The alleged shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was formally charged Tuesday by Utah prosecutors. The top charge is aggravated murder, along with six other counts. The accused, 22-year old Tyler Robinson, also made his first court appearance to hear the charges read. Prosecutors say they will be seeking the death penalty in the case.

The case has set off media speculation about the shooter’s possible motives, including the meaning behind cryptic meme references engraved on bullets recovered by police. Makena Kelly, senior writer at Wired, says that the messages are not “inherently political” and allude to some of the online communities Robinson was involved in.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The alleged shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was formally charged Tuesday by Utah prosecutors. Twenty-two-year-old Tyler Robinson faces charges of aggravated murder and six other counts. Prosecutors say they’ll seek the death penalty.

On Tuesday, prosecutors released the transcripts of text messages Robinson allegedly sent to his roommate, who’s also his romantic partner, that he sent after the shooting. In one of the alleged messages, Robinson wrote about Charlie Kirk, quote, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” unquote. Robinson also texted his roommate after the shooting that he had left a message under his keyboard. The message reportedly read, quote, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it,” unquote.

The messages showed the roommate was shocked that Robinson was the assassin. The roommate now is cooperating fully with investigators, according to the Utah governor.

In the wake of Kirk’s murder a week ago, the Trump administration has vowed a crackdown on the political left, but the motives and ideology of Robinson, whether or not he acted alone, are still mostly a subject of speculation. Some of the first evidence released in the case were inscriptions written on bullets found with a rifle. This is Utah Governor Spencer Cox reading some of the inscriptions.

GOV. SPENCER COX: Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read, “Hey fascist! [exclamation point] Catch! [exclamation point]” up arrow symbol, right arrow and — symbol and three down arrow symbols. A second unfired casing read, “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Ciao, ciao!” And a third unfired casing read, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by senior writer at Wired, Makena Kelly. Her latest piece is headlined “Bullets Found After the Charlie Kirk Shooting Carried Messages. Here’s What They Mean.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Makena. If you can start off just by explaining — I mean, yesterday, also in the questioning of the FBI Director Kash Patel, there was this whole discussion about Discord, and he says that everyone that he was communicating with — you know, apparently, Tyler Robinson said on Discord, “I hate to tell you, I’m the one who did this.” They’re going to investigate all the people he was talking to. But Discord, the deep web — can you explain to people who are not familiar with all of this, and then what these messages — how they may have been misinterpreted and what they mean?

MAKENA KELLY: Sure, yeah. So, Discord has become a huge messaging platform, especially for young people. It operates similarly to Slack, if you use Slack at all. So, there’s options to create a server, which is what your company would use, and then separate little channels divided into topics. So, a Discord channel operates in the same way. There are different channels, oftentimes for groups of friends. Like, the one that it looks like Robinson was involved in had a channel for probably memes, had a channel for like a general discussion, things like that.

And so, the people who use Discord, it’s a variety of folks for a variety of different purposes. They could just be kind of a friendly group chat, something that maybe you would have on your messages app on your phone, with a little bit more direction or topic and some more niche focuses. But also Discords can be used for a bunch of different things. I have friends in the New York area, actually, who use Discord for political organizing and for bringing folks that they meet, you know, on the streets or helping organize voting drives and things like that.

And so, it’s not necessarily a political platform. It is a very, like, politically neutral platform that people use because it serves a certain purpose. But that doesn’t get away from the fact that people who are involved, deeply involved and deeply, you know, indebted to the internet, who get on it every day, who maybe are accessing stranger forms than you or I do every day, they’re able to organize and bring people from those maybe deeper, darker places of the internet, bring them to Discord and be in touch with them, basically at any moment every day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Makena, FBI Director Kash Patel, during an interview on Fox News, said that Tyler Robinson, quote, “subscribed to left-wing ideology.” Can you talk about this idea that Robinson’s motives may not be rooted in traditional extremism, but constructed from randomness and irony of online culture?

MAKENA KELLY: Yeah, if you even look at the documents that came out yesterday, the charging documents for Robinson, in the text exchange that they show, these transcripts, he specifically notes that, like, “I will die laughing,” or something like that, “if Fox News reads some of the memes that I have inscribed on these bullets.” So, all of these memes themselves are not inherently political. “Hey fascist!” sure, that can be read, you know, as maybe being a bit leftist. It can also be seen to be maybe ironic. And until we actually get some idea of the communities that Robinson was involved in, then we’ll get a better idea of what he ascribed to. But these memes are everywhere online. You would have people using them ironically, people using them perhaps seriously. But we just don’t have enough information to go off of right now to really make any real decision on what it is that Robinson ascribed to.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Makena, can you talk about video game culture and the up and down arrows and how they are being misread, and how you talked about particular games they’re from, as opposed to a leftist ideology?

MAKENA KELLY: Yeah. So, the first bullet casing that they mentioned in that press conference said, “Hey fascist! Catch!” And then it had an up, and then a right, and then three downward arrows. At the beginning of this investigation, a lot of folks were saying that those three downward arrows were an anti-fascist symbol, but when you add those additional first two arrows, it’s actually just a code that you would input when playing a game called Helldivers 2, which is a satirical anti-fascist game where you’re playing as what you — what the characters believe to be anti-fascists, but you really are the fascists. So it’s just a game that folks play.

The bomb that that code calls for is like this thing called an Eagle 500-kilogram bomb or something. And it’s a meme in the community of Helldivers, where it’s seen as — when you call that down, it is in a comically excessive bomb to drop. It will just basically — in the game, it’ll solve all of your problems, and you don’t have to think about anything else.

And so, instead of thinking — instead of looking at that bullet casing and saying, like, “Oh, this is a leftist ideology, right?” you could look at it coming from the community around the folks who play this game, be like, “Oh, I’m doing something perhaps comically excessive in assassinating this man,” fortunately, and trying to send that sign — right? — trying to make it a joke and a meme, something that we kind of saw him reference in the charging documents yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will, of course, continue to follow this case. I think the funeral, next Sunday. Makena Kelly, I want to thank you for being with us, senior writer at Wired. We’ll link to your piece, as you focus on the intersection of politics, power and technology.

We speak to Bishop William J. Barber II about conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk’s killing and the right-wing weaponization of his death. Barber says outrage over political violence should also extend beyond Kirk’s assassination, to what he refers to as the political violence of policy, including the hundreds around the world who die of poverty, war and disease every day. “You cannot claim that you believe in a God and a Christ of love and justice and mercy and grace and truth, and then you push policies that prey on the very persons, in the very communities, that the Scriptures, that the example of Jesus and the prophet, tells us we should not only pray for, but we should also be lifting up and helping up and protecting.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Prosecutors are expected to file charges today in the murder case of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. The alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of Utah, is currently in custody and may be facing the death penalty. He’ll be arraigned today.

Charlie Kirk was a well-known figure in the MAGA movement, a close ally of President Trump. Through his organization Turning Point USA, he’s credited with mobilizing young conservative voters, expanding Republican turnout in 2024. He also reached a wide audience with his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. Kirk strongly identified as a Christian and didn’t believe in the separation of church and state. This is Kirk speaking in 2022.

CHARLIE KIRK: Of course, we should have church and state mixed together. Our Founding Fathers believed in that. We can go through the details of that. They established, literally, a church in Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: While the motives for the murder are not known at this time, President Trump and his allies are accusing the political left of fomenting violence. President Trump was questioned about this by a reporter at the White House yesterday.

NANCY CORDES: Given the killing of Melissa Hortman, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the attack on Gabby Giffords, the attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, why make the case that violence is only on one side? It seems to be taking place across the spectrum.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I didn’t say it’s on one side, but I say the radical left causes tremendous violence, and they seem to do it in a bigger way. But the radical left really is — caused a lot of problems for this country. I really think they hate our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, a unit of the Department of Justice published a major “study”on domestic terrorism. It found, quote, “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” unquote. The DOJ removed the study after the Charlie Kirk killing.

For more, we’re joined by Bishop William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, also national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and leader of the Moral Mondays movement, co-author of the book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Your response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Bishop Barber?

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: I pause for a minute, Amy, because of the last statement that you made, where you said that they removed the study where the facts did not line up with the narrative that the president, Stephen Miller and others were seeking to put out. And I just had to — I’ll come back to that, but I just had to stop for a moment. I want people to hear that, who are listening here.

You know, this past week, there was a brutal, on-camera assassination of brother Charlie Kirk, and we must all despise it, as one — I’ve known what it means to live with people who send you threats and want to see your demise. And because we’re human beings, we should despise violence against any other human being. We should despise that it left him dead, his wife broken, heartbroken, without a husband, his children without a father. And all of us should be bothered. All of us should denounce political violence and pray for the family and stand against this viciousness and violence, murder. We’ve had too much.

Just yesterday, we had a Moral Monday, on September 15th, remembering that after the March on Washington, 17 days afterwards, four girls were blown up in a church in Birmingham, what they called “Bombingham” at that time, with a white supremacist trying to stop the civil rights movement. And Dr. King said at that time — he raised the issue of not just who killed her, but what killed her. And so, we should all be — be deeply moved, deeply bothered.

But here’s the other side, Amy, and to the audience: If you didn’t get bothered by political death until the other day, this must be challenged, too. The prophets in the Bible, and even in the — Jesus in the New Testament, they talk about how our trouble in nations is rooted in political violence. So, if we — if you’re bothered by what happened last week, you can’t be quiet and not cry out against what happened to some politicians earlier this year in Minnesota. If you’re bothered by that kind — what happened last week, you have to cry out also against the 800 people who die every day from poverty and over 200-and-some thousand who die every year from policies that cause violence among the poor. You have to cry out against the hundreds of thousands that died needlessly, died needlessly during the height of COVID, and still die from the lack of healthcare — the lack of healthcare in a nation where politicians, in the middle of a pandemic, refused to ensure healthcare. And one study said over 350,000 people died not from COVID, but from the lack of healthcare.

You have to cry out against any kind of political violence. You have to cry out against the violence perpetrated against the homeless, and accented by policies that say “lock them up” rather than build housing, or when a Fox News host says, “Just kill them. Just give them a lethal injection.” You have to cry out against threats of political violence in all of its forms. The president is saying, “I can stand in the middle of the Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any followers.” You have to stand against the violence we see happening in Gaza and the Congo and Yemen.

America has been facing a turning point in this society for some time. And the question is: When will America say that death is and violence is no longer an option? Not just that that happened, as terrible as it was. We have to have a real, real serious moral debate about political violence in this nation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Reverend Barber, I wanted to ask you — during the recent speech at a Senator Bernie Sanders rally in North Carolina, you called Christian nationalism, quote, “heresy by another name.” Could you — could you talk about that?

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, the reason I called it that, because of what the Scriptures say. If you go to the ancient Scripture Isaiah 58, that’s lifted up by Jews, Muslims and Christians, it says that the kind of religion, the kind of fasting that God requires is not just saying that everybody pray — I’m paraphrasing. It says the kind of religion that the Lord wants is to speak truth to the nation, to tell the nation its sin, to cry out against oppression, against paying people less than what they deserve, against those things that hurt and cause more homelessness. Throughout the Scriptures — there are more than 2,000 Scriptures. You go to the New Testament, says a nation will be judged by how you treat the least of these.

And what happens with so-called religious nationalism is that it attempts to lift the flag above the cross. It attempts to say — suggest that one political side or one political party or one political framework is, in fact, God’s way, when, in fact, the Scriptures are clear about that. And what heresy is is when you take something that is truth, and you try to twist it, when you try to twist faith to support political violence, when you try to twist faith to give you the right to denounce even those who are trying to live out the call of love and justice.

Are we not — and this is not the first time we’ve had a debate with a kind of religious nationalism. Religious nationalism was what undergirded the slave masters. They created a religion that said that slavery was all right. There was the kind of religious nationalism that was formed to come against Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he called for the New Deal. There was a religious nationalism that came against Dr. King and many others who were standing up for civil rights. We’ve always had this debate in this nation. And really, we need to have it even the more today, because, on the one hand, you cannot claim that you believe in a God and a Christ of love and justice and mercy and grace and truth, and then — and then you push policies that prey — P-R-E-Y — on the very persons, in the very communities, that the Scriptures, that the example of Jesus and the prophet, tells us we should not only pray for — P-R-A-Y for — but we should also be lifting up and helping up and protecting.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, Vice President JD Vance hosted The Charlie Kirk Show and interviewed Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy at the White House. Vance asked Miller to elaborate on how the administration would be working to prevent what he called the, quote, “festering violence that you see on the far left,” in reference to the assassination of Kirk.

STEPHEN MILLER: We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. So, let me explain a little what that means. So —

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: I’ve got 30 seconds, so be quick, Stephen.

STEPHEN MILLER: The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement. And with the God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Stephen Miller talking to JD Vance, who was hosting Charlie Kirk’s daily podcast because Kirk was assassinated. We just have 30 seconds, Bishop Barber, but as they talk about the left as “terrorists” and taking down the network “in Charlie’s name,” can you respond?

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Three things real quickly. First of all, when people of faith are Christian, we’re supposed to do things in Jesus’ name, not in somebody’s name, and that Jesus would not be talking what he’s talking about there.

Secondly, you just said at the beginning of the program that they had documentation of what’s really going on, factual evidence, and they removed it from the website because they don’t want to deal with the truth. And instead, they want to use a tragic, violent death, that all of us should be against and should be concerned about, and use that to stoke more division, possibly more violence, more ugliness. And that is wrong. It is undemocratic. It is unjust. And it does not line up with their oath to establish justice, to promote the common defense, to promote the general welfare and to ensure domestic tranquility and equal protection under the law.

What Stephen Miller should be working on is stop terrorizing immigrants, stop pushing policies of healthcare that are going to cause people to prematurely die, stop being against living wages, and stop trying to undermine equal protection under the law. That’s what we ought to be doing. And we ought to do that in the name of all that is holy and good and gracious, and we ought to do it in line with our deepest political — constitutional values and our deepest faith values.

AMY GOODMAN: Bishop William Barber, I want to thank you so much for being with us, president of Repairs of the Breach, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.

The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday sent shockwaves across the country and around the world, not only through its raw violence, with a single, deadly sniper shot, but as a hallmark of worsening political divisions wracking the United States. President Donald Trump could and should use his enormous platform to calm tempers. Instead, he immediately blamed, without evidence, the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder. This came just days after Trump threatened war against Chicago and while he’s assembling a paramilitary force for domestic deployment against citizens, immigrants, and anyone else he cares to target.

Trump has been threatening for weeks to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. On September 5th, Trump renamed the Pentagon the “Department of War.” He had no authority to do so – only Congress can – so his order specifies “Department of War” as a “secondary title” and instructs the executive branch to use the name. Sporting his new title “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced in the Oval Office, “We’re going to go on offence, not just on defence. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”

Trump then issued a disturbing post on his Truth Social platform, declaring, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” along with the phrase, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…”

The post included an image of Trump in a US Army cavalry officer’s uniform, squatting before a smoke and flame-engulfed Chicago skyline, with the phrase, “Chipocalypse Now.” The image was based on a scene from the 1979 Vietnam war film, “Apocalypse Now,” in which Lt. Col. Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, massacred a Vietnamese village so he and his troops could safely surf on a nearby beach. Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Trump had already recently deployed troops without reason, request by state or local authorities, or legal justification in Los Angeles. This, from the president desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize. A federal judge in California has already ruled this was a violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the military in domestic law enforcement except in limited cases like insurrection.

“Trump has always wanted his own muscle,” investigative reporter Radley Balko said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “He’s always expressed envy for dictators and authoritarians overseas who have forces that they can deploy to do their own personal bidding, whether it’s putting down protests or going after political opponents,” Radley Balko wrote the book, “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.”

Trump also recently ordered the launch of an online portal to recruit “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement” in policing Washington, DC. In other words, he wants to recruit and deputize vigilantes.

Balko also noted how the “unlimited budget that Congress has given Trump to hire ICE and Border Patrol agents is going to allow them to really build out those forces. It would be one of the largest militaries in the world if ICE itself were a military. They’re going to staff it with people who are primarily loyal to Trump and who aren’t going to be questioning unconstitutional orders. He’s trying to fulfill this vision of his own personal paramilitary force in multiple different ways.”

Which brings us back to Trump’s disturbing reference to “Apocalypse Now.” While the comparison to the callous, violent Lt. Col. Kilgore might be valid, a more appropriate comparison would be to the film’s chief antagonist, Col. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. In the film, Kurtz abandons his command and retreats deep into the jungle, to control his own fiefdom and a military force of native Vietnamese, who seem to revere him as a demigod. Kurtz seems convinced of his own infallibility, and rejects any authority or bounds on his power.

The film is based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, “Heart of Darkness,” set in the Belgian Congo. In it, another Kurtz goes rogue, assuming local power, amidst the rampant violence of colonialism and resource extraction.

Political violence has no place in society, and must be rejected by everyone, on all sides of any debate. This includes the targeted assassinations of political foes, as happened with the assassination of Minnesota’s former Democratic house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, or the assassination this week of Charlie Kirk.

Likewise, Trump’s constant threats of violence against entire cities, against marginalized communities, or against individuals he deems his political enemies, must also be rejected and resisted, relentlessly.

President Trump announced on Friday that a suspect was in custody for the killing of far-right activist Charlie Kirk. Although the motive has not yet been established, Trump has escalated his attacks on the political left, saying, “We just have to beat the hell out of them.” Democracy Now! speaks with Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo, who says that the right is using Kirk’s killing to smear the left.

“There’s a real rewriting of history going on. It’s what far-right regimes do after tragedies like this: They try and weaponize them to go after their enemies,” says Hasan. “None of us should celebrate political violence, because it’s a threat to all of us,” he adds.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has just announced on Fox News that the suspected gunman who shot the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, killing him, has been caught. Trump said, quote, “I think with a high degree of certainty we have him in custody,” unquote.

Trump’s comments came a day after the FBI announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Officials also released photos and video of the suspected gunman who shot Kirk during an outdoor event at Utah Valley University. A bolt-action rifle was also recovered in a wooded area near the campus. In one video, the suspected gunman is seen jumping from a roof on campus and running away.

On Thursday, President Trump said he’ll honor Charlie Kirk with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Trump also escalated his attacks on the political left, saying, quote, “We just have to beat the hell out of them.”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have a great country. We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.

AMY GOODMAN: On the floor of the House, Republican Representative Bob Onder of Missouri described the political left as, quote, “pure evil.”

REP. BOB ONDER: Well, everything has changed. If we didn’t know it already, there is no longer any middle ground. Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people. But their ideology is pure evil. They hate the good, the truth and the beautiful, and embrace the evil, the false and the ugly.

AMY GOODMAN: This call comes as some lawmakers, including Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are canceling or postponing public events out of safety concerns.

To talk about all of this and more, we’re joined by Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo, where his new piece is headlined “Hypocritical Conservatives Are Using Charlie Kirk’s Horrific Murder to Cynically Smear the Left.”

Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out what you’re seeing in these last few days, as we talk about this breaking news that the suspected gunman has been caught?

MEHDI HASAN: Thanks, Amy, for having me.

The problem with this administration, of course, is you can’t trust anything they say. Kash Patel put out multiple statements over the last 48 hours suggesting that somebody’s been caught, somebody’s in custody. They leaked to The Wall Street Journal that there was trans ideology on the weapon, and then walked it back. We have an administration of gaslighters and serial liars. So, unfortunately, in the old days, even if a president lied, you could try and take the bureaucracy or the law enforcement people, maybe — maybe sometimes — at their word. Now you have to start from a position of pure skepticism. So I don’t believe anything Trump says until I see more verification. I do hope they’ve caught the person.

The problem is, Amy, that since the — from the moment Charlie Kirk was horrifically murdered, on camera, a horrific act, inexcusable act, on Wednesday in Utah — from the moment that happened, Republicans, conservatives, prominent figures in this country on the right went to work to blame this on the left, even though the killer was not in custody — apparently is now. Let’s see the alleged killer. They — no killer in custody, no motive, and yet for the last 36, 48 hours, we’ve been told again and again that the left did this, the left killed Kirk, the left has blood on its hands.

And I wrote that piece for Zeteo because I was deeply frustrated at what I was seeing. It’s not just frustrating. It’s dangerous, right? Your response to a political assassination, to political violence, cannot be to ratchet up more political violence, more dehumanization and demonization.

And the reality is, of course, as I say, we don’t know the motive of the killer. Let’s say the killer turns out to be someone on the left. Even then, that doesn’t mean the right is somehow scot-free here. And that’s why I wrote my piece, pointing out that the vast majority of right-wing political violence in this country comes from Trump supporters, comes from people on the far right, comes from all sorts of people who have horrific views about minorities and white supremacists. And I laid down the evidence in my piece.

For example, this summer, just a few weeks ago, I know the right wing has been erasing her killing, but Melissa Hortman, the speaker emerita of the Minnesota House, was murdered in her home with her husband. Another lawmaker was shot and almost killed with his partner. That was done by a Trump supporter this summer. Trump didn’t even bother to show up at the funeral. No one mentions Melissa Hortman’s death on the right when they’re talking about political violence. We’ve erased January 6th. We’ve erased the attack on Josh Shapiro’s home earlier this year. We’ve erased multiple attacks over the years that have been attributed to or that the suspect turned out to be some kind of Trump supporter.

And I think that is why I wrote that piece, because there’s a real rewriting of history going on. It’s what far-right regimes do after, you know, tragedies like this: They try and weaponize them to go after their enemies. And Trump’s made that very clear — in all his statements, “the radical left.” This is a guy who has incited violence himself, including on January the 6th.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Hunter Kozak. He’s the Utah Valley University student who posed a question to Charlie Kirk about gun violence just before Kirk was shot and killed.

HUNTER KOZAK: Five is a lot, right? I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

CHARLIE KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?

HUNTER KOZAK: Great.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, that young man — he was 29 years old — Hunter Kozak, the Utah Valley University — I think he was a student — posted his message response to what happened after he asked the question.

HUNTER KOZAK: And people have obviously pointed to the irony that I was — the point that I was trying to make is how peaceful the left was, right before he got shot. And that — that only makes sense if we stay peaceful. And as much as I disagree with Charlie Kirk — I’m on the record for how much I disagree with Charlie Kirk — but, like, man, dude, he is still a human being. Have we forgotten that?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Hunter Kozak, who posed the question. He started by asking about how many trans mass shooters Charlie Kirk thought they were, and then talked about that percentage as the number of mass shooters in this country. But as he says, was horrified, as here is Charlie Kirk answering a question about gun violence, then is shot dead. Your response to this young man, who’s in a lot of pain? He said, in fact, though, he disagrees with almost everything, is known for opposing —

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Charlie Kirk, himself a TikToker. His wife just gave birth to their second child. He sees their families, you know, both of them having two children. And he said, “But I’m absolutely against violence and for his freedom of expression.”

MEHDI HASAN: Amy, we all are. I mean, 99% of the people in this country, I hope, are against politically motivated murders. I mean, it’s horrific. What happened to Charlie Kirk is horrific on a human level, on a political level, on multiple levels. And, you know, people are going around saying, “Well, you know, he didn’t believe in empathy, so I don’t care.” Well, just the fact that he didn’t believe in empathy is irrelevant. I believe in empathy. Most of us should believe — have empathy. And I do have empathy for his wife and kids. Two kids are going to grow up without their father. The fact that their father had vile political views that I disagree with, the fact that their father said I should be deported from the U.S., is irrelevant. All right? You don’t kill people for their speech, ever. And that young man gave a very eloquent statement there.

The irony of him being killed after taking a question on gun violence and trying to make it about gangs, I mean, Amy, right now everything in American politics just feels bizarre and ironic and unprecedented. You know, if you sat in a Netflix TV writers’ room and said, “Hey, this is a script for a political drama about politics in the United States,” and it was the script of the last five or 10 years, the TV writers would throw you out of the room and say, “This is ridiculous. We can’t make this TV show. This is so unrealistic — the plot twists, the turns.” But that’s our daily life right now. I mean, we’re all going crazy seeing, you know, what happens on a daily basis. You know, it’s beyond anything we see on TV or in the movies these days.

And I worry that everything’s going to get worse. I was on the BBC just a couple nights back, and, you know, the question they asked was: Is America going to come together after this? That’s what other countries are wondering. That’s what would happen in most normal countries after a tragedy like this. Unfortunately, the U.S. is not a normal country right now. And I suspect not only are we not going to come together, we’re going to go further apart, because the president is someone who takes this opportunity to incite more. I mean, everything Donald Trump has said since this murder has been unhelpful at best, dangerous and destructive at worst. He’s not the right leader whenever there’s a tragedy, whenever there is a murder or a terrorist act. That’s always been one of my great criticisms of Trump — I have many. But he’s not the right person to lead a nation when there is a tragedy or a crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, in 2023, Charlie Kirk called for you to be deported over your views on the COVID-19 pandemic while you were working at —

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — MSNBC. I just wanted to play a clip from The Charlie Kirk Show.

MEHDI HASAN: So we need to reassert what the actual truth of the matter is, especially if we are to be prepared for the next pandemic when it inevitably comes.

CHARLIE KIRK: Wow, who is that neurotic lunatic? Who is that guy? Send him back to the country he came from? Holy cow! Get him off TV. Revoke his visa.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Charlie Kirk. And again, the horror of his murder right now. Your response then, Mehdi, and as you reflect on this now?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, I responded at the time pointing out how racist that statement was. Charlie Kirk was very anti-immigrant. He was very anti-Muslim. People forget this stuff. But again, you know, I’ve spent the last 48 hours condemning his killing. I have been — I’ve found the posts celebrating his death — very few of them; I know the Republicans are trying to exaggerate. There are deaths. There are obviously posts online celebrating his death. I found them distasteful, inappropriate. It’s not something I would do. And yet, I think to myself, had I been the one shot in the neck and passing away, I wonder whether — what Kirk would have said about me. This is the reality of where we live.

I mean, we’re in this weird situation, Amy, now where some liberals are going to another extreme, which is we should all condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk, but we don’t need to participate in the whitewashing of his record or the kind of — this suggestion that he’s some kind of free speech martyr. He was not a supporter of free speech. You just saw that clip. I said something on MSNBC he did not like — I, an American citizen. He said I should be deported from the United States. Is that someone who sounds like they support free speech? He was super anti-Muslim. Just a couple of days ago, he was posting about Islam being the sword with which the left slits the throat of America. He called Muslims conquerors, invaders. His rhetoric was horrific. He put targets on people’s backs.

But again, I don’t measure my own views or my own responses to tragedies by the standard set by Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump or anyone else. The fact that he may have had a more gleeful response to my death than I do to his is irrelevant. As I say, none of us should celebrate the death of a human being. None of us should celebrate political violence, because it’s a threat to all of us and to this country.

And I think it’s interesting that so many people are now trying to suggest that this guy — I’ve seen people saying, “Oh, he never did anything. He just went and had good-faith debates with college students.” Just not true. He supported the — you know, he supported the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card legal resident who was punished for his speech, nothing else, by the Trump administration.

So, look, even us having this conversation, Amy, will be clipped somewhere by a Republican and say, “Look! Look! They’re celebrating his death. They’re criticizing him.” No, criticizing someone’s views is not celebrating the death. We can do two things at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can say it’s absolutely outrageous that Charlie Kirk was murdered for his views, and we have absolute empathy for his wife and kids and friends and family. But we can also say those views were horrific. We’re not going to suddenly say, because he was murdered, his views are somehow good. No, bad people can be unjustly murdered. Bad people can be innocent when it comes to being killed, because even bad people shouldn’t be killed for their views.

US President Donald Trump is on a losing streak this week. Just look at the latest judicial decisions challenging his policies, from mass deportations to tariffs to his troop deployments to US cities.

The courts are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power.

These cases illustrate the point:

Immigration

Over Labor Day weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempted to begin deporting up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. In the dead of night, the first children were loaded onto planes in south Texas. “These are unaccompanied children who do not have a parent or a guardian with them,” Efrén Olivares, an attorney representing the minors, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

At 1:00 am on Sunday morning, Olivares and his colleagues filed an emergency complaint with the federal court in Washington, DC. Judge Sparkle Sooknanam was woken after 2:00 am, and by 4:00 am she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportations until the children had the immigration hearings to which they have a legal right.

Meanwhile in Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the nation’s most conservative, ruled that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport people was illegal.

Tariffs

The Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal and unconstitutional, noting that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs. The ruling was “a sweeping decision that unequivocally rebukes President Trump’s idea that he can impose tariffs on American consumers on his own,” Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued the case, said on Democracy Now!

Domestic Deployment of the Military

Trump says, “We’re going in,” threatening to invade Chicago using, among other forces, the Texas National Guard.

But in California, a federal judge, invoking the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of military in domestic law enforcement, ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, along with several hundred US Marines, was illegal. Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops [from] engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”

These are just a few of the recent court cases that have rebuked Trump as he attempts to subvert the US Constitution.

We recently got a personal glimpse into what judicial wins over Trump look like. In the high mountain air of Telluride, Colorado, we had a chance to spend time with E. Jean Carroll, the renowned advice columnist and journalist. She was at the Telluride Film Festival for the premier of the new documentary, Ask E. Jean.

Carroll had a long and storied career as the advice columnist for Elle Magazine, and has published several books. In recent years she became known as one of the most prominent women to accuse Donald Trump of sexual abuse, saying he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, in Manhattan.

The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people.

Carroll sued Trump in civil court, and a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing her. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote, “Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.” She was awarded a $5 million settlement from Trump. After the verdict, he called her a liar. She then sued for defamation, and won an additional jury award of $83.3 million.

Carroll cut an elegant figure, walking along Telluride’s main avenue with the sweeping Continental Divide as a backdrop. Her film premiered to rave reviews, and, should there remain a film distributor in this country not cowed by threats of lawsuits from Trump, it should be available for viewing by a wide audience. The film highlights the story of one courageous woman refusing to be defined as a victim of Donald Trump, providing inspiration, no doubt, to the hundreds of survivors of Trump’s old friend, the now-dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them spoke this week outside the US Capitol, demanding the full release of the Epstein files. The Trump administration, which controls the files, is resisting.

Behind each lawsuit are impacted people, whether immigrant children pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and thrown on planes, or people standing up in the streets of LA confronting illegally deployed troops, whether sexual abuse survivors banding together, or federal workers fired en masse.

The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people–people at every level organized in opposition, defending democracy.

NOW READ: Trump's horrific cult contains the seeds of its own destruction

Jeffrey Epstein survivors rallied in front of Congress on Wednesday, detailing their experiences of abuse and calling for the release of all Epstein files. “We cannot heal without justice,” says one Epstein survivor, Chauntae Davies. “We cannot protect the future if we refuse to confront the past.” Survivors also announced that some victims would work to confidentially compile their own list of individuals implicated in Epstein’s crimes. This comes as lawmakers seek to force a House floor vote compelling the Justice Department to release all the files from the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Lauren Hersh, the national director of the anti-trafficking organization World Without Exploitation, is a former sex-trafficking prosecutor in New York who joined survivors for their press conference just steps from the Capitol on Wednesday. “Courage is contagious,” says Hersh, adding that “we were approached by several other Epstein survivors who we didn’t even know.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Survivors of serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein held a press conference steps away from the Capitol Wednesday to share their testimonies and demand lawmakers release all government files related to the Epstein investigation. Calls for the full files to be released have continued to grow, particularly among President Trump’s base. Trump campaigned on releasing the files but has called it a distraction and a, quote, “Democratic hoax” since taking office. The women were joined by members of Congress who have introduced a rare bipartisan bill that would make release of the Epstein investigation files law.

AMY GOODMAN: In a few minutes, we’ll speak with Congressmember Ro Khanna, who co-sponsored the bill, and Lauren Hersh of World Without Exploitation, which helped organize the survivors who spoke out Wednesday. But first, the voices of survivors.

MARINA LACERDA: My name is Marina Lacerda. I was minor victim one in federal indictment of Jeffrey Epstein in New York in 2019. I was one of dozen of girls that I personally know who were forced into Jeffrey’s mansion on 9 East 71 Street in New York City when we were just kids.

Today is the first time that I ever speak publicly about what happened to me. I never thought that I would find myself here. The only reason that I am here is because it feels like the people who matter in this country finally care about what we have to say. As an immigrant from Brazil, I feel empowered knowing that the little girl struggling to get by at 14 and 15 years old finally has a voice. For the first time, I feel like I matter as an American.

I was only 14 years old when I met Jeffrey. It was the summer of high school. I was working three jobs to try to support my mom and my sister, when a friend of mine in the neighborhood told me that I could make $300 to give another guy a massage. It went from a dream job to the worst nightmare. Jeffrey assistant Lesley Groff would call me and tell me that I needed to be at the house so often that I ended up dropping out of high school before ninth grade, and I never went back. From 14 to 17 years old, I went and worked for Jeffrey instead of receiving an education. Every day, I hoped that he would offer me a real job as one of his assistants or something, something important. I would finally have made it big, as, like we say, the American dream. That day never came. I had no way. I had no way out. I was — until he finally told me that I was too old.

There are many pieces of my story that I can’t remember, no matter how hard I try. The constant state of wonder causes me so much fear and so much confusion. My therapist says that my brain is just trying to protect itself, but it’s so hard to begin to heal, knowing that there are people out there who know more about my abuse than I do. The worst part is that the government is still in possession right now of the documents and information about — that could help me remember and get over all of this, maybe, and help me heal. They have documents with my name on them that were confiscated from Jeffrey Epstein’s house and could help me put the pieces of my own life back together.

HALEY ROBSON: My name is Haley Robson. I was a 16-year-old high school student athlete who made good grades and had high aspirations for college, when I was recruited and asked by a classmate of mine, alongside with a 20-year-old male, if I wanted to give an old rich guy a massage. But what high school girl would not want to do that? That day changed my life forever.

And when I got into the massage room, Jeffrey Epstein undressed and asked me to do things to him. My eyes welled up with tears, and I have never been more scared in my life. When it was over, he made — he paid me $200 and requested, in exchange, that I bring a girl each time to make another $200. I told him I did not want to do that, and then he gave me an ultimatum: “Either you come here and massage me when I call you, or you bring me friends of yours to massage, and I will give you $200 per girl for each time she comes.”

I felt and hoped to never hear from him again, but he called me every day. He was so wealthy and powerful, and he would not let me go. I felt I had no choice. If I disobeyed him, I knew something bad would happen. So, knowing I did not want to be sexually abused — I’m sorry — I started to bring him other girls from my high school, and he paid me $200, $200 for bringing them. I just hoped each time it would be the last time.

One day, the stepmom of one of the girls brought him and called the police on Jeffrey Epstein. The police then called me, called me in for questioning. I had told them the truth, despite the fact that I was a teenager and a minor, and I was able to tell the police the names of all the other victims. The police treated me like a criminal. I had, by this time, had turned 18. I had been with Jeffrey since I was 16 and for two years. So, they had told me I distribute — I distributed to the — so, they told me I was going to be arrested. My name was then distributed to the press as a co-conspirator of my abuser, who I detested. My entire world was crashing in around me, and I started being threatened and bullied, ’til this day still receiving death threats.

CHAUNTAE DAVIES: My name is Chauntae Davies, and I’m here before you today as a survivor, a survivor of decades of pain, the trauma, betrayal at the hands of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, and the people who enabled them, and a government that for far too long refused to help. …

I was just one of the many young women trapped in his orbit. I was even taken on a trip to Africa with former President Bill Clinton and other notable figures. In those moments, I realized how powerless I was. If I spoke out, who would believe me? Who would protect me? Epstein himself was the most powerful leader of our country — Epstein surrounded himself, I’m sorry, with the most powerful leaders of our country and the world. He abused not only me, but countless others, and everyone seemed to look away. The truth is, Epstein had a free pass. He bragged about his powerful friends, including our current president, Donald Trump. It was his biggest brag, actually.

And while I — what I endured will haunt me forever. I live every day with PTSD. I live as a mother trying to raise my child while distrusting a world that has betrayed me. This kind of trauma never leaves you. It breaks families apart. It shapes the way we see everyone around us. But one thing is certain: Unless we learn from this history, monsters like Epstein will rise again.

There are files, government files, that hold the truth about Epstein, who he knew, who owed him, who protected him, and why he was allowed to operate for so long without consequence. Why was Maxwell the only one held accountable when so many others played a role? Why does the government hide this information from the public? This secrecy is not protection; it’s complicity. And as long as the truth is buried, justice will remain out of reach.

That is why this bill matters. Passing it will — bless you — endure — ensure that the suffering of survivors is not in vain. Passing it will bring accountability, transparency and prevention. It will help protect the next generation of predators who seek to place themselves above the law through wealth, influence and connections.

This is not just my story. It is about every survivor who carries invisible scars. It’s about the weight we live with daily. It is about the families broken and the futures stolen. So, I ask you, President Trump and members of Congress: Why do we continue to cover up sexual abuse and assault? Who are we covering for? Let the public know the truth. We cannot heal without justice. We cannot protect the future if we refuse to confront the past.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Those were some of the Epstein survivors who spoke out Wednesday in a news conference outside the Capitol. They also called for the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, introduced by Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, who will join us in a moment.

AMY GOODMAN: World Without Exploitation helped organize the survivors who spoke out. It’s the largest anti-trafficking coalition in the country. For more, we’re joined by its national director, Lauren Hersh, the former chief of sex-trafficking unit here in New York.

Lauren Hersh, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can talk about the significance of this moment? You had scores of women, of survivors. Some of them had never spoken before, surrounding the group of women who did speak. Talk about this moment and also what it means for them to be calling for something that the Trump administration said they were protecting the victims when they were not releasing the files, calling for the release of the Epstein files.

LAUREN HERSH: Well, good morning, and thank you so much for having me.

This was truly a historic moment. We saw more than 20 Epstein survivors come together. They stood in solidarity with one another and so many survivors of other exploiters who joined them at the Hill yesterday to listen to their voices. And it was historic for so many reasons, because this was really the first time that these women were coming together and really connecting with one another.

But also, it was so powerful to listen to their stories and also listen to their call to action, and listen to the other women who surrounded them, many of whom were exploited by other people. But interestingly, we were approached by several other Epstein survivors, who we didn’t even know who were in the space, who said, “I needed to be here today. I needed to listen to my survivor sisters. And this gave me strength and empowered me for the very first time.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, that’s extraordinary, Lauren. Do you think any of those people would be willing, the people who were there who were also survivors of Epstein’s or his consorts, cohorts, subject to their — to sexual abuse by them, whether they would also be willing to speak out?

LAUREN HERSH: Well, what we know is courage is contagious. And we saw that yesterday. I’m not sure if any of these women who came yesterday, who were Epstein survivors who had never said that out loud, if they planned to even approach some of us. And yet, once they listened to these survivors speaking their truth, they felt empowered and safe enough to come forward and say, “Yes, me, too.” So, I think this may be the moment where we are unlocking even more, more voices, more survivors, and the possibility of so much more truth coming out.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Trump’s response when asked about the Epstein survivors’ testimony, as he was sitting in the Oval Office.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So, this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. … I think we’re probably having, according to what I read, even from two people in this room, we’re having the most successful eight months of any president ever. And that’s what I want to talk about. That’s what we should be talking about, not the Epstein hoax.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Trump. Lauren Hersh, a “hoax.” I keep thinking of one of the women saying, “I’m a Republican. I voted for President Trump. This doesn’t have to do with party politics.” Your response, Lauren?

LAUREN HERSH: I mean, what I want to talk about is listening to the voices of survivors, right? They said, loud and clear, this is not a political issue. This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue about people. This is an issue about what they, these women, collectively and individually, have experienced over decades. There has been so much trauma. There has been so much terror. And they’re finally at the point where they’re saying, “No more. We are ready to speak our truth.”

And truthfully, this is not the first time that women have come forward. Many have come forward individually, saying, “We want these people to be held to account.” But this is really the first time that they’re collectively coming together. And so, we want to make sure that we’re centering those voices, we’re listening to the voices, who are saying, very loud and clear, it’s time to release all of the files.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Lauren, if you could comment on the significance of the survivors saying that they are, in fact, compiling a list of clients themselves? They didn’t say necessarily that they would release that client list, but just the fact that they’re compiling it. Your response to that?

LAUREN HERSH: My response is, there is such power in this incredible community. What you’re hearing from them are decades of frustration. These are women who have been let down by system after system, and they’re at the point where they’re saying, “We’ve got answers. We know the truth. And if we come together, we can provide the truth.” And so, that is what they intend to do. It’s very powerful.

AMY GOODMAN: Lauren Hersh, we want to thank you so much for being with us, national director of the largest anti-trafficking coalition in the country, World Without Exploitation, former sex-trafficking prosecutor in New York. The organization helped to organize the survivors who spoke out Wednesday just steps from the Capitol.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, recaps and responds to the latest legal news on the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. We cover judicial decisions that the Trump administration cannot deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process, that it broke the law by sending National Guard troops to put down protests in Los Angeles, as well as its attempts to deport hundreds of Guatemalan children currently in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and deputize military lawyers with no experience in immigration law to serve as immigration judges, and more.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We look now at a slew of legal developments with the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities and his broader immigration crackdown. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of the retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, ruled Trump broke the law when he deployed the National Guard to L.A. to quell protests against immigration raids. Breyer expressed concern [that] the deployments are, quote, “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” unquote.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges.

And in more immigration news, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a two-to-one ruling that blocks President Trump from using the 18th-century wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members, because, quote, “We find no invasion or predatory incursion had occurred.” The 5th Circuit is considered to be one of the most conservative appeals courts in the United States. The case is expected to head to the Supreme Court.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Aaron, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s start with that last overnight court decision. If you can talk about this very conservative court ruling against Trump using the Alien Enemies Act, the AEA, and then just go through these latest decisions in the last two days?

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, well, first, starting with the Alien Enemies Act, we saw the 5th Circuit, in a two-one decision, rule that the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime authority, which is what everyone has been saying so far. The judges’ panel’s rule, it was a two-one decision. They joined over a dozen other federal judges to rule that this law, adopted in 1798 during the quasi-war with France, and that has only ever previously been invoked during declared wars, is in fact a wartime authority and not something that can be used to deport Venezuelan alleged gang members without any due process whatsoever. So this is yet another blow for the Trump administration in their efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act. And though we know that this case will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, at the Supreme Court, as well, the Trump administration is zero for two in their efforts to use the law without any due process.

Beyond that, of course, we had Judge Breyer’s decision in California finding that the President violated the Posse Comitatus Act when the military was used for domestic law enforcement, things like riot control or crowd control in Los Angeles.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And for those who are not aware, what is the Posse Comitatus Act?

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: The Posse Comitatus Act is a 150-year-old law, adopted after the Civil War, that says extremely clearly that the U.S. military may not be used for domestic law enforcement unless explicitly authorized to do so by Congress. And here, Congress has never authorized the military to be used for basic law enforcement tasks like crowd control.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Also, if you could comment on the federal judge’s decision over the weekend stopping the Trump administration from illegally deporting as many as 700 Guatemalan children in the middle of the night back to Guatemala?

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, that’s another case that looks very suspiciously similar to the kinds of things the Trump administration did in the Alien Enemies Act case. They adopted a very out-there, bizarre legal interpretation that had never been for — been put forward, and then tried to execute mass removals in the middle of the night, or very early in the morning, before a judge could stop them. In this case, a judge acted at 2 a.m. to put forward an order to block the Trump administration, and continued forward that order and her actions throughout the day, so they did, in fact, prevent the planes from taking off.

But at its heart, this resulted from — this was a result of the Trump administration’s bizarre claim that the Office of Refugee Resettlement has an authority to effectively run its own shadow repatriation system and has the ability to send children home outside of the normal constraints of immigration law, which include things like the right to seek asylum. So, those flights have been blocked. This case will now continue forward in the courts. But unlike what happened with the Alien Enemies Act and the deportations to El Salvador, the planes did not manage to take off and deplane their passengers.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges. The head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Ben Johnson, warned the decision will gut due process and undermine the immigration court. He said to the Associated Press, “It makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.” Talk about the meaning of Army lawyers becoming immigration judges.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, Ben Johnson is right here. The reality is that immigration law is extraordinarily complex, and it’s often been described as second in complexity only to the tax system. And immigration court has often been described as death penalty cases in traffic court procedures. So, what we have here are 600 lawyers, who may very well be good lawyers and conscientious, but have absolutely no experience in immigration law whatsoever, and they’re being assigned to take cases that could lead to someone’s death if they’re decided wrong. While undoubtedly they could eventually become experts in immigration law with months and months of training, these deployments are supposed to last only 179 days. So, you have people who have been or are going to be ordered to take on these incredibly weighty, difficult, complex cases, without any of the relevant experience they need, which is only going to strain the immigration court system. And indeed, the purpose of this is clear. Corey Lewandowski, who is a senior adviser to Secretary Noem, and, of course, a longtime member of Trump world, said on X yesterday that the goal of this is to increase deportations. And I think that really gives away the game.

AMY GOODMAN: So much for being with us —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to —

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No, no, I just wanted to ask him about the pending invasion of Chicago by both federal agents and the military, especially this idea that Trump has of bringing National Guard troops from, essentially, Republican states to occupy largely minority cities in Democratic states.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, I think, as Governor Pritzker has stated, this is particularly disturbing. You know, when you look at the statistics, Chicago is not even in the top 20 most violent cities, which is not to say, of course, that there are not issues with gun violence, but not ones that would justify deploying the National Guard.

But I want to emphasize that, you know, beyond the National Guard, this is in many ways also about immigration. Here in Washington, D.C., the National Guard has mostly been standing around the Mall or doing tasks like spreading mulch and picking up trash. But what’s actually been happening, most significantly, is the invasion of the city by federal law enforcement officers to carry out immigration enforcement. You have ICE and the Metropolitan Police Department setting up checkpoints in major thoroughfares in the city. You have a major increase in ICE raids across the city and people being afraid to take their children to school. So, while a lot of the attention in Chicago is going to be on the National Guard deployment, keep an eye out for what ICE is doing, because this could be yet another Los Angeles, where we see huge increase in immigration enforcement throughout the city and immigrant communities forced to shrink back in fear.

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, thanks so much.

NOW READ: Here's why we really don’t trust Donald Trump

“How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency?” That’s the question driving a major new investigation by journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in The New Yorker, which finds that the first family has been leveraging its place atop U.S. politics to rake in billions. According to Kirkpatrick, Donald Trump and his immediate family have made $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

“What really surprised me about all this is just how fast they’re making this money. They seem to turn down no opportunity,” says Kirkpatrick. “It really sharpens the question of what a buyer, so to speak, might be getting for that.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

“The Number: How Much Is Trump Pocketing Off the Presidency?” That’s the headline of an exhaustive new investigation published by The New Yorker magazine. In the piece, journalist David Kirkpatrick writes, quote, “Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his Presidencies: a two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto; fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch.”

In March, Forbes estimated that Trump’s net worth had more than doubled over a year to $5 billion. And a few months later, The New York Times estimated Trump’s wealth had grown to $10 billion. But these estimates and others did not attempt to look at how exactly his fortune is growing.

David Kirkpatrick writes, quote, “Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he’s made. … I decided to attempt to tally up just how much Trump and his immediate family have pocketed off his time in the White House,” unquote.

Well, David Kirkpatrick joins us now in our New York studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Explain how you arrived at the number. And what are the — is the period of time that he has made this money?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Well, what’s important here is that I’m trying to be fair to the president. I’m not out to get Trump here. I went through and looked at all the sources of income, the income streams flowing into the Trump Organization, the president and his family, and I asked: Is this money that he would have made absent the presidency? Because he’s got hotels, he’s got golf courses. Sometimes people go there just to play golf or rent a hotel room. We’re not talking about that. So, I only wanted to look at money that he has made because he is or has been in the White House. And then I tried to ask, as best I could: What is each one of those things worth? And that’s how I came up with $3.4 billion. And again, I think what I hope will make this report credible, and the reason I urge people to read it, is that it’s — I’ve tried as best I can to be fair. I’ve shown all my work. And people can make their own conclusions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, could you talk about some of the specifics, from the small to the big, for instance, the ubiquitous MAGA hat at Trump rallies? How is — Trump has a private store that sells these? Can you talk about that, and also the family’s investments in crypto?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, the hats. I was quite surprised to realize that in addition to the campaign merchandise sold by his campaign, which all candidates and all presidents do — that’s money that goes into the campaign coffers, that he can’t really touch for personal purposes — the Trump Organization also has its own online store, and they sell all kinds of Trump merchandise that looks very much like its campaign merchandise, but this money flows to Trump and himself — you know, $20, $40 for a pair of flip-flops, a pair of beer koozies, a baseball hat. He’s making, you know, millions of dollars — you know, I forget what the exact number was, but 20 millions of dollars over the last few years — selling this kind of merchandise, which is arguably competing with his own campaign and diverting some of the money that his supporters might think is supporting the MAGA movement and his candidates to his own pocket. That’s the — you know, that’s the small end. Nobody thinks that anybody who’s paying $50 for a baseball hat is actually going to get any influence, you know, over the president in return for that. That’s just a way of making money.

On the other extreme, there’s significant amounts of money flowing into the Trump Organization now through its various or the president’s various crypto enterprises. Some of these, you know, predate his return to the White House, but I tried to look here at the — you know, all the money that they made off of the White House over the course of the two terms and the time in between, when he remained a kind of kingmaker in the Republican Party, so — and most of it has happened during around his second term, you know, shortly before, through his second term. In terms of crypto, you know, should I go through and break down all the ways they’re making money off of crypto?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: OK, well, here you go. So, first of all, for people who might not be familiar with crypto, all it is, really, is a kind of online ledger or spreadsheet keeping track of who owns what. There’s a number of ways the Trump family has tried to take advantage of this new technology. He started out by selling NFTs, non-fungible tokens, which are basically sort of digital cartoons of himself.

Then he moved on to setting up a company. His family, his sons set up a company called World Liberty Financial. And that’s done a couple things. It sold a kind of token or online certificate that would ostensibly allow somebody to vote on whatever its futures, plans in the crypto business might be. They raised, you know, $550 million selling those tokens, and 75% of that flows to the Trump Organization. Then it went into a new business, selling what’s known as a stablecoin. A stablecoin is basically the online equivalent of a dollar. It’s not really an investment. It’s just a kind of, like, almost a checking account. It’s a way to transfer money here and there, perhaps more efficiently by doing it digitally. For the company, World Liberty Financial, they get to make money off of investing that money in treasuries while it’s out in the world circulating as a stablecoin. So, they go into the stablecoin business. Their first customer is a company owned by the United Arab Emirates that puts up $2 billion to buy stablecoin. While that money is out circulating as stablecoin, they’re going to get about 4% a year on that, I calculate, by investing it in short-term treasuries. So, that’s a couple.

There’s a few others he’s gone into. His memecoin is perhaps the most famous. President Trump, right around the time he was elected, before he was inaugurated, went into this business selling a kind of online novelty, basically just a joke. It’s a kind of digital certificate that just allows you to say, “I paid money to own a little Trump novelty.” That’s it. That’s all it is. There’s nothing to it. And it doesn’t even purport to sort of hold wealth, although you can trade it back and forth. He’s made about $300 million selling those memecoins.

And the last thing is a little bit of kind of a financial engineering that his company, Trump Media & Technology Group, a publicly traded company of which he’s the chairman — a little bit of financial engineering that that company has done. Now, that is the company that owns Truth Social. Truth Social is a very small online platform, social media platform. It doesn’t have much revenue, maybe a million dollars a quarter. It’s never really made a profit. It doesn’t have much chance of ever making a profit. And yet, the stock that owns it, Trump Media & Technology Group, trades at a kind of surprisingly high price. People on Wall Street consider it a meme stock. It trades basically on how people feel about President Trump. And in the last couple months, really in June, that company has done a remarkable thing, which is they have sold — they’ve issued new shares of stock. They’ve sold the stock at their inflated memecoin price, and they’ve taken that money, and they’ve bought bitcoin. They’ve also done the same thing to try to stockpile some cash, but they’ve bought about $2.3 or $2.4 billion worth of bitcoin, and they’ve stockpiled about $760 million worth of cash. So, in the end of last quarter, they said, “Look, we’ve got $3.1 billion of liquid assets on our books.” So, I calculate that since President Trump owns 42% of that company, he has an ownership interest in that $3.1 billion. So, as I was doing this reporting over the last few months there, my calculation of their net worth, of his net worth, bumped by — I shouldn’t say “his net worth” — of the amount of money he’s made off the presidency, jumped up by a billion dollars.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, other members of the family, for instance, Jared Kushner and his daughter, in terms of the investments by foreign government sovereign funds in them, and what that looks like?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I think you’re thinking about Jared Kushner’s private equity firm.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: So, after he left — after Trump left the White House in 2020, his son, Jared Kushner, who had been in real estate, went into private equity, a new line of work. And he went to the Persian Gulf to solicit money, and he asked the sovereign wealth fund of the United — of Saudi Arabia to invest. Their panel of advisers said, “This is a mistake. He doesn’t have a track record in private equity, only real estate. There could be some public relations problem here. People are going to say this is a payoff to the family of a president.” The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who controls the public investment fund, overruled that and, nonetheless, invested the $2 billion with Jared Kushner’s private equity firm.

Since then, he’s accumulated as much as $4.8 billion in assets under management, almost all of it from foreign sources, quite a bit of it also from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Under standard private equity terms, he would get 2% a year of that money as asset management fees. With Saudi Arabia, it’s a little bit lower. But that is also, I’m counting as, money flowing into the Trump family coffers as a result of their time in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us, David, about the family? I mean, in the first term, many of them were advisers to President Trump. They were in the White House. They would have to deal with ethics rules. We don’t see that right now. So, I’m wondering how the family business has changed from the first term to the second term. And I also wanted to ask you about — for example, President Trump says he struck a trade agreement with Vietnam. He’ll apply a 20% tariff on Vietnamese imports, down from the 46% he threatened. The reported deal comes just weeks after the Trump Organization broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf course in Vietnam. A few questions there.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, a few questions there. So, during the first term, President Trump, on his way into office, volunteered that he and his family were not going to do any deals overseas, because they didn’t like the way that looked. Right? It raises the specter that some foreign interest, or even foreign government, is going to try to buy favor with the U.S. government by paying Trump and his family privately.

During the second term, the family has said, “We’re not going to do that anymore. We’re no longer going to abstain from those deals.” Donald Trump Jr. has said publicly, “Look, we restrained ourselves last term, and people accused us of profiteering anyway. So we’re not going to lock ourselves in, quote-unquote, 'the proverbial padded room.' We’re just going to go ahead and be businessmen and do as many deals as we can.” And they’ve done quite a few.

Now, again, in my accounting, I’m not including deals which appear to be extensions of the business they were in before he was elected. You know, he had licensed his name for use on four condominium buildings around India before he ever went into the White House. Now there are five more Indian projects. Fine, let’s leave that aside. That’s, more or less, legitimate Trump business.

On the other hand, since late 2022, when he was really the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he’s had a whole flurry of new deals around the Persian Gulf with one Saudi Arabian company, and that’s in, you know, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, a couple in Saudi Arabia and one in Qatar. And I don’t think there’s any way those would have happened without the presidency. And that adds up to, I would say, you know, guessing as best I can the various income streams involved — that’s more than $100 million right there in terms of its present value.

You mentioned the Vietnam project. That’s another one that I think, you know, would not have unfolded as it has, were he not returning to the White House. That is probably, you know, physically, going to be the largest Trump-branded property in the world. Its planned size is about three times as big as Central Park with 54 holes of golf. It’s very hard to know how much the Trump family is actually going to make out of that property. On his most recent financial disclosure form, he said that the Trump Organization had already received $5 million in initial licensing fees from lending their name to that property. He’s not going to build it. He’s not going to own it. They’re just lending their name and some management services. So, I figure, over 10 years, which is kind of a minimum term for a management or licensing agreement, he’s likely to make at least $50 million, with a present value of about $40 million. Probably it’ll be a lot more than that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how much of this, in your perspective, is legal or — and also, how much of it is unprecedented for a president?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: As far as I can tell, it’s all legal. You know, I don’t have any evidence of a quid pro quo. I don’t have any evidence of a specific instance where he has explicitly sold a public favor for personal profit. And the remedy that our laws prescribe for potential conflicts of interest is disclosure. Elected officials disclose what they own and how they’re making money, and the voters or the Congress can decide what’s appropriate or inappropriate. And I guess we’ll have to see how voters feel about that. The other part of your question, I think, was — what again?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: How much of this is unprecedented for a president?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of — that’s been widely reported. There’s nothing like this before, right? A lot of presidents make money after they leave, selling books, you know, various other endeavors. But he and his family are making this money while he’s in the White House. And the scale is really quite novel.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the last 10 seconds, you talk about the frenzy.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Well, that’s right. What really surprised me about all this is just how fast they’re making this money. They seem to turn down no opportunity. And that’s what makes the questions about a conflict of interest all the more pressing, because I feel like when they are so evidently zealous, so eager to make money, it really sharpens the question of what a buyer, so to speak, might be getting for that.

AMY GOODMAN: David Kirkpatrick, we want to thank you so much for being with us, reporter with The New Yorker. We’ll link to your piece, “The Number: How Much Is Trump Pocketing Off the Presidency?”

Watch the segment below:

As President Trump threatens to use U.S. special forces against drug cartels abroad, a new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reveals some of the most secretive and elite special forces in the Army are heavily involved in narcotrafficking themselves. “There’s at least 14 cases that I’m tracking of Fort Bragg-trained soldiers who have been either arrested, apprehended or killed in the course of trafficking drugs in the last five years or so,” says author Seth Harp. The book also looks at “how U.S. military intervention often stimulates drug production,” including in Afghanistan, which he says became the biggest narco-state in the world during the 20-year U.S. occupation. “Most of the drug trafficking and drug production was being carried out and done by warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, who were on the U.S. payroll in a corrupt structure,” says Harp.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As the National Guard expands its presence in Washington, D.C., President Trump says he’ll seek long-term federal takeover of the D.C. police force.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re going to be putting in, and it’s going to pertain initially to D.C. It’s almost — we’re going to use it as a very positive example. And we’re going to be asking for extensions on that, long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days. Thirty days is — that’s — by the time you do it — we’re going to have this in good shape.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C., even though violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has denounced Trump’s takeover of the police force as an “authoritarian push.” At least 800 National Guard troops are being deployed in D.C., alongside 500 federal law enforcement agents.

The Washington Post revealed Tuesday the Trump administration is also planning a so-called Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force composed of hundreds of National Guard troops set to rapidly deploy to other U.S. cities targeted by Trump, including Democratic strongholds of Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Oakland. The force would be comprised of two groups of 300 soldiers permanently assigned to the force, stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona.

This comes after Trump earlier deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids and arrests by masked, unidentified agents who also targeted U.S. citizens when they were making their arrests.

Rolling Stone reports, quote, “One of Trump’s biggest regrets from his first term in the Oval Office, according to former and current senior Trump advisers, is that he didn’t use military forces and other federal assets to crack down harder than he ultimately did in the summer of 2020” on racial justice protests. Trump’s secretary of defense at the time did not agree with the president’s idea to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters near the White House.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, Trump secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon’s use of military force on foreign soil to target drug cartels, especially in countries like Mexico.

All of this comes as Trump is due to meet Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the U.S. has also sent troops.

Today, we take a rare look at U.S. special forces deployed around the world, whether we’re talking about Mexico, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan or here at home. They’re stationed at the most populous military base in the country, which was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, until Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change the name back to Fort Bragg, saying, “Bragg is back.” Fort Bragg is home to Delta Force, the most secretive black ops unit in the military, which carries out classified assassinations and other clandestine missions and is also heavily involved in drug trafficking, as our next guest reveals in his new book.

Rolling Stone investigative reporter Seth Harp is a foreign correspondent who’s reported from Iraq, Mexico, Syria and Ukraine, also an Iraq War veteran. His new book, out this week, is titled The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.

I don’t think people usually expect to see, when talking about a cartel, the largest U.S. military base, Fort Bragg. So, if you can talk about drug trafficking and murder in the Special Forces? Begin with what Fort Bragg is, who the Special Forces are, especially Delta Forces, and who these dead bodies are that are turning up all over Fort Bragg and the surrounding area.

SETH HARP: Well, Trump says he wants to deploy military forces to countries like Mexico to crack down on drug cartels there, but I think he should look closer to home, because there’s at least 14 cases that I’m tracking of Fort Bragg-trained soldiers who have been either arrested, apprehended or killed in the course of trafficking drugs in the last five years or so, often in conjunction with those very same Mexican drug cartels.

This is especially concerning because of what Fort Bragg is. It’s not only the largest U.S. military base, but it’s central to U.S. operations and special operations. It’s the home of the 82nd Airborne Division, which is the United States’ main contingency force. It’s also the headquarters of the Green Berets, the Special Forces, as well as the Joint Special Operations Command, which includes Delta Force, which is the most —

AMY GOODMAN: That’s JSOC?

SETH HARP: That’s JSOC. That’s the most secretive and elite component of the U.S. military. And as you said, there have been some members of Delta Force who have been involved in trafficking drugs recently.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you begin this book with the discovery of two bodies. Tell us when they were discovered and who those men were.

SETH HARP: In December of 2020, two dead bodies were found in a remote training range of Fort Bragg. One of them was a member of Delta Force. They had both been shot to death. And the limited information from police at that time was that it was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. The other person who was killed at that time was Timothy Dumas, who was a support officer, a logistics officer, for JSOC. The other one, the Delta Force operator, his name was Billy Lavigne. And my book mostly is, or at the core of it, it’s an investigation into who committed these murders.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Billy Lavigne, Delta Force. Talk about the Delta Force operations. And you just mentioned that people are being killed in Fort Bragg, and part of the killing responsibility is the Mexican drug cartels, but those cartels, you talk about being trained at Fort Bragg?

SETH HARP: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s unclear who committed the murders of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas, I’ve got to say. Certainly, we might suspect that it could have been some of their associates in the drug trafficking industry. I did learn in the course of researching the book and reporting it that Lavigne and Dumas were buying cocaine through the Los Zetas cartel in Mexico, which, in fact, was trained in the United States. It began as a project, a joint project, between the U.S. Special Forces and the Mexican government to create an elite paratrooper unit of the Mexican Army, and later went rogue and became one of the most feared cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re talking about a kind of Mexico Delta Force.

SETH HARP: You could say that. You could say that, or Mexican Green Berets.

AMY GOODMAN: The numbers that you’re talking about of soldiers who have died at Fort Bragg, in a couple years over 100?

SETH HARP: A hundred and nine from 2020 to 2021. And only four of those deaths took place in foreign combat zones, in Afghanistan and Syria. All the rest took place stateside, either on Fort Bragg itself or in Fayetteville, which is the town right by Fort Bragg.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about, with this number of deaths, how does it compare, for example, to Fort Hood? And talk about what happens when you have this massive number of deaths. Who is held responsible? And how are they dying?

SETH HARP: Well, so far, nobody has been held responsible. Fort Bragg is the largest military base; however, the number of deaths there, on a per capita and absolute basis, outstrips any other that you might compare it to. For example, we’re well aware that in Fort Hood in 2020, 38 soldiers died. That led to extensive news coverage, as well as two congressional investigations, which ultimately concluded with the entire chain of command at Fort Hood being fired. Even though the situation at Fort Bragg is objectively worse, and has been for years, so far, to my knowledge, nothing has been done about it.

AMY GOODMAN: You say that “Fort Bragg has a lot of secrets. A lot of underground narcotics secrets. It’s its own little cartel.” That was Freddie Huff, who is the ex-DEA agent, talking about Fort Bragg. What exactly does that mean?

SETH HARP: So, Freddie Huff was a corrupt North Carolina state trooper and DEA task force agent who became a high-level drug trafficker in North Carolina. He was the connection between Los Zetas in Mexico and this group of Special Forces soldiers on Fort Bragg who were trafficking and distributing drugs in the area. And that quote was from Mr. Huff. And, you know, he was alleging that he sold, you know, hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to this group.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people die of suicide, and how is that dealt with, in the military at Fort Bragg?

SETH HARP: A shocking and depressing number. You know, the Army is well aware that it has a suicide problem. It has for a long time. But the numbers at Fort Bragg are really extreme, and it’s the number one cause of death at Fort Bragg by far. And many of those deaths are also drug-related, regrettably.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why isn’t there investigation going on? As President Trump tariffs Mexico and increases tariffs on Canada, talking about fentanyl, talk about what’s happening at Bragg.

SETH HARP: Well, on the contrary, there haven’t been. Not only has there not been any sort of reforms or any crackdown on this, but Trump and Hegseth, they make a big show of their support for Fort Bragg, changing the name back to Fort Bragg from Fort Liberty, giving speeches there, touting the Special Forces and the Airborne Corps, without really taking seriously some of these underlying and systemic issues, which are quite troubling.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the ways you use these murders to talk about U.S. presence in the military around the world is when you talk about Timothy Dumas — you say he was a quartermaster with the Special Forces — and how he used his position — was it in Afghanistan? — to bring drugs into the United States. Now, this is the guy who was murdered.

SETH HARP: Yes, that’s the allegation. Not only did — not only was he involved in that, actually, Timothy Dumas, before he died, wrote a letter, a blackmail letter. It was with the intention of blackmailing the Special Forces, because he had been kicked out of the Army for his misbehavior and his crimes and had been deprived of his pension as a result of that. In order to — in a stratagem to exert leverage on the Special Forces and get his pension reinstated, he composed this document, which purported to name the members of what Mr. Huff called the “Fort Bragg cartel.” But before he was ever able to release that letter, he himself was murdered.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about Afghanistan for a moment. Talk about the U.S. presence there, the forever war, and talk about heroin, drugs and how they became so critical to the Afghan economy. And did the Taliban have anything to do with that?

SETH HARP: It’s really shocking, the degree to which the war in Afghanistan had to do with drugs and drug production. It’s an aspect of the war that was never covered to the degree that it ought to have been. Afghanistan under U.S. occupation became by far the biggest narco-state in the world, producing more heroin than the entire planet could absorb. Most of the drug trafficking and drug production was being carried out and done by warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, who were on the U.S. payroll in a corrupt structure, which you could plausibly describe as a cartel, that went all the way up to the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, as well as Ashraf Ghani. During the entire time that the U.S. occupied the country, it was turning out staggering quantities of very high-potency heroin, which flooded the entire planet and caused terrible heroin crises all over the world, including in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, “No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working class across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza.”

SETH HARP: Right. And part of that has to do with the DEA’s assertion that only 1% of heroin in the United States comes from Afghanistan. This is something that we were told by the DEA during the course of the war, and which was duly repeated by many media outlets. But I go into some detail in my book about why I believe that that number was fictitious. And in fact, just as in Canada, just as in Australia, Russia, wherever you look in the world, by far the majority of heroin in the United States, I believe, came from Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to move over to Ukraine. You have the summit that President Trump is holding with Vladimir Putin in Alaska tomorrow. You spent a good amount of time in Ukraine. Talk about where you were, when you were there, and what the U.S. Special Forces were doing there.

SETH HARP: I was in Ukraine at the start of the war. I was in Kyiv during the Battle of Kyiv. And at that time, we had been told that there were no U.S. military forces in Ukraine, that they had all been withdrawn on orders of President Biden before the Russian invasion. However, I was the first to report that, in fact, there were members of the Joint Special Operations Command active in Ukraine from day one, including members of the Delta Force, as well SEAL Team Six. And that reporting was subsequently confirmed by other media outlets. They may not have specified what units they came from, but certainly the presence of U.S. special operators in Ukraine has been confirmed.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about the significance of this, where they came from in the United States, what they were doing.

SETH HARP: Well, they all come from Fort Bragg. And the conventional troops that were there in Poland to back up the Ukrainian army also came from Fort Bragg, the 82nd Airborne Division. That’s an illustration of the centrality of Fort Bragg to all U.S. military operations. Now, where are they in the country of Ukraine right now? That’s not — I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know that anybody knows that. But certainly, it is concerning that we have our U.S. military personnel there in a conflict with another nuclear-armed power.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to President Trump’s relationship with the military. There’s the op-ed in The New York Times today talking about how it was thought it would ultimately, interestingly, be the military that would stop Trump from using it on the ground in the United States. The headline is “We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong.”

And I wanted to go back to — well, we’ve talked about The New York Times revealing a trove of confidential military interviews with the Navy SEALs who accused Chief Edward Gallagher of war crimes. He met with President Trump at Trump’s private resort in Mar-a-Lago weeks after Trump overruled his own military leaders and blocked them from disciplining Gallagher, despite him being — despite him being convicted of posing with a teenage corpse in a high-profile war crimes case. He was also accused of fatally stabbing the captive teenager in the neck and shooting two Iraqi civilians, but he was acquitted of premeditated murder. In the never-before-released videos, the soldiers tell Navy investigators Gallagher was “toxic” and “freaking evil.” So, he was a Navy SEAL. You served in Iraq. You also report on Iraq. Talk about the significance of this pardoning, ultimately, that Trump did of Gallagher, and who exactly he was, and where he was found guilty of committing these crimes in Iraq.

SETH HARP: Trump’s cozying up to war criminals like Eddie Gallagher is the one — one of the most deplorable features of his administration and is an illustration of the incredibly deleterious effect that Trump’s malignant command influence has had on the entire special operations community, because Eddie Gallagher is somebody who was turned in by his own teammates, who were far from bleeding-heart liberals. These are active-duty Navy SEALs fighting in Mosul, in Iraq, who see their chief murdering people right and left, men, women, children, unarmed people. He was caught on video about to stab that teenage ISIS fighter in the neck. His teammates wanted him gone. The Navy SEAL command wanted him gone.

But Trump saw an opportunity to make guys like Eddie Gallagher part of his personal political brand. And that is — he also pardoned people like Mathew Golsteyn, who was the Green Beret officer who admitted to committing murder on live television. Other people that Trump has made part of his retinue, some of the craziest people in the special operations community.

All of this has had the effect of — you know, there are people in this community who do go by a sense of ethics and who are not so criminally inclined, and the more Trump is in office and doing things like this, the fewer you have of those people, and the more you have of the sort of piratical types like Eddie Gallagher staying in and rising higher in the ranks. And you see that in the kind of fallout of the domestic crime that I describe in my book.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Seth Harp. He is the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel. It’s out this week. The subtitle, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. What did you discover, Seth, about the intelligence role of Delta Force and its covert actions in countries where the U.S. is not at war?

SETH HARP: It’s really incredible how little we know about the Delta Force. I believe my book is the only sort of serious investigative look at the unit, despite the fact that it is the most elite unit in the U.S. military and has been at the forefront of all U.S. wars since at least 2001. So, Delta Force, I’d be happy to tell you anything about the unit. What was your — what should I say?

AMY GOODMAN: You tell us. You did the — you wrote the book.

SETH HARP: The intelligence gathering, you said.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

SETH HARP: So, it’s interesting, because a lot of people are not aware the extent to which these type of units, Delta and JSOC, which Delta is a part of JSOC, are — besides their paramilitary capacities, besides their operations doing assassinations and abductions in war zones, they also have strong intelligence-gathering capabilities and are — they have troops that are overseas, that are active-duty U.S. military members who are not wearing uniforms, who are not carrying IDs, who are operating under cover identities, sometimes pretending to be American businessmen, other times pretending to be State Department employees, but, in fact, are carrying out military operations in countries with which the United States is not at war, including things like bugging missions, other things that we don’t know about.

And I think what’s most crucial to emphasize in this context is that, unlike the CIA, unlike other civilian intelligence agencies that are subject to congressional oversight and must report their covert actions to Congress, the military is largely exempt from that type of oversight. And so, I think that’s one reason why you have seen a lot of the authority over covert action shift from civilian agencies to JSOC over the last 20 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we wrap up, I wanted to go to these latest moves by Trump, I mean, that special secret directive. We’re using it today to talk about what’s happening at home when it comes to drug cartels. But what about — and you’ve reported from Mexico. What about what Trump is saying, that the Pentagon can deploy in countries like Mexico? The Mexican president said — you know, had a very fierce reaction against this, going after drug cartels there. You started talking about Fort Bragg being a place where some of the most dangerous of these cartels were actually trained.

SETH HARP: Mm-hmm, that’s right. Los Zetas were trained at Fort Bragg, at Fort Benning, and they also received training from Israeli instructors, before they went rogue — another indication or another illustration of how U.S. military intervention often stimulates drug production. What was the second part of your question? Or what was the —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talking about Mexico, and the U.S. deploying troops there.

SETH HARP: I mean, it’s complete — to the extent — in these days, with the genocide in Gaza and so many other things going on, we almost have lost sight, and it seems like nobody cares about international law. But I just want to point out kind of the obvious, that using military force against drug traffickers, however bad you think drug traffickers are, that’s a total violation of the laws of war. They’re not combatants in war; they’re criminals. So, that’s one thing.

Another aspect of it is, you know, the sort of typical Trump showmanship. It’s not clear to me, having worked in Mexico as a reporter for years, that the sort of cartels that the DEA creates organization charts to illustrate and tout and purport — I don’t know that those really are such coherent organizations as they might imagine, and I question whether they have the intelligence on these purported organizations where they could actually carry out military strikes on them. I don’t know that they actually have the targeting intelligence for that to become a reality. But in any event, they ought to look more closely at the drug crime that’s taking place in the United States and even on our own military bases.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the long U.S. history, military and clandestine operations and drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, for people who are not aware of what happened, as well as in Latin America, for example, the illegal funding and support of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the thousands of Nicaraguans who were killed?

SETH HARP: Sure. There is a long pedigree of this kind of thing, covert alliances between U.S. Special Forces and paramilitaries and intelligence agencies and foreign forces that are implicated in the international drug trade. As you indicate, one of the first examples of that was in Laos and in Cambodia and Vietnam during that era, as well as in Central America, the case of the Nicaraguan Contras.

However, I must say, all of it pales in comparison with the complicity of the — practically the whole of the U.S. government with heroin cartels in Afghanistan during the war there. The amount of drugs that were produced, the openness of the alliance between the United States and known drug traffickers in that country surpass anything that we had previously seen in American history.

AMY GOODMAN: What most surprised you, Seth, in your research for this book? You, as a member of the military, but then stepping outside, you became a lawyer. You were an assistant attorney general in Texas, but a longtime investigative journalist around the world.

SETH HARP: The stuff about Afghanistan, I think, was the most shocking to me, because it was one country where I had not worked, and I really wasn’t aware of the degree to which the U.S. client state was the entity responsible for producing most of the drugs in Afghanistan. I have been kind of snowed, like everybody else, with this narrative that it was the Taliban that was doing it. But in the course of writing the book, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, and the Taliban in 2023 had completely eradicated all drug production from Afghanistan. So, seeing the Taliban come into power and totally eliminate that massive drug-producing industry that the U.S. had not only tolerated, but supported for 20 years, really showed — I guess, really belied the claim, until then, that it was either the Taliban or it was both sides, when, in fact, it was really our guys that were doing it the entire time.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think with this special directive, a secret directive that Trump has signed, that special forces operations in Latin America will increase under the guise of fighting cartels?

SETH HARP: It’s possible. I find that to be a very complicated prospect. So many of the drug traffickers in Latin America are military or police forces that are allied with the United States. Things are changing in Mexico and in Colombia, but, historically, the biggest drug traffickers in the Americas have been, let’s say, the Colombian Army and right-wing paramilitaries affiliated with the Colombian military, as well as, you know, you see the same type of phenomenon in Honduras and El Salvador and also in Mexico. So, when they talk about targeting these people, who exactly are they talking about?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’ve set us up well for our next segment. I want to thank you so much, Seth, for joining us. Seth Harp, Rolling Stone investigative reporter, his new book is just out. It’s called The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.

WATCH THE SEGMENT BELOW OR AT THIS LINK:

NOW READ: 'Trolling the president': How the myth of Trump's mental fitness has finally been revealed

Jess Michaels lives with the PTSD from her 1991 assault by the serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. She is part of a national chorus of voices calling on the Trump administration to release files related to the federal case against Epstein, who reportedly died by suicide while awaiting trial in 2019. Trump’s personal relationship with Epstein has been under heavy scrutiny since he broke a campaign promise to publicize details about the Epstein case and instead moved to cut a new deal with convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The decision has fractured his right-wing base, but as demands for transparency grow within the MAGA movement, Michaels says survivors are still struggling to be heard. “You never hear the words 'Epstein victim' or 'Epstein survivor' out of this White House,” she says, slamming the politicization of survivors’ pain and trauma. “The victims of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been speaking up for almost two decades,” Michaels says. “It is appalling that there is so little justice for this issue.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show looking at attempts by the Trump administration to quell an uproar by Trump’s MAGA base over the government’s refusal to release files related to the dead serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. CNN is reporting Vice President JD Vance met with top Justice Department officials Wednesday to discuss the Epstein case. The meeting was reportedly set to take place at his Washington, D.C., home but was moved to the White House amidst intense media coverage. The gathering reportedly included Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, among others, of course, with JD Vance, who discussed the need to craft a unified response to the Epstein scandal and emerging details of Trump’s longstanding friendship with the dead serial sex trafficker. CNN’s reporting directly contradicts Vance’s denial that officials huddled behind closed doors for this discussion.

Meanwhile, the family of Jeffrey Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre has called on President Trump not to consider clemency for the serial sex trafficker’s co-conspirator, the convicted sex felon Ghislaine Maxwell. She was the first — Giuffre was the first survivor to come out publicly against Epstein. She died in Australia in April, reportedly by suicide. In a statement, Giuffre’s family members said they were alarmed by these comments of Donald Trump in July, when Trump said Epstein “stole” Giuffre away from his Mar-a-Lago club, and that was the reason that he threw Epstein out.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He — he stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: In response, Giuffre’s siblings and their spouses wrote, quote, “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been 'stolen' from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey 'likes women on the younger side … no doubt about it.' [unquote] We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this,” the family of Virginia Giuffre wrote.

Well, Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas just days after she met with Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who formerly served as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse and traffic underage girls. Trump has not ruled out pardoning Maxwell.

For more, we go to Jess Michaels, a survivor of a 1991 sexual assault by Jeffrey Epstein. She’s an advocate for sexual assault survivors, the founder and CEO of 3 Joannes, a public benefit corporation.

Jess, thanks so much for joining us. I think the key question right now, as we hear about these private huddles — we know about Todd Blanche getting the nine-hour response of Ghislaine — of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is a convicted perjurer, as well. Is he also speaking to survivors? This very serious question of where voices like yours are. Can you talk about what this all has meant for the survivors? It’s believed the survivors of Maxwell and Epstein might number as much as 1,000, you included.

JESS MICHAELS: Well, firstly, Amy, thank you so much for having me on, and thank you for asking for the survivors’ perspective on what’s happening, because you are, and this White House is not. When you ask me how we feel about that meeting that they had about the “Epstein situation,” in quotes, what it didn’t include was any survivor voices, any victim voices. And that’s something that is very frustrating for all of us to hear.

I also had heard you mention earlier, you know, “Where are survivors in this?” And I want to point out, the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been speaking up for almost two decades. That’s two decades including the 2006 case against him. But before that, authorities were alerted in 1994, 1996, by Maria Farmer, who’s now leading a class-action suit against the government, the FBI, and I believe it’s the Florida Attorney General’s Office, for not following protocols for being alerted of sex trafficking. So, victims have been doing the right thing. Where it’s fallen apart is any accountability and justice. And that’s really frustrating.

What’s incredibly beautiful about this moment is that this issue is crossing party lines. There is no one out there that is OK with child sex trafficking.

AMY GOODMAN: As you point out, Maria and her sister Annie Farmer. Annie Farmer testified at —

JESS MICHAELS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial. And what is also amazing here is that she has been moved, after speaking to Todd Blanche, Trump’s former attorney, criminal defense attorney, to a — from Florida to a Texas minimum-security prison camp. I don’t know —

JESS MICHAELS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — if any sex felon has ever been at a minimum-security prison camp, because, again, important to point out — and you’ve worked with so many of these survivors — she’s not only accused with conspiring to bring women and girls to Epstein, but she herself —

JESS MICHAELS: She participated.

AMY GOODMAN: — abused women.

JESS MICHAELS: Yes, yes, she participated. And so, when I hear a call for her to be considered a victim of this, I am appalled. I am sick to my stomach that anyone would say a grown woman molesting children is a victim in any way. And we could go on — that’s a whole other interview and discussion, Amy, on what is a victim. But it is appalling that there is so little justice for this issue.

So, on one hand, we have this wonderful public support of finally believing that survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been harmed, and they’re behind — America is behind the victims 100%. That’s what I’m seeing in my comments. That’s what I’m seeing on social media. That’s what I’m getting in emails and DMs in an overwhelming degree.

And the reason they’re responding this way is because they are seeing now, maybe for the first time, the horrific lack of justice for sexual assault survivors, when there is so much evidence. Because it’s not just — it’s not just all of the videotapes and the audiotapes. It is victim impact statements. All of our victim impact statements are in those files. And we are all saying the same thing: Release them. Protect our identities, but release them. Release them now. And guess who else doesn’t want those — doesn’t want those files released? Ghislaine Maxwell does not want those files released.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

JESS MICHAELS: Because it’s going to prove how much she was involved. There are victim statements about her.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you make of President Trump refusing to rule out a pardon? You almost have the sense of moving to a minimum-security prison camp, then possibly what? House arrest and then a pardon. Each one is a trial balloon to see how the public responds. But what’s so interesting about this is that MAGA has divided over this, President —

JESS MICHAELS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — Trump’s base.

JESS MICHAELS: Yes, yes. Do you know what I find really fascinating about this whole thing, is the miscalculation on his part. I have been speaking up as an advocate for four years. And in my comments four years ago, when I shared that I was an Epstein survivor, I would see right-leaning up to MAGA, serious MAGA, saying, “You know what? Donald Trump is on top of this. Donald Trump is the one that’s helping the FBI get the evidence on him.” They really believed that he was law and order. And I think that’s the big disconnect right now, is they’re finding out that he’s not following through with what they — who they thought he was, and it’s really backfiring.

I think it’s also backfiring for him because we are not — I’m not the 22-year-old girl that was raped in 1991. The children that were abused by Maxwell and Epstein are no longer children. We are women. And I think he is greatly misunderstanding the strength and resolve of women that have been systemically and over time completely ignored.

You never hear the words “Epstein victim” or “Epstein survivor” out of this White House. I have yet to hear those two words. It’s always about “We are going to get the bad guys. Here’s the first — the first big phase one dump of information from Pam Bondi,” in February. But we never hear, “We’re going to get the victims justice. We care about how the victims feel right now. We’re going to try to move this along in a way that gets the victims and those survivors, that have been working so hard to speak up, justice.” That’s not happening. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Jess —

JESS MICHAELS: — it is a level of injury that is painful.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but I don’t want to end before you talk about trauma, before you talk about PTSD or, as you call it, PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury, of the survivors at this point.

JESS MICHAELS: What I think people assume is that we are just struggling emotionally. And what they — what the — what happens for me, I should — I’m speaking for me now — is that the pain is physical. It’s fatigue. It’s stomachaches. It’s heart palpitations. It’s headaches. It’s insomnia. It’s anxiety. It’s an inability to just calm my nerves down. So it has physical repercussions that I think people are not aware of.

AMY GOODMAN: Jess Michaels, I want to thank you so much for speaking out, 1991 Epstein rape survivor. She was 22 at the time. Now she’s head of an organization called 3 Joannes. That does it for our program. I’m Amy Goodman, This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

Investigative journalist Vicky Ward spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his rich and powerful associates, and the impact of his crimes.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re continuing now with Part 2 of our conversation with the investigative journalist Vicky Ward as we look at Trump’s attempt to quell his MAGA base uproar over the Trump administration’s refusal to release the files of dead serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. President Donald Trump’s deputy attorney general, who is Trump’s former private lawyer, just finished two days of meetings with the convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse young girls. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Maxwell met for nine hours at the courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

Now, I want to go back to April, when Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an outspoken survivor of sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein, died, apparently by suicide, in Australia at the age of 41. She was the first survivor to come out publicly against Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Ghislaine Maxwell. Virginia also sued Prince Andrew for sexually assaulting her when she was 17. The disgraced prince was forced to step away from his royal duties and settled with Giuffre in 2022. In a statement, Giuffre’s family said, quote, “Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. She was the light that lifted so many survivors,” unquote. Back in 2019, Virginia Giuffre spoke to the BBC.

VIRGINIA GIUFFRE: It was a wicked time in my life. It was a really scary time in my life. I had just been abused by a member of a royal family. So when you talk about these chains, you know, yeah, I wasn’t chained to a sink, but these powerful people were my chains. I didn’t know what could happen. And I just — I didn’t — I couldn’t comprehend how the highest levels of the government and powerful people were allowing this to happen, not only allowing it to happen, but participating in it.

AMY GOODMAN: “But by participating in it,” as well. That was Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2019.

We’re now continuing our conversation with Vicky Ward, the longtime investigative journalist, who wrote for Vanity Fair, now host and co-producer of the podcast series and TV series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow.

If you can give us some background on Giuffre? This was back in 2019. That’s when Jeffrey Epstein was charged in a much more comprehensive and serious way, to be followed a few years later by Ghislaine Maxwell, after he supposedly committed suicide. And she was found guilty. Give us the history of this story and what Virginia is alleging.

VICKY WARD: Well, so, Virginia Roberts Giuffre plays a really, really important role in all of it, because after Jeffrey Epstein avoids federal charges the first time round, when the feds come for him in 2000, investigate him in 2006 for the next couple of years, that is when there is this sweetheart — he has a huge team of hugely influential and high-powered lawyers, and he is able — we don’t yet know all the details as to quite why, but he is able to —

AMY GOODMAN: And these lawyers, just to say —

VICKY WARD: — through Alex Acosta —

AMY GOODMAN: — from Ken Starr to Alan Dershowitz, a battery of lawyers.

VICKY WARD: Right. There were nine of them, I believe. And they managed to convince Alex Acosta, then-attorney general in Florida —

AMY GOODMAN: U.S. attorney.

VICKY WARD: — to drop the federal — sorry, yes, to then drop the federal charges, and instead he gets this slap on the wrist. He pleads guilty to the state charges, which is one count of prostitution and one count of soliciting a minor. And as you outlined, Amy, he has this really cushy 13-month sentence where he’s, you know, half in the jail, half not. He goes to work, you know, and he comes out basically unscathed and carries on.

Virginia surfaced, but what had happened that was illegal was that this plea deal had been done without notifying any of the women, any of the victims who had come forward. Virginia, who was not part of that case, joined what was a class-action lawsuit of all the victims coming together. And because she had a rather infamous photograph of herself with Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist, her allegations immediately hit the headlines. And she went public, accusing, as you said, not just Jeffrey Epstein, but also Prince Andrew, and also she named other men who she claimed Jeffrey Epstein had pimped her out to.

Ghislaine Maxwell — and Virginia Roberts did all this publicly — and Ghislaine Maxwell then, in public, called her a liar, at which point Virginia Roberts sued Ghislaine Maxwell civilly. And ultimately, although this case was settled, it was the — it was all the depositions and the discovery in that civil litigation that really then became the backbone of the government’s charges that they finally brought against Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. As you say, he then dies in strange circumstances without facing the music. But the stuff that was in the civil litigation with Virginia Roberts is also what formed the backbone of the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell during her trial. Virginia Roberts was not called as a witness in her trial, and that, you know, largely was to do with the fact that when there is so much — when there has been a big civil case, prosecutors prefer not to go down that discovery, and so they found four other victims to actually appear in court to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell. But a lot of what Virginia Roberts had said about Ghislaine Maxwell came up in that courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, one of the things you point out in your series is this deal that the U.S. attorney at the time, then chosen as labor secretary by Trump in his first term, then forced to resign immediately because all of the scandal came up as a result of Julie Brown’s reporting in the Miami Herald — like, why did he make this sweetheart deal? In the actual deal, it says, “In consideration of Epstein’s agreement to plead guilty and to provide compensation in the manner described above, if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to” — and the names are blocked out, but something like four names. Now, this could be the basis — right? — of Ghislaine Maxwell getting off. It says not only if he does this 13-month sweetheart deal, but anyone who was involved with sexually abusing or raping girls or women will be protected from prosecution? Is this possible?

VICKY WARD: Yes. I mean, the whole — the whole nonprosecution agreement was something that, you know, his attorneys believed would have actually protected him, too. I mean, his own attorney, Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, told me that one of the reasons he found it very difficult to believe, initially, that Jeffrey Epstein had committed suicide was that they’d had a whole conversation the day before, in which his attorney said, “You know, I don’t think the government will be able to keep going with the charges against you because of this nonprosecution agreement muddying the waters.”

Amy, I will tell you, you know, the four names that are redacted in the nonprosecution agreement, I mean, you know, I know who they are. And again, it speaks to, you know, the sickness of this web. You know, these are all women who were victims at one point of Jeffrey Epstein, who then — victims who then turned around and brought in, helped bring in other women. But, yeah, unquestionably, Ghislaine Maxwell believed she was, and still believes she is, protected by the nonprosecution agreement, 100%.

AMY GOODMAN: And then Alex Acosta said something very unusual when he was really pressed about why he would do this, when, in fact, the investigations that were going on in Florida brought up dozens and dozens of women who, in many cases, were girls when Epstein raped or assaulted them, in some cases with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell. He talked — he mentioned something about “I thought he was involved with intelligence”?

VICKY WARD: Well, so, that, that is my reporting, and I 100% stand by it. He said that when the issue of Jeffrey Epstein came up in — during the transition. And he was asked, you know, by the committee during the Trump transition. You know, they get a sheet of background, because he’s going to have to be confirmed by the Senate. And it’s like, “Oh yeah, you were the guy who gave Jeffrey Epstein his plea deal. Is there going to be — is there any problem with that?” And that is when he said — you know, it was a very quick conversation — “No, I was told he belonged to intelligence.”

And this, you know, this comes back to, I think, Amy, the heart of the questions swirling around Jeffrey Epstein and why it is that the MAGA base want answers, because people want to understand the network of men who enabled Jeffrey Epstein, the system of soft power around him that enabled him to wield so much influence in the face of such horrendous criminal charges. So, you know, why did so many prominent men gather around Epstein? Many of them, you know, finance him. I mean, there’s no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein abused or trafficked underage women, until he quite mysteriously — this is a man who’s not a college graduate. He was a high school math teacher. He suddenly, in the 1990s, explodes with all this money, you know, vast, vast, vast wealth, and builds the — you know, he’s in this enormous private townhouse in Manhattan. He’s got an island. And it’s almost like the walls go up, behind which he starts to do these — perform these terrible sex crimes. But why did — why and how did he make all this money? Why and how were all these boldface names frequently in his company, on his planes, going to his island with him? You know, why did he carry on almost in plain sight with impunity? And that’s the question that people want answered.

AMY GOODMAN: And who were some of these people? I mean, they are well known now.

VICKY WARD: Well, they’re extremely well known. You had — yes, you have Donald Trump. You also have Bill Clinton. You had the president of Harvard. You had Leslie Wexner, the billionaire. More recently, you’ve had another billionaire, Leon Black. You’ve had Bill Gates. We’ve had, you know, the lawyer — one of his lawyers, as you mentioned earlier, you know, Alan Dershowitz, former Senator George Mitchell, Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, a huge assortment, former — Henry Rosovsky, a huge assortment of academics, Prince Andrew. We know the now current crown prince of Saudi Arabia was a guest in his house, Mohammed bin Salman. He was friends with the Gaddafi family, the rulers of Africa, the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak. I mean, you could go on and on and on.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the last months of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, it’s clear he was completely shocked when he flew in from Paris on his jet, and, you know, the authorities had moved in on him and picked him up at Teterboro Airport. He had, you describe it as, a kind of kitchen cabinet of advisers, everyone from — even if they’re informal, everyone from Steve Bannon to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — something he denied. Talk about that group that was advising him, because he thought maybe something was going to happen to him.

VICKY WARD: Well, I think he did and he didn’t, right? I mean, this is a man who has always used his money and his connections to basically outwit law enforcement. I mean, you know, my understanding, in the last months before his arrest, he was sort of undergoing some sort of media training, bizarrely. I mean, he thought — he thought he could massage his image one more time and again, I’m sure, throw money at a situation. I’m not — which is why I don’t think he for a second thought he was going to be arrested at Teterboro Airport. This is a man who’s never been held to account in his life.

AMY GOODMAN: And when they broke down the doors of his apartment — right? — they found in a safe other passports, as well as diamonds. Talk about the significance of that.

VICKY WARD: Well, you know, he had talked — I do remember this — even years before, of going, moving and living in Saudi Arabia. There was one point in time when he talked about, you know, also going, possibly living in Israel. I mean, this was a man — you know, there are still questions as to, you know, when Alex Acosta mentioned in the transition, “I thought he belonged to intelligence,” I mean, that’s not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds, because, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was unusual at a moment in time, given the influence that he did have in both Israel and in the Gulf states and frankly, in the Clinton White House at one point. I mean, he was in and out of there over 20 times. And when you are able, just through people you know, to walk to sort of have dialogues with that many leaders, it does mean that you are in a position. You don’t have to be a spy. You don’t have to be on a government’s payroll. But it does mean that you are a useful asset. In Chasing Ghislaine, the term that the intelligence community uses for someone like that is a “hyper-fixer,” someone who can move easily between the leaders of countries, that may not have official or friendly relations at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what’s happening now, what it meant that Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, now deputy attorney general, meets with Ghislaine Maxwell for two days? They’re talking about coming up with a list of a hundred people. Interestingly, apparently —

VICKY WARD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — former President Bill Clinton has called for the release of the documents. But what does this all mean? And President Trump himself? What was it? Senator Dick Durbin was the one who said that he had a thousand FBI agents going through all the files to tag every time he’s mentioned, and he’s been told he’s been mentioned a number of times in these documents. Where is this all headed?

VICKY WARD: Well, so, one of the tantalizing and sort of frustrating things about sitting through Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial was that the scope of it was very narrow. It was about the sex crimes, you know, understandably so, and that, you know, the government tends to only bring cases it thinks it can win. So it was confined to that. But there were these sort of frustrating cameo brief mentions of all these names of all these men who appeared on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs or who had been, you know, invited to stay on the island, but you never got, you know, as someone sitting in that courtroom, to piece it all together. You never got to understand the other side of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, which was the power and the money and what the heck all these guys were doing there.

And so, I’m sure that what Ghislaine Maxwell has been doing with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, is filling him in on that, all the pieces of that side of Epstein’s life, which she had, you know, a front-row — not just a front-row seat to, actually, she was part of it. I mean, let’s not forget that, you know, part of Jeffrey Epstein’s rise to power was Ghislaine Maxwell. She was the one who arrived in New York right around the time of her father’s mysterious death. She was the one with the Rolodex of Prince Andrew and the heads of state, because that’s who her father had known and done business with and traded information with. So, that is the part of this puzzle that Ghislaine Maxwell can answer. And I’m sure that there are at least a hundred names. This was a woman who knew hundreds and hundreds of powerful people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what’s being said now. You have Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin saying on CNN, quote, in “2009, there was a [sweetheart plea deal that] was made under the Obama administration with Epstein.” He was corrected by Jake Tapper, “No, that’s not right. It was 2008. The U.S. attorney at the time was Alex Acosta. He was a Bush appointee. He went on to become President Trump’s secretary of labor.” And this from MSNBC: “But what made Mullin’s error even more notable was the fact that it offered a fresh opportunity to remind the public that it was Trump who rewarded Alex Acosta — the guy who helped orchestrate Epstein’s deal — with a Cabinet position in the president’s first term” — though, ultimately, he didn’t get away with it. Your response to that, Vicky Ward?

VICKY WARD: Well, I have always really, really wanted to understand what really went on behind the scenes regarding Alex Acosta and that plea deal. What was the leverage that was used? And I think that is a key question that actually Trump’s base wants answered. And Ghislaine Maxwell, I think, probably has a pretty good idea. She had — by 2008, she had sort of left Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit. She had got a boyfriend, a guy called Ted Waitt. But she would have a pretty good idea of what went on behind the scenes there. And that’s exactly the kind of the use of soft power that I’m talking about. That’s what people want to understand.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why has the MAGA base pushed so hard? Why has this been a tenet of what binds people together, of Trump supporters, to release the Epstein files? He so clearly has been a part of Epstein’s life. He was for years. We all saw the pictures. We know his famous quote, you know, “We both like women. He just likes them a little younger,” Trump said. Why would they be pushing for this from the beginning?

VICKY WARD: Well, because among the MAGA base — right? — you have this fundamental mistrust, which Trump has leaned into, of the — you know, this mistrust of the, quote-unquote, “deep state” and, you know, mistrust of invisible systems of power. And, you know, I think that Trump has happily leaned into this for his political purposes. And this is a case of being hoist by your own petard, Amy. It’s as simple as that. And so, you know, but it is — we are now in this very tricky situation, because any deal that is done, if a deal does get done with Ghislaine Maxwell, you are quite understandably going to have victims of both — her victims and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims up in arms, and rightly so. So, this is a — this is a real political nightmare for Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have people like Maria Farmer, one of the first people —

VICKY WARD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — to speak out, that you dealt with — right? — who said not only was she sexually abused by both of them, and then they abused her little sister Annie, which she felt so horribly guilty about, but when she went to the —

VICKY WARD: And Annie was underage, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: When she went to the FBI in New York, and then they didn’t investigate this, she said for years she would get a phone call, and she would pick up her cellphone, and it would be Ghislaine saying something like, “I know where you live.” She moved like 30 times, Maria said. But she would call up, “We know where you live. We know what time you run every day” — this constant threat. And then, of course, we didn’t even talk about, with Graydon Carter, who spiked your story, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, the part of it that talked about the girls and women who were sexually abused, he found a bullet? A cat’s head was left at his house? Is that right?

VICKY WARD: Yes, I’m told, you know, that was — that, I believe, was after the piece. But Jeffrey Epstein — it was a very frightening time, that whole period reporting that piece. But, you know, that’s not a reason to then go and cut out the on-record allegations of two sisters. You know, all the more reason to go ahead and print them. And, you know, Graydon Carter has since said, you know, that I’m a terrible journalist and that I didn’t have the reporting. I did. I absolutely did. Because, you know, I mean, this is years before the #MeToo era, but even then, you know, I went out, and I spoke to their mother and to the artist Eric Fischl and to another businessman whom they knew, all of whom they had gone to contemporaneously. So, it was complete garbage.

But, you know, and Ghislaine Maxwell, I had known her, not well, but socially. I mean, we’re both originally — we grew up in England. She’s a few years ahead of me, and I would run into her from time to time at, you know, things in New York. And, you know, she seemed to have an extraordinary life. She talked about flying helicopters and flying around with Bill Clinton. And, you know, one didn’t have really a clear view of what she was really doing, but she was indignant when I put the Farmer sisters’ allegations, to me, absolutely indignant, and sort of said: How could I possibly believe two women who I didn’t know over her? And she was a journalist, but, you know, she wasn’t. I mean, you know, she and Jeffrey Epstein were — you know, I mean, they knew how to go about killing these stories and these allegations, and, you know, in hindsight, you can see exactly why they were so powerful and why they got away with this for so long.

AMY GOODMAN: And interestingly, though she has French citizenship, she has British citizenship, she did not leave the United States after Jeffrey Epstein died, for any extended period. And ultimately, while she was being sought after, when they were wanting to serve her when she was being charged, she was found at her — a house she had bought for a million dollars in cold cash, right in New Hampshire.

VICKY WARD: I know. You know, who knows? I mean, you know, one has to believe that at the — you know, she thought that she could outrun this, in a way, in a way just like Jeffrey Epstein had. But, you know, now she’s got an opportunity, or her lawyer does, to — you know, she’s got some leverage to negotiate with a president, you know, his lawyers, a president who likes to negotiate. So, you know, it’s a very, very precarious situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think part of these discussions were what she knew about Donald Trump?

VICKY WARD: I’m — listen, she is going to be sitting there discussing everything. I mean, this is a woman who knew Donald Trump — we know this — pretty well. But, you know, a few years ago, I believe Trump said, on record, you know, “I wish her well.” So —

AMY GOODMAN: That’s something that her brother, Ian Maxwell —

VICKY WARD: — anything — you have to believe that anything is on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Her brother, Ian Maxwell, who’s fighting for her freedom, her two brothers — Ian Maxwell said they very much appreciated what Trump had to say. And Trump has so much at stake here.

VICKY WARD: Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, I found it hard to believe that at the end of these two days of conversations and, you know, the reporting that there’s a hundred names, that the needle isn’t going to move one way or the other. I mean, Trump’s going to have to give his base something, and she’s going to get something in return. It’s very, very troubling, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Vicky Ward, we want to thank you so much for being with us, longtime investigative journalist, host and co-producer of the podcast series and the TV series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow. To see Part 1 of our conversation, you can go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

Watch the segment below or at this link

As controversy over President Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein continues to dog his administration, we speak with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who has spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator, his rich and powerful associates, and the impact of his crimes. Much of Trump’s political base is in an uproar after federal officials declined to release government files about Epstein and his serial sexual abuse of women and girls, with Trump himself reportedly named in the documents.

“They were friends. They hung out with each other,” Ward says of Trump and Epstein.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

In an attempt to quell the MAGA base uproar over the Trump administration’s refusal to release the files of the dead serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump’s deputy attorney general, who is Trump’s former private lawyer, just finished two days, Thursday and Friday, of meetings with the convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse young girls. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Maxwell met for nine hours at the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida. This is Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus.

DAVID MARKUS: Ms. Maxwell answered every single question. She never stopped. She never invoked a privilege. She never declined to answer. She answered all the questions truthfully, honestly and to the best of her ability.

AMY GOODMAN: The meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell at a federal courthouse in Tallahassee come as President, Trump faces growing bipartisan pressure to release the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, longtime friend of Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump was questioned if he considered pardoning Maxwell.

KEVIN LIPTAK: Would you consider a pardon or a commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell if she’s cooperating —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s something I haven’t thought about. It’s really something —

KEVIN LIPTAK: If it’s recommended —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s something — I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the first accusers of Jeffrey Epstein says she warned the FBI and the New York Police Department to look into his relationship with Donald Trump as early as 1996. Maria Farmer is now suing the government, which she said failed to protect victims. In a new interview with The New York Times, Maria Farmer said her only sense of justice has come from the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted sex trafficking accomplice. Maria Farmer also spoke on MSNBC with Jen Psaki about Ghislaine Maxwell.

MARIA FARMER: I’ve never met a more predatory, terrifying human being in my entire life. And neither had Virginia Giuffre, and neither has Annie or Anouska or many girls, like Chauntae Davies. There’s hundreds of us that were preyed upon by Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s a very dangerous person, and she threatened my life on many occasions. I’ve had to move and be in hiding because of this predatory child predator and just victim predator. So, it’s completely unacceptable for anyone to call her a victim. The woman is not a victim. She’s a victimizer.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Maria Farmer, who has alleged that both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein abused her and her sister, Annie Farmer, who has testified about how Ghislaine Maxwell not only groomed and recruited her, but also took part in her abuse. Annie Farmer spoke on ABC News.

ANNIE FARMER: She was the one who asked me to undress. She was the one who exposed my chest. She’s the one who touched me. And I think that that was not unusual. I mean, that was something that came out in her trial and one of the things that she was found guilty of. If you — you know, the Department of Justice is clear on that, that she herself is a sexual predator who has participated in this abuse.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Vicky Ward, longtime investigative journalist, host and co-producer of the series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow. It’s a podcast series. It’s a TV series. Vicki Ward profiled Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Vicky. Let’s go back to 2003, before we talk about this deputy attorney general meeting, the fact that you tried to get Maria and Annie’s story out so many years ago. You would have broken this story. But you talk about how the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair stopped you from doing this, and it came out to be just a kind of profile of Jeffrey Epstein.

VICKY WARD: That’s right, Amy. And thank you for having me.

Yeah, you know, I was assigned to write about Jeffrey Epstein, who was an enigma back then. He was not someone whose name was in the newspapers, except for the fact that he popped up in the fall of 2002 as having flown Bill Clinton on his plane to Africa. And on the back of that, I was assigned to go out and find who this kind of Gatsby-like figure was, who lived in the biggest private townhouse in New York, who had an island, ranch in New Mexico. Where had his money come from?

And along the way, I discovered that he had a reputation for having a lot of young women around him. This was in addition to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sort of like a Girl Friday. It was — her role became sort of very nebulous. And I did encounter the two Farmer sisters, who told me their harrowing stories. They went on the record, which was a very brave thing to do, given, as you heard Maria Farmer just there saying that, you know, she felt they were coming after her for a lot of her life.

And, you know, it was a difficult time for me. I was on a high-risk pregnancy, so once I had handed the piece in, I went on bed rest before I ultimately went into labor. Jeffrey Epstein was threatening me and telling me he was going to find out where I was giving birth, and he was going to have a witch doctor place a curse on my unborn children, if he didn’t like this piece. He was clearly furious about the fact that I had spoken to the Farmer sisters. That, more than anything else about what I had uncovered, enraged him. And when I was at home on bed rest, I heard from a fact-checker at the magazine, who emailed me, that he was in the Vanity Fair offices meeting with the editor-in-chief in person. I knew that the magazine —

AMY GOODMAN: This was Graydon Carter?

VICKY WARD: — was still waiting for photographs. Yes. And the next thing that I knew was, you know, when I saw a final galley of the piece, that was already on its way to appear in the published version of the magazine, the Farmer sisters’ allegations had been removed. And I will stress I didn’t, obviously, at the time have any idea of the scale of this awful sort of pyramid scheme that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had going on with underage girls. But I did have the Farmer sisters. And obviously it was appalling, because they had gone on record, so Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were aware of what they had said. And it was a horrendous situation.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Jeffrey Epstein, there was this deal that ultimately would take down Alex Acosta once he became secretary of labor, because he was the U.S. attorney in Florida that cut this sweetheart deal that meant Jeffrey Epstein could serve 13 months in a Palm Beach jail, leaving every day for about 10 hours, in which the allegations are he abused one young woman after another, 13 months, then he was out, and it would take until 2019 for the federal charges to be brought in New York. Now, that’s a lot to get in here. But these victims, let’s talk about how many you believe there have been. I mean, you have one victim after another saying they were victimized, and then Ghislaine Maxwell or Jeffrey Epstein would say, “Can you go get others?” One young woman said she can’t live with herself. She recruited like 40 kids in her high school, girls, often, you know, poor, needing money. They would be paid something like $200. Another said 60 — she recruited 60 friends. Are we talking upwards of a thousand people, children or young women, who were abused or raped by Jeffrey Epstein with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell?

VICKY WARD: Well, Amy, I mean, that’s actually a figure I think Pam Bondi — you know, I think she said “thousand.” I mean, one of the things that became very, very clear when, you know, I sat through Ghislaine Maxwell’s six-week trial was the sort of the cleverness, as well as the sickness, of the manipulation that went on inside Jeffrey Epstein’s household, beginning, if you like, with Ghislaine Maxwell, this very polished, sophisticated, Oxford-educated woman who spoke many languages, who knew presidents and heads of state all around the world. Once she had got these much more vulnerable young women inside that house, sort of effectively normalizing for them the incredible abuse that went on, you know, they were then incentivized to turn around and go and get, as you say, these other children. And it became — I mean, you know, one of the things that became very clear in her trial was the sickness, but also the scale of this web.

And, you know, one of the reasons that you sort of only had four victims come and testify at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial was that there were complications with other stories, because, you know, Virginia Roberts, for example, who was, in a way, the single victim whose civil litigation against Ghislaine Maxwell ultimately caused this whole sort of house of cards to come tumbling down and Jeffrey Epstein finally to face the music in 2019, you know, Virginia Roberts’ story is a complicated one, because she then was accused of going out to recruit other girls. So, it’s a —

AMY GOODMAN: And Virginia Roberts, you’re talking about —

VICKY WARD: It’s a very complicated, horrible story.

AMY GOODMAN: Virginia Roberts, you’re talking about Virginia Giuffre, who was an outspoken survivor —

VICKY WARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — and ultimately sued Prince Andrew, settled for some undisclosed amount —

VICKY WARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — and apparently died by suicide, though it’s not clear if she died by suicide. It’s not clear Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. But she just recently died in Australia at the age of 41.

VICKY WARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get to President Trump, what his connection is to this, and who are the people who you feel have not been properly investigated, and this possibility — you heard Trump himself, you know, saying not clear whether she would be pardoned or her sentence commuted.

VICKY WARD: Right. And I also think, you know, it’s worth thinking about the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is a citizen of many countries. You know, another option is whether or not she would be sent back to Europe or to England, you know, where there may be a different view of her, given her background.

AMY GOODMAN: “Given her background” meaning that she’s the daughter of Robert Maxwell.

VICKY WARD: Well, she comes — yeah, exactly. She comes from a family that’s very prominent socially in England that once held great power and great wealth. And, you know, it’s a different culture, different society. I mean, that, I think, would be an option.

AMY GOODMAN: He was — I mean, for people to understand, he was the — he was sort of the competitor with Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul, who she was very close to, and died mysteriously at sea, his body overboard.

VICKY WARD: That’s right. But he was also a politician. He was a massive worldwide publisher who had enormous influence all around the world. As you say, he died in very strange circumstances. He’s buried. He was given a sort of hero’s burial in Israel at the Mount of Olives. When he died, it emerged that he had basically robbed the pensions of his employees at this big media group. Two of his sons went on trial but were acquitted for that. But so, but this is a story that is very — this is a family, rather, that is very high-profile in England and in Europe.

You asked, Amy, though, about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. You know, they were friends. They hung out with each other. These were two guys, you know, between Donald Trump’s marriages, who were single and who both hung out with models. Jeffrey Epstein’s main financial benefactor, Leslie Wexner, was the owner of Victoria’s Secret, the most sort of prominent, you know, modeling organization in the world. We know, particularly last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that when — for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, the Journal claimed — Trump denies this, says it wasn’t him — that, you know, Donald Trump sent him a sort of racy congratulatory message alluding to Jeffrey Epstein’s private life. So, Donald Trump, you know, clearly, we do know, was aware of Jeffrey Epstein’s predilection for women and, you know, his sort of social life.

They did fall out. You know, interestingly, Donald Trump, who is very articulate about a lot of subjects, has not ever really explained why. He has said to, you know, campaign operatives around him, or did say back in 2014, when Virginia Roberts first sort of surfaced with her public claims about Epstein, that he had severed ties with him when Epstein had come after a daughter of a member of Mar-a-Lago. There is also reportedly a dispute that — well, there was a dispute between the two men over a piece of real estate near Palm Beach that both men wanted and that Donald Trump ultimately ended up getting at a bankruptcy auction and then flipped at a massive profit a couple of years later. But he’s never — he’s never actually talked about that in public. He has just said, you know, he’s just distanced himself —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

VICKY WARD: — from Jeffrey Epstein.

AMY GOODMAN: But we’re going to continue with a post-show with you, because it’s really critical to talk about what are these files the MAGA base and many Democrats and Republicans have called for releasing. Vicky Ward, longtime investigative journalist, host of the series Chasing Ghislaine.

Watch the video below or at this link.

We speak to a survivor of sexual abuse perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein and enabled by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. Teresa Helm was sexually assaulted by Epstein at what she was told was a job interview in the early 2000s. She now works as the survivor services coordinator for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and joins many voices calling for the release of federal documents pertaining to Epstein’s criminal case, though Helm emphasizes that the goal of their release must be to promote accountability and justice for victims, not as a form of political score-settling. “I really urge everyone to focus their commitment, their intention, all this time, effort and energy onto … these survivors and their healing,” says Helm. “We’re talking about people’s lives, and it should not be weaponized either way, in any administration.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Missing in much of the MAGA frenzy over the Jeffrey Epstein files are the voices of survivors of the sexual abuse he perpetrated against them. Many, like our next guest, have joined the call for transparency and for the Trump administration to release the files as promised.

This comes as Virginia Giuffre, an outspoken survivor of sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein, died, apparently by suicide, at age 41 in April. She was the first survivor to come out publicly against Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, who remains in prison. She also sued Prince Andrew for sexually assaulting her when she was 17. The disgraced prince was forced to step away from his royal duties and settle with Giuffre in 2022. Her family said in a statement, quote, “Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. She was the light that lifted so many survivors,” unquote.

Just last week, when the FBI and Department of Justice announced there was, quote, “no incriminating client list,” it also said Epstein harmed over 1,000 victims over two decades, far more than previously known.

For more, we’re joined by Teresa Helm, who is a survivor of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, facilitated by Ghislaine Maxwell. She was assaulted by Epstein in the early 2000s. She now works as the survivor services coordinator for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Her 2024 piece for Newsweek is headlined “I’m a Jeffrey Epstein Survivor. The Documents Are an Opportunity.”

Thank you so much for joining us. You, Teresa Helm, have talked about the dangers of grooming. As you see all of this taking place, the uprising within the MAGA movement, lost are what sexual violence survivors go through. Talk about how you first met Jeffrey Epstein, how you were brought to him, how you were groomed.

TERESA HELM: Well, hello. Good morning. I can certainly talk to that.

So, I was attending college out in California at the time and was a full-time student and a full-time employee there. And so, that began the process of recruitment to grooming, passed along the line from various people as far as “This is an opportunity that I’d like for you to see if you’re interested in, and go talk to this person.” So, after speaking with a couple young women about an opportunity that I thought I was being blessed with at the time, I eventually met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who really — what she did was pretty astounding, in the fact that within a day I was convinced that I was in a safe, healthy, wonderful environment, blessed with an opportunity to pursue a career that I could — had only dreamed of having. In fact, that was my dream, to do what she had stated I would do alongside her, working for her. She was very polite and kind. She built trust in a very — you know, within hours, I thought that I had really landed the opportunity of a lifetime. My family was very pleased that I was there interviewing with her, which is what — the intention. That’s what the — that’s what I thought I was there for, was an interview. And things went so amazingly well. And then, she was so successful in all of that very, I would call it, you know, master manipulation. She was very calculated in her craft and did it very well.

I was very young. I mean, I was an adult, 22 years old. However, I had such big dreams and aspirations and determination and really wanted to make the most of this opportunity that I thought that I was getting, to the point where at the end of my time with Ghislaine Maxwell, although I hadn’t known that there was a partner, as she referred to him, that I would be meeting at the end of my time with her — I hadn’t heard Jeffrey or any other person’s name the entire time, from beginning, sitting behind the desk at work in California at the college, to meeting Sarah Kellen at the beach to — who then introduced me to Ghislaine. I had no idea that there was a final person that I was going to go meet.

And once I learned of him, by the name of Jeffrey, I did not — I paused and thought about some things, waived any kind of red flag in my mind, because, again, she was so — Ghislaine was so, so good at what she had done and built that trust in me. And so, then I walked — I walked myself to Jeffrey’s home later that day to what I thought was to interview with him, without really a lot of question, actually being quite excited, because I thought, “Well, if I was so successful here with Ghislaine, which she has really made me believe that I have been, now I get the opportunity to go complete this, like a second round of the interview.” And that was — really, I walked myself into tragedy. I had no idea. I could — I actually should and I will reframe that. I didn’t walk myself into tragedy. I was lured there. I was coaxed there, coerced there, under false and fraudulent, you know, conditions and expectations.

AMY GOODMAN: And it was there —

TERESA HELM: And that’s how I —

AMY GOODMAN: It was then that Jeffrey Epstein assaulted you?

TERESA HELM: That’s right, there in his very big, beautiful home there in Manhattan, you know, the home that Ghislaine was raving about after I had been complimenting her on her home and speaking about the different various buildings and the architecture and how much I enjoyed it and comparing different cities to New York. And then she raved about his: If I thought hers was great, wait ’til I see his. Yeah, so, it was there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have joined the call for the Epstein files to be released. Can you explain why you feel this is so important?

TERESA HELM: Where I stand with all of this is in, you know, utter solidarity with survivors of this entire nightmare that’s just been ongoing for decades with these people that have gotten away with so much for so long, you know, whether it was a failure of the system back in the ’90s, whether failure of the system again in the early 2000s. There are so many women and, at the time, even, you know, children that have been harmed by these people.

I really urge everyone to focus the — you know, the commitment, the intention, all this time, effort and energy onto bringing to light what needs to bring to light for these survivors and their healing, and less about political weaponization of anything, because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people’s lives, and it should not be weaponized either way in any administration, no matter who’s in control at the time, who did what, when, who’s doing what now. Transparency is key, because we cannot move forward as a society and as a culture without these fundamental changes of — these fundamental changes of doing the right thing and holding people accountable, because we can’t continue to have systems of power that just get away, or people — whether it’s a system or a person, we cannot continue to have these people or systems continue to get away with anything that they can get away with, because they’re not — they’re skating through. They’re dodging accountability. There’s too much money involved, so, you know, people silenced through money.

We have got to change the — it’s degrading our society to continue to allow these predators and perpetrators to get away with harming so many people. You know, those that harm and exploit, they have to be silenced, not the survivors continuing to be silenced, because when you don’t have accountability, you don’t have justice. We are so far out of balance with justice. It’s almost like, you know, Lady Liberty, she can take us a small step to the ground, because we’re so uneven, where survivors are holding on, clinging on to hope, which tends to be, you know, one thing that you can’t take away from a survivor. It’s how we get here. We survive through it because we have so much hope. But hope tends to get shattered often. And it’s like the onus is on us to pick up the pieces and try to get louder and louder. You know, our silence is not — it’s very loud within us. We have to then — you know, we’re tasked with rising back up, fighting bigger, fighting louder, you know, screaming from the mountaintops.

Like, who is going to do something? Because we are setting horrible, horrible influences to our children and to our youth of what you can and can’t get away with, depending on who you are, what position you are in. And as I said, I just feel like, you know, oftentimes we have these huge-profile cases where people are harming others, and there’s just such a big — you know, “Did this really happen to you? Well, if it did, what about this?” We have to get to the point where we are survivor-focused in the justice system, because we’re such a huge part of it that we have to stop politicizing everything and listen to the survivors, listen to the ones that have the lived experience. You cannot take this experience — people can say there’s nothing there. You cannot take the lived experience away from us, not that we wanted it in the first place, but here it is. It lives with us. It remains with us. We’re fighting for justice. You cannot take away our lived experience.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Teresa Helm, I want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to your piece, “I’m a Jeffrey Epstein Survivor. The Documents Are an Opportunity.”

President Donald Trump has signed a wave of pardons for people convicted of fraud, including a Virginia sheriff who took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and a reality TV couple who evaded millions in taxes after defrauding banks. Last month, Trump pardoned a Florida healthcare executive convicted of tax evasion for stealing nearly $11 million in payroll taxes from the paychecks of doctors and nurses. Many of Trump’s pardons have gone to supporters of his or those who made political donations to the president.

“These pardons are not indiscriminate,” says constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein. “They’re targeted to help people who are politically his supporters, raise money for him or otherwise.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with a slew of pardons President Trump has issued, many this past week. In one case, Trump pardoned Scott Jenkins, a former Virginia sheriff and longtime Trump supporter, convicted on corruption charges after undercover video showed he accepted over $75,000 in bribes.

In another case, Trump pardoned the former reality show couple Todd and Julie Chrisley after they were sentenced to long prison terms for evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million. The couple’s daughter helped campaign for Trump. She requested the appeal on Fox News.

This comes as Trump loyalist Ed Martin has a new role as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, after he failed to win Senate approval to become District of Columbia’s top prosecutor.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C. We’re joined by Bruce Fein, constitutional lawyer, former associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan, author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy.

Bruce, thanks so much for joining us. Why don’t you go through these pardons with us? Talk about the Virginia sheriff, talk about the reality TV couple, what they were imprisoned for, and what it means that they’ve been freed, not to mention fines worth millions of dollars being forgiven.

BRUCE FEIN: Well, in the two cases you mentioned, the sheriff was convicted of basically using his office to raise money through bribes, $75,000, to give favors to friends. The other case concerned tax evasion and fraud, the kinds of crimes that Mr. Trump himself has been under attack for.

I think that if you look in the broader sense, Mr. Trump is trying to create an aura of incredulity about the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, at least with regard to the pardons of these slew of white-collar offenses, and sometimes they’re political allies, as well. We just learned today in the newspapers a former congressman, former governor of Connecticut also pardoned. And I think that Mr. Trump recognizes that he’s losing overwhelmingly in the courts now, and that’s why he’s even turning on the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, because he believes when he loses in the United States Supreme Court, he’s going to need a political reason for why he’s losing, and he’s trying to cast aspersion, I believe, on the legitimacy of the entire justice system. That’s why these pardons are not indiscriminate, because they’re targeted to help people who are politically his supporters, raise money for him or otherwise, which is very dangerous.

I want to add this: The framers understood the possibility that the pardon power would be abused. There was an exchange in the Virginia ratification debate between James Madison and George Mason. And Mr. Madison, when Mr. Mason said, “Well, what if the president uses his pardon power to help his political friends? That could be very, very dangerous. Why are we endowing the president with such pardon power?” — and Mr. Madison said, “Well, if the president uses pardons to help his political friends or personal friends, certainly the House will impeach, and he will be removed from Congress,” because it’s very difficult for an individual citizen, you or me, to have standing to challenge a pardon.

Unfortunately, Congress has turned into an ink blot. It has no spine. And so, that remedy is gone, which I think underscores the importance, if we’re going to have any kind of pushback, of public opinion saying we need the law to be enforced even-handedly.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Paul Walczak. In April, President Trump pardoned him, the Florida healthcare executive convicted of tax evasion for stealing nearly $11 million in payroll taxes from the paychecks of doctors and nurses. The jury found him guilty after prosecutors showed he used the money to finance a lavish lifestyle. Walczak is the son of Betsy Fago, a healthcare entrepreneur and Republican Party donor. Trump pardoned Walczak three weeks after Fago attended a million-dollar-a-plate fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. And he also pardoned or forgave the fine of something like $4 million that he’d have to pay in addition to serving time in jail. The significance of this, Bruce?

BRUCE FEIN: Well, at least it has the appearance of bribery. You’re raising money, and then, shortly after you raise money, then comes the pardon. And we know at least one of the offenses that justifies impeachment is bribery, even if it’s indirect. I think this is very dangerous.

But I want to underscore, Mr. Trump is not the first one who’s abused the pardon power. He’s had to take it a different scale, I think. We have Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. We have, remember, Marc Rich and William Jefferson Clinton and Roger Clinton. And even George H.W. Bush, he pardoned the Iran-Contra defendants, including Cap Weinberger. So it’s been abused before, but it’s taken to a scale now where it threatens to undermine the entire legitimacy of the criminal justice system.

And you mentioned earlier Ed Martin, which is really quite alarming, since Mr. Martin said, “I am going to use my position not to just go after people I think committed crimes, but to stigmatize them. Even if we can’t convict them, we want to harass them, make them lose their reputation.” It’s a danger that Justice Robert Jackson, a former attorney general, warned against in 1940, because the laws are very vague. And here we have a member of the Justice Department saying, “We’re coming after you, even if we can’t prove that you’re guilty of a crime, just to harass you and give you a bad name.” That clearly is an abuse of the obligation to faithfully execute the laws. Typically, you have an obligation in the Justice Department not even to begin an indictment unless you believe you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And now we have a very, very low threshold for beginning an investigation, that probably will go nowhere other than tarnish reputations.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bruce Fein, I want to thank you very much for being with us. You mentioned Martin. Politico reports Martin spent his first week on the job reviewing pardon applications of January 6 insurrectionists, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, seeking to have President Trump convert their commuted sentences into full pardons. Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer, former Reagan attorney, was associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan.

We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”

“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”

Schrecker is the author of many books about the McCarthy era, Cold War politics and right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Her recent piece for The Nation is headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s crackdown on academic institutions in the United States was the focus of protests and commencement speeches this week as universities like Harvard held commencement ceremonies.

The Trump administration has now directed federal agencies to review all remaining contracts with Harvard, after it already canceled nearly $3 billion in federal research grants for the university and moved last week to revoke its ability to enroll international students. Harvard has two separate suits pending against Trump, arguing the moves violate due process, as well as free speech protections under the First Amendment because they target the university’s staff, curriculum and enrollment.

In his address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony Thursday, Stanford University professor, doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese praised the school’s defiance of Trump and spoke to students facing threats of deportation or having their visas revoked.

DR. ABRAHAM VERGHESE: When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least — who had at least one his medical school classmates tortured and disappear. … More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. … So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the novelist and medical doctor, Ethiopian Indian American, Dr. Abraham Verghese addressing Harvard’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. His latest book, The Covenant of Water.

Meanwhile, down the road in Cambridge, the Indian American class president at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about how MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union had voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with Israel. Megha Vemuri wore a red-and-white keffiyeh and said MIT students would never support a genocide, and praised them for continuing to protest despite, quote, “threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially,” she said, “your own university officials.”

MEGHA VEMURI: Last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military. You called for a permanent cease fire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed, because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.

Right now while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it. The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with. This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now, as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties.

AMY GOODMAN: That was MIT class president Megha Vemuri, now Indian American graduate of MIT.

This comes as Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — another school facing attacks by the Trump administration — writes for The New Yorker magazine this week about how, quote, “Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege.” In his piece headlined “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close,” he describes how he consulted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, along with other deans at Columbia. They spoke about government repression on college campuses in the 1950s through to the present. Schrecker told him, quote, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse,” he quoted her saying.

Well, we begin today with Ellen Schrecker in person, joining us in our New York studio. She’s the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Schrecker is also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. And she just wrote a piece for The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.” Schrecker has been active in the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, since the 1990s. I should note she has three degrees from Radcliffe Harvard and formerly taught there. She’s a graduate of Radcliffe 1960.

Ellen Schrecker, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. As we look at these universities under attack, you’ve studied higher education for over half a century. Let’s talk about what was happening then and what’s happening today.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK. The main thing that happened then to universities was that about a hundred faculty members, most of them with tenure, were fired and blacklisted. That happened in every major institution of civil society within the United States. And although the universities pride themselves on academic freedom — whatever that means — they collaborated with the forces of repression through — that were actively imposing a climate of fear and self-censorship throughout American society.

Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it. I don’t know what it’ll be. But during the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left, in the past and in the present, then present. Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to start off — we have a very young audience. We also have their parents and their grandparents around the world. And I’d like you to start off by talking about who McCarthy is. What do we mean by the McCarthyism of, for example, the 1950s?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK, that’s a very good way to start, because McCarthyism, unfortunately, is misnamed. It is not just the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came in onto the stage of history in 1950 after the “ism” that he gave his name to had been really dominating American domestic politics since the late 1940s. ’47 is when the Truman administration imposed a loyalty test, an anti-communist loyalty test, on its employees.

So, if we wanted to name this phenomenon of political repression, anti-communist political repression — and I want to specify that it didn’t attack randomly people on the left, but very specifically people who had some kind of connection, usually in the past, with the communist movement, that during the 1930s and ’40s was the most dynamic force on the left, even though it was a very flawed, very flawed political group. It was nonetheless very influential on the left. And if we wanted to give that political repression of the 1940s and ’50s a name, it should have been Hooverism, after the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, the movie Good Night and Good Luck, they showed real black-and-white footage of McCarthy, and test audiences thought he was too harsh, unrealistic, not realizing it was actual footage. And now you have Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway, George Clooney starring in it, and it is the financially most successful Broadway show we’ve seen, is going to be now for free on CNN in a few days. But the significance of that, that that — what people feel today was a cartoon character was, in fact, much harsher and sharper than people ever dreamed?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, he was beyond the pale, because, like the current president, he had no guardrails, as it were.

AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention Roy Cohn, his sidekick in the hearings, who would later go on to mentor Donald Trump, until, at the very end of his life, Donald Trump rejected him when he was dying of AIDS.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly. So, there are lots of similarities with the fact that there’s this very aberrant character at the heart, or at the sort of public heart, of this repressive movement. But what we should have known in the '40s and ’50s, and should know now, is it's not just a one-man show. It has been this moment of trying to crack down on dissent, constitutional dissent, free speech, the ability to say what Israel is doing in Gaza is a terrible thing. That is something that has been building up for decades. And that was the same thing during McCarthyism. There was a kind of network of right-wing activists, similar to groups today, like the Heritage Society, that brought us the 2025 Project blueprint for Trump’s attack on the institutions of civil liberties and civil society, that has come to fruition since he entered the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, you speak as a Jewish author, active member of the American Association of University Professors. Would you say that the McCarthyism of yesteryear is the charges that President Trump, with his sidekick Elon Musk giving the “Heil Hitler” salute, charging antisemitism for what he’s doing?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Antisemitism is a pretext. We know that. Trump has been all his life a racist, clearly befriending these fascist individuals and groups for years. And what we’re seeing is a kind of a melding of Trump’s own right-wing proclivities, reactionary proclivities, pro-fascist proclivities, with a long-term attempt within some pro-Zionist organizations to eliminate all support for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian liberation from American universities, in particular, but from within American society.

AMY GOODMAN: You have, earlier this month, a federal judge, Geoffrey Crawford, ordering the release of Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from a prison in Vermont. He was picked up by masked, hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview in Vermont. He was beyond holding a green card. The judge writing in his ruling, quote, “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920” and during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. And I wanted to take it beyond that. You note that, you know, that we’re not just talking about individual professors anymore. We’re talking about current attacks being much broader. And you write that — this interesting paradox, quote, “despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention.” Why is it weaker?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: It’s weaker for two reasons. One, because the state is stronger. The state does much more with regard to higher education than it did in the 1950s. You know, it supports most important basic scientific research. It regulates things on campus with regard to, shall we say, diversity, equity and inclusion, with trying to ensure that all Americans have a good shot at higher education. That was a push by the federal government. So, you can see that the government is much more involved. It funds student loans. Most smaller universities without huge endowments rely on students who have to get federal loans in order to pay tuitions. So, what he’s doing by withdrawing federal money from higher education is, essentially, threatening to destroy American higher education today.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking in March following the arrest of the Columbia graduate student, now graduated graduate student, albeit he was in jail in Louisiana when he got his diploma at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If you tell us, when you apply, “Hi. I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,” if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, “And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities,” if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Trump administration not proven any of this. And a number of students have been released from prison, with very angry judges talking about “Where are the grounds for these people to be imprisoned?” Mahmoud Khalil has been now imprisoned for three months as his little baby was born here in New York. If you can talk about what this leads to, these kind of harsh attacks, when it comes to speech and when it comes to universities? You were just addressing the deans at Columbia University. Some compare Harvard not fighting — Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and Columbia conceding, and the pressure it’s put on its students.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, this has been a constant in the history of American higher education to collaborate with political repression. They, universities, do not fight back. They didn’t fight back during the McCarthy period. They’re not — were not fighting back, until this miracle. It really was a miracle, totally unexpected, of the president at Harvard saying, “No, I cannot go along with what you were asking.” And what they were —

AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish president at Harvard, right?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: He’s Jewish, right.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Garber, who President Trump is accusing of antisemitism.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Well, of course, we’re all antisemites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.

But what we’re seeing is the beginning of a pushback against what Trump is doing, what his entire apparatus of hoodlums, I think, is trying to do to the universities. And that wonderful quote you had from Secretary of State Rubio, when he said, you know, paraphrasing these supposed terrorists, that they wanted to shut down the universities, he’s doing more to shut down the universities than probably anybody else in America at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Threatening to revoke the visas of all —

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: — international students. What about the role of your organization, the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Right. We are a group that is over a hundred years old. And when we were founded, it was a period very much like today, where outsiders, politicians and especially very wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees, were interfering with what faculty members were saying and doing with regard to — at that point, there was a lot of labor unrest and attempts to create unions. And university professors were sort of saying, “Well, look at the working conditions under which American workers are being oppressed. Let’s do something about industrial accidents and things like that.” Today, we’re seeing that, in every way, the federal government, state legislators interfering with the academic work of university professors. And that is what my organization is trying to do, is to protect the integrity and the educational value of what goes on on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope, in this last minute we have together?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yes, because, unfortunately, we have no model we can follow from McCarthyism, because there was no pushback, but today we’re seeing people marching to commencement at Harvard wearing labels saying, you know, “Enough is enough, President Trump. “We’re seeing huge crowds showing up to welcome Mohsen coming back from Vermont after having been picked up by ICE.

We’re seeing a growing movement within civil society, that has to be maintained, and has to be maintained for years. I mean, the damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education. So, we’ve got to get out there in the trenches and even begin to think some more about: OK, if they’re not paying attention to the judges, if the Supreme Court folds — and let us pray that it does not — what do we have to do?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump,” as well as Jelani Cobb’s piece in The New Yorker that extensively quotes you, Ellen Schrecker, at democracynow.org.

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Trump’s sweeping budget legislation has been described as the biggest Medicaid cut in U.S. history. House Republicans passed the bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote. The legislation would trigger massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next 10 years, denying coverage to an estimated 7.6 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Food assistance under the federal SNAP program would also see $300 billion in cuts, while adding billions in funding for Trump’s mass deportation agenda and giving the wealthiest Americans a tax break.

“The legislation is basically a mugging conducted by the 1% against the rest of us. It represents the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history,” says Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation.

Senate Republicans, who have voiced some concerns over the bill, will now have to pass their own version of the budget. With all Democratic senators opposed to the package, Republicans are working to use the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Trump’s sweeping budget bill that includes what’s been described as the biggest Medicaid cuts in U.S. history. On early Thursday morning, House Republicans passed the bill, giving massive tax breaks to the rich while slashing spending for Medicaid, Medicare, food assistance and subsidies for clean energy. The measure just eked through with a 215-to-214 vote that came after an all-night session and days of negotiations.

Food assistance under the federal SNAP program would also see $300 billion in cuts, while adding billions in funding for Trump’s border enforcement and mass deportation agenda.

House Speaker Mike Johnson praised the budget package, speaking after the vote.

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: We look forward to the Senate’s timely consideration of this once-in-a-generation legislation. We stand ready to continue our work together to deliver on the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, as President Trump named it himself.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahead of the House vote, Democratic Congressmember Greg Casar of Texas confronted Republicans on the House Budget Committee on rising healthcare premiums for their constituents while giving billionaires more tax breaks.

REP. GREG CASAR: In this bill, they’re going to jack up the premiums on healthcare for the people that rely on the marketplace for their healthcare. And so, I will hand the mic over, yield my time to any of my Republican colleagues that want to address the amount of money that their tax-paying citizens are going to have to pay in increased premiums for their healthcare. … And what bothers me the most is that we want to hide it. Nobody wants here to talk about the fact that they are jacking up insurance costs on their own constituents while giving a billionaire a tax break. Nobody on the Republican side pushing this bill wants to have an in-person town hall and look their constituents in the face and explain to them why they want to hand Elon Musk another $25 billion contract while jacking up your health insurance costs, not just by hundreds, but by thousands of dollars.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, they’re the largest Medicaid cuts in U.S. history. The legislation would trigger $625 billion in Medicare cuts over the next 10 years.

Some Senate Republicans have voiced some concerns over the measure and will now have to pass their own version of the budget. With all Democratic senators opposed to the package, Republicans could resort to using the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C. We’re joined by Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation. His latest piece is headlined “Trump and Johnson’s Big Ugly Lie.”

Chris Lehmann, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out what’s in the legislation.

CHRIS LEHMANN: Thanks, Amy. Always a pleasure.

Yeah, I would say the legislation is basically a mugging conducted by the 1% against the rest of us. It represents the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history. The tax cuts work out to about $4 trillion, and the chief beneficiaries are at the upper end of the income spectrum. People earning $4 million or more, the 0.1%, will realize $389,000 gains in their after-tax income, whereas the lowest quintile of earners, who make $17,000 or less, will be on the hook for $1,000 and some change in their after-tax income, and that number will rise over the 10-year course of this package.

And the GOP has dishonestly peddled it as a, you know, necessary — the cuts in the legislation as necessary fiscal discipline. In point of fact, this package will increase the federal deficit by $3 trillion. And you saw instantly the bond markets swooned on the news that this legislation has passed. The futures markets today are sort of in freefall.

So, it is just an outlandish piece of legislation, you know, based on basic economic principles, and it is a massive giveaway to the wealthy. You mentioned, you know, the historic cuts to Medicaid, to SNAP, to food assistance. There’s also just, you know, crass and corrupt lobbying giveaways. There’s a provision in it that prohibits all states from regulating artificial intelligence. It’s a staggering work of theft from on high.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain the “on high.” Explain what the billionaires get in exchange for cutting Medicaid, triggering the Medicare cuts, cutting clean energy, cutting food assistance.

CHRIS LEHMANN: They get $2.5 trillion in tax cuts. And that is — that’s been the social contract, you know, behind the MAGA takeover of the GOP all this time. You know, the billionaires are more than happy to have Trump foment racial hatreds, you know, panic about the border, about DEI, what have you, go after universities, as we’re now seeing, all in exchange for this, for yet more obscene wealth. That, you know, as is crafted in this bill, is directly taking critically needed support and, you know, assistance from the middle class and the working class.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the position of the Democratic Party in this. The party has faced widespread criticism, accused of failing to properly challenge Trump’s agenda. There’s a new piece —

CHRIS LEHMANN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — by The New — in The New Republic that says, quote, “House Republicans managed to pass their draconian budget bill, which promises to make massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and food assistance, early Thursday morning by a narrow one-vote margin that was only possible due the deaths of three Democrats in this current Congress.” It goes on to talk about, on Wednesday, Representative Gerry Connolly of [Virginia] passed away after battling esophageal cancer. He’s the third Democrat to die in office this year and the sixth in just over a year. In March, longtime Arizona Congressmember Raúl Grijalva passed away also after battling cancer, and Congressmember Sylvester Turner of Houston, Texas, died six days earlier. Can you talk about all of this?

CHRIS LEHMANN: Yes, this is, you know, an ongoing problem. And obviously, this is all in the shadow of new revelations about how the Biden White House basically concealed the actual cognitive decline of the president. You know, there is a huge gerontocracy problem in the Democratic Party, and where, you know, it is not an exaggeration, as the piece you quoted says, that if we did not lose these three House members, this disastrous bill might have been stopped.

And it’s also — you know, beyond the demographics, there is also just a basic failure of standing up for principle. You know, there was an earlier budget showdown that could have produced a government shutdown, and Democrats had leverage at that point to get concessions from Republicans in exchange for letting the budget go forward, and Chuck Schumer just folded like a cheap suit in the Senate and gave the Republicans everything they demanded. That’s the sort of longer-term background to this disastrous bill that passed yesterday. The Republicans know they can count on Democrats either to, you know, to put things bluntly, to die or to fold. And, you know, this is a real problem.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to note, Heather Cox Richardson, in her newsletter, points out that we’re talking about “the single biggest increase in funding to —

CHRIS LEHMANN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — “immigration enforcement in the history of the United States,” increasing ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least 100,000 people at a time. Your final comment, Chris Lehmann, as we move on to talk about one of the people who’s in that detention system, Mahmoud Khalil?

CHRIS LEHMANN: Well, I think it’s, again, important to outline, in this case, that this boondoggle to the repressive and, you know, illegal ICE detention system comes on the back of another Democratic capitulation. The same Democratic Senate voted to endorse the Laken Riley Act, which erected this new system of detention and rendition that’s operating illegally and without accountability in our country, after, prior to that, the Democrats eagerly touted a Republican immigration reform that included many of these same draconian provisions. So, again, it’s a failure of effective resistance and moral leadership on the part of the Democrats. And yeah, it’s a disastrous amping up of this shadow, you know, fascist state.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to put an underscore on it, Heather Cox Richardson writes, “It increases ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations by 500%, from the current $721 million to $14.4 billion. It also calls for [$46.5 billion] for construction of barriers at the border, including completing 701 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.” It calls for $45 billion for adult and family detention, enough to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.

Chris Lehmann, I want to thank you for being with us, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation. We’ll link to your piece, “Trump and Johnson’s Big Ugly Lie.”

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We go to Memphis for an update after jurors acquitted three former Memphis police officers of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father who died after the officers brutally beat him during a traffic stop in January 2023. The group beating was caught on video, provoking widespread outrage and calls for police reform. The three officers still face sentencing after they were convicted of separate federal charges, along with two other officers who pleaded guilty to the state charges and will not stand trial. “A lot of us were shocked,” says Amber Sherman, of the Memphis community’s response. Sherman, a community organizer and member of Black Lives Matter Memphis, joined the family Thursday at a community vigil and protest. She warns this latest acquittal will “embolden” Memphis police as they continue to “do whatever they want.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show in Memphis, Tennessee, where the family of Tyre Nichols joined supporters to protest and grieve Thursday, after jurors Wednesday unanimously acquitted three former Memphis police officers of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father who died after the officers brutally beat him during a traffic stop that was caught on video.

For more, we go to Memphis. We’re joined by Amber Sherman, community organizer, member of the official Black Lives Matter Memphis chapter and host of the podcast The Law According to Amber.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Amber. You were out there with the family yesterday as people held a memorial vigil and protest. Can you respond to the jury’s acquittal of the three officers? Not to say they won’t serve time in jail, because they were also federal charges that they faced, along with other officers.

AMBER SHERMAN: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I think that a lot of us were shocked. I thought they would at least be found guilty on a few charges, but, boy, did they prove me wrong. I was like, “OK, never mind then.” But I do feel like them being found guilty [sic] on all of the charges really does embolden the Memphis Police Department —

AMY GOODMAN: Acquitted of all the charges.

AMBER SHERMAN: — to feel like now they don’t even have to take their —

AMY GOODMAN: Acquitted of all the charges.

AMBER SHERMAN: Yeah, acquitted. Yeah. Really emboldens them to just feel like they can do whatever they want. And they can really just leave their body cameras on. It doesn’t even matter, because if you see it on camera, they’re still going to find you not guilty of the charges, and you’ll be acquitted.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you remind our audience what happened to Tyre when he was just stopped for a traffic stop?

AMBER SHERMAN: Yes. Tyre was stopped by the Scorpion Unit, which is a type of task force here in Memphis. The task force has since been disbanded, but there are similar task forces that exist still, so they’re still doing these types of stops, where they are targeting people in certain types of cars, in certain neighborhoods — specifically, Black neighborhoods, because they said that they want to target high-crime areas. But the area that he was in had only had one homicide in the entire year before. So, to me, it looks like they’re targeting Black people and Black neighborhoods.

And he was stopped by an officer. He was immediately yanked out of his car and yelled at. He was asking them, why are they were stopping him. They don’t tell him anything. They started hitting him. Their body cameras were still on at that point. And then, at some point, he is able to escape them from beating him and runs down the street towards his house. And then they find him on a corner at Castlegate and Ross, which is in Memphis, in East Memphis, and there’s a Skycam above him, which are these cameras that the police department used to surveil our neighborhoods, actually.

But this Skycam actually had AI technology that helped the camera to move around, so it actually moves as they’re beating him. And you can see from multiple angles that multiple officers are kicking him in the head, are hitting him in the body. They try to spray him with pepper spray but sprayed themselves, so then they get even more angrier and continue to hit him. And he is, at one point, just lifeless, laying there, just being hit. And they’re using all the excuses in the world about how, you know, this is their training, and he was resisting. But you can clearly see on video that he’s not.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say that the former officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith — were found not guilty of murder in the state trial, but in a separate federal case, they were found guilty of witness tampering and await sentencing for that conviction. And two others were also convicted on the federal charge and pleaded guilty to state charges, will avoid trial. But they are all possibly expected to serve time in prison. In this last minute that we have, Amber, the response of the family, what they’re calling for at this point?

AMBER SHERMAN: Well I just want to also add that Demetrius Haley was found guilty of excessive force, deliberate interference for medical intervention, and witness tampering — not just witness tampering. And he’s facing up to life in federal prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Amber Sherman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, community organizer, member of the official Black Lives Matter Memphis chapter, host of the podcast The Law According to Amber. We have 15 seconds. The message from his family?

AMBER SHERMAN: We want justice for Tyre. And that looks like abolishing the police.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us from Memphis, Tennessee — Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated April 4th, 1968.

Survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests are calling for Pope Leo XIV to institute a zero-tolerance policy and for the church to investigate his handling of prior sexual abuse allegations. “He needs to be transparent. He needs to be honest,” says Peter Isely, a survivor of sexual assault by a Catholic priest and a co-founder of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Wait and see,” says James V. Grimaldi, executive editor of National Catholic Reporter. “Don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.” We are also joined by Father Bryan Massingale, professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring our next guest into this conversation. He’s back in Rome, Italy: Peter Isely. He is a survivor of sexual assault by a Catholic priest as a 13-year-old boy growing up in Wisconsin. Peter is one of the founders and global affairs chief of SNAP, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. SNAP’s open letter in response to the new pope, quote, “highlights the grim reality underpinning the College of Cardinals — many who voted in this conclave actively shielded abusers, and many who will be appointed to the curia under this papacy bear similar stains,” they write.

Peter Isely, can you talk about your organization’s very grave concerns about Cardinal Prevost being elected pope?

PETER ISELY: Yeah, and you can imagine how difficult this is for me to be sitting here, for survivors to — what they’re experiencing today, especially when survivors from Peru and some in the United States who were raped and sexually assaulted by Augustinians, the order that Prevost was provincial of and then global — head of the global order, what it felt like to see him walk out on that balcony, knowing that your family, you, your life has permanently changed because of how he has managed or mismanaged sexual abuse cases. It’s hard not to be a part of the Leo fan club right now. I’m pretty confident I’m the most unpopular person probably in Rome right now, and certainly on this panel.

But here are the facts, and this is why we were in Rome launching Conclave Watch. People need to know what the records on sexual abuse and cover-up are of these cardinals. And we filed a _ Vos estis_ complaint. That’s the official mechanism that you’re supposed to use when a bishop has evidence of covering up sex crimes. And in that filing, there is plenty of evidence — now, I’m not saying he’s guilty, but we’re saying it reaches well beyond probable cause that he covered up sex crimes as Augustinian provincial and as head of the Augustinian Order and then as a bishop in Peru from 2014 to 2023.

And the worst is a case that he was directly involved in, three sisters who were sexually assaulted and raped by two priests in his diocese. They were, like, 6 and 7 years old. The statute of limitations in Peru for child sex crimes is four years. So, they didn’t go to the police by — you know, 9 years old, they didn’t go to the police. But they did it, and one of them admitted it. He admitted to the church that he committed these heinous, awful crimes against these girls. And what Prevost did with that information is that he didn’t launch an — give it to justice officials, say, in Peru to find out if there’s any possibility of prosecution. He took that criminal evidence, like they do all around the world, and he shipped it via diplomatic pouch over here to the Vatican over here. What are they doing with it? And that case was closed because of the civil statute in Peru. The man has sexually assaulted children. They were left in ministry. These victims had to go public. Imagine the courage of these three women, women that didn’t get to read the Gospel today or whatever, what happened over there, but these three women raped and sexually assaulted by two Peruvian priests. Prevost — I’m sorry, I hate saying this — I hate saying this —

AMY GOODMAN: I want to, Peter —

PETER ISELY: — the evidence is that he covered up these crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter, I wanted to go to a clip —

PETER ISELY: Who’s sitting right now in the Augustinian headquarters, by the way?

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip, by the way.

PETER ISELY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: This recent scrutiny centering around Cardinal Robert Prevost’s alleged awareness and mishandling of accusations of sex abuse against two priests, when Prevost, now the pope, was the archbishop, as you described, in Peru. This is a clip of Ana María Quispe, a Peruvian woman, who you were talking about, who accused the two priests, Eleuterio Vásquez and Ricardo Yesquén, of sexual abuse. In an interview with the Peruvian media in 2023, she said the abuse started when she was 9 years old.

ANA MARÍA QUISPE: [translated] What happened to me was around 2007. At the time, the priests would invite us to celebrations, to go on missions, to pray the Rosary with him or to Mass. He would insist on having youth go on missions with him to rural regions in the mountains. After so much insistence, my parents agreed, because the priests and I were really close. When it was time to go to bed, he ended up sleeping with me. It was something I didn’t expect, and it was very uncomfortable. … In regards to Father Ricardo Yesquén, I attended a youth missionary group with him. … I was standing in line to greet him when he kissed me. He sat me on top of his legs, and he kissed me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there is the clip of Ana María Quispe, the Peruvian woman accusing two priests of sexual abuse. If you can talk further, Peter, as you sit there in Rome, what your demands are at this point, and if you’ve ever spoken to the current pope, to Pope Leo XIV?

PETER ISELY: No, I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know if any survivor has spoken to him. He hasn’t tweeted anything from survivors, as far as I know.

I mean, here’s what we wanted from him. Here’s what he needs to do. One, he needs to pass not a policy, a law, a canon law — that’s what governs the Catholic Church — a zero-tolerance law. And what that means is simple. Any cleric, any priest, known, determined — known, determined, like these priests were known and determined — to have committed acts of sexual abuse, violence, rape, assault against a child will be permanently removed from the Catholic priesthood. He can no longer be a priest. He can’t function as a priest. He can’t represent himself as a priest. That zero tolerance right now around the world. You can be a bishop, you can have priests — and they know of these priests — who have raped and sexually assaulted children, and you can stay in the ministry, you can transfer them to new assignments, and that’s perfectly legal under this church law.

Secondly, he needs to tell us how he has handled these cases. There needs to be an independent body, not hired by the church, not hired by him, that’s going to look into the abuse archives that he’s involved with, so when he was Augustinian provincial, when he was head of the Augustinian Order. Right now we’re in the Augustinian headquarters. Those files might be right here. They might be, like, three floors down from me. Those need to be reviewed, what cases did he handle, because every case of an Augustinian during that time of rape and sexual assault — and there were cases — went to him, he was responsible for. And in Peru, all that time in Peru, every case in his diocese, he was responsible for. That needs to be examined. He needs to be transparent. He needs to be honest. Let’s open the archives and see what he’s done. Even with the case, by the way, of this victim, her other two sisters then came forward with her. It’s not just her. It’s her and her two sisters, for God’s sake. Let’s see the report he sent to Rome that has led to the closing of this case.

And then, finally, the last job he had was head of the Dicastery of Bishops. All the reports of bishops that have covered up sex crimes, guess where they’re supposed to go. Guess where Vos estis is supposed to be instituted. Over there with him. So, he knows of all the — any reports of bishops that have covered up sex crimes, or cardinals. Those files are over there. So, he needs to open up those archives, because, believe me, we want to trust him.

Right now there is no indication, when it comes to this, that he can be trusted. I am the last person that wants to say this. Do you know how difficult this is for me to say, with all the praise and adulation and glory? I agree with many of the positions that the other two guests talked about. I agree with that. But just because I criticize Pope Leo, and just because we had the same problem with Francis covering up sex crimes, that does not make us JD Vance, that doesn’t make us conservatives, because, oh God, you know, we’re criticizing Pope Leo. And I’m sorry to get so worked up about this, but it is extraordinarily difficult to be in these conversations right now.

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: Can I respond, Amy?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, James Grimaldi, editor of National Catholic Reporter, who’s sitting next to Peter Isely in the studio in Rome, if you could respond?

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: Yeah. First, I want to say that there is no media organization in the world that has done more to expose sexual abuse by priests than the National Catholic Reporter. That’s number one. We gave our database of abusers to SNAP and Bishop Accountability. That’s why they have a database. So I just wanted to make that point.

Second, I’m from Missouri, Amy. You’ve got to show me. And I think Peter’s a nice man, like Peter a lot. But he’s conflated a number of things. The cases that he’s talking about are horrific. They’re awful. Those priests should be banished from the Catholic Church. We agree on that. No question whatsoever. The question that I don’t have, the evidence that I don’t have — and when I met Peter the other night, I asked him to send it to me. And, in fact, I emailed him the next day, and I said, “Give me that evidence on Prevost,” because he was on our short list. We thought he could become the next pope. And I didn’t get a reply. Now, he’s here in Rome. I didn’t have his card. I sent it through their website. So, it could be that for whatever happened and a million things going on — and I’m running a team of seven people — but I’m still eager to see the evidence, because you’ve got to show me that his fingerprints are on a cover-up, and we don’t have that.

Third, I agree with a lot that he just said. And we don’t know if Pope Leo is going to agree or not. I hope he does, because I am a lifelong, as you know, Amy, after having exposed Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist — I’m all in favor of transparency and openness. And Francis made some steps in that direction. Did he go far enough? No. Could Pope Leo go further? Yes. You know, I’m with Peter. Let’s go downstairs and look for the archives. I love archives. If those archives are here, they should open them up. I want to see exactly what happened. So, all of the things he’s talking about — and the canon law change, which he mentioned to me the other night, I think that’s a great idea. We have no evidence yet that he isn’t going to do that.

And I agree with our priest friend that we had on a minute ago. You know, something he said 13 years ago, how do we know it hasn’t changed? I mean, people’s minds change. As you know, Amy, as you know very well, Amy Coney Barrett allegedly told Senator Susan Collins she would not overturn Roe v. Wade because she believed in stare decisis. How did that work out? Well, people change their minds. And we don’t know what’s going to happen with Pope Leo. So, I would say wait and see. Don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I’m going to give you right there, Peter —

PETER ISELY: Let me respond.

AMY GOODMAN: — the last 30 seconds, and then to Father Bryan Massingale for a final comment here. But what I want to do is have the two of you back on as you review the evidence, because this is obviously an ongoing conversation, Peter.

PETER ISELY: Did you hear the victim talking? They did an open letter. Do you know what guts it took to put their names on a letter that they released to the public with their names on it? They’re the ones that said they went to Prevost. Let’s see the report Prevost sent. I am talking and believing the victims. Their accounts are completely consistent. There are two —

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: I believe the victims, too.

PETER ISELY: Please let me finish, sir, OK? And you never sent me the email.

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: I did.

PETER ISELY: OK, fine. OK, let me finish, please. And the thing is, please respect the fact, whether you disagree with me or not, that I am a survivor of rape and sexual assault by a priest in the Catholic Church. And what I’m thinking about is that young lady in Peru and her sisters and what they are going through right now, seeing the praise and adulation of this man. He covered up those crimes in Peru. There’s plenty of evidence for an investigation.

He did it in Chicago. This is in court records. He put two priests in residences, one next to a high school, pedophile priest, one next to an elementary school, pedophile priest. He didn’t even tell the parents of those children or the principal of that school, “I’ve got a pedophile priest like 1,000 feet away from your school.” OK? Didn’t do any of that. So, that’s not the care of children.

And I’ll tell you, finally, he was out on that balcony. Did you hear one word to victims of sexual crimes and violence in the Catholic Church? All about peace. Peace is about ending violence. And so, the violence he can end — I don’t know what he can do about the Ukraine and anything else, but he can end the sexual violence in the church, pass said zero-tolerance now law. He knows what it is. It’s been drafted. Pass it. And let’s see the archives. There’s plenty of evidence. Maybe you can ask him. I mean, you seem to be good friends with him. Let’s go get those archives.

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: I’ve never — I’ve never met him. I want to see your evidence. JGrimaldi —

PETER ISELY: I’ve said it. Go up — go to — go —

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: I’m going to give you my email, Peter.

PETER ISELY: You said you did that before. Go to —

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: JGrimaldi@ncronline.org.

PETER ISELY: OK. OK, great, fine.

JAMES V. GRIMALDI: JGrimaldi@ncronline.org.

PETER ISELY: I know NCR. [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to —

PETER ISELY: OK, let’s — OK, all right.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue this conversation, because it’s clearly —

PETER ISELY: Please.

AMY GOODMAN: — an absolutely critical one. I want to thank Peter Isely, as the two of you also pat each other on the back there. You’re clearly both interested in the investigation of this and getting to the bottom of it.

PETER ISELY: James, please. OK?

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Isely is the survivor of sexual assault by a Catholic priest when he was growing up in Wisconsin, and the founder, one of the founders of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. And I also want to thank James Grimaldi, executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter. We have a date to put the two of you back on the show. But I want to get a final comment from our guest here in New York. You may not be in Rome, but you have a lot to say about this. As we look at the future of the new pope, Reverend Bryan Massingale, what do you want to see?

FATHER BRYAN MASSINGALE: I guess I want to see a couple things. I want the pope to be a voice for the voiceless. What we see around the world and in our own country is rising intolerance, the scapegoating of the migrant and the immigrant. We are seeing the erasure of trans people from our public lives. We’re seeing the revision of our histories, when we try to edit Harriet Tubman out of the Underground Railroad, all in the name of DEI. And this is only in this country. We know that populist nationalisms are increasing around the world. We need this pope to be a voice for the voiceless.

We also need the pope to be a moral conscience for the world. There are so few leaders of global — global leaders of moral integrity. And I was pleased to see that he was taking on JD Vance. But we need him to step into that void of moral and ethical leadership that we have in our world right now.

And we also need the pope to be a prophet of hope in these uncertain times. We haven’t talked about climate change. And I think one of the things that being from Peru — and he sees that climate change is threatening the existence of entire island nations around the world. We’re seeing people in our own country that are wrestling with growing uncertainty, and we see how that uncertainty is being weaponized by public leaders. We need someone who can be an articulate voice of hope.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Father Bryan Massingale, professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University here in New York, recent article for the monthly Catholic magazine America headlined “Pope Francis and the future of Catholic moral theology.” We will link to that.

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Donald Trump has raised nearly a billion dollars from his various cryptocurrency schemes, says researcher Molly White. “He is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency,” White says. She lays out how the Trump family profits from cryptocurrency while directly influencing policy and regulations, encouraging the transfer of wealth to the industry despite its “enormous risk of fraud and collapse.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley are calling for a federal investigation into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, after a fund backed by Abu Dhabi announced it would make a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance using a Trump-branded cryptocoin. The deal could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family.

In their letter, Senators Warren and Merkley wrote, quote, “The deal, if completed, would represent a staggering conflict of interest, one that may violate the Constitution and open our government to a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security,” unquote.

Senator Warren also released this video last week blasting the deal.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: The United States is getting ready to bless Donald Trump’s latest grift. A shady Abu Dhabi investment firm just announced it’s going to make a $2 billion business deal with a foreign crypto company called Binance. So, here’s the kicker: Binance and the foreign investment firm are going to use Donald Trump’s stablecoin to finance their transaction, essentially giving Trump a cut of that $2 billion deal. Boy, looks like corruption, smells like corruption. So, yeah, the Senate is going to put a stop to it, right? Wrong. Right now the Senate is getting ready to greenlight the grift by passing the so-called GENIUS Act next week. This is a bill that would make it even easier for the president and his family to profit off their own stablecoin and oversee their own financial company.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is headed to the Gulf next week.

In related news, last night, on Monday, President Trump spoke at a crypto and AI innovators’ dinner to raise money for a pro-Trump super PAC. Tickets were one-and-a-half million dollars a plate. The event was held at the president’s golf club in Virginia. The co-host of the dinner was David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks is a South African-born tech investor who was part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, founding PayPal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

On May 22nd, Trump is also hosting a private gala dinner for the top 220 investors in his meme coin. The dinner will also be held at the Trump National Golf Club. The promotion also offers an ultra-exclusive VIP reception with the president and a tour of the White House for the top 25 $TRUMP meme coin investors. The anti-corruption group CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the promotion, quote, “one of the most blatant and appalling instances of selling access to the presidency we’ve ever seen,” they said.

We’re joined now by Molly White, an independent cryptocurrency researcher who runs the Citation Needed newsletter. She recently wrote an article headlined “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”

Molly, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can start off, for folks who aren’t following cryptocurrency that carefully, explain what cryptocurrency is.

MOLLY WHITE: Cryptocurrency is a digital asset. So, it’s an entirely digital form of speculation, essentially, that allows people to speculate on the value of tokens that are, you know, things like bitcoin or Ethereum, and it’s entirely digital. There is no physical representation. There is no physical asset or service backing the tokens.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in your recent piece, Molly, you wrote that “The scope of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency conflicts illustrates a degree of corruption that makes the emoluments concerns of Trump’s first term seem quaint by comparison.” Could you explain?

MOLLY WHITE: Yeah. So, Trump’s crypto ventures are growing, seemingly by the week. It seems like every week something new is announced, whether it’s his World Liberty Financial crypto platform or his $TRUMP meme coin or rumors of a new crypto game that his backers are working on. And so, he is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency. You know, he’s allowing people to send him money. He is profiting directly from the cryptocurrency industry, while he is simultaneous influencing policy, legislation, calling off regulators who previously oversaw the crypto industry, in ways that are benefiting him and his family very directly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And given the fact that cryptocurrency has become sort of the favored money-laundering method of criminals, drug dealers, anybody who wants to hide their money, what is the impact of the growing size of the crypto industry in terms of the financial system?

MOLLY WHITE: Well, it’s definitely concerning. I mean, there is this major potential for criminal activity using cryptocurrencies. We’ve seen it dramatically increase for use in money laundering, as you mention, terrorist financing. Ransomware is primarily these days done with cryptocurrency. And there’s very little in the way of regulations or laws that crack down on that type of activity.

And under the Trump administration, we’ve actually seen what few regulations were in place be pared back. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously was, essentially, the primary regulator of the cryptocurrency industry, has been called off the beat. We’ve seen cases against cryptocurrency companies dismissed with prejudice, investigations of crypto companies dropped. We’ve seen the cryptocurrency investigations teams at the SEC and the Department of Justice dismantled. And so, under the Trump administration, I think we are seeing dramatic expansion of the potential for criminal activity within cryptocurrency, as well as the, you know, complete reduction in consumer protections that would allow those who choose to get involved with cryptocurrency to do so without the fear that they are going to be scammed or taken advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly, how exactly does Trump and his family profit from these crypto ventures? How much money are we talking about? And explain. Trump has a crypto coin. Melania has one. Explain how this works.

MOLLY WHITE: Well, Trump has multiple crypto ventures that are directly enriching him. So, you mentioned there’s the $TRUMP meme coin, which is the token that is themed after him, essentially, and is being currently used as a ticket to this private dinner at his golf course. Melania has a token of her own. And the Trumps make money off of those tokens, both in terms of the trading that’s happening, as well as facilitating the liquidity for those types of tokens.

Then there’s the World Liberty Financial platform, which is a yet-to-be-released crypto platform that is nevertheless selling these World Liberty Financial tokens to interested buyers. Trump makes 75% of the protocol revenues from that project, and he owns a 60% stake in the company. He and his family sort of maintained the illusion that there was an arm’s-length relationship between the project, despite it being entirely themed after Trump, prior to his election and inauguration, but after he was inaugurated, they sort of gave up that facade and obtained a majority stake in the company.

And then, Trump has sort of an endless list of additional crypto ventures. He has his NFT projects. He has sold crypto-themed sneakers. You know, there has been reporting that he is working on a crypto game. His Trump Media & Technology Group, which is the company that is behind the Truth Social platform that he controls, is also getting into crypto with a partnership with Crypto.com to launch crypto ETFs, exchange-traded funds. And there’s also reporting that they are considering launching their own token. So, the list really goes on.

And so far, I think he has raised close to a billion dollars, or he has profited in close to a billion dollars from his combined ventures. That number is only continuing to increase, as there are deals like this stablecoin being used by the United Arab Emirates Investment Fund, and as, you know, multiple new ventures are being launched as we go on.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the Trump administration has claimed that all of Trump’s investments are in a blind trust, that basically his sons run the company, not him.

MOLLY WHITE: Right, that is the claim, although he’s made varying claims. He’s even claimed not to profit from crypto at all, which is plainly untrue. But I think that, you know, frankly, it is not fair to say that he is divested from crypto ventures when it is controlled by his sons. His sons are profiting, and ultimately he is profiting. You know, he should not be making policy decisions or influencing policy in ways that benefit his family quite, quite plainly. And I don’t think that the claims that he has divested are accurate whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, can you talk about the latest push by the Senate Democrats? Tell us more about the legislation that they want to change on cryptocurrency pending in Congress. What did the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry, call for?

MOLLY WHITE: So, the GENIUS Act is primarily intended to regulate stablecoins, which are a category of crypto assets that are intended to maintain a peg to some other form of asset. So, we often see dollar stablecoins, which are crypto tokens that are intended to be worth $1 a piece. Those are assets like USDC or Trump’s USD1 stablecoin, which was recently launched. And the GENIUS Act, you know, seeks to install some amount of legislation that would regulate those types of assets.

And this is something that we’ve seen the crypto industry pushing for for quite some time, even prior to the Trump administration. But Trump’s own crypto ventures, including launching his own stablecoin, have recently stalled that legislation, with a number of Senate Democrats speaking up to oppose this bill, as well as those in the House, signaling that, you know, the Trump family financial interests are a major concern for them. The crypto industry has also pushed for a number of changes to this bill that would benefit the industry. And we’re now starting to see Democrats in Congress saying that this bill does not go far enough to prevent national security concerns or even terrorist financing using these stablecoins, which have been used to transfer massive amounts of funds. They are sort of the bedrock of the crypto industry, almost like the poker chips at the casino. Stablecoins are a major venue through which value is transferred in the crypto world. And so, this type of legislation is extremely important to get right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do we have any sense of who in the United States does this investing in crypto coins? How widespread is it? Or is there a profile of typical people who are buying the coins?

MOLLY WHITE: Well, there are everyday people who are involved in crypto speculation, but we also see major venture capital firms and investment firms getting involved in the crypto world, as well, including a number that have a significant presence in Washington. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is one of the largest technology venture capital firms. They have significant investments in the cryptocurrency world, and a number of Andreessen Horowitz employees have been installed in various positions at the White House. Marc Andreessen himself was involved in selecting members of the Trump administration, and they were very heavily involved in political campaigning. Then there are figures like David Sacks, who is the AI and crypto czar at the White House. He runs an investment firm that also has crypto investments, some of which he’s not divested from.

So, there are multiple profiles of crypto investors, many of them institutional, but also everyday people who have bought the story that cryptocurrency is a way to get ahead financially, that crypto investments can potentially provide high returns and are worth the enormous risk and volatility that crypto brings with it, and, you know, now the enormous risk of fraud and collapse throughout the crypto industry, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, we want to thank you so much for being with us, software engineer, independent cryptocurrency researcher, running the Citation Needed newsletter. We’ll link to your recent piece, “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”

An alliance between the far right and Silicon Valley oligarchs has given rise to a form of “end times fascism,” says journalist Naomi Klein, who details in a recent essay co-authored with Astra Taylor how many wealthy elites are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. Klein says that while billionaires dream of escaping to bunkered enclaves or even to space, President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders are turning their countries into militarized fortress states to keep out immigrants from abroad and ramp up authoritarian control domestically.

“There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and ’40s had a horizon” for a utopian future, says Klein. Today, by contrast, “we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future — not just actively betting against it, but fueling the fires that are burning this world.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We spend the rest of the hour with award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein. She has a major new piece out, co-authored with Astra Taylor, for The Guardian newspaper. It’s headlined “The rise of end times fascism.” It looks at the apocalyptic fervor of the far right.

In it, they write, quote, “[T]he most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the [hard] right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers,” Naomi Klein writes.

She is also professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

Naomi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you can start off by talking about your piece and what exactly you mean by talking about the end times, fascism?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s very good to be with you, Amy.

This isn’t the most cheerful piece I’ve ever written, with Astra Taylor, a very close collaborator, founder of the Debt Collective. And we were trying to kind of map what is similar and what is different about the type of far-right politics that we’re seeing today. And I should say, the piece is not only grim. It also looks at what this can mean for a response to this particular form of fascism, because we can’t fight it if we don’t understand it. So, I think a lot of very good scholarship attempting to understand authoritarianism today, whether it’s Trump or figures like Duterte or Modi, have looked at similarities between these far-right figures and, say, Mussolini or Hitler, and have taken a kind of a checklist approach of looking at what is similar to the past, right? And I think there’s a lot of value in that. But the risk of it is that it doesn’t look at what is new and what is particular to our time.

Fascism always is an attempt by the right to resolve a crisis of its own era. Right? So, in the 1930s, they were attempting to resolve, you know, in Germany, the humiliations of the First World War, the impacts of the Great Depression, and to propose a unity in the face of that for the in-group. But our moment is different, and one of the things that makes it different — I mean, if you think about fascism in the 1930s, this is before the atomic bomb. It’s before they understood climate change. And we are in a moment where our elites, whether they admit it or not, do understand that our economic model — and I’ve written books about this and talked about it with you in the past — is at war with life on Earth, right? And they are barreling down this road of more and more extraction of fossil fuels, of all kinds of — you know, basically, anything they can extract from this Earth and turn into energy and money, particularly now with AI, which is a energy and resource hog — water, LNG, critical minerals, all of it.

So, we’re trying to understand how this is informing the kind of fascism that we’re seeing, and also we’re trying to understand what unites this kind of strange Frankenstein coalition that Trump represents, where he’s bringing together these — you know, the richest people in the world who have ever existed with many working-class people, so what binds the vision, right?

And what we cope with in this piece, or what we propose in this piece, is that they all have given up on this world. Like, they all have bought into a kind of apocalyptic fever — right? — whether it’s Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their investments in outer space and sort of writing off this planet, whether AI, which is willing to sacrifice this animate world in order to build an artificial world, or whether it’s the more populist MAGA vision of the fortress nation-state — right? — which is thinking, “OK, we know more and more people are going to be coming. We know that disaster is on the horizon.” I’ve listened to a lot of Steve Bannon for — you know, when I was writing Doppelganger, and it’s all very survivalist, right? You know, all of the commercials, pretty much, are selling, you know, gold, because the economy is going to collapse, you know, ready-to-eat meals for 90 days, because you never know what’s going to happen. So, it sees the nation and the in-group as being inside the bunker, and then it’s exiling the out-group to all of these lawless territories that you’ve been covering on the show. So, it’s not the same vision, but what it shares is this apocalyptic fever.

And then, of course, all of it is following a similar structure, like narrative structure, to the biblical Rapture. And, of course, you have people who believe in that within the Trump coalition, who are, you know, Christian Zionists, like Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, who believe that the actual end times is coming, and they think it’s all going to go down in Israel. And all of the horror that you report on so well and so committedly on the show, these are all good signs if you believe in the Rapture, right? Because it means that the end is coming, and the faithful are going to be lifted up to a golden city in the sky. So, you know, what we’re looking at is like the religious version of that story, the the fundamentalist religious version of that story, where you literally believe you’re going to be saved and taken up to heaven, but also the secular vision, where your wealth protects you, or your citizenship protects you, and you get your own version of that golden, bunkered city.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Gaza, and you just came from the Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore, where several thousand people gathered from around the country. Our latest headline, the Israeli military calling up tens of thousands of reservists as Israel’s security cabinet unanimously approved plans this weekend to expand its assault on Gaza, where Israel has already killed over 52,000 Palestinians — and that’s by far an undercount — in the last 18, 19 months. Israel has killed more than 2,400 Palestinians just since it shattered the ceasefire in March. This comes as Israel’s devastating blockade in food aid has entered its third month. Palestinian health officials say 57 Palestinians have already starved to death. According to UNICEF, more than 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition so far this year. And aid groups, like Norwegian Refugee Council, blasting a new Israeli proposal to take control in distribution and put U.S. security contractors in charge. If you can talk, as you so often do, about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank and what the centrality of Israel in President Trump and the current U.S. government — although it was also the past, President Biden’s worldview and approach to foreign policy?

NAOMI KLEIN: So, I don’t think there is a single answer to understanding what the driving forces are. And this is what we’re trying to get at, is that there’s a kind of an overlap of these different apocalyptic worldviews. Some of them are religious, and some of them are secular, right? So, I think that people who subscribe to this, like, literalist version of the Rapture believe that all of this is good news, in the sense that, according to the story that they believe in, that the Israelites have to return to Greater Israel. Those are the preconditions for the return of the Messiah. They have to rebuild the Third Temple. So you have this convergence of interests between the religious extremists and the Netanyahu government, who are absolutely committed to rebuilding the Third Temple. They really want to do it. They want to destroy Al-Aqsa. This is why so much attention is focused on it.

But then, you know, does Trump believe that? I don’t think Trump believes that. I mean, what he views for Gaza is he sees resources. He sees money. He sees a private, you know, resort.

AMY GOODMAN: Resort.

NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly. But this is something I’ve been saying from the beginning. I think the interests have been fairly consistent in terms of what the end goal is, which is a depopulation of Gaza, pushing Palestinians out, whether through death or whether through forced exile, whether through ethnic cleansing. And under the Biden administration, there was a denial that that was what was going on. And under the Trump administration, it’s all out in the open. So, you know, this is what is going on.

Now, what the reason for that is, I think, differs. But this is what — part of what we’re getting at in the piece, Astra and I, is that there is a confluence of interests in terms of what Israel represents. Some of the supporters of the Trump administration in the tech industry are talking about wanting freedom cities, for instance, these privatized, corporate cities. And they talk about this as tech Zionism. They have a lot of admiration for the idea that Israel was created, they say, you know, from a book, Theodor Herzl’s books. And they said, “Well, why can’t we start our own country, our own private countries? Why do we have to — you know, why do we have to abide by the rules of the nation-state?”

So, I think part of the support for Israel isn’t just our classic understandings either of Jewish Zionism or Christian Zionism, although that’s absolutely going on. It’s also this idea of a very technologically advanced startup country, right? Israel has marketed itself that way. And a lot of these tech companies want to do that in San Francisco. They want to push everybody out who doesn’t agree with them, who’s poor, who have more needs, and create their kind of corporate, privatized utopia. So, you know, I’m not saying this is a coherent agenda. I’m saying that there’s a lot of overlapping stories that follow a similar structure and share similar goals, if that makes sense.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, yes, I mean, the overall issue, obviously, is hard to make sense of.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And most Trump’s supporters are neither wealthy nor are they Christian Zionists. So, why are they backing this whole approach?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s not clear the extent to which they actively back it, but I think that they see a kinship in the ethnostate — right? — because a lot of Trump supporters are becoming increasingly Christian nationalist about the United States. And this has been carefully fostered by figures like Steve Bannon. And so, when they look at Israel, they see a country that is openly an ethnostate that is fortressing itself in a sea of its enemies, you know, and they want to do something similar. And they’re sharing technologies. They’re sharing, you know, legal precedents, tools. So, there’s a — you know, there’s a kinship. And, you know, we’re seeing this now with India with its attacks on Kashmir, following us, you know, using similar techniques that, you know, Israel has used in Gaza. So, there is a kind of a solidarity of the ethnostates. And they are sharing — you know, they’re even trading trinkets of golden pagers and swapping chainsaws. You know, this is something that we — I think, you know, when you’re inside the crucible of it here in the United States under Trump, it’s hard to see the extent to which this is an international project on the right, and they are influencing one another.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does unite them, you know, this whole fortress mentality, is this hatred of immigrants. You have —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — President Trump just saying he doesn’t even know — he’s not a lawyer, so he doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution, he said.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. I mean, this is what I’m trying to get at about the awareness that we are in an age of consequences, that when you don’t act in the face of the climate crisis for decades, when scientists have been warning you, that more and more of the world becomes uninhabitable, and, lo and behold, people move to try to find safety in the face of wars, in the face of economic deprivation and in the face of ecological disasters.

And so, that fortressing of the nation-state — and this is what I think, you know, Israel’s come to represent, just as a very small nation that is extremely fortressed — right? — whether it’s with the high-tech walls, the Iron Dome. Trump says now, “I want not an Iron Dome, but a golden dome.” Right? That —

AMY GOODMAN: Here.

NAOMI KLEIN: Here. That all of this is, whether it’s stated explicitly or not —

AMY GOODMAN: And a military parade that’ll cost tens of millions —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of dollars, even as he slices and dices the government, on his birthday, in June.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. So the pattern is protecting the in-group and exiling and cleansing the out-groups. Right? And so, that, I think, is — you know, if there is support among the MAGA base for Israel, it’s less out of a love for Israel than more out of an identification, like they are doing what we want to do here.

AMY GOODMAN: You write many things in your piece, and I just want to go to one of them. You say — in talking about Musk’s apocalyptic vision, you talk about, and also detailing the end times fascism, this whole issue of the rise of the city state, the corporate city state. I think this is a new concept for many. They’re not going to know what you’re talking about.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: In southern Texas, Starbase, just this group of people, who are mainly workers at SpaceX, have just voted to make a city right there?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. And we’ve had sort of — I mean, the idea of a company town is not entirely new, right? And Disney had Celebration, Florida, and there are lineages to this, right? Colonial lineages to this. You know, I live in Canada, which started as the Hudson’s Bay Company, right? So it was a company before it was a country. So there is some precedent for this.

But I think what this is — I’ve been following this out of the corner of my eye, Amy, because this is where libertarians have been going for a while. There was an — Peter Thiel has been obsessed with this idea. It’s increasingly being called exit, so exiting the nation and just starting your own country, where you can set your own tax level, you can make your own regulations.

AMY GOODMAN: Or not.

NAOMI KLEIN: Or not. And countries — and these little corporate countries will compete with one another to try to attract capital, right? So, in a way, it’s an extension of the free trade zone — right? — where this is, in a way, like a denationalized country within a country. But Trump started to float this in 2023, the idea that he would create 10 freedom cities, on the campaign trail. I don’t think his base much knew what he was talking about. But now you have all these lobbyists who fully intend to take him up on it. And we’re starting to see the beginning of this with this SpaceX city.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you also write about El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the notorious prison, CECOT, where so many hundreds of people have been sent from the United States, and at the same time, in the last 24 hours, President Trump saying he wants to reopen the notorious Alcatraz —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — an island in San Francisco. If you can talk about the prison as a model for what Trump wants to put forward, and particularly in relation, as we see motivating so much, to immigrants?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an incredibly bleak vision. So, repression is always a huge part of any kind of fascist project, right? You need to contain the out-group. You need to disappear the out-group. So this part of it is not new. But I think what is so worrying to me is that Trump was elected promising all kinds of things to his base, right? He promised to eliminate inflation. He promised to bring these great jobs home. He’s not delivering on any of that. So the sadistic part of his project is really all he has to offer, right?

I think one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen in the United States was Trump sharing that video at his hundred-day rally of just pure sadism, of just looking at prisoners, as entertainment, being shaved, being shackled, being paraded. And he’s not delivering on the price of eggs. And he’s not delivering on the jobs, by the way, because he’s throwing all in— he’s going all in on AI. So the jobs that are coming back seem to be mainly for robots. It’s not actually for his base. And so, this scales up the need for the sadism and these spectacles, right? And I think that that’s what something like Alcatraz represents. He’s a TV producer, first and foremost, right? He’s producing spectacles. And the less he has to offer economically, tangibly, materially, the more he leans on the sadism.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, “The governing ideology of the far right … has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. … Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.” What would that movement look like, or what do you see is being formed right now?

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, what we’re doing in this piece by laying out the bleakness of the vision — and when I say “bleakness,” you know, I think it’s beyond something we’ve seen before, because there’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and '40s had a horizon. Like, after the apocalypse, people were being promised a future, a pastoral, peaceful little piece of land where they could live out their lives, you know? Even though Trump talks about a golden age, there really isn't a future that the base believes in, you know? And this is what I’ve learned by consuming far too much MAGA media, Amy. They envision a future of endless war, right? And this is why they’re bunkering down. This is why they’re buying ready-to-eat meals to last. This is why they’re buying gold and crypto. They think the whole thing is going down. So —

AMY GOODMAN: And why Elon Musk is trying to have so many children, at least 14 at this point. But he’s actually explicitly texted it, saying, “We’ve got to do this much faster,” as he proposed to one of the women he has children with, saying, “We’ve got to start using surrogates.”

NAOMI KLEIN: So, they don’t believe in the future, is the bottom line. And that is — you know, I think I’ve been in a lot of progressive spaces in recent months where we’ve talked about building these very broad coalitions, including with people who we don’t entirely disagree with. I’ve never encountered a potential coalition more broad than the idea of: How about if we believe in this world? How about if we believe in the future? Because we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future, right? Not just actively betting against it —

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.

NAOMI KLEIN: — but fueling the fires that are burning this world, actively fueling it. So, I think that if we have the courage, really, to look at the bleakness of what they believe in, which is an apocalyptic future, then we have our work cut out for us of being the people who actually believe in this realm, in this world, in the beauty of creation and of each other.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, author, columnist. We’ll link to your piece with Astra Taylor, “The rise of end times fascism.” I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

NOW READ: Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

Social Security recipients could soon see their benefits interrupted or delayed as a flood of cuts hits the agency, thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who served as Social Security commissioner under President Biden, says the system is on the brink of collapse as the Trump administration pushes out thousands of staffers and peddles lies about who actually benefits from its services. The former commissioner adds that he believes “they’re trying to wreck Social Security’s reputation, wreck its ability to serve its customers, wreck its unbeaten string of regular monthly payments, so that, having wrecked it, then they have an emergency under which they can rob it.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Our next guest, former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, is warning Social Security recipients could soon see their benefits interrupted or delayed. In a recent interview, O’Malley said moves by the Trump administration to cut costs at the Social Security Administration could, quote, “crater the agency and lead to a system collapse.”

The Washington Post recently reported a flood of cuts pushed by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and DOGE are already leading the Social Security system to breaking down. The Post reports, in March, Social Security website crashed four times in a 10-day span, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. Phone lines have also been overwhelmed due to staffing cuts.

According to the group Social Security Works, around half of all seniors rely on Social Security for most of their income, while 25% of seniors rely on it for virtually all of their income. The average annual payout to these seniors is just $20,000 a year.

Last month, Trump’s commerce secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, sparked outrage after suggesting only fraudsters would complain if Social Security checks don’t go out on time.

COMMERCE SECRETARY HOWARD LUTNICK: Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump adviser Elon Musk recently described Social Security as a Ponzi scheme during an interview with Joe Rogan.

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, the government is one big Ponzi scheme, if you ask me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, you could tell better than anybody.

ELON MUSK: Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.

AMY GOODMAN: Elon Musk’s attacks on Social Security come as the Trump administration is moving to cut off benefits to more than 6,000 immigrants who had lawfully obtained Social Security numbers, were paying into the system for years. The administration is doing this by falsely labeling them as dead to cut off their benefits.

We’re joined now by Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security commissioner under President Biden. He’s also the former governor of Maryland and the former mayor of Baltimore.

It’s great to have you with us, Governor O’Malley, Commissioner O’Malley. If you can start off by explaining why you say that you think the Social Security system in this country is on the brink?

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Well, because of all of the things that Elon Musk and the DOGE team and Donald Trump have been doing to Social Security, with a speed and a virulence that I think is stunning, shocking. I mean, they have, Amy, actually been paying people, with our money, at an agency that was already at a 50-year low of staffing and all-time high beneficiary customers — they’ve been paying them to leave. They have created a hostile work environment. They have engaged in wholesale, like, firing entire offices and divisions. They have driven out almost, by now, 10,000 people out of the agency. They say 7,000. It’s going to go down to 10,000.

And part of that is a 50% reduction in the people that keep the IT systems going, the same IT systems that never missed a beat and sent out the checks, the right amount to the right person at the right time, every month all through COVID. They have cut the IT department in half. You’re seeing, as you just mentioned, outages in some of the customer-facing aspects of it. Those outages are going to become more regular, rather than intermittent. They’re going to happen for longer durations. And ultimately, you’re going to see that cascade into a collapse of the entire system and an interruption for some time of benefits. I don’t see — with the path that they’re on, I believe they’ve taken probably 90% of the actions necessary to accomplish that aim.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you explain this master death list and putting 6,000 people who’ve paid into Social Security on the list that says they are dead — we’re talking about immigrants — and where this master list goes?

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Sure. That’s an operational question rather than a question about what their intent is. I mean, this is some really chilling stuff. By law, Congress requires that the Social Security Administration, which maintains a lot of personal data on all of us, from our first summer job, from the first moment we’re born, actually — and so, Social Security is required to keep what Congress has dubbed the master death file. And so, Social Security has contracts with all 50 states, the territories. And the second that a death certificate is recorded, Social Security lists that in the master death file, and then a lot of other entities ping off of that — in other words, our banking systems, credit companies, the IRS. And so, if you list somebody as deceased, when clearly they’re not deceased, it has the effect — as their puppet acting commissioner of Social Security said, it has the effect of terminating the financial lives of people here in the United States.

It is a stunning, willful, criminal act, any one of those counts to put a false information into a federal record, and in particular a Social Security record. And yet they’re doing it with a breadth in total violation — a breadth and a scope and a depth way beyond anything that’s happened before, and actually in direct contravention and direct — exactly opposite of what a federal judge ordered them to do, which was stay the hell out of our personal data.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you have, at the same time that all of this is happening, the degrading of the system, President Trump insisting that he’s not planning to cut Social Security. But can you talk about what you see as Trump and Musk’s ultimate vision for Social Security? Do they just want to make it unworkable so that it’s privatized? And in this, talk about the history of Social Security. How many people get it, Social Security and disability benefits, as well?

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Sure. For 90 years, Social Security has never, ever missed a monthly payment. And right now there are approximately 73 million Americans who are in pay status, who are beneficiaries, whether in the survivor and old age aspect and widows and orphans, or whether it’s people with disabilities who can no longer work.

Now, the question you ask, Amy, about what their ultimate goal is, it’s hard to — hard to figure. Social Security, as you probably know and many of your viewers know, is not a Ponzi scheme. It is a pay-as-you-go program. Americans working this year pay in $1.3 trillion, and Social Security pays out those same dollars to beneficiaries. And when, as now, with baby boomers moving through the system, Social Security makes up any difference from its large surplus reserve. And many people believe it is that large surplus reserve — the only agency that runs a large surplus reserve — of $2.6 trillion that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have their eyes on.

I don’t know what they want to do with that money, but it does appear that they’re trying to precipitate an emergency situation, knowing that Congress would never allow them to touch it, absent an emergency. I do believe that they’re trying to wreck Social Security’s reputation, wreck its ability to serve its customers, wreck its unbeaten string of regular monthly payments, so that, having wrecked it, then they have an emergency under which they can rob it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about what has happened when it comes to — first they said they were going to cut off the phone ability to call a helpline, which for so many Social Security recipients is the only way they could communicate with Social Security. That would force them to satellite offices, of which they closed many. What is happening right now? And what do you say has to happen to fix this system at this point?

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Well, it is going to take years now to build back Social Security. In our last year, the men and women of the Social Security Administration achieved some of the best customer service timeliness achievements, and certainly since before COVID, some of them, you know, the best timeliness in 10 years. For example, answering that phone used to be an average — average — wait of 42-and-a-half minutes. They got that down to just over 12 minutes. But now all of those things are going in the wrong direction.

Social Security is one of the most trusted brands in the entire federal government, second only to the National Park Service and Smokey the Bear. So, what they have to do in order to get away with whatever their end goal is, you know, with their eyes on the big trust fund, they have to degrade its ability to serve customers. They have to turn people away from it or against it. You’ve heard a lot of big lies about Social Security. You’ve heard Elon Musk say it’s a Ponzi scheme just like the rest of our government; illegal immigrants get Social Security benefits, when they don’t. You’ve heard about the zombie apocalypse, that is, you know, millions of people roaming the Earth and taking our money. None of those things is true.

But the other big lie you hear, Amy, is that Social Security is bad, it’s always been bad, it’s never really worked. So, that’s the big lie they’re pushing. And then they demonstrate it by cramming as many people into Social Security offices as they can for services that they used to be able to get online or used to be able to get on the phone. And that’s going to be the evidence, then, that they create, that “it’s always been bad, so, you know, we had to privatize it, or we had to liquidate it. Here’s your lump sum. Be happy. Go away. It was always a Democratic program that never worked.” So, that’s what’s going on here, and it’s happening with a stunning speed that I think Americans are waking up to.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the 10 seconds that we have left, this allegation that immigrants are being fraudulent in getting Social Security. They have paid into the system for years. It’s their money.

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Well, actually, illegal immigrants, so-called, people working here outside of legal status, cannot receive any Social Security benefits, and never have been able to. They’re prohibited by law. But they do pay in $25 billion for the benefit of the rest of us and into the Social Security trust fund. It’s a total lie. Illegal immigrants do not receive Social Security benefits.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet they pay. Martin O’Malley, thank you so much for being with us, former Social Security administrator.

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President Trump is facing increasing criticism from big businesses over his decision to launch a global trade war. On Monday, CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House to warn about Trump’s trade policies. A day later, Trump signaled he is open to substantially lowering tariffs on China. Trump has also toned down his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he had previously threatened to fire. This all comes as global stock markets remain in turmoil over Trump’s trade policies.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst April performance since the Great Depression. “This is classic Trump,” says Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. “You create a crisis. Then you say, 'Well, actually, I'm going to back off,’ and the crisis is over. And you end up with yourself and the country worse than before you started.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: President Trump is facing increasing criticism from corporate America over his decision to launch a global trade war. On Monday, the CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House to warn about the impact of Trump’s trade policies. A day later, Trump signaled he’s open to substantially lowering tariffs on China. Trump is also toning down his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who he had threatened to fire. This all comes as global stock markets remain in turmoil over Trump’s trade policies. The Wall Street Journal reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst April performance since the Great Depression.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. His most recent piece is headlined “Trump Blinks.” Kuttner’s latest book is Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy. Robert Kuttner is also a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

Robert, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, let’s begin with this U-turn, with this reversal of Trump’s. When he started talking about 145% tariffs on China, it was like someone else had proposed them, and he wanted to turn that around. So, you’ve got from China to the possible firing of Jerome Powell and the turnaround on that. Can you talk about the significance of this and what it means that the Dow Jones is plummeting to the point of being compared to the Great Depression?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, Amy, I’ve been obsessively concerned with one question: Where are the firewalls? Where are the speed bumps? How might we slow Trump down? And there may be three or four ways that we can do this. One is by activism. One is by the Supreme Court remembering that its job is to protect the rule of law — and that seems to be happening. And one is financial markets.

Now, as someone who’s spent my entire career criticizing the power of Wall Street, it doesn’t give me great pleasure that financial markets can be a source of restraint on Trump. On the other hand, in World War II, you know, we had an alliance with Stalin to beat Hitler. So you take the allies you can take.

And what’s happened in the past few days — and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, is the interesting figure here — markets crashed, first of all, when Trump declared “Liberation Day” and tried to impose tariffs on the whole world. They crashed again when he made noises about firing Jerome Powell. They crashed again when he did this lunacy with China. And what Bessent has done — he’s sort of the most conventional Wall Street guy of all of Trump’s advisers, so he kind of speaks for financial markets. And he basically said to Trump, “You really don’t want to do this.” And so Trump walked it back. And if you look at markets, financial markets, the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, in the past few days, you know, they bounced around like a yo-yo. And they bounced around primarily in response to whether Trump is doubling down on this craziness or whether he’s backing off.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you’ve said, Robert, that Scott Bessent is the — plays the role of the, quote, “sole grown-up in the room” in the Trump administration.

ROBERT KUTTNER: That’s right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could say a little bit about his background and what kind of influence you think he has on Trump?

ROBERT KUTTNER: It’s very interesting. I mean, he is the most atypical of all of the close Trump advisers. He used to be a Democrat. He worked for George Soros for a long time. He’s the guy who came up with the bet that crashed the pound in the mid-'90s. And then he set up his own hedge fund. He's gay. He’s married to a man. He’s about as unlike most of MAGA as he could be.

And Trump picked him because he wanted one traditional Wall Street guy to reassure financial markets. And Bessent has not been shy about using this influence to kind of talk Trump off the ledge and get him to back off some of the crazier stuff. Now, we’ll see whether Bessent’s days are numbered — right? — because Trump is paranoid about loyalty. He’s petulant. He could turn on Bessent. But I think, for the moment, he’s following Bessent’s advice.

Now, here’s the complication. It’s sort of easy to say, “OK, I’m not going to fire Jerome Powell.” It’s much harder to do a deal with China. China plays a long game much better than we do, as I wrote. China’s time horizon is measured in centuries, if not millennia. And Trump’s attention span is measured in hours, if not days. And you don’t just do a deal with China. China has an entire economic system based on mercantilism, so-called, industrial policy, using state subsidies to build the world’s second most powerful economy, soon to be the world’s most powerful economy. You don’t just have a staged meeting with Xi Jinping and say, “OK, we’ll cut the tariffs, and you change your whole economic and political system.” That’s not how it works. So, it’s not clear what kind of deal is in the offing. And Trump has basically weakened his own hand by doing this ridiculous 145% tariffs and then, humiliatingly, having to walk it back. So, Xi’s hand is stronger than it was before Trump did this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain, actually, what do you think happened? Because, I mean, just to clarify, the tariffs that Trump had imposed on China were at 145%. China retaliated by imposing 125% on American goods to China. Then he says earlier this week to reporters in the Oval Office that tariffs on China will, quote, “come down substantially,” saying, he said, “We’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.”

ROBERT KUTTNER: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And then, China today came out and said, actually, there are no negotiations going on between the U.S. and China on that, and much less has there been any agreement.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, exactly. So, a lot of what Trump is saying is in the realm of wishful thinking. And the reason he backed off is that so many American consumer goods, American producer goods, like auto parts, are intimately bound up with sources of supply that come from China. Now, think about what 145% tariffs mean. That means that if something costs $100, it suddenly costs $100 plus 145% of $100, so it now costs $245. That’s tantamount to a boycott. It’s like a complete boycott of Chinese exports. And after all these years of neoliberalism, where so much stuff gets outsourced to China, we’re very dependent on China.

The flip side — and this has to do with China’s retaliatory tariffs — our biggest export is, guess what? It’s soybeans. It’s 9% of all of American exports — not farm exports, all exports. And the biggest customer for American soybeans is China. Well, if China’s tariffs are over 100% on American soybeans, China is going to start getting its soybeans from Brazil or from Argentina. So you’ve got farmers very upset, as well. And you’ve got all of industry and all of agriculture telling Trump, “Back off. Don’t do this to us.” So, of course, he has to back off.

And China is in the catbird seat, and China can very well say, “Well, we don’t have any deals pending. We didn’t do this. He did this.” And he’s weaker than it was before — he was before. And this is classic Trump. You create a crisis. Then you say, “Well, actually, I’m going to back off,” and the crisis is over. And you end up with yourself and the country worse than before you started.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, the question is how much he and his friends make when he suddenly does a turnaround and the stock market goes up. Robert Kuttner, 10 seconds to respond to that.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, he’s totally corrupt. He doesn’t make any bones about the fact that he’s totally corrupt. You’ve had the item about cryptocurrencies. I mean, he’s the ultimate grifter.

AMY GOODMAN: As in “grifter,” not to be confused with “drifter.” Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. We’re going to link to your piece, “Trump Blinks.”

“These were otherwise healthy school-age children who didn’t have to die.” We speak to the world-renowned pediatrician, virologist and vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez, about the dangerous anti-vaccine agenda of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Amid a growing number of measles cases in the United States, RFK Jr. has promoted skepticism of the efficacy of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. At least two unvaccinated children have died from measles, a highly contagious disease that had been effectively eliminated in the U.S. in the past few decades. Hotez, the father of a child on the autism spectrum, also debunks RFK Jr.’s claims that vaccines are linked to autism, and criticizes his “deeply offensive” statements about people living with autism. Evoking eugenic beliefs, the HHS secretary, who now holds the power to determine healthcare policy in the United States, “shows this consistent lack of intellectual curiosity, this kind of simplistic way of thinking and talking about autism,” says Hotez.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

In his first news conference as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who now oversees the nation’s federal health agencies, focused on new findings about autism published in a Centers for Disease Control report which found an increase in apparent autism rates among 8-year old children. Kennedy described autism as an “epidemic” and blamed environmental factors for the increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder.

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin.

AMY GOODMAN: RFK Jr. did not connect autism to vaccines during his news conference, but in his previous role as chair of Children’s Health Defense, he had repeatedly claimed that vaccines cause autism — which they do not.

Meanwhile, as the number of measles cases in the United States surpasses 700, RFK Jr.’s position on the measles vaccine is mixed. At an event Tuesday with Republican Indiana Governor Mike Braun and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Kennedy said the measles vaccine is “leaky,” which medical experts dispute.

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: People get measles because they don’t vaccinate. They get measles because the vaccine wanes. The vaccines wane about 4.8% per year. And so, you know, that — it’s a leaky vaccine, and that problem is always going to be around.

AMY GOODMAN: Measles cases have been reported in at least 24 states, with the majority of infections in Texas, where the outbreak began in January. Three unvaccinated people have died from measles-related illnesses so far: an adult in New Mexico and two elementary-aged schoolchildren in rural Texas. Before that, there wasn’t a measles death for the last decade.

Earlier this month, Kennedy attended the funeral of the second child who died of measles, an 8-year-old girl in West Texas. During his visit, he posted on social media, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” unquote.

However, he’s also continued to raise safety concerns about vaccines. In an interview last week with CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook, Kennedy claimed the vaccines were, quote, “not safety tested.”

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I’m not going to take people’s vaccines away from them.

DR. JONATHAN LAPOOK: Right.

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: What I’m going to do is make sure that we have good science so that people can make an informed choice. And we are doing that science today, so that we know the risks of that product and we also know what the benefits are. And right now we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested.

DR. JONATHAN LAPOOK: And I understand that position. But just to be clear, you are saying, and we do, on the federal level — and you personally do — recommend that people get the measles vaccine?

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. And when I say they’re not safety tested, what I mean is they’re not adequately — many of the vaccines are tested for only three or four days, with no placebo group.

AMY GOODMAN: Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease that’s preventable through vaccines and had been considered eliminated from the United States in 2000. The disease has now spread to border communities in Canada and Mexico, with Canada reporting 730 cases, Mexico at least 360 cases with one death.

For more on RJK Jr. and his positions on measles and autism, and what to do about the growing number of cases of measles, we’re joined now from Boston by Dr. Peter Hotez, who is usually in Texas. He’s dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he’s also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. He’s the author of several books, including The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning and Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.

Dr. Hotez, welcome back to Democracy Now! So —

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: We recently spoke, but since then, I believe two more people have died of measles. If you can explain how rare this is and what actually is happening in your state of Texas?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah, Amy, we haven’t seen a measles death in a very long time, and now we have two unvaccinated children who tragically died from measles. These were otherwise healthy school-aged children who did not have to die, but they weren’t vaccinated with the highly effective and safe MMR vaccine.

And this measles epidemic is really escalating. We now have at least 500-plus known cases of measles in West Texas. It’s probably much higher than that, because if you do the back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the case fatality rate of measles, there’s probably closer to a thousand, or maybe even more than that, cases in West Texas. And now it’s extending into New Mexico, into Oklahoma, into Kansas. They all seem to be related to the same very large epidemic. So this is sweeping across the Great Plains. And we’ve had sustained transmission now since the very beginning of the year, possibly even earlier than that. And the worry is that we’re going to reach a point where, if it continues, we could even lose our elimination status for measles, which was so hard-fought.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to RFK Jr.'s what seems to be — I mean, it's nuanced, but a slightly shifting position? He would not have endorsed MMR, the measles vaccine, before, but now, under enormous pressure, with hundreds and hundreds of cases of measles, and it being fast-growing, he has said he’s not opposed to them. Can you explain and also address his concerns?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Well, his comments are insufficient. He grudgingly acknowledges the importance of the MMR vaccine and immunizations, when it’s the only way we’re going to be able to contain this highly dangerous and lethal epidemic. So he needs to be much more of an advocate for MMR vaccinations.

And he surrounds it with disinformation, Amy. You know, he says the measles vaccine is a “leaky vaccine.” I’m not even sure I know what that means, but it’s absolute nonsense. It’s one of the most effective and safest vaccines we have — a single dose, over 90% protection; two doses, 97% protection. You know, I’m a vaccine developer, a vaccine scientist. We make vaccines for global health. We’ve reached 100 million doses of our low-cost vaccines for COVID administered globally and now vaccines for parasitic disease vaccines. When we are designing our vaccine, our strategy when we whiteboard this out, our gold standard is the MMR vaccine. We aspire to make a vaccine that’s as good as the MMR vaccine. And yet he calls it “leaky,” which is absolute nonsense.

He also gives an absolutely false number. He says there’s a decline of 4% protection, of vaccine protection, per year. It’s absolute nonsense. It’s nothing like that. If it declines at all, and there’s some estimates that it could be 0.04%, not 4%, so a hundredfold less. So, that’s really unfortunate.

And then, when he talks about vaccination, he then often will pair it with this false equivalency, talking about a steroid, budesonide, which has no preventative activity, or vitamin A, which is not preventative, or he’s using other unproven interventions. And that really sends a mixed message, because it tells parents, “Hey, you have the choice: You either get the MMR vaccine, or you get this nonsense cocktail of interventions.” So, he still has a long way to go about all of these things.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me go to RFK Jr. speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity last month.

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It used to be, when you and I were kids, everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but in many people, it wanes.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can respond, Dr. Peter Hotez? Everyone used to get measles, he said.

DR. PETER HOTEZ: That’s right. Everyone used to get measles. And measles, at one time, was the single leading killer of children globally. And it caused hundreds of deaths annually in the United States in the pre-vaccine era. I mean, we’ve got — you know, we know what measles does. Twenty precent of children who are unfortunate enough to get measles because they’ve not been vaccinated, 20% are hospitalized — measles pneumonia, measles encephalitis, permanent hearing loss from neurologic damage, sometimes loss of vision. Measles is a bad actor. It’s one of the most serious childhood infections we know about.

And the fact that he would be so dismissive of it, again, this is — had been consistently his modus operandi and the modus operandi of the anti-vaccine lobby. What they do is they’re dismissive of the severity of childhood infections, especially measles. And what they’ll do is they’ll exaggerate the very, very rare side effects that occasionally occur, but we’re talking extremely rare instances. And the consequence of that is parents then make executive decisions based on the disinformation coming from Mr. Kennedy and others and decide not to vaccinate their kids. And this is happening now across the Great Plains in the United States, and we see what the consequences are: likely thousands of cases of measles, 56 hospitalizations so far and now three measles deaths.

AMY GOODMAN: In March, The Washington Post reported that HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, hired David Geier to study vaccine autism data — gī(ə)r or gir. Who is he?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: I don’t know much about him. That’s a sort of a blast from the past. I hadn’t heard his name or his father’s name for some time. But the point is, you know, what’s his rationale for doing this?

We have — as I’ve outlined in the book about my daughter, we have detailed evidence showing there’s no vaccine and autism link. And one of the things the anti-vaccine lobby does is they always move the goalposts. As soon the scientific community debunks one of their assertions, beginning with the MMR vaccine, then they come up with something else. So, in the late 1990s, there was a false assertion in a fraudulent paper written, claiming that the MMR vaccine causes autism. That was shown to be — that paper was retracted, and the scientific community followed with large cohort studies of hundreds or even thousands of kids showing that kids who get the MMR vaccine are no more likely to get autism than kids who don’t. And then, a few years later, Mr. Kennedy, in 2005, wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine claiming, “OK, if it’s not MMR, it must be thimerosal preservative,” that used to be in vaccines — similarly debunked with large cohort studies, even nonhuman primate studies. The scientific community was very vigilant in following up with his assertions. Then he switched it up again, or they switched it up again, saying it’s because we’re overwhelming the immune system by spacing vaccines too close together. Absolute nonsense. Then it was aluminum in vaccines. So, you’re always kind of playing this kind of parrot game of whack-a-mole or moving the goalposts.

But the other really important point — and the reason I wrote the book, Amy, was in response to a year of discussions I’ve had with Mr. Kennedy, you know, going through all of this. We have at least a hundred autism genes that have been identified, many here in Boston at the Broad Institute of Harvard-MIT. We did genomic sequencing on Rachel, my wife Ann and I, and found Rachel’s autism genes. And they all operate in early fetal brain development, very early on in pregnancy. That’s when autism occurs. This is a genetic process. And yet, he dismisses all of the massive scientific evidence, the fact that all of this is occurring in pregnancy.

And by the way, I even had discussions with him, saying, “Yes, there could be some environmental exposures, but not vaccines. This is — these are environmental exposures that are occurring early on in pregnancy.” Let me give you an example. If you’re pregnant and maybe don’t realize it, and you’re on an anti-seizure medication called Depakote, also known as valproic acid, you have a much higher likelihood of giving birth to a child with an autism phenotype. And there’s at least half a dozen chemical exposures that I shared with Mr. Kennedy to look into this. But it’s all occurring during pregnancy.

And I was very puzzled by his lack of interest in it. I even said, “You know, Bobby” — I was calling him Bobby then, and I said, “You should be all over this. You’re an environmental attorney. This is your sweet spot. This is your moment to really look into this.” This was eight years ago. And he had no interest in it. He was just so — had this kind of fixed belief about vaccines, when there was not — not only was there massive evidence showing there’s no link, but the lack of plausibility, Amy. I think that’s what’s the most important part, is this is all occurring in early fetal brain development.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you make of Bobby Kennedy saying that he will discover the cause of autism by September?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah, that one’s a head scratcher, because, first of all, there’s at least a hundred autism genes. There are many different forms of autism. And it’s not a simple cause, right? It’s clearly the genetic component is huge. There could be some environmental exposures early on in pregnancy. That would all be very reasonable for him to look at. But the way he frames it is almost childlike. It’s very simplistic, saying he’s going to find the cause of autism. There is not a cause. It is a complex set of interactions between genes and the environment, very much like cancer. It’s almost like saying that he’s going to find the cause of cancer by September. It makes no sense on scientific grounds. And that’s been explained to him in detail.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to the Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy speaking at a news conference Wednesday morning.

HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be — who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Bobby Kennedy. Your response, Dr. Hotez, as an autism dad yourself, as well?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah, well, it’s misguided on multiple levels. So, let’s unpack it a bit. The first point — well, the second point, where he talks about autism and not paying taxes, never working, look, my daughter Rachel, she’s a young adult. She’s in her early thirties. She can’t live by herself. She lives with us and has been living with us, but she works every day at Goodwill. She pays taxes. She earns money. She loves going to work. She walks to work. She has friends at work. She goes to the movies. And the way he portrays autism in these very dark terms simply doesn’t reflect the vast majority of people who live on the autism spectrum. So, I found that deeply offensive. And it has, you know, this kind of creepy tone to it, as well, which we can go into more, if you like.

But the other piece to this is, you know, he also misrepresents the processes of autism. Autism occurs in early fetal brain development. And the full clinical expression often will not manifest until 1 or 2 years of age. And it can be shown that that clinical expression of autism coincides — this is work done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — with a big increase in brain volume expansion, as evidenced on imaging, MRI studies. But you can actually go back months or even at the beginning of life and show that those increases in brain volume expansion were already beginning as a consequence of the activity of autism genes. And so, again, he misrepresented, saying these kids had no issues at all, and all of a sudden there was some deus ex machina, you know, this kind of intervention that suddenly made them autistic. That’s not what occurs.

And we have this well documented, well detailed, and the science is quite clear. It doesn’t mean that we understand every aspect of autism, but, you know, that’s how he needs to talk about it, is saying, “Look, through funding supported by the National Institutes of Health, we’ve learned an awful lot about the causes of autism, how autism genes operate, how they interact with environmental factors, how then the full clinical expression occurs between 1 and 2 years of age.” And that’s where he needs to go and say, “OK, now we’re going to bring all of the world’s experts together — and we have an enormous amount of intellectual horsepower on autism here in the United States — and bring them together and say, 'What are the gaps? What else do we need to look at?'” But he, again, shows this consistent lack of intellectual curiosity, this kind of simplistic way of thinking, and talking about autism, in my view, in what almost seems to be like eugenics terms, and I found it very offensive.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, switching gears a bit, Dr. Hotez, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned after being forced out by HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy. In his resignation letter, Dr. Marks wrote, quote, “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” unquote. If you can talk more about what’s happening at this point to HHS, and specifically also talk about the flu vaccine and the cancellation of the meeting that would determine the strains of flu in a new vaccine?

DR. PETER HOTEZ: Well, you know, I don’t have the — I do not have the inside baseball on what’s going on at FDA or HHS. It’s a bit opaque right now, more opaque than it’s ever been. But I will say, in regard to Dr. Marks’s letter, you know, that sounds about right, that Mr. Kennedy seems to have this fixed belief that vaccines do bad things to kids, and he’s absolutely wrong. I mean, we have this extraordinary vaccine ecosystem that’s led to the elimination of multiple childhood infections, including kid meningitis and measles and many others. And now I’m really concerned that he is so fixed on these false links between vaccines and autism and other things, that this is going to jeopardize our entire vaccine ecosystem. That’s point one.

Point two, I don’t know what this means now when there’s efforts to introduce new vaccines. You know, the technology now is really advancing rapidly. We have the opportunity to build next-generation vaccines for emerging diseases. I’m very concerned about H5N1, and we need better vaccines for H5N1. We may have another coronavirus illness coming online. Remember, we’ve had SARS in 2002, which is a coronavirus, MERS in 2012, then, of course, COVID-19 in 2019. And I’m worried that we could have another one, as well. And we always need — and the vaccine producers are always refining and improving vaccines, and I’m worried that all innovation is going to stop.

On top of the fact, number three, that we’re gutting the NIH, and we’re facing potentially 40% cuts to the National Institutes of Health for all of our innovation. And that includes, Amy, new vaccines not only for infectious diseases, but noncommunicable diseases. For instance, we’ve been historically making low-cost recombinant protein vaccines, but now our scientists in the labs at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development have really improved mRNA vaccine delivery, and now we have some exciting collaborations with our cancer center at Baylor to maybe — and we’re now looking into making a mRNA vaccine for triple-negative breast cancer, for which you cannot use recombinant protein technology, that there are some limits to that technology. So I think we’re going to need mRNA for that. Is that all going to stop now with this new regime? That also concerns me.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Peter Hotez, I want to thank you so much for being with us, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, where he’s also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, author of several books, including The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning and Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.

As President Trump finally unveils his global tariff plan — setting a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods, with additional hikes apparently based on individual countries’ trade balances with the United States — economists like our guest Richard Wolff warn it will have grave economic effects on American consumers and lead to a recession. Wolff says the Trump administration’s tariff strategy is borne out of an ahistorical “notion of the United States as a victim” despite the fact that “we have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top.” In response to the growing economic fortunes of the rest of the world and the associated decline in U.S. hegemony, Trump and his allies are “striking out at other people” in desperation and denial of an end to U.S. imperial dominance. “[It’s] not going to work,” says Wolff.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Global stock markets are tumbling after President Trump unveiled the biggest hike in global tariffs in modern U.S. history, including a 10% blanket tariff on all imported goods from about 185 countries. In addition, many U.S. trading partners, including the European Union, China and Japan, will see even higher tariffs. China now faces a total 54% tariff. Trump announced the plan during a speech in the Rose Garden at the White House.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day — waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. We’re going to make it wealthy, good and wealthy.

For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steelworkers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen — we have a lot of them here with us today — they really suffered gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American dream.

AMY GOODMAN: The impact of Trump’s tariffs are expected to be felt around the world. While Trump claims the tariffs will boost the U.S. economy, many economists fear it could lead to a recession or worse. Trump’s trade war could also shift global alliances as countries seek new trading partners. China, Japan, South Korea have already announced plans to increase trading ties and coordinate their response to Trump’s tariffs.

We begin today’s show with Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. He’s the founder of Democracy at Work and hosts a weekly national TV/radio program called Economic Update, the author of a number of books, including, most recently, Understanding Capitalism and The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.

Professor Wolff, it’s great to have you with us again. Well, start off by responding to, and were you surprised, shocked, or did you guess that, well, about 185 countries were going to see increased tariffs?

RICHARD WOLFF: On the one hand, we knew something like this was coming. On the other hand, the sweep and the scope of it does make you stop. Mr. Trump is right: It is a changing moment in American history and world history. But I think his representation of what’s going on is completely fantastical and has only to do with the self-promotion that he has engaged in most of the time. It was never foreigners who did it to us, this notion of the United States as a victim. We have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top, just like him. It has nothing to do with foreigners taking advantage of us. This attempt to make himself strong and powerful relative to others, to blame the foreigner, these are cheap shots that a real president wouldn’t do.

And there’s the most important point. The American economy is in trouble. The American empire is in decline. We don’t want to discuss it in this country. We engage in denial. And instead, we are striking out at other people — a sad way of handling a decline. The British Empire declined before. So did all the others. We are now at that point. We had a great 20th century. The 21st century is different. You have to face those problems. That’s not being done. What’s being done is to say we have difficulties, but they’re all somebody else’s fault, and we’re going to solve it by punishing them.

I would like to point out, as you suggest, quite rightly, Amy, that the rest of the world is not going to sit by. The United States does not have the power it had in the 20th century. It is not in the position it seems to imagine itself. When the secretary of the Treasury added to Mr. Trump’s comments that he warned the rest of the world not to retaliate, that would imply that if they do, there would be escalation. Yes, he said, there will be escalation. Well, nothing will guarantee more escalation than if they do nothing, because then it’s an invitation for Mr. Trump to keep doing it as each of these efforts doesn’t work.

AMY GOODMAN: Given how dramatic this was yesterday, is it possible he was deciding this to the very last second, as they put this off? And explain exactly — you’re a professor. You’re a teacher. Most people don’t even realize how tariffs work.

RICHARD WOLFF: OK. A tariff is a tax. It’s just a particular tax that got that name. It used to be called import duty. All it means is, when something comes into the United States that was produced outside and is brought in to be sold, it has to pay a tax, literally as it crosses our border into our country. It is paid by the American company that brings it in, which may pass it on to the consumer — usually what happens — and the tax goes to Uncle Sam. It goes to Washington. Mr. Trump loved to suggest that tariffs were paid by the others — a little bit like Mexico would pay for the wall. Never happened. It’s not going to happen here, either. It’s an American tax.

And there’s something remarkable that clues you in to how big a change this is, that the Republican Party, which has branded itself as the anti-tax party for a century, is now imposing the most massive tax imaginable. Why this big change? Because we have big, big problems, and this kind of slapping the rest of the world is an attempt to solve a little bit of them. But it is not going to work, because we don’t have the power to do it anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to UAW President Shawn Fain, who supports Trump’s new tariffs, saying last week, “We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working-class communities for decades.” Fain spoke Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

SHAWN FAIN: We’ve seen over 90,000 manufacturing facilities leave the United States. We’ve seen, in the Big Three alone in the last 20-plus years, 65 plants have closed. You know, and so, look, tariffs aren’t the total solution. Tariffs are a tool in the toolbox to get these companies to do the right thing. And the intent behind it is to bring jobs back here and, you know, invest in the American workers. … If they’re going to bring jobs back here, you know, they need to be life-sustaining jobs, where people can make a good wage, a living wage, have adequate healthcare and have retirement security and not have to work seven days a week or multiple jobs just to scrape to get by paycheck to paycheck.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, while UAW President Shawn Fain praised Trump’s tariffs, he also said he had great concerns about President Trump’s move to eliminate contracts for 700,000 federal workers, the firing of workers at the National Institute of Health and other agencies.

RICHARD WOLFF: I was a bit disappointed. I like Shawn Fain, and many of us do, but this was disappointing, to say, basically, “I will support the president because he does something that might help my union,” even though Shawn Fain knows, as most economists do, that if you put a tax on the goods coming in, they will go up in price, because we have to pay that tax now, and that will lead to domestic producers able to raise their prices because their competitors from abroad are stuck with this tax. So we expect a boost to inflation, which is going to hurt the working class of this country in a very serious way, especially if it builds on itself, which often happens when you do tariffs like this.

And I want to remind everyone, including Shawn Fain, that the auto workers also represent workers in places that need export markets, that produce in America and sell abroad. When those countries retaliate, as they likely will, we will lose export markets, and that will mean fewer jobs. And no one — let me stress — no one now knows whether the jobs lost from this trade war will be greater or smaller than any jobs that are gained. It is a big risk being taken by Mr. Trump. And if it doesn’t go well, it will be very bad for the American economy. It will produce the recession folks are worried about, because if the prices go up, people buy less, and that loses jobs.

When you look at all of this, this is an incredibly risky effort to blame the world, punish the world, and then cross his fingers — which is what he’s doing — hoping it comes out all right. Reminds me of the football metaphor: This is a Hail Mary pass. You throw it down the field. You hope it bounces into your team’s hands. But that’s all it is: a long shot. And it’s a sign of how troubled the American economy now is.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can put this in a bigger picture? Talk about the tax cuts and how they fit into the tariffs, the — what is it? — something like $4 trillion in tax cuts, and who benefits. And then talk about the other issues that President Trump keeps saying that they’re not going to touch, even though what many call his co-president, Elon Musk, whether he steps back from being — you know, giving speeches or not, going after Social Security, issues like Medicaid.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me start with the tax issue. The biggest single thing that Trump did in his first presidency was the tax cut of December 2017. And when that tax cut was written into law, it had a sunset. It expires this year, 2025. If that expiration is allowed to happen, corporations and the rich, who were the big beneficiaries back then, will face a big tax [increase]. He doesn’t want to do that, because that’s his base, that’s his donor support. He doesn’t want to have those taxes go back up.

Well, then, what is he going to have to do? If he keeps on spending and he doesn’t let those taxes go back up, he’s going to have to borrow trillions, as we have been doing. He doesn’t want to be the president who keeps borrowing trillions, in part because the rest of the world is a major creditor of the United States, and they’re not going to continue to do it the way they have. So he’s in a jam. He has to do something.

So his hope is to savage the expenditures in this country. Look what he’s doing. Mr. Musk stands there with a chainsaw to give us the clear implication, “I’m going to solve the problem on the backs of the working class. I’m firing them all. I don’t care what the rest of the working class suffers. I’m going to fire all these people, without notice, without a plan.” Calling this efficient is a silly joke. An efficient process takes time, takes experts. You’re not doing that. You’re just wholesale firing. Calling that efficiency is an attempt to fool people, that shouldn’t make any difference.

Mr. Trump is now in a jam. He can’t get out of this without in some way solving the problem that has been built up. And there is no way other than the one he’s doing, because it’s the last gasp of how to take away from the mass of the people the ability to borrow. I mean, let’s be honest. If you put a tariff, you make everything coming in from abroad more expensive. That means people will buy less of it. They’ll shrink their standard of living. If American companies take advantage of the tariff, which they always do, by raising their prices, that will also hurt the working class. You are immiserating your workers in order to try to solve the problem you haven’t solved before.

But here’s the irony that may in the end come back to haunt us. Europe has been unable to unify under the umbrella of American alliances. The enmity of the United States is bringing Europe together better than the alliance was able to do. And as you pointed out, very important, China, Japan and South Korea, with long histories of animosity and tension, are getting together to cope with this. Wow! We are unifying the whole world.

If you want the big picture in my judgment, after World War II, George Kennan taught us about containment: “We’re going to contain the Soviet Union.” The irony, which the philosopher Hegel would enjoy, we are becoming contained. We are isolating ourselves — the votes in the U.N. of the United States alone or the United States and Israel and two or three other countries, the isolation politically, the isolation now economically. We are the rogue nation for the rest of the world. We may not want it. We may not agree. But it doesn’t really matter, if that’s how they perceive us. And that’s what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked about South Korea, Japan and China joining together. One of the biggest announcements of [tariffs] was against Taiwan. It’s just a little more complicated for Taiwan to join that group.

RICHARD WOLFF: And also, another one was Vietnam, which got a very heavy whack. I mean, is there no recognition of what the United States did to that country? Maybe you wouldn’t want to crush them with this kind of a thing after it. As I’m saying, this is a change. This is a sign to the world that as the United States empire declines, this is a nasty place that’s going to, you know, gesture and thrash around, doing damage everywhere, as it copes with its own decline.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recently wrote a piece headlined “Donald Trump’s economic masterplan.” He wrote, quote, “This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.” Do you agree with that, Professor Wolff?

RICHARD WOLFF: No, even though Yanis and I do a lot of work together, so normally I defer to him. He’s wonderful in his analysis. I don’t think this is correct. Is it a possible outcome? Yes.

You know, we’re in a situation — let me put it this way. Tariffs are not new. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. If you teach a course in international economics, which I’ve done, you tell students, “Here are a thousand books. Here are 5,000 articles. We know.” And the answer is, when you impose a tariff, you don’t know what the outcome is, because it depends on everything else going on — interest rates, exchange rates of currencies, rising or falling economies around the world. You can’t know in advance. It’s a very risky thing, which is why for the last 50 years we have had, administered by the U.S., something called free trade or neoliberal or globalization.

All of that is over now. The United States can’t win anymore in that system, so it is reverting to economic nationalism. And that’s a fundamental shift that throws the world. It was the accepted wisdom for 50 years, 50 — the last 50 years, not to do what Mr. Trump is doing now. If you want, you can think that everybody who thought that way for 50 years was wrong, and Mr. Trump, the genius, is correct, but that would be a long shot. Better bet: He’s trying to save his own political life, and he’s trying to cope, to his credit, with a declining economy without having to admit that that’s the case.

This won’t end well. It normally doesn’t. And what we’re going to see is the fighting against one another of the euro bloc, the Asian bloc, the American bloc, at a time when the United States is weaker than it has been economically and politically. Look at the debacle in the Ukraine, as well, the misunderstanding that the Russians could turn to the Chinese and the Indians to cope with the costs of that war in a way that hadn’t been calculated and is turning out to shape the outcome. And it’s not a question of which side you’re on, but just watching how it lines up, that’s the problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty seconds, as you often talk about, are you seeing this as the beginning of the end of American empire?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I think we are already in 10 or 12 years of that decline. It can’t — here’s the single best statistic. If you add up the GDP, you know, the total output of goods and services in a year for a country, of the United States and its major allies, the G7, it’s about 28% of global output. If you do the same thing for China and the BRICS, it’s about 35%. They are already a bigger bloc of economic power than we are. Every country in the world thinking about building a railroad or expanding its health program, they used to send their people to Washington or London to get help. They still do. But when they’re done, they send the same team to Beijing, New Delhi, São Paulo, and they often get a better deal. The world is changing. And the United States could cope. But as with alcoholism, you have to admit you have a problem, before you’re in a position to solve it. We have a nation that does not yet want to face what this all adds up to.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School here in New York, founder of Democracy at Work, hosts a weekly national TV/radio program called Economic Update. Among his books, Understanding Capitalism. Thanks so much for being with us.

NOW READ: The week the tide turned on Trump

President Donald Trump’s efforts to take over cultural institutions and attack diversity, equity and inclusion programs has centered on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the venerable arts institution in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center was established by Congress and has been run by a bipartisan board since it opened in 1971, but Trump upended that in February when he moved to install his loyalists in key positions and make himself chair. Last week, the Kennedy Center’s new leadership fired at least seven members of its social impact team that worked to reach more diverse audiences and artists, including the vice president and artistic director of Social Impact, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The acclaimed artist and playwright joins Democracy Now! to discuss Trump’s changes at the Kennedy Center, which he criticizes for destroying a “sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression.” Joseph notes that while the Kennedy Center has not yet made drastic programming changes, the rhetoric from Trump and others “severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to the Trump administration’s intensifying attacks on cultural institutions and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In February, President Trump ousted the center’s longtime chair, David Rubenstein, made himself chair of the board. Trump also fired longtime President Deborah Rutter. Last week, the Kennedy Center fired at least seven members of its Social Impact initiative, including its vice president, artistic director, the renowned artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The team aimed to expand the art center’s reach to diverse audiences, to commission new works by Black composers. The job terminations come weeks after President Trump took over the Kennedy Center and also appointed his allies, including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to the board, and her mother and second lady Usha Vance and two hosts on Fox News, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph recorded this video from his office just after he was fired.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Well, I am sitting in my office at the Kennedy Center one last time. It’s funny. I’m taking things down, like this red, black and green American flag and this extraordinary piece of artwork that my man Greg made that honors Stevie Wonder and this poster from BAM and a commemorative album that was organized by Swizz Beatz. Basically, I’m taking down everything Black in my office, just as the new leadership of the Kennedy Center is doing its best to disavow much of the literal color that has made this place special. I am grieving and angry and also ready to be rid of the moral injury that has come with being in this place. It’s hard to say goodbye, but it isn’t hard to say goodbye to an oppressive situation. So, may liberation be my liturgy. I’m proud of what we made here. We will always have an impact.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, speaking after he was fired as vice president and artistic director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the last time he was in his office. And this is a portion from Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s spoken word performance Friday, when he went back to Oakland for a timely production with the Oakland Symphony titled “The Forgiveness Suite,” accompanied by musician Daniel Bernard Roumain.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Steps to grace. Face the hurt. Unthread the truth. Choose mercy. Engage your transgressors. Say I leave this pain with you. Grace requires a loosening of other people’s stuff for American-socialized Black girls who considered shame reflexively when self-love wasn’t enough. Grace is never enough when the forgiveness isn’t deserved. But here you are, facing the truth, reconciling the pain by extending grace.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been listening to Marc Bamuthi Joseph. He joins us right now from Virginia.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bamuthi. Talk about what happened last week. Talk about what’s happening to the Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Peace, Amy. Good morning to you, and good morning to everyone listening and watching.

I feel so privileged to be the child of immigrants and having lived in the state of California for a long time. Moving to D.C. infused me with a different sense of patriotism and connection to the American promise, to the plurality that makes this country truly great.

There has been, as you’ve distilled, an infusion of a kind of binary political discourse into what’s supposed to be a sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression. The Kennedy Center, it should be said, has not officially canceled any performances or explicitly contractually removed themselves from relationship to any artists. But as you’ve been describing so diligently and so bravely over the course of your entire career, we create atmosphere through rhetoric. The stated agenda as institutionalized in spaces like the National Endowment for the Arts, let’s say, severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity. The specific attack on gay, trans and drag performers has narrowed the cultural radius at the Kennedy Center significantly, so that artists feel like they can’t in good conscience come to the Kennedy Center. So you’re seeing artists like Issa Rae or the producers of Hamilton or the artist Rhiannon Giddens remove themselves from their relationship to the Kennedy Center.

And that, in turn, trickles down to the brave staff, who are arts professionals who care about cultural providence and have to do their very best to make it possible for artists to continue to be at their best. But against the backdrop of this oppressive regime and this politically narrow board of directors, that’s extraordinarily difficult to do.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have this unbelievable moment that we just played, Jon Batiste playing “Star-Spangled Banner.” President Trump is saluting —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the Super Bowl, and he had just fired him from the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — along with many others. And then John F. Kennedy, you’ve got the portrait there in the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And when he came for his board meeting, President Trump as chair, what he put up, new portraits, himself, his wife, Usha Vance and Vice President Vance.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, you know, what you’re seeing all over government are folks who aren’t necessarily experienced in the lines or departments or vectors of action that they’re supposed to lead. And there is no formal experience in either nonprofits, arts management or the art of curation that is now present at the top of the organizational chart, beginning with the board chair. So, you know, the desire to satisfy one’s ego or the desire to be vengeful, apparently, has superseded the desire to serve this nation in terms of making a safe space for artists, particularly artists from historically marginalized communities or historically minoritized communities to thrive.

The work that we did in Social Impact — and I’m so proud of my team, my staff and all of my colleagues who supported us — you know, that work was meant to focus on the historically marginalized, but also it connected to this idea of the constitutionality of inspiration. Our belief is that you cannot be — you cannot have access to the franchise, to the American franchise, if you don’t have access to the impulse of creativity, that just like you have access to the ballot box or equal protection under the law under the 14th Amendment, you also have access and protection to inspiration. How can you be an American if you cannot hope? And who authors hope more than artists? So, this diminishment of creativity, of ideas, the diminishment of folks’ access to high-level inspired works of art is among the more un-American things, I think, that a leader would do.

AMY GOODMAN: During your time there, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, you helped launch the Culture Caucus, which offered two-year residencies with groups —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — that work with queer and trans youth, formerly incarcerated people —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the disabled community.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You also established a national partnership —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — called Conflux, which worked with the National Arab Orchestra —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the First Nations community and World Pride.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your audience, mainly wealthy and white.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the direction that Trump is now taking the performing arts center in? We heard from, what, Steve Bannon, one of his allies, that he had spoken to Ric Grenell, the new head of the Kennedy Center, that they’re going to be bringing, what, in one of the first performances, the January 6th Choir to perform there to usher —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — in a new era of culture in the new Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, I won’t speak to the president’s curatorial tastes. They speak for themselves. I think maybe what I would point to is the list of maybe more than 200 musicians who didn’t want their music played at his rallies. That speaks to a broader environment, I think, and disconnect between the arts community and the political direction of the president of the United States.

All the work that you cited, that’s the work that we stand on and that we’re proud of. You know, your listeners and your viewers know, going out to have a date night or a family night is increasingly expensive — parking and food, and, you know, not to mention the cost of the tickets themselves, child care. A lot of the work that we did was we lowered the barrier to entry from a financial standpoint, but also from a social standpoint. You know, my folks always want to know who all gonna be there, right? Well, what we did in Social Impact was we helped usher in a culture of invitation. The Kennedy Center, historically, at its best, produces more than 2,000 events a year.

So, maybe less than focus on what happens curatorially, I think we all have to ask ourselves: How many artists are willing to come into a space with such a narrow field of cultural vision? What is the scale of the Kennedy Center going to be like six months from now or a year from now?

What happens inside the building is only as powerful as the people and the artists within it. So, you know, God bless all the curators at the Kennedy Center, but maybe more importantly, God bless the artists, who now have perhaps one less venue to share their work with the world. And then, God bless the audiences, because audiences or, you know, American citizens, folks who have less access to inspiration erode the democracy from the point of a lack of sight onto the creative horizon.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also ask you, Bamuthi, about Trump’s executive order —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — signed last week, appointing the vice president, JD Vance, to eliminate, quote, “divisive, race-centered ideology,” unquote, from Smithsonian museums, research centers and the National Zoo. The order, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aims to remove exhibits and programs that portray U.S. history and values as “inherently harmful and oppressive,” unquote. It cites in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. The Smithsonian operates independently, since it was established as a public-private partnership by Congress in 1846, but roughly receives 60% of its funding from the federal government. You know, you’re an Oakland guy, but you’ve moved to Washington —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — for your job, that you were just fired from, and I’m sure you’ve spent time at the African American museum. The significance of —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: — putting Vance in charge of deciding what exhibits are appropriate or not, what is American or not?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah. Yeah. It is chilling. It is a harbinger. It is a signifier in the most ominous of terms.

I think about the words of John F. Kennedy inscribed on the wall at the Kennedy Center. Kennedy spoke of an America that was unafraid of grace and beauty. I think about the writers and the teachers who made me, everyone from Dr. Daniel Omotosho Black at Clark Atlanta University to the author Toni Morrison, the poet Nikki Giovanni. I think about how they all authored the story of our overcoming.

America is actually built on struggle. And, you know, it’s obviously impossible to decouple American history from a genocidal, hyper-patriarchal, hyper-capitalist frame and origin story. But the idea of democracy itself is a radical idea. The Constitution itself is a critical theory. It describes a way, a populist way, that requires participation in order to actually make the country thrive. In order to be — in order to fully participate in the democracy, you have to sublimate or suppress your apathy.

My partners at SOZO Artists and I think about the idea that the way to turn apathy into empathy is to infuse inspiration as a conversion element. These museums, these Smithsonian museums, inspire folks because they distill the story of our overcoming. You enter — even if you entered one of the Smithsonian institutions apathetic as to the idea of struggle or overcoming, you are inspired inside of that institution, and you leave a more compassionate and more empathetic human being. So, you know, this description of what the Smithsonian institutions do, particularly what we call the “Blacksonian” here locally, that description is severely un-American and disconnected from the American promise. But maybe more critically, it minimizes the opportunity to generate empathy among not only the citizens of this country, but visitors from all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, I want to thank you so much for being with us, renowned artist and playwright, fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative.

The U.S. government this week released thousands more records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, long a source of fascination and intrigue. This is the final batch of JFK files after the federal government began declassifying documents in the early 1990s. While these latest files contain no major revelations about the assassination, they do include many previously redacted details about “the CIA global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments,” says Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, a government transparency organization and research institution. “Now at least we know what was being done in our name but without our knowledge.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show looking at the federal government’s release of around 80,000 pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While the documents have revealed few new revelations on the assassination, the unredacted files are filled with details about covert CIA operations around the world, from the Vatican to Latin America.

One document revealed 47% of political officers working in overseas U.S. embassies in 1961 were actually intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover. At the U.S. Embassy in France, the CIA had 123 undercover agents acting as diplomats. The documents also shed new light on CIA activity across Latin America, including in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia.

Those are just some of the revelations highlighted by the National Security Archive, an independent organization that’s been reviewing the documents.

We’re joined now by Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst for Latin America at the National Security Archive. He’s researched CIA operations for decades with a focus on Latin America. His books include Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana and Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba. He’s joining us from Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Peter, welcome back to Democracy Now! What’s in these tens of thousands of pages of documents that you’re continuing to plow through?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, we don’t have enough time to talk about all the details of the early 1960s history of the CIA kind of global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments. But we’ve learned a lot more of the minutiae, the granular kind of side of these covert operations — names, places, shell companies, expenditures — so many little details that really complete, I think, in many ways, our sense of the universe of covert operations and what they targeted, how they happened, how they, you know, were organized. I mean, it’s fascinating from a historical point of view.

You know, the U.S. taxpayer, Amy, has shelled out a lot of money, for decades now, to have these documents kept secure and clean in the vaults of the national security agencies of the U.S. government. And now, finally, we are accessing this history that we paid for, that we’ve paid to — we’ve paid for it to happen. We financed the CIA with our money way back when. And now at least we know what was being done in our name but without our knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you write that on the day, President Kennedy’s inauguration in January '61, nearly half of the political officers serving in the U.S. embassies were CAS, C-A-S, intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover known as “controlled American sources.” What's the significance of this, Peter?

PETER KORNBLUH: Simply, the significance is that, whereas most people thought these were actually State Department officials in U.S. embassies around the world, almost half of them, almost half the people in these embassies, particularly using the office that was called political officer, were CIA undercover agents. It’s pretty incredible. As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out in this extraordinary memo, that’s been completely declassified now, to John F. Kennedy on June 10th, 1961, 3,700 officers around the world were CIA officials under diplomatic cover, in comparison to 3,900 of actual diplomats around the world. So it was almost 50%. And that’s quite an extraordinary number. And I think a number of countries will be surprised at the kind of level to which the U.S. embassies were being used as cover for the CIA.

Again, this is all in the past. It’s old history. We’ve known for many years that political officers were often used to kind of disguise CIA operations. And there were other parts of the embassies, too — the labor attachés, commercial attachés, etc. And then there were the CIA officers that were operating in countries like Chile and Bolivia and Brazil and elsewhere who weren’t in the embassies at all. But it’s a tidbit of covert operations history that certainly is dramatic and reminds us of what the United States was doing around the world and is capable of doing in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: In light of the U.S. cracking down even more on Cuba right now, especially young people may not know how many assassination attempts there were against Fidel Castro. Is it in the range of 600? And then I want to follow that up with a question about one of the JFK assassination documents being released about the inspector general’s report of the ’61 successful, if you call it that, assassination of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot. Can you talk about this?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the 600 or so figure about assassination attempts on Fidel Castro comes more from Cuban intelligence than from U.S. intelligence. Every attempt by any exile group that Cuban intelligence intercepted or learned about was added up, and those were quite a few. The CIA itself counts about 16 earnest CIA-sponsored attempts, which now have become folklore of covert operations history — exploding sea shells, poison cigars, sniper rifles, etc. So, you know, we’ve known about those assassination plots for a long time.

There is one document, an internal CIA inspector general’s report, on the assassination in late May of 1961 of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. And it’s quite detailed. It names the names of all the CIA officers involved, including their code names that they used in their discussions with coup plotters and the assassination team in the Dominican Republic. It names all the names of the coup plotters, as well, that the CIA was working with. The name of the actual covert operation, which was called EMDEED, and the actual assassination plot, which was called EMSLEW. There are a lot of details on that history. And, you know, you get to learn not only how the CIA works with foreigners to assassinate a head of state — in this case, the dictator Rafael Trujillo — but you also learn how the CIA goes about investigating its own wrongdoing of the past, the files that it keeps, how they are reviewed, what they yield, etc.. So, it’s quite fascinating from a historical point of view.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve done a lot on USAID and Trump’s getting — essentially shuttering the agency. You’ve covered foreign policy in Latin America for decades. Can you talk about the story of the USAID’s Office of Public Safety?

PETER KORNBLUH: You know, that’s, again, part of the folklore of covert operations. There was a famous movie made about Dan Mitrione, who was an officer in the Office of Public Safety. It was never completely proven that he was a CIA official. He was kidnapped and executed in Uruguay by the Tupamaros, became a very famous case. There is evidence in these declassified documents that the CIA did use AID as cover.

But, you know, that was a long time ago, and even if it was doing that, there’s still quite a bit more to USAID than CIA covert operations. And so, when we talk about AID being shuttered today, we’re talking about programs that were literally saving lives every day, providing food, food bought from U.S. farmers, by the way, by the federal government, and food, medicine, vaccines — quite a bit of support to many of the causes that we actually care about. So, it’s easy to look back on the older history of USAID when it was first started as a tool of the Cold War. The Cold War has been over for a long time now. So, closing it down now is simply a crime against humanity, frankly, in my opinion, because so many people will die and suffer and become ill and impoverished by this cruel act of simply closing the doors of the USAID programs.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, The New York Times reports a senior official at the main USAID agency, which is being dismantled by Trump, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff. The significance of this, you as an archivist who deeply wants to understand what is happening and has happened in the past?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there is a Federal Records Protection Act, a law that prevents documents from just being wantonly destroyed, erased, shredded, burned, as this email that you refer to indicated. And so, that was very alarming when that news broke and that email was shared with the kind of legal community. It also spoke to the issue of whether these documents might have been relevant in the ongoing lawsuits, the legal pushback by AID employees to save their jobs and save their institution, legal efforts that are underway right now. And those documents might have actually been relevant to those legal efforts.

You know, my organization joined in protesting that action. It was the subject of court discussion. We don’t know — we don’t have an index of what documents were actually shredded that day and burned that day, but, hopefully, at some point we will.

But that speaks to a different issue, Amy, that I hope we want to raise before we go, which is, you know, part of what’s important about the declassification of the John F. Kennedy documents is not just what’s in the documents. It is the law that mandated that declassification, which is known as the JFK Act and passed in 1992. And it was a law that’s probably the strongest law on declassification that’s ever been written. It created an independent panel outside of the national security agencies to oversee the declassification of the documents. It mandated that, with very few exceptions, the documents be released without censorship, without redactions. And this is a law that really is very important. Now that it’s been fully implemented, by, ironically, Donald Trump, you know, it’s a law that creates a new standard and a new precedence for openness and transparency. And it’s very important that, now that we have that standard, we apply that standard to the very administration that is in power today.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s interesting that while he’s released the JFK files, the Shabazz family is asking for the release of the Malcolm X files, which he has yet to do. Peter Kornbluh, in the last 30 seconds, I wanted to get your response to President Trump basically also shuttering Voice of America and Radio Martí, particularly the news, if you could call it that, agency that was broadcasting into Cuba U.S. propaganda.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, he has shuttered the Cuba programs. USAID had Cuba democracy programs, which were very objectionable to the Cubans. Those are gone now. Radio Martí, TV Martí gone now. That does not mean that Trump is not going to be pressuring Cuba in other ways, but at least the Cuba programs are gone.

People who look closely at the Voice of America will know that they’ve used our documents in many stories that they’ve done. They, too, are not the Cold War product that they once were, and had some value around the world for quite a bit of people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’ll continue in a post-show at democracynow.org. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst for Latin America at National Security Archive.

The Social Security Administration is considering drastic new anti-fraud measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans, according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information. The changes would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. An estimated 75,000 to 85,000 elderly and disabled adults per week would be diverted to field offices. This comes even as the Trump administration slashes jobs and closes offices at the agency. Officials in the Social Security Administration who spoke with reporter Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information, have told him that there is an “effort to break the organization.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The Social Security Administration is considering drastic new, what they call, anti-fraud measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans. This is according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information.

Authored last week by Acting Deputy Social Security Administration Commissioner Doris Diaz, the changes proposed in the memo would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. According to the memo, customers applying for retirement and disability benefits would be required for the first time to verify their identity through an online system. If their identity can’t be verified online, they would have to visit a field office in person. The memo estimates that 75,000 to 85,000 people per week would be diverted to field offices, because a large number of elderly and disabled adults do not have access to a computer or a smartphone and would be unable to complete the online identify verification requirement. The memo acknowledges the strain this would place on vulnerable populations, and lists service disruption, as well as legal challenges and congressional scrutiny, among the risks of the proposed changes.

A day before the memo was sent, The Washington Post reported Social Security Administration was considering ending telephone service for all claims, under pressure from DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Hours after the Washington Post report came out, the agency issued a press release claiming telephone services would not be eliminated. The proposed changes to Social Security come as DOGE is targeting the agency for staff cuts of more than 12%. We’re talking about a lot of these offices being closed or severely limited in staffing, and yet a deluge of people would be forced to go to these satellite offices, some of them already closed.

For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Judd Legum. He is founder of the political newsletter Popular Information, which first reported the memo.

Judd, lay it out for us. What are the threats to Social Security right now?

JUDD LEGUM: Well, one thing, Amy, that we know is that this is no longer a proposal. This is now happening. The Social Security office came out late yesterday with a press release at a news conference announcing that these changes were taking place.

And there’s a number of things that are happening, but the primary one that’s of concern is that as Social Security closes down field offices, as they reduce the number of staff who is available to speak with people making claims, they’re going to require tens of thousands of people weekly to come into these offices. And the people that I’m speaking to at the Social Security Administration believe that this is an effort to break the organization, that there is no way, even at current staffing levels, for them to deal with this number of influx of people into their offices, and that it will create chaos. And, indeed, those implications are laid out in this memo itself, which I obtained and published earlier this week.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Judd, what about this claim that Elon Musk has made that as much as 10% of Social Security payments are fraudulent? What do you know about what the actual numbers are?

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, there’s no basis for that claim. The best estimates from the government is that 1% of payments are inappropriate, but those aren’t necessarily payments that are related to fraud. It’s generally payments that are related to either the government or individuals not updating their records.

So, what’s happening here, as well, and I think it’s important to understand, is that this ID verification is — they’re imposing this at the time of people applying for a claim. And there are no benefits at the time of application. After you make that application for a claim, depending on the kind of claim, there are many steps that are already taken by Social Security to verify your identity. They’ll look at pay stubs. They’ll look at employment records. If it’s a disability claim, they’ll look at medical records. There’s all these steps that are taken to verify that you are who you say you are, and you are, or not, entitled to the benefits that you’re seeking. So, the idea that this point, the point in which you’re initiating a claim, is the point in which you need to impose this ID verification that requires people, many people, to come into the offices, to fight fraud, just doesn’t make any sense, because no benefits are being distributed at that point in the process anyway.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to go back to this issue of the staffing levels, with DOGE planning about a 12% staff cut, about 7,000 employees. Yet Social Security staffing is at a 50-year low, exactly at the time when more people are on Social Security than ever before, and those numbers are bound to grow over the next couple of decades.

JUDD LEGUM: Yes. This was a problem — this predated the second Trump administration. I mean, this has been a problem, as you note, for many years. And actually, just beginning — at the beginning of January, before the Trump administration was put into place, there was a new rule for Social Security that you can no longer drop in. You can no longer simply show up at a Social Security office. You have to make an appointment. And depending on where you live, there was a wait time, on average, of 30 days. That’s the average. Of course, some people are waiting even longer than that.

And so, now we have a situation, then you’re layering on top of this a significant staff cut. There’s already been thousands of people who have left through the Fork memo that was sent out, through other voluntary retirements. They’re trying to cut about 7,000 in total.

They’re also closing dozens of these field offices. And that’s very significant, too, because already, even before these closures, some people would have to travel a hundred miles or more to get to their field office. It’s not necessarily the case where it’s around the corner. Of course, some people are lucky: They might be near an office they have to visit. But others are many, many miles away, and those commutes are going to be even longer.

And what the memo mentions, somewhat elliptically, but I think is important, is that especially when you’re talking with very elderly or disabled populations, there are people who simply cannot make it to the office, to these offices. They are not able to travel. And there’s really no provisions laid out in this plan to accommodate those people.

AMY GOODMAN: Judd, before we go, I wanted to ask you about the newsletter Musk Watch that you run, which focuses on reporting on billionaire Elon Musk’s wealth, power and influence. And last week, you launched the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker to see what’s being cut and who’s being impacted. And Musk has gone after it, as well. Talk about what you found.

JUDD LEGUM: Well, we really looked very closely at this website that Musk has put up, and tried to see — he’s claiming over $110 billion in savings. How much are actually itemized? Only about $30 billion. But then, how much are verifiable? When you actually look at the actual primary sources, how much can you actually determine has been cut? And it’s more around the range of $8 billion. So, what we found is he is vastly overstating the number of cuts. That doesn’t mean the cuts aren’t devastating. If you’re cutting a grant that’s helping people avoid deadly diseases in other — abroad, that could have a big impact. But the size of these cuts is not something that’s going to make any kind of impact on the deficit, at least at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: And Musk has attacked it?

JUDD LEGUM: Musk has attacked it, essentially saying that we were claiming he’s not cutting enough. That’s not what we’re saying. But, yes, I don’t think he appreciates people taking a close look at his claims. But I think that’s important.

The website he set up really doesn’t provide enough transparency, and so we’ve set up this Musk Watch DOGE Tracker to try to really drill down. You can look at each individual cut. You can look at it by state. You can look at it by congressional district. You can see exactly how much in each — for each grant that he is overstating the savings. So, it’s all right there for people to learn for themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have five seconds, but do you think they’re attacking Social Security to privatize it?

JUDD LEGUM: I don’t know exactly what the end goal here is, but I think they’re — when you’re looking at trying to get a trillion dollars in savings, you’ve got to look at programs like Social Security, and so that’s why there is an attack on it, which is what this new system is.

AMY GOODMAN: Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information and Musk Watch. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The new book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by The New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich chronicles an ongoing campaign by the wealthy and powerful to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which in 1964 established bedrock protections against spurious defamation and libel cases in the U.S. legal system. By “subject[ing] people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process,” those who can afford to pay for expensive and threatening defamation lawsuits can silence any public criticism and suppress others’ rights to free speech, says Enrich. “It has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now from attacks on the right to protest to attacks on press freedom. President Trump is escalating his criticism of the news media, claiming many outlets are engaged in illegal activity. This is part of what he said last week during a speech at the Great Hall of the Department of Justice.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s comments come amidst a right-wing push to overturn protections for the press to investigate public figures, a right guaranteed by the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan.

We’re joined now by David Enrich. He’s New York Times’ business investigations editor. His new book is titled Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

If you can start off — it’s great to have you with us, David — by talking about what this Supreme Court decision, this landmark decision in the 1960s, Sullivan, was all about?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, it was brought on behalf of supporters of Martin Luther King, and it basically detailed this litany of abuses by Southern officials. The gist of it was completely true: Southern officials were trying to preserve white supremacy. Some of the facts were either wrong or exaggerated, and a powerful Southern official named L.B. Sullivan, sued The New York Times and won at trial. And the goal, basically, of Sullivan and his pals was that by filing lawsuits that seized on tiny little inaccuracies, you could punish the media for covering the civil rights movement.

And so, this went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled, in a unanimous decision in 1964, that in order to preserve free speech and allow people to write and criticize and investigate powerful people and institutions, the media and the public needed breathing room so that if they got a fact wrong by mistake or made an honest error, they would not be sued into oblivion. And so, that Supreme Court ruling has really set the stage for decades of investigative journalism and for normal people, non-journalists, as well, to speak up and kind of reveal abuses and criticize people who hold positions of power, both at the national level or at a community level, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for the First Amendment?

DAVID ENRICH: And it means that the First Amendment gives everyone the right to speak and to interrogate powerful people, and you do not need to worry about — there should not be a legal cloud hanging over your head when you criticize or investigate someone powerful, and you do not need to worry that an innocent mistake is going to bankrupt you because of litigation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to 2016, Donald Trump vowing to make it easier to sue news organizations.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws, so that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was before Donald Trump became president the first time around. Talk about the significance of what he’s saying and the overall campaign, as in your subtitle, the Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, when Donald Trump made those remarks in 2016, it kind of acted as the firing of a starter’s pistol in a race, and it sent a signal to the entire kind of conservative movement, and, in particular, the conservative legal movement, that a race was on to try to dismantle some of the long-standing First Amendment protections for the media and for others. And you can trace very directly back to that speech that he gave in Fort Worth, Texas, in February of 2016 the arrival on the scene of this kind of small cottage industry of high-priced lawyers whose entire practices were devoted to suing and threatening news outlets.

And the more successes they piled up, the more the strategy caught on, so that by the time — and within a couple of years, there was a real grassroots movement, funded and fueled by the likes of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, to really weaponize defamation laws to make it much, much scarier, really, especially for small and independent news outlets and journalists, to write about powerful people — not just the president of the United States, but across — but in their local communities, a big company, maybe a powerful real estate developer, things like that. And this strategy has now worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, where there is increasing support for either doing away with New York Times v. Sullivan altogether, or at least chipping away at it around the edges.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re the business investigations editor at The New York Times. What led you to write this book?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, we were getting, and still do get, inundated with legal threats basically every time that we start writing about or investigating someone powerful. And it occurred to me — you know, The New York Times is in a pretty good position to handle that kind of threat, but it occurred to me a few years ago that, you know, the experience might be very different if you worked at a smaller outlet or if you were an independent journalist. And, you know, there are so many independent journalists right now, which I think is a really good thing for the media and a good thing for our democracy. But it’s people with a Substack newsletter or a blog or a podcast who are uniquely vulnerable to these types of threats and these types of litigation, because they are enormously expensive to defend against.

And they’re not always meant to — these challenges are not always meant to win in court. They’re often meant to just subject people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process. And a lot of people make the economically rational decision, which is that in the face of those threats and in the face of that litigation, they’re going to back down rather than fight, which is exactly what the people making those threats want you to do.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about how Hulk Hogan or, as you point out, much more relevantly, Peter Thiel fit into this story.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, so, Peter Thiel had a long-running grudge against —

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who he is.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he’s very closely aligned with people like Elon Musk. And he —

AMY GOODMAN: Co-founder of PayPal.

DAVID ENRICH: Co-founder of PayPal, yes, and one of the owners of Palantir, as well. And he had a long-running grudge against the website Gawker, because Gawker was really pioneering a form of journalism that was very skeptical of Silicon Valley elites and was kind of puncturing some of the bubble surrounding them. And so he set out in the early 2010s to destroy Gawker. And he went searching. He hired a bunch of people. He put a bunch of money into this. And he eventually settled on a case involving Hulk Hogan. Gawker had published a snippet of a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.

And so, Peter Thiel secretly financed and organized a multifaceted legal campaign using Hulk Hogan as a vehicle for retribution against Gawker. He won — Hulk Hogan won. Peter Thiel won. Gawker was destroyed. And this became a real blueprint for other billionaires and other powerful people to really attack the media. They saw that they — a well-funded, well-orchestrated, secret legal campaign — had the ability to absolutely destroy a well-established media outlet.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Gawker was destroyed. Now talk about some of the Supreme Court justices’ views. Particularly begin with Clarence Thomas.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, Clarence Thomas, during his confirmation hearings in 1991, expressed real support for New York Times v. Sullivan. He then went through a period where he got some very negative media coverage, and his views seemed to shift. And so, by 2019, Clarence Thomas became the first sitting Supreme Court justice to openly call for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan.

His argument originally was grounded in the 45 words of the First Amendment, which do not mention libel or defamation, and therefore should not — he argued that should not be protected under the First Amendment. Really, though, this was a part of a campaign by Thomas and his allies to really erode the powers of the media and the protections for the media and normal people to speak up when they saw abuses and to criticize people like him.

And so, he, now joined by Neil Gorsuch, as well, have really embraced this call and are trying to recruit other justices, I think, and are calling for other people to file lawsuits that might make their way up to the Supreme Court that will challenge these long-standing precedents that protect, again, not just press freedoms, but the right of a person in a community to circulate a petition, for example, or make a comment on Facebook about their mayor, things like that. So this is not just about protecting journalists. It’s really about protecting anyone who wants to stand up and have their voice heard on matters of public importance.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does Neil Gorsuch stand?

DAVID ENRICH: Gorsuch has joined Thomas in wanting to have this overturned. And his views really — and he views Sullivan as protecting all sorts of online defamatory speech. The arguments that he has made — I mean, one of the things I do in this book is really deconstruct those arguments. And it turns out, a lot of them are premised on not just kind of faulty logic, but inaccurate data that he cited, that he got from a law review article that was filled with a lot of false assumptions and kind of misinterpreted data. And so, he has actually had to correct his opinion calling for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan, but it is still being cited to this day by the conservative legal movement as one of the real kind of sources of information and authority that should be used to overturn it.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book, the prologue, “A Panicked Phone Call.” You tell the story of Guy Larson [sic]. Tell us who he — Guy Lawson — is.

DAVID ENRICH: So, Lawson is an American journalist and author who wrote a book that became the basis for the movie War Dogs, with — starring Jonah Hill. And the book basically tells the story of how these three stoners from Miami Beach become international arms traffickers. It’s kind of a rollicking, really fascinating tale. Some of the action is set in Albania. And there’s a bit part in the book played by the son of Albania’s former prime minister, who is kind of an autocratic strongman. And the details in the book, as far as I’ve been able to determine, were completely accurate. But for argument’s sake, the son of the strongman claims that he was kind of smeared in the book and that some of the facts were wrong, so he filed a lawsuit against Lawson in U.S. court, and it’s worked its way — it’s been kind of years winding its way through the legal process. It got dismissed by multiple courts. But years later, it worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it became one of the latest vehicles to try and challenge Sullivan.

And it was seized on by people who had been inspired by Clarence Thomas, who had basically issued an open invitation to lawyers and, you know, prospective litigants, begging them to bring him a case that he could used to overturn Sullivan. It made its way up to the Supreme Court. They did not get enough votes to actually overturn Sullivan, or even hear the case, but it became another vehicle for Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to really, you know, bring this issue much more to public light and to argue forcefully that Sullivan should be overturned. And those calls, while unsuccessful — they did not get the Supreme Court to change the legal standard — they inspired hordes of lawyers, activists and other judges at lower levels across the country to really lean into this argument. And you can look at cases all over the country, and you can see that they are slowing down, they are taking longer, they’re not getting dismissed as quickly. And that creates all sorts of pain and difficulties for — especially for local and independent journalists, who now have much kind of higher odds of being dragged through expensive litigation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talk about — let’s look a some of the cases that President Trump is involved with right now. He sues ABC. He sues The Des Moines Register. He sues CBS. Is he trying to bring these cases to the Supreme Court? Now, of course, ABC, there was a settlement. Explain what these cases were about and what it means to settle.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, well, first of all, Trump is very much trying to get a case to the Supreme Court that will lead to the overturning of Sullivan. I don’t think any of those three cases you mentioned are the likely vehicles, but there are a bunch of others working their way through the federal appeals system that I think stand a much better chance.

These more recent lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register are all pretty clearly efforts by Trump and his allies to weaponize the law to get — to kind of punish criticism and to deter others from speaking up and saying critical things. And they involve different legal theories. The ABC case was a straight-up defamation case. The Des Moines Register and the —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, ABC case, where George Stephanopoulos had said President Trump —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — was found civilly liable for rape. Now, again —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the judge in the case said, in common parlance, this case would be about rape.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and even in the technical details, that he was actually found liable by the jury for sexual abuse, not rape. But so, even if you assume, for argument’s sake, that that’s an important difference and that Stephanopoulos got it wrong — and I think Stephanopoulos would say he didn’t get it wrong — but for argument’s sake, let’s say he did get it wrong. That is exactly the type of mistake that is supposed to be protected by New York Times v. Sullivan, because it is an honest, good-faith error, and you should not be held liable. ABC nonetheless decided that it was prudent to settle this case.

AMY GOODMAN: Or Disney did —

DAVID ENRICH: Well, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — which owns ABC.

DAVID ENRICH: Disney, as parent company, did. And, I mean, I think the rationale for that — and we’re seeing this play out in other settings, as well — is that these big multinational companies, that have varied interests, are trying to protect their corporate interests and do not feel like having outstanding litigation against the president of the United States is in their best interest, and so they are, pretty clearly, I think, taking the side of their profits in the long term over the First Amendment concerns that many of their journalists have. And you’re seeing a very similar dynamic playing out with CBS right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And CBS is the case of 60 Minutes.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And Trump is suing them for $20 billion, I think, at this point, for how they edited a Kamala Harris piece.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and this is the very definition of what I think is a meritless lawsuit. And at the time the lawsuit was filed, there were some discrepancies in the way CBS kind of cut or aired parts of Kamala Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes. We now have the full, unedited transcript. We have the full, unedited recordings of those interviews. And it is plainly clear, objectively, that the interview, while edited, was not done so deceptively. There are not material differences between the different things that aired on different CBS shows. And so, the lawsuit, clearly, to me at least, and certainly all the legal observers I’ve spoken to, with the exception of people aligned with Trump, is not a strong legal argument. And yet, CBS’s parent company, which has a multibillion-dollar merger pending, that it needs —

AMY GOODMAN: Paramount.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah — that it needs federal approval for, has started talking with the Trump side about possibly settling this. And the rationale, again, is quite clear: They are concerned, on the Paramount side, that if they do not settle this, that the Trump administration is going to essentially punish them by holding up this multibillion-dollar merger. And so, you have journalists and, I think, media executives at CBS who are apoplectic about the prospect of settling this, because, A, they are on very strong legal footing, and, B, it would set a terrible precedent that the companies are going to cave to this kind of legal extortion. But I think — we’ll see what happens.

AMY GOODMAN: How does protection of the press in the United States compare to other countries? And talk about libel tourism.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah. So, the U.S. is — the First Amendment is a really special thing in the U.S. It’s one of the things that distinguishes America from many other democracies. So, if you look at countries like the U.K., for example, or Australia, which are, you know, very democratic — small-D democratic countries, it is much harder for journalists and others to write critical things or to investigate powerful people and institutions in those countries, because their libel laws make it much easier to sue, and that also allows you to much more easily and kind of potently threaten people.

And so, you have — in the U.K., for example, we’ve had this phenomenon, as you just said, called libel tourism, where people, rich people, like Russian oligarchs, and big companies file lawsuits against journalists from all over the world in the British court system. And that has created a real chilling effect even for American journalists, who sometimes find themselves getting sued in British courts just because you published something. It goes online. It’s accessible probably everywhere in the world. That can expose you to liability in the British court system.

Now, it’s getting a little bit harder to actually bring those suits right now, but, to me, it’s a really clear reminder of the importance of the protections we have in the U.S. It really does differentiate this country from many others. And it means we have a much more robust and aggressive media. And again, it also means that just normal people who want to circulate a petition online can do so without fear that if they get a fact wrong, they are not going to be bullied and intimidated and potentially sued because of just minor inaccuracies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, after you wrote this book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, were you more or less hopeful?

DAVID ENRICH: Oh my goodness, less hopeful. We have a real problem right now in this country. We have very strong legal protections, and yet people and companies and institutions are, on a daily basis, threatening journalists and threatening normal people, and they are getting their way a lot of the time, and that’s with our legal protections in place. And the assault on these protections is very much underway. It’s a very much alive threat, I think. And we’re seeing the White House engage in this almost on a daily basis, it seems. So I think the threat is growing, and it has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind and criticize powerful people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about some of the particular cases you look at in the book after the show, and we’ll post it as a web exclusive at democracynow.org. David Enrich, New York Times business investigations editor. His new book, just out, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

President Donald Trump spoke at the Department of Justice Friday in an unprecedented speech in which he threatened to take revenge on his political enemies, from the press to the FBI itself. “It was a typical rambling and hate-filled diatribe,” says Maryland Congressmember Jamie Raskin. “Nobody has ever taken a sledgehammer to the traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement, on the one side, and presidential political will and power, on the other.” Raskin, who spoke at a press conference in response to Trump’s address outside of the Department of Justice, is a former constitutional law professor and served as the Democrats’ lead prosecutor for Trump’s second impeachment over the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He also responds to Trump’s “illegal” invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and his attempt to deport foreign-born university students and faculty. Trump’s sweeping efforts to make the United States hostile to immigrants “creates danger for everybody,” warns Raskin. Finally, Raskin responds to recent divisions within the Democratic Party over a GOP spending bill. He urges congressional Democrats to present a “unified plan” and “common strategy” for resisting a Republican supermajority loyal to Trump.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States is moving closer to a constitutional crisis as the Trump administration refuses multiple court orders while the president vows to take revenge on political enemies and escalates his attack on the press.

On Saturday, the U.S. deported 137 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was last used to justify the arrest and internment of 30,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals during World War II.

Meanwhile, Columbia student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remains locked up in an ICE jail in Louisiana for taking part in student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. A second Columbia student protester has also been arrested.

On Friday, President Trump spoke at the Department of Justice and threatened to take revenge on his political enemies.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the department of injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over, and they are never going to come back. They’re never coming back. … So, now as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, but first let’s turn to a part of his response to Trump’s speech. Raskin spoke outside the Department of Justice Friday.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: In the 18th century, the American Revolution overthrew the kings, the lords and the feudal barons to establish a nation where we would have a nation where all would be equal under the law. As Tom Paine put it, in monarchies, the king is law, but in the democracies, the law is king. But, amazingly, we now have a president in the 21st century who believes he’s a king, and he believes that the king is the law once again.

The first seven weeks of this radical experiment in neomonarchism has been a disaster for the rule of law and for the Constitution and for the First Amendment. There have been 120 federal cases filed against Donald Trump all over the country, and he has lost already in more than 40 courtrooms across the land, where temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions have been issued against his lawless attack on the Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland speaking outside the DOJ on Friday, responding to Trump’s speech. He’s joining us now from Takoma Park, Maryland. Congressmember Raskin is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor.

During Trump’s first presidency, Raskin served as a floor manager and the Democrats’ lead prosecutor for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6th Capitol insurrection. He was also a member of the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. In January, Biden gave preemptive pardons to Raskin and other members of the January 6th House committee. Earlier today, President Trump claimed the pardons are invalid because, he said, they were done by autopen.

Congressmember Jamie Raskin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t we start there, with President Trump saying all the pardons that he issued that were done by autopen are invalid? That would include you. Your response?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: First of all, thank you for having me, Amy, and that was the first time I got to hear a clip from our press conference. What you couldn’t hear there was the constant berating and heckling of MAGA counterprotesters who showed up. We were being drowned out by a guy with a bullhorn. I wanted to borrow his bullhorn, because we didn’t have a sound system with us. But I appreciate your running that clip where we went and appeared opposite Donald Trump.

So, but I had not seen that Donald Trump is claiming that the pardon rendered by President Biden was somehow illegitimate because of the kind of pen that was used. This sounds like classic Donald Trump stuff. You know, the pardons, of course, were necessary because of Trump’s promises to prosecute Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, less so the rest of us, but they had already made their moves against Liz Cheney. And I have no reason to think that those were not valid any more than the humiliating and atrocious pardons that Donald Trump gave to nearly 1,600 insurrectionists, including violent felons who viciously attacked our police officers on January 6th.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about this almost unprecedented speech? It is very rare for a president to go to the Department of Justice and give a speech like this. I think Clinton did around some anti-crime bill, which many would dispute was actually an anti-crime bill. Obama went to say goodbye to the attorney general. But to give an hour address naming names of targets, talking about the press as enemies of the people, if you can respond, overall, to what he said?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, it was a typical rambling and hate-filled diatribe by Donald Trump. No speech like that has ever taken place at the U.S. Department of Justice, which has existed since 1870, when it was set up to try to enforce the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution against the Ku Klux Klan and against white supremacists and insurrectionists and secessionists.

But nobody has ever taken a sledgehammer to the traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement, on the one side, and presidential political will and power, on the other. But here Trump made it clear that he views these people as his lawyers. They are reporting to him, according to his corrupt unitary executive theory. And far from staying out of the business of deciding who will be prosecuted and who will be let go, he’s going to superintend the whole machinery of the Department of Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip from President Trump speaking at the Department of Justice.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is President Trump speaking at the Justice Department. Of course, he has sued ABC. He has sued CBS. He has sued The Des Moines Register. Because he has the backing of the wealthiest person on Earth, Elon Musk, he could do endless lawsuits. And whether or not they win, that’s not the point. But he could just wipe out one news institution after another, Congressmember Raskin.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, he’s obviously frustrated because he’s losing everywhere in court on everything from the birthright citizenship executive order, which is blatantly unconstitutional, to the spending freeze to the sacking of thousands of probationary employees. And so, he’s frustrated, so he says it’s got to be illegal for the media to be covering his defeats and to be trying to expose the various constitutional violations of his administration. Of course, it’s completely lawful and protected by the First Amendment.

And he’s just operating out of the authoritarian playbook, which says that the first thing you do when you get in is you crack down on the free press. And he’s been doing that in numerous ways. He’s been ordering the FCC to go after ABC, CBS, NBC, anybody who displeases him in any way. But he’s also been personally suing media entities. There was a shakedown of $15 million against ABC because he was unhappy with coverage there. And now he’s got a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, not even because of anything they said about him, but because he thought that the coverage of Kamala Harris was too positive.

AMY GOODMAN: It was about, right, a 60 Minutes interview, which in all news media you do an hour an interview, and you play 10 minutes, so things like her sneezing were taken out. And he said that was used to affect the — try to use to affect the election.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Of course, Fox News operates completely as an ideological arm of the Republican Party and of the Trump cult, and there’s nothing unconstitutional about that. You know, it’s totally fine for a newspaper entity to be endorsing Harris or Trump or what have you. So, he’s just absolutely confused on the point.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the naming of names, everyone from, oh, Norm Eisen to the organization CREW, that sues over corruption in government, to the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias to the prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, Pomerantz who worked for Alvin Bragg. He named him, as well, the Manhattan DA. What it means for the president of the United States to name check these people and talk about going after them?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, Trump has embarked upon exceedingly unpopular policy moves, including, you know, an $888 billion cut to Medicaid, increasing the tax on Social Security, coming from Elon Musk, gutting federal departments and agencies promoting environmental protection, promoting health research, promoting anti-disease campaigns. And so, the only way to try to protect these maneuvers is to shut down a free press and disable the lawyers who are in court every day holding them to account.

And understand, Amy, we are winning in court every single day against the lawlessness, most recently against this completely illegal move to deport people outside of the provisions of immigration law by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which requires that America be at war or be in the midst of an invasion. And we are not being invaded, and the Congress of the United States, which I have the privilege of serving in, has not declared war on Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go into that, Trump invoking that 18th-century law in order to deport Venezuelan nationals from the United States. On Saturday, they flew, the Trump administration, more than 260 immigrants, including 130 people accused, but not convicted, of being a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump has labeled a terrorist organization. The flights came despite a temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered any of these deportation flights that were currently in the air to be turned around. One of them was still on the ground. The Washington Post reports the three flights bound for El Salvador arrived after the judge’s order. It looks like Salvador, this maximum-security prison, which is ultimately run by the Trump ally Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, guilty of mass human rights abuses — it looks like this judge is holding a hearing today about why they disregarded his ruling. Can you talk about the significance of this? The same thing happened with the Brown University professor, the kidney doctor, who was sent back despite the judge ruling she should be allowed to at least be — her case be heard, and she should not be deported.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: James Boasberg is an excellent judge in the District of Columbia, federal judge. He’s also very conservative. And this is a pattern we note now, that it goes across Democratic and Republican appointees. The same with a bunch of prosecutors who have resigned rather than participate in a corrupt scheme like the effort to absolve and exculpate Mayor Adams.

But Boasberg’s order was completely flouted and violated by the Trump administration and by the president of El Salvador, who gloated and basically mocked the judicial order online, saying, “Oopsie… Too late.” And I think that was retweeted by — I think it was Elon Musk who retweeted it with some glee. But, look, you’re messing with federal court judges who intervene in a situation like this only when they believe there is imminent harm to people being threatened and when they think that there is a probable likelihood of success on the merits of the case. And I think it was shown, to his satisfaction, that there was all kinds of imminent harm being threatened by these deportations outside of the immigration law system that we’ve got by invoking the Alien Enemies Act from 1798, which was last used during World War II to round up Japanese and Japanese American citizens in the internment.

And so, I don’t know. It will be very interesting to see what Judge Boasberg does at this point, because as the president of El Salvador, the corrupt and human rights-violating president of El Salvador, said, “Oopsie… Too late,” when it was very clear they had the order to bring those people back and let them go through the normal process. We have no idea who was part of the contingent being deported.

AMY GOODMAN: And Rubio, the secretary of state, retweeted the “Oopsie.” Now I want to ask you about Mahmoud Khalil. There have been mass protests across the country for this Palestinian graduate student who was here on a green card — his wife, eight months pregnant, she is a U.S. citizen — to be released. Can you talk about what’s happened to him? He’s now still in Louisiana ICE detention. What you’re calling for?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, we’re calling for respect for the rule of law and for the First Amendment and for due process, and nothing more than that. I would hope, I would assume that people who support the freedom of speech and due process would be saying this is a completely unacceptable situation.

First of all, when he was picked up, they were saying that he had a student visa, which he did not. He’s a permanent resident, a green card holder, who has all of the same First Amendment rights that a U.S. citizen has. And so, you can disagree with his speech; you can agree with his speech. But in any event, he was picked up for his speech, not given due process under our immigration law system, and then deported and taken out of state. And that’s just an intolerable situation.

And if it can be done to him, it can be done to every other permanent resident. And indeed, because he’s never been charged with anything, there have never been criminal charges, and he’s not being charged with anything now, it creates danger for everybody, both noncitizens and citizens alike. And, of course, that’s the history of this, Amy. If you go back to the Alien and Sedition Acts from the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson was able to observe, along with other people who were the targets of the Alien and Sedition Acts, that the attack on immigrants very quickly becomes an attack on citizens, as the incumbent party thinks that they’re absolutely invulnerable and they can jail people and prosecute people just for being in the political opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about some of the things you’re calling for, calling on people to submit an open records request to DOGE for your own data, for people’s own data, to see what they have on you, like Social Security, student loans, etc., the meaning of this? And your overall, as a constitutional lawyer — the role of the richest man on Earth, of Elon Musk, firing thousands of people, using his own social media platform X to do this? What role does he have in the U.S. government?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, we don’t know exactly what role he has. That’s an excellent question, because they’re very slippery and elusive about this. Sometimes the president describes him as the head of DOGE, as the leader of DOGE. In court, they’ve said he’s not involved in an administrative capacity with DOGE; he’s just an adviser to the president. So we’d like to know.

We did get this victory in court last week, where a federal judge determined that DOGE is a federal agency, and they cannot slime away from that reality. It is a federal agency. That means that they are subject to FOIA and to the Privacy Act.

And I immediately sent in a request for all of the private records of mine, private data of mine, that DOGE has. And under FOIA and under the Privacy Act, we all have that right to find out what information they’ve got from Social Security, from the Department of Education, if there’s college loans, if there’s military service. Whatever it might be, all of that belongs to the people since the Privacy Act of 1974. So, I sent it in. I put it up online. I think more than 8,000 or 10,000 people have followed. And we’re going to launch a campaign this week, because more than 300 million people have that right, and people need to understand that you’ve got a right to the data, not Elon Musk and DOGE. And we want to know what’s happened to it. Has it gone to his artificial intelligence private business, to Grok? Has it been shared with other third parties? The people have a right to know that.

And so, you know, my grandfather was in politics, and he told me when I was a little boy, he said that duck hunting is a lot of fun, until the ducks start shooting back. And I think people are going to insist that our rights be vindicated within American constitutional democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Congressmember Raskin, your comments on what Chuck Schumer, the ranking Democratic member in the U.S. Senate, did, both supporting what was going to be called — the Trump administration threatened to call it the “Schumer shutdown,” but, actually, not so much that as having said to the end he would not go along with it, then switching, and the rifts in the Democratic Party now?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, I took a very strong position against that continuing resolution, which was packed with more efforts to dismantle the American social safety net, attacks on Medicaid, attacks on healthcare. And it also provided — and this was very troubling to me — retroactive validation, at least implicitly, of all of the assaults on the federal agencies and on the federal workers. So there was no way I could go along with it. Schumer took an opposite position after different twists and turns in his journey.

But I’ve got to say, Amy, what troubled me the most resembled what troubled me the most about what happened to us when Donald Trump showed up for the joint session of Congress. It’s that we did not have a unified plan across the House and the Senate within the Democratic Party to decide what to do. And I had said I would stick with any unified plan we had. We could boycott it. We could hold up signs. We could stage a walkout, whatever. But we needed to have a plan. We needed to call a play. And I think that’s the real political sin here, that House and Senate Democrats are acting like we occupy different galaxies. We’ve got to get together and decide what our common front and what our common strategy is. I’m an old, washed-up football quarterback. It’s like going out onto the field without any play at all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, do you think Schumer should step down as the ranking Democrat of the Senate?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: You know, they’re going to go through that. I think we’re going through a period of tremendous upsurge and ferment and change in terms of political leadership across the board. And because we’ve been so separated, the Senate and the House Democrats, I really know very little about the internal dynamics that led to what took place there. So, I’ll reserve judgment on that. But I will say this is a moment where new political leadership is popping up everywhere, and that’s all to the good.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, former constitutional law professor, thanks so much for joining us.

NOW READ: Trump now has massively more power than he did last week as Chuck Schumer caves — again

A pair of federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury. The White House vowed to fight what it called an “absurd and unconstitutional order.” This comes as the White House and its allies have increasingly targeted judges who rule against the administration. Elon Musk has posted dozens of messages on his social platform X calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against the administration. We speak with retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, who served as a federal district judge in Massachusetts for 17 years, from 1994 to 2011. “The distance between what they are trying to do and what is lawful is so enormous that anyone would rule as these judges are doing,” says Gertner.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Two federal judges — one in Maryland, one in California — have ordered the Trump administration to reinstate tens of thousands of fired federal workers. In one of the rulings, District Judge William Alsup said, “It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” unquote. The White House responded by saying, quote, “The Trump Administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order,” unquote.

This comes as the White House and its allies have increasingly targeted judges who rule against the administration. Reuters recently reported U.S. marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels due to a series of comments from Elon Musk, Donald Trump and others targeting judges. Musk has posted dozens of messages on his social platform X calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against the administration. He has also called judges “corrupt,” “radical” and “evil.” Vice President JD Vance has questioned whether judges even have the authority to rule on Trump’s order. Vance went to Yale Law School. Vance wrote last month on X, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” unquote. President Trump has indicated he believes he’s above the law, recently writing, quote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” unquote.

Trump has also gone after law firms. Last week, he levied unprecedented penalties against the firm Perkins Coie, that has ties to the Democratic Party. On Wednesday, a federal judge partially blocked the order, saying the order, quote, “casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportions across the legal profession,” unquote. The American Bar Association has also criticized efforts to undermine the courts. In a statement, the ABA said, quote, “We will not stay silent in the face of efforts to remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”

We’re joined right now by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner. She served as a federal district judge in Massachusetts for 17 years, from 1994 to 2011, now a professor at Harvard Law School. She’s also the author of the book, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate.

Judge, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you can respond, overall, to the attack on judges, and judges pushing back around the country?

NANCY GERTNER: You have to put it in context here. What the judges are doing in cases across the country are dealing with executive orders that are so, so far from lawful, constitutional, consistent with the statute, that, frankly, if they didn’t respond, there would be something wrong. In other words, there have been, what, over 111 lawsuits filed, and, for the most part, every time someone asks for a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, that has been allowed. It does not matter who appointed the judge. It doesn’t matter where this is happening in the country. As I said, the distance between what they are trying to do and what is lawful is so enormous that anyone would rule as these judges are doing.

The case in California, for example, is a classic example. The judge there yesterday said, you know, “Give me an explanation as to why the probationary employees have been resoundingly fired.” And the Trump administration refused to provide anyone from the Office of Personnel Management. It was as if they were saying, “We don’t have to explain. We don’t have to give an explanation.” And the judge was absolutely furious, because, of course, there has to be an explanation. These people were fired, completely not following any of the rules. And worse, in order to sort of come up with a lame justification, people who had great performance reviews only, you know, a few months ago were suddenly described as inadequate employees. I mean, it was a contrivance. It was a lie. And it violated numbers and numbers of laws and statutes. So, judges are doing what they are put on the bench to do, which is to call it as they see it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you your thoughts on Vice President Vance, who notoriously stated, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

NANCY GERTNER: Well, I think the word “legitimate” carries weight in that sentence. The question is: What’s legitimate? And courts are supposed to say what the law is. That was settled, you know, in the last century. Courts are supposed to say what is constitutional and what the law is, and the executive is to follow. So, they are doing what is completely within their legitimate scope of authority. And he knows that. He knows that. I’m a Yale Law graduate, as well, and his statements, frankly, are chilling, really extraordinary.

AMY GOODMAN: Judge Gertner —

NANCY GERTNER: So, yeah, he knows that. But the — yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to move on quickly, because we don’t have much time, and there’s a lot to talk about. I wanted to get your response to efforts by some House Republicans who have introduced a bill aimed at limiting the power of judges, in response to the mounting challenges against Trump’s measures, and the role of the Supreme Court.

NANCY GERTNER: Well, that was to be expected, which is to try to restrict the authority of judges. But the authority of judges to announce what the law is is in the Constitution, or it’s an interpretation of the Constitution, which they cannot undo without undoing much more than just the issue of this judge or that judge. Judges are supposed to interpret the law, and particularly interpret constitutional law. And this is power, it seems to me, that is baked into the Constitution and cannot be taken away. So, this is an empty gesture. But even worse, it is a troubling, outrageous gesture.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you respond to lawyers for Trump asking the Supreme Court this week to lift a nationwide pause imposed on the president’s order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, marking the first time the legal wrangling over the president’s order to end birthright citizenship has reached the Supreme Court?

NANCY GERTNER: Well, this is — again, this was a move that, in my view, is so far from constitutional that no judge worthy of their name would ever rule in a different direction. Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. Birthright citizenship was affirmed — what is it? — a hundred years ago. So, this is just pushing back on the judiciary, and then, when the judiciary does what they don’t want them to do, and the judiciary says this is wrong, trying to delegitimize that decision. I can’t tell you how fundamentally dangerous all of this is, because the judiciary is one of the institutions that deal with checks and balances. And if you take them out of the picture, you’re going the way of Hungary, you’re going the way of Russia. And it’s extraordinarily troubling.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about President Trump simply not obeying the courts? I mean, U.S. marshals are the kind of army for the courts, but they’re under the Justice Department, Trump’s Justice Department, the heads of that calling themselves Trump’s lawyers.

NANCY GERTNER: The marshals are supposed to be the enforcer of judgments. And as you say, they are under the supervision of the Department of Justice. Their authorizing legislation, however, says that the marshals shall enforce the law. And so there’s a division here. On the one hand, the authorizing statute says they shall enforce the law. And even if Pam Bondi says, you know, “I’m sorry, that law doesn’t matter. We’re going to skip over that law,” they still have an obligation to enforce the law. If they did not, then we would have a constitutional crisis.

Saying that doesn’t describe what that would mean. A constitutional crisis, what does that mean for all of us? I mean, then, it would mean, really, a marching on Washington, deluging all of our congressmen and representatives. It could mean mass demonstrations. I mean, it’s almost the end of law. And at that point, people have to make it clear, as the population in Israel did, as populations in Poland did, that this is beyond the pale. This is not what our Constitution was meant to accomplish.

AMY GOODMAN: Judge, would you call DOGE’s taking over of federal agencies, you know, run by, as President Trump keeps saying, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who gave the most money to the president to be reelected — would you call what’s happened, as judges push back across the country and say tens of thousands of workers have to be reinstated — would you call what has happened a coup?

NANCY GERTNER: What has happened with Elon Musk, well, I have called it a coup. If it succeeds, it will have been a coup. In other words, if the definition of a “coup” is a small group of people who are not elected — and there was Musk — who are taking over the power of the government, yes, I would call it a coup. I mean, he — there are challenges around the country to his authority, to Musk’s authority — Musk, who is not confirmed by Congress, who was selected by means that no one exactly knows, who was given powers that no one knows about, who is getting access to information that only government officials who have been appropriately selected can get. And if he’s successful in that — there are challenges to that. If he is successful, yes, I would call that a coup.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for being with us, retired Judge Nancy Gertner, professor at Harvard Law School, served as a federal judge in the District Court of Massachusetts for 17 years, speaking to us from Massachusetts.

NOW READ: The death of Chuck Schumer's career — and the future of the Democratic Party

More than 250,000 have signed a petition to support an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached during his first term. The Impeach Trump Again campaign is being led by the advocacy group Free Speech for People. “This president has already committed multiple abuses of power since assuming the presidency, and the framers designed the Constitution to ensure that we would not have a monarch or a tyrant govern this nation,” says the group’s president, John Bonifaz. “When we see these abuses of power, we have to invoke this impeachment clause.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition to support an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached during his first term. The Impeach Trump Again campaign is being led by the group Free Speech for People.

This comes as Texas Democratic Congressmember Al Green has threatened to soon introduce new articles of impeachment against Trump. Last week, Congressmember Green was removed from the House floor for protesting Donald Trump’s congressional address. He was then censured by the House. Green spoke on Democracy Now! on Friday.

REP. AL GREEN: Impeachment is a remedy for a runaway president who believes that there are no guardrails, who believes that the Supreme Court has placed him above the law, and who is now very close to a point where he will not honor court orders. When he does that, Ms. Goodman, he at that point will become a dictator. We are this close. When he goes over that line, that second, that scintilla of a second, he will become a dictator, and we will be under a dictatorship. I refuse to wait until that happens before I act, so I will act in defense of the Constitution and for the people of this country.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, organizing the Impeach Trump Again campaign. During Trump’s first term, he co-authored the book The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump.

So, he was impeached twice during the first term. We’re not even talking about a hundred days into his second term. Why, John?

JOHN BONIFAZ: Thank you, Amy, for having me.

We’re launching this campaign because we believe it’s critical that we invoke this impeachment clause of the Constitution at this moment in history. This president has already committed multiple abuses of power since assuming the presidency. And the framers designed the Constitution to ensure that we would not have a monarch or a tyrant govern this nation. They set up three coequal branches of government: the Congress, the executive branch, the judiciary. But they also put in this extra guardrail, the impeachment clause, and it’s designed to deal with that lawless president who abuses the power of the office.

And those multiple abuses of power keep piling up every day. We’ve documented at ImpeachTrumpAgain.org many of these abuses, including his abuse of the pardon power, where he, on day one, effectively pardoned 1,500 of his fellow insurrectionists who had attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

We have also documented the way in which he issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship. We know that this is a constitutional right. You cannot erase a part of the Constitution with an executive order. Two separate federal courts have found this to be unconstitutional. But it’s also an abuse of power.

He has usurped the power of Congress by freezing funds that have been duly appropriated by Congress. Only Congress has the power to appropriate funds. And he’s gone ahead and frozen those funds. And now courts have demanded that he release those funds, and he’s defying those court orders — an attack on the judiciary, an attack on the Congress.

The list goes on. And the point of impeachment power is to ensure that we do not have this kind of lawlessness coming out of the Oval Office, and that’s why we launched this campaign.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, John, how do you — how would you respond to critics who, even though they may agree with you on the violations by Trump, say that in the last two impeachments, even when Democrats had a majority in Congress, they could not move forward against Trump; now with Republicans in charge of both houses, this will virtually go nowhere?

JOHN BONIFAZ: Well, Juan, the important point here is to start building the case for why this president must be impeached and removed from public office. The fact is that when we see these abuses of power, we have to invoke this impeachment clause. You know, we know the votes are not going to be there today to start impeachment proceedings. But the point is that we, as a people, must demand that our members of Congress stand up and defend our Constitution at this critical moment in history. We commend Congressman Al Green for standing up and demanding that impeachment proceedings begin against this president. And we believe all members of Congress who still believe in the Constitution and our democracy must stand with him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of what would be the next steps — let’s say you keep building this petition — what would be the — I know Congressman Green has said he would introduce articles of impeachment, but what would be your sense of whether you’re having some progress on this issue?

JOHN BONIFAZ: Well, first, we see the progress with the 250,000-plus people who’ve already joined this campaign in less than two months, signing up at ImpeachTrumpAgain.org. And we want those numbers to continue to grow, and we believe they will.

But Congressman Green has pledged that he will introduce articles of impeachment, and we’re working with him and his office on that. And when he does so, they can be a privileged resolution requiring a floor vote, as he did in 2017. He was the first member of Congress to stand up in the last Trump administration. And we will see those numbers grow, as well. Members of Congress will have to be put on record with a floor vote on articles of impeachment as to where they stand. Do they stand on the side of the Constitution and their oath to protect the Constitution and our democracy, or do they stand on the sidelines in the face of this lawlessness from the Oval Office?

AMY GOODMAN: Before you go, John, you’re also working on other issues, like abolishing super PACs. I think that Elon Musk has promised to raise something like — or, he’s attempting to raise — $100 million for three pro-Trump super PACs. Of course, he could just give that himself, as the world’s richest man.

JOHN BONIFAZ: Yes. It’s important to remember that super PACs did not get created by the Supreme Court. People think it got created out of Citizens United, and that’s not true. Super PACs were created by a federal appeals court ruling out of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which wrongly held that because, in their view, independent expenditures cannot corrupt, that unlimited donations to political action committees cannot corrupt. That’s patently untrue, as we now know. Fifteen years after that decision, we see the history of how unlimited donations to super PACs, from the Elon Musks and others, have dominated our elections and corrupted the political process.

So, we are engaged, with others, in working to abolish super PACs. And the state of Maine recently passed a ballot initiative — 74% of the voters enacted it — to abolish super PACs in their state elections. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School was a catalyst for this initiative, along with his group Equal Citizens. And we’re working with him and the state Attorney General’s Office to help defend that critical law and create a new test case for the opportunity to abolish super PACs nationwide.

AMY GOODMAN: Axios is reporting Elon Musk has told the White House he plans to give $100 million to President Trump’s political operation.

JOHN BONIFAZ: It’s rampant corruption. It’s absolutely an obscene situation that we have now, where billionaires have this opportunity to dominate our government and our politics. And we have to put an end to it. And abolishing super PACs is one important step forward. And we believe there will be congressional legislation, soon to be introduced, that will deal with that, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of Hawaii, what they’re doing as a model, as you see it?

JOHN BONIFAZ: So, in Hawaii, the state Senate just unanimously and with bipartisan support passed our model legislation to end multinational corporate spending. This is another whole problem with our system of money in politics, which allows foreign-influenced corporations to now dominate our politics and send, through the corporate form, foreign investment into our politics. So, Hawaii has passed this model legislation that we’ve been advancing across the country through the state Senate, and now it’s on to the White House. And we hope Hawaii will become the next state to pass this law.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bonifaz, we want to thank you for being with us, president of Free Speech for People. The group’s petition to Impeach Trump Again has gathered 250,000-plus signatures.