Donald Trump signed an executive order this morning expanding the role of the National Guard in Washington, DC, creating a “specialized unit” that is “dedicated” to “public safety.” Anyone who thought the federal government would pull out after 30 days—following the law—is sadly mistaken. The order draws upon various agencies within the government:

The Secretary of Defense shall, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard, subject to activation under Title 32 of the United States Code, that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital.
As appropriate and consistent with applicable law, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce Federal law.

But it gets worse, much worse.

The order also calls for Pete Hegseth to create a “quick reaction force” to go to any locale in any state at a moment’s notice for “quelling public disturbances”, and also to ensure that state National Guard units are trained to work for the federal government and federal law enforcement.

What exactly is a “public disturbance,” and have we really experienced anything so terrible that it requires federalizing the National Guard and creating a special “quick reaction force”?

Surely we’ve seen terrible storms and natural disasters in which the Guard has aided citizens, and sometimes they’ve done so in helping local law enforcement regarding criminal activity. But there’s no reason we need the federal government to coordinate and oversee any of this. Governors can call in and have called in their states’ National Guard. The federal government’s role should be in making sure that FEMA is doing the work that is vital to its mission—oh, but Trump wants to gut FEMA.

No, Trump is envisioning “quelling” public protest, and using the National Guard to chill speech. And he’s thinking about elections and ways to intimidate voters, and he’s planning for backup for speeding up mass deportations.

How do we know this? Because he talks about stifling speech and limiting voting all the time, obsessed with both. And he’s already using the National Guard in DC and Los Angeles to help ICE’s diabolical work in rounding up immigrants.

According to the order, Hegseth, “shall immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety.”

The Secretary of Defense also, “shall designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment. “

So, let’s read that right. The federal government will basically take over every state’s National Guard, making sure they are there to “assist” federal law enforcement—that would be ICE, the FBI, the DEA and other agencies Trump is using for mass deportations—and would create a “quick reaction force” to be deployed at any time to any state.

You can imagine that the “quick reaction force” will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, since teams of service members dedicated to that mission only will need to be housed and always ready, and they will need to have aircraft available to fly them anywhere at a moment’s notice. And the fact that Trump thinks that such a force is needed means he’s planning to use it for very nefarious reasons.

This is another turning point in Trump’s march toward fascism, make no mistake.

NOW READ: Inside Trump's downfall — and the thing that will finally do him in

On Friday, Donald Trump did something that alarmed economists around the world—and even many Republicans in Congress—by firing the commissioner of labor statistics, Erika McEntarfer, hours after a very weak jobs report and revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed the previous months were even weaker. An angry, desperate Trump claimed without evidence that the numbers were “rigged” in a post in which he said, the economy is “BOOMING.”

Trump’s action signaled he will try to cook the books, killing reliable economic data. What other numbers would he try to fake? The markets and the entire world economy rely on accurate data. The ramifications could be staggering—and the opposite of what Trump would be attempting to do—causing massive uncertainly and broad disbelief, sending the economy into free fall.

The statistics chief, by the way, has very little to do with the numbers. As Harvard economist Jason Furman notes, “those numbers are produced by the 2,000 nonpartisan career staff members who work in the agency, in this case compiling the survey responses from the more than 100,000 businesses that report their employment to the B.L.S. every month.”

So why was Trump so spooked by the numbers to engage in such an impulsive and reckless action that even many in his party were freaked out by? Because Trump and those in the White House who might have supported his action are exceedingly desperate, as their authoritarian project is facing what could be insurmountable resistance.

The Epstein saga, a completely unexpected revolt within the MAGA base, has thrown them off, split their supporters and proven to be uncontrollable—a ravaging wildfire. Without a unified base, any would-be dictator of a representative democracy who is attempting to transform it into an authoritarian state is dealing with enormous drag.

So that is already one big area of concern for Trump. But another element that is absolutely necessary for his project is for the majority of people to believe the economy is booming.

Many commentators who are experts on authoritarianism have made the point that what distinguishes Trump from Hungary’s Victor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan—and even many fascists in history, like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler—is that they all had solid majorities in public approval numbers early on and for quite some time. This allowed them to consolidate power over time and engage in anti-Democratic actions with little public pushback.

That is not the case with Trump, who, with numbers in the toilet, is facing massive public resistance. For all of those other leaders, one reason the public was behind them was because of the belief that the economy was booming—whether or not it was true. Putin became president after years of economic stagnation in a fledging democracy, a nation coming out of decades of communist rule that deprived people of basic necessities, let alone luxuries.

Putin early on oversaw a growth in GDP, an expansion of the economy that got a big flat screen TV in every home, which kept enough people content for long enough to chip away at democracy. It was a much longer term project, however, than Trump is facing, trying to instill autocracy within four years.

Similarly, Erdogan, who, unlike Trump, has more control over interest rates, cut rates and kept them low in the face of astronomical inflation rates—which came to be known as "Erdoganomics”—allowing for cheap borrowing and the appearance of a booming economy (until he eventually was forced to increase rates or face economic calamity). Again, this kept enough people happy long enough for Erdogan to strip democratic rights, but it didn’t happen overnight.

This also explains why Trump keeps pressuring Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve to cut rates—to the point of floating the idea of firing Powell, though the Supreme Court has made clear he can’t. He wants that cheap borrowing to give people the sense of a boom, taking a page from Erdogan.

In Hungary, Victor Orban also worked over a longer period of time to dismantle democratic institutions because, as Paul Krugman writes, his party retained popularity, much of it based on people being content with the economy:

Since taking power in 2010 Viktor Orban and Fidesz, the ruling party, have systematically undermined democratic institutions, creating a de facto one-party state. But the process has been gradual and relatively nonviolent: Salami tactics that sliced off effective opposition a bit at a time rather than tanks in the streets and detention camps.
Why did Orban take a gradualist approach to destroying democracy? Partly, no doubt, because too overt a power grab might finally have roused the rest of the European Union from its slumber. But it’s also true that Fidesz had the luxury of time because until recently the party remained quite popular with the Hungarian public.
Some of this popularity may have resulted from Fidesz’s takeover of the news media. But it was also true that for a long time, Orban could claim to have made Hungary prosperous. He took power at a time of extremely high unemployment: Hungary, like much of the European periphery, was caught up in the disastrous slump caused by Europe’s debt panic. And he was able to preside over a large fall in unemployment as austerity was relaxed.

As Krugman also notes in comparing Trump to Orban, “It's now clear, by contrast, that Trump and MAGA don’t have the luxury of time. Trump’s approval has already cratered.”

Trump has less than four years and yet he’s far more unpopular than those autocrats—and the historical figures like Hitler—at the same point in time as he’s trying to consolidate power. So, since his tariffs are causing consumer uncertainty and will soon spike inflation, and since he can’t cut interest rates, the one thing he was clinging to that he hoped would help him push an aura of a booming economy were the jobs numbers.

But now that has been shattered too.

Trump is underwater on most issues. His mass deportations have brought his approval on immigration—one of the issues he ranked highest on—down to 35% in the Gallup poll. The Epstein saga has completely blindsided him. The one thing he probably hoped he could turn his approval around on more quickly than other issues was the economy, since it’s an issue on which he once ranked high and got him elected.

The new jobs numbers and the revisions of recent months’ reports, however, more than anything else, have economists pointing to a recession. That means Trump’s approval dropping further. And that means the resistance builds.

The numbers are indeed a mortal threat and Trump is desperate for sure, causing him to engage in further reckless actions. But unlike other autocrats he’s emulating, a sizeable majority of people are not happy just seven months after he’s taken power, and many of them are increasingly angry. That’s what we must continue to harness.

It was pretty startling to see Mike Johnson do a complete about face, from breaking with Trump and calling for the files related to the Epstein investigation to be released to unprecedentedly shutting down Congress until September to desperately avoid a vote on releasing them.

Johnson may have developed a spine momentarily last week, and then had it ripped out by a menacing and threatening Trump. Johnson suddenly decided Trump needed more “space” before a vote could take place. Or it could have been, as Kiera Butler at Mother Jones suggests, that Johnson is bowing to Christian nationalists, some of whom are among the MAGA supporters defending Trump against what they see as a plot by Democrats regarding the Epstein files.

Whatever the case, however, it underscores that MAGA is deeply divided. Johnson is trying to prevent a vote while Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and other MAGA extremists have joined progressive Democrat Ro Khanna and right-wing Trump instigator Thomas Massie in trying to bring a vote to the floor.

And that’s what prompted Johnson to send everyone home, fearful that a vote would force the Department of Justice to release all the files, since there are enough Republicans who would join all Democrats to easily pass a bill.

Democrats have effectively put on hold the GOP’s agenda, as Johnson ended all business, vowing nothing until Congress is back in September.

But what happens then?

Trump, who is fearful of what’s in the files—some of which is implicated in stories in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and elsewhere—is stalling for time. There may not be enough that’s incriminating, but there is surely enough for much of the public to believe Trump, himself an accused sexual abuser and someone found liable for rape, was deeply involved with Epstein at the time Epstein was engaged in sex trafficking and raping children.

One way Trump is trying to buy time and maybe even come up with a backstory is by having the DOJ speak with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is in prison serving a sentence until 2037, found guilty of sexual abuse of minors along with Epstein and having procured many of the girls. The DOJ announced it was seeking to speak with her, and her attorney confirmed that. The plan could be to have her clear Trump of any wrongdoing and then he would, in return, commute her sentence or even pardon her.

But this looks like a very desperate, difficult and unconvincing move. If Trump were to pardon Maxwell or commute her sentence, it would be clear that she lied. Sure, he could wait until the end of his term and in the meantime get this story out of the way, though it would be a MAGA bomb for anyone inthe GOP coming forward.

But before getting to that, she would really have to have information that clears Trump; a simple statement won’t suffice. What could she have? Why would people believe a pedophile who wants special treatment? (She’s also in the process of appealing her case to the Supreme Court.) As MSNBC.com’s Jordan Rubin, a former prosecutor, notes (italics are mine):

it’s difficult to analyze the value of Maxwell’s potential cooperation one way or the other without knowing specifically what she would share.
In any cooperation situation, the name of the game is corroboration. Therefore, in looking at this situation from the perspective of a prosecutor who would have to make a case based on Maxwell’s potential cooperation, she should not only have to be willing to implicate some other person or persons, but also be able to help prove it. Ideally, that would be with documentary or other objective evidence in a hypothetical case in which the defense would have ample room for cross-examination, given how this cooperation would have come about.

So the Maxwell angle won’t seem to work for Trump (and neither are any of the crazy deflections he’s made, like the ridiculous claim that President Obama fomented a “coup”). And the House Oversight Committee, again with Republicans joining Democrats, already has voted to subpoena Maxwell itself:

The House Oversight Committee plans to subpoena Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell "as expeditiously as possible," a committee spokesperson said.
A House Oversight subcommittee on Tuesday without opposition approved a motion directing the committee chair, James Comer, to issue a subpoena for Maxwell. Only four members were present.
Comer, R-Ky., had directed Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., to introduce the motion after Burchett requested that the committee subpoena her. The motion allows "the Committee to formally consider whether to proceed," the committee spokesperson said.
"The Committee will seek to subpoena Ms. Maxwell as expeditiously as possible," the spokesperson said. "Since Ms. Maxwell is in federal prison, the Committee will work with the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons to identify a date when Committee can depose her."

So Maxwell, rather than being a tool for Trump (who would have her release some sort of statement), could provide a circus in Congress that keeps the Epstein saga alive no matter what she says. And again, it’s unlikely she clears Trump in any convincing way.

Many Republican members of Congress, meanwhile, will now have to face the rest of the summer being hounded by their constituents, running away from town halls and afraid to do anything, fearful of Trump, but also of their own base, in addition to Democrats and independent who’ve been on their heels for allowing Trump to engage in reckless actions. And not much is going to change by September, when Johnson says he’ll bring Congress back in session.

In response to MSNBC’s Jen Psaki speculating that Trump “is hoping he can outlast this until August” and asking if he can, Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said it’s not going to work.

Absolutely not. We’re going to keep talking about the Epstein files until Donald Trump releases them. What’s happening right now is that the American public are seeing that Donald Trump has betrayed them. He’s broken their trust.
He ran on the Epstein files as a key part of his campaign. The MAGA world did as well. His family talked about it constantly. Don, Jr. tweeted about it dozens of times. They have focused the on the release to the public, and to build goodwill among his base. He’s now completely reversed on that. And if Donald Trump and Mike Johnson think Democrats are going to just roll over and let that happen, they are highly mistaken.

So what will Mike Johnson do in September? Just keep Congress on hold? That would be great, with Democrats effectively shutting down the GOP agenda for months and stopping more of the dangerous actions. But the GOP could not sustain that. Johnson may hope that threats against Republicans who are joining with Democrats may force them to back down by then.

But Rep. Thomas Massie and a few others haven’t backed down in the past in voting against Trump. More importantly, the others are unlikely to back down now, since their own base is demanding this and many them are true believers themselves when it comes to the Epstein files.

And if Republicans come back and vote not to release the Epstein files or continue to do what they can to stop Democrats from introducing votes to learn more about a notorious sex trafficker and child rapist, it only helps Democrats, for whom it’s win-win.

Right now and for the indefinite future, Democrats are keeping Republicans from even legislating. And they’re also keeping them and Trump on the run, where they want them.

NOW READ: Trump's Obama slam may have been a shocking confession

Some weekend fun, in which MAGA is suddenly so very concerned about homophobia!

During a discussion on my SiriusXM program about Donald Trump dropping bombs on Iran, Mike from Nashville called to ask, “ What would you suggest we do to a diabolical regime who are homophobic, anti-American, anti-Israel…?”

I cut in and said you are describing Saudi Arabia, where they “behead” people who are gay, and where women have use a different entrance at Starbucks. Had to give him a little history on that country, which Donald Trump fully embraces.

And of course, MAGA itself is animated by homophobia, with many fully ginned up on Christian nationalism—and theocratic control of the government—in a way that is not much different from the fundamentalist Islamic regimes.

Mike then did the typical MAGA thing of whining that I wasn’t letting him talk. A sure sign of a loser.

Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

The best thing that California Governor Gavin Newsom did—certainly the best thing in the past few months, as his political posturing has been out of sync—was to tell Donald Trump this week to come and arrest him.

Faced with threats by Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, regarding Newsom’s rightful outrage of Trump federalizing California’s National Guard without Newsom’s request amid protests over immigration raids, Newsom made it clear he’s not afraid. He called Trump an “authoritarian” and said he was “unhinged.” He called him a 'liar and said he should “grow up.”

The response from the administration, thrown off guard, was muddled—and caused Trump to overplay further, which is always unpopular.

Homan defensively backtracked—and then backtracked again. Trump, after Homan’s first backtrack, said, Homan “should” arrest Newsom. When a reporter asked what Newsom should be arrested for, Trump said, “for being elected” as governor.

It was both dumb and exceedingly threatening, exposing Trump as the dictator he is. And that’s exactly what we want the American people to see. Newsom stood up and Trump, unable to back down, went too far.

Polling shows the American people see the the LA raids and the bringing in of the military as massive overreach. And remember, Trump is worried about the mid-terms and the prospects for the GOP, worried about investigations by Democrats and even impeachment. He knows that that he and the GOP are enormously unpopular, and that the savaging of the federal government and its agencies by Elon Musk and his flunkies has enraged people. Musk’s numbers are in the toilet and he’s now been banished in a public battle that played out for days.

Trump sees immigration as his only strong suit—even as the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia and others showed him losing support massively on the issue because people were being deported who were not criminals are were not getting due process—and he surely expected the LA raids to lift him up.

But Americans do not want to see families terrified—hard-working people who committed no crimes and are a part of the community—and they don’t want to see troops in the streets of U.S. cities.

A new CBS/YouGov poll shows Trump underwater in sending in the Marines, with people disapproving by double digits. Pollster G. Elliott Morris, looking at several polls, notes the LA actions look like they’re hurting Trump:

[T] his morning, we got the first batch of polling data on how people are feeling about the LA situation, and I think it's worth covering. Despite apparent conventional wisdom that the events would help Trump (and he is clearly looking for a fight, so probably agrees), the data show voters do not initially approve of his response, even if they don't approve of the protestors, either.
The point is: The default assumption that the LA protests help Trump seems thinly evidenced at this point. They may very well end up hurting him.

The abominable Stephen Miller is in charge of this operation—someone who’s an extremist and who doesn’t care about what the larger public might think—and no one has any control over him in the White House. He has Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on television, besides himself. These are all pretty horrifying and often incoherent people, certainly not reassuring to the American people.

The LA protests are a show of solidarity and defiance, as The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote, and they’ve been largely peaceful even as corporate media and MAGA have focused on scattered acts of vandalism. Now there are protests across the country. When the SEIU leader David Huerta was arrested during the LA protests for no apparent reason, union activists in cities across America organized demonstrations in cities across America until he was released.

Now, on Saturday, we’ll have the “No Kings Day” protests, which will likely turn out millions of people in cities, small towns, and rural America, as we saw with the “Hands Off” protests a few months ago.

Trump is feeble and stumbling, a laughingstock to the world. His tariff madness is tanking the economy and causing instability. His battle with Musk was ludicrous and his threats against Musk for even contemplating supporting Democrats—not that any Democrat should take his help—revealed how lawless Trump is. It’s only when people stand up to Trump that he’s further revealed as extreme because he just can’t hide it, and it drives more people away from him.

Trump’s actions are threat to democracy for sure. And the raids are terrifying for many immigrant families. But the rest of us must stand up for them and expose Trump further, as the American people continue to show their disapproval. We’ve got to keep exposing Trump’s brutality and the GOP’s undying loyalty to make sure the Republicans no longer retain power come the mid-term elections.

NOW READ: Why Trump wants to turn America violent

Wall Street traders, who are almost feral in sniffing out patterns in which to make money, are using the term coined by Financial Times columnist Neil Armstrong, “the TACO trade”— which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”—regarding Trump threatening tariffs, sending the markets plummeting, only to back down later, causing markets to rise.

Trump became agitated yesterday in the Oval Office when a reporter asked him about TACO . At first, he was bewildered, not seeming to know about it, but soon he became angry, calling it a “nasty question.” That’s how you know something is true, when Trump is exposed— humiliated about the truth surfacing—and soon becomes furious.

We can all learn from the market traders and from China and others beating Trump at his own game. In fact, TACO should be a motto—and an ad campaign—for Democrats, because it’s both empowering to those taking on Trump, and it also gets under his skin big time.

There’s no question Trump is engaged in mass corruption and destruction to our democracy, causing what is seemingly irreparable harm. But Trump is also losing a lot too.

Those two things can be true at once. I don’t have to go through all the ways Trump is engaged in corruption—from crypto dinners to pardons—and the ways he’s taken a sledgehammer to our democracy. We’re all seeing it happen every day.

At the same time, those who’ve chosen to fight Trump rather than capitulate find it’s the only way to respond, and they’re often winning. Trying to strike a deal with Trump—as Columbia University and some law firms did—only has him extorting you further, like the mob, as former FBI director James Comey put it last week. Trump is a classic narcissist who doesn’t really believe in striking “a deal.” That involves give and take, calibration and compromise, with both sides coming out on top or able to tell their supporters that.

Trump doesn’t want compromise, and always wants to be the only winner. He wants domination, and once he knows he can dominate you—such as when you agree to his supposed “deal”—he will keep dominating you, as Columbia and the cowardly law firms are finding out. He now wants to control Columbia’s entire curriculum, and he’s making the law firms that struck “deals” with him represent shady MAGA clients, after they agreed to give him and his “causes” billions in pro bono work.

So the only way is to fight him—you have nothing to lose and everything to gain—because more often not he caves in, or is a dealt a blow in court, as happened with three with law firms in recent weeks that said no to him.

China, unlike some other countries, refused to bow to Trump, and retaliated with tariffs. As it escalated dramatically, it was Trump who backed down, dropping the 145% tariffs, with China making no concessions of any kind. TACO was in play.

Even Vladimir Putin, in a terrible example, knows how to play Trump, aware that Trump would never get tough. So far, horribly, it’s TACO again.

Those who fought Trump have also often won in court. Trump had a series of losses in recent days, including the stunning defeat at the U.S. Court of International Trade yesterday. The three-judge panel—an Obama appointee, a Reagan appointee, and Trump appointee—unanimously threw out most of his tariffs. The administration is, of course, appealing, but the states and businesses that brought cases have had a big win, and legal experts believe that the Supreme Court will uphold the ruling.

There was no way that Trump’s using emergency powers granted by Congress decades ago to impose tariffs for an unlimited amount of time was constitutional. But unless you decide to fight it, a court won’t declare it.

The universities and law firms that capitulated to Trump worried they’d suffer losses if they didn’t. Yet, their reputations are now in tatters, a major loss. And the law firms have lost major clients, and are losing attorneys, who are leaving for other firms or starting their own firms. Meanwhile, Harvard has the public behind it in its fight, and the law firms that fought Trump are empowering others.

Trump’s goal, again, is domination, not negotiation and compromise. China and others learned that if you push back, he folds. So, we all should learn from the Wall Street traders’ shorthand—”Trump Always Chickens Out.” It empowers more of us to fight—including major institutions with power and influence, which we need on our side—and it drives Trump crazy.

NOW READ: The one character trait glaringly common among Trump supporters spotted by researchers

The Trump administration has been relentless—merciless—in its attacks on America’s oldest and most prestigious university, continually stripping Harvard of funding, trying to force it to get in line. The goal is to control the university and its curriculum, make no mistake. And Harvard is fighting back hard, with lawsuits and defiant words from its president, its faculty, and its students.

Donald Trump’s determination to basically destroy Harvard—taking away its free speech rights and no longer allowing for independent thought and education free of government control, in line with what he’s doing to other universities—is in sharp contrast to how Trump is dealing with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a threat to Europe, the U.S., and the world.

Over the weekend, Trump feigned outrage over Putin’s escalation of the war in Ukraine, after Russia launched one of the worst attacks on Ukrainians since the beginning of the war.

Trump looked weak and also compliant. To watch the video of him answering questions as he was going onto Air Force One is to see Trump faking anger, making as if he’s furious at Putin for “killing a lot of people” while he and Putin are supposed to be having talks. “I don’t like it all,” Trump said, sounding completely phony.

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” he said when asked about the attacks. “I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him… What the hell happened to him?”

This was vintage Trump, both lying about having a supposed close relationship with Putin—having told Americans during the presidential campaign that Putin will listen to him and end the war immediately—and then professing shock that Putin is doing what he’s doing, explaining that it’s just “crazy.”

Putin, of course, has been doing what he’s doing for three years now in Ukraine and for many years before that elsewhere. So Putin hasn’t changed and become “crazy.” But that’s how Trump tries to excuse himself.

When asked if Trump would now move ahead with more sanctions, Trump only said, “Absolutely.”

Yet when the European Union further sanctioned Russia last week, the U.S. did not join. And it likely won’t. Don’t forget that Russia was the only country that didn’t get hit with tariffs on the so-called “liberation day.”

Trump is doing Putin’s bidding. He professes outrage and then makes like he can’t understand what’s happening. But does nothing. Putin is determined to take Ukraine—and then he’ll continue on. As David Sanger at the New York Times put it, everyone is on to Trump, as he’s done this over and over.

The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russia’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.

One European official said that in a meeting with European leaders, it was clear Trump was moving on from the war, leaving our longtime ally Ukraine to fend for itself, which means a complete takeover by Russia.

“He said, essentially, ‘I’m out,’” the official told the Times. Putin has now seized more land, and there is no stopping him.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is actually preparing for war with Russia should Putin take Ukraine and invade other European countries.

Of course, that makes no sense, particularly since Trump has teased pulling out of NATO—unless Trump wants a war with Putin in Europe and then plans to conquer him. Or maybe it’s just the Pentagon—the generals—preparing despite what the lunatic commander in chief is saying.

Whatever is going on, it’s all so dangerous. And if Trump only spent half the energy he’s expending against Harvard on Putin, he’d beat him back. But Trump is focused on his grievances, attacking elite universities, while his bromance with Putin has him going soft on the dictator—even as the Pentagon is preparing for the scenario the president might actually create—no matter what the outcome is for the U.S. and the world.

NOW READ: Donald Trump finally faces his reckoning

The GOP, following the orders of their despotic leader Donald Trump, passed the budget bill that throws millions off of Medicaid, funds Trump’s mass deportations and cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans. No matter the draconian cuts, the massive debt—more than we’ve seen in any budget bill by any president—has the bond markets shuddering, coming on top of the tariff chaos.

Then there are the hidden last-minute provisions in the bill, which, if debated at all, were only discussed in committee hearings and on the floor overnight so the GOP would not have the American people see what was happening. I’m just going to focus on three that have surfaced, but you know there’s more in a bill that is over 1000 pages and rushed through.

Democratic Congressman Joe Neguse of Colorado exposed the stunning provision that would allow Donald Trump to defy court orders, and he eviscerated Rep. Jim Jordan about it. Yes, tucked in the bill is a paragraph limiting a court's ability to make the government follow its rulings.

“This is a deep deviation from existing federal law," Neguse said. "And I find it astounding ... I imagine there will be a lot of limited government advocates who will find deep reasons to be concerned about this type of provision because as you can imagine it will preclude folks from being able to vindicate their constitutional rights."

Jordan huffed and puffed about looking at it again, somewhat feigning ignorance, but it’s in the bill, per Newsweek:

A provision "hidden" in the sweeping budget bill that passed the U.S. House on Thursday seeks to limit the ability of courts—including the U.S. Supreme Court—from enforcing their orders.
"No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued," the provision in the bill, which is more than 1,000 pages long, says.
The provision would prohibit courts from enforcing contempt citations for violations of injunctions or temporary restraining orders—the main types of rulings that have been used to rein in President Donald Trump's administration—unless the plaintiffs have paid a bond, something that rarely happens when someone sues the government.

Democrats also this week asked the Congressional Budget Office to score the impact of the bill on Medicare in addition to Medicaid. And lo-and-behold, the GOP had another surprise. They knew that significantly raising the debt would automatically trigger cuts to Medicare.

The Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would increase the national debt so much that, according to The Washington Post, “it could force nearly $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.” Some of those cuts would could come next year, as the bill would force officials “to mandate across-the-board spending cuts over that window that would hit the federal health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities.”:

When legislation significantly adds to the national debt, which already exceeds $36.2 trillion, it triggers ‘sequestration,’ or compulsory budgetary reductions. In that scenario, Medicare cuts would be capped at 4 percent annually, or $490 billion over 10 years, the CBO reported in response to a request from Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pennsylvania), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee.

Then, well past midnight last night, the anti-trans provisions were added, as The Advocate reports:

In the early hours of Thursday morning, while much of the country slept or was waking up, House Republicans rammed through a sweeping multi-trillion-dollar domestic policy package that slashes Medicaid, restricts food assistance, and — in a stunning escalation — bans federally funded health care for transgender people of all ages.

The heartless bigots added two provisions, one of which strips health care from the Affordable Care Act. The initial mark-up of the Medicaid provision said it applied to minors—and then “minors” was stricken, so it then applied to all trans people.

One strips all Medicaid and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program) funding for gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries, not just for youth but for trans people of any age. A second bans coverage for those same services under the Affordable Care Act by excluding them from the definition of “essential health benefits.”

Again, these are just three horrendous provisions added to the bill, which was forced through by Mike Johnson and Trump and passed last night with no Democrats supporting it. The bill still has to pass the Senate and there have been Republicans skittish about the Medicaid cuts. But you know Trump will make threats and they will fall in line. So I’m not hopeful that any of these hidden provisions—and more that we don’t even know about—will come out.

Let’s remember though that the GOP always overplays, and then gets completely slammed. So, as Democrats focus on the all out assault on the safety net, as Americans see it and feel it, we’ve got to make sure the GOP pays for it in the mid-terms.

When the news of President Biden’s aggressive form of prostate cancer broke, it could have been a teaching moment, an opportunity for the media to educate Americans about prostate cancer and the confusing, conflicting guidelines on PSA screening via an annual blood test. As a prostate cancer survivor who deeply delved into the research three and half years ago when I was diagnosed, I committed myself as a journalist to breaking through the fog and misinformation.

But when the Biden cancer story broke, our corporate media was already swirling in sensationalism regarding a book that claims Biden had lost his mental capacities while president—or, even more dubiously, before that—and everyone around him covered it up. That one of the authors is a CNN anchor meant that rather than an interview with the authors, which might be expected, it has been wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage.

Of course, that had MAGA ginned up and firing off conspiracies, and then came the news of the cancer diagnosis. That only further fueled the claims of a cover-up. He had to know he had cancer and everyone covered it up!

That is factually incorrect.

But too much of the media allowed this idea to be propagated in the first 24-hour news cycle. Right-wing outlets interviewed MAGA Republican members of Congress, from Senator Rick Scott and Rep. Mike Lawler to Rep. Warren Davidson and Rep. Ronnie Jackson, Trump’s former White House doctor. Donald Trump Jr. promoted the conspiracy on social media and then Donald Trump himself jumped into it in a press conference, showing his mental decline and why he should be the subject of scrutiny, falsely and idiotically claiming Biden had “stage 9” cancer and delayed sharing his diagnosis. (Biden has Stage 4 cancer. His Gleason score for prostate cancer is 9.)

Even on MSNBC and other networks, doctors were interviewed who implied Biden had to have known. Oncologist Ezekiel J. Emmanuel did this on MSNBC, saying Biden “probably” had cancer for a long while (only later clarifying to the Washington Post that he did not necessarily mean that Biden “knew” he had cancer.)

Here are the facts to cut through the lies and misinformation. The US Preventative Services Talks Force has for years offered antiquated guidelines on prostate cancer screening—the PSA test, which is a blood test that measures prostate-specific antigen. USPSTF nonetheless is the gold standard of the U.S. government medical establishment’s prevention efforts—at least before RFK’s tenure and the havoc he is wreaking and will continue to wreak.

According to USPSTF, anyone with a prostate should begin screening at 55 and stop at age 69—well under Biden’s current age of 82.

Cancer groups like the American Cancer Society, the Prostate Cancer Foundation—as well as many doctors—disagree, and advise screening beginning in the mid-forties and even advise some groups, like Black men and those with a family history, to begin at age 40. The groups also advise making individual decisions with your doctor if you’re in your 70s and if you’re healthy and active. Clearly, if you’re likely to live a long time, you should be screened continually.

Why the discrepancy?

There’s a fear of over-treatment and harms caused by unnecessary treatment. If people test when too young, the critics of testing believe, they may find something that will never grow—a Gleason 6 on a scale of 6 to 10, the measure of prostate cancer advancement—and might be driven to have treatment at a young age that causes more harm than good. (PSA testing can sometimes be elevated for other reasons too, even repeatedly, meaning unnecessary biopsies sometimes happen.) And if you’re over 69, and you develop a tumor, because the vast majority of prostate cancer is slow-growing, you’ll likely die of something else before prostate cancer becomes life-threatening.

But honestly, let people make up their own minds with their doctors. The advice from the government is paternalistic and seem to deny that we have the medical science to make sure people catch it early and won’t have to undergo severe, intensive treatments to beat it back if they only find out later.

So, all of that said, it’s quite possible that Biden was following the USPSTF guidelines and had stopped testing at age 69. This would have been following a US government medical authority in consultation with his doctors, and not an act of negligence.

But it’s also quite possible Biden was testing regularly after 69—as many do—and that there was no rise in PSA. In the rare, aggressive form of prostate cancer, PSA often doesn’t rise, and even if it does, the cancer is so fast that it can develop rapidly between screenings—within a year—and go undetected. Some of the media—only on the second day of coverage—are focusing in on that, when this should have been something at their fingertips from the beginning.

We don’t have a lot of facts from Biden’s team and don’t know if he was still testing annually. We know from what they’ve told us he had urinary problems, which, if caused by prostate cancer, usually means the disease has progressed. A digital exam by a doctor was then performed and a “nodule” was detected. (People should always get both a PSA blood test and a digital exam annually, by the way, because something might be detected in one that is not detected in the other.)

That could mean PSA testing showed nothing concerning, or that Biden had not tested in a few years.

Either way, the physical exam obviously warranted further testing that included a biopsy, which found the Gleason 9 cancer and the metastasis to the bone. They may also have done a genetic test on the cancer to measure the aggressiveness.

That Biden was covering this up is also belied by sheer logic. If Biden had Gleason 9 metastatic prostate cancer four months ago or 8 months ago or two years ago, would he not be going for treatment immediately? Why on earth would he wait until after Trump took office or after the election or whatever, and put his life gravely at risk? It makes no sense.

And no, before some MAGA nutbag says he must have been secretly getting treatment, let’s be real about the treatment he’s going to receive. Androgen deprivation therapy, administered for more advanced cancer, is withering, bringing fatigue and many other side effects. And followed by radiation or chemotherapy or both for a man Biden’s age, it’s terribly intense and exhausting. He’d not be sitting on “The View,” as he did two weeks ago, laughing and carrying on, showing great energy.

Now, one last word, about that book. The saturation of coverage across all the media is over-the-top—and for CNN, it’s an abuse of the platform for an anchor to sell books—and shows how our media is so ghoulish and sensational.

Yes, it’s a story to consider, regarding questions about Biden, and whether Biden should have dropped out sooner. But the melodramatic claims that it somehow is a blow to the Democratic Party for decades (as some pundits have stated) is ludicrous.

This is an inside-the-media story—from the very same media that constantly tells us the American public has a short attention span. The GOP, after all, nominated a four-times indicted, twice-impeached, convicted felon who clearly has his own mental incompetence—and the American people elected him—seeming to have forgotten he did much more horrible stuff than anything Joe Biden and Democrats did in some sort of “cover up.”

Actually, I don’t want that to be the last word. Because the last word here should be about what lessons Joe Biden will now teach us, and the one good thing that can come out of the very challenging reality he now faces: Educating the public. If you have a prostate make sure you get tested—and urge those you know to get tested—beginning in your 40s and throughout your life. Information is power, and we all should be informed to make your own medical decisions.

UPDATE, 5/20/25, 7:06 pm ET: Biden’s spokesperson today confirmed that Biden didn’t have prostrate cancer prior to his announcement nor PSA-test since 2014, following the USPSTF guidelines. This blows out of the water the MAGA extremist conspiracies. It also rightly calls into question the USPSTF guidelines on not testing over the age of 69.

There are so many horrible injustices perpetrated by Donald Trump—from brutal attacks on immigrants to the targeting of law firms and universities—but none of this is registering with the MAGA base in recent days quite like the $400 million jet Trump’s claiming he will accept as a gift from Qatar to replace Air Force One, which may cost almost $1 billion to upgrade.

Some soft Trump voters have been horrified by those other issues, seeing students snatched on the streets and law firms bowing to Trump—and we’ve seen Trump’s approval numbers on immigration go down—but the extremist MAGA personalities like Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin and others have mostly been silent on those issues or defending Trump, while they have been slamming the Qatari gift.

Also speaking out against it are MAGA Republican members of Congress, from Ted Cruz to Josh Hawley, who never criticize Trump. Enough Republican senators have come out against it that the gift would be voted down by Congress, which, by law, actually must approve gifts of this kind to the country.

Of course, the outrage is not enough that these cowards in the GOP will actually be moved to force a vote and try to stop Trump. But they’re likely feeling pressured to publicly express the opinions of their constituents who are contacting them, the MAGA base—who follow the MAGA online personalities, who have big platforms. And those opinions are like that of a caller to my SiriusXM show yesterday, a three-time Trump voter, who is so angry about the jet—and about Trump’s $45 million military parade to celebrate his birthday—that he’s dumping Trump.

The hardcore MAGA couldn’t care less about Trump’s brutality against people—they actually love it—so events like immigrants sent to torture prisons and parents being taken from their children don’t move the needle much with them.

And while many are claiming their opposition to the Qatari royal family’s gifted jet is about taking something from a country that has supported Hamas, this is much more about them, and their own pocketbooks. The only thing that moves these people is how something affects themselves. Don’t forget: They’ve given Trump a pass or even cheered him for emboldening more dangerous foreign leaders than the Emir of Qatar, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

No, the true reason the Qatar jet has broken through is that it connects to the other issues that have jolted the MAGA base: Trump’s tariffs, the faltering economy and rising prices. Trump promised to bring down prices on day one and instead sent the economy into a downward spiral with tariffs. Many of the same MAGA personalities attacking the gifted jet also criticized Trump on tariffs, like Shapiro. They saw their stock portfolios plummet and watched prices continue to rise.

More so, they heard from their millions of followers—the people who line their pockets, many of whom have been struggling—and the Republicans in Congress heard from their constituents. They’re hearing what the caller to my show, Albert from Cleveland, said about the military parade and the Qatari jet; you can listen to that call here.

Albert voted for Trump three times, but now he’s off the Trump train because of the military parade—and the millions spent on it “when their are people starving in this country”—and the Qatari jet.

As I’ve said in the past, I don’t give a really hard time to these MAGA callers who apologize for their vote—which he did, saying, “I made a mistake”—even as their claims are mind-boggling.

I ask a few questions to challenge them and to learn their motivations past and present—and their answers are not even remotely satisfying—but I don’t push too hard. (Usually, I ask if they will work to elect a Democrat in the mid-terms—which I think should be our priority right now over pushing them away—but I actually didn’t have the time on this one because I had to go to a guest.)

I think that if prices were down, and if tariffs weren’t creating havoc on the economy, these people would be fine with Trump accepting the “palace in the sky,” having a military parade and using government dollars on himself.

But they’re not getting theirs, while Trump is treating himself like a king and enriching himself. They’re fine with lot of other people suffering; their deal with Trump was that he was supposedly going to make things better for them, even if he and his family would be grifting, as they did in his first term.

Trump doesn’t seem to get how broadly his tariff disaster has now affected him, as more of these flashpoints will arise, and wake people up. All of it presents opportunities for Democrats.

NOW READ: At least one Trump attack dog just killed their career

Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has been front and center in the Trump administration’s trade wars.

His main function has been to puff Trump up, and then carry out Trump’s various cave-ins—most recently his folding to China. Bessent met with Chinese officials over the weekend, and the result was reducing tariffs (though onerous 30% tariffs remain), after Trump said he’d never back down from the 145% tariffs without concessions, which China never offered. And of course the economic impact is already underway with supply chain shortages.

Bessent’s other function is to go on television and try to spin it all as a win, though it’s been nothing but surrender after surrender for Trump on tariffs—and severe, lasting harm to the economy.

Despite the continued uncertainty, Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager whom the Wall Street Journal noted was previously “little-known” if respected in the financial world, now has a desperate Wall Street clinging to him as the person who they hope will save them from Trump’s lunacy.

He’s using that platform—and Trump—to promote himself as somewhat of an oracle. Bessent helps drive the markets back up after they’ve plummeted, as investors buy on hope and rumor—which he supplies to them—even when both might be false. (Inevitably the markets drop again on actual economic news and solid data, as well on Trump’s threats.)

But Bessent isn’t, as the media’s portrayed him, an “adult in the room” who’s a sort of Democrat-turned-Republican, trying to do the “right thing.”

JD Vance has been Bessent’s longtime friend, which should tell you enough about his character. The WSJ reported, in a piece last year, that Bessent supported Trump in 2016, and then, even after January 6th, “decided to go all-in [on Trump in 2024] when he saw that the legal cases against Trump were helping, not hurting, his approval rating. He told people the phenomenon reminded him of a stock that rises despite bad news, a bullish sign for some investors.”

Trump, always taken in by flattery, decided that Bessent was an oracle when Bessent backed Trump over Nikki Haley, who much of Wall Street’s Republicans got behind in the primaries. Trump then invited the ambitious Bessent to a 2024 North Carolina rally to speak, and called Bessent, “One of the most brilliant men on Wall Street. Respected by everybody.”

But Bessent was previously “little-known” on Wall Street precisely because he’s not an oracle—or, apparently, that brilliant. One of his biggest predictions—which he made at that very rally in North Carolina—has in fact been turned on its head.

“Kamala Harris will start with the Kamala crash in the stock market,” Bessent warned the crowd. “Then it will be the Kamala crash in the economy.”

Of course, the “crash”—the largest market drop in years because of Trump’s trade war, which saw the Dow have its worst April since 1932—was the “Trump crash,” not the “Kamala crash.” If Harris were president, there would be no tariffs, and no chaos imposed by tariffs, in the markets or in the economy. That is simply a fact.

There’s been much made of Bessent having worked for George Soros more than a decade ago, as chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, as well as his having held a fundraiser for Al Gore in 2000. Hence the idea that he was a gay man who supported Democrats previously.

But in fact, as the WSJ, reports, he “didn’t agree” with a lot of the causes Soros’ foundation backed, and regarding one of them—proposing to restrict the fund from investing in companies doing business with Israel—Bessent threatened to resign. The idea subsequently “was dropped.”

And the same year he the held the fundraiser for Gore, Bessent gave money to John McCain. He’s mostly backed Republicans in fact—to the tune of over $15 million—but gave money to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which, as with Gore, seemed more like making sure he, as a business person, buttered both sides of the bread more than anything else. And Bessent has been on the Trump train since it began rolling down the tracks.

In 2016, Bessent told people they were underestimating Trump’s chances. After Trump won the election, Bessent scored a big win betting on a market rally and later gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Bessent also has taken sides in the types of culture fights Trump picks. In 2020, he lobbied to get the headmaster reinstalled at his son’s former Manhattan school, St. Bernard’s, after concerns about the school turning too liberal.

So Bessent is more MAGA—and opportunistic—than the liberal-ish adult-in-the-room he’s been portrayed as in the press. And it’s pretty appalling for a gay man, working for a president stripping LGBTQ rights while the Supreme Court Trump created is routinely carving out exemptions to LGBTQ rights for “religious liberty” reasons.

Bessent has been married to a former New York City prosecutor, John Freeman, since 2011. They have two school-aged children, and they buy, upgrade and sell mansions in posh places, and have sold at least 20 homes. Until recently, they lived in what they called the Pink Palace in Charleston, South Carolina, which they sold for over 18 million dollars.

Bessent, according to an interview in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015, never imagined he’d be able to get married as a gay man, and have children via surrogacy. It’s a comment that is quite jarring considering that, a year later, he’d support Trump— and is now working him:

In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue. What’s fantastic is now, people in the rest of America, whether blue collar or white collar, have access to everything. If you had told me in 1984 when we graduated and people were dying of Aids that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But who made it possible for Bessent to marry, and have children?

Not the Republicans he was supporting—nor Trump. And not the current Supreme Court Trump created, which, if the issue came to them now for the first time, would never rule for marriage equality. And everything they’re doing now is in fact chipping away at the Obergefell ruling, allowing for discrimination against gay married couples in public accommodations.

It was gay and lesbian activists, putting their own bodies on the line, who fought for Bessent’s rights, and Democrats, who finally took up the mantle that got marriage equality legalized in the states and then eventually upheld by the courts. Marriage equality was opposed by the GOP—and still is opposed among most those Republicans in Congress, and among Trump’s powerful base Christian nationalist—and we’ve seen Trump stripping LGBTQ history from government websites, removing anything with the word “gay,” targeting queer people in atttacks on DEI and killing LGBTQ health initiatives.

Bessent, who once served on the board of God's Love We Deliver, an organization founded to deliver meals for homebound people with AIDS, is now part of an administration that is literally killing people with AIDS, having stopped lifesaving HIV drug treatments for millions through USAID. And Bessent is watching the abominable things this administration is doing to transgender people, destroying lives, denying they exist.

Bessent could have influence on Trump regarding LGBTQ rights if he wants. Curiously, we’ve not seen, for example, the Trump administration attacking Yale University the way it is attacking Harvard. Could that be because Bessent sits on the university council at Yale? In fact, he and his sister donated the Bessent Library to Yale, and Bessent has endowed three scholarships at Yale. Sounds like he might be protecting his alma mater from Trump. But he couldn’t care less about helping his own people under attack.

Bessent got his—his money, his marriage, his children, his homes—and now, opportunistically, he’s making a name for himself helping the very president who is harming LGBTQ people and so many other minorities every day, in addition to endangering democracy and sending the economy in a spiral downward, causing hardship for millions of Americans. There aren’t enough words to describe this kind of immorality.

With the arrival of Pope Leo XIV, much of the media has emphasized the mystery of the papal conclave, focusing on cryptic rituals, traditions shrouded in secrecy, and deep solemnity—which sells and keeps people riveted—when there are some things that are pretty clear as day regarding the politics of the selection of Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost. And even MAGA world sees that, and is in a full-blown meltdown over it.

The Catholic church is a global institution with huge cultural impact. As a nation state, The Vatican, with embassies and diplomats all over the world, and a presence at the U.N., has a head of state who has outsized power. The pope has a massive political platform. Certainly Francis sought to influence public policy, in the U.S. and in countries around the world.

And, as I noted last week, Francis was a smart politician—unlike his predecessor, Benedict, who was a lousy politician, a man led by the impulsiveness of his zealous conservatism, rarely making strategic decisions.

It’s clear that Francis knew—or certainly tried to ensure—that Prevost would be the next pope, desiring to have someone who would continue his direction for the church, away from the conservative American church’s ideologies and emphasis. Francis had named the vast majority of the cardinals who voted on his successor, and they were loyal to him—and likely loyal to his wishes if indeed he’d lobbied them prior to his death.

Francis brought Prevost to the Vatican in 2023—making him a cardinal, and thus eligible to be pope, only two years ago—to further learn the intricacies of the Vatican (and, by default, the papacy), obviously grooming him for the job. Francis put Prevost in charge of the office in the church that vets bishop nominations from around the world, one of the most powerful offices in the Vatican, tasked with reshaping the church’s leadership.

It involved choosing bishops, but sometimes removing church leaders and replacing them because they were trouble. Prevost worked alongside Francis in the two years before his death, a critical time. That was when Francis was seeking to reshape the American church’s hierarchy, as I wrote at the time, which for years has been deeply enmeshed in GOP—and MAGA—politics.

It was during that two-year period when there were big moves, such as Francis’ firing of Bishop Robert Strickland of Tyler, Texas—an icon of extremist MAGA Catholics—who defied Francis’ teachings. It was also during that time that Cardinal Raymond Burke was booted from his palatial Vatican apartment and sent packing. He was a Trump-supporting Covid denier who was making a fortune on the MAGA speaking circuit in the U.S.—and someone who also defied Francis’ reforms.

Prevost was there for all that and was deeply involved in helping carry out those decisions.

Before taking that job in Rome, however, Prevost, who was born in Chicago and educated in the U.S. and had spent his early years as a priest in the Midwest, was in the field as a missionary in Peru, where he also became a citizen of that country. He was Apostolic Administrator of Chiclayo, then named the Bishop of Chiclayo by Francis in 2015, where he served until Francis brought him to Rome in 2023 and made him a cardinal.

He got the experience as a missionary—a life experience that was vital to Francis’ outlook in reaching the people and getting beyond the church’s stone buildings—and then came to the Vatican to work with Francis in his last two years.

Francis may have had a few people in mind whom he was preparing over the years, but it was Prevost he clearly seemed focused on near the end of his life. The cardinals’ selection of Prevost, an American, sent shock waves through the world of church scholars and pundits, since no one expected an American to become pope because the U.S. has traditionally been seen as having too much power already.

But I believe having an American as pope at this point in time was part of Francis’ plan. Prevost was active in recent months on X. He hadn’t posted in all of 2024, but this year he slammed JD Vance, among other posts criticizing the Trump administration. I don’t think any of this was an accident, as these social media posts would become big news—which they are—upon the pope’s death and Provost’s becoming Pope Leo, sending a very clear message.

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One opinion piece from The Catholic Standard that Provost re-posted just a few weeks ago was written by the auxiliary bishop of Washington, DC, Bishop Evelio Menjivar, who is from El Salvador and had been an undocumented immigrant himself for many years. It’s a powerful piece slamming the Trump administration:

The video of a student being accosted by masked agents after her visa was revoked without notice – apparently because of an op-ed she co-wrote years ago – is horrifying. Most egregiously, the government has now claimed the authority to unilaterally seize certain people based on mere suspicion, or because of their tattoos, and send them to a prison in El Salvador accused of human rights abuses – all without review by a court to even determine their identity. The government admits some have been wrongfully deported, but officials are fighting attempts to right these wrongs.
More than a few natural-born Americans are saying they do not recognize their country anymore, but many of us from other lands recognize all too well the terror of people being snatched by secret police and disappeared. We left our former countries precisely to get away from it.

It’s also noteworthy that Prevost chose Leo for his name, meant to signify his carrying on the work of Pope Leo XIII, who was known as the father of social justice. In his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, Pope Leo outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safety in the workplace, and the ability to form labor unions. Interestingly, the previous Pope Leo served from 1878 to 1903, during the entire presidency of Trump’s favorite president, William McKinley, the fanatic on tariffs who also emboldened big business to trample on workers.

Provost also criticized Trump often in his first term, on issues such as gun violence and immigration. I believe Francis understood the need for a pope who is from this culture, who speaks English fluently, who spars in his own voice on social media, and who could sit down with American television interviewers and lay out the case against harsh policies and attacks on the marginalized.

While the U.S. is just one country among many, and while the church is growing much more in Asia and Africa, Francis had to see—as many of us have—that right now Trump is an existential threat to everything in the world that is held sacred, including the Catholic church itself. The Vatican is smack dab in the middle of the European Union, under attack by Trump’s trade war and by the U.S.’s encouragement of Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Europe. And the Vatican is surely impacted by any weakening of NATO.

But it’s, of course, beyond self-preservation. The causes that Francis promoted—supporting migrants, helping the poor and marginalized, saving the planet—are under assault.

We don’t know a lot about Leo’s recent beliefs and positions on women in the church, LBGTQ rights and other issues. Like Francis himself, he showed some hostility to gay rights many years ago—almost 15 years ago, in fact—but like Francis, he likely evolved, like many other leaders.

He recently remained open—though not fully committed—to Francis’s having allowed blessings of same-sex unions. And he has supported Francis’s commitment to “synodality”—diverse inclusiveness from grassroots lay people in the church—which the American conservatives in the church have fiercely opposed. My hunch is that Francis told him to keep his powder dry on the issue—as Francis did before he was pope—but we’ll know in time.

What is true is that there is no going back now to the archconservatives. Francis’s legacy lives on. And there is now a voice in the Vatican who is both a citizen of Peru and the U.S., someone whose maternal grandparents were Creole people of color from Louisiana. And he is someone with an enormous platform, who looks like he will be an outspoken home-grown counterpoint for all Americans—and the world—to the brutality of the Trump era.

A quick post as I’m going through audio for my SiriusXM show and just watched this brilliant clip I’ll be playing today. It’s an example of how Democrats need to slice and dice Republicans, courtesy of Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

Marjorie Taylor Greene led a hearing on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” yesterday.

It did not go well.

Democrats showed her to be the fool that she is by focusing on how this non-issue isn’t something anyone is talking about in a world of out-of-control tariffs, potential cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, and Donald Trump sending people who committed no crimes to torture prisons in El Salvador.

But Crockett won the day. She’s become a superstar among Democrats because she is able to very succinctly expose the ludicrousness of the GOP in clever ways. She also makes you laugh, and had me doing so the first time she came on my SiriusXM program.

“I want to play a game. It’s called Trump or Trans. You ready?” she asked Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, during Graves’ testimony. “I’m gonna ask you a question and you’re gonna tell whether it is Trump or trans people that are responsible. You understand?“

Graves said, “yes.’ Then Crockett proceeded.

The first one: Gutted medical research. Trump or trans?
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Kidnapping American citizens and sending them to foreign countries, aka “deporting” them.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Driving us into a recession.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Increasing the cost of everything.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Waging an idiotic tariff war.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Harming farmers.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Ignoring the Constitution.
Graves: Trump
Crockett: Proposing to take away Social Security.
Graves: Trump
Crockett; Cutting health care.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Firing government workers who keep our country safe.
Graves: Trump.
Crockett: Encouraging an environment of hate and divisiveness.
Graves: Trump.

Crockett then went on to highlight the fraud of Trump’s supposed war on waste, fraud and abuse, with a graphic behind her a life size Trump playing golf.

It was an amazing, fun take down, done so expertly.

Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has always positioned himself as straddling between MAGA and a mythical world of normal Republicans. I say “mythical’ because there is no world of “normal” or non-MAGA Republicans—just a few stragglers here and there, most of whom are Never Trumpers who are not in elected office.

The myth of huge numbers of non-MAGA Republicans is kept alive by the Youngkins of the world—a Republican governor who was elected in a blue state—for the sake of courting independents and even to suck in some disaffected Democrats.

For Youngkin, a multi-millionaire investor turned politician, it’s been about putting up a front as a regular guy suburban dad who’s some sort of mainstream Republican—even in cosplay in his signature red fleece vest—but pushing policies that are pure MAGA, religiously bowing to elements of the base, from the Christian nationalists to the rural voters in red caps.

But now Youngkin is overwhelmed by a divide within MAGA itself. And it’s one that won’t go away soon, involving a gay lieutenant governor candidate, drag shows, t-shirts and sexually explicit photos of men.

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Youngkin moved a week and half ago to oust GOP lieutenant governor nominee John Reid in this year’s Virginia elections, an openly gay and very conservative Richmond talk-radio host, who refused to withdraw after insisting that he’s not responsible for the Tumblr page with naked, sexually provocative photos of men that Youngkin pointed to in calling for Reid to drop out. And Reid is now getting support from other MAGA leaders in Virginia, who are pushing back on Youngkin.

Reid revers Donald Trump. He’s a homocon in a party that is stripping LGBTQ rights—and hellbent on ending marriage equality at the Supreme Court—and Trump has been very much a part of that, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who are almost every day creating exemptions to LGBTQ rights by citing “religious liberty.”

Christian nationalists in Virginia, so emboldened by the power they’ve amassed in the Trump era, moved to push Reid out of the race. Christian nationalists have tolerated having MAGA gays—Richard Grenell as a Trump diplomat, or Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary, for example—but only as long as they weren’t too powerful or promoting the “LGBTQ agenda.”

But having Reid just a heartbeat away from being governor of the state had Virginia Christian nationalists alarmed. And even if he didn’t actually advocate for fighting the GOP’s assault on transgender people and others, he showed signs, to them at least, of potential trouble—by attending a drag performance and where a t-shirt that called him “liberal in the bedroom.” I kid you not.

The Washington Post reports on their confrontation with Reid:

Several evangelicals had begun agitating against Reid after he won the lieutenant governor nomination by default when his only opponent dropped out for health reasons…
…Reid has been open about his homosexuality for some three decades and is in an eight-year, committed relationship… On April 11, 10 days before [his only opponent] dropped out, three conservative religious activists summoned Reid to the Silver Diner in suburban Richmond to confront him with three photos: Two showed Reid attending a drag performance, the other showed him sporting a T-shirt declaring, “Liberal in the bedroom.”
The activists warned Reid that those pictures — pulled from social media Reid agrees is his, not from Tumblr — would surface publicly in two weeks if he did not quit the race, according to one of the three, Virginia Christian Alliance Chairman Don Blake.

Reid blew them off. But then on April 25, a Youngkin adviser received a routine “vulnerability report” on the candidate conducted by an outside group, and it turned up the Tumblr page. The Tumblr used the same handle as Reid’s other social media, but Reid denied it was his page.

On the now-deleted account, someone had reposted pictures — none of which appeared to depict Reid — ranging from explicit photos of male genitalia to images typical of a racy underwear ad, according to posts that The Post reviewed on the Wayback Machine, an internet archive. As recently as March 2024, the account reposted a photo of a man facing the camera wearing only a baseball cap.

Youngkin, clearly bowing to what he thought were unified MAGA beliefs on the issue, called on Reid to drop out that morning. Except the position of the Christian nationalists wasn’t representative of others in the Virginia MAGA base who’ve now slammed Youngkin. As the Post notes, “some of the most ardent MAGA faithful have rallied for Reid because of his outspoken love for Trump and hard-right stances on issues” and noted the “open criticism of Youngkin by party stalwarts is new.”

But their support of Reid is highly conditional:

“I stand with John Reid,” Rooz Dadabhoy, a suburban Richmond activist who has been among Youngkin’s most prominent cheerleaders, tweeted on Monday. “This is a time where Virginia Republicans should be coming together”…Her tweet has since been deleted.
“He’s with us on every issue that we still have a vote on in this country” — unless the Supreme Court reverses its 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage — “and I couldn’t be more pleased to have him as our nominee,” Virginia Republican national committeewoman Patti Lyman said after a Reid rally in suburban Richmond on Wednesday. While saying she is “completely opposed to the entire LGBT agenda,” Lyman admires Reid’s “spine of steel that he has exhibited through this disgraceful onslaught from the governor.”

This is of course, bonkers—and so pathetic. They love Reid as long as he doesn’t promote his actual rights and defend who he is. And, at least with Dadabhoy, they don’t love him enough to keep a tweet up in which they support him.

Even the current extreme MAGA lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, the gubernatorial nominee for 2025, defied Youngkin and backed Reid—but only after a week of silence. And she apparently won’t even be seen with Reid:

After nearly a week of silence and canceling joint events, Earle-Sears finally chose a side: She supports Reid’s right to stay in the race, though she has still avoided appearing in public with him.

Republicans were already facing an uphill battled with an extreme MAGA candidate at the top of the ticket—who, unlike Youngkin, has done no window dressing to make herself seem less crazy—in a year in which Trump is bringing out Democrats to vote against the MAGA GOP. But now they’re completely divided going into the election as well.

Whether the Tumblr page was Reid’s—which he staunchly denies—or a setup by opponents, the entire episode shows how much queerness is still the third rail in GOP politics, enraging the Christian nationalist base.

They like to pretend it’s only about trans rights (which is horrendous enough), as they masquerade openly gay men among them as being just like other men—as long as those gay men don’t advocate for their rights or depict anything remotely sexual. This, even as the heterosexual MAGA men are expounding on their sexual conquests (think former Rep. Matt Gaetz and the many bro podcasters in the manosphere) while MAGA women like Rep. Lauren Boebert are groping their boyfriends in theaters.

Youngkin curiously has had an “LGBTQ + Advisory Board” during his term as governor, which saw at least one member resign in protest in recent weeks over his attempt to oust Reid. That board is clearly an artifact of Youngkin’s having tried to portray himself in his election in 2022 and the years thereafter as the mythical normal Republican. His trying to oust Reid, however, likely emanates from the newly anti-DEI wave in MAGA—which is anti-LGBTQ—that Trump 2.0 has ushered in.

Both Youngkin’s LGBTQ advisory board as governor, and the ousting of Reid, will likely haunt Youngkin from different directions if he makes a presidential run, which political observers have been going on about.

But it also points to fissures in the national MAGA movement, where many have thought, at least since Trump’w first term, that it’s okay to be gay as long as you stay quiet about it. Even that, however, is not going to be acceptable as the strictures around queer people—the censoring of government websites and data, and the stripping of rights, healthcare and basic dignity of LGBTQ people—intensify with the Christian nationalists’ rise to power.

NOW READ: Trump just issued a threat to all of us

A really bizarre aspect of the second Trump administration and its extreme actions is its choice of the face of its immigration policies—and now other policies too.

That face is Stephen Miller’s, a man who offers loud, hateful bromides to the media, all of which you expect to end with, “Heil Hitler!” This guy is pure evil, salivating over “deporting” brown-skinned 4-year-old American citizens with stage-four cancer.

And now they’re putting him out front on tariffs too, and government funding. It makes no sense—but I’m here for it!

This morning he turned up for a White House press briefing, a wannabe Joseph Goebbels, commanding, “"Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values.”

Here we have Trump collapsing in the polls, with the worst approval numbers of any president in history in his first 100 days. And as I wrote, it’s a perfect opportunity for Democrats to kick him while he’s down. For the GOP, it’s a potential political wipeout in the making, as Americans are waking up to what is happening.

A poll conducted by the widely respected Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of Americans now believe Trump is a “dangerous dictator.”

Seriously. When asked if they agree Trump is "a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy," 52% said yes.

But even more startling, 17% of Republicans agree with it.

That means a bunch of people who voted for Trump now think he’s a dangerous dictator who should be stopped, which, even if only partially accurate, is a five-alarm fire for Republicans in Congress going into the mid-terms.

Most of those who backed Trump say it was because of the economy and immigration, which were Trump’s strengths. But the tariffs and the brutal deportations of people who committed no crimes, sent to a torture prison overseas or elsewhere, have sent Trump’s numbers into a nosedive.

Faced with the polling plummeting on those issues and the majority believing Trump is a dictator, you’d think they’d turn to the many smiling, robotic blonde women they have as officials—though, admittedly, Pam Bondi is pretty scary. But they’re putting the grating and horror-movie-ready Miller—a guy who looks like a defendant at the Nuremberg trials—out to defend a president now believed to be a dictator by most Americans.

And, at least on immigration, when it’s not Miller it’s the really creepy-looking Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, who talks like he has marbles in his mouth and looks like he gives off the scent of three-day-old clothes and cheap bourbon.

Sure, Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro and RFK Jr. are no day at the beach, off the rails and batty as all hell in their beliefs, as are many others in the administration. But you literally cannot understand what Tom Homan is saying half of the time as he gobbles up his own words and slurs on national television.

And the half you do understand is his saying that he and Trump will defy judges and court orders and round up whoever they decide is a “terrorist”—which appears to be every undocumented immigrant and even some American citizens—based on absolutely no solid proof and with no due process.

Between Homan and Miller, the Trump administration is only reinforcing that on immigration they are engaging in violent, lawless actions against people, clearly intending to traumatize the targets and terrorize everyone.

It shows how much power Miller has amassed—because you know there are those in the administration who must loathe him—and how out of touch Trump is to make them the face of policies he’s cratering on. But hey, bring it on.

I had a plumbing issue in my building that had me up half the night—not fun!—but I wanted to weigh in with a quick post on Donald Trump’s first 100 days. ‘

Because, well, the first 100 days are a disaster for Trump—and the country and the world—but they are also a sign that he’s crumbling and that Democrats and progressives need to fully take him down.

All the politicians, the institutions, the people who thought they should “work with” Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE and “pick our battles” miscalculated badly. Columbia University. The law firms. Gavin Newsom and a slew of Democrats in Congress. They all f----- up big time.

Those who said the Democratic Party had entered a years-long wilderness unless it engaged in a wholesale makeover truly did not know what they were talking about. Poll-driven. Consultant talk. Focus-group bull----.

We all knew better—not because we’re geniuses, but because we saw what was in front of our faces. Trump won the popular vote by 1.4%. He didn’t even crack 50%. The notion that he’d fundamentally shifted the country—as these pathetic politicians and pundits told us—was always built on a house of cards.

Remember polling guru Nate Cohn at The New York Times, telling us in March of last year that we were amid a possible “racial realignment” and then echoing the idea of a political realignment after the 2024 election?

Now Cohn was forced to eat crow last weekend, as The New York Times/Sienna poll, like all the polls I wrote about on Saturday, showed Trump in free fall. Cohn stated:

You would be hard pressed to find a single “good” number for Mr. Trump in the survey.

The pollster G. Elliot Morris sums it up:

Take a minute to digest this. Just 100 days into his term Trump is posting 2022- to 2023-level Biden numbers on his handling of the economy.

That's despite inheriting a 3% inflation rate and healthy labor market and business conditions. The Economist last fall put a picture of a dollar bill rocketing into space on their cover to show the dominance of the American economic engine. Then, the newspaper asked: "America’s economy is bigger and better than ever. Will politics bring it back to Earth?" (The answer, as it turned out, was “yes.”)

But the most remarkable and politically significant decline for Trump is on immigration. Despite campaigning successfully on the issue in 2024, when Americans were preoccupied by a porous border and high-profile violent crimes blanketing right-leaning media for the GOP to score political points, polls now show that more Americans disapprove of Trump's immigration policy than approve of it.

And that’s why speaking out and slamming Trump hard was always the way to go—and it helps further wake people up to what he was doing and bring his numbers down more.

The “Hands Off” protests highlighted the dangers of Trump. Pushing back has the GOP loyalists in Congress—and in the states—in a box, fearful of Trump but death afraid of the mid-terms. They’re in turmoil at town halls—if they have them at all—and they are looking at a possible political wipe out in some places.

Democratic Governor J.D. Pritzker of Illinois has been sounding the perfect note—full, non-stop alarm—and last weekend in New Hampshire called for mass protest and disruption, saying Democrats should not let Republicans have “a moment of peace.” He wrapped the “do-nothing Democrats” who’ve gone with an appeasement message. But he really demolished Trump, showing how he’s brought us into a “perilous time,” explaining:

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.

The town calls. The sit-in at the Capitol over the weekend by members of Congress. The tour by Bernie Sanders and AOC Sen. Cory Booker’s 25 hour speech. Senator Chris Van Hollen going to El Salvador, and demanding—and getting—a meeting with Kilmar Abrago Garcia. It all showed Democrats have power and influence, and they have fight.

We need much more of this and we need to put an end to talk from the appeasement Democrats. Trump, at 100 days, is showing he is weak, with the lowest approval rating of any president at this point. And he’s going to continue to collapse, because he has no idea what he’s doing—but thinks he’s so smart—while those around him are ideologues so inside the bubble that they can’t grasp how badly it’s going.

It’s all right there for the taking at Trump’s 100-day mark. Democrats need to hit Trump while he’s down—repeatedly—and make sure he never gets up.

On my SiriusXM program, I’ve taken note that in recent weeks no MAGA people are calling in to defend Trump. Most of my callers are progressive, but a few times a week I’d hear from Trump supporters defending Trump.

We certainly have received calls from some Trump voters who are sorry for their vote. But why aren’t MAGA calling up to defend him?

Rob from New Hampshire called to tell me the reason: “We’re embarrassed.”

He’s a Trump voter who’s called in before defending Trump. But now he’s thrown in the towel. You can listen to the audio here.

“It’s as simple as that,” Rob said, pointing to how he feels when he opens up his 401K account. “You’re not getting the calls because, ‘What are they going to say?’”

As with other callers who changed their mind on Trump, I of course had a lot of questions, beginning with: Trump said he was going to do all of this, so did you not believe him?

Rob’s answer, like those of the others like who’ve changed their minds on Trump, won’t satisfy you. But as I’ve said before, I don’t push these people too hard because I’d rather they agree to vote for Democrats to halt Trump—which Rob did—rather thank push them away. We can always argue later.

“I think he needs to be stopped,” Rob said, vowing to vote for Democrats for Congress.

Then he even said he’s looking at Bernie Sanders and AOC as a presidential ticket, seeing them touring red states and getting huge crowds. I know—the mind boggles.

You’ll have to listen to this one for yourself. Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

This is just a short, cute one. But it exposes once again what hypocrites MAGA are, as well as their empty, grandiose claims. And it’s kind of funny.

On my SiriusXM program, I was discussing Elon Musk’s rummaging through the Social Security Administration, and the twisted arguments of Musk, Trump and their supporters. And then came a call from Tom in Cleveland.

But first, let’s be clear: Elon Musk, who has recklessly called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme,” has been lying about Social Security and the supposed massive fraud in the Social Security Administration—which he’s given us no evidence about.

The Washington Post exposed why Musk is struggling to find fraud in the Social Security Administration: “Claims of massive problems by Elon Musk and President Trump are at odds with the agency’s audits and reports.”

Elon Musk put a big target on the Social Security Administration in the first weeks of the Trump administration, claiming it is plagued by “immense waste” and promising audits to root out “the extreme levels of fraud.” President Donald Trump said during his joint address to Congress earlier this month that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service was already “identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” at the agency.

But some of the biggest examples of allegedly wasteful spending held up by Musk and DOGE so far have been overblown or inaccurate. Musk’s assertion that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security benefits was so off-base that it had to be tamped down by the agency’s acting head, who had been promoted because of his willingness to cooperate with DOGE. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” acting Social Security commissioner Lee Dudek said.

In fact, we’ve been offered no evidence of anyone over 100 receiving a payment who shouldn’t be receiving a payment, though Trump claimed in his speech before Congress that “over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are aged over 160 years old.” He even preposterously claimed there was someone over 360 years old—which would be shortly after the landing of the Mayflower—receiving checks, which is a couple centuries before Social Security was created.

First off, the Social Security Administration stops payments automatically to anyone over 115 years old. Second, as has been explained by analysts, the names of former recipients are still in the database even though they are long dead and not receiving checks.

If there’s all this fraud, tell us the names of the dead people receiving the checks, and tell us the names of the people who’ve been charged for cashing their checks? Are they going to prison? Where are they? Who are they?

It’s all a lie.

Enter Tom from Cleveland, calling into my show. He demanded to know if I cared about people over 100-years-old getting checks, if I cared about “fraud and abuse.” I told him this was a lie, and asked him to give me the name of the 360-year-old person getting a check, which he couldn’t. He actually then asked me to prove that it wasn’t true.

Haha. We’re supposed to believe Trump without proof, as if the burden is on us and not him?

But more hilariously, Tom himself engaged in fraud and abuse. He posed as someone else, telling our producers he wanted to talk about his fears of not getting his Social Security check after paying into the system, when he was actually a MAGA defender of Musk.

I have no problem speaking with MAGA callers and debating them—when it’s possible and they’re not ranting like maniacs—and I’m happy to take their calls. But I have no time for MAGA who call in posing as anti-Trump, engaging in “fraud” and “abuse,” and thus proving to be a “waste” of my time. So it was soon a “goodbye” to Tom.

Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

Donald Trump‘s approval ratings are dropping fast. He’s underwater in every poll, with a majority disapproving.

In a CBS poll released over the weekend, 59% of Americans said the economy is bad and getting worse. And a majority lays it at the feet of Trump, clearly seeing the chaos he unleashed with tariffs as a disaster, with 54% saying Trump's policies are more to blame for the bad economy and only 21 percent saying the blame is with Joe Biden.

This tracks with other recent polls. So Republicans and Trump himself can try to blame Biden until they’re blue in the face. That argument is only going to work with the most hard-core MAGA. And Republicans can’t win with just hard-core MAGA. They’re reportedly afraid of a “political wipeout.”

And it’s not just the economy. Young people who voted for Trump are leaving him in droves, horrified after seeing the deportations to torture prisons in El Salvador of people who’ve committed no crimes and the disappearing of international students on our streets. Trump is defying the Supreme Court on returning a man who was wrongly deported—sitting in the Oval Office with El Salvador’s self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” yesterday and doubling down—something that is jarring many Americans and creating a constitutional crisis.

Then there are specific people who have influence, right-wing figures with big followings, who now say they were wrong to back Trump. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times today tracks a “vibe shift,” in which “several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice.”

I’ve heard this among some callers to my SiriusXM program. After I asked for MAGA with buyer’s remorse to call in last week, Mike from California called in, a three-time Trump voter who is now furious, sorry he voted for Trump in 2024. You can listen in to the call here.

Mike is a federal worker—and an actual rocket scientist, no less — but his job is fine. He saw other people, however, people whose jobs were vital, losing their jobs all around him. The mass firings and Elon Musk taking a wrecking ball to the government angered him.

The attack on social security. The mass deportations of people who committed no crimes, and in particular the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongly deported who is now in the El Salvador hellhole prison, and who Trump refuses to return. The people disappearing from streets. The tariffs causing global economic disaster.

All of it infuriated Mike and made him sorry for his vote.

I, of course, had questions. Trump promised he would do all of this—the mass firing spree, for example, was all in Project 2025. Trump said he’d deport between 11 million and 18 million people, which would have to include millions of law-abiding people.

Mike’s answers won’t satisfy you. Mike believed Trump when he said he had nothing to do with Project 2025. “I believed what Trump said—but not any more!” Mike voted for Trump in 2020 even after the disastrous response to the pandemic because he didn’t support the lockdowns—and he even mentioned something about Anthony Fauci getting too much authority.

There was more. I could have argued these and other points with him. But when people say they’re sorry for supporting Trump and will work to support Democrats so we can blunt Trump’s power—which Mike “yes” to—I don’t push hard. Rather than alienate them at this point, I’d rather bring them in and make them part of the force against Trump. We can always argue later. And mostly, I want to get a sense of what changes these people and what might motivate others.

Among the people that Times columnist Goldberg, discussed in her column today on the “vibes shift”, is author Richard Hanania, who announced on X in recent days that he no longer supports Trump:

The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

It’s impossible to know if these shifts will continue. But what we’ve seen so far, both in Trump’s numbers and also in the words of prominent and less prominent people who’ve jumped ship, is pretty pronounced. And it’s not like things won’t get worse. Trump is not, by any stretch, pulling back. He’s moving full speed ahead, more radical by the day.

So it’s likely we’ll see more people flee. And surely we can worry if it’s enough people—and if we’ll have enough time—before Trump turns the country into a full-fledged dictatorship. But we have no choice but to move forward, speaking out, galvanizing people—as Bernie Sanders and AOC are doing, brining out massive crowds while touring red states—and making sure the resistance is growing by the day.

NOW READ: We’re on the cusp of a national outrage that transcends the old political labels

Massive protests across the country this past weekend turned out millions of energized Americans unified in opposition to Donald Trump. They came just as Trump had dropped a megaton bomb into the global economy, forever altering free trade, and shaking even his most staunch defenders.

Markets will rebound, because that’s what they do. But Trump will not.

He has caused lasting damage to the economy. Prices were rising before, and will rise more, with some experts saying inflation could soon go up to 4%. Consumer confidence has crashed. The Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell warned of high inflation and a slowdown in economic growth because of Trump’s huge global import taxes, and so did J.P. Morgan’s chief Jamie Dimon. And several financial barometers now point to a Trump-induced recession. Some GOP members of Congress are speaking out. Even if it’s not enough to stop Trump now, it’s enough to torpedo the GOP and MAGA coalition.

Elon Musk broke with Trump, calling for a free trade zone with Europe, in a battle that escalated in three days and got pretty ugly. Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager who went all in on Trump, joined other billionaires in slamming him this week, saying the economy will head into a “economic nuclear winter.” Only three months ago, this guy, who’d previously backed Democrats, said of Trump, “We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime.”

How does a hedge fund manager who’s made billions for himself and others get so conned by a guy who filed for bankruptcy four times, including with casinos he owned? Blinded by reality, whipped up by sheer madness over DEI in the workplace and driven by a “wokeness” witch hunt—all of which pales in comparison to what they’re facing now—people like Ackman deluded themselves. We’ve seen it repeatedly.

But no more, not when they’re losing billions. Having thought that Trump would never really inflict this much damage—it was all a negotiating tool, right?—they now see that Trump will do exactly what he promises to do.

Just as Trump said during campaign rallies, he’d use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants, even though it’s only to be used in wartime. Just as he said he’d deport between 11 and 18 million people, which would have to include millions of hard-working, law-abiding people who’ve been in this country for decades, even though defenders said it would only be criminals—”the worst of the worst.”

We’ve now had Venezuelan migrants, people who committed no crimes, sent to the brutal El Salvador mega-prison CECOT. And the conservatives on the Supreme Court that Trump himself created just ruled that, yeah, it was wrong, that those people deserve due process—but told plaintiffs they made a procedural error in challenging it in Washington rather than Texas, and have to start over, while Trump can attempt to resume the deportation flights. As if we’re in normal times.

The women on the court—the three liberals and Amy Coney Barrett—offered a blistering dissent, with Justice Sotomayor suggesting this was opening the door to sending any of us to a mega-prison outside the country and then have the courts deal with it when they get around to it.

That abominable action itself doesn’t spare the Trump defenders-turned-critics from the harsh criticism they should receive at having helped elect this madman. But it’s still a good thing we’re seeing them breaking. It may not last, but fractures are always an opportunity through which opponents can drive a wedge.

And Democrats are taking advantage. Coming off of a big win in Wisconsin and over-performing in Florida, they’re aiming for Virginia’s general elections later this year and are now targeting many more House seats on the map held by Republicans, including in districts Trump won by double digits.

On top of the recent surge by Democrats at the polls, the nationwide protests on Sunday sent a clear message. Millions in big cities and small towns across rural America spoke up. And it came as Trump is losing the support of some of his previously most ardent defenders.

Even as he’s engaging in horribly dangerous actions in these first 100 days, and as the GOP sits by or cheers him on, we should recognize that Trump is floundering big time. The opportunity is there for Democrats to hit him hard, and band together with others to take Trump and the GOP down.

NOW READ: 'Truly a moron': Elon Musk’s brother begs Trump to fire 'dumber than a sack of bricks' advisor

As Elon Musk rummages through our Social Security information and engages in mass firings while purging agencies, the Tesla brand is being destroyed, as sales and stocks plummet. And I’m here for it.

Glad to see protests in recent weeks—peaceful protests at which some people engage in non-violent civil disobedience—all over the country. On March 29th, organizers are calling for 500 demonstrations at all 277 Tesla showrooms, the biggest mass protest so far among the Tesla Takedown demonstrators.

Then there’s the vandalism at Tesla dealerships, Tesla facilities and even against Tesla vehicles on the streets. Individuals have not been targeted with violence at any of the targeted facilities, such as in Las Vegas this week, where cars were set ablaze in the early hours of the morning; only property has been vandalized. Still, I don’t like the idea of Molotov cocktails being thrown around. The people doing so know that it’s a crime, and that if caught, they will be punished. And they’re clearly willing to take that risk.

This is the kind of activity that has taken place during other protest movements in history, and we should be clear that it is independent from the peaceful protesters working for change.

But, as government has done in the past, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice—as well as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the GOP—not only are trying to conflate the violent attacks on the dealerships with the protests and even with the Democratic opposition; they’re railing against the vandalism as “domestic terrorism.” But in this case, more than any time in history, they have had absolutely no moral authority in deciding what is domestic terrorism.

Not when they organized a massive act of domestic terrorism against our country, inspiring the “Stop the Steal” rally-goers to storm the Capitol on January 6th. Not when they dismissed the terrible acts of vandalism against the building. Not when they were okay with violence enacted against police officers. Not when they were fine with death threats against the Vice President and House Speaker.

And surely not after Trump pardoned all the violent criminals and attackers of police officers—setting them free, over 1500 criminals—and just about the entire GOP was okay with that.

But now Trump and Musk and Bondi are shocked—shocked!—that Tesla dealerships are being vandalized.

“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” Bondi said in the statement. “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes, to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

Note the implication of some sort of coordination “behind the scenes.” Musk himself, with no evidence, implicated “the Democrats” in this, something about which there is no evidence of any kind. Trump, too, called it domestic terrorism and said the perpetrators will “go through hell.”

But all of their bluster is exceedingly empty, as the GOP gave up any right to tell us about violence or domestic terrorism, as this clip from CNN that went viral on social media expertly shows. Former Biden administration official Neera Tanden responds to CNN’s regular MAGA maniac Scott Jennings, who says whoever engaged in these acts of vandalism “should be put in jail and left there for a very long time.”

Jennings just snapped completely—lots of alpha man rage—after Tanden said, “So when they do it to a Tesla dealership, it's really bad. But when they do it to the halls of Congress, we should pardon them. Is that your position?”

That hit a nerve—exquisitely—because these people know they have no moral authority on this, simply because lawlessness is now their brand. This is yet another danger exposed in having allowed Trump to get away with committing crimes. If he can get away with serious criminal actions—all on behalf of himself and no one else—more people might think it’s okay to commit crimes in the name of a higher cause, particularly if it’s limited to destruction of property.

And if violence against police officers is dismissed by the president himself, few people are going to have sympathy with the billionaire buddy of the president who’s tearing apart our agencies—and gaining access to our personal information—while the property associated with his businesses is being vandalized.

That’s not to condone it. In fact, the last thing we want to see is right-wingers engage in attacks on companies they perceive as associated with the Democrats, nor do we want to to see any acts of right-wing terrorism, which we’ve been warned about by the FBI during the last year of the Biden administration. It’s simply to point out that it’s not a surprise that this is escalating after Trump and the GOP have embraced lawlessness, and that their cries of “domestic terrorism” ring hollow because of their own actions.

NOW READ: John Roberts has created a monster — and he knows it

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

How deranged is this? How can anyone not see the censorship and the erasure of history, and note that this is exactly what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did while trying to control public discourse by revising German history?

The Washington Post uncovered the newest missing pages:

Multiple articles about the Navajo code talkers, who were critical to America’s victory at Iwo Jima and the wider Pacific theater of the Second World War, were also removed, along with a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox toward the end of the Civil War.
The purge, which also targeted multiple webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members, highlights how aggressively military leaders are pursuing President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI mandate. Their actions mean that some of the most authoritative sources of public information about the achievements of minority service members decades before government DEI programs existed have disappeared.

First, let’s be clear that DEI initiatives in hiring or any other programs are meant to make sure that a qualified pool of people of every race and background is reached out to via various channels.

They’re not about giving jobs to marginalized groups over others; they’re simply about making sure all groups know about a specific position or program and can apply, so that there is a big, diverse pool of qualified candidates. We like diversity. It’s what America is about—or was about.

But whatever you think of DEI, how it got distorted to where it’s now about removing images and documentation about people who already performed jobs—people who made enormous contributions to our country—is the story of bigotry and hate.

More to the point, it’s the story of white supremacy. There is simply no excuse for taking away aspects of history because you don’t like who made the history. That’s pure censorship, wanting to hold up only certain Americans as true Americans while erasing others. And that’s about an attempt to reshape Americans’ views, control their thinking, and suppress truths deemed threatening to a white supremacist worldview.

We saw it begin on day one of Trump’s presidency, when mentions of “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity,” were expunged from the White House website. The Health and Human Services Department then removed all references to HIV and groups affected, such as transgender people.

Then we saw the Stonewall Monument page on the National Park Service website altered to take out the word “transgender”—when transgender people were at the forefront of the Stonewall riots.

Last Week the Arlington Cemetery page was altered to remove all references to Black, Latino and female veterans, with the claim, again, that they were doing to so to stop practices that “promote” DEI, which is nonsensical:

On these pages, users could read short biographies about the people buried in the cemetery, including Gen. Colin L. Powell, the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Hector Santa Anna, a World War II B-17 bomber pilot, Berlin Airlift pilot and career military leader;
members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first Black military airmen whose accomplishments include completing more than 1,800 missions during World War II;
and members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female Women’s Army Corps unit to serve overseas during World War II.
Users could also read about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black person to sit on the high court, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is buried alongside her husband, Martin Ginsburg, an Army veteran.

But now they’re gone. So far, war heroes are among 26,000 images purged from government websites, all in the name of eradicating the dreaded DEI.

The twisting of DEI—and the expansive way attacks on it are weaponized to censor and discriminate—has now extended to the Trump administration no longer explicitly prohibiting businesses from having segregated facilities as NPR reported today:

After a recent change by the Trump administration, the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.
The segregation clause is one of several identified in a public memo issued by the General Services Administration last month, affecting all civil federal agencies. The memo explains that it is making changes prompted by President Trump's executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion, which repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination. The memo also addresses Trump's executive order on gender identity.

To be clear, there are federal civil rights laws and state civil rights laws that ban such discrimination. So no businesses, whether or not they are federal contractors, can have segregated drinking fountains. But the fact that the federal government no longer explicitly restates to federal contractors that they cannot engage in discrimination—and actually took the action of changing text—raises a red flag about where this administration wants to go.

And it’s all under the cover of ending “DEI,” which is now just another term for installing fascism.

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Donald Trump stood in the White House driveway with Elon Musk this week, both of them using our taxpayer dollars to have the president try to sell cars for his number one benefactor, a billionaire who put $300 million toward electing him.

Musk, seeing Tesla sales plummeting as protests against him escalate, turned to Trump, a natural car salesman, who let Musk showcase various models while Trump discussed the pricing before the television cameras, and then claimed he was going to buy one. (There’s no evidence that Trump, who’s actually expressed revulsion about electric vehicles—saying “no one’s buying them”—actually bought the car.).

When asked by Fox News’ Peter Doocy about the fact that Trump is “buying a new car” while “there are folks who will see this clip at home who are struggling with their retirement accounts down at moment”—yes, when you’ve lost Doocy it’s pretty bad—Trump completely brushed it off.

I think we’re going to do great. Our country had to do this. We had to go and do this. Other countries have taken away our business, they’ve taken away our jobs. I did it, initially, very strongly, against China, as you know, and some others, and it was a very successful term. We had no inflation and we had the greatest economy in the history of our country.

We’ll get to the lies in a minute, but I want to again briefly address Trump’s confusing and meandering justifications for tariffs.

He all’s over the place, contradicting himself, diminishing his arguments, which are at odds with one another—tariffs are a negotiating tactic, or they’re a way to raise revenue or they’re about bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. (If they’re about revenue, for example, why are they on again, off again? Just implement them and bring in the supposed windfall.)

His statement about China and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s claims this week on CNBC that companies should make t-shirts, sneakers, towels and TVs in the U.S. rather than buying those that are made overseas, gets to the latter reason: wanting to bring all manufacturing back to the U.S. (By the way, when Lutnick said that, it got laughs from the CNBC hosts.)

As the great economist Paul Krugman notes in a piece titled, “Make Sweatshops Great Again”:

No serious person mourns the offshoring of apparel employment. Clothing production is a low-tech industry that even in its heyday mostly employed immigrants who, despite being represented by a powerful union, were paid low wages and often faced harsh working conditions. For a poor nation like Bangladesh, apparel jobs are a big step up from the alternatives. But American workers have better, and better-paying, things to do.

In The New York Times, long-time foreign policy, economics and politics reporter David Sanger similarly writes:

Of course, as much as Mr. Trump would like to see all products made in the United States, there is a reason nations trade with one another.
Some have a comparative advantage to make certain products. Others are at a different stage of development. And sometimes nations do not want to get stuck producing low-tech products when they could move up the ladder.
The towns north of Boston dominated the country’s shoe industry throughout the 1800s; today they are better known for software startups, law firms and some of the nation’s most expensive real estate.
But in Mr. Trump’s worldview, as he himself acknowledged in a 2016 interview, it is traditional manufacturing that matters. The 1950s, he said, were his ideal, when American manufacturing and power reigned supreme.

Trump wants to go back to a past that wasn’t great for the vast majority of American workers. They now have much better options for employment, while other countries can help develop their own economies, beginning with producing the lower-tech products we used to produce.

So now on to Trump’s claims about about tariffs he imposed in 2018 on China for a broad array of goods, and on Canada and Mexico for steel. Too much of our media doesn’t challenge his claims about the tariffs as helping the economy, just letting it slide. And they often say that Joe Biden kept the tariffs on China in place—or sometimes just that Biden kept Trump tariffs in place, implying there were more, on other countries, that Biden kept in place, which isn’t true—and this is another bit of “boths sides” distortion.

Far from being “successful,” Trump’s tariffs—most of which he lifted during the pandemic—were the canary in the coal mine for what’s happening today as Trump has launched massive trade wars with Mexico, Canada, China, and all the countries of Europe as part of the European Union, with tariffs on far more products,. And all those countries have retaliated. Trump is hellbent on putting tariffs on products from every country around the globe.

The Greenberg Center of Geoeconomic Studies published a deep analysis of the likely impact of Trump’s current tariffs on aluminum and steel. While there might be some short-term gain, there’s actually a loss of jobs in the long-run, the opposite of Trump’s claimed objective of bringing back manufacturing. And the study looks back at what happened in 2018 when Trump put tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada and Mexico, and broader tariffs on China:

The tariffs would likely boost steel prices, benefiting U.S. producers and potentially adding to the industry’s 140,000 jobs. Indeed, when Trump first imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018, prices for both metals rose some 2 percent, and imports fell by about a quarter.
However, any job gains will likely be offset by losses in manufacturing and other industries that rely on steel.
In 2018, steel-using sectors of the economy employed more than twelve million Americans. Nearly two million of those worked in steel-intensive industries—where steel inputs make up at least 5 percent of total input requirements—including auto parts, farming machinery, and household appliance manufacturing. Research estimates that Trump’s 2018 tariffs led to the direct loss of seventy-five thousand manufacturing jobs [PDF], with additional losses from retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries, often on non-steel products.

The impact now would be felt even more greatly:

Higher steel and aluminum costs would hit construction, auto, packaging, appliances, machinery, oil and gas, and electrical industries the hardest. Aluminum makes up around 80 percent of an airframe’s weight and—along with steel—a quarter of Coca-Cola packaging, meaning tariffs could make American planes and drinks pricier on the global market. Building a car, similarly, takes about half a ton of steel, so a 25 percent tariff could add over $1,000 in production costs per vehicle.
Manufacturers could then pass those costs onto consumers. Indeed, in 2018, U.S.-based Caterpillar—the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment—bumped up prices to make up for more than $100 million in extra costs, blaming Trump’s metal tariffs. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that, in the end, Trump’s steel tariffs cost taxpayers more than $900,000 each year for every job they saved or created.

Far from bringing down prices and being a “success,” as Trump has claimed over and over about the 2018 tariffs, they caused the stock market to dive and caused prices to rise. As Econofact explains in a fact check:

The tariffs required U.S. companies to pay an additional fee to import many foreign goods. Some companies passed on these fees to consumers by raising retail prices. Domestic producers responded by raising the prices of their own goods, which became artificially more competitive.

Trump ended up lifting the tariffs on Mexico and Canada both just before and during the pandemic, and reduced the rate of some tariffs on China, an acknowledgement that they had hurt the economy.

Joe Biden kept the then-reduced tariffs on China in place, as China didn’t keep to its commitments, and he even added new ones on electric vehicles. But this is the strategic use of tariffs that all presidents have engaged in to protect certain American industries, chastise countries not operating in good faith, and keep adversaries on their toes. Biden certainly didn’t put tariffs on any allies or close neighbors.

The scale of Trump’s tariffs of 2018 pale compared to what he’s doing now. And the impact is going to be far worse as well.

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For decades, the Republican Party has been hellbent on cutting Medicaid and Medicare in addition to Social Security and other social safety net programs.

Its leaders have been obsessively driven by the idea of getting government out of health care—fantasizing about slashing programs—and handing it all over to their big donor buddies in the private sector looking to make even greater profits. The GOP rode on a wave of discontent with Big Government in the base of their party, confident that their voters were behind them.

The anti-government fervor and the distrust of institutions among GOP voters are still there—in many ways, they’re even greater than before—except in one particular area where it’s gone in the other direction, toward a trust in government: healthcare

And GOP leaders, moving to gut Medicaid, and clearly looking at Social Security and Medicare—with Elon Musk and his flunkies messing around with our private information—are soon going to painfully find out how much. Some GOP pollsters and MAGA blowhards are trying to get them to comprehend the new reality. But the GOP leadership is drunk on power, believing it's closer than ever to its goals and not paying attention to the flashing red lights.

In an illuminating piece, the Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reported on the disconnect last week—after Republicans in the House just barely voted (by one vote) on a budget resolution to allow for cuts to Medicaid by $880 billion—citing surveys and presenting interviews with MAGA voters.

Democrats have warned that the GOP’s actions will create a situation for them mirroring 2017, when the GOP unsuccessfully moved to kill Obamacare and lost the House in a massive blue wave. And actually, it appears things may be even worse for Republicans this time around. KKF Health News reporter Noam Levey interviewed GOP voters, who clearly show the shift in the base:

Government regulation of health care prices used to be heresy for most Republicans. GOP leaders fiercely opposed the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which included government limits on patients’ costs. More recently, the party fought legislation signed by former President Joe Biden to cap prescription drug prices.
But as Trump begins his second term, many of the voters who sent him back to the White House welcome more robust government action to rein in a health care system many Americans perceive as out of control, polls show.
Even Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program that Republican congressional leaders are eyeing to dramatically cut, is viewed favorably by many GOP voters, like Ashley Williamson.

Williamson, a 37-year-old Trump voter and an Eastern Tennessee resident with five children, explained that Medicaid was a lifeline when her mother-in-law needed nursing home care.

“We could not take care of her,” Williamson told Levey. “It stepped in. It made sure she was taken care of.”

She was one of several Republicans interviewed who voted for Trump who talked about the soaring costs of health care and how they want limits enforced by the government on co-pays, insurance costs and hospital costs—and they expect Trump to make it all happen, even though he and the GOP are light years from doing anything remotely like that.

The MAGA voters also want a cap on prescription drugs. That, of course, is something about which Joe Biden became the only president to have any success. Biden and Democratic lawmakers capped the cost of insulin for people on Medicare and gave Medicare the power to negotiate prices with drug companies, all while GOP leaders fought these measures.

Trump voters made their priorities clear to KKF:

Charles Milliken, a retired auto mechanic in West Virginia, who said he backed Trump because the country “needs a businessman, not a politician,” expects the new president to go even further.
“I think he’s going to put a cap on what insurance companies can charge, what doctors can charge, what hospitals can charge,” said Milliken, 51, who recently had a heart attack that left him with more than $6,000 in medical debt.

Milliken is in for a very rude awakening, if he hasn’t already been paying attention. Because, no, Trump will do none of that, and Republicans in Congress are also going in the other direction. And that is where the GOP’s radical agenda is going to implode on it.

Even Steve Bannon is sounding the alarm, warning against Medicaid cuts, saying, on his screechy podcast, “Medicaid, you got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong.”

Trump’s own pollsters from his 2024 campaign are sending up red flares on healthcare too. Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, who conducted polling for Trump’s campaign, recently wrote a memo to GOP lawmakers, urging them to extend the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. Those Obamacare tax credits will expire this year, and about 2.2 million people will lose health care if no action is taken.

On Sunday, Fabrizio, ramped up the urgent message, telling The Washington Post, “It is popular and it would be good politics for the House and Senate GOP to embrace it.” But Trump and GOP leaders in the House and Senate made it clear months ago that they’re going to allow those tax credits to expire.

It’s notable that Trump’s own pollsters are being so public, clearly afraid of what the data shows and trying to convince the GOP to listen. Bob Ward of Fabrizio Ward told KKF’s Levey that many GOP voters are rethinking their embrace of free markets over government, after years in which many millions of Americans have been saddled with medical debt.

“I think most people look at this and say the market is broken, and that’s why they’re willing for someone, anyone, to step in,” he said. “The deck is stacked against folks.”

Yep, it’s pretty damn rich, since Democrats have been saying that for decades while Republicans have been trying to kill the safety net—and they’re still trying, oblivious to what their own voters now believe.

In a national survey that Fabrizio Ward collaborated on with Democratic polling firm Hart Research just after the 2024 election, MAGA voters were less likely to blame the federal government than insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry for high health care costs. Three quarters of them want the government to impose caps on hospital costs.

In a recent poll by KKF, half of Trump supporters backed continuing Biden’s achievement in having Medicare negotiate with drug companies. Price caps are in fact huge for MAGA, according to researchers KFF’s Levey interviewed, even though the leadership of the GOP has actively fought against limiting the free market. Republican pollster Mike Perry conducted focus groups on the issue, which Levey was able to observe.

Perry, who’s convened dozens of focus groups with voters about health care in recent years, said the support for government price caps is all the more remarkable since regulating medical prices isn’t at the top of most politicians’ agenda. “It seems to be like a groundswell,” he said. “They’ve come to this decision on their own, rather than any policymakers leading them there, that something needs to be done.”
Other forms of government regulation, such as limits on medical debt collections, are even more popular.
About 8 in 10 Republicans backed a $2,300 cap on how much patients could be required to pay annually for medical debt, according to a 2023 survey by Perry’s polling firm, PerryUndem. And 9 in 10 favored a cap on interest rates charged on medical debt.
“These are what I would consider no-brainers, from a political perspective,” Ward said.

And that’s just MAGA and GOP voters. When you widen out to independents and Democrats, the vast majority of Americans, as a January AP poll showed, want more funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, not less.

Trump himself possibly perceives there is a third rail here (though that knowledge hasn’t stopped him from stepping on it in the past many times). He keeps saying they “won’t touch” Medicaid.

But the budget bill the House just passed only allows the $880 billion—which are to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy—to come from money the Energy and Commerce Committee oversees, which is Medicare and Medicaid and some smaller health programs, like the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The GOP claims the money is only going to come from “waste, fraud and abuse” that they’ll expose but which they’ve yet to find.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan Congressional watchdog, in a study last year found that there may be about $100 billion in waste in both Medicaid and Medicare combined, which is little over 10% of the money the GOP needs—if they find even that. So it’s clear they’re going to have to cut programs to pay for the tax cuts of millionaires and billionaires, and Medicaid is what they’ve been focused on.

Democrats have been loudly warning about what will happen, and they’re planning, as they did in 2017, to hit the GOP hard, with political ads already running in some parts of the country. Republicans in swing districts are publicly expressing their fears, even though they voted for the legislation because Trump had a gun to their heads, threatening to primary them.

But the GOP’s leaders don’t get that, unlike at any time in the past—even in 2018, during the midterms in which they got clobbered over their unsuccessful assault on Obamacare—there is a huge gulf between them and their own voters on healthcare.

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Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting was amateur hour at its finest.

Elon Musk, the blundering billionaire who admitted at the meeting that he and DOGE “accidentally” fired the Ebola team at the Department of Health and Human Services, led the discussion, while Trump backed Musk on his threat to federal workers, telling them they’ll be fired unless they reply to the email Musk sent asking what they’d accomplished in the week prior.

Trump noted one million federal workers hadn’t responded and that maybe they “don’t exist.”

Musk then said he’d give them one more chance. Of course, the reason a good deal of them might not have responded is because the heads of agencies—the Cabinet officials in the room—as well as the Trump administration itself, had told employees that they didn’t need to respond, that it was all “voluntary.”

This was the latest example of the conflict and power struggle inside the White House, where “the Trump administration” has a different position than Donald Trump himself, and where Cabinet officials in the room were caught off guard, pitted against Musk. Trump and Musk were sending a warning to them to listen to Musk—and no one else—and every one of them stayed silent, complete cowards.

It was breathtakingly embarrassing and exposed so much about what’s going on as more comes out about the disarray and sheer stupidity. Meanwhile, reports about the economy stressing under tariffs, spending freezes and mass firings are emerging—while Trump seems oblivious to it—as is the fear expressed by some economists that we are headed for a deep Trump recession. And that will affect millions of people, no matter their political party.

Then there are the thousands of Trump supporters, federal workers who found themselves out of a job, making their lives worse even as they supposedly voted to Make America Great Again. They all have families, friends, neighbors and others who voted for Trump and who will be impacted or see what’s happening. The mass firings by the government will affect so many other industries and cause more layoffs as well as a pullback in spending.

The Los Angeles Times focused in some of the fired MAGA:

They voted for Donald Trump for president and for a change in the direction of the federal government. But this wasn’t the kind of change they had in mind.
Laid off by the administration in recent days from their U.S. government jobs, the Trump voters expressed dismay at what they said has been an unfocused, counterproductive and callous slashing of the federal workforce.

Georgia resident Jocelyn Steward, according to her Facebook page, was excited about her new job as a health insurance specialist with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She voted for Trump for three straight elections. She believed job cuts “would focus on early retirements and workers who underperformed.”

But she was duped—and dumped.

“Layoffs aren’t easy on anybody. But there has been zero compassion for anything or anyone in this process,” Steward, a Georgia resident, told the LA Times. ”A lot of these federal workers are doing good work. Please just show a little empathy.”

Now she seems really angry, days after she was fired and after giving the interview, posting on her Facebook page about the letter from Elon Musk to federal workers:

Are you f%%cking kidding me. Now, they want federal employees to share what they did everyday. Mo Fo you fired me last weekend. This is ridiculous.

Twenty-four-year-old Ryleigh Cooper of Baldwin, Michigan, voted for Joe Biden in 2020. According to the Washington Post article in which she’s interviewed: “She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them...But life felt more complicated these days..."

Struggling to have children, she was told IVF would be her only hope. Unable to pay the exorbitant costs, this young and clearly naïve woman actually believed Trump when he said his administration would pay for IVF.

But instead of getting IVF, she lost her job at the U.S. Forest Service, axed by DOGE, completely devastating her.

Getting fired meant she would no longer have health insurance, including the 12 weeks of paid maternity leave that was a guaranteed benefit of her federal service. Also gone would be the promotion that would allow her to plan for the kids she so badly wanted to have.
She wondered if Trump was going to break his promise to make IVF free, and if it would even matter if he did.

Four days after Trump fired her, Cooper was in bed with her husband and an alert came on her phone:

There was a new executive order to expand access to IVF. She read the White House fact sheet, which talked about Trump’s request for policy recommendations to reduce costs of the service.
But it still wasn’t free, and she was out of a job and out of a plan.
“Delivering on promises for American families,” read the White House’s announcement.
“That’s bulls---”, she recalled thinking, and put down her phone.

I know there’s zero sympathy for these people who stupidly—and selfishly—made their own beds. But again, they are representative of the people—many of the Republicans and independents—showing up at town halls and angrily expressing themselves to GOP lawmakers. Many of them and their families and friends will add to Trump’s and the GOP’s downfall and help Democrats in upcoming elections.

So too will the cowards running institutions that are obeying in advance and cutting medical care or ending classes, all based on Trump’s “DEI” executive orders, even though in many cases it’s quite a stretch and not even remotely necessary. And no law has been passed; they’re executive orders and they’re actually being challenged and, in some cases, have already been put on hold in court.

The latest outrageous example of spinelessness is the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington canceling shows by Black and LGBTQ artists, saying they must adhere to the DEI orders because a portion of their funding comes from the U.S. government. This is flat out censorship:

The Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue run by the Organization of American States that is steps from the White House and the National Mall, has canceled two upcoming shows, one featuring Black artists from across the Western Hemisphere and the other showcasing queer artists from Canada.
According to participants in those shows, museum officials canceled the exhibitions to comply with Trump administration orders to stamp out federal funding for “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.

It’s a ridiculous and dangerous action, because there’s nothing about DEI connected to the mounting of these exhibits. They are simply exhibits about and by Black and queer artists. They’re not being shown for any reasons of “inclusion” or “diversity” but because they’re really interesting and reflect vitally important aspects of history, in addition to speaking to big audiences that want to see them.

Featuring artworks by African American as well as Afro-Latino and Caribbean artists, “Before the Americas” aimed to track the influence of the transatlantic subordinate trade and African diaspora across multiple generations of modern and contemporary artists…
…The exhibit, “Nature’s Wild With Andil Gosine” — which he describes as a “solo show with many artists” — was based on the artist’s 2021 book about queer theory and colonial law in the Caribbean. It had been scheduled to open March 21 and featured works by a dozen artists, many of them queer people of color and most of them Canadian.

There was no reason to cancel these shows. But DEI has simply been interpreted to mean anything not White, heterosexual or male, and so the museum’s director canceled the shows even though the U.S. is just one of 30 countries that contribute to its work.

Artists around the country and worldwide are furious, and this is just one example of institutions obeying in advance and waking people up.

There’s no question Democrats have to amplify everything Trump is doing and push back hard. But they also need to exploit the outrage of the American people.

And the anger is building across the country and across the political spectrum among diverse groups, even among some people who voted for Trump. All of it is a welcome contribution to opponents working to take down Trump and the GOP.

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The incoherence of the Trump supporters continues. Eric in Pennsylvania called my SiriusXM program to say Trump taking over Gaza will not happen, even though Trump has said, over and over, that the U. S will take over Gaza. He's now threatened Jordan and Egypt, telling them he'll withhold aid if they don't engage in his ethnic cleansing scheme and forcibly displaced Palestinians.

So is Trump just lying? Yes, Eric admits, but it’s part of his grand strategy to keep us talking about Elon Musk—even though Musk is getting massive media attention. But then Eric contradicts himself by saying it’s a “good” idea to take over Gaza.

Eric’s main reason for calling my program was to say Trump won’t institute a military draft—even though mandatory service is part of Project 2025. And we’re seeing Project 2025 being put in place all across the government. Just because Trump said there wouldn’t be a draft during the campaign, after the details of Project 2025 became public, means nothing — because, as Eric admits, Trump lies. Eric when back to saying we don’t need the draft because none of these military actions will happen.

This silly mumbo jumbo went on about Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico too, in which Eric claimed Trump won something by getting cosmetic changes. But Trump had said huge tariffs were a good thing. So why did he back down on tariffs?

The truth is Trump is completely incoherent and his followers just echo that, changing by the day.

Listen in here and let me know your thoughts!

Sometimes it’s like banging your head against a wall. David in Pittsburgh called my SiriusXM program last week to defend Donald Trump gutting the United States Agency for International Development.

MAGA morons and Fox fantasists have convinced themselves that there’s a massive amount of waste—using few dubious claims and some known outright lies—about agency that was less than 1% of the budget.

Even Marco Rubio—before he was Trump’s lapdog secretary of state—defended USAID on the Senate floor over and over, and urged the Biden administration to expand the program to blunt China’s influence. Now he’s part o the mob that’s gutting the agency and literally taking the sign off the building—even as a judge blocked Trump from placing 2200 people on leave.

The facts are clear. The programs have done an enormous amount of humanitarian good. But the tiny investment for the U.S. also helps the keep governments stable, and stops them from collapsing and turning to our adversies.

As I said to David, “if you want to be the big guy on the block,” you have to look out for your neighbors.

He couldn’t quite grasp how this worked, and said that there was waste—which, even if it is true, you could cut, without killing the entire agency.

Listen in to get a sense of how the MAGA mind works—or doesn’t. And let me know your thoughts!

On my SiriusXM program, while discussing Elon Musk’s rummaging through confidential government systems, including the Treasury department—and how Musk sought to freeze foreign aid payments on his own—Carl from California called in to defend Musk.

He said that Musk wasn’t “taking” any money, but just making suggestions, even though we know Musk actually attempted to cut off foreign aid via emails obtained by the New York Times. But neither that nor his merely reviewing systems is lawful, as he and his underlings have not obtained security clearances nor were they confirmed by the Senate. And no one can stop payments and agencies ordered by Congress except Congress itself.

Trump himself can’t shut down federal disbursements, because Congress mandates them. And lawsuits are coming fast and furious.

But most outlandishly, Carl said Musk is “following the orders of the dictator, serving at his pleasure,” which either was a slip of the tongue, or an attempt at sarcasm.

I lit into him, wondering if he’d be okay with George Soros going through government systems under orders of Joe Biden, and if they’d not be screaming that Biden was lawless. Of course they would because they claimed that of Joe Biden for four years even though he did nothing illegal!

Yes, my blood was boiling—lots of F bombs!—as Carl claimed “elections have consequences”—which I guess means the president can become a “dictator,” but only if he’s a Republican.

Anyway, it’s a short, fun one. Ate him up and spit him. Listen in here and let me know your thoughts!

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Donald Trump's tariff threats are proving to be mostly empty, a risky game in which he accepts cosmetic changes from foreign governments that humor him. He then claims concessions that are big—when they’re not —and calls it a win. Much of the media goes along.

And he will do it again and again until they call out his bulls---.

Trump has talked about tariffs as absolutely necessary for his new “Golden Age”—though after “some pain.” He presents them as a cure-all to raise huge amounts of money (even though consumers pay for them). So it makes no sense for him to call them off by getting some minor things from countries—or nothing dressed up as something—that do not raise huge amounts of money.

This week, once again, Trump threatened tariffs against other countries only to stop them before they went into effect. Almost two weeks ago it was Colombia with 50% tariffs. And this week it was Canada and Mexico. He let 10% tariffs against China go into effect, but tariffs on Chinese products have been in effect for years, including through Joe Biden’s presidency, as it is not an ally of the U.S., and is competing in reckless ways. The tariffs on China, at least previously were strategically targeting specific industries and products.

And Trump had no way to back out of the threatened tariffs on China—which are stupid because they’re on all goods, not specific industries—with even a fig leaf of a win because China, unlike Mexico and Canada, didn’t give him any meeting before they went into effect in which it could humor Trump and allow him to save face.

China just waited for the tariffs to go into effect, and then retaliated with tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products, and it launched an investigation of Google. So much for Google and the tech companies sucking up to Trump. He just sold them out to China!

There will surely be economic ramifications from the tariffs on China but it will be nothing near the hugely detrimental impact of the 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada which caused markets to plunge yesterday—until Trump halted the tariffs from going into effect (“paused” for a month) after speaking with the leaders of Canada and Mexico. He likely wanted the same outcome with China, but didn’t get it.

Trump’s tariffs, first off, are illegal. Congress must pass a law putting tariffs in place, at it did at the time of the Great Depression—and they caused severe economic decline worsen.

Trump used “emergency powers” of the president to tariff the countries this week, saying it was a national security issue because of the fentanyl crisis and immigration. But there is not an emergency, so this is bogus—and illegal.

But even if Trump was using fentanyl smuggling as a cover to use emergency powers, that doesn’t take away the fact that he loves tariffs and doesn’t seem to get that tariffs are passed from companies onto consumers. During the campaign he vowed 20% tariffs or higher on all goods coming into the U.S. He said that tariffs would lead to the end of the federal income tax. He said that tariffs would fund child care programs. He’s said there’s a trade deficit that causes the US to “subsidize” Canada and Mexico, and thus tariffs would end it.

As the Associated Press points out, Trump has been all over the place on tariffs:

But even if the orders are focused on illegal drugs, Trump’s own remarks have often been more about his perceived sense that foreign countries are ripping off the United States by running trade surpluses. On Sunday, Trump said that tariffs would come soon on countries in the European Union. He has discussed tariffs as both a diplomatic tool on national security issues, a way to raise revenues and a vehicle for renegotiating existing trade pacts.

Trump claimed it as a win—and media went along with it—when Mexico said it would send 10,000 troops to the border. The problem with that is that Mexico regularly sends that many troops to the border. Mexico has 400,000 troops. In 2019 the government sent 15,000 troops to the border and in 2021. In addition, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum got Trump to agree to do something about illegal weapons smuggled into Mexico (not that he will actually do anything.) She’s being praised for how she’s handled it all.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada basically agreed to do what he announced in December, in a 2024 year end review. So it was nothing new. Trudeau also said he’s name a “fentanyl czar”—taking a page from Trump’s terminology—and giving some minor cosmetic changes to Trump to point to as a win.

In other words, Trump got very little in return for “pausing” the tariffs. And the big question is: Why would be pause them if the whole idea is to make a lot of money?

The answer is likely that Trump was, as a caller to my SiriusXM show pointed out, tipping his toe in the water on massive tariffs, something he’s been obsessed about. And the loud reaction on Wall Street—and among Republican politicians and millions of Americans—scared him. The focus on rising prices and the jolt to the economy made Trump blink.

Canada and Mexico had every reason to help him to save face, as it was in their best interests to end this quickly. China obviously took a different tack, but it is also a much more dominant economy and not about to play any game with Trump. China was actually hoping Trump would go ahead with the Mexico and Canada tariffs as it stood to gain a lot as our allies would move toward China.

All of this showed Trump to be weak, and also a fraud. You can’t tell us tariffs are the cure-all and then pull back every time you are set to impose them. And even if you’re doing it to get other countries to take some action, you can’t settle for this weak tea.

Paul Krugman and others have noted that Trump folded. He completely caved when he saw that Mexico and Canada retaliated—rather than bowing to him—and that world markets tumbled as Republicans fretted. And that’s how the media should be covering it, calling Trump’s bluff and exposing his con game.

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Donald Trump claimed the Colombian president had caved in as Trump ramped up the threat of tariffs last weekend after President Gustavo Petro spoke out about the terrible treatment of deported migrants and turned away two planes.

In actuality, Petro got the world stage and made a mockery of Trump in a long statement he posted—a world leader finally slamming Trump—even if much of the American media bought the White House’s line.

And just two days later it was Trump who feebly caved to outspoken Democrats—and the American people—after declaring a nationwide spending freeze on thousands of programs appropriated by Congress.

A federal judge first shut Trump down, saying it would do “irreparable harm,” ordering the freeze lifted pending litigation. But even before that, many Americans woke up and were outraged to see Medicaid portals shut down, transportation service disrupted, child care programs threatened, loans and grants put on hold, and even police departments’ funds pulled. And that was the tip of the iceberg.

Calls to Congress surged, and even Republican governors, senators, and House members were privately telling the White House to do something. Democrats—in the states and in federal office—loudly rallied, finally speaking in a unified way, lambasting the administration. Many Democratic senators vowed not to back any of Trump’s nominees any longer.

And the White House by Wednesday announced the freeze was rescinded.

This week, Democrats boycotted the Appropriations Committee vote for Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget, where the orders for the freeze came from—apparently in consultation with Vought, a Project 2025 big player, before he’s even been confirmed.

As this was playing out, it was impossible for a lot of us not to compare it to the disarray and confusion of Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017 and the outrage that lit up many Americans and had Democrats forcefully slamming Trump. We all vividly remember that. This episode one week into Trump’s second presidency showed Trump is weaker and even more incompetent than before.

We were led to believe that this time around Trump would have more loyal people around him and a well-oiled machine, with no one reining him in. The latter appears to be true but just because he has more devout people working for him doesn’t mean they’re always going to be able to get things done. In fact, their zealotry hinders them, causing them to act impulsively. They are the cut-throat kind of zealots who are clearly battling with each other, exemplified by the MAGA civil war. They’re keeping one another in the dark, including the president, who is clearly not in control, and working to undermine one another.

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Like I said, many of us saw it as similar to the Muslim ban in 2017, which alerted many Americans and gave Democrats a focus, and it’s rare when much of the media agrees with us. But this week many in corporate media made the comparison too. From The New York Times:

The episode, which amounted to the first significant reversal of the new administration, echoed Mr. Trump’s early-2017 effort to ban people from mostly Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. That order caused mass confusion at airports, sparked damaging headlines and was temporarily blocked in court and pared back…
..Behind the scenes, senior White House officials were caught off guard on Monday when the Office of Management and Budget released the memo, which ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance to ensure that federal programs aligned with Mr. Trump’s policy priorities.
But the memo did not provide detail on the scope and scale of the pause or a list of the services that would be affected. White House officials rushed to understand what had happened and what could be done to reassure people that essential services would not be affected.

There’s so much that is absolutely horrible that Trump has done in a little over a week. And much of it flew past the media’s radar in a big way. So I’m not exactly ready to say this is a major turning point—though it could prove to be—as much as that I see it as the start of something and an opportunity. People are paying attention and Democrats are getting some fire.

Add to all of this a special election in Iowa—on the same day the spending freeze was announced—in which a Democrat, Mike Zimmer, won a state senate seat by four points in a GOP-dominated district that Trump won in November by 21 points:

Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the statehouse campaign arm of the Democratic Party, said Tuesday the victory in a district where Trump won by a large margin shows Democrats have a strong path forward in the aftermath of major GOP wins in the 2024 election.
“This earthquake victory in Iowa puts Republicans across the country on notice,” Williams said in a statement. “… Tonight’s win marks the first flip of the cycle and builds on key majority-making wins in Virginia earlier this month. The DLCC is starting the new cycle strong just a month into 2025—from battlegrounds to Republican territory. We have dozens more special elections on the horizon—we’re only just getting started.”

So, things are happening. Trump is f------ up. Calls to Congress are getting heard. Democrats are speaking more forcefully—and they’re winning elections in places where Trump surged. All of it bodes well, but it’s just a start. Let’s stay focused and engaged, and definitely keep up the energy and the pressure.

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The Trump administration cruelly and abruptly stopped the distribution of live-saving antiretroviral drugs to almost 26 million people worldwide. The program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR—is the global health program started by Republican president George W. Bush in 2003. He celebrated the 20 year anniversary in 2023 at his presidential library.

While White House has called this a “pause,” The New York Times described it in more dire terms:

On Monday afternoon, officials worldwide were alerted that PEPFAR’s data systems would shut down at 6 p.m. Eastern — roughly three hours after the email was received — immediately closing off access to all data sets, reports and analytical tools.
“Users should prioritize copying key documents and data,” said the email viewed by The Times.
The message prompted speculation that the program would not resume, as its future was already in question.

The Times noted, in what seems like pure evil, that the administration, “has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.”

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Without the drugs for any length of time, HIV will replicate inside the bodies of these HIV-infected people in poor countries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere, who have been living and thriving, as HIV has thankfully become a manageable illness because of the drugs. HIV will be able to transmit from them to others—transmission is suppressed while taking the drugs—and more powerful strains could emerge.

And they will develop full-blown AIDS, suffer immensely, and die.

It’s as simple as that.

Let’s be clear, for Trump this is eugenics, killing off the non-white people in the “shithole” countries who he surely believes we shouldn’t be spending money on.

Trump has promoted eugenics—spouting off about “good genes” and “bad genes” in talking about immigrants he wants to deport who he says are “poisoning the blood” of Americans—and, according to his own nephew, said disabled people should “just die” in the context of his nephew’s own son.

So none of this is speculation. Trump is a racist and believes people with debilitating illnesses should “just die.” PEPFAR survived Trump’s first term, even though he did move to harm it. PEPFAR must be continually renewed by Congress in bills the president in office has always signed.

Trump’s proposed budget in 2017 would have severely harmed the program, though not destroy it entirely. In the end, Trump extended funding with no major cuts, signing the PEPFAR Extension Act of 2018, and the administration even touted it on the State Department’s website, in a post that is still there:

This marks another significant moment in the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s (PEPFAR) history of lifesaving work. In the past 15 years, PEPFAR has enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support from eight U.S. congresses and has been supported by three consecutive U.S. presidents. Since its inception, PEPFAR has saved over 17 million lives, prevented millions of HIV infections, and transformed the global AIDS response from death and despair to life and hope.

But, as we’ve seen, Trump in 2025 is far different. It’s not just that there aren’t people around him who can reign him in; there are people around him encouraging these actions.

Add to Trump’s racism and obsession with eugenics the fact that the people in place in his administration from Project 2025 just want to cut all foreign funding of any kind in their dangerous America First zeal, and want to slash funding to Americans’ social safety net as well. His nominee for Office of Management and Budget director, Russell Vought, a major contributor to Project 2025, is making that clear, seeking to target Medicare and Medicaid and other programs, even admitting it during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Then there’s the power of the Christian right—and Vought is also a devout evangelical Christian nationalist—which sees HIV as a sexually transmitted disease that could be “controlled” via behavior. But more so, abortion is at play here—or at least is something they’re blowing up to add into the mix.

Republicans last year accused PEPFAR of funding abortion. The evidence: Four nurses who distribute the drugs to people with HIV in Mozambique, where abortion is legal, also separately performed 21 abortions. Nothing linked the PEPFAR money to the abortions, but providers of the drugs are barred under the law from also performing abortions, period.

Whatever the case, this was an isolated incident in the context of 26 million people receiving the drugs worldwide. Nonetheless, Senate Republicans would only sign on to a one-year extension in 2024, with the Christian nationalist base pressuring them.

Then you have to add to all of this the fact that Trump is intent on making RFK Jr. his Health and Human Services Secretary. RFK is a crackpot and AIDS denialist who believes HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, a public health conspiracy theory that goes back to the 1980s and has no basis in scientific fact:

Despite firm scientific evidence that H.I.V. infections cause AIDS — some of which was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2008 — Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly questioned the link.
“There are much better candidates than H.I.V. for what causes AIDS,” he told a New York Magazine reporter in June 2023.
He has suggested that possible causes of AIDS include environmental toxins and “poppers,” an inhaled drug and immunosuppressant popularized by gay men during the 1970s.
But studies have looked at whether factors like drug use, sexual behavior and bacterial infections were associated with AIDS. They have all come to the clear conclusion that “the only common denominator” was H.I.V., according to the National Institutes of Health.

This is just homophobic blather dressed up as something else. RFK may as well be a Christian nationalist himself.

The bottom line is that Trump has these people in his ear, coming from various perspectives—from the costs that are incurred to conspiracy theories about science—and they’re all feeding his racist impulses.

The humanitarian crisis will be a calamity. But HIV, for a variety of reasons, has also been deemed a national security crisis, and that’s why a Republican president—George W. Bush—whose own father bowed to Christian conservatives regarding AIDS when he was president, realized the U.S. needed to be instrumental in stopping the transmission of HIV globally. In April of of 2000, the U.S. government under Bill Clinton declared AIDS a national security threat, entrusting it to the work of the National Security Council, something every president since—and most lawmakers—have understood. From the Journal of American Medical Association:

Security has been broadly defined as both the freedom from fear and the freedom from need.⁴ Under this definition, HIV/AIDS threatens the security of governments and economies around the world because of its ability to simultaneously endanger political stability and depress current levels of prosperity. According to one study, a significant decrease in life expectancy is the strongest risk factor for ethnic conflict, genocide, failure of fledgling democracies, and revolutionary wars.⁵
In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, average life expectancy rates will drop 25% in the next few decades from 59 years to less than 45 years, solely due to HIV/AIDS.⁶ Stable leadership may collapse if death rates continue to rise among public and private elites, including the police force and the military, where HIV prevalence rates have reached 60% in countries such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.⁷

Beyond that, Bush and many Republicans understood, along with Democrats, that if the U.S. doesn’t fill the vacuum on desperately needed aid, countries will seek help from our adversaries, most notably China. Already, in the crisis over deportations, some countries have noted it:

After Mr. Trump signed executive orders this week aimed at sealing the U.S. southern border, expelling migrants and slashing foreign aid, Honduran officials said such measures could push their country closer to China, even as Mr. Trump has criticized China’s advances in Latin America.
Enrique Reina, the Honduran foreign minister, said in a television interview this week that while the United States provides his country with important help, Honduras had increasingly been approaching other countries, including China.

While Colombia has been a staunch ally of the U.S. and has criticized China, its second largest trading partner is China, after the U.S. After Trump’s ramping up a trade war with Colombia you could envision the country shifting more toward China, at least economically, so as not to be impacted by Trump’s blackmailing threats.

So, many countries in need— such as those battling the scourge of HIV—might be forced to turn to help from China, which of course will have strings attached. MAGA just doesn’t understand that the U.S. supports other countries because of its own self-interests, to stabilize governments and economies—which actually prevents migration—and to keep people from turning to our adversaries.

And Trump himself is too blinded by his racist rage, and his cruel desire to let people “just die,” to see any of that.

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