I’ve been directly involved in government shutdowns, one when I was secretary of labor. It’s hard for me to describe the fear, frustration, and chaos that ensued. I recall spending the first day consoling employees — many in tears as they headed out the door.

In some ways, this shutdown is similar to others. Agencies and departments designed to protect consumers, workers, and investors are now officially closed, as are national parks and museums.

Most federal workers are not being paid — as many as 750,000 could be furloughed — including those who are required to remain on the job, like air-traffic controllers or members of the U.S. military.

So-called “mandatory” spending, including Social Security and Medicare payments, are continuing, although checks could be delayed. (Trump has made sure that construction of his new White House ballroom won’t be affected.)

There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four.

But this shutdown — the one that began yesterday morning — is radically different.

For one thing, it’s the consequence of a decision made in July by Trump and Senate Republicans to pass Trump’s gigantic “big beautiful bill” (I prefer to call it “big ugly bill”) without any Democratic votes.

They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation,” which allowed the big ugly to get through the Senate with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.

The final tally was a squeaker. All Senate Democrats opposed the legislation. When three Senate Republicans joined them, Vice President JD Vance was called in to break a tie. Some Republicans bragged that they didn’t need a single Democrat.

The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — with the result that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.

The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations.

Trump and Senate Republicans didn’t need a single Democrat then. But this time, Republicans couldn’t use the arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill to keep the governing going.

Now they needed Senate Democratic votes.

Yet keeping the government going meant keeping all the priorities included in the big ugly bill that all Senate Democrats opposed.

Which is why Senate Democrats refused to sign on unless most of the big ugly’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were restored, so health insurance premiums won’t soar next year.

Even if Senate Democrats had gotten that concession, the Republican bill to keep the government going would retain all the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations contained in the big ugly, along with all the cuts in nutrition assistance, and all the increased funding for immigration enforcement.

There’s a deeper irony here.

As a practical matter, the U.S. government has been “shut down” for over eight months, since Trump took office a second time.

Trump and the sycophants surrounding him — such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and, before him, Elon Musk and his DOGE — have had no compunctions about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like — such as USAID.

They’ve also fired, laid off, furloughed, or extended buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal employees doing work they don’t value, such as at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The federal government is already expected to employ 300,000 fewer workers by December than it did last January.)

They’ve impounded appropriations from Congress for activities they oppose, ranging across the entire federal government.

Yesterday, on the first day of the shutdown, Vought announced that the administration was freezing some $26 billion in funds Congress had appropriated — including $18 billion for New York City infrastructure (home to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries) and $8 billion for environmental projects in 16 states, mostly led by Democrats.

All of this is illegal — it violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — but it seems unlikely that courts will act soon enough to prevent the regime from harming vast numbers of Americans.

Vought is also initiating another round of mass layoffs targeting, in his words, “a lot” of government workers.

This is being described by Republicans as “payback” for the Democrats not voting to keep the government going, but evidently nothing stopped Vought from doing mass layoffs and freezing Congress’s appropriations before the shutdown.

In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t cave in.

Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?

Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.

If tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance starting in January because they can no longer afford to pay sky-high premiums, Trump and his Republicans will be blamed. Months before the midterms.

It would be Trump’s and his Republicans’ fault anyway — it’s part of their big ugly bill — but this way, in the fight over whether to reopen the government, Americans will have a chance to see Democrats standing up for them.

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/.

I recall participating in heated debates in late 1968 and early 1969 about why Democrats lost the presidency to “tricky Dick” Nixon. And another set of debates in the early 1980s about why Democrats lost to smooth-talking right-winger Ronald Reagan.

And then, after the disastrous midterm elections of 1994, why they lost both houses of Congress. And then in 2000 and again in 2004, why they lost to the insipid George W. Bush. And, worst of all, in 2016 and then again in 2024, to the monstrous Trump.

These debates usually occur within the rarified precincts of Democratic think tanks located in well-appointed offices in Washington, D.C.

They feature people called “political consultants” and “political operatives,” whose sole distinction is to have participated in one or more Democratic campaigns. Few have ever run for office. Fewer have ever served in office. Almost none live in the hinterlands; they live in or around Washington. They all make their money consulting and operating.

And for more than 50 years, they’ve almost always said exactly the same thing: Democrats must move to the “center” in order to “recapture” the “suburban swing” voters who are up for grabs.

May I say, based on my experience in and around politics over the last 60 years, including a run for office and stints in two Democratic administrations, that this is utter horse----?

Democrats have been moving to the putative “center” for over five decades. This has never helped them. It has only hurt.

The conventional lore among the Democratic consultant class is that Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 and saved the party by tacking to the “center.”

Wrong. Clinton won only a plurality of voters in 1992 because Ross Perot grabbed Republican voters from George H.W. Bush.

Moreover, Clinton didn’t run on a centrist message. He ran on a message Franklin D. Roosevelt would have been proud of.

I should know. I advised him during the campaign and then joined his Cabinet. Clinton ran on raising taxes on the wealthy, cutting them for the middle class, and establishing universal health care.

I was in Little Rock when, in announcing his run for president, Clinton “refuse[d] to be part of a generation that commits hardworking Americans to a lifetime of struggle without reward or security” and condemned a system in which “middle-class people spend more time on the job, less time with their children, bringing home less money to pay more for health care and housing and education.” He said it was “wrong” that “while the incomes of our wealthiest citizens went up, their taxes went down.”

Since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party’s biggest problem hasn’t been the “left” but its dependence on wealthy donors and corporate PACs, which have consistently argued for moving the party to the “center” and away from the working class. The moneyed interests in the party also back much of the Democratic consultant class.

So it’s no surprise that another Democratic think tank is now being formed, financed by billionaire donors, to push the party to the “center.”

This one is called the Searchlight Institute, and its head is Adam Jentleson, who The New York Times describes as “a veteran Democratic operative” who wants to “minimize the sway that left-leaning groups have over candidates before what is expected to be a crowded 2028 presidential primary.”

Jentleson says “the folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions” (i.e., the left).

Searchlight starts with an annual budget of $10 million and a staff of seven in its Capitol Hill offices. According to the Times, the organization is subsidized by “a roster of billionaire donors” including Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.

What?

If Democrats have learned anything from their losses over the years, especially their two horrific losses to Trump, it should be that they need a charismatic messenger with a clear and convincing message about how to lower the costs of living for average working families — especially housing, health care, and child care. And raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

At least since Richard Nixon, Republicans have been honing a cultural populist message telling working-class Americans that their problems are due to Black people, brown people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, government bureaucrats, “coastal elites,” socialists, and high taxes on the wealthy.

Democrats could have been honing an economic populist message that told working Americans that their problems are largely due to monopolistic corporations, greedy CEOs, rapacious billionaires, and Wall Street gamblers. And therefore what the nation needs are high taxes on the wealthy and big corporations, including a wealth tax, that allow the nation to meet the minimum needs of average working families for housing, health care, child care, and the rest.

This economic populist message is a winner. The most prominent candidate to capture the Democratic Party’s imagination this year, Zohran Mamdani, won the primary for mayor of New York by focusing on working families’ needs for affordable housing, groceries, and child care, to be financed by a tax hike on the wealthy.

This message also has the virtue of being accurate.

It accounts for the nation’s near-record inequalities of income and wealth, the tsunami of money flowing into American politics, the steady decline in tax rates paid by the ultra-wealthy, the near impossibility of forming unions, the near-monopolization of industries such as food and fossil-based energy, and the seeming inability of the richest nation in the world to respond to the needs of its working people.

But, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, and a few other brave elected Democrats and young candidates, Democrats have eschewed economic populism because they haven’t wanted to bite the hands that feed them.

As a result, working Americans understandably concerned about stagnant incomes, decreasing job security, and soaring costs of housing, health care, child care, and much else are hearing only one story — Republican cultural populism — and not the other, truthful populism.

It is a political truism that if one party gives you an explanation for your problems and a set of solutions for overcoming them, while the other party does neither, you’re apt to go along with the party that gives you the explanation and prescriptions, even if they’re rubbish.

Not surprisingly, the “rosters of billionaire donors” to Democratic think tanks like the new Searchlight Institute are not interested in offering the real explanation or real solutions. But because they don’t want to sell the Republicans’ cultural populism, they’re left opting for the so-called “center. ”

And what’s at their center? Lists of insipid policy proposals that don’t require raising taxes on the wealthy or on big corporations, or getting big money out of politics, or empowering average Americans. In other words, proposals that maintain the status quo.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Over the weekend, on his Truth Social, Trump shared a video purporting to be a segment on Fox News — it wasn’t — in which an AI-generated, deepfaked version of himself sat in the White House and promised that “every American will soon receive their own MedBed card” that will grant them access to new “MedBed hospitals.”

What?

Believers in the “MedBed” conspiracy theory think certain hospital beds are loaded with futuristic technology that can reverse any disease, regenerate limbs, and de-age people. No one has an actual photo of these beds because they don’t exist.

Trump also posted (again, without any basis in fact) that the FBI “secretly placed … 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during” the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, during which they were “probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists.”

Trump added that this “is different from what Director Christopher Wray stated, over and over again!” and went on: “Christopher Wray, the then Director of the FBI, has some major explaining to do. That’s two in a row, Comey and Wray, who got caught LYING.”

In fact, the Department of Justice’s inspector general reported that there were no undercover FBI agents at the January 6 riots. (FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed that the few FBI agents present on January 6 were there on “a crowd control mission after the riot was declared.”)

Trump also announced Saturday that he intends to send the U.S. military to Portland, Oregon, authorizing “Full Force, if necessary” to “protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

Hello? Although protesters have been camping on the sidewalks outside the ICE office for months, the demonstration has dwindled to almost nothing. Of the 29 related arrests, 22 happened on or before July 4, when the protests were at their peak.

What’s been the media’s response to Trump’s bonkers postings and announcements this weekend? Nada. The media either ignored them, mentioned them as part of Trump’s “strategy,” or assumed Trump was just being Trump.

But there’s another explanation.

Trump is showing growing signs of dementia. He’s increasingly unhinged. He’s 79 years old with a family history of dementia. He could well be going nuts.

You might think this would be covered in the news, but he isn’t facing anything like the scrutiny for dementia that Joe Biden did.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is centering much of his presidency.

The paranoia was becoming evident in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. On November 11, 2023, he pledged to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, New Hampshire, that:

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Most media commentators chalked this up to overheated campaign rhetoric.

But since occupying the Oval Office, Trump has demanded that his attorney general target political opponents, urged the head of his FCC to threaten a major network for allowing a late-night comedian to say things Trump disliked, suggested that the government revoke TV licenses of network broadcasters that allow criticism of him, and pulled government security clearances from former officials whom he deems his enemies.

Less than two weeks ago, he demanded that the Justice Department prosecute a handful of named political opponents “now!” — including James Comey, whom Trump fired from his post in 2017 after Comey oversaw the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election; Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who indicted Trump; and Adam Schiff, U.S. senator from California, who played an active role in the House hearings on January 6, 2021.

On September 19, Erik Siebert, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (initially selected for the position by Trump) resigned after Trump told reporters “I want him out.” Siebert had concerns about the strength of the evidence against both Comey and James.

The following day, Trump posted a message to his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “Pam,” it began, “Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’”

He said he was promoting Lindsey Halligan, one of his former personal attorneys, to take Siebert’s place, and fumed: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

On September 22, three days after Halligan assumed office, she secured a simple, two-count indictment against Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and for allegedly obstructing justice.

“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey,” Trump exalted on social media following the indictment. “He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation.”

The Comey indictment was a blip in the weekly news cycle. The media appeared to shrug: Yes, of course Trump is vindictive, so what else is new?

But wait. Are his acts those of a sane person? Or of an aging paranoid megalomaniac?

Even if it’s unclear to which category Trump belongs, shouldn’t this question be central to the coverage of his presidency? At the very least, shouldn’t the media be actively investigating?

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/.

It was an extraordinary week. The slumbering giant of America is awakening.

Americans forced Disney to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. Over 6 million people watched Kimmel’s Tuesday monologue assailing Trump’s attempt to censor him. Another 26 million watched it on social media, including YouTube. (Kimmel’s usual television audience is about 1.42 million.)

Trump’s dictatorial narcissism revealed itself nearly as dramatically in the criminal indictment of former FBI director James Comey, coming immediately after Trump fired the U.S. attorney who refused to indict him.

As did Trump’s demand that prosecutors go after philanthropist George Soros, Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and other perceived enemies.

As did Trump’s order yesterday, directing the “Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth” to use “full force, if necessary” to “protect War ravaged Portland” Oregon and any “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He is escalating his use of the U.S. military against Americans.

There was also his bonkers speech to the United Nations telling delegates that their nations are “going to hell.” His attribution of autism to Tylenol, even though doctors say it is safe for pregnant women in moderation. His unilateral imposition of tariffs as high as 100 percent on imports of pharmaceuticals and kitchen cabinets.

Friends, his neofascism and his dementia are both in plain sight.

Americans — including independents and many Republicans — are appalled by what we’re seeing

His polls continue to drop.

Voters are turning against him and his Republican party. On Tuesday, Democrat Adelita Grijalva won Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in a special election — leaving House Republicans with a majority of just five.

Grijalva’s victory comes on the heels of another Democratic win: James Walkinshaw’s in Virginia.

Two more special elections are coming, in Texas and Tennessee.

Speaker Mike Johnson is struggling to hold House Republicans together, facing rebellion on issues such as the release of files relating to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Democrats are refusing to go along with Republicans to fund the government beyond Tuesday unless Republicans agree to extending Affordable Care Act subsidies — now set to expire at the end of the year and cause 24 million people to lose coverage or pay skyrocketing premiums.

Friends, I can’t tell you exactly when the tipping point will occur — when elected Republicans will rebel against him, or when his dementia becomes so apparent he’s forced to resign, or when so much of the nation rises up against his dictatorship that he’s impeached and convicted of high crimes — but we’re getting closer.

As I said a few days ago, I’ve been in and around politics for 60 years and have developed a sixth sense about the slumbering giant of America. That giant is now stirring. He about to stand. He’s angry. Soon he will roar.

Your activism is working.

Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones. We’ll get through this.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

It’s too easy to accept the conventional view that the widening polarization of our society, and the decline of democracy, are due to the demagogue in the Oval Office.

That conventional view is way too simple. Follow the money. The underlying cause is the tsunami of legal bribes flowing from huge, wealthy corporations (and their oligarchic CEOs and major investors) into American politics.

That tsunami has grown dramatically over the last forty years. It underlies the crisis of democracy. It is fueling polarization. Democracy and social cohesion are impossible to sustain when big money is dictating political outcomes.

Over the last four decades, corporate political spending has more than quadrupled, adjusted for inflation.

Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. In the 2024 election, corporations outspent labor by more than 3 to 1.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Gilens and Page found that lawmakers listen mainly to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.

It’s far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002 — before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super PACs, before “dark money,” and before the Wall Street bailout.

Decades before Trump, corporations were already getting a high return on the money they invested in politics. I know. I was there. I had a front-row seat.

Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations, such as universal health care and paid family leave. They’ve attacked labor laws — reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a 35 percent forty years ago to just over 6 percent now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Ag, Wall Street, and the largest military contractors now dwarfs welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations have reached record highs, and the ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to nearly 300-to-1 now.

Most Americans, however, are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was forty years ago when adjusted for inflation.

The biggest casualty has been public trust in democracy.

In 1964, only 29 percent of voters thought government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, 79 percent of Americans thought so.

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy that they believe the blatant lies of a self-described strongman and support a political party that no longer stands for democracy.

Capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.

Ironically, the CEOs of many large American corporations are now finally confronting this reality. Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.

My message to every CEO in America: You need democracy but you’re actively undermining it by polluting it with big money and throwing much of your support behind a tyrant whose arbitrary and capricious decisions are threatening your businesses. It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement.

This is not only about economics. Widening inequality and a weakening democracy take a toll on the moral wellbeing of the nation, on the implicit social contract that binds us together, on the trust and cohesion we need to accomplish anything worthwhile.

In one of his first interviews, on September 14, Pope Leo XIV — history’s first U.S.-born pope — talked about the causes of the deep polarization he sees in America and elsewhere:

“Very significant is the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive. …Yesterday the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world. What does that mean and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”

Trump is not the cause of the growing cynicism about democracy and the deepening polarization of our society. He’s the consequence and culmination of decades of neglect. We could not have remained on the road we were on toward ever-widening inequality and ever-greater political corruption.

If there’s a silver lining to this darkening cloud, it is that Trump may finally force us to confront this long-term crisis.

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/.

Actions now being taken by Trump and his regime may seem far-removed from your daily life or the lives of people you care about. But they’re not.

The U.S. military has attacked three boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of smuggling drugs, killing at least 17 people.

Why should you worry?

Because Trump’s claims that the Constitution gives him the right to kill anyone he believes to be transporting drugs into the United States could be used to justify murdering you or your loved ones.

No judge or jury found that these 17 people did anything illegal. We’re taking Trump’s word for it that they were smuggling drugs into the United States.

We don’t know for sure that they were foreign nationals; they could have been Americans. Hell, we don’t even know that the number was 17; it could have been far more.

What if Trump decides you’re involved in transporting drugs into the United States? Or he doesn’t like you and wants to get rid of you, and uses this as an excuse?

Let me put this as directly as I can. The current occupant of the Oval Office is a thin-skinned sociopath who cannot tolerate criticism and who lies like most people breathe. Do you trust him with the power to murder anyone he says is transporting drugs to America?

It’s much the same with grabbing people from their homes who are legally in the United States and then whisking them off to prison because they’ve engaged in speech that Trump doesn’t like.

This is what happened to Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, who was in the United States legally on a green card as well as a student visa, and whose wife is an American citizen.

On March 8, immigration agents appeared at Khalil’s apartment building and told him he was being detained. They then revoked Khalil’s green card and student visa and held him at a Louisiana detention facility for 104 days before a federal judge ordered him released.

Khalil has never been charged with a crime. (In September, a Louisiana judge ordered him to be deported to either Syria or Algeria for allegedly failing to disclose information on his green card application. That decision is being appealed.)

Khalil was one of the leaders of last year’s peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. He expressed his political point of view nonviolently and non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump conceded Khalil was snatched up and sent off because of his politics. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Nearly 13 million people in the United States hold green cards. Tens of thousands more are here temporarily as foreign students and professors. All are now in danger of being arrested if they speak their minds.

I am not blaming the ICE agents who are merely carrying out Trump’s “crackdown,” and there is absolutely no justification for political violence targeted at them or at anyone else.

My point is that, if you accept the legality of what is happening, nothing can stop Trump from arresting you or someone you care about for supporting any cause Trump doesn’t like — such as, say, replacing Republicans in Congress in 2026 and putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028.

I say this not to frighten you but to warn you of the implications of what is occurring.

Trump’s bombing of three ships — killing at least 17 civilians — on the basis of unproven allegations that they were sending drugs into the United States, and his ICE raids arresting permanent residents on the basis of unproven allegations they are engaged in “anti-American activity,” endangers every one of us.

It’s not just that Trump is nuts. It’s that he’s unilaterally acting as judge and jury in deciding who’s guilty of actions that are being punished with deportation, prison, or murder.

These moves personally and directly threaten the freedoms you and I take for granted. We must resist them. October 18 provides one opportunity (see here).

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

As I noted yesterday, Trump has declared war on all criticism of him. Hopefully, he’s overreaching and sowing the seeds of his demise, as I predicted. But for now we’re on a slippery authoritarian slope.

Who’s his next target? Several possibilities come to mind, in rough order of their authoritarian consequences:

1. He’ll pull federal funding from any university whose faculties criticize him or whose students demonstrate against him. This would be a follow-on from his current efforts to pull federal funding from universities whose faculty or students say things he doesn’t like about Gaza, DEI, or American history.

2. He’ll mount defamation lawsuits against any media company that criticizes him. This would be the logical next step after his lawsuits against The New York Times and Wall Street Journal for publishing articles that he alleges defamed him, and after his threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks that criticize him.

3. He’ll demand that the attorney general prosecute any public figure who criticizes him. This is a possible follow-up to his demand that the attorney general criminally prosecute former FBI director James Comey, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, and New York attorney general Letitia James.

4. He’ll call for the arrest of anyone who publicly criticizes him. Here we finally come to unbridled authoritarianism — the kind we see in Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. It’s clear Trump can’t abide public criticism. At some point he’ll demand the arrest of anyone who engages in it.

So, today’s Office Hours discussion question: Who or what is Trump’s likeliest next target for suppressing criticism of him?

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/.

I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”

On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.

On Wednesday, after Brendan Carr, his lapdog chair of the FCC, pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, he claimed that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America,” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next.

On Thursday, he said broadcast networks have been mean to him and that Brendan Carr might have to start taking their licenses away. “When you have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he said, “they’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”

On Friday, he suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office he said: “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal,” adding “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

On Saturday, he demanded that Bondi prosecute several of his political rivals even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He demanded that she do it “NOW!!!”

On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”

Immediately after Kimmel’s suspension, Disney viewers and customers began to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.

According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.

Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.

By then the giant was roaring and stomping.

By Monday, Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air.

Trump’s poll numbers were dipping even before last week’s explosion of authoritarianism. Now they’re in free fall.

I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.

Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “have you no sense of decency?”

McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored 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 forty-eight.

The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.

It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.

It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

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 and his goons strip Americans of our constitutional rights, the silence of the nation’s leadership class is deafening.

I’m old enough to remember when, during the Vietnam War, university presidents utilized their bully pulpits to remind America of its moral center.

Today, university presidents are cowed. One college president recently told me point blank that “university presidents have no business speaking out on public issues.”

The chancellor of my own university, the University of California at Berkeley — the very place where the “free speech movement” began in 1965 — still hasn’t explained why Berkeley last week handed over to the regime the names of 160 students, lecturers, and faculty members who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Some are here on visas and terribly vulnerable. Others lack tenure and are vulnerable in different ways.

It’s not just university presidents who have become silent or complicit. Whatever happened to America’s religious leaders?

During prior crises of conscience, such as the struggle for civil rights, the voices of the nation’s religious leaders were loud and confident. They brimmed with moral authority. Today, we hear only the strident voices of the religious right.

What happened to America’s business leaders? They’ve never been especially reluctant to speak out on public issues.

For years Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, has acted as a self-appointed spokesperson for American business, sometimes reminding CEOs of their social responsibilities. This time? Utter silence.

Other CEOs have gone over to the dark side, competing to suck up to the tyrant-in-chief, eager to lavish him with praise, gush over his accomplishments, even hand him gifts of solid gold bullion.

The leaders of America’s legal community? “I want to keep my head down,” the senior partner of a large firm told me. “We have too much to lose.”

The leaders of the media? They’re busy consolidating their ownership over ever more of the nation’s media and dare not upset Trump’s FCC and toady Brendan Carr.

What of their responsibility to protect free speech? They’re far more interested in maximizing the value of their shares of stock.

And whatever happened to the nation’s political leaders? Where are their voices in this time of democratic crisis?

Most Republicans are zombies and most Democrats, wimps.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, won’t even endorse Zohran Mamdani for New York mayor — even though Mamdani is among the most popular young politicians with young voters.

We have to wait for Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — to sound the alarm about the FCC’s attack on freedom of speech?

The sad fact is that, like so much else Trump’s reign of terror has revealed, America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides.

It has relinquished its obligations to the common good — to freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom from government arrest and imprisonment without due process, freedom to vote and participate in our democracy, freedom from arbitrary and capricious government decisions.

Instead, people in positions of significant responsibility have succumbed to greed, small-mindedness, insularity, and cowardice.

During a crisis like the one we’re now in, these so-called leaders have abdicated their moral responsibility.

It’s not all bad that America no longer has a leadership class.

True leadership doesn’t necessarily require high office. It doesn’t require a fancy title. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and countless others who have moved the world held no formal positions of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others.

The disappearance of America’s leadership class at a time like this means that the rest of us have to be leaders.

We can no longer wait to be led by those with the power and authority to lead. You must lead, I must lead, all of us must lead. We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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 one thing Trump can’t take is a joke, especially one at his expense.

Yesterday — one day after ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” after pressure from the chairman of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — Trump said federal regulators should revoke broadcast licenses over late-night hosts who speak negatively about him.

“They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”

It was bad enough in the early 1950s when the U.S. government criminalized certain speech during Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts. Those witch hunts were directed at alleged members of the Communist Party who supposedly posed a threat to America (although the vast majority of them were loyal Americans).

Late-night comedians pose no conceivable threat to America. They make people laugh.

But they do pose a potential threat to Trump.

CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was announced just days after Colbert slammed CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for giving Trump $16 million to settle Trump’s defamation suit — which Colbert called a "big, fat bribe” to get the FCC to allow Paramount to merge with and be acquired by Skydance Media.

Colbert was correct, of course.

Trump’s response to Colbert’s cancellation? “I absolutely love that Colbert' got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”

Kimmel was next, and it’s probably not coincidental that ABC has also been a target of Trump’s defamation ire, finally settling with him for the same amount, $16 million.

Trump’s response to Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation this week? "Great news for America.” Trump then added, “[t]hat leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC."

What does Trump have against late-night comedians?

For as long as anyone can remember, they’ve been a source of jokes about those in power. In the wake of Kimmel’s firing, David Letterman, the longtime late-night host, said he’d routinely beat up on president after president over the years, and “not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency. Everyone sort of understood [it was] in the name of humor.”

But Trump hates to be the object of humor. Some deep part of his reptilian brain understands that humor can be a more powerful antidote to tyranny than any other form of criticism.

Laughter doesn’t just entertain, it subverts. Humor undermines tyrannical power that relies on projecting an image of inevitability and invincibility, by making a tyrant appear weak and vulnerable. Check one against Trump.

Laughter also undermines fear, which is used by tyrants to maintain control. When the public laughs at a leader, his oppressive control weakens. Check two against Trump.

Finally, humor can remind people they’re not alone. When a joke is widely shared, it reveals that opposition is widespread, which can encourage and validate resistance. Check three against Trump.

At some level, Trump understands this.

It’s also true that Trump’s fragile ego can’t stand to be ridiculed.

Anyone who watched the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner got a glimpse of how much Trump hates being mocked. President Obama and Seth Meyers spent nearly five minutes roasting Trump over his promotion of the "birther" conspiracy theory. The audience roared. But Trump appeared to seethe. Some of his biographers have speculated that this event was a key factor in his decision to run for president in 2016.

Finally, Trump seems constitutionally unable to recognize humor.

Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose wit encouraged us to laugh with him, or Ronald Reagan, whose funny asides endeared him to many who disagreed with his politics, Trump is humorless.

He doesn’t laugh. He rarely smiles. He occasionally tells a humorous story at the expense of someone or some group he dislikes but he is incapable of self-deprecating humor.

We don’t laugh with Trump. We only laugh at him.

In 2018, during his speech at the United Nations, his claim that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country” drew loud guffaws from world leaders. (Taken aback, Trump responded, “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay.”)

For all these reasons, Trump’s war on late-night comedians may be his undoing.

It’s one thing to declare war on crime or undocumented workers or even liberals. But everyone loves to laugh.

As Letterman said, “the institution of the President of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show, you know You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful [that they’ll get a laugh]. That’s just not how this works.”

NOW READ: Jon Stewart viciously mocks Trump with 'administration-compliant' show after Kimmel ouster

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/.

Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.

Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.

The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.

At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).

Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said that Trump was found liable for rape rather than "sexual abuse" in the civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The network settled for $16 million

Trump sued CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris on "60 Minutes" to make her sound more coherent. CBS also agreed to pay $16 million.

Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.

In the 1980s, Trump sued the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp for $500 million, for criticizing Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, a 150-story tower that Gapp called "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”

Trump charged that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" the project and subjected Trump to "public ridicule and contempt." A judge later dismissed the suit as involving protected opinion.

But such lawsuits are far worse when a president sues. He’s no longer just an individual whose reputation can be harmed. He’s the head of the government of the United States. One of the cardinal responsibilities of the media in our democracy is to report on a president — and often criticize him.

The legal standard for defamation of a public figure, established in a 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, requires that public officials who bring such suits prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.

That case arose from a libel suit filed by L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, against the New York Times for an advertisement in the paper that, despite being mostly true, contained factual errors concerning the mistreatment of civil rights demonstrators.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, finding that the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment and that the higher standard of proof was necessary to protect robust debate on public affairs.

Under this standard, there’s no chance Trump will prevail in his latest lawsuits against the Times or Wall Street Journal. Nor would he have won his lawsuits against ABC and CBS, had they gone to trial.

But Trump hasn’t filed these lawsuits to win in court. He has sought wins in the court of public opinion. These lawsuits are aspects of his performative presidency.

ABC’s and CBS’s settlements are viewed by Trump as vindications of his gripes with the networks.

He’s likewise using his lawsuit against the New York Times to advertise his long standing grievances with the paper.

His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is intended to send a message to the Journal’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, that Trump doesn’t want Murdoch to muck around in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

These lawsuits also put the media on notice that Trump could mess up their businesses.

Not only is it costly to defend against them — requiring attorney’s fees, inordinate time of senior executives, and efforts to defend the media’s brand and reputation.

When a lawsuit comes from the president of the United States who also has the power to damage a business by imposing regulations and prosecuting the corporation for any alleged wrongdoings, the potential costs can be huge.

Which presumably is why CBS caved rather than litigated. Its parent company, Paramount, wanted to be able to sell it for some $8 billion to Skydance, whose CEO is David Ellison (scion of the second-richest person in America, Oracle’s Larry Ellison). But Paramount first needed the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — which held up the sale until the defamation lawsuit was settled.

Here we come to the central danger of Trump’s wanton use of personal defamation law. The mere possibility of its use — coupled with Trump’s other powers of retribution — have a potential chilling effect on media criticism of Trump.

We don’t know how much criticism has been stifled to date, but it’s suggestive that a CBS News president and the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned over CBS’s handling of the lawsuit and settlement, presumably because they felt that management was limiting their ability to fairly and freely cover Trump.

It’s also indicative that CBS ended Stephen Colbert’s contract. Colbert’s show is the highest-rated late night comedy show on television. He’s also one of the most trenchant critics of Trump.

Among the capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration was to hire an “ombudsman” to police the network against so-called bias — and the person they hired was Kenneth R. Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute think tank.

Note also that on Wednesday ABC pulled off the air another popular late-night critic of Trump — Jimmy Kimmel — because Kimmel in a monologue earlier this week charged that Trump’s “MAGA gang” was trying “to score political points” from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

ABC announced the move after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, appeared to threaten ABC, and its parent company Disney, for airing Kimmel’s monologue —ominously threatening: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and related businesses, has muzzled the editorial page of the Washington Post — prohibiting it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and imposing a stringent set of criteria on all editorials and opinion columns, which has led to the resignations of its opinion page editor and a slew of its opinion writers.

Trump hasn’t sued the Washington Post for defamation, but Bezos presumably understands Trump’s potential for harming his range of businesses and wants to avoid Trump’s wrath.

Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy.

What can be done? Two important steps are warranted.

First, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be far stricter when a president of the United States seeks to use defamation law against a newspaper or media platform that criticizes him.

Instead of requiring that he prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, he should have to prove that the false statement materially impaired his ability to perform his official duties.

Better yet, a president should have no standing to bring defamation suits. He has no need to bring them. Through his office he already possesses sufficient — if not too much — power to suppress criticism.

Second, antitrust authorities should not allow large corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests to buy major newspapers or media platforms. They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their financial interests in their range of businesses.

The richest person in the world was allowed to buy X, one of the most influential news platforms on earth, and has turned it into a cesspool of rightwing lies and conspiracy theories.

The family of the second-richest person in the world now owns CBS.

The third-richest person now owns the Washington Post.

The Disney corporation — with its wide range of business enterprises — owns ABC.

The problem isn’t concentrated wealth per se. It’s that these business empires are potentially more important to their owners than is the public’s right to know.

If Democrats win back control of Congress next year, they should encode these two initiatives in legislation.

Democracy depends on a fearless press. Trump and the media that have caved in to him are jeopardizing it and thereby undermining our democracy

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 the midst of the Trump regime’s shameful attempt to attack any and all organizations and institutions that oppose it, we must not and will not back down from holding Trump accountable for his corruption and lawlessness.

Yesterday, the New York Times — which Trump just sued for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him — reported that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, apparently made a multi-billion dollar deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.

In return for Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps, the White House agreed to give the U.A.E. — in particular, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon — access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.

This is just the top of the iceberg of Trump’s crypto corruption.

To understand the full extent of it, you need to go back to four days before early voting started in 2024. That’s when Trump and his sons launched the crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.

As soon as Trump won, money started pouring in.

Then, just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.

Within his first six weeks in office, Trump called for a “Crypto Strategic Reserve”— a government backed stockpile of crypto assets, sort of like our oil reserve, but completely pointless. That announcement made crypto prices soar.

So far, the Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over half of Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.

With Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment.

One US company said it explicitly purchased $2 million of Trump’s meme coins to influence trade policy.

The corruption goes further.

Trump’s pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins is heavily invested in crypto himself. He’s been lifting financial guardrails in ways that will make it easier for crypto firms (like the Trumps’) to spread into new markets, and going easy on crypto fraud.

Chinese billionaire Justin Sun had been charged with crypto-related fraud before Trump was elected. After Trump’s election, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products. What happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun.

Trump’s SEC also abandoned a lawsuit against Binance, a crypto exchange that had previously pled guilty to money laundering.

This happened just days after Binance started listing a Trump cryptocurrency on its marketplace.

The corruption goes even further.

Trump’s Justice Department even scrapped the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, giving a green-light to all kinds of crypto crime, even though Americans lost $9.3 billion in crypto scams in 2024.

The crypto industry spent big on House and Senate races, on both Republicans and Democrats. Why? So the Senate would pass the so-called GENIUS Act — a regulatory bill that the crypto industry lobbied for. Eighteen Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to vote yes.

The bill gives a stamp of legitimacy to so-called “stablecoins,” a type of currency that Trump’s World Liberty Financial makes and sells.

Stablecoins claim to be more stable because they’re supposedly tied to the value of other assets that are held as collateral — like the dollar or Treasury securities. But we already saw one collapse just a couple years ago, wiping out some investors’ life savings.

While the bill appropriately bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins, it places no such restrictions on the president.

The most dangerous part of the GENIUS Act is how it allows crypto to reach into mainstream financial systems.

All this corruption is bad enough. Worse, it could tank the economy.

The GENIUS Act opens the door to institutions investing more heavily in crypto. It would even let banks and big corporations, like Walmart, Amazon, or Facebook, launch their own digital currencies — potentially thousands of them — all with little oversight.

Trump has also opened the door to letting retirement plan administrators invest 401(k) funds in crypto. That could put your savings at risk even if you never buy any cryptocurrencies.

As we saw during the 2008 financial meltdown, the more the economy becomes entwined with volatile and speculative investments, like crypto, the greater the risk to all of us. The failure of risky bets can have a domino effect.

If a single cryptocurrency began to tank — as crypto has done in the past — investors would likely rush to sell off crypto to get their real money back. This could lead to massive bank runs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that under the GENIUS Act, crypto firms could end up holding more than $2 trillion in U.S. treasury bills as collateral. If they had to suddenly liquidate those assets to cover a bank run, the value of U.S. securities could plummet, triggering a global financial crisis.

Crypto has shown no redeeming social value and it poses huge dangers to our economy. Yet Trump is enabling it to worm into the economy because he’s taken huge crypto payoffs that have made him and his family billions of dollars.

NOW READ: 'Lucky Loser': Trump's 'psychotic' NYT lawsuit ridiculed by legal experts

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/.

We are now witnessing the start of what might be seen as Phase 2 of Trump’s efforts to eradicate political opposition.

Phase 1 has centered on silencing criticism. It has featured retribution toward people Trump deemed personal “enemies” — not just Democrats who had led the criticisms and prosecutions of him in his first term but also Republicans and his own first-term appointees who subsequently criticized him, such as John Bolton.

Phase 1 also entailed an assault on universities that utilize so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” harbor faculty members and students who speak out critically against Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Palestine, or offer classes critical of the United States’s history toward Black people and Native Americans.

Finally, Phase 1 has gone after media that criticized Trump by withdrawing funding for public radio and television and relying on the billionaire owners of The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and X to suppress criticism of Trump on their media platforms.

Phase 2, it appears, will entail a more direct attack on all Trump’s political opponents, including the entire Democratic Party.

Trump has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats — Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans.

He posted a video last week assailing Democratic mayors on crime, although crime rates have fallen sharply in recent years. “For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people,” he says in the video.

Meanwhile, he’s sending disaster relief to states run by Republicans and that he won in 2024, most recently announcing $32 million in aid for North Carolina, “which I WON BIG all six times, including Primaries,” suggesting that states run by Democrats will not receive such relief.

He has taken off the gloves with Democratic states and their representatives in Congress, virtually ordering the governors of Texas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio to redistrict in order to come up with more Republican seats.

Another aspect of Phase 2 is his willingness to describe Democrats as “evil.” In a Fox News interview last week in which he complained about so-called “excesses” by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a “communist.”

In calling the entire Democratic Party the “radical left,” Trump seems eager to use the murder of Charlie Kirk to go after Democrats and liberals. Within hours of the murder, he declared that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” and he has hammered Democrats and liberals as “vicious and … horrible.”

Trump’s Phase 2 thinking can be seen most vividly in the remarks of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is turning Kirk’s murder into a political cause. As Miller wrote on Saturday:

“In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized,” calling them “the consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Miller continued:

“There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.
Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

Miller has vowed to use the power of the government against MAGA’s political enemies, calling his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warning:

“[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Phase 2 must be understood against the backdrop of Trump’s rapidly declining popularity. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, from September 9, shows that only 32 percent of Americans support Trump’s deploying armed troops to large cities.

His economic policies are similarly unpopular. Only 36 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, 30 percent approve of his handling of cost of living, and 16 percent support Trump’s having the power to set interest rates or tell companies where to manufacture products.

Other polls show similar declines in support for Trump.

Trump’s Phase 2 aims to overcome these declining poll numbers by demonizing the Democratic Party, liberals, and all other political opponents in an effort to divide the nation into those who are with Trump and those who are against him.

The overall goal is to make loyalty to Trump a litmus test of American patriotism.

I believe he will fail. Americans won’t fall for it. To the contrary: Trump’s Phase 2 will reveal the depths of his anti-democratic authoritarianism, from which even more Americans will recoil.

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By the way, please plan on demonstrating October 18 in the second and largest No Kings Day protests across the nation. Information can be found here.

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 reaction by Trump to the horrendous assassination of Charlie Kirk has been as irresponsible as anything Trump has done to date to divide our nation.

When bad things happen, presidents traditionally use the highest office in the land to calm and reassure the public. The best of our presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature, asking that we harbor “malice toward none.”

Trump consistently appeals to the worst of our demons, as he did Wednesday night after the shooting when he said:

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

I don’t know at this writing who was responsible for Kirk’s death, and Trump certainly didn’t know when he made these remarks Wednesday night. But for Trump to blame the “radical left” — a term he often uses to describe the whole Democratic Party — is an unconscionable provocation that further polarizes Americans at a time when we badly need to come together.

It’s also a vehicle for silencing criticism of Trump’s own authoritarianism, advancing the presumption that if you criticize someone for being an authoritarian, or the member of an authoritarian political movement, you’re a terrorist who’s inciting murder.

Trump continued:

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

It’s unclear what Trump is calling for here, but it sounds as if he may use the Kirk assassination as a pretext for unleashing the FBI and other federal law enforcement on every organization that could possibly be seen as contributing to the “radical left.” This becomes clearer from what he said next:

“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump is attributing America’s rising tide of political violence to the “radical left,” ignoring the significant if not larger amount of political violence perpetrated by Trump supporters on the far-right.

The latter includes the shootings of two Minnesota Democratic legislators at their home earlier this summer, the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro in April, the series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the attempted pipe bombings at the homes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2018, and the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022.

Trump’s list of so-called “radical-left” violence included attacks on ICE agents — which did not involve gunfire — but conveniently failed to mention the shooting a month ago at CDC headquarters, in which a man protesting Covid-19 vaccines fired more than 180 shots at the building and killed a police officer.

Nor, obviously, did Trump include the violence he himself incited at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by over 1,500 followers who received prison terms — all of whom Trump subsequently pardoned.

There is no excuse for political violence in America. Nor is there any excuse for provoking even more of it by blaming it on one side or the other.

And no excuse for a president of the United States using a heinous killing as an occasion to treat his political opponents as accomplices to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack them.

We have had enough violence, enough carnage, enough blame. We must do whatever we can to reduce the anger and hate that are consuming and destroying so much of this nation.

It is time for all of us, including a president, to take some responsibility.

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/."

If it’s to have a future, the Democratic Party must not only condemn Trumpism but explain why so many Americans are struggling and provide a credible way for most people to share in the nation’s prosperity.

That means forgetting about moving to the so-called “center” and instead embracing the passion, energy, youth, and big ideas of young Democratic candidates like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Senate candidates Graham Platner in Maine, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Nathan Sage in Iowa.

Most Americans are justifiably angry that our political-economic system is in the hands of a bevy of billionaires and multimillionaires who have rigged it for their own benefit.

Trump talks as if he’s a tribune of the people but he’s cutting Medicaid, food stamps, veterans’ benefits, education, and much of what average Americans depend on so he can give another big tax cut to his wealthy backers.

Where are congressional Democrats in all this? Dazed, asleep, mum, frightened.

Trump has baselessly attributed America’s real problems — such as stagnant wages, insecure jobs, soaring food prices, and unaffordable housing — to immigrants, the “deep state,” transgender people, socialists, and communists.

Why don’t Democrats tell America the truth — that these problems are largely due to monopolistic corporations and robber-baron billionaires? Because too many Democratic politicians are afraid to bite the hands that feed their campaign coffers.

Hopefully, that’s beginning to change. A cohort of new, young, progressive Democrats appears willing to take on the moneyed interests.

They’re calling for higher taxes on the super-wealthy to finance what average working Americans need. And they want big money out of our politics.

Mamdani’s remarkable win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary was based on the simple message that New York has an affordability crisis and that the wealthiest New Yorkers must help respond.

Mamdani’s three main proposals to help working families cope with it are to make city buses free, freeze the rent for stabilized apartments, and expand free child care.

Under Mamdani’s plan, the financial burden of paying for these policies would largely fall on wealthy taxpayers and businesses.

Other young progressives now running for U.S. Senate are sounding similar themes. They include Maine’s Graham Platner, a 40-year-old veteran and oyster farmer who’s challenging incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins.

Platner describes his candidacy as a referendum on wealth and power. He’s pledging to “topple the oligarchy.”

As he pilots a fishing boat in his launch video, Platner rails against billionaires, corrupt politicians, unattainable housing, and decades of stagnant wages.

“People know that the system is screwing them. No one I know around here can afford a house. Health care is a disaster, hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that get ripped away from us, and everyone is just trying to keep it all together.
Why can’t we have universal health care like every other first-world country? Why can’t we take care of our veterans when they come home? Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why are CEOs more powerful than unions? We’ve fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage.”

Nebraska’s Dan Osborn — a union president and former machinist who organized Nebraska workers during a nationwide strike at the cereal giant Kellogg’s — invokes a similar message. He’s attacking CEOs who care more about wealthy shareholders than workers and politicians who are more loyal to donors than voters.

Osborn captured national attention during his independent Senate run in 2024 against Republican Senator Deb Fischer. Although he lost that race, he narrowed Fischer’s margin of victory to single digits in a state that Trump won by 20 points.

Now he’s back, challenging incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts in a contest Osborn characterizes as a struggle between the working class and the wealthy.

Osborn contrasts himself with Ricketts, whose father founded stockbroker TD Ameritrade and whose net worth is estimated to be $184 million. “Our government doesn’t look like me,” says Osborn, “so that’s certainly what I want to get in there and change.”

Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed is the former director of Wayne County’s Health and Human Services and the Detroit Health Department and a former professor of epidemiology at Columbia. His background in public health is a big reason why he’s so dedicated to Medicare for All and abolishing medical debt.

El-Sayed has become one of the Democrats’ most cogent citics of RFK Jr. El-Sayed also has a strong political track record as runner-up to Gretchen Whitmer in the 2018 Democratic primary for governor and as part of the Biden-Bernie Unity task force in 2020.

Iowa’s Nathan Sage is challenging Republican incumbent Senator Joni Ernst. He’s a military veteran, mechanic, and longtime sports radio personality whose campaign emphasizes his working-class identity and the needs of Iowa’s working class.

The Democratic establishment doesn’t particularly like any of the people I’ve named.

Mamdani is making corporate Democrats cringe. Hillary Clinton endorsed Andrew Cuomo for New York mayor. Trump may, too.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is eschewing the progressive Senate candidates I’ve mentioned in favor of so-called “moderates.”

That’s a mistake. The Democratic establishment is looking in the rearview mirror.

What about the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2028?

My personal favorites are Representative Ro Khanna of Ohio and former senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s now running again for the U.S. Senate. I’ve also been impressed by three governors who are effectively standing up to Trump: California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker, and Maryland’s Wes Moore.

I’m also hearing from young people across the country — not only in the Democratic strongholds of New York, California, and Massachusetts but also in Texas (where I spent some time in August) — that they’re moved and excited by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In 2028 — assuming Trump doesn’t call off the next presidential election — AOC will be the ripe old age of 38, and eligible for the presidency.

A new day is dawning for the Democratic Party — if it’s able to see the sunrise.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Which is the worst industry in America? If you’re thinking crypto or Big Finance, you’re getting close. But the winner for the most disreputable industry is Big Oil.

Bad enough it’s despoiling our planet — making life miserable for hundreds of millions of people and literally threatening human life as we know it.

It’s also corrupting our democracy — using its profits to bribe people in high places, such as you-know-who.

It’s at the center of an ecological and political doom loop.

Every time you go to the gas pump or heat your home, you’re effectively being charged twice. First, you pay for the actual cost of the fuel itself — a cost that has risen 46 percent since 2019.

Second, as a taxpayer, you’re also footing the bill for the billions of dollars Big Oil gets through special subsidies and tax breaks — which are ballooning under Trump.

These handouts don’t go toward lowering prices for us. They help boost oil and gas companies’ profits — at the expense of your wallet and our planet.

All told, Big Oil already extracts about $35 billion a year from the federal budget in direct industry-specific tax breaks and subsidies.

Trump promised Big Oil even more in return for supporting his 2024 election bid.

In their big ugly tax bill, Trump and Republicans handed Big Oil an additional $18 billion in giveaways over the next 10 years. That includes the ability of oil and gas corporations to escape or limit the 15 percent minimum tax all corporations are required to pay.

Big Oil also gets to drill on more public lands and pay less in royalties to the U.S. for doing so.

Fossil fuel giants also gain from the rollback of clean energy tax credits and investments. These had been lowering your energy costs, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, reducing our dependence on oil and gas, and limiting climate change. But, hey, Big Oil wanted them gone, and — presto — they’re gone.

And what does Big Oil do with its big profits?

It spends billions juicing its own stock prices with stock buybacks to further enrich its major shareholders and top executives. And spends millions more paying off politicians in Congress to do its bidding. In the last election cycle, Big Oil spent $445 million.

That flood of money — including contributions to Trump’s campaign — is responsible for the latest round of Big Oil’s special tax breaks and subsidies, despite voters overwhelmingly wanting to end them.

While we continue to pay through the nose at the pump and on our home energy bills, the climate crisis is accelerating and our planet is being polluted — with weather disasters costing the U.S. over $180 billion in 2024 alone.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Big Oil’s agenda is not popular.

It’s also not inevitable. We can fight back.

The first step is spreading the truth about our giveaways to Big Oil. That’s why my talented young associates and I made the video at the top of this page — to give you a powerful visual version of what I’m writing about that you can share widely.

We need to keep fighting to get big money out of politics so we can reduce Big Oil’s influence on our democracy.

And we need to advocate for our taxpayer dollars to be spent on programs that actually deliver for people — like investing in clean energy that reduces our energy bills and protects the environment.

This is the future we deserve. When (and if) we’re back in power, Big Oil will pay the price.

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 U.S. government runs out of money September 30.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would see that as a huge problem. I was secretary of labor when the government closed down, and I vowed then that I’d do everything possible to avoid a similar calamity in the future.

Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me — who believe that government is essential for the common good — would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond September 30.

But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The U.S. government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath.

That sociopath is using the government to punish his enemies. He’s using the government to rake in billions of dollars for himself and his family.

He’s using the government to force the leaders of every institution in our society — universities, media companies, law firms, even museums — to become fawning supplicants: pleading with him, praising him, and silencing criticism of him.

He is using the government to disappear people from our streets without due process. He is using the government to occupy our cities, overriding the wishes of mayors and governors.

He is using the government to impose arbitrary and capricious import taxes — tariffs — on American consumers. He is using the government to worsen climate change. He is using government to reject our traditional global allies and strengthen some of the worst monsters around the globe.

Keeping the U.S. government funded now is to participate in the most atrocious misuse of the power of the United States in modern times.

So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole f------ thing down.

Morally, Democrats must not enable what is now occurring. Politically, they cannot remain silent in the face of such mayhem.

To keep the government funded, Senate Republicans need seven Democratic senators to join them.

Last March, when the government was about to run out of money, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, voted to join Republicans and keep the government going. Schumer successfully got enough of his Democratic colleagues to follow him that the funding bill passed.

As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has argued, even if you supported Schumer’s decision then, this time feels different.

By now, Trump has become full fascist.

Congressional Republicans are cowed, spineless, deferential, unwilling to make even a small effort to retain Congress’s constitutional powers.

The public is losing faith that the Democratic Party has the capacity to stand up to Trump — largely because it is in the minority in both chambers of Congress.

But this doesn’t mean Democrats must remain silent.

If they refuse to vote to join Republicans in keeping the government open, that act itself will make them louder and more articulate than they’ve been in eight months.

It will give them an opportunity to explain that they cannot in good conscience participate in what is occurring. They will have a chance to show America that they have chosen to become conscientious objectors to a government that is no longer functioning for the people of the United States but for one man.

They will be able to point out the devastating realities of Trump’s regime: its lawlessness, its corruption, its cruelty, its brutality.

They will be able argue that voting to fund this government would violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Then what?

They can then use their newfound leverage — the only leverage they’ve mustered in eight months — to demand, in return for their votes to restart the government, that their Republican compatriots give them reason to believe that the government they restart will be responsible.

It is time for Democrats to stand up to Trump. This is the time. This is their clearest opportunity.

NOW READ: Hook, line and sinker — and how MAGA took the bait

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 I travel around the country flogging my new book Coming Up Short (which, please remember, you can order here, and the audiobook here), I’m seeing a groundswell of revulsion against Trump.

His economy is a disaster. He promised to bring down prices, yet the prices of most goods are rising. Food prices are soaring. Job growth has stalled. American manufacturing has contracted for six straight months.

Trump’s poll numbers are dropping like stones.

The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein continues to haunt him.

He’s now trying to deflect attention from his failures by renaming the Defense Department the War Department and threatening to occupy if not go to war with Chicago (“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” read a White House post yesterday).

Yet most Americans don’t want federal troops in our cities and don’t want a war-mongering America. His immigration dragnet is deeply unpopular.

He surrounds himself with sycophants and lapdogs who tell him only how wonderfully he’s doing — he fires anyone who tells him the truth — which means he’s flying blind and doesn’t know how badly he’s doing.

Trump’s rampage is inadvertently teaching many Americans the importance of things we once took for granted: democracy, the rule of law, due process, federalism, checks and balances. As well as the value of several programs we took for granted, such as Medicaid, food assistance, and child vaccines.

A new cohort of progressive young candidates is catching on with voters. They include Zohran Mamdani in New York and Senate candidates Graham Platner in Maine, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Nathan Sage in Iowa.

The federal courts are doing a commendable job refusing to go along with what Trump wants. In just the last 10 days, they’ve said no to Trump’s taking tariff authority away from Congress, no to Trump’s withholding research funding from Harvard, no to Trump’s firing an FTC commissioner, no to his effort to deport Guatemalan children, no to his use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act to speed deportations, and no to the deployment of the National Guard for law enforcement purposes in California.

Don’t get me wrong. We remain in grave danger. The Oval Office is occupied by a sociopath. His twisted lackeys Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and RFK Jr. are doing terrible harm. His congressional enablers in the Republican Party have relinquished their integrity and kissed his derriere to remain in office. An authoritarian if not neofascist takeover of America is still occurring.

But across America I’m seeing the stirrings of a giant backlash. The people are rising. Americans are catching on. Our fight — the fight you and I are waging for democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and decency — is gaining ground.

Trump will lose. We will win.

Sorry to intrude on you again today, but this morning’s jobs report shows that Trump’s economy is experiencing a jobs crash.

When I say jobs crash, I mean that employers have essentially stopped hiring. Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the economy added only 22,000 jobs in August (relative to the normal monthly gain of 180,000 to 200,000).

The revised figures for June, based on added data, show that 13,000 jobs were lost that month. That’s the first net loss in monthly jobs since the start of the pandemic.

Trump blames Jerome Powell and the Fed for not cutting interest rates sooner, but that’s not the reason employers have stopped hiring. They’ve stopped because the risk is too great.

Trump’s arbitrary, capricious, and mercurial decisions about tariffs and everything else that affects the economy have made it impossible for employers to make even modest predictions about the future. So they won’t hire.

Meanwhile, the Fed can’t cut interest rates much without risking more inflation.

Trump promised to reduce prices, but prices continue to rise. Blame Trump’s tariffs. Prices for wholesalers rose at the fastest pace in three years in July, and those wholesale prices are now being passed on to retailers and consumers.

Food prices are rising especially quickly. The prices of vegetables skyrocketed 40 percent in July. A recent Consumer Price Index report found electricity prices rising at double the rate of inflation, increasing 5.5 percent over the past year.

A jobs crash coupled with soaring prices is bad for everyone — including Republicans seeking to be reelected to Congress next year.

NOW READ: A new kind of civil war is here — and this is the only way to fight back

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Today the Senate Banking Committee will consider Trump’s nomination of economic adviser Stephen Miran to be a governor of the Federal Reserve. Trump would like to get Miran confirmed in time for the Fed’s rate-setting meeting in two weeks.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has asked lawyers for Lisa Cook, the Fed governor whom Trump is trying to fire, to file more briefs as she pushes back against Trump. The law says a president can fire a member of the board only “for cause,” which normally means professional neglect or malfeasance. Trump alleges that Cook has committed mortgage fraud, but she has not been charged with any crime or convicted of any wrongdoing.

If Trump succeeds in getting Miran confirmed and firing Cook, he would be on track to have a majority on the Fed board. He’ll get a chance to name a new chair in May when Jerome Powell’s term ends.

Given everything else Trump is doing, why worry about the Fed?

Control over the Fed will give Trump power over the central bank’s decisions on interest rates.

He says he wants to lower borrowing costs — making it cheaper for America to pay interest on the national debt, for businesses to get loans, and for Americans to buy homes.

But if he controls the Fed and reduces borrowing costs, lenders will correctly assume that the Fed can no longer be relied on to control inflation. As a result, lenders will charge more to lend money — a higher “risk premium” — whether lending to the United States or to businesses seeking commercial loans or individuals getting mortgages.

In other words, if Trump controls the Fed, he’ll end up with the opposite of what he says he seeks. Longer-term interest rates will rise (it’s already starting to happen). And as longer-term rates rise, the stock market will fall (put on your seatbelts, folks).

So maybe lower interest rates isn’t the real reason Trump is so intent on controlling the Fed. What else could be on his mind?

With control over the Fed, Trump also gets the Fed’s power to oversee Wall Street — making the rules that big banks must follow to operate safely and manage risks appropriately. The Fed is also a lender of last resort during crises.

And why does he want these things? Trump operates on such a different plane of policymaking that it’s often hard to understand what he’s doing and why. Let me try to put it together.

Think of all his moves — whether controlling the Fed, or occupying American cities, or unleashing ICE on immigrants, or imposing import taxes (tariffs) on American consumers, or attacking American universities and museums, or shaking down CEOs, or punishing his “enemies” — as motivated by an unquenchable thirst to accumulate bargaining power over every other actor and institution in the world.

The more bargaining power he has, the more he can extort from them the things he most cares about: money and subservience.

We are dealing with a sociopath who is continuously seeking new ways to force others to reward him with personal wealth and total domination.

Money is not enough. He relishes the submission of others. He craves obsequiousness, groveling servility, and a----kissing. He detests criticism. He wants to get even. He wants a Nobel Prize and his face carved on Mount Rushmore.

His goal is to achieve, or be perceived to have achieved, omnipotence.

Trump’s art of extortion involves finding things that other powerful actors and institutions depend on — research funding for Harvard (and other universities); access to the American market for Canada (and other countries); avoidance of environmental regulations for Big Oil; access to the government for Big Law; federal funding and freedom to operate without federal troops for mayors of “blue” cities and governors of “blue” states; supplies and components from abroad for big corporations.

Then he uses that dependence as pressure points to extort more money and submission.

Control over the Fed gives Trump way more tools for extortion. With control over interest rates, he can get America’s biggest corporations and the world’s biggest nations to bend to his will. With control over the big banks, he can get Wall Street to submit to his whims.

Normal policy debates are over what’s good for the public (hence “public” policy). But we’re no longer in a world of normal policy debate. The central question inside the Oval Office — and among Trump’s enablers in the White House and Congress — is what will enrich Trump and strengthen his dominance over everyone and everything else.

The most important public policy debate we ought to be having is how to peacefully and lawfully rid America and the world of this menace.

NOW READ: We ignore this psychologist's warning at our peril

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 Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” Trump wrote recently on his Truth Social. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

So, Trump has ordered that the Smithsonian replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”

JD Vance calls American universities “fundamentally corrupt” and has referred to them as “the enemy.” In his 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Vance stated that universities “control the knowledge in our society” and promote “deceit and lies” rather than truth, and he pledged to “aggressively attack” these institutions to reform what he sees as their left-wing ideological domination.

So, the Trump regime has attacked Harvard, Columbia, and many other institutions of higher learning and is withholding government funds until they agree to the Trump regime’s terms for deciding what they teach.

Trump has for years condemned what he terms the “liberal bias” in the the media, calling journalists the “enemy within.”

So, he has defunded PBS, NPR, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. He has sued ABC and CBS. His Federal Communications Commission refused to allow CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to be sold until CBS purged itself of commentary and programming critical of Trump, including Stephen Colbert’s late-night comedy show.

Are Trump and Vance correct that museums, universities, and the media have a left-wing “woke” bias?

It’s the wrong question. It’s the question Trump would like everyone to be asking, but it obscures the more important question: Should government be determining the content of museums, universities, and the media? Or should the responsibility rest with these institutions?

Logically, someone has to decide what a museum will display; usually this is left to people known as “curators.” Someone has to decide what courses universities will offer; usually this is left to university professors and professional staff. Someone in media corporations has to decide what stories they’re going to report and which news items they’ll feature as important; usually these decisions are left to managing editors and senior producers.

We’d be concerned if wealthy donors or advertisers played roles in these choices, because their economic interests may conflict with our interests as members of the public in learning the truth.

We’d also be concerned if politicians played roles in such choices, because their interests in remaining in power may conflict with our interests in learning the truth.

Better that professional museum curators, university faculties, and managing editors and producers make those choices because they’re “unbiased” in the sense that they don’t have ulterior motives.

The issue isn’t any mythological left-wing “woke.” It’s trust that potential conflicts of interest don’t determine content.

We wouldn’t and shouldn’t trust what we learn from a museum curated by Trump and his lapdogs, or a university whose curriculum and faculty were influenced by them, or a media corporation under their patronage. Why? Because Trump and his lapdogs would want to promote themselves and their views and censor anything critical of them.

Just as many readers are now suspicious of the editorial page of The Washington Post because the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has censored pieces critical of Trump — and many worry about CBS News because the network’s new owner, David Ellison, has promised Trump’s FCC that its news coverage will reflect “varied ideological perspectives” — we have reason to worry that the museums, universities, and media with which Trump is “negotiating” will censor themselves from writing anything critical of Trump for fear of offending him.

We don’t trust Trump because he has shown a brazen disregard for the truth.

But we shouldn’t trust any administration to decide what museums, universities, or the media tell us. It’s not a matter of right or left or “woke.” It’s about the political independence of truth-tellers.

A free people needs to know things that an administration may not want them to know and must be able to trust that the agents of truth — museums, universities, the media — are not compromised.

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/."

A gentle reminder that my new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.

We are in the midst of the worst public tragedy of my lifetime — the despoiling and destruction of America. The destruction is now extending beyond American democracy to encompass the American economy, American science and learning, and American culture. People ask me, in outrage or despair, “How and why is this happening?” I have my answers, as I’m sure you do.

Donald Trump is the proximate cause, but he cannot be the only cause, because one man, no matter how malignant or sociopathic, cannot do the damage that is occurring to so many dimensions of American life. Nor can the small group of twisted sycophants and lapdogs around him.

Today, I’d like to explore other major causes and have you assess which in your view is most responsible for this catastrophe other than Trump. Among the likeliest culprits:

1. Congressional Republicans. They’ve become spineless zombies, afraid to vote against whatever Trump wants for fear of being “primaried” by a Trump supporter when they’re up for reelection, or fear of being physically assaulted or even killed by Trump supporters and vigilantes. Yet because they control both chambers of Congress, Trump can get away with raiding Medicaid to give his billionaire buddies another giant tax cut, usurping the constitutional powers of Congress over spending the public’s tax dollars, allying with Putin against America’s traditional allies, putting utterly incompetent people into Cabinet positions, cutting deals with Big Oil to despoil the planet, imposing significant import taxes (tariffs) on Americans, and taking personal bribes from countries and companies eager to gain his favor.

2. The Supreme Court. Alito and Thomas were bad enough, but Trump’s three appointees combined with reactionary Chief Justice John Roberts now form a super-majority that is enabling Trump to do his worst. They’ve given him immunity from prosecution for anything he does that is arguably part of his official duties, allowed him to take over what had been designed as independent regulatory agencies, looked the other way when he sends active troops into American cities for no reason other than a baseless claim of a “crime wave,” enabled him to eliminate affirmative action from all government programs and public and private universities, and quietly assented to his reinterpretation of civil rights as “white rights” over people of color.

3. Trump voters. They’re not a majority of Americans (Trump won the 2024 election by just a 1.5 percent margin of those who bothered to vote), but they’ve become vocal, active, and belligerent. They roar with approval at his rallies, wear his hats and other paraphernalia, and act almost as if they’re in a religious cult, worshipping at the feet of Trump. Most importantly, they keep congressional Republicans in Trump’s camp. They listen to Fox News, Newsmax, and right-wing radio, all of which give them a steady stream of far-right propaganda and lies, which they repeat across their “red” states and towns, as if dispensing truth. They believe in white, male, Christian, nationalism. Most lack a college education. Most are white and living in rural areas of America. Many feel angry and bitter toward “coastal elites” they perceive as looking down on them and are easy prey for Trump’s demagoguery.

4. The Democratic Party. They’re confused and in disarray, looking for a “message” and lists of policies rather than confronting their abject failure over the last 40 years to stop widening inequalities of income and wealth and to prevent the corruption — legalized bribery in the form of large campaign contributions — by America’s big corporations and wealthiest individuals. Many Democratic politicians are afraid to tell voters the real reason incomes have stagnated and jobs have become less secure: because big corporations, their top executives, the mavens of Wall Street, and America’s billionaire oligarchy have rigged the system against average working people and in favor of profits and capital gains for themselves. Most Democratic politicians haven’t said this or done anything of significance to reverse the widening inequalities and stop the corruption, for fear of biting the hands that feed their campaign coffers.

So today’s Office Hours question: Other than Trump himself, who is most responsible for the catastrophe we’re now living through?

NOW READ: Emotionally damaged Trump is a born loser

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 neofascist takeover of America — of our cities, universities, media, law firms, museums, civil service, and public prosecutors who tried to hold Trump and Trump’s vigilantes accountable to the law — worsens by the day.

As I’ve traveled across the country peddling my book, trying to explain how this catastrophe happened and what we can do about it, I’ve found many Americans in shock and outrage.

“How could it have happened so fast?” they ask. I explain that it actually occurred slowly and incrementally over many years until our entire political-economic system became so fragile that a sociopathic demagogue could bring much of it down.

Some people I speak with are still in denial and disbelief. “It’s not as bad as the press makes it out to be,” they say. I tell them that it is — even worse.

Others are in despair — heartbroken and immobilized. “Nothing can be done,” they say. I tell them that hopelessness plays into the hands of Trump and his lackeys who want us to think that the game is over and they’ve won. But we can’t let them. The stakes are too high. Hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Rest assured. The seeds of Trump’s destruction have already been sown. He will overreach. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of birthright citizenship, for example, and Trump announces he’s not bound by the Supreme Court, the uproar will be deafening.

Or the economy will bite him in the butt. As prices continue to rise and job growth continues to slow — due to Trump’s bonkers import taxes (tariffs), his attempt to take over the Fed, and his attacks on immigrants — America will fall into the dread trap of “stagflation”: stagnation and inflation. After months of this, his base is likely to turn on him — remember, many voted for him because he promised to bring prices down — and he and his Republican lackeys in Congress will be toast in the 2026 midterms.

Or his brazen corruption will do him in (he’s personally raking in hundreds of millions from crypto, for example). Or Putin will do him in (if Ukraine falls to Russia or an emboldened Russia strikes Lithuania). Or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

He no longer has any truth-tellers to advise him — he has purged all of them. And a president who’s flying blind, without anyone around him to tell him he’s about to crash, will inevitably crash. Many innocent people will likely suffer “collateral” damage. But at least the nation will see him for who he is and consign him to the dustbin of history.

None of this argues for complacency. We must continue to fight — demonstrate, phone your representatives and senators, boycott corporations and organizations that are caving in to tyranny, protect the vulnerable, make good trouble.

But please do not fall into denial or despair, and don’t let anyone else.

NOW READ: Surprise! Donald Trump is cheating the system — again

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/.

It’s now peak season for enjoying our national parks. But even here, in the pristine beauty of these national treasures, the Trump regime is axing America.

National parks like the Grand Canyon, Shenandoah, Yellowstone, and Yosemite conserve America’s nature for future generations.

But Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has chipped away at the National Park system. And Trump and Republicans’ Big Ugly tax cut goes a step further by taking an axe to the National Park Service budget. (This week marks the 109th anniversary of the National Park Service.)

Our parks belong to all of us. They’re being gutted so Trump can offer bigger tax cuts to his billionaire friends.

NOW READ: How to hit Trump hard on his own horrific record

Have a look at our latest video.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

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 escalating rhetoric of a “crime wave” in America, coupled with threats to occupy Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and many other cities, has put many Democrats in a bind.

They worry if they deny crime is a problem, they could turn off swing voters who always and inevitably worry about crime.

As with immigration, crime is an issue that Trump can demagogue because, while the rate of serious crime his fallen dramatically, most Americans continue to fear crime. That fear has been heightened by expanding homeless encampments and drug overdoses in plain view, no matter what the statistics say.

Crime has also been a racial dog whistle. At least since Richard Nixon emphasized “law and order” and Ronald Reagan said he’d be “tough on crime,” Republicans have used fear of crime as code for white fear of Black people.

So what should Democrats do? My suggestion: Don’t simply give statistics showing that the rate of dangerous has fallen. Say safety is critically important, but local police rather than federal troops are best at dealing with it.

Don’t stop there. Hammer Trump for pardoning the 1,500 criminals who violently attacked the United States capitol and caused the deaths of four police officers — and for then firing the federal prosecutors who held them accountable.

Attack him for opening the floodgates to white-collar crime — hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, freezing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, disbanding the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, and retreating from almost all federal lawsuits involving money laundering, crypto markets, and foreign corruption.

Since retaking the White House, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, a health care executive who was convicted of leading a Medicare fraud and money laundering scheme. Trump has commuted the 14-year sentence of Jason Galanis, who defrauded investors, including a Native American tribe and a teachers’ pension fund, of tens of millions of dollars. He has pardoned Julie and Todd Chrisley, the reality TV stars convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion.

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was “swapping out and sidelining career supervisors who were responsible for charging crimes such as corruption, price fixing and securities fraud.”

Trump is soft on crime as long as the crime serves his own purposes. People who try to get on Trump’s good side — such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on bribery charges during the Biden administration — have seen Trump’s Justice Department drop its charges against them.

Before they poured money into Trump’s initiatives and PACs, many Big Tech corporations were facing federal investigations and enforcement actions. Those investigations and lawsuits are now being dropped.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice dropped its criminal case against Boeing, which involved the company’s role in two plane crashes that killed 346 people — despite Boeing previously agreeing to plead guilty in the case.

Trump is himself a criminal, found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree related to payments made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.

Don’t just accuse him of manufacturing a pretext to go into American cities. Hit him hard on his own horrific record of coddling criminals.

NOW READ: This 'chilling' Trump attack isn't a conspiracy theory

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 possible connection to convicted sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein — who allegedly died by suicide in prison — may be the one thing that undermines his base of support and causes his Republican loyalists in Congress to turn on him. This makes it politically explosive.

With Congress now returning from August recess and the media and Congress looking into “Epsteingate,” the issue will either grow or disappear in the next few weeks.

Roughly half of the country now believes that Trump was involved in crimes committed by Epstein, according to recent polls. And more than two-thirds believes that the Trump administration is hiding information about Epstein.

Before the 2024 presidential election, both Trump and JD Vance called for the release of files related to Epstein. On February 21, Attorney General Pam Bondi, in an appearance on Fox News, said the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

But the Trump regime still hasn’t released any trove of “Epstein files.” In fact, on July 7, the Justice Department released a memo saying it had found “no incriminating ‘client list’” for Epstein, directly contradicting Bondi.

Then came publication by The Wall Street Journal of what it said was a risqué birthday note Trump wrote to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday, prompting Trump to claim that “the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures.” The next day, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against Journal over its coverage of his relationship with Epstein, including the birthday note that Trump says he didn't write.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-defendant who was convicted of sex trafficking minors and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Late Friday, the Justice Department released transcripts of that interview in which Maxwell praises Trump, claims she never saw Trump engage in improper or illegal acts during his long friendship with Epstein, and that there’s no hidden list of powerful clients.

Maxwell’s credibility is questionable. She has a big incentive to tell Trump and his lackeys exactly what they want to hear because she has been trying to overturn or reduce her sentence. Right after her interview she was transferred to a minimum-security prison, a highly unusual move for a convicted sex offender.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has received the first tranche of the Justice Department’s documents in response to its subpoena for all Epstein-related files. Democrats on the Committee claim that fewer 3 percent of the documents are new.

“Epsteingate” has all the hallmarks of a cover-up. Will it bring Trump down? Here are three likely scenarios:

1. Epsteingate keeps growing until it reveals a “smoking gun” that brings Trump down. Assume Trump continues to try to deflect attention from his connection with Epstein by, for example, occupying several American cities and threatening war with Venezuela. Yet the more he tries, the more evidence of his involvement with Epstein mounts. Eventually, a “smoking gun” emerges that forces even Trump loyalists in the House and Senate to vote to impeach and convict him.

2. Nothing comes of it, although it continues to percolate. Periodically, a damaging headline emerges, as more evidence comes out about Trump’s close connections to Epstein. But Trump and his lackeys continue to deflect attention from the stories. His loyalists in Congress refuse to probe any deeper into the issue. He distracts the media with so many controversial neofascist maneuvers that the stories never become a full-blown threat to Trump.

3. The whole Epstein story is a distraction from Trump’s neofascist moves. In reality, the Epstein story is a continuing distraction from what Trump is really doing — his takeover of the nation’s public and private sectors and his alliance with Putin to carve up the world. Every time a new story emerges about the connection between Trump and Epstein, the Trump regime takes more initiatives that violate the laws and the Constitution, but they do so not to distract from his Epstein connection but to take advantage of the public’s obsession with Epstein to bury the regime’s horrific moves.

Hence, this week’s question: Will Jeffrey Epstein finally take Trump down?

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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/

I’m old enough to remember when American politics was divided between those who wanted less government (they were called “conservatives,” or the Right) and those who wanted more social safety nets (called “progressives,” or the Left).

It’s hard to find Right or Left these days. Instead we have something no one has ever seen in America — a personal takeover of nearly all the institutions of government and, increasingly, the private sector, by a would-be dictator.

Trump is on the way to occupying Democratic-led cities with the Army, National Guard, and ICE — in what appears to be a dress rehearsal for the 2026 midterms.

He is telling Republican states to super-gerrymander in order to squeeze out more Republican seats in Congress, to help retain Republican control of the House after the 2026 midterm elections.

He is trying to silence criticism from universities, museums, law firms, and the media. And targeting critics for prosecution, such as Adam Schiff and John Bolton.

But that’s hardly all of it.

At the same time, Trump is taking personal control of the U.S. economy.

He’s trying to control the Federal Reserve Board, threatening Jerome Powell with unflattering stories about his expenditures on the Fed’s building and Fed governor Lisa Cook with stories about her home loan.

He’s imposing his will on key industries, from semi-conductors to steel.

He’s given the chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices export licenses to sell their semiconductors to China on condition that they pay the U.S. government 15 percent of what they make on those sales. (Not incidentally, Trump has reported substantial personal holdings in Nvidia.)

He’s converting nearly $11 billion of grants that the government had given Intel (part of the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act) into a 10 percent stake in the company, worth $8.9 billion, held by the government. Presumably, this would let Trump decide on its CEO.

His White House has even created a scorecard that rates American corporations on how loyal they are to Trump. Corporations with “strong” ratings (among them, Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, and Cisco) are to be rewarded with tax and regulatory benefits, while “low” rated corporations could face retribution ranging from Justice Department and regulatory lawsuits to damaging executive orders, harsh regulations, and unbridled scorn from Trump.

Before they poured money into Trump’s initiatives and PACs, many Big Tech corporations were facing federal investigations and enforcement lawsuits. Those investigations and lawsuits are now being dropped.

Trump’s import taxes (tariffs) are the results of individual deals between Trump and particular countries, as well as between Trump and big American corporations. So far, America’s trading partners have agreed to invest over $1 trillion in the American economy. Who will oversee such investments? Trump.

In sum, an increasing part of our economy is no longer being determined by supply and demand but by the deals Trump is striking.

Authoritarians rely on vast bureaucracies to control industry, as does China’s Xi Jinping.

But the new order being imposed on American industry doesn’t come from a vast authoritarian bureaucracy. It’s personal and arbitrary. A single so-called “strongman” is beginning to control everything.

I don’t know the proper term for this. State capitalism? Fascist capitalism?

Whatever we call it, it will be Trump’s downfall because his arbitrary and mercurial decisions are making the private sector nervous about investing in the U.S. economy, causing global lenders to demand a higher risk premium for lending to the U.S., and pushing the economy toward both inflation and recession — so-called “stagflation.”

If nothing else brings him down, the economy surely will.

***

Just a reminder that my new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.

Last week marked the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.

On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against “disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.

I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the 20th century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders.

Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform.

Corporate America duly followed Powell’s advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks.

Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast.

I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation.

By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress.

That tsunami of big money from giant corporations and their CEOs, top executives, and major investors was engulfing American politics. It not only sank reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people.

In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people.

And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all, Trump.

What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending.

Here’s a video my talented team and I created about all this:

- YouTube youtu.be

Should you wish for more detail — and to understand how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org.

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/

I’m writing to you from Houston, Texas, where I’m flogging Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America to every Texan who might be interested. So far, I think I’ve sold two copies.

Just kidding. Last night, in fact, I met hundreds of Texans who seemed interested.

Texas wasn’t always the bastion of right-wing extremism it seems today. Remember Ann Richards? She was the progressive firebrand governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995. I recall her keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when she said of then-President George H.W. Bush, “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Today, the progressive torch is being carried in Texas by people like Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Greg Casar (from Texas’s 35th congressional district), and State Rep. Nicole Collier.

Earlier this week, Collier remained in the Texas House chamber overnight to protest a Republican-imposed requirement that Democrats agree to a mandatory police escort to leave the Capitol after a redistricting walkout. She viewed the requirement as restriction on her constitutional rights.

Collier was right, of course. Texas Republicans are treating Texas Democrats as if they’re sworn enemies. Trump has stoked this by telling Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find five additional Republican congressional seats by gerrymandering the state even more wildly than it was already gerrymandered.

On Wednesday, the newly redrawn map finally passed.

Trump is putting pressure on other red states to do the same. It’s all part of Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress in the 2026 midterms.

The stakes are huge. Republicans could easily lose their current seven-vote majority in the House, or possibly their six-vote majority in the Senate.

Hopefully, blue state governors and legislatures — starting with Gavin Newsom’s California — will stop this assault on voting rights by credibly threatening to gerrymander an equal number of additional Democratic congressional seats.

With blue states mobilized, it wouldn’t be a race to the bottom. It would be a race to save democracy by removing any incentive for red states to try to gerrymander their way to more Republican seats.

Two other parts to Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress are also coming into view.

He’s attacking mail-in ballots. As he wrote on Monday in a social media post, he intends to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”

He also intends to target what he says are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Can anyone doubt what Trump is trying to do?

Asked about his effort to end mail-in voting and rid the election process of voting machines, he told reporters, “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt.”

The third part of Trump’s plot is to occupy major cities, mostly led by Democratic mayors, which are centers of Democratic voting. He probably figures that militarizing these cities will intimidate voters to stay away from the polls.

He’s doing a trial run now in his occupation of Washington, D.C. — deploying ICE agents, National Guard troops, and the Army. To justify it, he charged that: "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

Rubbish. According to the Justice Department’s own data (which, of course, Trump rejects), violent crime in the city hit a 30-year low last year. City data shows homicides are down by more than 10%, robbery down by almost 30%, and carjackings down nearly 40%.

Let’s be clear about what’s going on here.

The man who instituted a coup against the United States when he failed to win the 2020 presidential elections — demanding that Republican governors “give” him the votes he needed, instructing his vice president not certify the election, and encouraging a mob to attack the Capitol — does not want free and fair elections in 2026 or beyond.

That’s why the rest of us — Democrats, independents, and Republicans who still believe in democracy — must organize a counter-offensive, now.

Part of that counter-offensive begins with Newsom’s California; other blue states must join in. Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots and voting machines, and his occupation of our cities, should be challenged in the federal courts. A wide coalition of state and city officials should participate.

The rest of us must make good trouble by ensuring that Trump’s plot is widely known, and that we will resist it.

Most of the Texans I’ve talked with over the last few days (including at a coffee bar where we’ll be doing Saturday’s Coffee Klatch) tell me they don’t support what Greg Abbott is doing.

Texans relish their freedoms. They don’t want to be controlled by Washington. They don’t want to live in a dictatorship. The spirit of Ann Richards lives on.

NOW READ: Trump choked — but the rest of the GOP followed him anyway

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

Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who is now Trump’s chief of protocol, apparently left behind in a public area of an Alaskan hotel documents describing confidential planned movements of Trump and Putin during their Friday meeting in Alaska.

That’s nothing compared to Emil Bove, Trump’s new nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who reputedly told subordinates at the Department of Justice that they should tell the courts “f--- you” and ignore any court order blocking the deportations of Venezuelan migrants declared to be gang members.

Then there’s Billy Long, a former auctioneer and Republican congressman who Trump nominated less than two months ago to head the Internal Revenue Service, with little background in tax policy beyond promoting a fraud-riddled tax credit. Long has already been fired after clashing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Long was the seventh person to head the IRS this year.

Let’s not forget E.J. Antoni, whom Trump just nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing former BLS chief Erika McEntarfer for presiding over a disappointing jobs report earlier this month.

Antoni is that rarity who has drawn harsh criticism from economists on the right as well as the mainstream for being ignorant, unprincipled, and incompetent. He recently called it “good news” that “all of the net job growth over the last 12 months has gone to native-born Americans.”

I haven’t even mentioned the towering ineptitude of Trump’s Cabinet picks, such as Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kristi Noem. Or the flagrant cruelty and wild negligence of Trump assistants Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.

How to explain the rise of so many inept and unprincipled people?

Easy. They could never succeed on their own merits. As soon as their brainless incompetence became apparent — likely as soon as they took the first job that required some degree of intelligence and integrity — they were fired.

So they learned that the if they wanted to be rewarded with promotions, money, and power, they could not rely on the normal processes and systems of recognition for jobs well done. If they were to make anything of themselves, they must instead become a---lickers, lapdogs, and sycophants.

They must latch onto someone who values loyalty above integrity or competence, someone for whom fawning obsequiousness is the most important criterion for being hired and promoted, ideally someone who cannot tell the difference between a groveling toady and a knowledgeable adviser.

Enter Trump.

History is strewn with the wreckage of dictatorships that have attracted and promoted incompetent lapdogs lacking talent or integrity. As Hannah Arendt explained in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Early in his career, Trump apprenticed himself to Roy Cohn, an unprincipled lawyer who taught the young Donald how to gain wealth and influence through ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, baseless lawsuits, lying, and more lying.

Yet as Trump’s “fixer” with politicians, judges, and mob bosses, Cohn remained utterly loyal to Trump and his father, Fred.

Years later, in his first and bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, Trump drew a distinction between integrity and loyalty. He preferred the latter, and for him, Roy Cohn exemplified it. Trump contrasted Cohn with

all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who made 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.

Cohn died a disgrace, 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.

People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually. Blind ambition trips them up. They cannot explain or defend their behavior by relying on principled competence because, like Roy Cohn, they are unprincipled and incompetent to their cores.

The people they latch onto meet similar fates but for a different reason.

Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools who will not provide leaders objective or useful feedback about their actions — no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are a---licking commendations —“Wonderful idea, sir!” “Brilliant execution, sir!”

These cocoons of flattery seal off such leaders from the real-world consequences of what they do — which inevitably leads them to make grave mistakes. Some of those mistakes eventually cause their downfalls.

This perverse symmetry — the certain demise of grovelers because they’re incompetent and unprincipled, and the inevitable downfall of those to whom they grovel because they never receive useful and accurate feedback — marks the endpoint of all totalitarian systems. It’s the path on which Trump now treads.

This is not necessarily cause for hope. If history is any guide, many innocent people will suffer before the incompetent grovelers and the vain objects of their groveling meet their inevitable fates. America and the world are already suffering.

NOW READ: Trump has relinquished the presidency — and there's only one sane response

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/.

People ask me almost daily: “Can he really do this?”

My answer: He’ll do anything he can get away with.

He believes he can get away with anything as long as his Republican lapdogs remain in control of Congress, as long as congressional Democrats remain wimpy and disunited, as long as the Supreme Court immunizes him from prosecution, and as long as he feels he can disregard lower-court rulings with impunity.

This is why it’s so urgent that We the People are rising up — making a ruckus at Republican town halls, phoning our senators and representatives so often we’re jamming congressional switchboards, joining our local Indivisible resistance groups, demonstrating, forming sanctuary communities, and boycotting corporations (such as Tesla and Target) that are caving to Trump.

Another thing we can do is stop recognizing him as president.

He may occupy the Oval Office, but he has repeatedly violated his oath of office to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

He sends the National Guard into Washington, D.C., on the pretext that the city is overrun with crime when its crime rate has plummeted to its lowest in 30 years.

He supports Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory it controls to Russia, thereby rewarding Putin’s aggression and breaking with our European allies.

He orders ICE to “disappear” people — including American citizens — into detention camps and foreign jails.

He instructs Republican governors to super-gerrymander in order to gain more Republican seats so Republicans have better odds of staying in control of Congress after the 2026 midterms.

He usurps the constitutional power of Congress to dispense federal funds.

He usurps its authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations.

He takes personal gifts from foreign powers, also in direct violation of the Constitution.

He invites corporate executives to give him personal gifts in return for government favors. He and his family make a fortune on cryptocurrencies, which he has officially encouraged.

He smothers criticism of him and his regime. He attacks universities, media corporations, and law firms that have offended him. He fires public servants who tell the truth.

This is the same man who attempted a coup against the United States less than five years ago: refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, telling Republican governors and secretaries of state to change election returns and his vice president not to certify the results, encouraging a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, and later pardoning all who were found guilty of participating in that assault.

By repeatedly violating his oath of office, he has relinquished the presidency.

His presidency is illegitimate.

We must disavow our allegiance to him.

We don’t yet have the votes to impeach him, but we should stop referring to him as President Trump. Urge others to do so as well.

We will not fall for his strongman bullshit. He wants us to think he’s invincible and that we can’t stop him. But we won’t allow him to intimidate us, and we will stop him.

He wants to make us so cynical and hopeless that we give up our opposition to him. But that we will never do. We will keep fighting.

We will assume that everything he says is a lie. Ditto for his “spokespeople.” And for his White House staff and Cabinet. We will never fall for or repeat his lies.

We will not even listen to him. When he’s about to speak, we’ll turn off whatever device we have. We will not even read accounts of what he says, because they are meaningless drivel.

We’ll pay attention only to what he does. We’ll take whatever nonviolent action we can to stop him from trampling on our rights and freedoms.

I say all this more in sorrow than in anger. We are living through a profound tragedy. America is suffering a grievous loss.

Some day we will once again have a president.

We will support people of integrity who seek the highest office in the land. People who will honor their oath of office.

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

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/."