I just want to put up top that this story is about what it sounds like, which is fantastical and like something out of a spy thriller, and yet there’s nothing we can put past this administration. But it’s also about how The New York Times missed — or chose to ignore — a story staring it right in the face.

When I read reports last weekend about how Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president who’d been sentenced to home confinement after being convicted in a notorious coup plot, had been arrested after an attempted escape, the first person I thought about was Donald Trump.

Trump, of course, is Bolsonaro’s best buddy and fellow authoritarian coup-plotter who, unfortunately for us, was indicted but never convicted because he became president again and killed the cases against himself. And since becoming president, Trump has spent months railing against Brazil and its Supreme Court — even imposing 50 percent tariffs on the country as retribution — demanding Brazil’s current president release Bolsonaro.

But that wasn’t the only reason I thought about Trump. Reports about Bolsonaro’s arrest focused on how his ankle monitor was breached after midnight, and security forces immediately detained him, putting him in a pretty cushy jail, under orders from a judge on the Brazilian Supreme Court who noted that Bolsonaro lives close to the U.S. embassy.

Bolsonaro had in early 2024 slept in the embassy of Hungary — where another authoritarian buddy, Victor Orbán, is president — in what authorities believe was an attempt to evade arrest.

I couldn’t help but think the judge and law enforcement might be aware of a plot involving the U.S., and I discussed it on my SiriusXM show on Monday, speculating that it could have been an attempt by Bolsonaro to get to the U.S. embassy and get asylum from the U.S., which, under Trump, would give it to him.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that I actually saw the video from later in the day on Saturday of Trump, heading to his chopper at the White House, being asked questions by reporters about Bolsonaro, which you can watch right here.

At first, Trump clearly seems not to catch that the reporter is asking about Bolsonaro being arrested the night before and instead thinks it’s just a general question of some sort about his dictator pal.

TRUMP: So I spoke last to the person you just referred to, and we’re going to be meeting, I believe, in the very near future.

Reporter: Sir, are you aware about the president being arrested today?

Trump responds with what is clearly shock, sticking his head out .

TRUMP: What?!

Reporter: I’m talking about the former Brazilian president being arrested today.

TRUMP: No, I don’t know anything about that.

Trump seems a bit stunned, and again says, “I don’t know anything about it,” before asking the reporter, “Is that what happened?”

Then he kind of grimaces, and says, “That’s too bad,” and repeats again, “I Just think it’s too bad.”

The Times published a story about the latest on Bolsonaro’s arrest, but it oddly focused up top on how Trump, supposedly learning the limits of his power, doesn’t have as much interest in Bolsonaro as he used to, and it quoted from the exchange with reporters — but only the part where he says “That’s too bad,” and not the part where he says he just spoke to Bolsonaro:

“That’s too bad.”

It was a telling response from President Trump on Saturday when he learned the news from reporters that his once close ally, the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, had just been arrested.

Did he have any thoughts?

“No,” Mr. Trump replied. “I just think it’s too bad.”

What a difference a few months make.

In July, Mr. Trump sent an angry letter to the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, demanding that the authorities drop charges that Mr. Bolsonaro had attempted a coup. Mr. Trump slapped 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian imports and imposed sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice to try to keep Mr. Bolsonaro — a right-wing politician sometimes called the Trump of the Tropics — out of prison.

Five months later, Mr. Trump has all but admitted defeat.

This ia a very strange framing. It completely omits what Trump said before he said “That’s too bad.”

Trump said he’d just spoken with Bolsonaro the night before. And said he they were going to be meeting “very soon.”

How would Trump be able to meet Bolsonaro in home confinement in Brazil?

And how did the Times not catch what would otherwise throw cold water on the framing of its story? After all, far from forgetting about Bolsonaro, Trump was very much thinking about Bolsonaro, having just spoken to him and planning to see him “soon.”

Thankfully, the always sharp Rachel Maddow proved I was not crazy and being conspiratorial. Because when I did a search this morning, after seeing the video, I found that she indeed covered this on her MS Now program, raising all the right questions even as she pointed to what fantastical plot this would be if true.

But where is the rest of the media, and why did the Times not home in on Trump’s highly interesting comments, instead making it appear as if Trump had been giving up on Bolsonaro?

Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to reporting in Axios, is setting his sights on a 2028 run for the presidency. The report forced Donald Trump to respond to it, and thus to talk about life without him as the leader of MAGA, much less America.

No, Cruz will not be elected president in ‘28 — and we certainly don’t want that to happen — but we should encourage the talk nonetheless, and media should to bring it up more. Apparently, the White House is angry with Cruz for putting it out there, seeing it as undermining Trump — and JD Vance. As NOTUS reports:

The White House and its allies believe Sen. Ted Cruz is taking positions antithetical to President Donald Trump from his perch as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee as a way to position himself against Vice President JD Vance ahead of 2028.

And they’re not happy about it. Cruz has been making life difficult for the White House behind the scenes.

And that’s why it’s a good thing. This week’s outcome of the months-long debacle in Congress over the Epstein files, coming to a head after Republicans saw a Democratic blowout at the polls two weeks ago, underscores that Trump is a lame duck.

The dam burst, as Republicans rushed to vote to force the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. We have not seen a president rebuked like this in ions, with a veto-proof majority that was nearly unanimous in the House and Senate.

Sure, Trump jumped on the bandwagon and told Republicans to vote for it, but only after he saw he was going to lose big. He could release the files at any time, and didn’t need a bill. He signed the bill — which he had to do, or face that veto-proof majority — with no cameras, nor with the victims by his side, announcing it on Truth Social in the dead of night.

Trump was forced to do something he was loath to do. It doesn’t mean the files will be released, as he’ll go to Plan B or Plan C, working with the DOJ to block them or strip out anything in them about him. While that’s not good for the victims who want justice, any further stonewalling will just keep the story out there. It will never go away, and will continue to bring Trump down.

Trump is the lamest of ducks, as Republicans in states like Indiana now defy his orders to redistrict and further gerrymander. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-GA) went for broke and created a huge clash with Trump. She was the most high-profile deep, dark MAGA figure to break with him, taking a gamble that it would work for her. And it did.

Trump finally exploded and called her a “traitor” — which is rich for so many reasons, including that she’s used that word against so many others — inspiring violent threats against her. None of us knows MTG’s true motives. On Friday, she dropped the stunning news that she would resign from Congress in January. There’s been lots of talk about her positioning herself to run for president too.

Bring it on!

No, MTG will not be elected president. But the more the MAGA base talks about this rift and about other Republicans running for president, the more they show that they’re dividing and also looking at life beyond Trump, who’s dropped his threats — for now — of running for a third term.

Trump’s power over the GOP is slipping, and the Jeffrey Epstein debacle was really a massive exposure of that. NBC News reports that Greene’s voters, while they still support Trump in her blood-red, gerrymandered district in Georgia, also continue to support her.

Before Greene announced her resignation, NBC interviewed voters in her district. Trump had pulled his endorsement of Greene and threatened to back a candidate to primary her. But it doesn’t seem to be working:

“That’s not right. It’s not right,” Debbie Dyer, 60, said of Trump’s accusation. “She should not be seen as a traitor. She’s trying to do the best for the American people and I think Donald Trump should accommodate her and work for America.”

“She has a lot of courage and tells it like it is,” added Dyer, who lives in Dalton, near the Tennessee border, and works at a carpet company.

Trump was hoping the voters would choose between him and Greene, and choose him — his black-and-white world in which you’re either with him or you’re against him — but that doesn’t appear to be happening. This tactic always worked for Trump, but it’s now deflating.

“Some people are struggling with it. Some are choosing Team Marjorie, and some are Team Trump,” said Angela Dollar, a local Republican official in Floyd County, part of Greene’s district.

As for Dollar: “I can like two people who don’t like each other. My hope is they’ll reconcile.”

It seems highly doubtful that Trump is going to destroy Greene. And that’s a big deal.

Of course, none of us should trust or root for Greene, who’s been a vile force in politics, her recent pushback on Trump notwithstanding.

But if Trump no longer has the power to destroy Republicans by backing primaries against them — and as more of them learn that that’s true — we could see the GOP bucking him on a number of issues as we head toward the mid-terms, where Democrats have opened up a big lead in the generic ballot.(A whopping 14 points in one poll, and high single digits in others.)

Republicans are in disarray, with a civil war under way over everything from welcoming holocaust denier Nick Fuentes into the party to fears about the impact of Obamacare subsidies expiring.

The only thing uniting the GOP for years has been a fear of Trump.

But if that fear dissipates, the splits just widen, as they fight one another more and facilitate the MAGA crack up. And that is definitely something to root for.

Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.

“I’ve had enough,” Adam from Michigan told me in a call to my SiriusXM show last Friday, after identifying as someone who voted for Donald Trump three times.

He plans to vote “against him, up and down the ballot,” next year.

He said it’s not just him — it’s his entire family, and colleagues at work.

“We don’t want to hear any of it — we just turn it off,” Adam said, referring to TV at the office, where most of his colleagues are Republicans who supported Trump.

As we see MAGA Republicans in the House defying Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein files, and Republicans in states like Indiana ignoring Trump’s demands for redistricting and gerrymandering — an attempt to rig the midterms — there’s a clear sign that many GOP officeholders see Trump as a lame duck. They’re not following his every command.

They’re emboldened — and frightened — by the blowout elections for Democrats two weeks ago, which proved Trump is tanking and Democrats are soaring. And they’re looking at the polls where Trump is sinking, not just with a substantial majority of Americans but among Republicans and MAGA too.

It’s on every issue, including immigration and the economy, where Trump is doing the worst.

Adam is one of them. As I told him, I could argue with him for hours about why he voted for Trump three times, and about his claims that Trump’s first term saw a great stewardship of the economy and the handling of the pandemic. But that would get us off course — there’s always time for that.

I wanted him to just explain what had him dumping Trump now and what he planned to do moving forward. A transcript of our conversation follows.

MS: Adam is in Michigan. Hi Adam. Thanks for calling.

Adam: Oh, hey Michelangelo. I am a, I voted for Trump three times, and he is just like, he just right now, it’s amazing how he is not at a 10 percent approval rating. With the Epstein stuff, the tariffs, the economic destruction, the alienation of our allies. Telling Ukraine, you’re on your own. Destroys everything, saying he’s gonna fix things by lowering the tariffs with a mess he created.

Then you have the Epstein files and then he’s in the emails. I think right now is the time every Republican voters should say, “This our chance to dump him, impeach him, remove him, and get back to business.” That’s how I feel like — I’ve had enough.

MS: Tell me a little bit about how, ‘cause you seem very passionately opposed to him, but to vote for him three times, you had to be very passionately in favor of him and supporting him and certainly by that third time. So what is it that really did it for you after he was elected this time?

Adam: Well, the first time was a wild card, like a lot of people, right.

The second time was kind of like, I remember how the economy was pre-COVID, kind of anchored to that. Okay. Like 2020 happened, and then kind of like, this time, I was kind of thinking, Will things be like 2019 again?

I didn’t take him as serious on the tariffs because he talked about in 2015, 2016, but he never actually did it. But then when he did the tariffs this time, it’s like so reckless. With that “liberation day” and like he destroyed our standing in the world. Canada is gonna hate us for like 50 years. I mean, it’s really sad, but I’m just, I did not—

MS: So it was the tariffs first, but then what? The Epstein files? You mentioned a whole bunch of stuff.

Adam: I know, I’m just kind of sick of him, but you know, just, he’s just not the same person, I can’t explain it. He’s just not who he was the first time. Like the first time he cared about the economy more than anything. Like we saw that during COVID, right?

But then this time it’s like.He’s purposely trying to destroy the economy, then trying to act like he’s fixing it. Like I think he’s lost officially lost his mind — well, not officially, but just, he’s just not — he’s a different monster this time. He’s just reckless.

MS: I will, I will agree with you on that. He’s a different monster. Where we will disagree, and I could argue with you about COVID and the economy in the first administration and, you know what he was, but I’m not going to because I’m very happy that you’re now, you know, deciding you don’t support him.

And I do believe he’s a different kind of monster. He wasn’t like this in the first term, but a lot of us saw this coming with Project 2025. He just completely and totally, I think, is captive to these people. He’s kind of checked out.

Are you now going to do what you can in the midterm elections to vote against Republicans to make sure there’s a check on him?

Adam:I thought about the today out on my walk. I was kind of thinking for next election, I think I just have to maybe vote against him up and down the ballot.

I hate to talk about the people who have cancer, but kind of like as a chemo to get rid of the cancer of Trump. I can’t, I mean, no disrespect to people who have cancer. I hate using this analogy ‘cause it’s so disingenuous, but I just dunno how to explain or what to do, you know?

MS: Yeah, I hear you on that a Adam, thank you. I’m glad to hear that. I bet you represent some other people too. Maybe you can quickly tell me, are there other people you know who’ve also decided they don’t like him anymore?

Adam: Oh yeah. I have clients that work, you know, really like ‘hard in,’ said the same thing. They’re all done. All my siblings, my parents. I have colleagues, people at work who are all Republican voters, you know, like the Mitt Romney types, the John McCain types. We’re all done. Like when his staff comes on TV, we just hit the mute button at the office. We don’t wanna hear from any of them, like Peter Navarro or Scott Bessent or any of them.

Like, we don’t wanna hear any of it. We just turn it off.

MS: I’m, I’m glad to hear that. Make sure, do what you can to make sure they vote against Trump, and that means voting for the Democrat on the ticket, particularly in Congress, particularly for the Senate there in Michigan. Very important races in Michigan.

He has to be stopped. If the Republicans do not have the majority, everything stops. He won’t be able to do, what he’s been doing. So make sure you tell them all and organize. Thank you, Adam for the call.

Election night was exactly what we all needed.

Following the returns coming in, it was exhilarating, an experience that helped counter what we felt in 2024.

So yes, on a personal, psychological level, this will fuel us for the enormous work ahead. And this built on No Kings, which again points to the importance of organizing.

But we also surely needed this politically, to counter Trump and the GOP—and the corporate media, which is always pandering to the GOP.

Mikie Sherrill, winning by double digits in the New Jersey race for governor, killed the narrative of New Jersey as drifting toward the GOP. The pollsters and the pundits had a big upset, telling us it was going to be single digits and MAGA Jack Ciatterelli could win. Black and Latino voters, who the media told us had strayed to Trump, voted in big percentages for Sherrill.

In the Virginia gubernatorial race, the spread for Abigail Spanberger’s trouncing was also bigger than predicted, and the GOP harping on a texting scandal didn’t stop Jay Jones from becoming attorney general. The House of Delegates is seeing double-digit pickups for Democrats. Virginia, a true bellwether, is a massive blow to the GOP.

Californian organized fiercely within a matter of two months, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, and voted to fight Trump and Texas by redistricting their congressional map. It was a stunning turnaround—so rapidly—and an understanding of the stakes.

Newsom gave a powerful speech, letting Trump know we will not accept his authoritarian rule. And Newsom implored other Democratic states to follow suit with redistricting — and I think they will.

And in New York, Zorhan Mamdani brings a whole new generation to City Hall, as voters decided it was no more business as usual with the same old corrupt politicians. He ran on affordability, as the other Democrats did, hitting the GOP and Trump for only continuing to enrich the billionaires. Mamdani is also a model for Democrats across the country in how to engage with voters, and he sent a message to Democratic leadership: It’s time for change. Much will be written on that.

Mamdani’s acceptance speech, rather than being conciliatory, was fiery and defiant—the right stance for this moment—as he spoke directly to Trump, telling him to “turn up the volume” to listen, and then letting him know he will have a big fight on his hands if he comes for us. Pitch perfect.

So, let’s celebrate these big wins, and the fact that two women elected as governor, and an immigrant—the first Muslim and South Asian elected to be New York’s mayor—won the marquee races.

We needed it. And the GOP, Trump and the media needed to see it. Our opponents are now on the defensive. Republicans will fret, deathly afraid of what Trump will do to their chances—but also deathly afraid of what he’ll do if they pull away from him. That’s exactly where we want them moving into the 2026 midterm elections.

A strange thing happened over the past few days. No sooner did Donald Trump again float the idea of running for a third term, saying,” I’d love it” and “I’m allowed to do it,” than he backtracked completely, saying, “I guess I’m not allowed to it” and it’s “too bad.”

In between, House Speaker Mike Johnson rushed to tell the press, “I don’t see the path” for a Trump third term, and said he’d spoken with Trump about it on the same day—basically talking Trump down from his first statement in less than 24 hours, or so it appeared.

Now, don’t get me wrong. None of us should trust anything Trump says. He is a dictator and clearly wants to stay president, and he has already engaged in an attempted coup. So his word means nothing. But the backtrack was nonetheless odd.

What actually happened? A few things. It seems, first off, that Steve Bannon, in his interview with The Economist on Friday, may have been trying to mess with JD Vance—whom he can’t stand and has worked to take down—who’s made it quite clear he’s the heir to MAGA and wants to be president in 2028.

As I wrote on Tuesday, Bannon told The Economist editor that there was a “plan” to get around the 22nd amendment, which bars a president from running more than twice. “Trump is going to be president in 2028. And people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon claimed.

For Trump, it was catnip—irresistible. He doesn’t want to be seen as a lame duck. He wants to seem invincible. But, more pertinently, he most definitely wants to be president forever because he is an authoritarian. Anything breathing life into that idea was going to set him off.

And so, after being asked by reporters on Air Force One about Bannon’s comments, Trump then mused about it the way I explained on Tuesday—not ruling it out while remaining vague, sending the message that he’d try. But that seemed to set off a chain of events in the GOP that shows why No Kings had such impact—and why Republicans have been deathly afraid of the protest and the message of the seven to nine million people who marched.

Trump was in Asia—all of his comments, including the backtrack, came while he was on Air Force One—so it may have been easier for White House operatives to work around Trump and organize a pushback, including getting someone to talk Trump himself down. Trump made the initial comments on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon, Mike Johnson killed the idea.

“It’s been a great run, but I think the president knows, and he and I have talked about, the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many of the American people lament that,” Johnson said during a news conference.

Trump was in Japan at the time. But Johnson said he spoke with him that morning. Clearly, killing this idea of Trump blowing through the 22nd amendment, becoming president again—and maybe for as long as he lives, like a king—was important enough for Johnson to speak with Trump about it while Trump was galavanting many time zones away.

“I don’t see a way to amend the Constitution because it takes about 10 years to do that,” Johnson said. “As you all know, to allow all the states to ratify what two-thirds of the House and three-fourths of the states would approve. So I don’t, I don’t see the path for that, but I can tell you that we are not going to take our foot off the gas pedal.”

Trump then followed suit in answers to a question on Air Force One on his way to South Korea, where President Lee Jae Myung knew how to work Trump, feeding his ego by giving him a replica of a crown worn by Korean kings in 5th and 6th centuries. That, of course, deliciously fed into No Kings, as the gift mesmerized Trump, who even said he wanted to put it on “right now.”

Trump told reporters it was “too bad,” but “based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.” Of course, that last line still leaves the possibility open—because Trump still wants people to think he’s a king.

Jonathan Karl of ABC told “Morning Joe” this week that Trump often talks with reporters on Air Force One about who should succeed him, asking if it should be Marco Rubio or Vance, suggesting Trump actually has always been planning on leaving. Per HuffPost:

Karl pointed to Trump’s question [about Rubio and Vance] as evidence that the president doesn’t really have “any designs on actually staying past the end of this term” despite his repeated talk of and hints at trying to stay in the White House for an unconstitutional third term.
Trump “tells people privately, people close to him, ‘No, no, I’m, you know, I’m done,’” Karl said on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”…

Karl also suggested Bannon was stirring the pot in order to cause tension for the ambitious and super-dangerous Vance. Just this past Tuesday night Vance spoke at a Turning Post USA conference in Mississippi, where the young MAGA crowd was chanting, “Forty-eight! Forty-eight!”

So it’s quite possible Vance, feverishly working on getting the base behind him, was among those scrambling at the White House as Trump was traveling, doing what they could to tamp down any idea that Trump would run again, and bringing Mike Johnson in.

The GOP has a big problem: weaning the MAGA cult off of Trump and onto someone else. They must be talking about life after Trump, and they have to be worried about pushing a fantasy of Trump running again that doesn’t or can’t pan out. Trump may eventually draw them into some plan to keep him in office, as they’ve been drawn in to supporting many illegal things he’s initiated. For now, however, they’re surely thinking life after Trump.

But also, they know it’s toxic to have Trump talking about running for a third term as they are facing enormously tough elections, having already been brought down by Trump. As millions were set to march in No Kings rallies, the GOP was petrified of the message, doing what they could to demonize the protesters, none of which worked. Trump’s musings, inspired by Bannon’s claims, only added more fuel to that messsge of No Kings.

All of this is another example of why No Kings was so successful and will continue to be, and why we must keep marching strong.

Donald Trump uses a well-worn technique of saying several distinctly different things in one exchange, or in a series of exchanges, allowing people—including media, but also voters—to choose what they want to hear.

A case in point in the past few days is his answer regarding running for a third term, something that the 22nd amendment explicitly prohibits for any president elected to two previous terms.

A reporter asked Trump about Steve Bannon’s recent interview with The Economist, in which Bannon referred to a “plan” that would get around the 22nd amendment to make Trump president. “Trump is going to be president in 2028. And people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon claimed.

Trump answered the question by saying this: “I haven’t really thought about it… but I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” (That was a joke, as Trump’s numbers are in the toilet—but he doesn’t pass up any opportunity to spread disinformation.) And then he said, we “have great people,” floating Marco Rubio and JD Vance as strong candidates for president, suggesting he would not be running for president.

But then Trump added, “I would love to do it,” followed by this ambiguous line: “Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me.”

When asked about a scheme racing around right-wing circles in which he would run for vice president in 2028—which is legally dubious, but less clear cut—and then become president after his running mate resigns once in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to throw cold water on it while also saying he’s “allowed” to do it:

Yeah, I’d be allowed to do that…You’d be allowed to do that, but I wouldn’t do that. I think it’s too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out, because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not—it wouldn’t be right.

So, in this entire exchange, Trump both promoted the idea of running and refused to rule it out—which tracks with statements and actions this year, including trolling online with Trump 2028 hats—and suggested he wouldn’t run by promoting other candidates for president while dismissing what appears to be the only semi-debatable way he could legally become president again.

People can take from it what they want. Most of the media reported on both responses—Trump dismissing running for VP as “too” cute but not ruling out a third term—but there was little in-depth coverage of how Trump would seek a third term. I believe that’s because it would mean speculating that he’s lying about not using the VP loophole or that he will engage in a coup. And our corporate media is deathly afraid of going to either place.

It’s possible Trump is promoting the idea of a third term, as some suggest, merely to elevate his power and put fear into people while he doesn’t have actual intentions of seeking it. A lame duck president is seen as weak, and Trump may be trying to scare Republicans in Congress, so they don’t begin pushing against him.

At the same time, we cannot rule anything out with Trump. And media should be deeply delving into anything he says, laying out the scenarios.

There’s nothing in the major news outlets, however, about the possibility of Trump staging a coup—even though he attempted to do so in 2020 and sent his MAGA mob to attack the Capitol. Conservative former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, writing in the Atlantic, explained this week just how much easier it would be for Trump to be successful the next time:

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.)
Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

This kind of discussion is exactly what corporate media should be raising. They may claim it’s too conspiratorial and speculative, but the truth is that they’re just plain afraid. After all, it’s nothing out of the realm of possibility for Trump, because he’s attempted it all before.

They fall back on Trump giving mixed messages, and much of the public that wants to deny what Trump says follows suit. But how many times in the past nine months have we heard from Trump supporters, from Joe Rogan and the bro podcasters to average Trump voters, who’ve soured on Trump and now say they only thought he’d be going after hardened criminals—”the worst of the worst”—in his mass deportations?

How many times have we seen them express astonishment at the tariffs to which they are now strongly opposed? How many times have we watched as they expressed shock about mass firings in the government or attacks on foreign leaders and lands?

Trump said he was going to do all of this. He explicitly discussed deporting tens of millions of people during the 2024 campaign, for example, and even raised the reality of deporting mothers whose children are American citizens.

But people pre-disposed to like Trump’s rage and who were easily conned by his economic promises only heard what they wanted to hear. And much of the media has enabled this by not digging deeply into what Trump says, particularly when he purposely puts out mixed messages like a smorgasbord for people to choose from.

Right-wing UFC star Bryce Mitchell, an evangelical Christian who said during the campaign that he’d “take a bullet” for Trump, is now calling Trump the “Antichrist.” The fighter wrote on Instagram this week:

I do not like the guy at all…
Putting America last, and now he’s blaming the beef farmers for the price of beef. Hey, I’m not biased, man. He talked a good game, he tricked me. It fooled me. I admit it.

I’m glad he admits he was tricked and fooled. But again, it’s not like Trump didn’t say what he was going to do during the campaign. People who choose what they want to hear need to be hit over the head again and again with facts and analyses of potential outcomes. And unfortunately, our media didn’t do that and still isn’t doing it.

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In response to Donald Trump’s threat to “jail” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson simply for being opposed to having troops on their streets, Pritzker rightly responded by telling reporters Trump is a “coward,” and saying, “Come and get me.”

But he also gave an interview to the Chicago Tribune in which he raised Trump’s declining mental condition. It was biting but seemed accurate, getting to the core, and certainly raising questions for journalists to ask about:

This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “This is a man who has something stuck in his head. He can’t get it out of his head. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t know anything that’s up to date. It’s just something in the recesses of his brain that is effectuating to have him call out these cities.
“And then, unfortunately, he has the power of the military, the power of the federal government to do his bidding, and that’s what he’s doing.”

This came a day after Democratic Senator Reuben Gallego told reporters something similar, regarding Trump’s engagement on talks about the government shutdown.

And it came a week after Representative Madeline Dean of Pennsylvania told House Speaker Mike Johnson that Trump is “unhinged and unwell,” something Johnson actually didn’t outright deny. This shows the issue is potent, something Republicans see and would be put on the defensive about.

Dean then was brought on TV talk shows to discuss what she meant by her comments. This underscores that the media will only focus on this issue if Democrats raise it, and it’s something that many Americans will recognize—and be concerned about—when it’s highlighted. That’s vital right now as Trump is engaged in even more dangerous actions and rhetoric, while seemingly being used by those in his administration who are taking advantage of his declining mental state. Of course, Democrats should be responding to Trump many different ways. But this is one powerful tool in their arsenal right now.

And it’s good to see that raising the issue is becoming more prevalent, with at least three Democrats within a week focusing on Trump’s mental fitness. It’s not just about Trump making decisions without being mentally sound; it’s about others around him manipulating him and exploiting his increasingly feeble mind.

Trump is listless and half asleep at events happening in mid-morning. He sometimes has no public events for days at a time. There’s the mysterious bruise on his hand that appears and goes, which may or may not be connected to the chronic veinous insufficiency for which he’s been diagnosed and which causes his ankles to swell. These issues may or may not be related to his mental decline, but all of it is a concern and something the public should know about.

Jake Tapper of CNN described a phone text interview with Trump this week that was very odd. First off, Trump doesn’t text or email. He speaks on the phone for interviews, so it was suspicious from the beginning. The topic of discussion was the war in Gaza, and Trump answered in short, often inflammatory, several-word sentences, which gave the impression he wasn’t actually the person on the other end of the phone.

It was a dereliction by Tapper and CNN, which promoted it as an exclusive interview. They actually gave the questions to Trump—or whoever—in writing before the so-called interview. And CNN can’t confirm that Trump was actually texting. Even Tapper seemed dubious.

CNN’s journalistic malpractice aside, what the hell is going on? Why didn’t Trump just call the show? Who is actually running things and making decisions?

As I wrote about over the weekend, we had several examples last week of Trump not knowing key facts, while his administration has also taken major actions without informing him.

Trump had spoken in a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland differs from what’s being portrayed to him. He seemed shocked that she wasn’t seeing the fires in Portland that he’s seeing on television. And he continued this week to claim Portland is “burning to the ground” when there are a handful of protesters and no violence. We’ve learned that aides are using five-year-old footage to make Trump think there are fires.

The Trump administration late last week reversed extraordinary counterterrorism cuts to New York City—the number one target of terrorism in this country—of $187 million dollars. The reversal came only after New York Governor Kathy Hochul called Trump, who hadn’t heard about it. No one in his administration informed him of what Homeland Security was doing, and even worse, he didn’t see any of this in the news as DHS publicly defended the cuts.

And, as we now see Trump wavering on the idea of extending subsidies for Obamacare, saying on Monday that he was open to it only to backtrack after Republican leaders talked him down, it adds to Senator Chuck Schumer’s observation that Trump was in the dark about the subsidies from the very beginning.

Schumer, after he came out of the White House meeting over the shutdown, posted about how Trump seemed not to know that Obamacare subsidies were expiring at the end of the year.

Now The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that Trump’s Truth Social post ordering Pam Bondi to indict James Comey and others was actually meant to be a be a private message to Bondi, but he inadvertently publicly posted it.

Someone apparently removed it, but it was too late. It had gotten out, so they put it back up so it wouldn’t look like what it was: a confused man in mental decline posting something publicly that he clearly should have spoken with Bondi about in a meeting or on the phone.

On Sept. 20, Trump meant to send a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging her to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and his other favored targets, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote.
Trump believed he had sent Bondi the message directly, addressing it to “Pam,” and was surprised to learn it was public, the officials said. Bondi grew upset and called White House aides and Trump, who then agreed to send a second post praising Bondi as doing a “GREAT job.”

And let’s not forget the crazy QAnon “medbeds” post Trump shared little over a week ago:

President Donald Trump on Saturday shared an apparently artificially created video of himself promoting a cure-all bed with origins in conspiratorial corners of the internet.
The video, which has since been deleted, was intended to resemble a Fox News segment on the show hosted by the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, featured an AI version of Trump promising access to new medical technology. This segment has never aired on the network.
The “medbed” conspiracy theory has spread during recent years in QAnon circles online.

Did Trump actually think this AI version of himself was him, and that he had spoken with Lara Trump about “medbeds” on Fox News—and that they actually exist—and was now sharing the segment, proud of his non-existent accomplishment? That’s the only plausible explanation, especially since it was taken down, likely by someone else in the White House covering up what is bizarre behavior.

Trump is clearly unwell, and people in the White House are manipulating him and making their own power grabs.

Pritzker, Gallego and Dean were right to publicly raise the issue of mental decline. Every Democrat should do exactly that and force the media to put the White House and Trump on the defensive about it.

As happens often, the Trump administration overreached, this time after the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk.

A political assassination is something we all condemn. It was an opportunity for any president to bring the country together, and even have his opponents in agreement with him on at least that one issue, condemning violence.

Instead, Trump, as well as JD Vance and Stephen Miller, went for revenge and retribution, threatening to prosecute non-profit groups like the Ford Foundation, and publications like The Nation. They urged people to dox anyone speaking harshly about Kirk on social media, and to call their employers—and many people lost their jobs.

And then came the FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC based on a comedian’s monologue, and the network quickly jumped to put Jimmy Kimmel on “indefinite suspension.”

This was the third time ABC and the parent company Disney were caving to Trump since he took office, just like some law firms and universities did. They didn’t get that you can settle a frivolous lawsuit and bow to Trump—and he will only come after you again, a maniacal shark seeing blood in the water.

This time, America did not sit back.

The public outrage was intense, and Kimmel is someone known to the vast majority of Americans, and beloved by many. So are the women on “The View,” which was also threatened by Carr. I said this on my SiriusXM show late last week and wrote as much here late on Friday: The entire story had been turned about—by Carr’s own zealousness—from one of political assassination of a far-right figure who was little known in the mainstream to one of free speech and popular culture, silencing well-known and popular voices simply for criticizing Trump.

And as I wrote last week as well, we all know this was about Kimmel’s criticism of Trump in that monologue and not about Kirk. Trump later talked about taking the licenses away from all networks that have news or comedians who criticize him.

The uproar was intense, with Disney and Hulu subscriptions being canceled at a fast pace and some reports that Disney’s value had dropping dramatically. Figures from President Obama to former Disney CEO Michael Eisner slammed Disney for showing no leadership. Labor unions, in Hollywood and beyond, spoke out, protested and threatened further actions. Over 400 Hollywood celebrities signed a letter condemning the action, and some stars called for boycotts—even stars of Marvel, which is owned by Disney.

Then came conservatives like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who compared the administration to Mafia thugs.

This was only going to grow. Disney had no way out but to bring Kimmel back, and he is returning tonight. Whether he apologizes or says his critics misunderstood his comments doesn’t really matter. His return proves that this was not about his “ratings” as Trump and Carr claimed, suddenly on the defensive. Carr was likely jolted by how quickly ABC caved after the companies that own the stations—Nexstar and Sinclair—had said they wouldn’t air the show after his comments, as both companies have mergers and other business before the FCC.

So it proved Trump and Carr to be liars and authoritarians hellbent on controlling speech, because obviously it wasn’t about ratings—and Kimmel will probably have ratings through the roof tonight. Sinclair is sticking to its threat and not airing the show in the couple of dozen markets in which it owns stations. We’ll see how that lasts, as they say they will “evaluate” it in time.

For now, let’s look at the lessons learned.

Sustained outrage from the public and boycotts, coupled with shaming of leaders of corporations—by other political and cultural leaders—worked here. Obama has lately been very active, thankfully, on social media, after early on being very subdued. That has made a difference. Hollywood celebrities, former media executives and the other comedians—well-known-and lesser-known—had a huge impact.

This is one of those incidents in which the left and progressives used culture in going on offense—when it’s often MAGA that is whipping up fake stories within the cultural space—and we need to do that over and over. Jimmy Kimmel—and all the rest of us defending him—did more for the First Amendment and waking up the country than any politicians or media have done.

Many people who weren’t tuned in or paying attention to what’s going on are suddenly aware that something bad is happening in America. We have to learn from that for the battles ahead.

JD Vance and Stephen Miller, speaking for the Trump administration, declared war on liberal groups doing the important work of fighting to save democracy, all in the name of avenging Charlie Kirk’s death. The exploitation of a political assassination has been sickening—and dangerous—as MAGA uses it to promote revenge, silence free speech and shut down vital organizations.

These are all the same people who decried “cancel culture” from the left—and we don’t even know the motive of Kirk’s killer!—but don’t expect consistency from fascists. They’re just out for power.

One condition that has set the United States apart from other democracies in which authoritarians have seized power is its strong civil society. The U.S. has been a democracy much longer than Russia, Hungary, Turkey, India and others, past and present, in which we’ve seen strongmen seize control and snuff out democratic institutions.

As such, the U.S. has built a strong, very organized and wealthy civil society that is not nearly as easy to destroy as it has been in fledgling democracies. Universities and colleges, both publicly and privately funded. An unfettered and robust free press. Legal organizations and private law firms doing pro bono work, all guaranteeing a fight for basic protections.

And foundations, often created by wealthy people who have continued to fund them along with average Americans sending in whatever money they can, which have for many decades backed groups fighting for civil rights, women’s rights, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, LGBTQ rights, economic equality and much more. These non-profit organizations help fund other non-profit aid groups and non-profit publications doing investigative reporting and commentary that have been vital.

As the fear that Congress, controlled by a subservient GOP, would do nothing to protect democracy from the authoritarian came into view this year, and as we’ve watched a Supreme Court Trump has stacked doing his bidding, the United States’ civil society has been an important pillar.

That’s why we saw Trump attempting to dismantle it from the beginning of this term, starting with the universities, law firms and the media. After ABC caved in to Trump’s extortionist lawsuit, we saw CBS do the same. Eventually Paramount, CBS’s owner, got its merger approved by Trump’s FCC in a quid pro quo deal in which Trump got a settlement on his frivilous lawsuit, which, like ABC’s settlement, paid Trump’s legal fees and funds his presidential library.

Now CBS’s new owner, Skydance, is under control of Trump supporter Larry Ellison, who is eager to please Trump. In the last week we learned CBS News has hired a MAGA “ombudsman”—an internal censor is a more apt title in this case—with no media experience, who will make sure the network doesn’t stray from the far right agenda.

Ellison is also in talks to bring in right-wing Bari Weiss, who built the conservative Free Press—which he will buy up in the deal—and put her in a top job at CBS News. This will be the first network among the big three broadcasting networks—which are still more watched than cable channels—that looks like its news division will transform into a new Fox News.

Regarding the universities and law firms, after seeing many initially bow to Trump, we finally saw Harvard and several important firms fight back in the courts and win big. That’s been encouraging, and it’s what we must demand.

That’s more important now as Miller and Vance signaled the Trump administration is going after non-profit groups as they use Kirk’s death. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast yesterday—from the White House—and Miller and other Trump officials came on the program.

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Vance was the epitome of the rising fascist, declaring war on “leftists.” He promoted a mass doxing effort to have people who have criticized Kirk fired from their jobs. He called on people who “see someone celebrating Charlie's death,” to “call their employer.” Vance went on: “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”

This is the same JD Vance who spoke at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he backed the neo-Nazi party in Germany, the afD, and fought for their right to promote hate speech, saying, “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”

So much for that.

We’ve already seen people, from TV pundits and newspaper columnists, to teachers and an airline pilot, lose their jobs after making comments about Kirk mostly focused on his hateful, racist, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Many were fired after MAGA politicians and groups brought attention to their words. This is a purge, and it’s just getting started.

The Guardian reports an “anonymous website that began collecting reports of anti-Kirk ‘political extremism’ said it had received more than 63,000 submissions.” The New Republic notes that the effort is already out of control, sweeping up people who didn’t even write about Kirk, according to a User Mag report:

Ali Nasrati, 30, said he hadn’t posted anything about Kirk but was still publicly doxed over an account using his name and photograph that made posts mocking the right-wing activist, User Mag reported. This set off a tidal wave of threatening messages and phone calls, sending his mother and sister fleeing from their home and resulting in Nasrati getting suspended (with pay) from his job.

Even more alarming, Vance suggested taking away the non-profit status of the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, referring to an article in The Nation magazine, the renowned progressive outlet which he clearly wants to shut down. The Washington Post reports neither group actually currently funds The Nation:

Vance called out the “generous tax treatment” that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation receive as he accused the groups of funding a “disgusting article” in the Nation magazine that he said was used to justify Kirk’s death. Neither group appears to have provided money to the Nation in the past five years.
'The moves underscore the extraordinary amount of time and resources the administration has dedicated to advancing the legacy of Kirk and the way officials have harnessed the emotions surrounding his killing to potentially suppress dissent.

Miller said the White House is promoting a list of “left-wing organizations that are promoting violence.”

“This is not happening for free,” Miller said. “And so under the president’s direction, the attorney general is going to find out who is paying for it, and they will now be criminally liable for paying for violence.”

As The New York Times reports, investigators believe the suspect in Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, acted alone. But the paper noted the White House is implying some sort of coordination with progressive groups. This as Trump claimed political violence is coming from the left while he ignored the vast majority of political violence, which is directed at Democrats from MAGA killers, like the man who shot and killed Minnesota Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home a few months ago:

But Mr. Trump and his top allies suggested that the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives, without presenting evidence that such a network existed. America has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Trump, who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as “antifa,” as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.

Trump actually called for using the RICO Act against progressive non-profit organizations.

“We have some pretty radical groups and they got away with murder,” Mr. Trump said, without naming additional groups. He added that he was talking to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, about bringing charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act against “some of the people that you’ve been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.”

Is all of this a lot of bluster that won’t get far, even if they intend it to? Possibly.

That they couldn’t find a connection between their first mentioned targets, the foundations and The Nation—and that The Nation, as a magazine, is protected by the First Amendment—doesn’t bode well for their crackdown. It’s doubtful they will find any group on the left supporting violent action of any kind. Those groups after all have been speaking against gun violence for decades, fighting for gun reform and backing efforts to stem gun violence, domestic abuse and brutality by law enforcement.

This may mostly be about using Kirk’s death to fire up the MAGA base for the mid-terms—as Trump’s numbers are tanking and he can’t get away from the Epstein saga—while setting up JD Vance for a 2028 run.

But with odious Stephen Miller vowing revenge, and seeing what he’s done on immigration, I wouldn’t put anything past them. Part of Project 2025’s plan is dismantling the grip of groups that fight for democracy, and Trump and his allies see an opportunity to damage that robust civil society further. This is when we all have to pay even more attention.

In the 48 hours since Jimmy Kimmel was “indefinitely” suspended by ABC, the story of Charlie Kirk’s assassination has changed to one of a political purge and killing of free speech.

Kirk and the investigation are out of the news cycle, while Donald Trump’s FCC and its nazi tactics have taken center stage.

A man named Troy from Utah called my SiriusXM show yesterday saying he was “hard right” and yet he thought we’d surely all be on the same page on this one, that we can’t have government dictating speech. (You can Listen to the clip here). He expressed the discomfort that a lot Trump supporters have expressed.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as right-wing as they come, slammed Trump.

Mr. Trump has pursued retribution against political opponents in his second term. He’s used regulatory leverage against Paramount and CBS in a weak lawsuit and squeezed liberal law firms to do pro bono work, while the Justice Department is investigating prosecutors who brought cases against him.
A regulator like [FCC chair Brendan] Carr who might have ignored Mr. Trump’s musings about revenge in the first term doesn’t need direct orders in the second.
The squeeze on Disney looks to be a case of cancel culture on the right.
Mr. Kimmel’s comments Monday associating Charlie Kirk’s killer with the “MAGA gang” were false, callous and stupid. But they weren’t inciting violence, and in a free society they shouldn’t be cause for the government to push someone off the airwaves. Compared to the malevolent garbage on social media about Kirk and his killer, Mr. Kimmel’s words were only mildly offensive.

The head of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, one of the most powerful Christian nationalists in Trump’s base, is very worried, discussing with his panelists that this was “setting a precedent” for a Democratic president to do the same thing.

Even Ted Cruz came out on Friday afternoon and compared the FCC’s Carr to the Mafia operators in “Goodfellas”, speaking on his podcast, per USA Today:

"He says, 'We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,'" Cruz said, referring to Carr. "That's right out of 'Goodfellas.” That's right out a mafioso coming into a bar going, 'Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.'"
"What he said there is dangerous as hell," Cruz said after playing audio of Carr's remarks. That’s right out of a mafioso…It might feel good right now to threaten Kimmel, but when it is used to silence conservatives in America, we will regret it.”

Whoa!

It’s sounding like the GOP knows it’s got a massive problem, as the country is now focused on Trump overreaching, and that includes even some in the base of their own party. The story has shifted from Kirk to Trump’s fascistic actions. Carr, taking orders directly from Trump—who is now saying it’s illegal for the networks to write negative things about him, and should have their licenses taken away—undermined the MAGA narrative.

Kirk wasn’t well-known beyond young people and MAGA minions. But all of America knows Jimmy Kimmel, and they are smelling the stench of fascism.

I’ve been a little quiet for the past few days, as we were dealing with the passing of our pit bull Artie, who many of you will remember me talking about over the past 14 great years of his life. (And thank you to those who’ve written me kind notes.)

But of course the world has gone on and gets more dangerous. I popped up to see U.S. adversaries gathering together, making a mockery of Donald Trump. So, a few words on that.

Trump thought he was being slick when he met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska to supposedly use his supposedly great friendship with Putin to end the war in Ukraine.

He also thought he was being slick when he slapped 50% tariffs on India, when its authoritarian leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wouldn’t stop buying Russian oil.

And he’s thought he’s been really slick with President Xi, believing he was affecting China’s economy with tariffs that would cripple it.

But as we know, China said s----- you, and slapped on bigger tariffs. And while the trade war between the two countries has subsided somewhat, China never caved, and Trump never got what he wanted.

Modi also said f--- you, and now is in the warm embrace of Putin, with whom he held hands over the weekend at China’s summit of anti-Western leaders.

Modi also refused to take Trump’s call, in an act of total humiliation for the feeble orange man with blue hands, as Trump fumed over the Putin-Modi bromance.

This is not normal!

Seeing Xi, Putin and Modi creating an alliance—Modi and Xi having the largest populations and fastest-growing economic markets in the world — with Putin is a five alarm fire.

But then Kim Jong Un turned up in their orbit, in Beijing with Xi, Modi, and Putin to attend China’s military parade.

Trump—clearly feeling left out and very small—went nuts about it on Truth Social.

But it only shows how much he has no influence and credibility with any of these leaders. He so wants in the club, but even these villains don’t want him. To them, he’s just an amateur who also wants to push them around. They’re betting on banding together—a scary thought—and pushing the U.S. around. From ABC:

President Donald Trump took to his social media platform as Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared together in Beijing for China's largest-ever military parade on Wednesday.
Trump accused Xi of "conspiring against" the United States as they attended the parade, which marked the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II.
"May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America," Trump wrote on social media as the parade was underway.
Trump referenced America's involvement in World War II in his post on, saying, "The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and 'blood' that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader."
"Many Americans died in China's quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!" the president wrote.

But Xi sloughed it off and, speaking at the parade, let Trump know that he’s not afraid of him:

The Chinese nation is a great nation that does not fear violence, and that stands independent and strong. In the past, when confronted with a life-or-death struggle between justice and evil, light and darkness, progress and reaction, the Chinese people stood united, rose up in resistance, and fought for the survival of the country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the cause of human justice.

A top aide to Putin, Yuri Ushakov, accused Trump of conspiracy-mongering:

I want to say that no one organized any conspiracies, no one was weaving anything, no conspiracies. Moreover, no one even had that in their minds, none of these three leaders had that.

It’s a painful, humiliating needling for the narcissistic Trump because Putin’s aide is basically saying, “We’re not even thinking about you.”

Kim committed himself to Putin at the summit, and it’s clear that Kim, Modi, Putin and Xi stand with Russia against Ukraine.

Kim said, "As I said during our previous meeting, if there is anything we can do to help Russia, we will certainly do that, and we will regard this as our fraternal duty. We will do everything in our power to assist Russia."
After the meeting, Putin and Kim hugged in front of reporters, with the Russian leader inviting Kim to visit Russia. "Come back again," Putin said.

Trump’s Alaska summit did nothing. After Melania sent a letter to Putin imploring him to stop the violence because of “children” killed in the war, Putin responded by killing many more children—after bombing a U.S. factory and offices of the European Union—launching an attack on Ukraine that is the biggest blitz in the war, as NATO is scrambling planes.

Putin now has the full backing of the other leaders Trump tried to bully or bromance, or both—not understanding diplomacy at all—and has no reason to pull back in Ukraine, nor from threatening Europe or any other U.S. interests.

And no amount of embarrassing, whining, threatening, or ranting Truth Social posts is going to stop that.

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.

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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.

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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.

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