Yesterday, the Republican-led Senate confirmed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. attorney general.

Like Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, Blanche has carried out the illegal orders of a president of the United States. As was Mitchell’s fate, Blanche should be behind bars. Mitchell served 19 months of a two-and-a-half year sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.

Instead, Senate Republicans have given Blanche a promotion.

On Thursday, a Republican-led Senate panel voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal to answer questions at a hearing last week. At that hearing, Fauci sat stoically for three hours, invoking his constitutional right not to answer questions about his leadership during the pandemic because of his justifiable fear that Senate Republicans would try to find something he might say to charge him with perjury. As it stands now, Senate Republicans may ask the Justice Department to prosecute him for failure to comply with their subpoena.

Fauci is an American hero. He gave invaluable advice to seven presidents — from Reagan to Biden — through anthrax attacks, Ebola outbreaks, SARS scares, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He devised the U.S. global attack plan against AIDS. George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on HIV and AIDS.

Senate Republicans promote Blanche and s--- on Fauci? What the hell is going on?

Look, I’m the first to admit that too many Democrats in Congress are lily-livered, unwilling to fight as hard as they should against Trump’s neofascism.

But congressional Republicans are worse than profiles in cowardice. They’ve nearly become a criminal enterprise, actively colluding with the neofascist in the Oval Office.

They’ve confirmed Blanche even without any guarantees that Trump won’t use the $8 billion slush fund Blanche created for him to reward the Capitol attackers, or that Trump won’t use the IRS immunity Blanche also got for him to prevent the public from ever knowing the full extent of Trump’s criminal enterprises.

And what’s with the Republican obsession over Anthony Fauci? The guy is 85 years old and retired. Why bother? It can’t be about defending Trump or avenging any damage to him. COVID was six years ago. People don’t blame Trump for it. They probably should, but if they really did, he wouldn’t have had a chance in 2024.

It can’t be because Fauci’s role in the pandemic is a burning political issue, because polls show exactly zero percent of Americans care about going after Fauci.

Sure, Rand Paul has a personal grudge against him, but Paul is crazier than a s----house rat. So why are so many Republicans and even some Republican state attorneys general joining in his crusade against Fauci?

The reason is simple. Republicans have nothing else to talk about in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump’s foreign policy and Iran war are disasters. His economy is a catastrophe. His immigration dragnet, a cruel calamity. His health policy, an embarrassment or worse. His environmental policies, a gift to Big Oil.

Congressional Republicans have gone along with all of it. They’ve also enacted Trump’s giant tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations that are funded in part by cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

Trump himself is bonkers and losing it by the day. His communist witch hunt is a bad joke. His polls continue to plummet to record lows. Ballroom? Reflecting pool? Crypto deals? All have become Republican nightmares.

So Republicans are desperate for something, anything, anyone — a fall guy, a scapegoat — to rant against, whip up the Republican base against, and raise money for their fall campaigns. Fauci is old, can’t defend himself, is easily demagogued.

Yes, my friends, it’s all upside down. Frightening and nuts. But may I remind you that there are just 86 days until the midterms, when we can throw many of these criminal Republicans out of office?

Which gets me to you. A few days ago I asked many of you how you’re coping with this ongoing horror.

In response, some of you said you’re tuning it out, or you’ve concluded that nothing can be done about it so why bother.

I get it. I sometimes can’t stand to hear another word about the loathsome Trump and his insufferable sycophants. And occasionally I despair that he and his regime will continue their reign of destruction regardless of what I or anyone else does.

But the vast majority of you told me you’re coping in two other ways: by choosing to be grateful for what’s good about America and by becoming more activist.

You’re focusing on the generosity you see around you every day, the simple acts of kindness, and the courage and dedication of people such as our teachers, nurses, social workers, and community leaders.

You’re protecting the vulnerable in your community, supporting good candidates, sending postcards to potential voters, protesting against Trump and his outrages, and boycotting companies that are enabling him.

As one member of our Substack community, Johan, commented a few weeks ago, it’s perfectly normal for people to wait to take action until they feel hopeful.

Yet in reality, hope emerges from action. It’s what activism pays back.

Which is also why hopelessness is a trap. “We’re all f---- may feel like clear-headed realism, but it’s just surrender — draped in the costume of being realistic.

The billionaire class and their Republican lackeys want us to fall into hopelessness so they can have it all without any resistance. Hopelessness costs them nothing, yet it costs us everything. It’s the cheapest possible win for them, yet some of us hand it over for free.

Gratitude is the most powerful and enduring sentiment of all — not because everything’s fine. Obviously it’s not. We’re in deep s---. Gratitude is powerful and enduring because when you feel gratitude, you pay attention to what’s still worth defending. This fortifies hope and adds urgency to activism. Or, as Johan reminds us, you keep your head by keeping your hands on something real.

I don’t want to be preachy or didactic. I just want to reassure you that despite the loathsomeness of those now in control of our government — despite the Republicans in Congress who have confirmed Blanche and voted to hold Fauci in contempt, and despite the malignant, sadistic narcissist they suck up to — we can be grateful for the kindness, generosity, and freedom we experience every day.

It is worth defending. It gives hope for a better future. It adds urgency to our activism. It fortifies our commitment to rid ourselves of the criminals and quislings now in control of our government, and to do what we can to replace them with good, honest, and capable people.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

’m devoting the next several weeks to what I’m calling a “Realist’s Guide to the American System.” If you hadn’t noticed, almost everything’s going to hell.

Why? Trump is horrendous, but he isn’t causing all the failures of that system. He’s a consequence of that system. Think of him as a boil on its backside — an infected pustule on the giant a-- of the American system. The boil would have become infected eventually because of deeper flaws in how the system has evolved.

The best way of beginning is to introduce you to Jamie Dimon.

In the spring of 2018, Jamie Dimon phoned me at my office at the University of California, Berkeley. I had criticized him publicly, and he was not pleased. He sounded off on the phone for several minutes without stopping.

Dimon has a great deal of influence over the system. He heads the largest bank on Wall Street, JPMorganChase, which survived the 2008 financial crisis better than any other big bank. After the crisis, The New York Times gave Dimon the back-handed compliment of being “America’s least-hated banker.” He has also headed the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of the most powerful CEOs in America. He is featured regularly on cable news and in the business press. His opinions carry significant weight on Capitol Hill.

Dimon describes himself as “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan.” He is a lifelong Democrat. He admirably speaks out about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America. He is not just talk. He has pushed his bank to invest in poor cities and to create better opportunities for the disadvantaged.

I believe he’s sincere. But he is awash in self-delusion, a condition especially dangerous in people who have significant power over others.

Dimon doesn’t see how he has contributed to the mess we’re in. He doesn’t acknowledge the inconsistencies between his preferred self-image as “patriot first” and his roles as CEO of America’s largest bank and former chairman of the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t understand how he has hijacked the system.

Dimon is emblematic of an abdication of public responsibility to maintain the health of our political-economic system at a moment when a comparative few at the top have more power over it than at any time in over a century.

They have used their power to give themselves unprecedented wealth, which has bought them even more power. They have justified their wealth and power as being in the interest of the public, but the public has been shafted.

Dimon is among the most capable of American CEOs, adept at promoting and defending his corporation. He also understands some of the failings of the system and has called for some useful reforms. If he weren’t running JPMorgan, someone else would be, and probably not doing so nearly as well.

Nonetheless, a big part of Dimon’s job is to siphon off the gains of the economy for the benefit of a few at the top. As he does this, he’s eroding trust in the system. He’s undermining democracy.

This is how we got into the quagmire we’re in. Dimon is simply playing his part in the current system as it has evolved. He’s responding to how incentives within the system are designed.

To the extent Dimon or others like him are blameworthy, the fault lies in their unwillingness to buck these incentives in order to change the system for the well-being of the vast majority.

This may be an unrealistically high bar. Dimon has no legal obligation to reach it. But I believe he has a moral duty to try to change the laws and incentives so no one ever again can become as rich and powerful as he and his fellow CEOs at the Business Roundtable and as other major financiers on Wall Street. He has a moral obligation to ensure that the American system is no longer rigged in favor of people like him.

I’ll return to Dimon next week, but right now I want to talk about the consequences of all this.

Millions of Americans, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, know something has gone profoundly wrong.

The concentration of wealth in America has created a political system in which the super-rich can buy Congress and the presidency, an education system in which they can buy admission to college for their children, a healthcare system in which they can buy care others can’t, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate greed, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The term “ensh---ification” was coined in 2022 by novelist Cory Doctorow to describe the declining quality of almost everything. Monopolistic corporations are charging more for the products they sell and cutting back on services. Stuff breaks more often than it used to. Government is being starved of tax money to provide even the most basic of public services.

The whole system seems to be collapsing in on itself.

The word “ensh---ification” has been officially incorporated into major lexicons like the Merriam-Webster dictionary because of people’s increasingly common experience of being crapped on by big corporations, big hospitals, big energy, and big insurance, and of being bogged down in seemingly endless legal quagmires of corporate and government bureaucracies. As the New Yorker put it, we live in the “Age of Ensh---fication.”

The advent of AI has highlighted the possibility of mass unemployment and also the growing impossibility of boosting workers’ share of both corporate and national income.

The oligarchs who are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI — with funds funneled to them by Jamie Dimon and others on Wall Street — have done everything in their power to keep workers’ wages low, prevent them from organizing or joining unions, and stop them from having more political power, and they’re now funding campaigns to protect their fortunes against higher taxes on capital income and wealth.

This mammoth, systemic dysfunction is generating a great deal of heat — anger, frustration, and outrage. That anger is a major reason why Trump became president, twice (even though he has further ens----fied America and much of the world).

Heat in any system signals potential change. Like tectonic plates causing earthquakes and volcanoes as they crash into each other, heat is a sign of underlying tumult. In today’s America, the status quo is unsustainable. Subterranean tensions are building.

Trump exploited those tensions for his own malignant ends. But even if Trump is replaced by someone who’s noble, humble, and talented, and who cares more about America than himself — in other words, someone who’s the opposite of Trump — we’d still be in trouble.

The system is out of whack. It needs fundamental change.

If you want to understand why the American system has become so dysfunctional, and what you might do to help it to meet the needs of average people, you need to reassess many of your likely assumptions about it.

1. First, forget politics as you’ve come to see it as electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans. Think power. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none.

2. Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the “free market” and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

3. For the same reason, don’t try to separate economics from politics. They’re two sides of the same issue. (Be suspicious of anyone who tries to separate them.)

4. Forget the standard economic goals of higher growth and greater efficiency. The issue is who benefits from more growth and efficiency.

5. Don’t be dazzled by “corporate social responsibility.” Most of it is public relations. Corporations won’t voluntarily sacrifice shareholder returns unless laws require them to. Even then, be skeptical of laws unless they’re enforced and backed by big penalties. Large corporations and the super-rich ignore laws when the penalties for violating them are small relative to the gains for breaking them. Fines are then simply very manageable costs of doing business.

6. Don’t assume that we’re locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism — for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

7. Don’t define “national competitiveness” as the profitability of large American corporations. Those corporations are now global, with no allegiance to America. Real national competitiveness lies in the productivity of the American people — which depends on their education, their health, and the infrastructure linking them together.

8. You can also forget the ups and downs of the business cycle. Focus instead on systemic changes that have caused the wealth and power of a few to dramatically increase during the last 40 years at the expense of the many.

9. Forget the old idea that corporations succeed by becoming better, cheaper, or faster than their competitors. They now succeed mainly by increasing their monopoly power.

10. Forget any traditional definition of finance. Think instead of a giant gambling casino in which bets are made on large flows of money, and bets are made on those bets (called derivatives). The biggest winners have better inside-information than anyone else.

11. Don’t assume the system is stable. It moves through vicious spirals and virtuous cycles. We are now in a vicious spiral. The challenge is to turn the vicious into the virtuous.

12. Don’t believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone’s future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they’re born into.

13. Don’t separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.

14. Think systemically. Most people’s incomes haven’t risen for four decades, and they are becoming less economically secure. Meanwhile, climate change is intensifying competition for arable land and potable water around the world, generating larger flows of refugees and immigrants. Together they allow demagogues to fuel bigotry by blaming immigrants for the stagnant incomes and economic insecurity.

15. Don’t confuse attractive policy proposals with changes in the system as a whole. Even if enacted, such proposals at most mitigate systemic problems. Solving those systemic problems requires altering the allocation of power.

16. Most importantly, you need to understand the nature of power — who possesses it and why, how it is wielded, and for what purposes.

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda — to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one’s will on the world.

Power has been leached out of conventional discussions about what is occurring. Power doesn’t show up in standard economics texts, finance courses, or even political science and law. But you cannot comprehend today’s system without confronting power head on. It is the most important subterranean force.

Power is exercised through big Wall Street banks, global corporations, the executive and legislative branches of government, the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court, the military, elite universities, and the media (including social media as organized by Big Tech).

But these institutions don’t wield power on their own. Particular people have outsized influence over them. They include CEOs like Jamie Dimon, large investors, hedge fund and private-equity managers, media moguls, key lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable, and major donors to political candidates and universities.

To comprehend the nature of their influence over the system you need to understand the role of wealth. In the system we now have, power and wealth are inseparable. Great wealth flows from great power; great power depends on great wealth. Wealth and power have become one and the same.

I don’t intend for these underlying realities to make you more cynical about the system or resigned to its intransigence. To the contrary, the first step toward changing the system is to understand it.

If we cannot comprehend the truth, we become entrapped in conventional falsehoods and false choices, unable to envision new possibilities. Seeing the system for what it is will empower you to join with others to change it for the better.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

As Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran drive up prices of everything from oil to steel, you’d think big American corporations would be screaming bloody hell. Presumably, Trump’s tariffs and war are squeezing their profits just as they’re squeezing the wallets of average Americans.

To the contrary, corporate America is quietly encouraging both Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs. Why?

One possibility is they’re raking in money off the war as defense contractors and suppliers.

Some surely are, but this can’t account for the acquiescence if not outright support by most big American corporations that have nothing to do with the defense-industrial complex.

Another possibility is they don’t want to p--- off Trump, fearing his retaliation.

But if they were really concerned about the negative effects of Trump’s war and his tariffs on their bottom lines, surely they’d be using their armies of lobbyists and piles of campaign contributions to stop his war and his tariffs. After all, that’s what the armies and piles are for.

There’s a much simpler explanation for corporate America’s silence if not encouragement. In point of fact, both Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs are helping their bottom lines.

Trump’s war and his tariffs are allowing domestic U.S. producers to raise their prices to match the elevated prices of imports. And those who aren’t directly affected are using the higher import costs as excuses to raise their prices, too.

Presto! — corporate profits have exploded, and their stock prices have soared.

But American consumers are getting shafted. Both Trump’s war and his tariffs are pushing up prices for a vast range of goods and services. The result is a massive redistribution of income and wealth from American consumers to big American corporations.

This is the story of the American political economy under Trump that’s rarely if ever told, but it’s critical to understanding why Trump has been getting away with his war in Iran and his tariffs without much political opposition.

Start with oil.

Brent crude is now selling for $90.05 a barrel. If the war drags on it could push crude prices much higher, especially if it further depletes oil inventories, and spreads to Houthi militants starting a naval blockade in the Red Sea and to other Gulf states.

Oil prices are set globally. As global supplies dwindle, oil prices rise across the board — including prices charged by domestic U.S. producers. They’re enjoying a huge windfall.

With crude oil prices averaging $95 a barrel between March and June — up from about $66 before the war — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental Petroleum have collectively raked in some $31 billion in earnings for the second quarter of this year, according to FactSet estimates.

That’s up from about $12 billion for the same period last year.

These windfall profits have helped boost Big Oil’s stock prices. Big Oil’s investors and executives (who are paid partly in shares of stock) have done wonderfully well.

But American consumers are bearing the burden, as gas prices once again soar past $4 a gallon, a dollar more than they were before Trump started his war on February 28.

So is it any wonder that Big Oil isn’t criticizing Trump’s war, and is quietly rooting it on?

Or consider steel. Trump imposed steel tariffs of 50 percent in March and June 2025. These tariffs have driven up steel prices in the United States.

The tariffs have been a boon to American steelmakers, who have raised the prices they charge their American customers to match the higher prices now charged for steel from abroad.

As a result, leading American steel producers like Nucor and Steel Dynamics report significant year-over-year earnings increases.

Nucor’s profits in the second quarter of 2026 were $1.16 billion, up from $603 million a year earlier. Steel Dynamics has reported a second-quarter income of $534.1 million, nearly double its net income compared to the same period last year. A third U.S. producer, Cleveland-Cliffs, earned $97 million in the second quarter of this year (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), compared to a loss of $213 million last year, and the firm anticipates doubling earnings next quarter.

Who’s bearing these higher costs? American consumers of steel — in the prices of everything we buy that contains steel (such as cars and appliances).

The Producer Price Index (a widely used proxy for input costs) for steel mill products is now sitting at its highest point since May 2023.

American-based producers that utilize oil and steel have been able to pass those costs on to their customers without harming their profit margins. Some corporations that don’t depend on oil or steel have used the higher import costs as excuses to raise their prices, too.

Hence, Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs are wins for corporate America. Profit margins are up, the value of shares on the stock market are up. Shareholders are happy.

Big corporations aren’t raising a fuss about the war or tariffs because they like what’s happening.

But American consumers are getting shafted. Their wages aren’t keeping up with the price increases. Yet they have no alternative but to pay the higher costs for energy and steel and everything else — which is the whole point.

As the inflationary effects of Trump’s war and his tariffs (taxes) on imports spread throughout the economy, they’re hiding what’s really occurring: an upward redistribution from consumers to big American corporations.

American consumers need to know the truth: Two of the major reasons why everything is less affordable are Trump’s war and his tariffs.

Consumers may not have armies of lobbyists and piles of campaign contributions to do their bidding, but they do have a way to express their disapproval. They can vote out Trump Republicans on November 3.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

With just 97 days until the midterm elections of 2026, Democrats are fired up, while Republicans are in the doldrums. That means Democrats have a good chance of retaking control of the House. It’s even possible (although less likely) that Dems will retake the Senate.

One of the biggest uncertainties is what (if any) tactics Trump and his lapdogs will use to reduce the odds of a Democratic victory, especially in the House, where 435 seats are up for reelection.

I’ve spent the last several days talking with election experts and political advisers. When I spoke with them last year, they were most worried about gerrymandering, restrictions on mail-in voting, voter IDs, and the demise of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

They’re still worried about many of these things (Trump just filed with the Supreme Court an emergency request to allow his executive order that restricts voting by mail, after a federal appeals court blocked key parts of it over the weekend).

But now, with 97 days to go, they’re most worried about the elections process. I’ve summarized their concerns below.

It’s possible that Trump will do nothing to interfere in the elections, of course. It’s also possible that he’ll do everything the experts fear he might do. Please weigh in with your thoughts about what he’s most likely to do.

1. He’ll do nothing other than claim the elections are rigged.

By this view, Trump will continue to sow doubts about the reliability and security of elections, especially in predominantly Democratic cities and states, but he won’t do more. Experts who hold this view tell me Trump doesn’t really care all that much about the midterm elections. His real goal is to continue to generate doubts about the 2020 election, so that when the history of that election is written, questions arise about whether Biden legitimately won.

2. He’ll deploy federal agents at voting places.

Some experts I talked with believe Trump will try to suppress voting by deploying federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in predominantly Democratic communities during early voting or on Election Day. Or he’ll deploy federal agents in official attire to hover near voters, questioning them about their citizenship and asking about voter fraud.

It’s a federal crime for anyone — including federal, state, and local officials — to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” Most states also prohibit voter intimidation. Additionally, federal law explicitly prohibits the presence of armed federal agents at the polls.

But proving intimidation is difficult. Besides, by the time any lawsuit alleging intimidation were filed, voting would be long over.

3. He’ll try to stop state certifications.

Alternatively, election experts tell me that Trump will stop states with predominantly Democratic voters or large Democratic cities from certifying the results in House races. (Election rules about certification vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December.)

In recent years, Trump has persuaded some local officials to use false claims of fraud or of noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, usually in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories.

Experts tell me that if there are similar delays and refusals after November 3, Democrats will go to court to force local officials to certify results. They’ll probably win these cases, as they have in the past. But such litigation is inevitably accompanied by delays and uncertainty that could give Trump and Republicans time to whip up public support for recounts, audits, or similar tactics we saw after the 2020 election.

4. He’ll try to prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in January 3, 2027.

A final scenario that’s been described to me is that Trump will prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in. Normally, on January 3, the clerk simply goes to the House chamber with the roll of newly elected representatives. Although the people on that roll are not yet official members of Congress, they elect a new speaker of the House. The winner of the race for speaker then swears in the rest of the members of the House, and they then begin conducting legislative business.

But some experts predict that Trump will declare that the election is full of fraud and demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire the current nonpartisan House clerk. Johnson could substitute a toady who produces a roll of new House members — one that includes Republicans in races that Democrats believe they won.

What can Democrats then do? They’ll contest Trump’s move in the federal courts, but the courts are reluctant to get involved in matters of internal legislative governance, regarding them as “political questions” that the judiciary should leave to Congress.

Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What’s Trump’s most likely move on the midterms?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

This daily letter to you doesn’t offer financial advice. And most of you have been so worried by the nation’s lurch toward dictatorship under loathsome Trump that it seems almost unfair to burden you with an alarm about the economy. But we’re facing a five-alarm fire that you need to know about.

Much of the United States economy is now based on A.I. — or, more specifically, expectations that A.I. will pay off very big in the near future. A.I.-related stocks have accounted for roughly half of the rise in the S&P 500 this year. And U.S. economic growth is dependent to a remarkable degree on A.I. infrastructure spending.

But it’s becoming a house of cards.

Yes, America now dominates A.I. with the most powerful systems and more data centers than any other nation. But that lead hasn’t come free of charge, and it’s eroding quickly.

The lead is based on colossal spending on data centers, especially by Oracle, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. A stumble by any one of them would spill over to the rest of the economy.

It’s estimated that these five companies combined will account for more than $800 billion in A.I. investments this year. They plan to spend a additional $1.2 trillion in 2027 — more than Trump’s entire military budget request for 2027.

Where’s all this A.I. money coming from? Some from investors, but much of it is being borrowed.

One worry is their borrowing is outpacing their profits. Not surprisingly, the bond market has begun to charge premiums for what it considers a heightened risk that they won’t be able repay.

Oracle’s debt now stands just a bit above junk bond status. Amazon’s bond prices have also been hard hit. So have those issued by SpaceX, which is also building A.I. data centers and whose bonds have been trading at junkish rates.

Here’s another worry. Chinese A.I. companies are now offering A.I. that’s almost as good as that emerging from Anthropic and OpenAI — but Chinese companies are offering it free of charge to companies anywhere in the world, including in the United States. This is likely to mean lower earnings for leading American A.I. corporations and less demand for data centers.

Last month, Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released a model that’s been rapidly adopted by start-ups and independent developers across Silicon Valley.

What’s the consequence? So far this year, the stock prices of four of the five big data-center companies have trailed the overall S&P 500. Oracle’s shares have fallen more than 35 percent. Shares of SpaceX have fallen below their initial public offering price.

On Thursday, a Chinese start-up called Moonshot AI, released a new A.I. model called Kimi 3, that’s nearly as powerful as the leading American model, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. Moonshot said it would soon provide Kimi 3 as open source, essentially free. The news caused a sell-off of U.S. technology stocks on Friday.

The latest systems from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI still outperform Kimi and other Chinese models, but the top Chinese models are far cheaper — which is why Anthropic and OpenAI are now urging the Trump regime to block imports of Chinese A.I. Yet such blockage would competitively harm much of the rest of the tech sector and other big American companies that are using Chinese A.I.

The third worry is how much economic activity in the U.S. now depends on A.I. If investor confidence in A.I. crumbles, much of the economic activity built on it could come crashing down. The sell-off would make it more expensive for companies to raise and borrow the capital they need to fund further A.I. investments, causing companies to delay or cancel their plans for data centers and related infrastructure.

The drop would also push wealthy consumers to pare their spending. Much consumer demand in the U.S. now turns on spending by the richest 10 percent of Americans who own over 90 percent of the value of all shares of stock traded on U.S. stock exchanges. They’re spending like mad now, largely because the ebullient stock market has made them feel far richer. If the market drops, they’ll pull back on their spending, which could lead to wider job losses and, ultimately, a recession.

Bank of America’s monthly global fund-manager survey for July reports that fund managers see the key risk to financial markets to be a bursting of the A.I. bubble. It’s also now the key risk to the economy.

I don’t want to rain on the A.I. parade. Maybe — just maybe — the extraordinary price-earnings ratios of A.I. companies will be justified by torrent of A.I. buying by consumers and businesses in the next few years.

Even if it’s a bubble, it’s impossible to predict when it will burst. Maybe not for several years. And maybe not with a bang but with a whimper.

But the sobering reality is this: the U.S. economy has become so concentrated in a handful of giant A.I. corporations, so highly leveraged with A.I.-related debt, and so dependent on predictions about huge earnings flowing from A.I. in the foreseeable future, that the risks of a recession or even a crash are growing.

Yes, we have fiscal and monetary policy tools to counteract a sudden downturn. But will those tools will be powerful enough to respond if a significant portion of business and consumer demand suddenly shrinks, when investors and creditors are left holding nearly-worthless pieces of paper, when the United States is already deep in debt, when the competence of government policy makers is highly questionable, and when trust in government has never been as low as it is today?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Starting August 1, Trump Media and Technology Group will launch a new data feed aimed at high-frequency trading firms whose profits are made by making trades a fraction of a second faster than everyone else.

It will provide “licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.” In other words, the feed will let you know what Trump has said before anyone else knows, meaning it’s well worth the tab that Truth Social will charge to see Trump’s posts before the rest of the public sees them — up to $100,000 per month.

That’s a pittance relative to what could be made, because Trump’s words on Truth Social — about his war in Iran, about his latest tariffs, about the Fed — have caused the stock market to soar or drop. So, if you’re a trader on Wall Street, you’ll make millions if you know what he’s posting a fraction of a second before everyone else knows. Perhaps more to the point, if you’re behind on that news, “you’ll get crushed,” as one hedge-fund executive told the Financial Times.

No wonder Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn is gloating that the feed will “become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.” Trump Media has been unprofitable until now.

Trump, of course, is the company’s largest shareholder.

The scheme is Trump’s most brazen way to illegally profit off his presidency and enrich his Wall Street insider friends.

I say illegally because the Constitution lists “bribery” as a reason to remove a president from office, and the federal ban on bribing public officials also expressly applies to a president. (Whether these provisions can be enforced against a president who’s been given blanket immunity from “official acts” by the Supreme Court is another matter.)

The good news, though, is Americans are catching on to insider trading, and they hate it — so much so that House Republican leaders are now teeing up a vote this week on a bill that would create new guardrails for lawmakers trading stocks.

The “Stop Insider Trading Act” would bar members of Congress and their families from purchasing new shares of stock and require them to file a notice of their plans to sell shares at least seven days ahead of time.

Most Democrats say the measure doesn’t go far enough because it allows members to keep shares of stock they already own, in contrast with a competing bipartisan proposal that bars members from trading individual shares of stock altogether. And one provision Republicans have snuck into the measure —and that must be removed if they want any Democratic votes — deters mail-in voting.

The point is that at the same time Trump is rolling out a new tool to give traders more immediate access to his market-moving posts on Truth Social — if they’ll pay him up to $100,000 a month for it — Congress is limiting how members can profit from inside information they obtain through elected office.

The American public is so disgusted by corruption in Washington that even Republican lawmakers want something to show they’re not in the swamp.

Trump doesn’t give a damn about the public’s mounting revulsion at corruption. He’s not up for reelection. He doesn’t care that his polls are in the cellar. All he wants to do is make even more money, exert more power, and get even with people who have gotten in his way.

But the public wants his swamp drained.

Democrats, take note. Three months from now, ask Americans two related questions: Do they think they’re better off than they were before Trump became president again? Do they approve of the most corrupt White House in American history?

The answer to both will be a resounding no. And the best way for Americans to act on their disgust will be to kick the Republican bums out.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Trump on Monday signed orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on a wide range of Canadian imports.

The White House claims the tariffs are a “punishment” for Canadian discrimination against American cars, dairy, and alcohol.

But the tariffs will also punish us. Remember, tariffs are import taxes — paid for by you and me and everyone else in America. So, we’re about to pay more for everything we import from Canada — plywood, paper, furniture, hockey sticks, cement, et al. Canada is our second-largest trading partner, for chrissake.

Even if the Supreme Court finds that Trump lacks authority to invoke these tariffs and the government must refund American importers for the extra cost — as the high court did with his first round of tariffs — you and I won’t be reimbursed for the extra costs we’ve paid.

Corporations aren’t giving their customers any of the $80 billion in refunds they’ve received from the Treasury Department for the first round of tariffs, so don’t expect any reimbursement on this second round. Which means we’re doubly screwed.

Worse yet, the Treasury isn’t really bearing the cost of the $80 billion in refunds. The cost is being borne by you and me and all other American taxpayers, because our money funds the government. And as taxpayers we’ll also be paying for the second round of refunds, assuming the Supreme Court orders them. Which means we’re triply screwed.

Actually, we’re quadruply screwed because Trump is imposing the new tariffs under the Tariff Act of 1930 — the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff that worsened the Great Depression by causing other countries to retaliate and impose tariffs on goods coming from the United States. It’s likely to have a similar effect in coming months.

If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is already shaky. Prices are rising faster than wages, which means most of us are becoming poorer even before Trump’s next round of tariffs. His war in Iran is pushing up the price of gas and, indirectly, food.

The real reason for the new tariffs is that Trump is pissed off that Canada had the temerity (and the right) to retaliate against his first round of tariffs, and it has resisted Trump’s calls to be annexed as the 51st state.

Why would Canadians ever want to live in a nation that could elect Trump?

In any event, I believe I can speak for most Americans when I apologize to our Canadian friends. We’re sorry we elected him. He’s made our lives worse. He’s a continuing embarrassment to us. (Did you see him grandstand at the World Cup? We have to live with this crap every day.)

Believe me, we’re doing everything we can to put him back in his cage.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Trump’s war with Iran has resumed (it never really stopped). The U.S. is sending more warplanes to the Middle East. Two American service members were killed in an Iranian missile attack on Jordan, and a third is missing. The Strait of Hormuz is again closed. Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement following his father’s funeral, saying “revenge is the will of our nation” and that Iran would act against “criminals whose names are known.” In response, Trump threatened to “completely decimate and destroy” Iran if assassination threats against him were acted upon.

How long can Iran continue the war? Its economy appears reasonably stable; it has exported oil sufficient to meet its needs. Its population has become used to sanctions and economic pain, and has no voice, in any event. As shown by its attack on Jordan, as well as those on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Qatar, Iran has ample missile stocks and has also become more adept at evading U.S. air defense systems.

How long can the U.S. continue the war? America doesn’t have sufficient munitions to maintain the current bombing campaign indefinitely. World oil reserves are almost depleted, which means that continued blockage of the strait will cause even more economic pain. Oil has again topped $90 a barrel. Plus, there are midterm elections to think about.

So, what’s Trump’s likely next move? I’ve made the rounds of the foreign policy advisers and experts I consulted with in early March, asking what they believe Trump will do now.

Their responses are arrayed below. I’d appreciate hearing from you as well, about what you think Trump will do.

1. Continue the air strikes

Several believe the most likely scenario is for Trump to continue to rely on air strikes against Iran’s military, leadership, and infrastructure. The purpose of the strikes would be to further reduce Iran’s capacity to attack shipping targets, or at least obtain concessions at the bargaining table. The strikes would be aimed at Iran’s transportation infrastructure.

But Trump has pursued much of this strategy for months now. Iran hasn’t budged, and it has maintained its capacity to attack ships in the strait. This is also draining U.S. stockpiles of ammunition and leaving America unprepared for other conflicts around the world. It’s estimated that merely replacing the most crucial weapons expended in the Iran war so far will take at least three years of defense production.

Still, this strategy may be the least bad of several bad alternatives.

2. Make life in Iran impossible

A second scenario is for Trump to ramp up the bombing campaign to include attacks on Iran’s water infrastructure, such as dams and desalination plants — making life in Iran precarious and desperate.

But this could create a humanitarian catastrophe leading to mass deaths and a flood of refugees. It would also turn the world against the United States. In addition, Iran’s leaders have made clear that if the U.S. strikes the water infrastructure needed to keep their people alive, Iran will retaliate in kind against the Gulf States. It has already hit a water desalination plant in Kuwait. The U.S. would have difficulty defending Gulf States against this sort of attack.

Still, this strategy may be advocated by Trump’s most belligerent advisers, such as Pete Hegseth, who could convince Trump that it will show Iran and the world how tough and strong Trump and the U.S. are.

3. Launch a ground invasion

A third possibility is for the U.S. to invade Iran. This option can’t be ruled out, because Trump has mentioned it several times. Although highly risky, it’s the only option that could possibly achieve Trump’s stated objective of finding and destroying Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Trump may also believe that, with the lives of American ground troops at stake, the U.S. public will rally around him, perhaps even giving Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.

But the U.S. lacks the manpower and logistical support to mount a successful land invasion of Iran. Even seizing tiny Kharg Island would be highly risky, given Iran’s strategic advantage over the strait. Trump also knows that if he loses more American troops, public opinion could swing more sharply against him and his war.

Still, an invasion can’t be ruled out.

4. Declare victory and go home

The final option is for Trump simply to give in to Iran’s demands, declare that he has solved the problem and gotten the best deal imaginable, and walk away. The ill-fated “memorandum of understanding” was a move in this direction.

But Iran interpreted that agreement as giving it control over the strait — and still claims control. Allowing Iran to command the strait would leave the U.S. far more economically vulnerable than it was before February 28, when the strait was open and Trump launched his war. It’s hard to see how Trump could accept this humiliating outcome.

Still, Trump could decide that this is the least damaging option and hope to sell it as a win, figuring he can get a plurality of Americans to believe anything he says.

Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What will Trump do in Iran NOW?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about the meaning of integrity.

You didn’t hear the word used directly; it was alluded to indirectly — in wondering whether Lindsey Graham was an immoral opportunist or clever pragmatist; in suspecting Todd Blanche of being more loyal to Trump than to the nation; in distrusting Erica Schwartz, Trump’s latest pick to lead the CDC, when she said she’ll never compromise on the science; in doubting that Jay Clayton, his pick for director of national intelligence, will tell Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear.

The word integrity is rooted in the Latin word integer, meaning “whole” or “complete” — living by your principles, choosing honesty over opportunism, making ethical choices that may be inconvenient or unpopular, maintaining your moral compass.

Graham’s public record of denouncing Trump on the Senate floor after January 6, 2021, and then becoming Trump’s most loyal Senate apologist revealed someone who traded honesty for influence — a person with little or no integrity.

Blanche, in his hearing to be attorney general, said he wanted to bring trust back to the Justice Department but then accidentally referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer —before clarifying that he “was” — had been —Trump’s lawyer. Blanche’s momentary lapse revealed a deeper conflict, as evidenced by his unswerving loyalty to Trump. He lacks integrity.

Schwartz, in her confirmation hearing, undercut her pledge to be guided by science in saying she believed Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would “never” implement policies that aren’t scientifically sound. That’s enough to cast doubt on her integrity.

Clayton, in his confirmation hearing, repeatedly refused to say Biden won the 2020 election, causing Senator Jon Ossoff to ask Clayton: “You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election? But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community? Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question, why can you not give it?”

It is not possible to have integrity and be loyal to Trump. The two are in direct conflict.

No one can be honest in a regime based on big lies. As the poet, philosopher, and statesman Václav Havel put it, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”

So a choice must be made — personal integrity or loyalty to Trump.

In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that he preferred loyalty to integrity — as epitomized by his mentor, Roy Cohn.

History remembers Cohn for his ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, lying, and more lying. Like Trump, Cohn was utterly without principle and prioritized personal power that could be leveraged for wealth, influence, and celebrity. In 1986, Cohn was disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune.

Yet in his book Trump praised Cohn for his loyalty, contrasting him with “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.”

It is not possible for Blanche or Schwartz or Clayton or anyone else in Trump’s orbit — nor was it possible for Lindsey Graham — to be loyal to Trump and simultaneously maintain their own integrity. It must be one or the other.

Yet integrity is more important than loyalty. As Trump demonstrates time and again, someone lacking integrity is inherently untrustworthy. Such a person cannot serve the people of the United States.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation last night is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.

We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.

His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.

He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich. that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”

The most significant foreign influence operations occurred in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of Trump, according to the Mueller report. To the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

So the entire performance was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants.

This means that you and I and every other patriotic American have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections, and fight Trump’s torrent of lies and authoritarian moves.

If you’re anything like me, you’re warn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up — and accelerate — the fight.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Quietly and without any fanfare, the Trump regime is becoming a shareholder or profit-sharer in an array of corporations thought to be critical to the nation’s security.

For example, in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history, the U.S. chipmaker Intel’s shares have more than quadrupled in value since March 2025. The stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion.

A year ago, Intel was on life support. Many predicted its death. What happened?Intel’s rebirth is partly due to the AI boom, which requires huge quantities of computer chips known as CPUs, which are Intel’s specialty.

But a far larger factor in Intel’s stunning resurgence has been the Trump regime’s direct interventions — not only into Intel but also into other tech corporations: Apple and the giant super-chip maker Nvidia.

The Trump regime has justified this on grounds of national security. But it’s socialism because the downside risks are broadly shared by the public.

Yet the upside the benefits go to the U.S. government and to top corporate investors and executives.

And it further centralizes power and control over key industries in Trump’s hands.

Call it national socialism.

In August 2025 — in one of the most audacious moves by any administration — the U.S. government converted $9 billion in federal grants to Intel into a 10 percent stake in the company, thereby becoming Intel’s single largest shareholder.

Can you imagine if the Obama administration had converted its bailouts of Wall Street, GM, and Stellantis into equity stakes in the big banks and automakers? Republicans would have been on rooftops hollering: Socialism! Communism!

But the Trump regime did the deal without so much as a Republican peep.

At about the same time, Apple CEO Tim Cook came to Washington, seeking to persuade the Trump regime to abandon its plan to impose tariffs of 100 percent on all semiconductor imports. The tariffs would have dramatically increased the cost of Apple’s iPhone and other products, which relied on imported semiconductors.

Apple eventually won an exemption to the semiconductor tariff, on one condition: Apple would work with Intel — it would commit to buying from Intel certain chips used for iPhones and Macs, use Intel’s manufacturing plants (or fabs) to make some of Apple’s chips, and collaborate with Intel on chip design and production.

Then in January, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, came to Washington seeking the Trump regime’s approval for Nvidia’s sales to China of its H200 chip for artificial intelligence.

Huang was desperate to get access to China’s giant and potentially lucrative market, but the sale would require an exemption to America’s policy of not selling or licensing to the Chinese our advanced AI technology, to minimize any risk to U.S. security.

Huang got what he was after, after agreeing to two conditions. First, the United States government would get 25 percent of all profits from Nvidia’s sales in China. Second, Nvidia would invest $5 billion in Intel and buy its custom data center chips. Huang called the deal a “historic” partnership.

This isn’t capitalism, folks. It’s government becoming the major shareholder of the biggest chip-making in America, then giving a tariff exemption to another key tech corporation on condition it buy the products of and collaborate with the first, and giving a national-security exemption to a third key tech company on condition it also buy the products of the first and give the government a portion of its sales in China.

And who the hell knows what Trump and Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce who spearheaded these deals, grabbed for themselves or their families along the way?

Trump’s national socialism doesn’t stop here. Under Trump, the U.S. government has also become the largest shareholder of MP Materials, which operates the only mine for rare earth minerals in the United States, after sinking $400 million of taxpayer dollars into the corporation.

And when Nippon Steel acquired U.S. Steel in June of 2025, it was announced that Trump would personally control the so-called “golden share” that his regime forced U.S. Steel to accept as part of the deal.

It’s ironic that Trump is berating the Democrats for electing and nominating a group of young people who call themselves democratic socialists when he’s been shifting the United States to national socialism.

Doubly ironic because Trump’s national socialism is making fortunes for a small group of top executives who were already fabulously wealthy, while the democratic socialists in the Democratic Party want to tax the wealthy to provide funds for better schools, better wages, and healthcare for all.

And Trump’s national socialism is concentrating ever more power in Trump’s hands. A whole new range of decisions is being made about the U.S. economy but without any congressional oversight or public knowledge. Which corporations get major infusions of taxpayer dollars in return for partial government ownership? Which get tariff exemptions and under what conditions? Which get exemptions to trade with China and under what conditions?

It’s all up to Trump and his lapdogs in the White House and at the Commerce Department. And it helps explain why corporate America will do whatever Trump asks, say whatever he wants, and obey whatever he demands.

The result is not unlike the world’s last big experiment with national socialism — in the 1930s, in Germany.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

On Wednesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

If the rule of law means anything, the Judiciary Committee should not send Blanche’s name to the Senate for confirmation. And under no circumstances should the Senate confirm Blanche as attorney general.

Blanche, who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still acts as though Trump — not the United States — is his client.

Consider what Blanche has done for Trump, rather than for the United States.

1. Illegally suppressed the Epstein files

Blanche has conceded that the Department of Justice violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act by making improper redactions in the public release of Jeffrey Epstein’s records but continues to drag his feet. Under Blanche, the department is currently battling lawsuits from journalists and demands from the state of New Mexico to unseal the unredacted documents.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the department to either unredact and release specific files — including emails, potential co-conspirators, and interview notes summarizing allegations against President Trump — or justify why they must remain withheld. But under Blanche’s direction, the department has repeatedly missed or delayed fulfilling orders to unredact the records completely, leading plaintiffs and transparency advocates to accuse Blanche of ongoing noncompliance.

Blanche also personally interviewed Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison, before Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security facility. Minimum-security prisons are generally reserved for inmates with far shorter sentences than Maxwell’s 20 years. Did Blanche make a bargain with her? We don’t know.

2. Prosecuted Trump’s “enemies”

Blanche has assured White House officials that he will move faster and more efficiently against Trump’s targets, and at executing other White House priorities, than did his predecessor, Pam Bondi. Bondi was fired presumably because she didn’t deliver what Trump wanted quickly enough.

At Trump’s insistence, Blanche is moving ahead with investigations into several targets whom Trump regards as enemies — including John O. Brennan, the former CIA director who helped investigate Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Blanche is overseeing the Brennan inquiry, examining whether he lied to Congress in testimony in 2023, and relating to what Trump’s allies have cast as Brennan’s involvement in a “grand conspiracy” by Obama and Biden administration officials to keep Trump out of office each time he ran.

Blanche has also given the green light to inquiries into Cassidy Hutchinson, a young former White House aide who outraged Trump four years ago after she implicated him in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Under Blanche, prosecutors have also revived a botched attempt to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former FBI director, after a federal judge threw out charges last year that Comey had lied to Congress.

Blanche’s new indictment of Comey is for posting on social media an image of seashells he took while walking on a North Carolina beach. Blanche’s prosecutors are casting it as threatening because the image spelled “86 47” (the number “86” is slang for “getting rid of” someone or something, while “47” refers to Trump). Comey says that he quickly deleted the post as soon as he heard that the numbers were associated with violence.

There appears to be nothing Blanche won’t do that Trump wants done. Blanche is prosecuting the Democratic fundraising organization ActBlue. He’s prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit in Alabama. In terms of turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Trump’s Grievances, Bondi was bad, but Blanche is far worse.

3. Sought to erase January 6, 2021

Blanche is also doing Trump’s bidding in seeking to erase from the public record the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Blanche delivered Trump’s pardons to those who were found guilty and sentenced to prison.

Under Blanche’s direction, the Department of Justice has even removed from its website news releases about the criminal cases related to what occurred on that fateful day, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda.”

Blanche also signed off on a $1.8 billion fund that could have been funneled to those who stormed Congress as part of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump, after Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service. After lawmakers from both parties criticized the deal, Blanche said, during a June 2 hearing before the House, “We are not moving forward with the fund, period.” But his flat refusal to put his reversal in writing is an indication that he could devise an alternative.

Meanwhile, Blanche has said there’s a “ton of evidence” the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump, though he couldn’t provide a “definitive answer” and has pointed to ongoing investigations in Georgia and Florida as possibly answering the question.

4. Tried to immunize Trump and his family

Blanche personally signed — and was the only name on — the “settlement” document that would immunize Trump and his family from all future prosecutions. The breadth of this agreement is staggering. It prohibits the U.S. government from looking into any of the corrupt s---Trump and his family have gotten into.

And there’s a lot of corrupt s---. Trump is easily the most corrupt president in American history. Since being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more.

If the immunity part of the “settlement” remains in force, we may never know the true extent of Trump’s corrupt transactions, because the agreement — devised and signed by Blanche — may result in the largest cover-up of presidential wrongdoing and illegality in American history.

5. Overseen the largest exodus of talent in the department’s history

Blanche’s tenure has seen the departure of a record number of Department of Justice attorneys, including the termination of personnel who previously worked on January 6 cases or on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations.

The resignations and departures amount to over a quarter of what had been the department’s entire legal staff. For example, roughly 70 percent — 250 — of the Civil Rights Division’s attorneys have departed. Two-thirds (69 out of 110) of the lawyers tasked with defending executive actions have either resigned or announced their exit. Staffing of the Voting Section unit has fallen from 30 attorneys to just three. High-level resignations have also occurred in the Southern District of New York and the Public Integrity Section.

For all these reasons, Blanche should not be confirmed as attorney general of the United States.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

On Thursday, the Trump regime forced out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — effectively ending it.

You need to see this as part of Trump’s overall strategy to take over the midterm elections some 90 days from now. The strategy has six parts:

1. Eliminate neutral watchdogs

The small Election Assistance Commission was focused on the unglamorous but important work of election administration — helping states with testing and certification of voting systems, serving as a national clearinghouse for information on how best to administer elections, and maintaining the national mail voter registration form established by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

It had been created by Congress in 2002 after the Florida recount marred the 2000 presidential election and effectively pushed it into the Supreme Court to decide. In 2016, after Russia’s election interference, the commission targeted cybersecurity, supporting states as they reviewed and improved safeguards on their voting machines.

Trump has also overseen major cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also intended to review and improve safeguards on voting machines. The cybersecurity agency has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Trump returned to the White House.

The two major points of nonpartisan help for state and local elections officials — the Election Assistance Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — are now effectively gone.

The Trump regime says it had the right to fire the commissioners, under the Supreme Court’s recent Slaughter decision (the name fits), which gave a president the authority to fire commissioners from what had been independent regulatory agencies. But the high court did not authorize Trump to eliminate an entire agency wholesale.

2. Eliminate all constraints on big money

On June 30, the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court in NRSC v. FEC ruled against any spending limits on coordinated party expenditures. That means political parties can now spend unlimited money in direct coordination with their candidates. A donor who could give a candidate $7,000 directly can now route a million dollars or more through the party to cover that same candidate’s bills, and the candidate can solicit exactly it.

The case was filed in 2022 by JD Vance. Although those spending limits were contained in an act of Congress, the Trump regime’s Justice Department refused to defend it when it reached the court. (I used to argue Supreme Court cases before the Supreme Court, and I’m hard-pressed to think of another case in which an administration has refused to defend an act of Congress before the Supreme Court.)

3. Intimidate voters

Make no mistake: ICE is intended to intimidate potential voters who have every right to vote. ICE is now arresting an average of 2,000 people a day — twice its rate just a year ago — and has three times the resources it had then. Some 70,000 people are now in detention centers.

Some of them are American citizens.

The Justice Department is also prosecuting Americans who have protested against ICE. Eight were convicted on domestic terrorism charges following an incident last year in which a police officer was shot during an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. A ninth defendant in that case, Ines Soto, was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison for “providing material support to terrorists” because he had transported political pamphlets in his car.

Fifteen Minnesota protesters pled not guilty last week to conspiracy charges stemming from protests in January. Activist and healthcare worker Isaac Sant, one of the accused, said the trial was “a naked attempt to silence our voices, to squash dissent and to have a chilling effect on organizing here in the Twin Cities,” which, he noted, “is not going to work.”

ICE recently shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Earlier this year, it murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good. None of these murders is being investigated by the FBI or the Justice Department.

All of this has been dressed up as immigration policy, but it has a much baser motive: to normalize the presence of federal forces deployed against civilians in Democratic cities, in preparation for federal troops monitoring polls in these cities. These will inevitably be followed by fraud investigations if, as expected, these cities nonetheless vote for Democratic candidates.

4. Investigate and arrest alleged leftist “terrorists”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting next week about what the Trump administration views as a major peril: the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”

The administration’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, has had discussions with colleagues about using foreign terrorism labels for antifa to justify going after Americans with links to the movement, a loosely knit association of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies, three current and former U.S. officials said.

A linkage to foreign terrorist groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” such as surveillance, one U.S. counterterrorism official told The Washington Post.

5. Make it harder to vote and control how ballots are counted

Trump’s Justice Department has already demanded voter rolls from secretaries of state. Trump is demanding that Republicans in Congress enact his so-called “SAVE America” act, which would impose strict ID requirements — including showing passports or birth certificates — in order to vote. And his Department of Homeland Security has warned state election officials they can face criminal penalties if non-citizens are permitted to vote.

So far, district courts have struck down Trump’s demands for voter rolls, and Republicans in Congress have resisted his demands for the so-called SAVE Act.

6. Cast doubt on the outcome of the midterms

Trump will use every opportunity over the next 90 days to claim that Democrats are cheating — as he did in early June when claiming on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” that the California primary elections were rigged and that NBC correspondent Kristen Welker and her network were “playing right into their hands” by questioning him about the basis for his claims that elections were “crooked” in Democratic states.

He wants to cast doubt on the outcome of the midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted, so that after Democrats win the House and possibly the Senate, Trump will demand recounts or audits.

What you can do, now:

1. Join with local get-out-the-vote groups to make sure everyone who’s legally entitled to register to vote in your city or county is registered.

2. Before Election Day on November 3, join with local get-out-the-vote groups to literally get out the vote. Give people rides to voting places, if they need them. Make sure they know where to vote. Help them get whatever voting information they need.

3. If you become aware of any irregularities — any attempts to discourage or intimidate people who are entitled to vote from voting — alert the offices of your state attorney general and secretary of state.

4. Make sure your city, county, or state Democratic organization has lawyers ready and willing to litigate illegal efforts to obstruct the vote. Every county election office should know which state officials to call and, if necessary, file an emergency complaint.

5. Finally, let me also quote Rick Wilson, who for many years was a Republican operative:

“For the love of God, stop trying to shame the Republican Party into decency. I watched this party from the inside for thirty years. There is no bottom, there is no invisible line of conscience, and there is no cavalry of Serious Republicans waiting for permission to do the right thing. The ones with even marginally functioning consciences already left.
What remains is an apparatus that responds to exactly two stimuli: power and fear of losing it. Every hour spent crafting the perfect appeal to their better angels is an hour donated to the opposition. They are not going to be shamed. They can only be beaten.
Here’s the strategic core, and it’s the oldest rule in the book: cheating operations work on the margins. They flip close races. They exploit recounts, certification fights, faithless officials, and friendly courts. What they cannot do, what no operation in American history has ever managed to do, is steal a landslide.
A three-point race in Wisconsin can be litigated, delayed, “investigated,” and strangled in a certification meeting. An eight-point race cannot. The math of the steal collapses when the margin exceeds the degree of MAGA -------. …
You have the numbers. You have the law. And you have about ninety days.”

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

At the NATO summit just ended, Trump lashed out at other NATO members, saying he was “very disappointed with NATO” and asking “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us?” He reiterated his desire to take over Greenland, blasted European energy and immigration policies, insulted Spain, and worried allies by declaring that the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow “doesn’t affect us.”

Yet throughout the proceedings, Trump was treated by other NATO powers with as much courtesy and respect as any U.S. president has ever received from NATO — perhaps more. “It was a great meeting, there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity,” Trump crowed when it was over.

What happened? It’s important to understand the source of Trump’s power.

His power doesn’t come from his being president of the most powerful nation in the world. In fact, his arbitrary tariffs, absurd war in Iran, and outright abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife have reduced America’s standing in much of the world.

Nor does his power come from his MAGA base, which is now having second thoughts about supporting someone who got the U.S. involved in another Middle Eastern war, caused prices to rise, and still refuses to release the complete Epstein files.

Nor does his power flow from his strategic brilliance or cunning. Of all U.S. presidents in modern times, he easily ranks as the stupidest.

Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules, and laws about how American presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power, and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way.

The NATO presidents and prime ministers treated Trump with extraordinary deference because they’re afraid of what he might do if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Whether it’s NATO, Iran. the World Cup, the 2020 election, making billions off his presidency — or anything else — he’s unconstrained by norms, rules, treaties, and laws.

When the global community of World Cup fans objected to his intervention last weekend on the side of the U.S., he responded, “If [Belgium] beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say it was — I’d say — it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020.”

Note how he corrected himself — from we’ll say to I’d say. Ethics is all about “we” — our collective judgment about what’s right or wrong. Trump doesn’t give a fig for the world’s or the nation’s judgment about right or wrong. He doesn’t think about right or wrong.

We’ve been missing the boat by characterizing Trump as breaching ethical standards. Ethics assumes some sort of agreed-upon standards against which a breach can be defined and measured. But Trump doesn’t have any standards at all. His entire approach to life, to business, and now to the presidency, has nothing whatever to do with standards. It’s about winning at all costs. Whatever it takes.

Trump isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.

It’s hard for most of us to conceive of living in a Trumpian world without standards, norms, rules, or laws — a world composed only of transactions and calculations in which the only test is what’s in it for me and at what cost.

And that difficulty most of us have of imagining such a world is itself the key to Trump’s power.

Whether you’re president of the United States or anyone else, it’s always possible to extract personal benefits by being the first to break a widely accepted norm.

Think of a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows because of the unwritten rule that no one steals. Under these circumstances, the first thief to commit robberies operates at a huge advantage. He can effortlessly get into anyone’s house.

This first-mover advantage disappears as soon as people catch on and start locking their doors and windows. But the thief doesn’t bear the costs of the locks or the hassle of locking all the doors and windows. He exploits the community’s trust. Then, once he destroys that trust, he leaves it to them to protect themselves against such future violations.

That asymmetry — small cost for the violator of trust, large costs for everyone who has to thereafter protect themselves — is the very essence of Trump’s MO. He gains wealth, power, and glory for himself by shattering norms, after which everyone else has to pick up the pieces.

As president, he has far bigger norms to shatter than does a small-down thief, and at far greater benefit to himself

As president, his thuggery has paid off, at least for himself. But it has also damaged all sorts of institutions that America and the world have relied on — from NATO to FIFA to the U.S. Department of Justice — institutions based on the trust that no American president would ever do what he’s done.

He’ll be remembered as the most powerful president America has ever had, but also the worst.

When he’s gone, all of us will be paying to clean up the mess. We’ll have to buy an infinite number of locks for an endless number of doors and windows, and spend huge amounts of our time installing them and then keeping them locked.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Today I’m going to ask you to make a difficult decision: name the worst elected official in America today, other than Trump.

The point of this exercise is not for you to become any more discouraged with American politics but to highlight that Trump is hardly the only horrendously awful elected official in America. A second purpose is to name (and shame) elected officials who deserve to be better known for the horrible things they’ve said and done. Finally, it’s to stimulate a candid discussion about why voters have chosen these loathsome people (and why eligible voters who wouldn’t have chosen them don’t vote).

It’s been difficult to pare the list down. I’ve had to eliminate Ted Cruz because two other finalists are from Texas, and I didn’t want to make this solely about the Lone Star State. I’ve also eliminated members of the House Freedom Caucus because there’s no meaningful way to differentiate their bigotry and fanaticism from one another. I’ve included Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s technically no longer a public official — she resigned from Congress on January 5 — because her influence continues, and she’s now talking about forming a third party.

So here are the finalists for the worst elected official in America today, other than Trump:

1. Vice President JD Vance

Vance has as few principles as his boss, which is to say none. In 2016, he was an outspoken critic of Trump (whom he privately likened to “America’s Hitler”) and is now his most loyal defender.

During Vance’s recent visit to the Nixon Library, he defended Nixon for the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” It was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” — not Nixon’s serious crimes.

In his new autobiography, Vance writes that it was “boneheaded” of him to call Kamala Harris and several other prominent Democrats “childless cat ladies.” But when his remark resurfaced during his early days as Trump’s running mate, he refused to apologize or express regret for it and charged that the Democratic Party is “anti-family and anti-child.”

He is also a virulent nativist. He insisted during the 2024 campaign that the pets of Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.” When confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

2. Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General

Paxton is now running for the U.S. Senate. Few politicians have had as checkered a career. In 2015, Paxton was indicted on state securities fraud charges relating to activities before taking office; he pleaded not guilty. The charges were dismissed a decade later, after Paxton fulfilled a pretrial agreement for restitution to the victims, ethics training, and community service.

In 2021, Paxton aided Trump in his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, filing an unsuccessful case in the Supreme Court and speaking at the rally Trump held on January 6, 2021, that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. During the Biden presidency, Paxton pursued legal action against the administration 106 times. Paxton supports a total ban on access to abortion.

In May 2023, Paxton was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives by a vote of 121–23, leading to his suspension. The articles of impeachment included allegations that Paxton gave preferential treatment to a political donor who bribed him, misapplied public resources, made false statements against whistleblowers, obstructed justice in the securities fraud trial against him, and made false statements regarding his financial interests. After the vote, he was suspended from office. In September 2023, the Texas Senate voted 16–14 to acquit Paxton, ending his suspension.

3. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene

Greene represented Georgia’s 14th Congressional District from 2021 until her resignation in January 2026; she says she is now laying the groundwork for a third political party.

Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views, including the white genocide conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and Jews have plotted to bring immigrants to America to vote against white Christian candidates. She has also promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, claiming that a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping elites operates a global child sex-trafficking ring. She has also promoted “Pizzagate,” a debunked theory that top Democrats ran a similar ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.

She has amplified other conspiracy theories that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the U.S., that implicate the Clinton family in murder, and that suggest the 9/11 attacks on the United States were a hoax.

Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As a congresswoman, she has equated the Democratic Party with Nazis and compared Covid safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust (later apologizing for this comparison). During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised Vladimir Putin. She identifies herself as a Christian nationalist.

A vocal advocate of Trump during his first presidency, Greene promoted his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, aided and supported his attempts to overturn it, and called for the results of the 2020 election in Georgia to be decertified. In response to her endorsements of political violence, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from all committees (she was appointed to new committee roles in January 2023). She broke with Trump over the Justice Department’s handling of files tied to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and the longest-ever government shutdown.

4. Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Of all America’s governors, Abbott stands out for his white Christian nativism. As attorney general, Abbott successfully advocated in the Supreme Court for the Texas State Capitol to display the Ten Commandments and unsuccessfully defended Texas’s ban on same-sex marriage. He was also involved in numerous lawsuits against the Obama administration, seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act and reverse the administration’s environmental regulations. As governor, Abbott has maintained Texas’s total ban on abortions, sought more lenient gun laws, and supported additional funding for police and law enforcement.

During the Covid pandemic, Abbott opposed face mask and vaccine mandates and blocked local governments, businesses, and other organizations from implementing their own. He signed into law a ban on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices at Texas’s public colleges and universities. Abbott concedes that the climate is changing but doesn’t believe human activity is the major cause.

He has also prioritized fighting illegal immigration, making Texas the first state to decline refugee resettlement. He directed his administration to transport undocumented immigrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. On September 15, 2022, Abbott sent two buses with mostly Venezuelan immigrants to the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C. In November 2025, Abbott declared the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to be “foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations.”

After Trump’s failed attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Abbott made it more difficult for Texans to vote — eliminating 24-hour polling and drive-thru voting, banning the sending of applications for mail-in ballots, and allowing partisan poll watchers to move more freely at polling places.

So, today’s difficult Office Hours question: Who’s the worst elected official in America? Please choose from the list, or add your own nominee in the comments.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.

It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-of-a-b” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.

McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.

“Son-of-a-b!” my father shouted, even louder.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.

During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).

I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.

So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Okay, we’ve now gone through the bitter-sweet 250th anniversary. Now let’s get to work.

Every day brings more news of Trump’s greed, incompetence, cruelty, and criminality. Raking in $2.2 billion in his first year in office, much of it siphoned off from taxpayers and gullible followers. His Iran debacle. His malignant narcissism, putting his face and name everywhere. His cruel mass deportations. His use of the Justice Department to prosecute anyone he feels has wronged him. And so on.

As journalist Tom Edsall writes, “The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.”

I think it important to separate the loathsomeness of Trump as a person from the horrendous things he’s doing. Trump won’t change, but we can begin seeking changes in our system to prevent such awfulness in the future — especially if/when we boot out the Republican cowards and sycophants from Congress.

What basic reforms are necessary to begin cleaning up the mess? I’m not talking about specific policies such as reducing the size of the military, saving the planet from climate change, providing Medicare for All, or dealing with AI — as important as they are. I’m focusing on basic meat-and-potatoes reforms of how our government functions — reforms that will be necessary to get anything done.

I’ve tried to boil it down to 10 bare essentials. Herewith:

1. Subject Supreme Court justices to term limits. Limit the terms of justices to 18 years, after which time they must move to courts of appeals or district courts. Justices already on the high court can remain only until they’ve been there for 18 years. Those who are beyond this limit must immediately move to other courts. (Another reform is to expand the number of justices, but FDR tried this and it proved so politically unpopular that he had to abandon it.)

2. Prevent conflicts of interest. End the exemption of the president and vice president from conflicts of interest laws. Require all federally elected officials to put their investments into blind trusts. Prohibit all trading of specific shares of stock.

3. Stop a president from using the Justice Department. Prohibit a president from having any involvement in decisions about whom to prosecute. Require congressional review of any pardons or commutations.

4. End gerrymanders. Require states to create independent commissions to draw congressional district lines.

5. Revive voting rights. Reenact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (which barred voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity) and Section 5 (which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval before changing any voting laws or procedures).

6. Protect press freedom and independence. Amend the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts to bar large corporations, or any person already owning major media, from purchasing major media networks or platforms.

7. Protect the freedom of inquiry. Bar the executive branch from conditioning research or other educational grants to universities on any ideological litmus test. Researchers should be free to pursue truth.

8. Get big money out of politics. Establish public matching funds for small-dollar donations for all federal elected offices. Encourage states to grant corporate charters only on condition that corporations refrain from political activity (as Hawaii has done and Montana is considering, and hopefully California will do). Pursue a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and establish Congress’s authority to limit big money in politics.

9. Tax large aggregations of personal wealth. Enact a wealth tax. Eliminate the “stepped-up basis at death” rule that allows large fortunes to be transferred from one generation to the next without paying taxes on capital gains.

10. Eliminate the Electoral College. Pursue a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and base the selection of president and vice president on whichever ticket wins the overall popular vote. In the meantime, seek a compact among states (and the District of Columbia) to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote.

You may have different priorities, in which case please add them in your comments below (but indicate which of the above you’d knock off so we can keep the list manageable).

The point is that we need to begin talking about major structural reforms of how our government functions — and pushing candidates for every level of government to support them. Trump has revealed how easily the system can be abused. When we have the power, we must act to end such abuses.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Some 163 million people in the U.S. live in areas that experienced dangerous heat on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service — sending “heat risk” forecasts in major cities (including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlanta) into the most extreme risk category through Saturday.

Part of the reason is the planet is warming dangerously, but Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and is encouraging more use of fossil fuels.

Especially endangered are workers toiling under the hot sun, or in stifling warehouses, or in delivery trucks with no AC.

Yet Trump’s pick to run the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, David Keeling, is weakening the agency’s own heat standards by removing specific inspection goals. OSHA’s Heat National Emphasis Program expired on April 8. Its proposed heat standard has been stalled.

For many workers, heat standards are literally a matter of life and death. Every year, workers collapse, suffer permanent injuries, and die while doing their jobs in extreme heat.

Years ago, when I ran the Labor Department, we had the toughest Occupational Health and Safety Administration in history, run by a truly committed worker advocate named Joe Dear. We made workplaces safer — reducing worker deaths and injuries.

Since its inception in 1971, OSHA has reduced workplace-related fatalities by almost 63 percent. It has slashed the rate of serious workplace injuries and illnesses by 75 percent.

But OSHA under Keeling is retreating from worker safety.

Before Trump picked him to head OSHA, Keeling was Amazon’s top safety executive.

During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, a Senate report found that Amazon warehouses were twice as dangerous as those of its competitors.

This year, we’ve already seen reports of Amazon workers dying on the job on a near monthly basis, including incidents in Oregon and North Carolina. Why would we trust Amazon’s safety head with the country’s workers?

Before he was at Amazon, Keeling was in charge of safety at UPS. How did he do there? OSHA repeatedly cited UPS for exposing drivers to excessive heat. Federal investigators found at least 100 drivers were hospitalized for heat-related injuries between 2015 and 2018. UPS delivery trucks had no air conditioning until 2024, when it was won in a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters.

Now Keeling is head of OSHA, and OSHA is weakening its heat protection standards.

Workers are already paying the price. Reports of worker deaths during extreme heat continue to emerge across the country. Heat exposure can trigger heat stroke, organ failure, and chronic kidney disease. These are among the most predictable workplace hazards, which means they can often be prevented with strong safety standards and rigorous enforcement.

But instead of strengthening those protections, OSHA under Keeling has weakened them. At a time when record-breaking temperatures are becoming more frequent, retreating from enforcement sends a dangerous message that worker fatalities are a cost of doing business.

When he was in charge of safety at Amazon, Amazon became notorious for dangerous warehouse conditions. When in charge of safety at UPS, UPS resisted providing air conditioning for delivery vehicles. Now, when the agency responsible for protecting millions of workers should be leading the fight against preventable heat deaths — it’s backing away from its most basic responsibility to protect people over profits.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

In financial disclosures released Tuesday, Trump reported earning more than $1.4 billion last year from his several cryptocurrency ventures.

All told — including other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets —Trump pulled in at least $2.2 billion last year. That compares to the roughly $622 million his enterprises raked in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

In other words, it’s a fair guess that last year he made more than $1 billion off his presidency.

We’re talking big money and big looting.

Trump has conflicts of interest up the wazoo.

For example, as a candidate in 2024, Trump embraced crypto. Then he and his family invested like mad in it — through CIC Digital — a Trump Organization affiliate that is behind his memecoin, $TRUMP. And through another Trump family-backed crypto company, World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Trump, his sons, and the family of special envoy Steve Witkoff in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign. World Liberty is now behind several prominent crypto tokens.

The problem here is more than potential conflicts of interest, more than the mere appearance of conflicts of interest. The conflicts are real, blatant, outrageous.

Since taking office, Trump has installed friendly regulators to oversee digital assets, and he’s pushed for landmark crypto legislation that would further free crypto from being treated as a security (in which case all sorts of disclosures would have to be made about it).

It goes way beyond crypto. His investment accounts made more than 20,000 trades last year — and many appear to be timed to take maximum advantage of his public announcements that moved markets.

Just one day before he announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, for example, his investment accounts made 327 individual stock purchases, each valued as much as $250,000. It was one of the largest single-day buys disclosed in Tuesday’s financial disclosures. The following day, when Trump announced the pause, the S&P soared nearly 10 percent — one of the biggest single-day gains in the index’s history.

He’s made a bundle from real estate deals that foreign governments have been eager to strike with him and his family, presumably because he’s given them — or will give them — something in return. Entities from the Persian Gulf paid around $300 million to Trump’s businesses last year, more than any other foreign region identifiable in his financial disclosures.

On Wednesday, he traveled to North Dakota on the maiden flight of the new Air Force One, a $400 million jet gifted to him by the Qatari royal family whose ownership will transfer to Trump when he leaves office (technically, it will go to Trump’s own presidential library foundation, but there’s nothing stopping him from using it for private purposes).

This is called corruption, folks. And it’s on a massive scale.

A White House spokesperson says neither Trump nor his family “has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

Oh please. Next we’ll be told Trump never tells a lie, either.

Conflicts of interest like these make it impossible for the public to judge whether Trump is working for America or for himself when he advocates for or implements a particular policy, such as his crypto policy or his moves in the Middle East.

We don’t even know for sure that Trump has disclosed all his investments. The financial disclosure made Tuesday was voluntary. Can anyone be certain Trump has come clean about all his conflicts of interest?

But perhaps the most troubling thing about all this is Trump doesn’t give a shite.

In his first term, when asked about conflicts of interest, he said, “the president can’t have a conflict of interest … because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest.”

He’s also said Americans “don’t care at all” about his unreleased tax returns or his personal finances.

In his second term, he’s even less inhibited about raking in money. “I found out that nobody cared,” Trump told The New York Times in January.

Now, he has nothing to lose by making as much money as possible off his presidency.

He probably figures he’s survived two impeachments so far and won’t be impeached for pesky conflicts of interest. He won’t be running for the presidency again, so he doesn’t have to worry that his conflicts of interest will be used against him in a future campaign. Why not rake in as much as he can?

As to his historic legacy, Trump isn’t worried about that either. He likely believes he can create his own history. That’s what he’s tried to do for the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That’s what his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House is all about — framed portraits of all U.S. presidents accompanied by Trump’s own partisan, gold-lettered plaques, many written by Trump himself.

In other words, we’re dealing with a malignant narcissist who thinks only about his own wealth and power and about vengeance against those who have tried to stop him from acquiring more.

How can we possibly expect that he’s working for the people of the United States rather than for himself?

Trump doesn’t have any conflicts of interest. That’s because he really has only one interest: Trump.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

In one of the most notable upsets of the Democratic primaries so far, Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros, 29, yesterday won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette to represent Colorado’s hotly-contested First Congressional District.

I expect to see more stories about how the Democratic Socialists of America are taking over the Democratic Party. In New York last week, nine of 10 candidates endorsed by the DSA won primaries for the state Legislature and Congress. All three Democratic Socialist insurgents Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed for Congress prevailed. Two of them defeated incumbents.

Democratic Socialist elected officials now include U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib (both elected in 2018), New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle mayor Katie Wilson (both elected in 2025). Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George is set to follow as mayor of Washington, D.C.

In 2025, over 250 DSA members held elected public office across 40 states, with 90 percent of them elected after 2019.

Pundits eager to declare a new movement or sound the alarm about socialism are having a field day.

But they’re wrong.

Voters who have supported these candidates haven’t done so because they’ve been particularly attracted to the idea of Democratic Socialism. Most don’t even know what Democratic Socialism is.

In reality, voters have been attracted to vigorous young people who are committed to getting stuff done. Voters have had it with incumbents who have been in their jobs for decades. And they want fighters — who will get big corporate money out of our politics and go to the mat for average working people.

Colorado’s DeGette has held her seat for nearly 30 years. Kiros was born the same year DeGette was first elected to Congress.

Kiros is poised to become the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress. Her win in the solidly blue district that makes up most of Denver means Kiros is likely headed to Washington next year.

Kiros is a fighter who understands what’s worth fighting for, and expresses it clearly. “The thing is, fighting Trump is just one piece of the problem. Trump is not the cause,” Kiros said during a debate earlier this month. “He’s a symptom of a system that is broken and has been broken for a really long time because our party has failed to understand the role that they need to take in getting money out of our politics.”

A former lawyer and Ph.D. candidate, Kiros easily presents herself as a politician for the working class. Her family immigrated to Denver from Ethiopia when she was a baby.

Kiros has never before run for elected office, but she won support from a range of voters with a message of fundamental reform of the American system.

Or consider Manny Rutinel, 31, a progressive Colorado state representative who on Tuesday defeated a moderate Democrat to win the primary election in Colorado’s most competitive swing district.

A Dominican American activist and lawyer with a significant social media following and a knack for fund-raising, Rutinel isn’t a Democratic Socialist. He appealed to voters with his youth, energy, and multicultural biography in a suburban area north of Denver that’s nearly 40 percent Latino. He prevailed over Shannon Bird, a white moderate Democrat who had argued that she had broader appeal in the general election.

The district is one of Colorado’s ranching and agricultural hubs. It narrowly voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 and for President Trump in 2024. It is one of just a handful of battleground House districts with a substantial Latino population.

Besides their youth and multicultural backgrounds, these young Democratic politicians are committed to making people’s lives better. New York’s Mamdani focused his mayoral campaign on what New Yorkers needed — affordable housing, childcare, and basic services like clearing sidewalks after a snowstorm.

Seattle’s Wilson, a self-described Democratic Socialist who won election without the endorsement of the DSA, rose to prominence for advocating affordable housing, increased taxes on large corporations, and workers’ rights.

In Washington, D.C., Lewis George, a city council member, ran on a platform of expanding childcare, education and housing, and revoking the district’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

“From the start of this campaign, we championed the principle that DC residents deserve a government that works,” she said in her victory speech. “Over time, failing public services eroded people’s faith in government as a force of good in their lives. As mayor, I will be relentlessly focused on delivering reliable public services to every DC neighborhood. These are not trivial issues. They are core government functions and we need them to work.”

These new young Democrats have also won because they inspired armies of young activists to knock on doors and work the phones for them. They didn’t rely on big money; they relied on big excitement.

Two final things about them. Most are the children of immigrants; and they’re disproportionately female. They’re living illustrations of the diversity, equity, and inclusion America can foster, at its best. They’re the opposite of the white, male, Christian, nationalism that has overtaken the Republican Party.

At a time when Trump and his regime have cast a dark pall over America, a new generation of Democratic politicians is shining a bright light. The source of the energy and excitement they’re generating isn’t Democratic Socialism. It’s the emergence of the next America.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day One executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.

The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to directly conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The Trump regime appealed the lower-court rulings, contending that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision had been misunderstood for more than a century. The administration argued that the drafters of the amendment were focused on guaranteeing citizenship for the children of former slaves—and that the amendment was never intended to extend citizenship to the children of people who weren’t living in the country legally.

Trump and his Solicitor General, who argued this case before the Court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”—the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.

Trump has been vowing to try to change the law since entering politics in 2015, arguing the 14th Amendment was written specifically to enshrine the rights of freed slaves. His critics have countered that it was always designed to apply to the children of immigrants too. A 1898 Supreme Court decision confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.

Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the Court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump.

Had Trump won, it would have probably caused panic among recent immigrants and their families. Although Trump has insisted his policy would apply only to future births, it was far from clear that the logic of any win for Trump wouldn’t apply retrospectively if a future president (JD Vance? perish the thought) wanted to go there.

What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.

Only five of the nine justice ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.

The Court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

Pure and utter claptrap.

Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.

Clearly, the Supreme Court must be changed — either by expanding the number of justices or by invoking term limits on Supreme Court justices. The Constitution would permit both remedies.

Perhaps the best thing about today’s majority decision is that it’s such a direct repudiation of Tump, who has long taken a personal interest in the issue. During his 2024 campaign, he made curtailing birthright citizenship a key element of his immigration platform.

When the high court heard arguments on the case in April, Trump took the unprecedented step of showing up in person for the hearing, making him the first sitting president ever to attend a Supreme Court argument. For the Court to so directly reject his position today is surely a humiliation for Trump.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.

I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically-powerful corporations in America.

Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is — or was — independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.

The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy — and corrupted the nation’s politics — during the First Gilded Age.

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.

That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people — and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.

We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.

Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

Hence, today’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

Today’s ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the Court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Today marks the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.

It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.

In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau — again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor — said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.

Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued: “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”

Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”

That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.

Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary — to check and constrain him.

Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.

But as of today, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Today’s ruling overturns the basic idea — part of the fabric of our government for well over a century — that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.

As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

JD Vance said on Friday that the U.S. wins “either way” in negotiations with Iran. “If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country.”

Just hours after Vance’s appearance on HBO, Iran launched attack drones on Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

So much for Iran being much weaker.

Pressed by Maher on whether Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed, Vance shot back: “What part of it is not destroyed? The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

In fact, Iran still has a stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which experts concede could be turned into a nuclear weapon.

Vance’s media appearance came two days after he visited the Richard Nixon presidential library and museum in California to talk about his new book on his journey from atheism to allegedly devout Catholicism.

During his visit he defended Nixon for the Watergate break-in scandal that ended his presidency. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” It was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” — not Nixon’s serious crimes.

Hello? The only conceivable reason Watergate might not bring down a presidency tomorrow or be a 12-hour story is the gargantuan criminality and corruption of the Trump-Vance regime, which puts Watergate in the minor league by comparison.

I raise Vance’s recent bizarro comments because in a few months he’ll be actively campaigning to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028.

He’s a more dangerous demagogue than Trump because he wraps his demagoguery in the apparent thoughtfulness of a graduate of Yale Law School and a serious best-selling author.

I’ve spent the last two days reading his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, a memoir focusing on his 2019 conversion to Catholicism, and can assure you of three things: First, it’s a serious book. Second, Vance’s mind is as vacuous and unprincipled as he is in person. Third, the book isn’t worth reading.

In one of the few mea culpas in the book, Vance writes that it was “boneheaded” of him — “one of the dumbest things I ever said” — to call Kamala Harris and several other prominent Democrats “childless cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” In the book Vance calls the insult, “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

What Vance doesn’t admit to is that, when his remark resurfaced during his early days as Trump’s running mate, he refused to apologize or express any regret for it. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said then — sarcastically — adding that “if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” which in his view had made the entire Democratic Party “anti-family and anti-child.”

Vance’s intentionally provocative rather than illuminating demagoguery was in evidence again when he insisted during the 2024 campaign that the pets of upright Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.”

When confronted with irrefutable evidence that Haitian immigrants were not eating pets in Springfield, Vance admitted publicly that he was speaking, shall we say, metaphorically: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

It’s much the same with Vance’s recent response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa in the British city of Southampton. After Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Vance declared that Nowak would still be alive had Europeans “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

Inconveniently for Vance, Digwa didn’t migrate to Britain. He was born and raised there.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s Senate race.

Before running for the Senate, Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why was Thiel such a devoted sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel saw in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the U.S. away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Bullshit. Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Thiel and Vance believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the U.S. is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the U.S. establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” — as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The next step is to foment so much division and bigotry inside the U.S. and within other major Western nations that people come to view those on the other side of the political divide as the source of everything that’s wrong with their lives — which Vance has been eagerly trying to do.

That way, they won’t look upward to see that the billionaire robber barons, plutocrats, and oligarchs of this second Gilded Age have grabbed most of the wealth and power for themselves. Hence, average people will trade in democracy for strongman autocracy.

Behind Vance’s demagoguery about the U.S. winning either way in Iran, Nixon being taken down by the deep state, childless cat ladies, the Democratic Party being anti-family and anti-child, Haitian-Americans eating pets, and immigrants threatening Western civilization is a deadly serious plan to unite the far-right of America and Europe and rid much of the world of democracy. If Vance becomes president, he’s intent on furthering the job.

Vance resembles Trump in every way — he lies effortlessly, he’s utterly without principle, and he’s intent on gaining power — except that he’s smarter and more ruthless than Trump.

Take note and beware.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.