Carping Trump gets a dose of comeuppance after election shocker

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Marine One upon departure for New York, in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared Thursday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism, and that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:

— A healthcare system that covers every American as a right of citizenship, where injury or illness won’t break a family. A half-million of our families lost everything to bankruptcy last year just because somebody got sick; that literally does not happen in any other developed country on Earth, just America. And wanting to free us all of that fear isn’t “communism.”

— An education system that really works for young people, instead of barely maintaining 70-year-old schoolhouses and slapping the Ten Commandments on the wall as if “Thou shalt have no other gods before me … for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” is going to incentivize students (it won’t).

— A college system like in every other developed democracy in the world where everybody, if they’re capable of handling the work, can get an education and graduate into the working world without debt. And an end to the existing ~$2 trillion in student debt, a crime visited on the generations coming up today by a handful of rich bankers and their Republican buddies.

— A political system where a foreign government, massive corporation, or a greedy billionaire can’t simply buy elections, legislators, and judges. Where citizens can easily vote without having to jump through a million hoops designed to drive down the participation of low-income people and women. Where people can trust that the government and its spokespeople are telling the truth under all circumstances.

— An environment where we can breathe the air and drink the water, the food is safe, and our collective actions have reduced the methane and CO2 that are driving climate change.

— An immigration system that reflects America’s embrace of diversity as “the great melting pot,” a phrase that was popular in the mid-20th century and is now derisively called “DEI.” No more masked secret police, no more concentration camps that lock up children and brutalize people who’ve never committed a crime (immigration violations are civil, not criminal). No more violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments, no more killing Americans for protesting, and no more arrests based on the color of a person’s skin.

— A tax system where the morbidly rich pay their fair share, instead of throwing that burden on working class people and the upper middle class — who often are now seeing their combined federal, state, and local tax rates run over 50% — while billionaires pay a fraction of 4% and absolutely nothing on literally trillions in unrealized wealth gains.

— Respect for international law, particularly the laws against violently attacking countries like Iran, Venezuela, or individuals in boats in the Caribbean who haven’t attacked us first. Defense of those countries who are under attack by Trump’s owner, Vladimir Putin, and his buddy President Xi. And respect for the human rights of Palestinians and acknowledgement of the criminal, genocidal slaughter they’ve faced under international war criminal Netanyahu.

— An economy where at least two-thirds of all American families can have what they had in 1981: the ability to buy a home, a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and have enough for a comfortable retirement. Instead, as Robert Reich points out:

“Household electricity costs are up 18%, ground beef prices are up 22%, gas prices are up 40%, ACA out-of-pocket premiums are up 58%, [and] inflation is at a three-year high.”

Americans aren’t really asking for that much: Canada has it all. England has it all. France has it all. Germany has it all. Spain has it all. As do dozens of other countries, all the way down to little Costa Rica.

This isn’t rocket science. People simply want a government that will help them and their children achieve their highest potential, an economy that’s not rigged by and for the morbidly rich, and a job that pays enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

The problem we face today is that a large cohort of our billionaire and CEO class are suffering from the mental illness commonly known as hoarding syndrome, a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s never enough for them, no matter how much they have, so they don’t care how many people must die or live in poverty for them to maintain their (tax-deductible) islands, palaces, bunkers, yachts, and private jets.

It’s like that popular meme you find these days all over the Internet:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Those billionaires and CEOs, following the 1971 advice of notorious tobacco lawyer and sociopath Lewis Powell, built out a massive think tank and media infrastructure to transform America from a middle-class nation into a full-blown oligarchy, where every decision made by the Supreme Court, Congress, and most state legislatures would take care of their wants and desires before those of anybody else.

Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and, in 1978, he authored the Bellotti decision, saying that corporations are “persons” and money is the “free speech.” That let Reagan float into the presidency two years later on a tsunami of oil industry money (along with the treasonous deal he cut with Iran’s Mullah’s to hold the American hostages until after the election), remove Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and kill his plans for solarizing America.

Billionaires began immediately spiffing and sucking up to the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who returned the favor in 2010 by doubling down on Bellotti with Citizens United. Now fortunes are spent on every election cycle, including tens of millions from groups representing the interests of foreign countries.

A few hundred billionaire families, representing considerably less than one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the American population, supplied roughly one-sixth of all the money spent on the 2024 federal elections and, in the presidential race, put down 44.5% of all the money spent by outside groups, virtually all of it for fellow billionaire Trump.

As Jimmy Carter told me almost a decade ago, America is no longer a democracy:

“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery...”

This is what Americans are voting against this year in massive numbers, and no amount of name-calling and red-scare tactics by on-the-take Republicans and corporate Democrats, or hand-wringing by TV pundits and podcasters, is going to stop it.

Voters want fighters, and El-Sayed is a fighter. As are so many others in the Progressive Caucus and among the Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen X’ers now coming up into politics.

Americans know they’ve been screwed over the past 45 years since the GOP’s Reagan Revolution stopped seriously taxing the morbidly rich, killed off our unions, and sent our jobs overseas. And they’re rapidly waking up to exactly who it is who screwed them.

As my dear old friend Dick Gregory told me one brutally hot afternoon in Kampala as the two of us were touring Africa together in 1981 and discussing progressive change and US foreign policy:

“When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to have to force it on people. They will steal it!”

American voters are in the process of stealing back their democracy and their middle class. Call it what you want, but it won’t be stopped.

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