FILE PHOTO: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts arrives before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Here's what happened this week.
— While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. Former B-lister reality TV and Fox star Sean Duffy revealed Friday on Fox & Friends — the same way he announces most things — that he and his wife, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, spent seven months shooting a road-trip reality program called The Great American Road Trip while he was, in theory, running the Department of Transportation. The corporate sponsors are a Cabinet ethics nightmare laid out in a press kit: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast, and United Airlines, meaning the airlines and defense contractors he’s supposed to regulate were paying him to bring their cameras on family vacations.
This is the same Sean Duffy who presided over historic air traffic controller shortages and a government shutdown that forced 13,000 controllers to work without pay, with 10-percent flight reductions at the country’s 40 busiest airports. People nearly died this winter because his agency couldn’t keep towers staffed while he spent more than half his Cabinet tenure shooting infomercials for the industries he’s supposed to be regulating. In any functioning government, this would be a forced resignation by Monday morning. In Trump’s America, it’s a Friday Fox segment with the kids.
— Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives.
Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at a minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House.
Forty-five years of Reaganomics and grievance politics have produced a Republican Party that confuses chest-thumping with strategy. Now its Dear Leader is hurtling toward an oil-crisis cliff at the end of the month with one hand on a nuclear threat button he doesn’t even begin to understand and the other on a phone tweeting about butterflies falling beautifully into the sea. Vladimir Putin, watching Trump rattle nuclear threats while his own CIA reports the war is already lost, must be sleeping like a baby.
— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them.
Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy.
The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try.
— Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated.
As the Brennan Center and the Guardian have now shown, that line was lifted almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Trump’s Justice Department, and it depends on phony junk methodology that calculates turnout against the entire over-18 population, including non-citizens and people with felony convictions who legally cannot vote. Use the methodology experts actually use, and Black turnout in Louisiana exceeded white turnout in only one of those five elections: 2012.
The two years Alito cherry-picked were 2008 and 2012, the two times Barack Obama was on the ballot. Roberts pulled the same slick trick to claim there’s no more racism in America in Shelby County back in 2013. This right-wing Court isn’t reading evidence; it’s writing the conclusion first and then shopping the DOJ or 17th century witch-burning judges for numbers or examples that fit.
And Roberts apparently has the gall to whine that it hurts his feelings when people call his Court partisan. Save the tears, Mr. Chief Justice; save them for the millions of Black voters whose ballots your project just helped the Confederate states dilute.
— A billionaire is reportedly negotiating with Trump over which CNN anchors he should fire. Two press freedom groups — the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — filed with Delaware a demand on Thursday for Paramount Skydance’s internal records, citing reports that Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s bankrolling the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger with his nepo-baby son, told White House officials he’d “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN if regulators wave his deal through. Translation: axe the anchors Trump hates — Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar were the names floated — and run the newly-rightwing CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN’s air as a kind of pro-Trump-regime consolation prize. We’ve already watched the CBS version of this.
Days after Stephen Colbert called Paramount’s settlement of a bogus Trump lawsuit a “big fat bribe,” CBS canceled The Late Show. High-profile reporters have walked, ratings have crashed, and now they want to do it again at CNN. This is what state-aligned media looks like in real time: billionaires offering up newsrooms as personal favors to a corrupt neofascist president who, like Stalin and Hitler, calls journalism “the enemy of the people.” The First Amendment was not supposed to come with an unless Trump complains clause.
— ICE apparently just murdered a man in custody and we only know because a witness refused to be silenced. In January, Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died in a Texas ICE facility. The Trump administration immediately ruled it an attempted suicide. But a fellow detainee, identified by Zeteo only as “Texas” for his protection, tells a very different story. He and roughly nine other detainees in the adjacent room could hear Campos repeatedly begging for his medication, then officers entering the room and grabbing him. The last words “Texas” says he heard from Campos were that he was being choked. Days later, an ICE officer reportedly threatened him for talking, then made good on the threat by relocating him to another facility. He has yet to be interviewed by a single law enforcement official.
This is exactly what authoritarian regimes like Russia (Trump‘s role model) do: they detain people without due process, kill some of them in custody, and silence the witnesses. The only thing standing between us and the full version of that picture right now is the courage of one man who decided he wasn’t going to keep quiet and the journalists at Zeteo willing to publish him. Remember their names when this is over.
— Forget corporate Democrat Rahm Emanuel: Maine’s Graham Platner is what the future of the Democratic Party actually looks like. Robert Reich makes the case at Common Dreams that the corporate-funded Democratic establishment desperately wants you to believe nominating recycled triangulators like Emanuel is the route back to power. Maine voters say otherwise. Platner — a Marine with four combat tours, an oyster farmer who’d never held an office higher than town harbormaster — is running for the Senate seat Susan Collins has occupied since 1997, and his viral August launch raised $1 million in its first nine days.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, Martin Heinrich, Ro Khanna, and Reich himself have endorsed him (you can include me on that list, too). Schumer’s hand-picked alternative, Gov. Janet Mills, was forced out of the primary entirely.
Platner’s pitch is the one establishment Democrats have refused to make for 45 years: that the real enemy isn’t the other party: it’s the oligarchy itself, the billionaires who fund both sides, and the politicians (Collins very much included) who sell out their voters to keep getting paid. That’s the lesson the DNC has been refusing to learn since 1992. You don’t beat fake populism by running corporate cardboard. You beat it with the real thing.
— Ted Cruz just admitted out loud what Republicans have been whispering about Social Security for 50 years. At the Milken Institute’s billionaire-studded global conference in California this week, the Texas senator dropped what he himself called the “dirty little secret” of the GOP’s so-called Trump Accounts: they’re a Trojan horse for Social Security privatization. Cruz waxed nostalgic about 50 years of conservatives trying — and failing — to get their hands on payroll tax revenue, lamented the collapse of George W. Bush’s 2005 privatization push, and predicted that within five years, parents will demand to divert their Social Security contributions into Wall Street-managed Trump Accounts “just like” the ones their kids got under the 2025 budget law.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent already said the quiet part out loud last summer, calling the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” And as an SSA insider told The New Yorker this week, the playbook is two-handed: gut the Social Security Administration with one hand while pointing at the smoking ruin with the other and saying, “See? It doesn’t work — let Goldman Sachs run it.” Just 15 percent of Americans support privatizing Social Security; even the MAGA base wants their checks to keep coming.
So Republicans, true to form, are doing it anyway; they’re just lying about it until the trap snaps shut. Ted Cruz, drunk on Milken Institute champagne, finally admitted what FDR warned us about back in 1936: the same Wall Street crowd that crashed the economy in 1929 has been trying to get its hands on Social Security ever since the day it was signed. Eighty-nine years later, they’re closer to privatizing all of Social Security than they’ve ever been.