice Department must fork over a report to lawmakers with a list of the politicians and government officials in the files.

When asked if he thought there would be a cover-up, Massie noted that the officials appointed to review the Epstein files — namely, FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi — are not implicated in them. As such, he said there's no reason for them to be reluctant about releasing them.

"Why would they be reluctant?" he asked.

Massie warned that this is a law that "lasts forever."

"So the next attorney general will prosecute this attorney general or this FBI director if they do become involved in a cover-up by not being in compliance with this law," he said.

Massie also accused House Speaker Mike Johnson of lying about the law.

"Three federal judges cite the Transparency Act, but, more importantly, they cite that they're going to redact the victims' names, which was a lie that was told about this bill by the Speaker himself. He said that victims would be exposed by this bill… but all three judges said no, there are sufficient protections," said Massie.

When asked if Mike Johnson would remain in power long term, Massie said Johnson would remain in place as long as President Donald Trump wants him there.

"As long as he's on his good side, he's still the Speaker," said Massie.

Garcia repeated his call to reporters on Thursday to release all the files, and also put Bondi on notice.

"Let's be very clear that the Department of Justice has to release all of the files tomorrow, and I also want to remind the attorney general that she cannot use any excuse that somehow the law says that 'if there's an investigation happening, we can, you know, partially not release everything.' The subpoena that's in place, that's essentially with the law that Oversight passed, does not include that provision. They have to release everything."

Garcia threatened that Democrats will use every tool available to them, including going to the courts and taking legal action to get the files released.

"We're prepared to do that, but we're gonna see what happens tomorrow," he said.

WASHINGTON — Even as Democrats accuse the Trump administration of misleading Congress in the wake of the president’s announcement of an oil tanker blockade on Venezuela, Republicans are dismissing Democrats’ — and some Republicans’ — fears.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, one senior GOP senator went so far as to mock Democrats for speaking up.

“Poor babies,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Raw Story.

Asked if he had been surprised by Trump’s announcement on Tuesday night, as senior Democrats complain they were, Cornyn said: “Not really.

“I mean [Venezuelan oil] is the lifeline for Iran and to some extent, for China, and an outlet for Russia to continue to be able to sell oil and finance its war machine against Ukraine. So I think it's not a surprise from that standpoint.”

Cornyn is a member of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.

Raw Story said, “Your Democratic colleagues are saying they wish [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio would have focused on this yesterday, and they kind of feel deceived or misled a little bit.”

Rubio and Hegseth briefed both chambers of Congress during the day on Tuesday about controversial U.S. strikes on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea.

“Well,” Cornyn said. “I was in this briefing and [Democrats] were asking questions about the strikes. They weren't asking about” the blockade.

Raw Story suggested that was because the Democrats didn’t know the blockade was coming.

“Poor babies,” Cornyn said. “They just need to open their eyes.”

Most Democrats’ eyes have long been wide open to President Trump’s moves to secure regime change in Venezuela.

The administration has implemented boat strikes that have now killed nearly 100, while Trump’s regular statements on the matter have accompanied reports of both a major U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and CIA covert action in Venezuela itself.

Most Democrats and some Republicans maintain Trump needs congressional approval for any action against the regime in Caracas, led by the left-wing authoritarian Nicolás Maduro.

On the House side of the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Raw Story: “We heard it again from the Chief of Staff, who said that these bombings won't stop until Maduro is out” — a reference to remarks from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in a bombshell Vanity Fair profile.

After Trump’s blockade announcement, Meeks said, it was clear Venezuela was “about oil. It's not about drugs. It's about taking oil.

“You know, I'm a former special narcotics prosecutor. If you really try to stop drugs, you don't take the little guy, kill them and then pardon the top guys and don't go after them at all.”

That was a reference to Trump’s recent pardon of a former Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking.

“You try to get the little guys to get you all the information that you can so that you can go after the big guys,” Meeks said, going on to condemn the “double tap killing” of two men on a boat hit by the U.S. on Sept. 2.

The two men survived the original strike but were killed with a second missile — by most observers’ standards, a war crime or plain murder.

Hegseth has vehemently denied the strike was illegal, while shifting responsibility to a senior military commander.

Meeks and other Democrats said they were not satisfied with Rubio and Hegseth’s briefings.

“That wasn’t a classified session,” Meeks said.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), a House Intelligence Committee member, said: “No one has gotten an intel briefing. So that's what we're owed.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also lamented the absence of comprehensive briefings, telling Raw Story: “That just reflects the attitude [the Trump administration has] with Congress.

“If the Republican majority in Congress will allow it, they will continue to follow their agenda regardless.”

Among that Republican majority, not all opinions were as dismissive, or harsh, as Cornyn’s.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voiced his continuing concern about the “double tap” boat strike.

Two months after the Sept. 2 killing, Paul said, when U.S. forces “saw people in the water, they're like, ‘Oh, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't kill helpless people in the water.’ And they plucked them out. And did they prosecute them? No, they sent them back to their country.

“There's so much that's inconsistent and wrong about this. With the video, every American should be able to see it. We should continue talking about it.”

Raw Story asked Paul for his view on Trump’s surprise announcement of an oil blockade.

“I’m opposed to it,” Paul said, bluntly.

WASHINGTON — Outspoken Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised dire concerns Wednesday about the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and robotics, warning that the United States is unprepared for the economic disaster that such technologies will bring.

In comments to Raw Story, Sanders cited major tech figures such as Elon Musk in noting that industry leaders openly predict an ominous future in which traditional work becomes obsolete. According to Sanders, the U.S. faces the prospect of widespread unemployment, particularly among young people already grappling with a dearth of entry‑level jobs.

"He tells us that the concept of work itself, your job, may be obsolete. That means mass unemployment," Sanders warned. "Is Congress dealing with that issue?"

Sanders emphasized that while AI offers potential benefits, the nation must ensure that tech serves the broader public rather than a tiny group of billionaires. To that end, Sanders demanded a temporary "moratorium" on new data centers until lawmakers can figure out how to integrate AI responsibly and protect workers from economic ruin.

The senator also cast doubt on the motivations of tech elites, including Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that their priorities don't align with the needs of the working class.

He called President Donald Trump an "oligarch" who is "working with other oligarchs."

"Do you think he's staying up nights worrying about the working class of this country? I don't think so," said Sanders.

Donald Trump is ready to launch an illegitimate war against a nation that did us no harm in a cynical bid to make America love him again.

I think it’s that simple.

No, his war-mongering isn’t about the midterms. If the president cared about politics, he would act politically. He would, for instance, prevent his supporters from being immiserated by skyrocketing health insurance premiums. As it is, he allows the House speaker to suggest in front of television cameras that some Trump voters are expendable.

If Trump cared about politics, he would care about his public image – and the effect of that image on the GOP’s fortunes. He wouldn’t piss on the still-warm bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife, who seem to have been killed by their troubled son. He wouldn’t suggest that the creator of beloved films like This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me and The Princess Bride had it coming. He wouldn’t hint at wanting more of the same.

If Trump cared about politics, he would do what every single president has done in the face of economic crises. He would say something to the effect of “I get it. Things are bad right now and I’m gonna do something about it.” Lots of presidents can’t live up to their promises, or don’t bother to follow through on them, but no president in our lifetimes has said to the American people that their hardship is “a hoax” and anyway, kids don’t need that many Christmas presents.

Some say the president’s saber-rattling over Venezuela is a bid to revive his party’s chances before the midterms. Others say it’s just another distraction from issues that are dogging him (eg, “the Epstein files”). But I think the reasons are dumber. Consider Henry Enten:

"The report card is negative. Every single day since March 12, Trump has been in the red. Two hundred and twenty-eight days in a row. The bottom line is Americans don't like what Trump is doing and they haven't liked what Trump's been doing for a long period of time."

To Donald Trump, for whom “ratings” are everything, this is certainly evidence of America falling out of love with him. What can he do? Oh, America loves a war president! They are strong. They are tough. They look good on TV! If Donald Trump can become a war president, no matter how much he’s failing otherwise, America will love him again!

What we’re seeing isn’t the behavior of a politician.

It’s the behavior of a man drunk on power.

In understanding this, let’s thank Susie Wiles. Trump’s chief of staff told Vanity Fair that JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” She said Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck.” She said Russ Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And she said Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” at handling “the Epstein files.”

But her greatest unintentional insight was reserved for Trump.

He “has an alcoholic’s personality,” she said.

In characterizing him that way, Wiles brings forward the idea that there’s no higher-order thing – not morality, decency or honor – that can rival Trump’s insatiable need. In his case, it’s not a need for booze. It’s a need for power, attention, validation, and, I would suggest, love.

Everyone must love him or everyone must pay. The president might turn desperate in order to make that happen, even launching a war against a nation that did us no harm. But he won’t succeed. Drunks, or in his case dry drunks, can’t get enough. They can only hit bottom.

In threatening war to force us to love him, Donald Trump illustrates something Jen Mercieca told me. A communications and journalism professor at Texas A&M, she said autocrats “try to project strength, masculinity and virility, because they believe that those are the characteristics of strong leaders. Yet scholars who study leadership find that those autocratic ways of leading are actually weaknesses.”

That weakness could be hastening Trump’s descent to the bottom, she said. “According to recent polling, this government is very unpopular. If the elections are fair and free in 2026, we would expect to see what they called an ‘electoral purification’ in 1816. That's when the majority of Congress were kicked out for the self-dealing Compensation Act.”

A president drunk of power is in need of purification.

Here’s my conversation with Jen.

After the election, you wrote: "The fascists won temporarily, but fascism is for losers. They'll fail. They are con men and swindlers. And when they do lose, we make a real democracy. The kind they hate. Their ‘creative destruction’ will be democracy rising."

How are we doing now?

The only way forward is through it. And we're going through it. The rule of law does not constrain autocrats. Rather, they "rule by law" – using the law as a cudgel to punish enemies and outsiders.

Autocrats are not "cognitively responsible" leaders. They don't want to explain why they do things. They act first and make up reasons later.

This is the way Trump's second term has operated and so problems like the economy and affordability are only getting worse. That's the way it works when all accountability is stripped from government.

According to recent polling, this government is very unpopular. If the elections are fair and free in 2026, we would expect to see what they called an "electoral purification" in 1816. That's when the majority of Congress were kicked out for the self-dealing Compensation Act.

Before Trump returned, he presented himself rhetorically as macho. His campaign regularly featured the song "Macho Man" (without being aware, seemingly, that it's a gay anthem.) Yet now, the long macho man con is slipping. What should his opponents do with that?

It's almost cartoonish to think about what autocrats think is leadership and what actually constitutes good leadership. Autocrats try to project strength, masculinity and virility, because they believe that those are the characteristics of strong leaders. Yet scholars who study leadership find that those autocratic ways of leading are actually weaknesses. The best leaders are empathetic, inclusive and dialogic – the very opposite of the autocratic projection. Trump's opponents should hold him accountable to the rule of law, the Constitution of the US, and the basic American values of dignity, decorum and decency.

Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed to signal to QAnon believers that Trump isn't the hero of the story about the battle between good and evil. What's going on? Did Trump take believers for granted?

Trump is a lame duck, so lots of people are trying to figure out how to take over after he is out of power. Greene seems to be making a play to inherit the maga movement and it appears as though she's decided to make that play by attempting to erode Trump's base of support.

She would like to drive a wedge between Trump and his followers, which would position her for 2028 as an outsider. Essentially, Greene has argued that she knows exactly why America is still corrupt, even after Trump promised that he would end corruption. Politicians typically run on a hero narrative that argues that they are the right hero for the moment and only their election can save the nation.

In 2016, Trump argued that he had been a corrupt insider himself and because of that, only he knew how to fix corruption and make America great again. Based on recent polling, most Americans don't think that Trump has made America any greater, so it is perhaps politically expedient to separate Trump from the maga movement – though it's unclear if that movement can survive without Trump.

You have said that the public square is dominated by conspiracy theory. Everyone knows at least one person who's been indoctrinated. It's like McCarthy never died. What can we do?

Conspiracy is incredibly enticing and most of us have succumbed to conspiratorial ways of thinking. A conspiracy theory is a narrative that is "self-sealing," meaning evidence is not allowed to count against it. The narrative can never be proven, but it can also never be disproven.

Conspiracy rhetoric is like a “self-sealing” tire that has magic goo in it to prevent it from popping when you run over a nail. Conspiracy rhetoric is a “self-sealing” narrative that prevents it from popping when confronted by facts, logic or evidence. We're all vulnerable to conspiracy narratives, because believing in them makes us heroes.

We're vulnerable because of basic cognitive biases like motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. We're also vulnerable because our information environment is designed to spread conspiracy. And we're vulnerable because we've lost trust in institutions, the political process, the media and each other. We're quite vulnerable to conspiracy, which makes it a profitable way to engage in the public sphere for people who like to exploit our vulnerabilities.

America is in or on the verge of a seriously bad recession and the Trump regime is hiding the numbers — the signs are everywhere. His incoherent tariffs, massive tax breaks for billionaires, and gutting the Inflation Reduction Act are kneecapping our economy.

In response, Trump visited Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania and tried to pitch himself as a champion for the little guy, the middle class, small farmers, and working people.

Which raises the question: who do Trump and the GOP really work for?

— Vladimir Putin was furious that the Biden administration had been providing Ukraine with weapons systems, including air defense munitions and HIMARS rockets, so in March of this year Trump abruptly suspended delivery of most US military aid and Republicans in Congress never restarted it.

— American billionaires didn’t want to pay their damn taxes, so Trump and the GOP gave them trillions in new tax breaks with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill while increasing the taxes paid by the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

— After giving the Trump family gifts, trademarks, and patents, President Xi Jinping of China wanted Nvidia chips to help bring his military and AI capabilities up to where he could easily defeat a US effort to defend Taiwan, so Trump changed the rules, so Xi could get his chips and Republicans in Congress are refusing to stop him.

— Both Putin and Xi were constantly irritated by the Voice of America broadcasting truthful news and pro-democracy programming so Trump killed off the broadcasts, is shutting down the stations and transmitters, and Republicans in Congress are letting it happen.

— Massive airline monopolies hated the $200-$775 per incident that they had to pay passengers as compensation for being bumped or having flights cancelled, so Trump had his reality-star FAA head undo the rule.

— Putin and Xi hated the “soft power” America got by saving millions of lives around the world every year with anti-poverty, anti-AIDS, and famine relief programs across the Third World, so Trump killed off the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Republicans in Congress didn’t object.

— Rightwing billionaires who don’t believe they should have to pay taxes to “subsidize the little people” didn’t want Trump and Republicans to extend the taxpayer-funded subsidies of the Affordable Care Act that kept insurance rates down (House Speaker Mike Johnson called them a “boondoggle” even though they keep rates low for millions of his Louisiana constituents), so Trump and the GOP obliged by refusing to continue them.

— Saudi Arabia, massive American fossil fuel corporations, and petrostates like Russia were offended by the Paris Agreement and other United Nations and Biden efforts to phase out petroleum and mitigate climate change, so Trump and the GOP pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement and refused to attend the most recent COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil.

— The morbidly rich wanted to be able to pass their massive fortunes to their trust-fund babies without paying estate taxes, so Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a tax cut that primarily benefits the 400 richest families in America, costing our nation trillions that will be added to our debt and paid for by working-class people.

— Fossil fuel billionaires and their corporations were worried that the money Joe Biden allocated for green energy projects might cut into their future profits, so Trump and the GOP slashed trillions from them, as well as subsidies and rebates for saving energy and electric vehicles.

— Rightwing billionaire-funded media operations were offended by how NPR and PBS kept showing up their lies, so Trump and congressional Republicans cancelled federal funding for the networks. Rightwing billionaires are enthusiastically buying up as much of the American media landscape as they can.

— Billionaire Elon Musk was reportedly facing billions in regulatory costs and fines that he was able to get rid of when Trump and Republicans hired him to start and run the DOGE program that gutted our government to the benefit of Russia and China.

— Bitcoin billionaire Changpeng Zhao was serving a lengthy prison sentence for violating federal anti-money-laundering laws, but Trump pardoned him when he promoted a new stablecoin issued by a crypto firm that made billions for the Trump family.

— Giant corporations and their morbidly rich owners wanted to screw their workers so they could increase their profits, so Trump and congressional Republicans took more than 100 individual actions that cut pay, gutted union protections, and slashed benefits for workers but helped the most massive corporations.

— Big banks that make billions every year on interest from student loans hated Biden’s efforts to pay them off and reduce interest rates, so Trump and congressional Republicans rolled them back and are ending the last of the loan forgiveness programs.

Have Trump or congressional Republicans done anything of major consequence to help out average working people or small businesses in the 44 years since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?

Nope. Instead, the neoliberal Reagan Revolution has seen the American middle class go from over two-thirds of us to around 43 percent of us today, and it takes two paychecks to have the lifestyle a single one could produce in 1981. Only the morbidly rich have benefited from every GOP action during all these years. And Trump is making it all worse.

The 2026 elections are coming sooner than most realize, which is why Republican secretaries of state are vigorously purging the voting rolls in their Blue cities. Double-check your registration every month at vote.org and make sure everybody you know is informed and ready.

The Supreme Court is poised to overturn a 90-year-old decision protecting the heads of independent federal agencies from firing by the president — a move more significant in the court’s rightward march than the 2022 decision to overturn the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, alarmed legal experts tell Raw Story.

“This is the most important case of the decade,” said Seth Chandler, professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter last week, most observers predict the Court will side with President Donald Trump in his firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

That will “further unleash massive corruption by this executive branch,” said Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability and author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

‘Even more powerful’

Trump v. Slaughter revisits a 1935 case, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which concerned President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner over disagreements about New Deal policies.

The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could enact laws limiting the president’s ability to fire independent agency officials.

Now, Dec. 8 arguments in front of the current, right-wing-dominated Court made it clear there’s likely no “path for Humphrey's Executor to survive,” Chandler said.

“You're really changing the structure of government and a precept of law on which Congress has relied for 90 years and delegated immense power to these so-called independent agencies, and if these independent agencies are no longer independent, but are basically subject to loyalty tests from the president, that really changes the way that our government functions.”

Harold Krent, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, agreed that “Humphrey’s Executor is mostly dead.”

“For the most part the idea of an independent-expert-type agency will be over,” Krent said. “It's incredibly significant. It gives the president even more powerful control over these agencies.”

Along with the FTC, agencies likely to be affected are the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Krent said.

“It’s just a wide array of agencies which would almost for sure fall in the wake of the Slaughter case,” he said.

“It just means that there's more of a political edge to all agency investigations and policymaking, and so there is less of a check.”

Chandler said Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal appointed by President Barack Obama, questioned whether “Congress would ever have given so much power to the agencies if it knew that they were going to be subject to the political control of the president.”

“In a post-Humphreys Executor world where Congress felt the people who took leadership positions in these agencies were immune from political firings by the president, they were willing to grant enormous powers to these agencies and basically make them a fourth branch of government,” Chandler said.

“But, now we have half of the deal being taken away. We have that the agencies are now subject to the political desires of the president, but they still have all the power that they did originally.”

‘Out of control’

Legal experts predict that the Court will rule 6-3 in Trump’s favor in Slaughter, along ideological lines.

“I think the majority is going to say Humphrey’s Executor was very dubious when it was enacted and that the agencies look quite different from the way they were conceived,” Chandler said.

The process of weakening Humphrey’s Executor was already in motion, Chandler said, pointing to a 2020 decision, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which allows the president to remove the leader of a single-headed agency at will.

It’s likely the same logic will apply to a multi-person commission, Chandler said.

“I think they're going to say that in some sense the die has already been cast, that Humphrey's Executor has been on life support for a decade, and that it's now time to pull the plug,” Chandler said.

Humphrey’s Executor was an explicit target of Project 2025, the hard-right leadership plan from the Heritage Foundation, Graves said.

Noting that the Court had already “chipped away” at Humphrey’s Executor, Project 2025 said: “The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.”

Trump’s claim on the campaign trail that he had no involvement with Project 2025 “misled the American people grossly,” Graves said, adding that the Court has since matched Trump’s “aggression in trying to destroy long-standing rules.”

“That the Supreme Court is playing along with this and actually eagerly embracing it is a sign of how out of control and arrogant the Roberts Court is, because the easiest thing for this Court to do would be to uphold the lower courts that are following those long-standing precedents,” Graves said.

“Instead, it has sought to combine its counter-constitutional edict, giving Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution, which swept him back into the White House.

“It's been seeking to combine that ruling, giving Trump extraordinary, unprecedented and unwise powers, with a whole series of rulings through the shadow docket, and now through the primary docket, that further expand presidential power, and I would say so, expand it recklessly.”

‘Loyalty pledges’

After Trump v. Slaughter, Chandler said, he anticipates Trump will seek to extend his firing power to lower-level agency employees, because if the Supreme Court determines “the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, and you take that literally, then it's hard to see why the decision wouldn't extend all the way down the federal bureaucracy.

“President Trump has not been shy about insisting that loyalty to him, personally and to his ideas, is extraordinarily important in government … even with Humphrey's Executor on life support, so I don't see why he would show any restraint once it's killed off,” he said.

“Could he require, essentially, loyalty pledges from mid-level clerks at the NLRB? Why couldn't he insist that they're part of the executive branch and that they are just acting as his delegates, and if they're unwilling to commit to him, why should they have a job?”

Krent agreed.

“The Heritage Foundation, that's what they had recommended in terms of giving the president absolute power over all federal employees, and there is the extreme version of the unitary executive.

“I don't think the Court's going to go there in this particular case, but that's certainly within the goals of the Trump administration, and so it's something the Court may have to face at a future date.”

Graves called giving the president the power to fire independent agency heads at will “a recipe for corruption.”

“The corruption that Trump is engaged in is manifesting on a daily or weekly basis,” she said.

“The idea that the president would be controlling the decisions of the FTC, which relate to an array of matters about corporate conglomeration, as he's basically trying to orchestrate who gets control of a major swath of media, including CNN — it’s extraordinary.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, is preparing to undergo a merger with Netflix or Paramount. Trump has called for selling CNN to new owners.

‘Rampant corruption’

Commissions leading federal agencies typically have split-party representation — which could also disappear following a ruling for Trump in Slaughter, Krent said.

“This whole idea of a balanced independent agency thinking about energy policy or labor policy, banking policy, consumer relations policy, that seems to be done,” Krent said.

That would allow Trump to enact his policies, such as tariffs, as he pleases.

“If he wants to just start changing even tax policy or energy policy or labor policy, he'll be able to do it by saying, ‘This is what I want you to do, or I fire you,’” Krent said.

“It would have all sorts of ramifications across the economy.”

Congress could theoretically limit the power of agencies by defunding them, “but not in reality,” Chandler said.

“It's just something that we took for granted, that you could have, in effect, a fourth branch of government in which immense power had been vested, and when you take that away, and you say it's all subject to the president's control, and you don't undo the prior delegations of power, that is a huge deal,” Chandler said.

A ruling in Trump’s favor will give him “far more power than the founders ever anticipated,” Chandler said.

Krent said overturning Humprey’s Executor “cuts against not only history, but precedence.”

“That could lead to the end of the civil service,” he said.

Graves said: “This would be yet another instance of the Roberts Court handing Donald Trump extraordinary powers that no president should have, and the presidents before him did not.

“This would return, in some ways, the United States to a previous era, which was really disreputable, where civil service appointments … were handed out as a part of a political spoils system, which was rampant with corruption.

“That's why the modern civil service system came to be over 100 years ago, to try to make sure that we would have people serving us at all levels of federal agencies who were well-qualified for those positions and not merely supplicants to the president.”

Krent said overturning Humphrey’ Executor would lead to “increasing politicization of policymaking across the government,” to “the detriment of the American people.”

“It may mean that you're going to have less expertise in government, less political party balance in terms of how these agencies work, and ultimately, that's against the congressional design.

“Regulation and policymaking will just be infused with the president's brand of whatever is politically convenient at the moment.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke the “unvarnished truth” when he openly complained about immigrants from “sh–hole” countries, one senior U.S. House Republican told Raw Story, amid outcry over the president’s spate of racist remarks.

“Trump tells the truth,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said at the Capitol. “He tells unvarnished truth. I have no problem with what he's saying. He rallies the troops like no other.”

Asked what he thought about Trump being accused of being racist, Norman, 72, was unabashed: “People say what they want. This man has brought this country back in less than 11-and-a-half months.”

In a cabinet meeting last week, Trump, 79, attacked Somalian Americans in virulent terms, including calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive, “garbage.”

This week, in a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump attacked Omar again. He also said he had “announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.”

Answering a supporter’s shout of “sh–hole”, the president said: “I didn't say sh–hole, you did.”

But referring to a scandal from 2018, in his first term, he admitted it: “Remember I said that to the senators, they came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan.

“So they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest.’ Because our country was going to hell.

“And we had a meeting. And I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from sh–hole countries?’ Right? Why can't we have some people from Norway? Sweet and just a few. Let us have a few from Denmark, ‘Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind?’

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships.”

Rep. Derrick van Orden (R-WI) knows a thing or two about ships, having been a Navy Seal. Telling Raw Story he had lived in Africa, specifically Djibouti, he backed Trump too.

Asked to respond to Trump’s “s------- countries” remarks, Van Orden said: “Listen."

“The President of the United States is in charge of foreign policy. And the President of the United States has affected more positive changes in foreign policy than any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Reagan…

“So I have the utmost confidence in the President of the United States and [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio getting foreign policy in a way when it's a benefit to America.”

It fell to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), a former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, to provide a more conventional GOP take on Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remarks.

“It's not a good message,” McCaul said, adding that “there are some who argue, ‘Hey, we did away with all of our soft diplomatic power’” thanks to Trump’s cost-cutting as well as his frequent racist invective.

McCaul said he was “briefed by Rubio's chief of staff yesterday about things we are doing to deal with soft power in a different model paradigm.”

“Is that hard when the president’s calling them ‘s------- nations’?” Raw Story pressed.

“He said that in the first term,” McCaul answered.

“But they denied it then and now he said it publicly,” Raw Story pressed again.

Choosing not to engage, McCaul continued to talk about ways to advance U.S. soft power despite crippling cuts to foreign aid via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

‘Ignorance, racism, xenophobia’

Among Democrats, Rep. Omar lamented rising “ignorance, racism, xenophobia” and said Trump was more open in his second term about his use of racial invective because “he feels more comfortable being a racist.

“His base [is] basically raising money for a woman who gets fired for calling people the N-word. What is there more to be surprised” about?

Omar was referring to a high-profile story from Wisconsin, in which a woman employed by Cinnabon was filmed subjecting a Somali couple to brutal racist abuse.

Crystal Wilsey, 43, was fired but has since benefited from crowd-funding efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is one of the longest-serving Black members of Congress. That means that when it comes to Trump deploying racist language, he’s seen it all before.

“It's par for the course,” Thompson, 77, told Raw Story when asked about Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remark. “He lies on the regular.

“He has some kind of tendency to talk about countries and people of color … and he makes no bones about it. When he apologizes for insensitive statements, he comes right back and repeats.”

Raw Story cited a recent National Parks Service decision to drop free admission on holidays dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth, but to provide it on Trump’s birthday.

“Why are you trying to erase things that people of color have contributed to just because you disagree with them?” Thompson asked, rhetorically.

‘It’s very frightening’

Unlike Thompson, first elected in 1993, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is new to Congress, sworn in just last month.

“This can't be the new normal,” she said of Trump’s remarks. “That's what we're here for, fighting against it…

“I see it every day now, where people are openly discriminated against, people threatening their neighbors because they don’t like something that they're doing. It's very frightening.”

Proudly announcing herself as a “wife, daughter and sister of librarians,” Grijalva lamented “the dismantling of public education” through Republican attempts to ban books and change school courses to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, particularly on grounds of race.

“Generations won't hear history,” Grijalva said, “because this administration is deciding that it hurts their feelings to talk about how oppressive they [white people] were and what we did too, right? Native American, indigenous people, I mean. We have to talk about that stuff.

“I'm very afraid, and I'm a mom with three kids. So [does] this country look like the one we grew up in? Right now it doesn't.”

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know, the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.

We’re now there.

It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.

At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.

In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.

A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20 percent of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.

Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.

As the National Security Desk writes:

“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”

Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:

“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”

David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by the New Republic:

“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”

Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:

“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:

“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”

Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.

And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.

Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.

Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.

NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.

And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.

These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.

Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”

This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.

Pass it along and help wake up our country.

Donald Trump recently told reporters he’d have “no problem” releasing video of US strikes off the Venezuelan coast where two survivors clinging to the shipwreck were shown no quarter — executions that violated federal law, the US Code on War Crimes, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibiting murder.

But when asked about the video three days later, Trump denied ever agreeing to release it, claiming, “You said that, I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news,” before pivoting to “whatever Pete Hegseth decides” to release to the media will be fine with him.

It was a safe punt. The Secretary of Defense has fought media access to the Pentagon like no secretary before him. Hegseth will keep spinning his “kill everyone” strikes, his Signalgate publication of war plans, and every other military crime he can get away with until he is stopped.

Ministry of Truth

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobblehead with barely-there military credentials, fights the release of any Pentagon information that he hasn’t choreographed.

In September, Hegseth announced a new DOD policy that essentially required journalists to get his permission before they publish. Journalists were required to sign pledges acknowledging that if they ask the wrong questions, or probe into department employees in any way that could elicit the wrong kinds of information, they could be labeled a national security risk, lose their Pentagon press badges, and be blocked from the building.

When Hegseth announced the change, credible media outlets cried foul.

The New York Times called it an attempt to “constrain how journalists can report on the US military, which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually,” adding that the public has the “right to know how the government and military are operating.”

The National Press Club echoed that with, “For generations, Pentagon reporters have provided the public with vital information about how wars are fought, how defense dollars are spent, and how decisions are made that put American lives at risk. That work has only been possible because reporters could seek out facts without needing government permission.”

Last week, the NYT put teeth into their criticism, and filed suit to restore media access.

Illegal 'prior restraint'

Hegseth’s reach for a “media oath” smacks of prior restraint, a type of government censorship before publication that has long been deemed unconstitutional. Several early cases examined when national security interests were strong enough to overcome First Amendment freedoms in times of war; during WWII, “Loose lips sink ships” reflected an awareness that advance public disclosure of military secrets could be dangerous.

But in 1971, the Supreme Court held that prior restraint on speech by the government is unconstitutional, requiring an "exceptional" showing of "grave and irreparable" danger.

In The New York Times vs. the United States, the Nixon administration tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers by arguing that publication of classified documents about the Vietnam War would endanger national security, necessitating prior restraint to protect vital security interests. The Supreme Court ruled that the public’s right to know outweighed the danger of publication, and that vague security claims aren't enough to censor the press.

In order to support an issuance of prior restraint today, the government must prove that publication would cause inevitable, direct, and immediate danger to the United States. In Hegseth’s “kill everyone” bombings, it’s hard to fathom how releasing video after the fact would jeopardize anything other than his own spin, as all victims are dead, their ships obliterated, and Trump himself repeatedly posts snuff videos of the violence.

National security risk

Blind to irony, both Hegseth and Trump have personally modeled why some military secrets should not be published, at least not in advance of the act.

In March, Hegseth’s Signal chat published US plans of attack in Yemen, including the exact time and location of the planned attack, which easily could have led to ambush or counter attacks costing American lives.

In June, Trump posted that the US knew where Iran’s enriched uranium was stockpiled, giving Iran advanced warnings to move it before the bombing began, which Iran did.

Both Trump and Hegseth seriously jeopardized national security by releasing US military plans of attack in advance, which no media outlet has sought the right to do.

Nonetheless, Hegseth’s new media restraints require Pentagon approval before public release of even unclassified information, because “unauthorized disclosure … poses a security risk that could damage the national security of the United States and place personnel in jeopardy.”

Press in MAGA hats

After 80 years of free press access to the Pentagon and military professionals who work there, Hegseth has granted himself sole authority to determine when journalists pose “national security risks.”

Based on a journalist's “receipt, publication, or solicitation of any ‘unauthorized’ information,” Hegseth has unbridled discretion to block, eject, and blacklist them. This amounts to authority to revoke reporters' access to the Pentagon for engaging in lawful newsgathering, which is an illegal, prior restraint to stop speech before it happens.

Hegseth has now replaced all credible media outlets with MAGA content creators, whom he welcomed to the Pentagon earlier this week for press briefings. These MAGA influencers, despite their lack of reporting or military beat experience, are the “new Pentagon press corps.” They include the My Pillow guy, nutjob Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, and Tim Pool, who was paid to produce videos for a company secretly funded by the Russian government.

All of them signed Hegseth’s required pledge.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

On November 26, 2025, in a quiet northern suburb of Hong Kong, an aggressive fire broke out in the middle of the day. The fire was unusual in its intensity and duration, consuming 7 of 8 high rise towers in a residential complex. Despite the quick response of well-equipped fire trucks, the blaze spread quickly and burned for more than 43 hours.

Although the death toll is not final, at least 160 people suffered the most horrific deaths imaginable, with dozens so charred they may never be identified.

The ferocity of the fire has been blamed on a private contractor’s use of highly flammable materials including polystyrene foam boards placed over windows, along with substandard scaffolding netting that failed to meet fire-retardant codes. The buildings were undergoing renovations when the fire hit, and numerous fire alarms also failed to warn.

The fire could have been prevented with government inspections

A tragedy like this gives pause, in part because it should have been prevented. Fire analysts say that more rigorous inspections, including thorough sample testing of materials used on higher floors, not just of easily accessible ground level floors, would have identified the use of non-compliant, cheaper materials before the blaze started.

Although the Chinese government will never admit any fault for the inadequate inspections and has instead jailed people for asking, it’s already clear that standard building inspections would have prevented the loss of life. Lapsed and loose inspections, and possible corruption, meant officials did not detect that flammable materials were used where they should not have been, or that fire safety systems were not functioning, despite residents alerting officials of these problems a year prior to the fire.

It’s also the kind of tragedy lying in wait in the US, ready to strike after Trump's all-out war on safety standards and regulations meant to protect the public.

The Trump administration has put Americans in danger

Since his re-election, Trump has rewarded his corporate donors by dismantling costly regulations they dislike. In the process, time-honored regulations and safety standards that quietly protected life have been gutted, setting us up for a Hong-Kong tragedy of our own.

Federal government regulations designed to protect health and lives include, in the broadest sense, workplace safety, transportation safety, food and drug safety, and environmental protection. Under Trump 2.0, each of these categories of protection have either been gutted outright, or are now so attenuated due to funding cuts they barely function.

Each federal agency with regulatory authority, including OSHA, the FDA, the EPA, and DOT, among others, has been significantly weakened with reduced investigations into wrongdoing and corruption, and fewer cases for failing to comply with safety and environmental standards. Trump has also imposed across the board budget cuts for regulatory enforcement, including inspector staffing across a wide spectrum of industries.

None of these changes will continue in a vacuum; other than ignoring climate change which is already wreaking havoc, we won’t know what other unenforced regulation will lead to tragedy until it strikes.

Trump’s attacks on regulatory agencies

Under Trump’s profits-first-people-last strategy, the EPA has launched the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. Trump dismantled EPA regulations protecting air, water, and soil, relaxed emissions standards for power plants, increased toxic vehicle emissions, weakened water protections, limited scientific research into the risks, and rolled back greenhouse gas reporting and soot standards, all to boost industry profits at the expense of citizens who live and work in those communities.

Trump also shuttered 11 OSHA offices in states reporting unusually high workplace fatalities, most of them Republican controlled. Louisiana, for example, ranks the sixth most dangerous state for workers in the U.S. Louisiana is also home to more than 200 chemical plants and refineries dotting an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley” because of the high rates of cancer and birth defects linked to petrochemicals.

Former OSHA Director David Michaels said that with these closures, “enormous oil and petrochemical facilities with significant safety and health hazards will be inspected even less frequently than they are now.”

According to DOGE, the government will save $109,346 from the closures.

Statistics are only dry until you’re in them

If a Hong Kong-type tragedy strikes, Trump will first block information about it, Karoline Leavitt will call it fake news, and Fox won’t report it. Then, after the tragedy dominates mainstream media headlines, the whole administration will pivot to blaming Biden.

But the danger is real, it is now, and it is not about politics.

Americans have lived for generations with barely-there inspections, leading to Cancer Alleys, occupational disease, dangerous products, collapsing infrastructure, etc. But now Trump has expelled almost all regulatory watchdogs in service to his corporate donors. Because less regulation means higher profits, corporate America is rewarding Trump handsomely in what amounts to quid pro quo.

In a functioning democracy, this would amount to criminal recklessness. In a rule of law republic, the resulting tragedies, when they strike, would lead to charges of foreseeable homicide.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Amnesty International’s new report on the U.S. detention sites Alligator Alcatraz and Krome is a warning flare for every American who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and the basic dignity of human beings.

We’ve seen governmental cruelty before in our history, but these facilities mark a new level of calculated dehumanization on U.S. soil, and Amnesty is calling it what it is: torture, enforced disappearance, and a deliberate system designed to break people.

What makes this report so chilling isn’t just the details, although they’re horrifying enough. It’s that the government has begun giving these places cute, theme-park-style nicknames like “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Cornhusker Clink,” as if they’re attractions instead of concentration-camp-style black sites.

Authoritarian regimes always begin by softening the language, making the abuses sound like logistics, law enforcement, or processing rather than cruelty. If you want to condition the public to accept state violence, you start with euphemisms.

Investigators found people packed into filthy tents and trailers where toilets overflowed onto the floors and into sleeping areas. Water was sometimes rationed. Food quality was lousy. Insects swarmed at all hours. Lights were left on day and night. Cameras reportedly pointed at showers and toilets, in clear violation of privacy and human dignity.

This wasn’t an accident. These were choices.

The so-called “box” at the Florida concentration camp may be the most grotesque example. It’s a two-by-two-foot outdoor metal cage where detainees, shackled and already vulnerable, were left in blistering Florida heat, exposed to mosquitos and biting flies, denied water, and forced to endure punishment sessions lasting up to 24 hours.

These are exactly the kinds of stress-position torture techniques our nation once condemned when used by dictatorships abroad. Today they’re being used in our name, by our government, on our soil.

At Krome, Amnesty documented prolonged solitary confinement, routine shackling even during medical transport, denial of legal access, and a pervasive system of intimidation and retaliation. Medical care was often delayed or unavailable. People needing lawyers were blocked from communicating with them.

This is not a “processing system”: it’s a punishment regime. It’s brutality done with your and my tax dollars and in our names.

The report makes clear that these are not isolated violations: they’re the design.

This administration has woven cruelty into policy, permitting state-run detention networks to operate as if constitutional rights simply evaporate when you cross a razor-wire perimeter.

The crisis for American democracy isn’t just that the camps exist; it’s that they’re being normalized, bureaucratized, branded, and replicated. Amnesty warns that DHS is already planning more such sites, using “emergency” authorities and no-bid contracts to create an extrajudicial detention network beyond the reach of meaningful oversight.

This is exactly how authoritarian systems evolve. They never begin with political opponents: instead, they begin with people the majority already sees as powerless. Immigrants. Refugees. The poor. Non-citizens. Those without family or money or social standing.

When the public tolerates a government treating one group of human beings as disposable, that system is inevitably expanded to inflict that same treatment on others — dissidents, politicians, people like you and me — whenever it becomes politically useful.

We’ve seen this in nation after nation that slid from democracy into authoritarianism. The first victims are always those considered “outsiders” or “threats to the order” the regime promised to maintain.

Once the public is desensitized to cages, beatings, disappearances, and secret courts, it becomes frighteningly easy to redirect those same tactics toward dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, activists, and political opponents.

This Amnesty International report isn’t just a humanitarian alarm bell: it’s a constitutional one.

When due process is suspended for one class of people, it’s suspended in principle for all. When the government can hide detainees in swamp camps with no legal representation, it’s already established the machinery necessary to detain anyone it wants to silence. When the public is conditioned to see cages and brutality and think “this is fine,” the moral system of a nation starts to collapse.

We forget that the Constitution doesn’t protect itself; it’s protected by norms, culture, public outrage, legal oversight, and a shared belief that the state doesn’t get to brutalize human beings no matter who they are.

When those norms erode, when brutality becomes invisible-but-known or acceptable, authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a drumbeat. It arrives quietly. It arrives bureaucratically. It arrives through “temporary measures” and “emergency facilities” and “processing centers” set up for “those people over there.”

Amnesty is demanding the immediate closure of Alligator Alcatraz and any similar state-run black sites. They call for an end to emergency-authorized detention, a prohibition on outdoor punitive confinement, the restoration of access to legal counsel, real medical care, due process, judicial oversight, and a halt to no-bid construction of new concentration camps in America.

These aren’t radical demands. They’re the bare minimum for a nation that claims to believe in the rule of law.

Because if we let our government continue to create a network of secretive, cruel, extrajudicial detention facilities for one set of powerless people today, tomorrow it will inevitably turn those same systems against anyone who challenges their power.

That is how every authoritarian regime in history has done it.

And unless we stop it now, it’s how this one will, too.

I want to pour you a shot of good news, with a stiff chaser.

It won’t wipe away all your troubles, but it might make you feel warm and fuzzy for about 30 minutes — maybe longer if you just allow yourself to go with the buzz …

(BARTENDER’S TIP: Allow yourself to go with the buzz. It’s been a hard damn decade.)

All’s not well in MAGA land, my friends.

It seems there are hardcore members of the most destructive cult in American history, who believe their fearful, orange leader is outdoing himself in the Department of B-------, as he undoes our democracy.

It’s actually starting to look like Donald Trump can go too far for at least a few of his ardent supporters, who have been known to see homegrown terrorists stomping on police officers and destroying our Capitol as “tourists,” and view the poisoning of our air and water as “healthy.”

The list of terrible things these morally busted people have endorsed by helping elect this garbage can of a man, is longer than a summer day in Alaska, but might not be limitless.

It could be there are actually lines they prefer not to be crossed — even by their vulgar idol, who has done the heroic work of battering our government, our benefits, and his spineless party into submission.

In the past week, I have heard from two old friends in the business community here in Madison, Wisconsin, and in my hometown haunts of New Jersey.

These gents deal with a lot of MAGA bros in their day-to-day work, which takes them deep inside the American staples of sales and finance. They interact with these people because they have mountains of patience, and those dreaded bills to pay. Like myself, they are both old-to-middle-aged white men, and as such have been afforded a lifetime of privilege to do just about anything they want in America (including attack it) without any serious ramifications.

Here’s one of those messages I received:

“I’ve had a couple of MAGA folks confide in me the last couple of weeks that they are officially off the Trump train. It seems like based on the posturing that’s happening and his recent losses that they will be cannibalizing him soon.”

He cited Epstein, the “Kash/Bongino obvious lying” and the “pro-billionaire s----” as some of the reasons for their sudden discontent with the orange and appalling man, as well as their desire to be more public with their upset.

Another message I received said this, among a lot of other “stuff”:

“He’s losing MAGA. This is not what they voted for, and the Epstein stuff is killing him. I’m telling you, he’s in trouble.”

Reports like this are hardly scientific, but they are meaningful, and the numbers back them up. Trump’s approval ratings are at historic lows for a president (and I use that term loosely) in his first year in office, where honeymoon periods, and “benefit of the doubts” can extend well into a second or third season.

The speed in which Trump has lost support is breathtaking.

Recent election results that have gone heavily Democratic, and some skirmishes in the Republican ranks point to a presidency that is beginning to wear thin on the majority of America, including more than a few of his once loyal foot soldiers.

Look, I’m not even remotely insinuating we are out of danger here. In fact, if there is any validity to the growing anti-Trump movement in the Republican ranks, and I think there is, Trump will only become more unhinged and dangerous, as the golden walls close in around him, and he becomes more isolated.

He will lash out like a snot-nosed baby with a loaded machine gun, and before he is through, the January 6th insurrection will look like a minor skirmish.

The rest of one of the above messages from my buddy, reads like this:

“Hopefully this doesn't lead to some wild outburst when he (Trump) realizes this is happening (his cratering support), but it most certainly will ...”

Yes it will.

One morning this week, he rolled out of his steel-enforced rack, grabbed his nuclear-powered cell phone and went into full, unhinged, bro-mode by launching this beauty on his state-run social media channel.

This is the President of the United States of America at work on a Monday morning.

And let me answer your question, before finishing up:

“No, I don’t know how ANYBODY can support this grotesque, unhinged thug ...”

We’ll never survive three more years of this madness, and I have been of the opinion that Trump and his failing physical and mental health likely won’t either.

Rather than bet on the natural order of things, though, we are better off cautiously hoping that enough people in his revolting base will start to pull the plug on this failed regime, which will help release some of the hot air in a country that is ready to blow sky-high.

It’s worth keeping on eye on Republicans in Congress as we swing into the midterms and they hear from angry constituents who are fed up with Trump and his billionaires’ money-grab, while their costs increase and they discover they are literally paying for this authoritarian takeover.

We must continue to fight like never before, while expecting the absolute worst from a maniac, who has the singular talent of always going lower.

We still have a long road ahead of us, my friends, but for just today, why not pull off to the side of that road, and enjoy the buzz?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Growing up in an ultraconservative Mormon family, Jennie Gage said, she was primed to become a Christian nationalist and supporter of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement — or MAGA.

But about two years ago, at 49, Gage had a reckoning, realizing she had been “literally a white supremacist from birth,” based on teachings from the Book of Mormon.

Gage said she came to see Mormonism as “the OG Christian nationalist church.”

So, she flipped her life upside down, leaving organized religion and the Republican party.

She now calls herself “a raging feminist,” hosts a podcast, “Life, Take Two,” and is a member of “Leaving MAGA,” a nonprofit online community for former Trump followers who found themselves lost in conspiracies, losing friends, even committing crimes in the president’s name.

‘God’s president’

“I would have never said, ‘I'm white supremacist. I'm Christian nationalist,’” Gage told Raw Story. “I would have just said, ‘I'm traditional, and I'm conservative because I believe in church and family and America.’”

But when Trump ran for president in 2016, Gage embraced MAGA.

“I will never forget him on my big-screen TV, saying the words, ‘Make America Great Again,” Gage said.

“The first time I heard that, I literally started crying … and I pictured Norman Rockwell.”

What came to mind was the painter’s “Freedom from Want” — ”The grandma putting the turkey on the table, the Thanksgiving dinner, the beautiful home and just that American traditional family and conservatism," she said.

“Obviously, I hated brown people. I hated all the illegal immigrants. I hated that our country was being overrun with lesbians and feminists, women who worked instead of being in their proper place in the home, gay people — they are like the biggest sinners in Mormonism — and baby killers, all of that,” Gage said.

“When [Trump] said, ‘Make America Great Again,’ what I pictured was this businessman not only is going to save our economy, but he's also going to get rid of all of that stuff that people are doing that's destroying our country, and we're going to return to the 1950s where life was great and everything was simple, and he's going to make America great again.”

‘God’s president’

Gage’s family, she said, took Mormonism to “next-level insanity,” as much of her childhood revolved around The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“It is a cult without walls,” Gage said.

She attended Brigham Young University, the flagship Mormon college, for two years, taking classes including early childhood development, as well as dating and marriage.

“Even going to Mormon college, I was just indoctrinated also,” Gage said.

As treasurer of the BYU Young Republicans, she canvassed for President George H.W. Bush when he ran against Bill Clinton in 1992.

“It was devastating to see this evil Democrat Bill Clinton get elected,” she said.

As Gage had children, she became less politically involved. Her interest revived when Mitt Romney ran for president.

She remembered thinking, “‘We're gonna have a Mormon boy,’ and then that's probably gonna usher in the Millennium, so it's gonna be Mitt Romney and then Jesus.”

Gage began watching Fox News, listening to conservative commentators and reading books by Republican politicians. When Trump announced his run, Gage was familiar with his reality TV show, The Apprentice, and his books, The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback.

“The Apprentice was actually my pipeline into MAGA. It was just really interesting, as we had a business and were really wealthy,” Gage said.

“That sucked me into … completely buying into it because NBC, The Apprentice and his ghost-written books, they showcased him as this really savvy entrepreneur, and that spoke to me because I was this conservative Christian wife of an entrepreneur.”

Gage said she liked the idea of a “businessman” running America, instead of “slimy politicians.”

She became more active on social media and engaged in arguments defending Trump. She recalls one verbal fight with her 10-year-old nephew.

She told him, “Donald Trump to America is going to be what Napoleon was to France. He is going to free us, and generations to come are going to thank God that Donald Trump was voted in office.”

When Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Gage thought: “President Trump is God's president.”

‘A major shift’

Gage began to upend her life in October 2018. One day at church, she “literally stopped believing.”

“I Googled my own religion for the first time,” she said. “I had never researched Mormonism outside of books that I would go to the Mormon bookstore and read. And so I resigned from the church.”

The church’s history of polygamy pushed her away. Simultaneously, she said, she ended her 24-year marriage, due to infidelity.

She “plunged pretty headlong into Christianity, and in a way, that kind of kept me stuck in that traditional conservative Americana,” she said.

But she continued “deconstructing” her beliefs, and by the time of the 2020 election had seen “a major shift” in her values.

She was prepared to vote for Trump, but on the way to the voting booth, Gage said, “my MAGA started to crack."

“I remember sitting there in the car, and I just felt sick thinking about Donald Trump because some of the debates that year, he started to seem a little bit unhinged, and the MAGA crowd was just no longer aligning with me.”

Gage and her partner decided not to vote for either Trump or Joe Biden.

Gage returned to her computer, to research political issues.

“I’m like ‘Oh s—. There's not one f—- thing that the Republicans are doing that I support. Not one. I'm a Democrat,” Gage said.

“I literally support everything that most of the Democratic leaders are currently doing, and the entire Democratic platform speaks to me so much.”

Gage said she began “really stepping into my true, authentic self.”

While it was “extremely unsettling” and “terrifying” to change her beliefs,” her life in Tucson, Ariz., now looks far different than her life in MAGA.

She has a diverse group of friends, is an atheist feminist, and calls herself an “anarchist” and “white apologist,” for her ancestors’ roles in massacres of Native Americans.

“I am moving farther and farther away from everything that originally made me lean into MAGA,” she said.

‘American Gestapo’

To Gage, Trump is now “f— reprehensible” and “so hateful.”

“Donald Trump is the president of only the people he gives a f— about,” Gage said.

“Everybody else is just out. He's more of a mob boss, and he is a president, and that's not the way that America is supposed to work.”

During the 2024 election, Trump accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of eating cats and dogs. Gage called that the “a straw that broke the camel's back.”

“I wouldn't want him to be in charge of our PTA. I wouldn't vote for him for the president of our homeowners’ association,” Gage said.

“Listening to the debates and the hatred in some of the rallies, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, and it made me panic because I'm like, ‘Oh, now what? I hate Donald Trump, and the whole entire MAGA movement no longer aligns with who I am.’”

Gage now calls Trump administration immigration enforcement agents an “American Gestapo.”

Just in cases reported by Raw Story, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained a breastfeeding mother, proposed a plan to deport unaccompanied immigrant children, physically assaulted bystanders and deported young adults with pending immigration cases.

“The whole point of the Gestapo was to be this police force out there terrorizing people,” Gage said.

“Sure, deport illegals if they're a threat, but to drag people down the street, the masks, the fear-mongering, the scare tactics, is absolutely reprehensible.”

‘It’s going to re-brand’

Gage is starkly concerned about Trump and the GOP’s quickening push toward Christian nationalism.

“I wasn't just Christian nationalist for logistical reasons,” she said. “It was part of my religion.

“I believed Jesus had written the Constitution and that the American government was just the interim government until Jesus came back, and then Jesus was going to rule America, and the rest of the world from America.

“The Charlie Kirk people … or Christian nationalists, honey, they ain't got nothing on the Mormons. We took Christian nationalism next-level. I believed all of that 100 percent.”

Gage likens Christian nationalism to “a virus,” particularly as it gains a platform with Turning Point USA, the youth nonprofit founded by Kirk, who was killed in September.

“My worry is that these religious institutions and these political movements … are targeting the people that they need to target in a way that's effective enough that they are always going to be 10 steps ahead of us, and they're specifically targeting those emerging young adults,” Gage said.

“I'm afraid that conservative Christian nationalism will not die out, that just like a very smart virus, it's going to adapt. It's going to re-brand. It's going to emerge on the other side, maybe a little bit different than the 2020 MAGA movement, but it has a vested interest in protecting itself.

“They have the money, they have the power. They don't want to let that go, so they're going to fight to the death.”

Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and more than 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

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

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

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

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

I was wrong.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Dec. 4 memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

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

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

With so little pushback to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s domestic cruelty and violence that highlights Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and mega-yacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.

As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:

“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.

That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.

It’s no coincidence.

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.

No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.

It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.

It’s why — with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating — those countries are still functioning democracies.

The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.

Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.

Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.

If you haven’t already, join us.

The Supreme Court says it will determine whether the Trump regime can “end birthright citizenship.” That’s the name given to the clause in the 14th Amendment that says that if you’re born on US soil, you’re a US citizen entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship.

Many roads were traveled to get here, the main one being Donald Trump’s decade-long campaign of hatred against immigrants.

But a road that gets less attention is just as important: Trump’s hate-mongering never saw an equal, opposite and liberal reaction.

Instead, over those years, the Democrats accepted cand Republican allies about immigrants and immigration law.

For instance, the southern border is not open. It has never been open in our lifetimes. But Trump says it is. The Republicans say it is. Their rightwing allies say it is. And the Democrats rarely challenge them.

Over time, the result has been a kind of conventional wisdom about the southern border that is so deeply established that Hakeem Jeffries avoided facing it head-on in a recent interview with CNN. Instead, the House leader gave Trump credit for securing the border. “The border is secure,” he said. “That's a good thing. It happened on his watch.”

Fact is, nothing about the southern border has changed. It wasn’t open last year, under Joe Biden’s watch. It wasn’t secured this year under Trump’s. That there are fewer migrants coming across is the result of other factors, mainly Trump’s criminal treatment of immigrants. (In practice, they now have few legal protections. Everyone knows it.)

By giving Trump credit for something he did not do, Jeffries validates the lie – that under a Democratic president, the southern border was open. In doing so, he undermines his own party’s position, allowing the GOP to define the terms. That makes it untenable to stand up for immigrants and their constitutional rights. Ultimately, Jeffries cedes ground in a much bigger debate over who counts as an American.

Repeat this pattern long enough, in the absence of an equal, opposite and liberal reaction to Trump’s hate-mongering, and you get what we now have: a high court that will decide whether a president can break the law and ignore the unambiguous wording of the 14th Amendment.

For too long, the Democrats have treated the southern border as a distraction. The Republicans have not, because it represents the highest stakes – the power to decide who America is for. Is it for the rich white men who have historically controlled it or for everyone?

I don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to decide, but I do know the mainstream position of the Democratic Party can no longer hold. The Democratic Party needs to be reminded of its values, the liberal principles that have animated reformers since the founding.

For that task, the republic is fortunate to have visionaries like Adam Gurri. He’s the editor of Liberal Currents, a publication dedicated to the revival of American liberalism after a long period of complacency. Adam is currently in the middle of a big fundraising push to expand the magazine’s reach and influence. I think he’s doing so just in time.

In this interview, Adam tells me about an ambitious project coming up, something he calls The Reconstruction Papers, an effort to lay down the intellectual basis for the restructuring of the constitutional order.

Above and beyond that, Adam told me, “we will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.”

American liberalism has needed a refresher for a long time. I think Liberal Currents is that refresher. Its focus, above all, is liberty and justice for all. How did you get started and why?

We started out as a response to Trump the first time around. More to what he represented than the man himself. It seemed to us that liberalism had grown complacent. Its values had become assumptions held by a lot of people, and those assumptions had gone more or less unquestioned for a generation.

We got started because we believed those assumptions were by and large good, actually, but that people had been left unable to articulate why they were good. There was an intellectual vulnerability in this regard, because our enemies had spent decades aware of what our assumptions were and positioning themselves to attack them, whereas we liberals spent that time feeling as though we had already won.

Good times make weak liberals? Hard times make strong liberals?

I don't like to put it that way just because it sounds like we need some kind of existential battle in order to make progress, and I just don't believe that's the case.

What I would say is that things were becoming untenable already. A lot of our best institutions were designed under economic and social conditions that no longer apply. A lot of our oldest institutions were first drafts of democracy that sorely needed updating and we just sort of knuckled down and kept going.

A lot of work needed to be done, I suppose is my point. And a lack of truly understanding the heart of it, the why, the rationale behind these choices made in the past made it harder to to get that work done. The open conflict of the Trump era has certainly brought things into sharper focus for a lot of people. I'd like to think that wasn't the only path we could have taken, and I certainly believe we needn't hope for some future conflict to help us advance yet further some day.

Where do you see the place of Liberal Currents among other liberal publications, the few there are, and where do you want it to be?

If I were to draw a parallel, I would say Liberal Currents seeks to be The Atlantic, if The Atlantic were run by people truly committed to liberalism and to opposing the consolidation of dictatorship here.

We are a place where liberals can have internal debates about how to orient ourselves to events, as well as for ideas and principles. But we are also a place that won't blow with the political winds, but instead continue to fight for liberal principles, on behalf of everyone, even when trans rights or immigration does not poll well, say.

We are also a place that seeks to give positive answers and provide an actual vision of a liberal future. A lot of people have been caught flatfooted by the crisis. Many genuinely just don't know what to do, even if they understand the danger. We want to be a place that provides at least the beginnings of answers, starting points and ways of thinking about the problem.

You're in the middle of a big fundraising push. What do you envision for Liberal Currents?

We're going to grow the voice of genuine liberals who hate fascism in our media system. One concrete thing we're going to do is invest in a project we're calling The Reconstruction Papers, a printed essay collection where we will draw on a wide variety of subject matter experts in political science, higher education, media studies and more.

These experts will write about how to not only repair the damage that has been done in their area of focus, but how to rebuild and reform into something better than we started with. In general our pitch to people is that we will aim to grow ourselves into a version of The Atlantic that will never abandon trans people or immigrants or people of color to fascists.

We will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.

WASHINGTON — Thursday is the long-awaited health-care day in the U.S. Senate, but that doesn’t mean Congress has a plan to avert massive spikes in health premiums in the New Year.

To counter Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s proposal to extend COVID-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies for three years — which most Republicans say is too long — on Tuesday, Majority Leader John Thune announced the GOP would offer a new measure to replace subsidies with health savings accounts.

“We need to fix it. It's broken. It's a piece of s---,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story of the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare.

While many in the GOP are glad the party finally has an alternative to the ACA to rally behind, more middle-of-the-road Republicans are upset with the competing messaging bills at a time when Americans are desperate for a solution.

“How are you feeling about this [new GOP] health-care measure?” Raw Story asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a rare moderate in GOP ranks.

“Bad,” said Murkowski. “We haven't resolved anything, so we're going to have votes? Good deal. What have you got? What are you going to get out of it?”

With no bipartisan solution in sight, the American people aren’t expected to get anything from Thursday’s dueling health-care measures — setting up a key battle in next year’s midterm elections.

‘Not a serious proposal’

This fall, throughout the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Democrats demanded the GOP sit down and find a way to prevent the pending health insurance premium spikes.

The GOP refused, leaving rank-and-file Republicans scrambling to craft a counter offer.

“The 1.6 million people approximately that will lose their subsidy, I've got sympathy for those folks,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story. “They're going to be left paying enormous Obamacare premiums.”

“And your party might get blamed for that?” Raw Story asked

“Totally. We get blamed for everything,” Johnson said. “But Democrats should be blamed for destroying that individual insurance market with Obamacare.”

Democratic leaders say their three-year extension is essential for families struggling under the weight of inflation induced by President Donald Trump’s tariffs — but the measure is bound for defeat.

“That’s not a serious proposal, because they know there’s billions of dollars in fraud,” Sen. John Husted (R-OH) told Raw Story. “That’s not going to be tolerated.”

Earlier this year, under the guise of rooting out “fraud,” Republicans cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and SNAP benefits, or food stamps, in their “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

That’s something you only hear Democrats mention these days.

“Why not promote the changes you guys made to Medicaid in the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ as Republican health reform?” Raw Story asked Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA). “You guys just did sweeping reform, just to Medicaid.”

“Well, it's a possibility,” Kennedy told Raw Story.

“It seems like you guys don't want to own that and make that a part of the debate?” Raw Story pressed.

“No, I think your conclusion is wrong,” Kennedy said.

While the GOP scrambles to save face on the Senate floor, Republicans continue to rally around unraveling Obamacare — but not much else.

“At the end of the day, we got to get the federal government out of it,” Sen. Tuberville said. “To do that, we got to have a lot of smart minds putting it together where it'll help everybody and not only just a few.”

With little to no guidance from party leaders, four competing GOP Senate measures have emerged, including a new proposal from Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH), to extend ACA subsidies two years.

While that is likely to attract Democratic support, GOP leaders refuse to bring it to the floor and instead are promoting health savings accounts.

It’s almost as if GOP leaders don’t want to solve the pending health-care cost crisis, even as the party desperately tries to portray itself as serious about health care.

“We need to put something forward. We need to show America what we're for,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told Raw Story.

“This is just a springboard. This bill that we're voting on now is a springboard to a hopefully bipartisan bill that truly addresses all of health care in January.”

But as the New Year quickly approaches, the clock is ticking.

“Nothing happens around here without a deadline,” Husted said.

So far, Republicans haven’t gotten much of any direction from President Trump.

“Would it be helpful for Trump to say: ‘This is the plan that I want, the one I prefer?” a reporter asked Sen. Kennedy.

“Sure,” Kennedy replied. “But I don't think the White House is going to do that, nor do I think that they're prepared to do that. I think the White House is concerned about what, if anything, the House would do, as am I.”

‘Get to 60’

Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson remain mum, even as swing-state Republicans are freaking out.

At the same time, Minority Leader Schumer’s putting forward a three-year extension despite opposition from most all Republicans.

With a mere two legislative weeks before the end of the year, it seems as if the two parties are campaigning past each other instead of trying to find a path to a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators.

“Is that all this week is,” Raw Story asked Sen. Murkowski, “just politics on both sides?”

“That’s what it seems like,” Murkowski replied. “It takes both sides. Sixty. Neither side has 60. We need to get to 60.”

Murkowski’s one of the few senators willing to cross the aisle. While she remains undecided as to how she’ll vote Thursday, she says she knows the outcome.

“See, the thing is, how I vote doesn't matter, because either one, the public gets nothing, right?” Murkowski said. “So I can say I support the Republican agenda. I can say I support the Democrat [bill]. I can say I support either, but the results are the same.”