Earlier this week, the number one most-read story in the Financial Times was headlined, “Nvidia shares fall on signs Google gaining upper hand in AI.” It turns out that Google’s AI software/product is doing about as well as its competitors but isn’t using Nvidia’s “must have” AI super-chips, shocking the market.

But even with that, we ain’t seen nothing yet: get ready for the Moores’ Law shock and a few others that seem increasingly inevitable.

For months now, the tech world has been drunk on the language of inevitability. AI will transform everything. AI demand for electricity will double America’s power consumption. AI data centers will be the new steel mills, the new auto plants, the new engines of prosperity.

Wall Street has inflated this into a bubble so big that it’s hard to see where the hype ends and the real economy begins.

But if history teaches us anything, it’s that bubbles don’t pop harmlessly; they burst outward. And when they do, the people who had nothing to do with inflating them are usually the ones who end up paying the biggest part of the price.

We’ve seen this movie before. When the dot-com bubble collapsed in 2000, it wasn’t just stock traders who felt the pain. Entire cities that had boomed on tech spending suddenly cratered. Construction, retail, restaurants, and transit systems all took the hit.

It wiped out retirement savings, yes, but it also wiped out jobs for working people who never owned a share of Pets.com. Economists later found that the recession following the dot-com crash fell hardest on lower-income workers who had been pulled into booming metro economies that vanished overnight.

Then came the housing and derivatives bubble of 2008. Once again, the story was sold as something contained within the financial sector. Exotic mortgage-backed securities. Credit default swaps. CDOs squared.

Most Americans had no idea what any of that meant, but when that bubble burst, they didn’t need a glossary. They felt it in lost jobs, lost homes, gutted neighborhoods, and a social safety net that was suddenly overwhelmed.

George W. Bush made sure that his Wall Street donor executives walked away with billion-dollar golden parachutes instead of going to jail, while average Americans endured a decade of lower wages, higher rents, and shredded public services.

When banksters crashed the S&L banking system during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, he prosecuted more than 3,000 of them and sent more than 1,000 to prison. But Republicans stopped respecting the rule of law in a big way around the time five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court handed the White House to Bush in 2000.

And then, of course, five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010, so now the banksters own DC and have bought a lot of deregulation recently. As a result, the risks now are even greater than they were in 1999 or 2008.

Bubbles don’t stay on Wall Street: they metastasize through the entire economy. And the AI bubble today is no different; in some ways, it’s even more deeply wired into the lives of people who may never touch ChatGPT, Midjourney, or a Nvidia chip.

Right now, electric utilities from Arizona to Georgia are spending billions building power plants and upgrading transmission lines because they’ve been told AI demand will explode for decades.

Utilities aren’t like normal businesses; when they make a bad bet, they don’t absorb the loss. Instead, they pass it on to you. And that means that if the AI bubble bursts — if the rosy forecasts don’t materialize — average Americans could end up paying higher electric bills for a generation to cover infrastructure built for a demand that never arrived.

This has happened before. After the 1990s gas-capacity boom fizzled, ratepayers in multiple states spent decades covering the cost of underused plants. When nuclear projects went over budget or were abandoned altogether, like the VC Summer project in South Carolina, consumers were forced to cough up billions to foot the bill while executives walked away with multi-million-dollar bonuses.

The same fate is now looming over families already struggling with high utility bills. AI operators may walk away from canceled projects, but working class people can’t walk away from the debt that built the substations, transformers, cooling systems, and pipelines intended to serve the data centers. Giant utilities and their morbidly rich executives will squeeze it out of you, me, grandma, and the kids.

Low-income households will feel this first. When utility rates climb, affluent families may grumble, but low-income families get their power shut off. Thousands of Americans die every year in heat waves because they can’t afford air conditioning, and climate change is making the situation worse. Piling the cost of a Wall Street-driven bubble onto electric bills isn’t just unfair: it’s dangerous.

States are also handing out massive tax incentives and subsidies to lure AI data centers. These deals often rely on long-term economic projections that look a lot like the rosy promises made in the lead-up to every other bubble in the last century.

If AI expansion stalls, those states are left with reduced tax revenue, higher infrastructure costs, and no way to fill the gap except by cutting public services or raising taxes on people who can least afford it.

This is exactly what happened when manufacturing plants promised by past booms never materialized or closed early: schools went underfunded, transit systems decayed, and local governments fell deeper into debt. I grew up in Michigan and saw this first-hand as the auto boom collapsed under the weight of Reagan’s free-trade neoliberalism.

And then there’s the jobs picture. The AI boom has unleashed a construction frenzy of data centers, substations, power plants, cooling towers, and fiber lines. These are good jobs for electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, welders, and truck drivers. If the bubble bursts, however, those jobs will vanish overnight.

The layoffs won’t hit coders at Google; they’ll hit working people who relied on the stability of a years-long construction pipeline. When jobs like that collapse, they drag down entire communities: restaurants, small shops, repair businesses, daycares, and clinics. It’s the same domino effect we saw after both the dot-com collapse and the 2008 financial crash.

Meanwhile, pension funds — especially public pensions — are heavily invested in tech stocks and the infrastructure financing now increasingly tied to the AI boom. Teachers, firefighters, public employees, and retirees who depend on those pensions could watch helplessly as their future security evaporates through no fault of their own.

After Bush’s 2008 housing crash, public pension systems all over the country were left with massive unfunded liabilities that led to service cuts, higher contribution rates, and reduced benefits. The same pattern is already being written into the AI bubble, brick by brick, stock by stock.

Worst of all, an AI crash could hit at a moment when tens of millions of Americans have no margin left. Inflation has been punishing, and Trump’s incoherent tariff policies have made him and his kids rich (as they use tariffs to extort foreign governments to give them billions in cash, build Trump resorts, and even gift Trump a jet plane), but they’re relentlessly jacking inflation on the rest of us.

• Housing costs have become predatory as Republican-aligned Wall Street vultures swoop in and buy up entire city blocks of single-family homes to convert into rentals.
• Medical debt from for-profit hospitals and insurance companies is pushing families into bankruptcy because Republicans refuse to even allow a discussion of single-payer healthcare like the rest of the developed world has.
• Student loans, which Republicans sued to prevent Biden from forgiving, are again grinding down young workers.
• Meanwhile, billionaires are gambling with the $4 trillion tax cut Donald Trump gave them, and that loose money is jacking the stock market like in 1929 after the Republican Harding/Coolidge/Hoover tax cuts (from 91 percent on the morbidly rich down to 25 percent).

In an economy already stretched to the breaking point, the shockwaves from a tech market collapse could intensify already obscene levels of inequality in ways we haven’t seen since the Republican Great Depression.

The wealthy will weather it. They always do. They’ll diversify, hedge, shift assets, pick up distressed real estate at a discount, and wait for the next upswing. Most will even profit from it, buying up homes, businesses, stocks, and other assets for pennies on the dollar.

America’s billionaires saw their greatest gains during the dot-com bust and the housing crash. “Cash is king” was the saying in the 1930s, as well as after the dot-com and housing crashes. And they’re muttering the same today with breathless anticipation.

But low-income and working-class Americans — the people least responsible for the bubble — will face higher electric bills, job losses, crumbling schools, gutted pensions, and reduced public services. They’ll pay for the gambles made by the same financiers and speculators who made out like bandits in 2000 and 2008.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.

Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time — and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most — the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.

Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news just three weeks ago with an article titled and subtitled:

“The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.”

Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:

“Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors — 14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip — with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.”

A data center — a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigiwatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling — replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.

Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?

Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built — if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites — will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.

If there’s a lesson from history, it’s that bubbles only appear harmless until they burst. And the bursting always lands hardest on those who never benefited from the boom in the first place.

In a future article, I’ll examine the political consequences of this possibility (hint: read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book about the 1929 crash and its impact on America, the world, and how it realigned our nation’s politics) but for now, get ready. This could get real ugly, real fast.

The most gruesome feature of the Trump/Vance/Miller regime is their glee in brutalizing non-white people and terrorizing anybody who objects or tries to hold them to account. Their entire rationale is that the barbarity and savagery are “necessary” to deal with millions of “illegals.”

Denmark is onto something that could blow up their entire excuse for this violence against both people and our Constitution, and Democrats need to pay attention.

Back in June 2008 I did my radio program for a week from the studios of Danish Radio in Copenhagen. They let me hire one of their producers and I asked her to book prominent Danish conservatives, at least one a day, and she pulled it off. (I used to regularly debate conservatives until they started refusing to come on my show over the past decade.)

Several were prominent politicians, a few were well-known commentators, and one was the publisher of a major Danish newspaper. All identified themselves as conservatives, and a few even referred to themselves as “a right-winger.”

I asked every one a similar set of questions, and the answers I got were consistently pretty much the same. It went sort of like this:

Q. “So, you’re a Danish conservative. Does that mean you want to do away with your unions representing about 80 percent of the labor market, resulting in a roughly US$18/hour functional minimum wage?”
A. “No, of course not. Conservatives don’t want people living in poverty. And they have a right to representation to balance the power of giant corporations.”
Q. “So, you must want to do away with free college and the roughly $1,000 stipend Danish college students get every month for living expenses?”
A. “Why would we ever want to destroy our country’s intellectual infrastructure? We conservatives value education!”
Q. “So, if you’re a conservative you must want to do away with your single-payer Medicare-for-All healthcare system that’s free for all residents, has no premiums, free doctor visits and hospital stays, and has very tiny co-pays for dental and drugs?”
A. “What, are you nuts? I don’t want to sit next to a sick person in a restaurant or on the bus. Healthcare is a human right that true conservatives have always embraced.”
Q. “Do you, like conservatives in America, want to do away with environmental protections and the move toward green energy?”
A. “Who would be stupid enough to want to do that? We conservatives are at the forefront of environmental protections and building out renewable energy.”
Q. “So, other than wanting to slightly lower taxes and supporting the Danish monarchy, what makes you a conservative here in Denmark?”
A. “I want the immigrants to leave. Denmark should be for Danes, and Danes only.”

That was 17 years ago, and the Danish conservatives largely got their way in the years since. In fact, they’ve been joined by Danish moderates and even Danish progressives in embracing what here in America we’d call comprehensive immigration reform.

The New York Times reports that particularly since the 2015 influx of Syrian refugees into Europe, “the Danish government has enacted policies to make life challenging for asylum seekers, trying to discourage them from coming.”

For some it’s simple racism, but for most Danes, particularly those on the left, the changes in Danish law and policy just reflect the simple reality that no country can quickly absorb large numbers of immigrants without social and political disruption.

Immigration and accepting refugees is fine, in other words, but only in numbers that allow for successful integration into society. Social scientists have found that when those thresholds are exceeded, the result is a loss of social cohesion, a rise in racism and bigotry, and political chaos that can even threaten democracy.

The embrace across the Danish political spectrum of rational immigration limits and polite, nonviolent expulsion of undocumented immigrants has not just stabilized the political system in that country; by joining hands with conservatives, it’s also strengthened the power and influence of the center-left and progressive parties and politicians.

Left-leaning political parties across Europe are taking notice, and several are actively imitating or emulating Danish policies.

The result is a universal loss of support for radical rightwing parties that had been mostly focused on hating on immigrants, and a rise of centrist and progressive parties, politicians, and policy successes.

Democrats here should be paying attention, as I’ve argued for years, including in my 2010 book Rebooting the American Dream, which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivered to all 99 of his colleagues with a personal note, and then read from on the floor of the Senate during his famous filibuster.

The chapter titled Put Lou Dobbs Out To Pasture basically argues the Danish position: we need immigration, but to avoid disruptions to labor and society it should be well-regulated.

Opposition to immigrants was where Donald Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign. It’s the one consistent issue where Republicans beat Democrats in the polls, typically by double-digits.

Failing to address uncontrolled immigration also endangers our democracy: Viktor Orbán, for example, rose to power in Hungary by railing against immigrants, and has since used the issue as an excuse to create a secret police force, shut down media outlets, pass draconian “anti-immigrant-crime” laws that outlaw dissent, and pack the legislature and judiciary.

Trump, it appears, has similar plans for America. But there is a reasonable solution that would take the wind out of his sails.

In early 2024, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) — a guy who’s about as close to a Goldwater conservative as you can get — and progressive Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced a bipartisan bill that would largely accomplish here in America what Denmark and other European countries are doing now.

It would have limited immigration, tightened asylum criteria, funded deportations of actual criminal immigrants, punished employers who hire people without legal status, and given then-President Joe Biden the legal authority to close the southern border. It had widespread support among members of both parties in both the House and Senate and was sailing toward passage.

But because the bill would have neutralized the immigration issue as a political weapon — both parties openly supported it and it was written by a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat — Trump, then the leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, ordered his MAGA followers in Congress to kill it.

Enough Republicans bowed to Trump’s demand that the legislation died, setting the stage for Trump to demagogue the immigration issue all the way up to election day, and then use it to justify the creation of a massive new masked secret police force largely answerable only to Trump, based on the excuse that immigration was “out of control.”

The last time US immigration policies were significantly reformed was during the Reagan presidency, when he signed legislation that gave amnesty to around 3 million people and tightened up our southern border. A 21st-century reform is long overdue.

Congress needs to step up and revisit the Lankford/Murphy bill to stop the brutality Trump’s ICE and CBP officers are inflicting on our nation and bring sanity to our immigration policies.

It’d not only be a good thing for the Democratic Party (and the Republicans) in next year‘s midterms, it’d help rescue American democracy from the racist demagogues Trump and Miller have unleashed and empowered.

I’ve been feeling something unusual these past few weeks: optimism.

Not naïve optimism or the kind that ignores danger, but the real kind that arrives when you see people waking up, standing up, and refusing to bow before a lawless president who believes rules are for suckers and the Constitution is a mere suggestion rather than the foundation of our republic.

We’re now governed by a man who treats legal limits as personal insults. Donald Trump doesn’t just violate our nation’s norms and laws: like every wannabe third-world tinpot dictator before him, he despises the idea that any law can constrain him at all.

Trump and the spineless sycophants in his administration have rejected the entire idea of a rules-based society. He and his lickspittles are turning the presidency into a throne, trying to transform you and me into its subjects, and painting as enemies anyone who insists soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (and others in government) should follow the law.

Under Trump’s neofascist worldview, the only “legal” act is obedience, while defiance of his whims and illegal orders is a crime. We saw this when Trump lashed out at lawmakers who reminded our military that their sworn oath is to the Constitution and not to him personally.

He posted a rant about those six CIA and military veterans/lawmakers and wrote “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” in response to their message that both history and law — including military law — require soldiers to refuse illegal orders. Then he reposted a message calling for them to be hanged.

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish: it was Trump’s declaration of war on the rule of law, something so essential that it’s the basis of every democracy and civilized society in history throughout the world. Instead of respecting American ideals, he’s sounding more like his “good friend,” the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia (who’s given Trump’s family billions, with more billions on their way).

You’d think that after the My Lai massacre, the horrors committed at Abu Ghraib, and the Nuremberg trials, Americans — and Trump and those around him — would have gotten the message, but over at the Fox propaganda channel and on other rightwing media they’re actually defending this obscene behavior.

It’s also criminal behavior: 18 U.S. Code § 610 makes it a crime for any federal official — including the president — to use their authority to intimidate, threaten, or punish citizens for their political expression, voting behavior, or dissent. Threatening members of Congress with execution for following the law is an extreme, textbook violation.

Meanwhile, the country is learning how this un-American philosophy plays out on the ground. In cities like Charlotte, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc., masked, anonymous, secret police-style federal agents descend without warning, kicking in doors and smashing car windows, arresting U.S. citizens, stealing people’s possessions, invading trusted community spaces, shuttering businesses, and sending tens of thousands of students home in fear.

This isn’t border enforcement or public safety: it’s warfare against due process and America itself. It’s gotten so bad that Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and her peers are getting death and bomb threats.

Our nation’s Founders warned us that America’s greatest threats to liberty would come not from abroad, but from leaders who’d try to turn our legal system and military against us. James Madison said the means used against foreign dangers too easily become instruments of tyranny at home. That warning wasn’t theoretical: it was aimed directly at moments like this.

Yet we’re also see something the Founders hoped for, something that echoed their heroic efforts against King George III: average Americans refusing to be cowed.

People are documenting abuses, flooding the streets in peaceful protest, forming rapid-response networks, hauling the government into court again and again. Ordinary citizens are doing the job Congress has been too afraid, too compromised, or too divided to do.

It’s the most patriotic thing happening in America today.

Which is why Trump’s response to lawful dissent has been so horrific: he’s demanding Saudi-style executions.

He wasn’t being metaphorical: he demanded actual executions (although he later pretended to walk it back). That’s the language of a dictator. It’s the purest expression of Trump’s governing philosophy: if the law gets in his way he simply ignores it.

This isn’t merely corruption. It’s not even ordinary authoritarianism. It’s a direct repudiation of the entire American experiment. Defiance of courts and the law is a poison that says the only legitimate authority is the will of the leader, and Trump’s entire presidency has featured a nonstop campaign to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump.

He enriched himself in office (he’s made billions off his position in just 10 months), he wielded the government as a tool of reprisal, he attacked judges, he extorted foreign governments, he stole government property and lied about it to federal investigators, he’s using public office to reward loyalists and punish critics, and he now presides over masked, unaccountable paramilitary raids that terrorize American communities.

The Constitution offers a clear remedy for a president who behaves like this.

Impeachment isn’t a political act: it’s a constitutional obligation when a president becomes a danger to the Republic. And Trump crossed that line long ago.

The only way to restore the rule of law is for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. Half measures are complicity. Silence is complicity. Delay is complicity.

But impeachment alone isn’t enough. There must also be criminal prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators. Real prosecution, by real prosecutors, following real evidence, for real crimes.

And while we’re at it, DOGE deserves a pretty good looking at, too. And what happened to all those government investigations of billionaire donors’ companies?

Trump and those doing his bidding must face justice. His children who participated must face it. His bagmen and loyalists who broke laws to carry out his will must face it. A nation can’t heal if high office becomes a shield from justice.

Equality before the law is the foundation of any functioning democracy. If we abandon that principle now, we abandon the Republic itself.

I believe we’re at or very near a turning point. People are rising up. Communities are resisting. Judges are pushing back. Journalists are exposing what the administration wants hidden. The illusion of Trump’s invincibility is cracking.

The billionaires who believed he could terrorize the country into submission on their behalf are discovering that Americans refuse to bow.

This country was built by people who rejected kings. It can survive this counterfeit king, too.

But only if we act. Only if we insist that the Constitution still has meaning. Only if we refuse to let a lawless president redefine the rule of law as disloyalty.

Trump has declared war on the American Way. The only acceptable response is the full force of our constitutional system: impeachment, prosecution, and the unrelenting assertion that no man, no family, and no political movement is above the law.

I realize the political reality is that Mike Johnson won’t allow such a vote in the House and the Senate is now controlled by Republicans so timid and cowed by Trump that a GOP senator who’s a physician is afraid to criticize Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But we’re only 12 months away from an election that could sweep both bodies and we must lay the foundation now for that.

That means waking up as many people as possible , engaging with groups like Indivisible, and supporting litigators and progressive Democrats across the board.

We can do this. We just need resolve, passion, and to begin the hard work of reclaiming the American Way and the American Dream, as Democrats did in the 1930s and the 1960s, and both parties did to oust Nixon and imprison his cronies in the 1970s.

Donald Trump just called for the execution of American veterans — all of them also elected members of Congress — because they reminded our active duty soldiers that it’s a violation of both American and international law to commit war crimes.

If that’s not impeachable, what is?

This is his most dangerous and insane escalation yet, because it crosses a bright red line the Founders themselves warned about: a president openly demanding the execution of members of Congress for telling U.S. service members to obey the law.

And the horror of it isn’t subtle. It’s not, like in the days of Nixon and Reagan, even coded. It’s not even wink-and-nod stochastic terrorism.

This is the President of the United States calling for hanging lawmakers — by name — for the “crime” of reminding military personnel that their oath is to the Constitution, not to him.

That is the precise scenario the Founders feared when they warned that a would-be tyrant could try to transform the military from defenders of the republic into enforcers of a single man’s will.

What these senators and representatives said in their video is not controversial, not partisan, and not new. It’s bedrock American law. It’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It’s every ethics class, every commissioning oath, every baseline principle of civilian-controlled government in a constitutional republic.

Trump’s reaction — psychotic, paranoid, and dripping with bloodlust — makes one thing painfully clear: he’s terrified of the military remembering who they actually work for.

It also suggests an ominous future Trump may have planned where he turns our military against you and me.

Or uses it against a foreign nation so he can wiggle out of the growing questions about his 1990s teenage modeling agency, his Miss Teen USA pageant, and their possible connections to Jeffrey Epstein and child sex trafficking.

The lawmakers who made that video are, to a person, military and combat veterans or intelligence professionals who’ve literally risked their lives for this country.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) was shot at, launched into space, and flew combat missions over Iraq. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) served in the Air Force. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) was an Army Ranger. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is a Navy vet. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) spent years as a CIA analyst overseeing Iraq policy. These aren’t armchair patriots: they’re the real thing.

So when Trump — who faked bone spurs to dodge Vietnam — calls for them to be executed, it tells you something profound: he wouldn’t be flipping out like this unless he intends to give orders like that.

Everything about this situation is a rerun of January 6th — for which he’s already been impeached — only with the stakes ratcheted up.

Trump has already learned that violent language produces violent followers. He watched it happen in real time. He saw his crowd beat police officers bloody, hunt for Mike Pence, and smash their way through the Capitol while chanting about hanging elected officials.

As I mentioned about the attacks on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), he knows his movement is filled with men eager to “carry out the punishment” for him. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offers a warning — that Trump is lighting a match in a country soaked in gasoline — that isn’t metaphor. It’s a sober assessment grounded in hard experience.

And now Trump is testing the waters again, seeing how far he can go, how hard he can push, before America pushes back.

Consider what these lawmakers actually said in their video: follow lawful orders, refuse unlawful ones, and remember your oath is to the Constitution. That’s the opposite of sedition. It’s literally the definition of military ethics in a democratic society, right out of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, American law, international law, and even the Nuremberg trials

Fox’s commentator Andy McCarthy — hardly a liberal — made this clear:

“There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required.”

Veterans and members of Congress telling soldiers to obey the law? That’s the American system working.

But Trump immediately interpreted it as a threat to himself and his agenda. Not to our country. Not to political or military norms. To him personally.

That should reveal to every American with half a brain who this man really is and what his plans really are.

The cries of “HANG THEM!” and “punishable by DEATH!” aren’t policy positions. They’re the words of an out-of-control authoritarian, a wannabe dictator, a man intent on destroying the rule of law and the American republic that’s been based on it for over two centuries.

They’re the gut-level reactions of a man who thinks loyalty should flow upward to his person, not outward to the nation.

And it’s not a one-off. This is a Trump pattern that necessitates impeachment.

• This is the same Trump who demanded the execution of Gen. Mark Milley.
• The same Trump who encouraged chants of “Hang Mike Pence.”
• The same Trump whose follower mailed pipe bombs to Democratic leaders.
• The same Trump who says generals should be shot, newspapers and TV networks shut down, and political opponents imprisoned.
• Who calls soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who also avoided military service, like every man in the Trump family — shrieking that veterans should “resign in disgrace” for stating U.S. law is the purest illustration of an authoritarian mindset straight out of 1930s Germany: loyalty is owed to the leader, he suggests, not to the Constitution. And the moment someone asserts otherwise, they’re a traitor.

And Fox “News” giving Miller a platform to do it, without even trying to push back or defend American values of the role of law, is unspeakable.

Which brings us to a remarkable admission from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Republicans are “afraid” to cross Trump. They’re terrified of Trump’s base, the Confederate flag-waivers, the well-armed Bros. Terrified, because Trump has conditioned those men (virtually all of the violence has come from right wing men) to see critique or embrace of the rule of law as betrayal, and betrayal as punishable.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is right: you can’t negotiate with a party whose operating principle is “wait to see what Trump wants.”

As Murphy noted yesterday in response to Trump’s call to kill Democratic lawmakers:

“If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a f------ side.”

We now have a major political party that openly accepts their president calling for the execution of lawmakers who simply restate the Constitution. And a White House spokeswoman who pathetically backs him up.

Trump isn’t just attacking political rivals: he’s asserting that the American military’s loyalty belongs to him personally, and that those who contradict him should be killed. That is the exact formula the Founders designed the Constitution to prevent.

That’s not normal political dysfunction. That is a republic confronting its own death-throes.

The heartening part — the only heartening part — is the response from the lawmakers themselves.

These elected officials understand the stakes. They know the oaths they took aren’t merely symbolic.

They know that stopping this modern-day rightwing fascism depends on We the People standing up, speaking out, and refusing to be intimidated while we support members of our military — from the most senior levels to the lowest privates — in their refusing to follow illegal orders.

Trump wants a military that obeys him, not the rule of law. That’s why he’s screaming for the deaths of these congressional veterans. It’s also why Congress must impeach him now.

These veterans in Congress reminded the members of our military that their duty is the exact opposite of Trump’s demand for unthinking, unquestioning fealty to illegal orders.

No democracy survives that.

The Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who on Friday announced her shock resignation from Congress, has been dissed and ridiculed by the left for years. Progressives mocked her lies, shredded her conspiracies, exposed her QAnon nonsense, and denounced her cruelty. And through it all she never once feared for her life.

She fundraised. She smirked. She gave speeches, traveled the country, and strutted through Congress like she owned the place.

But the second she angered the Republican base, barely 48 hours after she resisted Donald Trump’s demands and broke from the MAGA line, she suddenly feared for her life and needed private security.

She told reporters and the world on Twitter that she’d been warned about threats to her safety coming from Trump’s supporters. Death threats. Serious ones. The man she once called her political soulmate — Trump — had turned on her instantly, publicly labeling her a “traitor” and mocking her fear.

For years she thought she was part of the mob. Now she’s discovering Trump and his followers only ever thought of her as their useful idiot.

This is the difference that America and our mainstream media refuses to say out loud:

When you cross Democrats, you get a political argument. When you cross the MAGA right, today’s GOP, you get threats of violence. And not metaphorical threats: real ones. The kind of threats that force a sitting member of Congress to hire armed guards because she dared anger their god-king.

So let’s stop pretending this is random.

What Greene is experiencing now is the inevitable consequence of what’s known as “stochastic terrorism,” the weapon of choice for Trump and the modern GOP.

Stochastic terrorism means the leader doesn’t need to tell anyone directly to commit violence: he just smears his target, inflame his base, calls his target a “traitor” and “enemy,” and then gleefully waits for the most unhinged followers to “get the message.”

It’s like the infamous plaintive cry from King Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?“ that led to the murder of archbishop Thomas Beckett. The violence becomes “plausibly deniable,” but entirely predictable.

This has been Trump’s signature political method for a decade now.

This is how the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were hunted, harassed, stalked, and driven into hiding after Trump singled them out by name.

This is how the man who tried to shatter Paul Pelosi’s skull was radicalized.

This is how election workers, librarians, teachers, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and now Greene herself end up on the receiving end of death threats.

It’s how the January 6th assault on our Capitol happened, leading to the deaths of three police officers.

Trump knows how his words will be received. The GOP knows it. They’ve built an entire political apparatus on the expectation that some fraction of their followers will respond with violence.

This is nothing new; it’s the same tactic used by authoritarians throughout history.

• The Klan used it during Reconstruction.
• Fascist movements used it in the 1930s.
• Trump’s MAGA movement and his “bros” use it today.

You vilify your target. You paint them as an existential threat. You whip up your crowd. And someone will decide to “do something.”

You don’t need orders: you just need followers who believe you’re speaking for God and country.

Trump has mastered this, and Greene is now caught in it.

Our nation’s Founders warned us about this, over and over: just read George Washington‘s farewell address to the Nation:

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind … It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

They didn’t fear foreign armies as much as they feared internal demagogues who could inflame a faction into violence.

James Madison wrote that the “means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Washington warned that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” could exploit factions to destroy the Republic from within. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both warned that once a demagogue captures a faction, the people become tools, not citizens.

That is exactly where we are today. Take it from someone — me — who’s been on the receiving end of death threats like this for years.

One of America’s two major political parties has normalized violent intimidation as a form of political expression. It enforces loyalty not by persuasion but by fear.

It encourages resentment and rage and then pretends to be shocked, “Shocked, I tell you!” when those emotions spill into threats or bloodshed.

Remember when Mitt Romney told a confidant that he and other Republican senators were afraid to vote to impeach Trump because it would endanger their lives and those of members of their families? What’s extraordinary is that while Romney and other Republican senators wimped out, Greene stood her ground.

And now, as a result, even Greene has discovered what happens when you step outside the lines of a movement built on menace.

The outrage here isn’t that Greene feels unsafe. It’s that she finally feels what millions of Americans have been living with ever since Trump taught his followers that violence is patriotism and that critics are enemies.

The outrage is that we still pretend this is a healthy democracy when one faction uses threats of violence and the media pretends it’s normal.

The outrage is that this monster — which last dominated America during the era of the Ku Klux Klan — keeps growing because too many people in power are afraid to name it.

The outrage is that rightwing outlets keep feeding this beast for profit.

This must be confronted. We can’t keep ignoring the rising tide of political violence tied directly to Trump’s rhetoric and the GOP’s ecosystem of rage.

Federal law enforcement must treat rightwing stochastic terrorism as a real threat to national security.

Like with the Church Commission in the 1970s, we need hearings, investigations, and consequences. We can’t wait until the next shattered skull or the next Ruby Freeman or the next terrified election worker or, God help us, the next January 6th.

If Greene has finally seen the monster, good. Now, the rest of us can’t afford to look away.

In a comment to my recent article about how much Trump-like corruption the American people will tolerate, Sabrina Haake (who writes the “Haake Take”) wrote:

“I really want to see a deep dive on how power affects the brain. A strong addiction, as you say. but it deserves a special study in the age of Trump, given its complete takeover…”

It’s a great question, and the revelations of the Epstein connection to Trump and numerous — perhaps hundreds — of rich and powerful men and their abuse of powerless children again highlights how this addiction warps behavior, destroys lives, and kneecaps democracies.

For most of our history, Americans have believed that political power is something granted — temporarily — to leaders who serve the public good.

But modern neuroscience and social psychology are revealing something more dangerous and more sobering: power doesn’t just sit in someone’s hands; it reshapes the human mind itself.

And — as Trump’s masked secret police abuse people with total impunity and his toadies celebrate it with bizarre videos, as Republicans vote for more tax cuts for billionaires while cutting off health care and food for the poor, as Ghislaine Maxwell is treated like a princess while her victims are demonized — we’re seeing how this has twisted and damaged our nation.

Put a man in uniform and give him unaccountable power over life and death and it changes him. Give a president complete immunity for any crimes he commits and it unleashes a darkness no country should have to suffer.

As our democracy strains under the weight of Trump’s relentless need for dominance, the science raises a disturbing question: Are we witnessing the consequences of a dark addiction to power, and, if so, what does that mean for the future of our republic?

Researchers from Berkeley to Columbia have discovered that when people feel powerful, the brain shifts into what scientists call an “approach state.” Dopamine-driven reward circuits fire more easily. The world seems simpler, brighter, even easier.

Confidence rises. Caution fades. And empathy, that quiet internal tuning fork that vibrates in response to other people’s feelings, becomes less sensitive.

Many remember when the world’s richest man — who oversaw the destruction of USAID, which has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — highlighted what wealth and power had done to him in a revealing comment to an interviewer:

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

In one remarkable experiment, scientists used brain scans to measure how automatically the brain “mirrors” — deeply feels/understands and can empathize with — others’ experiences. People who were praised, flattered, and told stories that put them into a high-power mindset showed less mirroring, meaning their brains became less attuned to the people around them.

Historically, this has been a definition of evil. Less connected. Less empathetic. Less concerned for others because they’re no longer able to actually feel within themselves what others are experiencing.

This neurological shift doesn’t necessarily make powerful people behave as if they’re immoral, but that’s often the case and when it does it can produce tragic results for those around them or those they have power over.

And here’s where modern politics — and particularly the Trump era, Epstein, and the politicians at the center of today’s GOP — enter the picture.

Psychologists have long identified a trio of personality traits known as the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People high in these traits crave status and admiration. They feel little guilt. They view relationships transactionally.

For them, power isn’t a tool to shape policy: power is the point itself. It’s the reward. The psychological oxygen.

When people with these characteristics gain power, dominance becomes patriotism, cruelty becomes strength, and attention becomes fuel.

And we can see that this hunger for power hasn’t just shaped Donald Trump’s life. It’s reshaped the entire conservative movement. The entire Republican Party. Even — particularly those average people who spend hours with rightwing media — our national narrative, the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what our nation means.

And neuroscience gives us one more warning: losing power can feel like withdrawal.

We’re seeing this right now as Donald Trump thrashes about, losing his grip on his party and his followers. Calling a reporter “Piggy.” Sucking up to a foreign tyrant who’s handing his family billions.

We see it as Republican senators slip into legislation a clause that forces the government to give each of them millions of taxpayer dollars, or help cover up Epstein’s crimes.

For someone whose identity is fused with dominance, losing an election — or even facing accountability — can feel intolerable. The result is a frantic attempt to reclaim power at any cost, even if it means attacking institutions, undermining elections, or convincing millions that democracy itself can’t be trusted.

This is how republics falter, reflecting the “narcissistic collapse” that I’ve written about before.

It often begins with a psychological spiral when one leader’s desperation to hold onto power merges with millions of his followers’ fears and grievances, until the nation itself becomes trapped inside his addiction.

So, what do we do? It turns out that the antidote to the danger of power is democracy itself.

Shared power. Checked power. Transparent power. A system of checks-and-balances where no one person becomes the sun around which the nation must orbit.

So the question we face today — the question both science and history force us to confront — is this:

“How will We, the People respond as Trump, his MAGA movement, and the GOP lash out at us as they’re losing the near-absolute power they now enjoy and has been handed them by six corrupt members of the Supreme Court?”

• Will we stand up and speak out?
• Will we defy their attempts to militarize our nation and terrify us into submission?
• Will we take away their tax breaks and immunities and force them back into the world the rest of us inhabit?
• Will we rally together and support each other and the brave politicians and leaders willing to risk their lives and livelihoods by rising in resistance?

Or will we as a nation — like the Germans and Italians did in the 1930s, like the Russians and Hungarians did over the past two decades, like most of today’s GOP are doing right now — surrender to power addiction and decide that having a “Dear Leader” and single-party state is okay?

The choice is ours.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal stripped away the polite fiction that wealthy white men in America are held to the same standards as everyone else.

Epstein wasn’t an exception. He was the rule, laid bare.

From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.

We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.

That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.

The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.

The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.

And then — as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — that logic didn’t stay confined to the frontier. It seeped into every corner of American life and rose up to try to destroy even the idea of a pluralistic democracy in this country.

Slavery was built on the same logic. It wasn’t an ugly exception to American values; it was a central expression of them. The economy depended on it. Congress bent itself into knots to protect it. The Constitution accommodated it.

When the Civil War ended, our country had a chance to uproot the white male supremacist ideology that had allowed human beings to be treated as property. Instead, we dodged it.

I still remember well, when our son was nine years old and we lived in suburban Atlanta, asking him over dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” and his answer was, “We studied the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”

We allowed the old Confederates back into the halls of power in the 1870s. We let them write the history books. We abandoned the freedmen who had been promised protection and citizenship.

And the system that emerged was simply white male supremacy, the foundation of slavery, by another name.

Jim Crow wasn’t a detour; it was the natural continuation of the racial hierarchy this country was built on and today’s GOP — and ICE, CPB, and Trump’s toadies in DHS — are trying to re-solidify for the 21st century.

Every tool was used to maintain it. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Lynching. Chain gangs. Sharecropping. Segregated schools. Redlining. Policing practices that looked far more like occupation than law enforcement.

All of it justified by the same foundational lie that today animates the brutality of Trump‘s ICE raids: that white people were meant to rule and everyone else existed by their pleasure. And the Big Lie that brown-skinned immigrants are committing “voter fraud” that justifies purging millions from our voting rolls every year.

That lie still echoes in our institutions. It’s why entire communities — and now polling places — are policed like enemy territory. It’s why Republicans on the courts (particularly SCOTUS) have so often sided with the powerful over the vulnerable. And it’s why we’ve seen, in recent years, an explicitly brutal willingness to use federal force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and protest.

When Trump sent federal agents and troops into Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and threatened to deploy them elsewhere, it wasn’t a new idea. It was an old ideology flexing its muscles again. It treats American citizens as though they’re foreign enemies. It uses military-trained forces not for defense but for control.

James Madison warned us precisely about this danger of the military policing civilians:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

He couldn’t have been clearer. The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.

The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.

It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).

It thrives on fear and resentment, and encourages a view of fellow nonwhite and female Americans as enemies to be controlled rather than citizens to be represented.

Today’s GOP and the rightwing-billionaire-funded, 50-year-long “Conservative Movement” that drives it have embraced every bad instinct of the Confederacy, the frontier, Jim Crow, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

They’re not “conserving” anything. They’re restoring an old order.

This didn’t happen suddenly. It took decades and the investment of billions of dollars.

People of a certain age (like me) well remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966-1999 show Firing Line, every Sunday on PBS, as he pontificated about the wonders of “conservatism” and promoted Republican politicians. My dad was a religious viewer and we watched it together every weekend; the show was a major force in national politics.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.

“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Arguably following up, in April 2021, the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.

By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.

Trump told white male voters they were the only “real Americans” and everyone else was suspect. He told them the military and the police existed to protect them from demographic change. He told them the only valid elections were the ones they won.

The good news is that most Americans reject this.

Most Americans believe in a multiracial democracy. They want equal justice. They want freedom that applies to everyone. They don’t want their own government treating nonwhites or women as enemy combatants. They don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men. They don’t want leaders who behave as if the military is a toy for intimidating political opponents.

But we can’t defeat what we refuse to name. America’s original sin wasn’t just slavery or colonialism: it was the belief that white men are entitled to rule by default and women and nonwhites must be subordinate to them.

That belief still infects our politics and largely controls the GOP. It still shapes our institutions. It still animates Republican justices on the Supreme Court who see equality as a threat and democracy as negotiable.

We can’t move forward until we reckon with that truth about our nation’s history and today’s GOP.

We can’t protect liberty while ignoring the warnings of the people who built this country.

And we can’t defend American democracy — and democracy around the world — while the GOP wages war against the very idea of a nation where everyone counts.

The reckoning is long overdue. This time we have to finish the job.

Double-check your voter registration and pass along the good word to everybody you know.

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the way, or the exception that proves the rule?

By the shocking light of today’s glaring headlines, it’s time to ask a larger question that no one in the media appears to be willing to say out loud: at what point does the accumulation of misconduct by Donald J. Trump become so brazen, so corrosive, so frankly immoral and even criminal, that Republican elected officials and voters finally say, “Enough is enough?”

So far:

• Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring are demanding Congress release all the files, and Trump was attacking Republicans for even considering going along with them (now he’s opened his own “investigation,” which will prevent their public release regardless of Congress as he pretends to call for them to be made public). A coalition of Epstein survivors has urged Congress to declassify every remaining record tied to his global network of child sexual abuse. They argue that decades of secrecy protected rich and powerful men while silencing victims. House Democrats dropped a political bombshell this week, releasing emails from Epstein’s estate that appear to show Trump wasn’t just aware of the abuse taking place in Epstein’s orbit but “spent hours at my house” with at least one of the presumably underage girls.

• The January 6 insurrection, the Big Lie, and the GOP’s shrugging at treason. Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after insisting, against all evidence and over 60 court losses, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That wasn’t protest: it was a violent assault on American democracy itself that led to the death of three police officers and the hospitalization of over 140 others. Yet the GOP continues to use Trump’s lie as a political weapon.

• He’s incited hate against those least able to defend themselves, promoting a culture of violence and intolerance. From people fleeing murder and rape in their own countries to those merely seeking a better life to American communities of queer people and religious and racial minorities, Trump has licensed the most base and disgusting elements in our society.

• His trade wars gutted American credibility, paved the way for bribes to himself and his boys, all while punishing the very supporters he claimed to champion. Trump’s tariffs on China, Europe, and beyond slapped billions in hidden taxes on U.S. consumers and farmers. They crippled small manufacturers, triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad, and exposed how “America First” became America isolated. In response, corporate and foreign leaders showered Trump and his boys with gifts, investments, gold, crypto, a jet, and overseas Trump hotel projects. The GOP, once the party of free markets, turned away as this con man and his family accepted bribes, committed economic vandalism, and “earned” a reported $5+ billion during his first ten months in office.

• His praise for Vladimir Putin and contempt for Ukraine revealed a chilling abandonment of America’s historic role in defending democracy. Even after Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, his kidnapping Ukrainian women and children, and his ongoing nightly missile and drone attacks horrified the world, Trump boasted of “good talks” with Putin and mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His words told the world that U.S. loyalty could be traded for personal favors and ego-fluffing — or blackmail. When strength is redefined as submission to autocrats, freedom everywhere grows weaker.

• The most horrific symbolic act of corruption yet: demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a Trump-style billionaires’ ballroom. In October 2025, the East Wing, a historic cornerstone of American democracy (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the East Portico), was razed for a 90,000-square-foot “Presidential Ballroom,” financed by companies and billionaires buying Trump’s favors and conducted with virtually no oversight. Some preservationists called it the most reckless desecration of the People’s House in American history. This isn’t a renovation, it’s a Marie Antoinette-style attempt at monarchy.

• He is now the first U.S. president convicted of 34 counts of felony election fraud, and whose company was nailed for falsifying business records to rip off insurance companies and the taxpayers of New York. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of orchestrating a criminal cover-up to hide hush-money payments from voters during the 2016 election. It’s the first time in history an American president has been convicted of a felony, and yet the GOP still kneels at his feet. When “law and order” applies to everyone except the powerful, justice collapses.

• In a civil trial, a jury of average people found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, with evidence showing he’d committed what the judge in the case called the common-sense “definition of rape.” Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store, and the jury believed her. Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the verdict meant what Trump had done to her met the ordinary understanding of rape. The GOP’s continued embrace of a man found legally liable for sexual violence — after bragging on tape that he had regularly sexually assaulted other women — shows moral bankruptcy in its purest form.

• Twice impeached, and twice rescued by the party that pretends it swore an oath to the Constitution. Trump was impeached in 2019 for abusing power by trying to blackmail Ukraine into creating phony dirt on his political opponent, and again in 2021 for inciting the January 6th insurrection. Both times, Republicans in the Senate saved him. When loyalty to one man outweighs loyalty to country, impeachment stops being a safeguard and becomes a ritual of surrender.

• He’s fired senior officials and watchdogs across government agencies, installed incompetent toadies in critical positions, and gutted the guardrails against presidential corruption. From food safety to pollution controls to safeguarding public lands to stopping climate change, Trump has elevated the interests of his donors and morbidly rich friends above those of average Americans and our nation itself. He’s cut taxes on billionaires while hitting working-class Americans with billions in tariff taxes to pay for those same tax cuts. He prodded Texas to gerrymander/rig the 2026 election while demanding his Attorney General prosecute California for their attempt to rebalance the playing field. And now he’s going after his political enemies — many of them Republicans who could no longer stomach his criminality and corruption — with trumped-up charges designed to wipe out their retirement savings or even leave them homeless.

This is a crisis that’s tearing apart the soul of democracy itself.

How much corruption, how much deceit, how many assaults on truth can a republic endure before its citizens stop believing that justice still matters?

When the weight of wrongdoing piles high enough, it isn’t just the Republican Party that breaks and submits; it’s the faith of the people in the very idea of democratic self-government that dies.

And yet the GOP continues to worship him, to kiss his a--, to pretend he’s a great and brilliant man, a modern-day Wizard of Oz. They still rally behind the man. They still defend him, excuse him, and elevate him.

Why? Because corruption is addictive. Once a party decides that power is more important than truth, every lie becomes easier to rationalize, every abuse becomes normalized, every crime becomes “politics as usual.” Power is a drug that numbs the conscience, and the GOP has become a party of addicts.

Democracy can’t survive this level of violence against the rule of law. It must have accountability to survive. It requires honesty. It depends on the courage to face truth even when that truth is painful. The longer a party or a people look away from corruption and criminality, the deeper that corruption and criminality spread, until the whole system collapses from the rot within.

The only cure for that rot is trust, brought about by the evenhanded application of justice and the enforcement of laws and democratic norms. And the only path back to that trust is truth and accountability.

The GOP must decide whether it still believes in the words and examples of Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower or whether it’ll continue to worship at a cheap, gold-painted altar atop which stands one man.

For the sake of democracy, for the sake of the next generation of Americans, these abuses can’t continue. There must be an accounting, and it must come before Trump’s damage is irreparable.

If the Republican Party continues to accept a leader who shatters every norm, effortlessly breaks laws, and ridicules every moral boundary, then the experiment called America will fail.

Because if Republicans continue let a man who once bragged he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” prove himself right, they haven’t saved our country: they’ve destroyed it.

“Russia unleashed a massive combined attack on Kyiv” last night, The Guardian reports. “Five people were hospitalized, including one man in critical condition and a pregnant woman, after a series of powerful explosions sounded in the city and air defenses were activated. …“Pictures posted on social media showed different sites in flames and residents gathering in rubble-strewn streets outside apartment buildings.”

The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are apparently not the only ones who‘ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long relationship with that notorious pedophile.

Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe.

Trump’s coverup may well represent a form of treason, the aid and comfort to an enemy attacking an ally during time of war. It should lead, at the very least, to impeachment.

Right now, the largest nation in Europe, a democracy and an ally, is under violent attack by a brutal dictator intent on reestablishing the Soviet empire. In a threat to European democracy itself, Ukraine is getting pummeled every day because Donald Trump refuses to respond in a meaningful way.

But why?

In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump:

“I think you might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrov can get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”

Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation implies.

If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the pattern: ever since Trump came back into the White House, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have exploded in their ferocity and brutality.

Recently, a missile strike by Russian forces hit the city of Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine and killed at least 20 people including nine children. Apartments collapsed around weeping parents who pulled bodies from the rubble; a baby only a few months old was among the victims.

In another attack, a children’s hospital in southern Ukraine was struck, shattering windows, strewing blood-soaked medical stretchers across the grounds, all while about a hundred people were inside.

Schools, kindergartens and residential buildings have been leveled in multiple towns, as the Russian military targets civilian infrastructure with vicious abandon. They’re daily destroying Ukraine’s fuel and electric grids with the goal of freezing that country’s people into submission as winter approaches.

These are not accidents of war. They’re the deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment buildings, homes, and hospitals. Russian drones hunt civilians down the streets of Ukrainian cities, sometimes smashing the windows of their homes as they chase people indoors to kill them.

And all of this — the horror of what’s happening in plain sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to Putin — appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened Trump with exposure.

We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and afterward seized and destroyed her notes.

Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another lengthy, secretive conversation.

That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide, who’s terrified by some horrible secret; it’s not the behavior of a leader defending the national interest of the United States or our European allies.

On top of that, Trump has been placing private phone calls to Putin repeatedly ever since he was reinstalled in the Oval Office.

No previous American president throughout our 249-year history had ever conducted such meetings and repeated communications in secret with the murderous leader of a hostile foreign power. None has ever tried to cover up meetings with such men.

When we place Trump’s bizarre, unprecedented secrecy next to Epstein’s emails in which the billionaire pedophile tells European and Russian contacts that he could offer “insight” into Trump, the outlines of a deeply troubling possibility emerge.

At this moment, it’s only speculation, but it’s one hell of a big if. Because Trump himself keeps doing things — including trashing NATO and betraying Ukraine in ways that only benefit Putin — and therefore demand a serious, honest investigation.

We now know — from the emails released this week — that Epstein wrote that Sergei Lavrov could “get insight” from him and that Russian Ambassador Churkin “understood Trump” after their talks.

And the Russians, as the world knows, never, ever let such juicy material go to waste. Former KGB senior intelligence officer Vladimir Putin is a man trained to find the soft spot in any opponent and apply the exact right pressure to make them bend to his will, and it’s looking more every day like that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Trump was “best friends” with Epstein for more than a decade. They lived near each other in both New York and Palm Beach, and partied publicly together. They traveled on Epstein’s jet repeatedly. They allegedly shared women.

These don’t prove blackmail, but the possibility that Epstein passed along compromising details to Lavrov or even Putin is staggering.

Imagine Putin, alone with Trump in Helsinki way back in 2018, quietly signaling that he knew more about Epstein, Trump, and underage girls than Trump could survive being exposed.

A soft whisper. Perhaps simply sliding a note card to Trump with the words “Epstein, girls” on it.

And then Trump goes out to meet the press after their meeting, shoulders down looking beaten, and lavishes Putin with praise while trash-talking his own intelligence and military officials. What the hell?

Even former Harvard President Larry Summers was horrified, writing to his friend Jeffrey Epstein on July 16, 2018, moments after the Helsinki meeting:

“Do the Russians have stuff on Trump? Today was appalling even by his standards.”

Epstein replied to Summers the next day:

“My email is full with similar comments. wow. Im sure his view is that it went super well. he thinks he has charmed his adversary.. Admittedly he has no idea of the symbolism. He has no idea of most things.”

The idea that Putin threatened Trump in that first private meeting is only a hypothesis, of course. But the secrecy Trump immediately imposed — and his repeatedly whipped-dog-like servile behavior to this murderous dictator in the years since — makes such a moment impossible to rule out.

If something like that did occur, if Putin delivered even the hint of a threat and Trump immediately bent over and bowed down and has ever since, it would explain Trump’s world-changing behavior and why he’s so seriously damaged the interests of America while abandoning our European allies.

Is there anything else that could possibly explain why Trump has spent years refusing to confront Putin for anything, no matter how shocking or monstrous the Russian dictator’s behavior?

It would also explain his silence in the face of Russian assassinations, Putin’s bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, and now the horrific nightly devastation of Ukraine and Putin‘s kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

If Trump was intimidated in that private moment, if Putin used Epstein’s information as a weapon, then the cost of Trump’s fear of exposure has been measured in thousands of Ukrainian civilian deaths, including far more children then even Epstein himself victimized.

It’s been measured in the suffering of the millions of Ukrainians now facing the possibility of freezing to death this winter without power, as Putin relentlessly and nightly targets their energy grid while Trump plays golf, bulldozes the White House, and throws elaborate parties.

It’s measured in America’s humiliation on the world stage and in the bone-deep terror felt across Europe as Putin tests the resolve of NATO and his officials explicitly threaten the Baltics.

The sheer scale of harm that could have flowed from this one corrupt, degenerate, perverted man’s desperation to protect himself is absolutely breathtaking.

If it turns out that this is what actually happened, it would make historic betrayals like Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, Robert Hanssen, and even the petty treacheries that toppled ancient republics look small by comparison, because none of them placed the survival of modern, worldwide democracy itself at risk.

This isn’t an accusation: it’s the unavoidable suspicion forced upon us by Trump’s own secrecy.

He hid his conversations with Putin from his own government and even from the American people. He created a vacuum where certainty should exist. And now, into that vacuum, flows Epstein’s boast that he was willing to provide Russia with usable, exploitable insights into Trump’s vulnerabilities and psychology.

Trump has refused the basic transparency required of every president who interacts with a hostile foreign leader. If he’d behaved like every president before him, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he has bizarrely, inexplicably kissed Putin‘s ass repeatedly and publicly in ways that have astonished and horrified our intelligence and military officials, as well as those of our allies.

And now he’s in the process of purging any among our military ranks and intelligence services who he appears to suspect may not go along with his inexplicable behavior.

Because Trump’s so frequently surrendered America’s, Ukraine’s, and NATO’s best interests to Putin’ s desires — and now we learn Epstein offered to advise Putin on how to blackmail (or at last control) him — we must now investigate every plausible explanation for his actions, no matter how disturbing.

Just releasing Epstein’s emails isn’t even close to enough to answer these questions.

Congress, what’s left of our independent media, and the FBI must investigate not only Epstein’s crimes and connections but the terrifying possibility that American foreign policy has been warped by a president desperately trying to shield himself from the exposure of unforgivable behavior.

That investigation must be thorough, public, and relentless; it must meet the high standards of the internal and public investigations into Richard Nixon‘s criminality in 1974, at the very least.

If true, the possibilities raised by Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and kowtowing to Putin are far worse than anything Nixon could have conceived in his wildest fantasies.

If Republicans have an ounce of integrity left they’ll not only sanction investigations that could lead to criminal prosecutions; they’ll convene impeachment proceedings.

The American people deserve to know whether blackmail, intimidation, and Trump’s personal vulnerability have cost thousands of Ukrainian lives and shaken the foundations of Western democracy. As well as ignoring — or participating in — the destruction of the lives of hundreds of young girls.

The stakes are too high, the damage too great, and the possible treason too severe to accept anything less.

The New York Times reported that Donald Trump personally called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and then had Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel take her into the top-secret, no-recording-devices-allowed Situation Room to urge her to drop her support for releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump apparently also tried to reach Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) for the same reason.

This week's newly surfaced details about Epstein and Trump again reveal something far larger than the tawdry specifics of their relationship, as grotesque as those are.

They point to a structural crisis at the heart of American democracy.

As Republican President Theodore Roosevelt said:

“The exposure and punishment of public corruption is an honor to a nation, not a disgrace. The shame lies in toleration, not in correction…“If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.”

These newest documents, including Epstein’s correspondences with the journalist Michael Wolff about how Epstein’s knowledge of Trump’s involvement could be used against him — long before Trump was involved in politics (apparently to blackmail him, something Epstein apparently advised Vladimir Putin about how to do) — reveal a pattern we’ve seen throughout history.

It’s a pattern where men of wealth and power create a zone of impunity that protects them while destroying vulnerable people like Virginia Giuffre.

This is where the story moves from sleaze to a massive crisis for American democracy itself.

When a president insists that scrutiny of his possible crimes is illegitimate, he’s not defending his innocence: he’s attacking a foundational principle of the American republic. As John Adams proclaimed:

“We are a government of laws, not of men.”

If only that were true today. If only more than a tiny handful of Republicans believed in that principle.

From Socrates’ collapsing Greece and Caligula’s Rome through the dictatorships of the 20th century and today’s Russia and Hungary, history shows that democracies don’t survive when their leaders live above the law and beyond the reach of legitimate inquiry and a free press.

This danger to America is magnified by Trump’s pardoning or promising to pardon the very people who’ve already committed crimes on his behalf, acts intended to benefit him politically or personally. And he continues to signal that he’ll pardon even more people who help him out.

This isn’t forgiveness: it’s instruction. It’s an explicit message to present and future loyalists that when they commit crimes for him, particularly those involving election or financial fraud, they’ll be rewarded rather than punished.

From Blanche’s treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell to Bondi and Patel’s ongoing coverup for Trump, he’s created a private so-called “justice system” where loyalty to Dear Leader outweighs loyalty to the law.

As we see with the case of Maxwell and Trump's pardon of a crypto executive who made his sons billions, our Justice Department has turned into a “Protect and Enrich Trump Department.”

Amy Wallace, co-author of Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, says she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein. She says the FBI and the Department of Justice know them too.

“Yes, I know who the names are,” Wallace said. “Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”

Was Trump part of it? Was his Miss Teen USA pageant another front in Epstein’s network? Is that why House Speaker Mike Johnson was stonewalling, terrified of the truth?

George Washington warned that when politicians became more loyal to their party or its leader than to our nation or our laws:

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.“It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.”

The principle of a nation of “laws, not men” that Adams envisioned becomes meaningless when wealthy and powerful men are no longer held responsible for their actions.

Thomas Jefferson reminded us that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” a phrase that becomes hollow if the institutions meant to guard liberty are paralyzed by the fear of offending a wannabe dictator like Trump.

We see this with billionaires like Elon Musk, whose destruction of USAID has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children with absolutely no accountability. With Trump’s henchman and Republicans in Congress gutting healthcare and food assistance, while threatening war in Venezuela.

Thomas Paine cautioned that “when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

Paine never imagined corrupt billionaires building a network of over 1,500 rightwing radio stations, four rightwing television networks, and hundreds of rightwing-controlled newspapers and websites, all with the singular message of protecting their wealth, privilege, immunity, and tax cuts.

Today we’re seeing right before our eyes, in real time, how easily democracy can slip away when a leader trains his followers to believe every investigation is treason and every fact is a lie.

The Epstein revelations matter because they’re symptomatic of a larger ecosystem of secrecy and impunity that Trump — and many of the rightwing billionaires associated with him — have relied on for decades. An ecosystem that destroys democracies.

Epstein, Trump, and Maxwell spent years cultivating relationships with extremely rich and politically powerful people. That network helped shield them long after allegations of exploitation became so obvious they would have destroyed a less wealthy or powerful person.

The crisis this affair presents to America — including the complicity of Republicans in the House and Senate, along with the billionaire owners and executives of rightwing media — isn’t simply about “who knew what, when.”

The crisis is that such a network exists at all. That Trump has rebuilt government in a way to protect that morbidly rich network.

These latest releases remind us that when powerful men — including those claiming to be in the press — operate in spaces where wealth and social status shield them from scrutiny, abuses become routine and accountability vanishes for decades or evaporates entirely.

Thus, the most urgent threat to our republic isn’t the past behavior of Epstein or even Trump’s proximity or alleged participation with it. The real danger is that Trump is now rewriting the rules of political accountability in real time in ways that have already corrupted the Republican Party for a generation, and threatened to corrupt our entire nation in ways we may never recover from.

By dismissing legitimate scrutiny as “hoaxes,” by attacking those who want transparency, and by pardoning people who commit crimes for him, our president is teaching his followers that law has no meaning except as a tool to reward friends and punish enemies.

That’s precisely the type of explicit corruption that America’s Founders feared and repeatedly warned us about. Like in ancient Rome, or modern-day Russia and Hungary, it’s the corruption of a republic from within.

Democracy can’t survive this pattern if it’s allowed to continue. A previous generation of Democratic and Republican legislators understood this, which is why they drove the criminal and corrupt Richard Nixon from office.

The Founders also understood this, and their warnings weren’t abstract philosophy. Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had insulated us from exactly what is happening today.

• But he and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 40+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.
• They never conceived of an Australian billionaire family coming to America and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and adjudicated sexual abuser would become a noble president.
• They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to put him back into office after presiding over the unnecessary deaths of a half million Americans.
• And they never imagined that a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a serial bankrupt and professional con man would be able to leverage rightwing billionaire money and captive media to ascend to the Oval Office twice.

In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

He never imagined the American people tolerating such a widespread level of deceit and corruption.

Today those founding ideals are being tested in a way so serious, so severe, that it puts the future of our country in question.

If we fail to investigate possible crimes and enforce the law, if we continue to allow billionaires and Trump to corrupt our political system, if we continue to tolerate a culture of impunity to harden into a permanent feature of our nation’s political life, America will cease to be America.

And that “shame we let in” is something we must purge from our body politic and never again tolerate.

The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.

Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.

First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.

He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.

He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.

Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.

Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.

Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.

This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.

But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.

Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.

That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.

This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.

And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.

This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.

That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.

But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.
“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger.

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

What we witnessed this weekend in the United States Senate wasn’t “compromise.” It was surrender: the kind of gutless, morally bankrupt capitulation that betrays American families and feeds the billionaires devouring our democracy.

Eight senators who caucus with the Democrats joined Republicans to end the government shutdown, not in victory, not to secure healthcare for millions, but to hand Donald Trump and his morbidly rich cronies a gift-wrapped political win.

And standing at the center of this disgrace is Chuck Schumer, the so-called “leader” of the Senate Democrats, who orchestrated — or at least approved or failed to stop — the entire debacle from behind the curtain, then had the gall to vote “no” at the last minute to wash his hands of it.

Let’s be clear: this was Schumer’s deal. He built it, he pushed it, and he enabled it. His fingerprints are all over this betrayal.

And what did Democrats get in exchange for reopening the government? What did the American people get? Nothing.

Not a penny restored to Medicaid (or the hit Medicare will take in a year under Trump’s Big Ugly Bill). Not a rollback of Trump’s rescissions that gutted essential agencies. Not even a meaningful vote to protect Affordable Care Act subsidies or food stamps.

The so-called “promise” of a vote in the Senate within 40 days is a joke, a political placebo meant to sedate the public while the insurance industry counts its profits.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was right to call Sunday evening’s vote a “very bad night.” The deal explodes health-care premiums for over 20 million Americans and paves the way for 15 million to lose coverage altogether.

That lack of coverage, experts estimate, will cause 50,000 preventable deaths a year. These are real people and their children, their deaths sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s and the GOP’s lust for wealth and power.

And it wasn’t just cowardice: it was also cash.

The health-care industry owns far too many Democrats, and this vote appears to prove it. The same corporations that profit from denying you care are stuffing the pockets of the very lawmakers who just “compromised” your future.

When Democrats vote with Republicans to gut health care, it’s not bipartisanship. It’s corruption, legalized and laundered through Citizens United campaign finance loopholes created by five bought-and-paid-for Republicans on the Supreme Court. Bribery by another name.

Schumer has presided over this kind of rot for years, protecting incumbents who serve donors instead of voters, blowing up efforts to promote genuine progressives like Bernie in 2016, while building a machine that runs on Wall Street money and insurance and banking industry cash. He was so ineffective he couldn’t even stop Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema back in the day, even though he wields enormous power.

Schumer’s’ leadership — and, generally, the leadership of the Democrats since the 1990s Clinton years — have turned the Democratic Party from the party of FDR into a cautious club managed by well-paid consultants who tremble at their own shadows while they fill their bank accounts with blood money.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Trump is showing us exactly what real political power looks like, as well as what it fears.

The simple reality is that Trump was about to break. He was freaking out.

Before the eight senators caved to the GOP, Trump was so frantic that he was demanding Senate Republicans end the filibuster altogether, so he could “ram through legislation that will make sure no Democrat ever gets elected again.”

GOP leaders — including (and especially) Senate Majority Leader John Thune — are terrified at the possibility of ending the filibuster, not out of principle, but out of self-preservation. They know ending it could expose just how extreme and deranged the Republican agenda really is.

As I’ve argued before, the filibuster has been a scam for a half-century, a tool that since the Reagan era both Republicans and corporate Democrats use every year to fool their base and donors into thinking their hands are tied.

It obscures Republican radicalism, while similarly protecting the so-called “moderate” Democrats who spit-shine the boots of their corporate masters.

Trump believes killing the filibuster will increase his power. In reality, it would tear his party apart and lay bare its madness for the world to see because Republicans could no longer say, “We couldn’t pass that bill to [fill in the blank] because those damn Democrats filibustered it.”

But the filibuster should be ended, and if these eight Democrats hadn’t surrendered, Trump might have forced it. That would’ve been the best thing for America.

And make no mistake: Trump’s terrified or he wouldn’t have even considered killing the filibuster. As Steve Bannon bluntly said, if Democrats ever regain full control, “a lot of Republicans are going to prison.” Presumably including Trump himself.

Compounding Trump’s freak-out, alleged horrors are leaking out about how Trump appears in the Epstein files. Reporter David Schuster noted:

“A few GOP House members say they’ve heard from FBI/DOJ contacts that the Epstein files (with copies in different agencies) are worse than Michael Wolff’s description of Epstein photos showing Trump with half-naked teenage girls.”

Trump knows what’s in those files; he partied with Epstein for a decade and is now throwing bennies at Ghislaine Maxwell to try to keep her quiet. That’s why he’s trying to distract his supporters by hosting his Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago, making incoherent threats about cash check “rebates” to Americans and war in Venezuela, and hustling billions from foreign dictators to insulate himself and his boys before the walls close in.

If Democrats are going to really confront Trump’s authoritarianism and the corporate corruption that fuels it — which is absolutely necessary now to rescue and sustain American democracy — we need a Senate leader with a spine, not a strategist for surrender. Chuck Schumer’s brand of 90s politics, to triangulate, capitulate, and hope nobody notices, has failed us for decades.

He embodies the rot of the old guard: a generation of post-1992 Democrats who think fundraising prowess equals political courage.

It doesn’t. Times have changed, and we’re now standing in the midst of a progressive populist era. Just look at New York’s mayoral race.

Leadership means fighting for working families, not finessing deals for donors. It means standing up to Trumpism, not whispering in back rooms while pretending to resist.

We need new leadership. America — and Democrats — deserve statesmen and women willing to call out corruption in their own ranks, to reject the blood money of lobbyists, and to stand unflinchingly for universal healthcare, living wages, and democracy itself.

Americans are sick of being sold out. We’re done watching our supposed champions cave while billionaires pop champagne. The fight for our democracy won’t be won by appeasing bullies or bowing to donors.

It’ll be won when Democrats rediscover their courage, and when Chuck Schumer finally steps aside to be replaced by a true fighter.

America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty.

Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: “law and order,” “family values,” “national security.” Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering.

From the actuarial tables that justified the deaths of Black people a hundred years ago, to the silence that let gay men die in the 1980s, to the unmarked vans prowling our streets today, the design remains the same. The faces change; the purpose — upholding straight white male supremacy — never does.

While many Americans are shocked by the cruelty and brutality of Trump’s/Miller’s/Vance’s ICE and CPB thugs against Hispanics in the United States, such attempts to “purify” the country are really nothing new. Hopefully, though, our response to them will be different this time.

One of the most shocking things I learned when I was writing The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich was how much American policy was driven by white men in power who were trying to decrease the Black population, both by deportations, like James Monroe tried, and through actually genocidal domestic healthcare policies.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the vice president of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, published a widely cited “scientific” book claiming that Black people were so biologically inferior that they would “eventually die out.” He argued that if white society simply refused to extend medical care, social support, or public health infrastructure to them, their extinction would “occur naturally.”

It was an extraordinary act of pseudoscientific cruelty: a man with corporate and political power using the language of statistics and medicine to rationalize genocide by neglect. Hoffman’s 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — one of the best-selling books of the early 1900s — became the actuarial and intellectual foundation for denying healthcare to Black Americans to this day, giving white policymakers cover to block public health investment while claiming to be guided by “data.”

Hoffman’s claim is why there’s a 20% hole in traditional Medicare: it was created at the demand of white racist southern senators so elderly Black people — who couldn’t afford the 20% co-pay — wouldn’t show up in the then-whites-only hospitals and doctors’ offices.

That same brutal logic — intentional genocide by state action or inaction — reappeared when the AIDS crisis erupted in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s response to the disease was defined by silence and contempt. As tens of thousands of mostly gay men got sick and died (several of them close friends of ours), America’s bigoted President Reagan refused even to utter the word “AIDS” throughout his presidency.

— His press secretary laughed, from the official White House podium, about gay men dying .

— Conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan called the disease “nature’s retribution” for “immoral” homosexuality, and Senator Jesse Helms successfully banned federal funding for educational materials about safe sex and AIDS that he said might “promote homosexual activity.”

— William F. Buckley Jr. (who also wrote about the supposed genetic inferiority of Black people) proposed tattooing people who had AIDS so they could be identified, discriminated against, and segregated from the rest of us.

The message from Republicans in power was unmistakable: the queer victims of HIV were morally defective, they deserved their excruciatingly painful deaths, and the government had no duty to save them.

It was Hoffman’s calculus all over again, dressed up in the language of religion and “family values” instead of racial eugenics.

Now that same monstrous pattern is repeating itself both along our border and border towns, as well as across the interior of the United States. The logic of white racial and cultural superiority reflected by Republican rhetoric has today metastasized into open brutality.

The so-called Kavanaugh stops — made possible by a morally evil shadow-docket ruling written by Brett Kavanaugh for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — have effectively given Trump’s agents permission to seize and detain people based solely on the color of their skin or the way they speak, just like the Klan could do in the Old South.

Under this blatantly unconstitutional decree, masked federal goons can snatch anyone they choose, hold them without due process, and claim they’re “immigration suspects.” There are already reports of U.S. citizens, including fathers and mothers driving their kids to school, being pulled from their cars, cuffed, and dragged away by men in black or camo tactical gear with no badges and no warrants.

One video shows a terrified child screaming as her father — a US citizen, brutalized in broad daylight — is shoved into an unmarked van, because he looked Hispanic. They then kidnapped the terrorized child and held her for much of the day.

This is not law enforcement. It’s state terror. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “The cruelty is the point.” Stephen Miller and his colleagues in the Trump White House appear to have designed these policies precisely to maximize fear and suffering.

During Trump’s first term he bragged to colleagues that family separation worked as “deterrence.” Children were warehoused in cages, parents deported without them, and about a thousand have vanished to this day through a shadowy network of pop-up “Christian” foster homes that vanished after they got the kids from the Trump administration.

The trauma was — and is — intentional, an explicit message to would-be brown-skinned migrants that America would destroy their families if they came here. Now Trump, et al, are expanding that same logic nationwide, empowered by corrupt white Republicans on a Supreme Court that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of hateful, bigoted ideology and obedience to the party that appointed them.

What we’re witnessing right now is the third great chapter in a grim American tradition: define a population as “lesser,” withhold or weaponize care, legalize and expand harassment, and watch the consequences unfold — people brutalized, children traumatized, citizens terrified — while pretending they’re inevitable and the cause is noble.

Hoffman’s statistical analyses justified abandoning Black Americans to early death by refusing them healthcare. Reagan’s silence and cuts to government funds allowed a generation of gay men to die untreated. And Trump’s immigration machine now turns suffering into policy.

In each case, the people inflicting the harm claim moral superiority — that they’re protecting the “real” America from impurity or invasion — while what they’re really doing is institutionalizing cruelty and brutality as governance while being cheered on by their bigoted white supremacist base.

This is not hyperbole. When a Supreme Court packed with rightwing ideologues uses an unsigned opinion to strip away constitutional rights and green-light racial profiling, we’re no longer operating under a system that respects equal protection under the law.

When federal agents are masked, unmarked, unaccountable, and armed, snatching US citizens and peaceful protestors off the street, we’re living in a police state. And when our national conversation treats all that as normal, we’re back in Hoffman’s world; the world where suffering isn’t an error to be corrected but a strategy for how the powerful maintain straight white male supremacy.

We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations.

They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice” for straight white men and a society that claims they should exclusively be in charge.

The outrage of the Kavanaugh stops isn’t just about immigration or policing. It’s about whether the United States still recognizes limits on government power.

It’s immoral. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic evil that once hid behind actuarial tables and “family values.” Rightwing leaders in past fascist regimes have used it to justify the wholesale destruction of a people.

We must not let history repeat itself again. We know where this road leads: to children in cages, to communities terrorized, to hospitals turning patients away, to families burying their dead while officials shrug.

Hoffman — a Republican who openly celebrated the death of FDR — thought Black extinction would come naturally if white men in power simply withheld care. Reagan thought the gay community would vanish if government refused to help. And Trump’s America First ideologues continue to argue that nonwhite people will “self-deport” if the state makes life unbearable enough as they welcome white South Africans.

In every case, the goal is erasure of “undesirable people” through pain.

We have the power to stop it, but only if we refuse to normalize it. Every senator, every judge, every journalist, every citizen must confront the reality that the machinery of cruelty is running again in our names.

Once a nation accepts pain as governance, democracy becomes performance and compassion becomes treason. Republicans have perfected the unthinkable. The only question left is whether America will finally refuse to justify it.

Silence is complicity. Outrage is the only moral response, and action the only cure.

Yesterday was election day in much of America, although the biggest races were in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York City. As a bellwether for next year’s midterms, they could could define the fate and future of Trumpism. The stakes were enormous, and were bleeding through into social media.

One of the most viral Facebook posts this week was from a MAGA mom complaining that her Democratic mother-in-law won’t loan her grocery money. She explains that she can’t feed her family because Trump’s government shutdown has frozen her SNAP (Food Stamps) and WIC benefits, and, she wrote of her husband:

“He asked his mother to buy a can [of baby formula] until our WIC comes in. Her response was, ‘We voted for this.’”

The largest percentage of comments were variations on, “That’s what you wanted when you voted for that orange a–hole, but you must have thought he’d only do it to Black and Hispanic people. FAFO!”

Along those same lines, Trump went on 60 Minutes this weekend and lied to Nora O'Donnell’s face multiple times, including a whopper about grocery prices when she pointed out that they’re going up, up, and up.

“No, you’re wrong.” Trump lied with his best “sincere” expression. “They went up under Biden, right now they’re going down. Other than beef, which we’re working on.”

Yeah, tell us about it, Donny. Just like climate change is a hoax, cutting taxes on billionaires helps working people, and you and your sons taking billions in crypto money from foreigners isn’t corruptly peddling influence out of what’s left of the White House.

The simple fact is that back in the 1960s you could rent a small apartment, buy a used car, and put yourself through college on a minimum wage job. I know because I did it (pumping gas, washing dishes, working as a part-time DJ), as did millions of my generation. Just ask your grandparents.

So, what happened?

Through most of America’s history, our economic life was similar to that of other countries that practiced unregulated capitalism. Charles Dickens wrote about that era in most of his novels, including Christmas Carol. There was a small 1% that owned about 90% of the nation’s wealth. A small middle class of professionals (doctors, lawyers, retail shop owners, etc.) who worked for the 1% making up around 10%-25% of the population. And a very large cohort of the working poor.

In Christmas Carol, the 1% don’t even show up. Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class: he was a small businessman who owned a company so meager that it had only one employee. Bob Cratchit was the working poor, who couldn’t even afford to cover the cost of healthcare for his son, Tiny Tim. That was the norm across most of Europe and America from the 16th century right up until the 1930s.

After the Hoover administration and their corrupt Wall Street buddies drove the world economy off the edge with the Republican Great Depression, and America elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to put the country back together, conservatives began to worry aloud about FDR’s advisor, British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes and FDR (and Francis Perkins) had this wild idea that it should be possible to create a nation where at least two-thirds of the people were in the middle class. They’d do it by heavily taxing the morbidly rich (FDR raised it to 77% in 1936), giving union power to working people (Wagner Act, 1935), and providing a solid social safety net — Social Security (1935), a minimum wage (1933/38), unemployment insurance (1935), and Food Stamps (1939) — to create a middle-class floor.

The programs were universally decried by the GOP as socialism, the doorway to communism, and “radically anti-American.” Every major social program since the 1930s has been opposed by Republicans, and in the 1950s Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and other “thinkers” in the movement provided a rationale for their opposition.

They argued, throughout the 1950s, that if the middle class ever got “too large,” American society would begin to disintegrate “under the weight of FDR’s socialist programs.”

Kirk and Buckley warned that women would forget their place in the kitchen and bedroom, young people would stop respecting their elders and the value of hard work, and racial minorities would demand social and economic equality with whites. The result would be societal chaos leading to the downfall of America as we knew it.

Their warnings were largely ignored or even ridiculed through the 1950s as the nation’s prosperity steadily increased and we shot past that 50% threshold.

And then came the 1960s, as we passed 60% of us in Kirk’s dreaded middle class.

The birth control pill was legalized in 1961; within a few years there was a full-blown women’s movement. The Civil Rights movement was embraced by the Kennedy brothers and Black people began to fight back against police brutality, causing multiple cities to erupt into flames. And by 1967, young men were refusing military service, protesting in the streets, and burning their draft cards.

The collective response of the Republican Party was something like, “Holy crap! Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, and Barry Goldwater were right!! The country is on the verge of something like the Bolshevik Revolution that led straight to communism!!!”

Thus, Ronald Reagan came to the White House in 1981 with a simple mandate: cut the middle class down to size to restore social and political stability. To save the nation.

He started by destroying the unions that supported high wages and benefits. A third of us were unionized when Reagan came into office; now it’s in single-digits and Trump just de-unionized an additional few-hundred-thousand federal workers.

Then he instituted the first long-lasting freeze on the minimum wage (9 years), cut the top income tax rate from 74% to 27%, “reformed” Social Security by raising the retirement age to 67 and taxing its benefits as income, ended enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), gutted federal support for colleges, and threw small local businesses to the wolves by abandoning enforcement of 100 years of anti-monopoly laws and securities regulations that forbade stock buy-backs.

Before Reagan, the middle class was thriving and growing and you could get into it with a minimum wage job. A union job, like my dad had at an a tool-and-die shop, was virtually a lifetime guarantee of stability solidly in the middle of the middle of class.

Look through newspapers of that era and they talked about “wage-earner income” because most middle-class families were making it just fine with a single paycheck. Today, instead, you’ll find references to “household income” because it takes two or more paychecks to maintain the same standard of living a family could in the 1960s and 1970s with one wage-earner.

In the intervening years, Republicans (and a few “moderate” and “Third Way” Democrats) have continued the Kirk/Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan project of dismantling Keynes’ and FDR’s grand middle class project.

As a result, the middle class has shrunk to fewer than 50% of us, and it takes two paychecks to do it. Student debt has frozen two generations out of the American Dream. Healthcare expenses destroy a half-million American families every year. Republicans have kept the minimum wage frozen for sixteen long years as they transferred fully $50 trillion from working-class homes and families into the money bins of the top 1%.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill simply continues Reagan’s assault on the American middle class. You could call it, “Making America safe for the morbidly rich like in the 1920s.”

He even had a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lardo over the weekend to celebrate his accomplishments: We now have more billionaires, and richer billionaires, than any other country in the history of the planet. Trump himself and his boys are setting an example for the pillaging of America: they have taken in at least, by some estimates, $5 billion in just the first 10 months of his presidency.

We stand in a pissed-off progressive populist moment, although that movement is up against a massive wall of billionaire-owned media and infrastructure. Five bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of judges and politicians. Bondi and Noem are spouting lies to militarize our cities, presumably in anticipation of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

If America is to survive as a democratic republic, our middle class must again become the beating heart of both our economy and our politics. That means restoring strong unions, ending legalized bribery of politicians and judges, breaking up corporate monopolies, providing healthcare and education to everybody, and taxing billionaires enough to rebuild the social contract that made this country great in the first place.

Every generation faces a choice between oligarchy and democracy, between government by the people and government by the morbidly rich. We made the right choice in 1932, when my parents’ generation rose up and said “enough.” It’s past time for ours to do the same.

Democrats won big in last night’s election, and it’s a great sign for the future of American democracy. Voters rejected racism, fear, and cruelty. They said in a loud and singular voice — overwhelmingly voting for moderate Democrats, progressive Democrats, and even a ballot initiative without a single person on the ballot — that they want their democracy back.

Nonetheless, Mike Johnson is still keeping the House on vacation and John Thune is still refusing to break a Senate filibuster and reopen the government. And, crucially, Trump is still refusing to fully fund SNAP/food stamps, even though he can easily put his hands on the money.

Yesterday’s New York Times’ podcast The Daily interviewed a group of West Virginians who’d lined up at a food bank because Trump had cut off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds. Many of them told their interviewer that they worked full-time jobs but still didn’t make enough money to feed their families.

Roughly a third of the people on SNAP, in fact, work a regular job, and 70 percent of them work full-time.

While Trump and the ghouls in his administration tried to cut off SNAP benefits (and are now threatening to cut off unemployment benefits if Democrats don’t relent and let them gut Obamacare), what this entire drama is really revealing is how what started out as programs to help the unemployed or disabled people have now become billion dollar subsidies for morbidly rich employers and their massive corporations.

When FDR created the food stamp program in 1938, it had three main purposes. The first was to generate Keynesian “from the bottom up” financial activity by giving government money to retailers, who would then circulate it in, and thus stimulate, local economies. The second was to provide a market for struggling farmers, millions of whom were then facing bankruptcy. And the third was to ameliorate hunger among America’s poor.

Today, the SNAP program still accomplishes the goals of helping out farmers, supporting local food stores, and reducing hunger among America’s poor, but about a third of the program has also become a way of insuring that America’s morbidly rich billionaires get even richer on the taxpayer’s dime.

And it’s not just SNAP: you could make the same argument for much of Medicaid and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (TANF times-out at 5 years).

As long as employers know that their employees can get SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF benefits even when they’re working full time, they’ll keep wages low and thus profits high. It’s really that simple.

With FDR‘s new deal, Democrats explicitly proclaimed that if you worked a full-time job you should be able to buy a house and raise a family.

Republicans, on the other hand, have argued since the 1930s that employers should have sole control over what paychecks they cut, even resisting the minimum wage. And now they’ve found a slick new way to exploit Democratic programs like SNAP and Medicaid to help employers further lower their payroll expenses.

Back in 1817, economist David Ricardo coined what he called the “Iron Law of Wages.” His point was that there’s a “marketplace” for labor and the price for labor — the wages paid — in that marketplace is determined by two main variables: actual take-home pay and the local cost of living.

Employers, in other words, carefully calibrate what they’ll pay people to meet (but not exceed) what their workers need to minimally meet the local cost of living. It’s why, for example, wages are higher in expensive cities and lower in cheaper rural areas.

Ricardo’s Iron Law is also why when taxes go down on working class people the effect is paradoxical: tax cuts will always, within a few years, cause corresponding wage cuts, while tax increases on working class people drive wages up.

“Taxes on wages will raise wages,” Ricardo wrote. “If the taxes, instead of being increased, were diminished, wages would fall.”

The reason is easy to understand: tax cuts mean more take-home pay, and when employers see that their workers are taking home more money than they need to live, they’ll lower wages to get back to where take-home pay was before the tax cut. On the other hand, if income taxes are increased employers will be forced to pay more so people’s take-home pay can once again cover the local cost of living.

We’ve even seen this work in real time. During the 1930s-1960s era, income taxes went up considerably on working class people to pay for WWII and digging America out of the Republican Great Depression; wages similarly went up. The years following Reagan’s, Bush Jr’s, and Trump’s tax cuts, however, each saw wages fall. (The same thing happened when income taxes fell after WWI and wages similarly dropped a year later.)

Which brings us to how SNAP, Medicare, and TANF have become Billionaire Protection Programs, helping them keep wages low and profits high.

Ricardo’s Iron Law works the same way with government benefits, although they largely didn’t exist in his time.

Employers know what people need to take home to meet the local cost of living, but when government subsidizes people’s food (SNAP), healthcare (Medicaid), and/or rent and utilities (TANF), employers also know that’s money they don’t have to pay out as wages.

Billionaires like the Walton Family, in other words, know that they can cut their employees’ wages by the same amount as the government subsidies that are available to those workers. Every penny of government benefits, under this GOP strategy, becomes a penny less that Walmart, for example, has to pay its people who qualify for benefits.

The one-third of SNAP recipients who are working, for example, are receiving around $3 billion a month in food support from the government; that’s $3 billion that employers can keep for themselves instead of having to pay out as wages.

Republicans love to pretend that these programs are purely designed for the truly needy (and that’s generally been the goal of Democrats who’ve created them), but they give away the game when they repeatedly — and almost always successfully — force work requirements into them.

Why, after all, would anybody put together a program to feed hungry people and then demand that, to get the full benefit, they had to have a job?

Shouldn’t every job pay enough — as Democrats have argued since the Minimum Wage was established in the 1930s — to prevent hunger? Shouldn’t people who work full-time make enough to cover healthcare, rent, and utilities?

The answer to this 50-year-long GOP scam isn’t to kill off these three programs, but, instead, to do the exact opposite of what Republicans are constantly demanding: eliminate eligibility for people working full-time jobs.

That way, employers will be forced to pay a living wage to their workers, rather than padding their bottom lines with workers’ food, medical, and rent subsidies financed by our tax dollars.

It’ll also increase pressure within state and local governments to raise minimum wages, another demonstrably positive outcome that Republicans and fat-cat billionaires hate.

Obviously, a change that radical would have to be phased in gradually and carefully, combined with increases in the Minimum Wage, so peoples lives are not disrupted.

But doing so would blow up the low-wage business model giant employers have been using for decades, converting government subsidies year-after-year into new yachts for their billionaire owners.

So, whenever you hear Republicans go on and on about the importance of “weeding out the welfare queens with work requirements,” know that what you’re really hearing is a variation on, “We want taxpayers to subsidize low-wage workers so the billionaires who fund our campaigns can buy another mansion or newspaper or TV network.”

Sometimes the biggest Republican scams are run right out in the open, right under our noses. It just takes a moment of reflection — and a simple insight from a 19th century economist — to see through them.

Hopefully the GOP’s attempt to increase Americans pain via SNAP denials will backfire and spark a much-needed conversation about how all this works. Last night’s elections are a good sign that we’re moving in that direction.

That can lead to remaking our work and welfare systems so they’ll once again benefit average people, instead of also subsidizing Trump’s plutocrat friends.

Will the 2028 election even happen, or are we watching the slow-motion rehearsal for its cancellation? Every signal from Trump’s orbit points to a deliberate strategy to turn fear, chaos, and manufactured crisis into political weapons.

History tells us how these stories end. From John Adams jailing his critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Richard Nixon’s troops gunning down students at Kent State to crackdowns by Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, authoritarians have always wrapped repression in the language of patriotism.

Today, with talk of “domestic enemies,” “rapid reaction forces,” and “nuclear demonstrations,” the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it.

Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries’ people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?

Back in 1964, Americans were worried that Barry Goldwater — with all his anti-communist rhetoric — might start a nuclear war with the USSR. Lyndon Johnson exploited that with his famous “Daisy” advertisement, where a little girl plucked petals off a flower as the countdown to a nuclear bomb sounded in the background. In the end, over video of a nuclear bomb going off, Johnson’s voice said:

“These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the darkness. We must love each other, or we must die.”

The ad ended with “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” It only ran once, but had such an impact that it turned the election and kept Johnson in office.

When I was a child we had “duck and cover” under our desks in elementary school, and lived in fear of nuclear war. My dad seriously considered building a fallout shelter in our basement; his concern wasn’t outside the mainstream.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president, people called him “Ronnie Ray Gun” because he was widely seen as the trigger-happy cowboy who might start the next world war. He reminded us of characters in the Dr. Strangelove movie.

Many folks also worried that both Goldwater and Reagan might use the intelligence and military services of America to go after their “socialist” enemies in America. Those old enough to remember can tell you how, on May 1, 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” and added, as The New York Times noted at the time:

“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Three days later, on May 4, 1970, Reagan got his bloodbath at Kent State University when 28 National Guard soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on an estimated 3,000 student protestors.

Over a mere 13 seconds, nearly 70 shots were fired. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed, and nine others were wounded. Schroeder was shot in the back, as were several of those injured.

Trump, it appears, intends to out-Goldwater and out-Reagan both of those two old cold warriors and take us fully into Putin-style leadership territory.

The top two headlines on Drudge Report on Thursday were: “TRUMP ORDERS NUKE TESTS and HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB” with a graphic reminiscent of Slim Pickens.

They were followed by six subheads:

Pentagon readying thousands of ‘reaction forces’ as DOMESTIC missions widen...
Troops across country being trained for civil unrest...
Top White House Officials Moving Onto Military Bases...
The Don Swaps Decorated Admiral With 33-Year-Old DOGE staffer...
DOD can’t say who it killed in military strikes against ‘drug smugglers’...
Dems excluded from briefing...

Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he’s ordering his military to prepare for demonstration explosions of American nuclear weapons. (“Tests” is an euphemism; there’s no doubt our bombs work just fine. Exploding them is more appropriately called a “threat.”)

Later in the day we learned that he’s ordered all 50 state national guards to prepare “rapid reaction forces,” not to fight a foreign enemy but to turn their tanks, drones, and automatic weapons of war on Americans who dissent from Trump’s coming crackdowns on “the enemy within.”

I’ve written before about how in 1798 Federalist President Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts — precursors to the Insurrection Act that came a decade later — to shut down the nation’s roughly 20 Jefferson-aligned Democratic newspapers and imprison anybody who spoke out against him (including Newark’s town drunk, Luther Baldwin).

When Jefferson became president in 1801 he let most of Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts expire, but today Trump appears hell-bent on reviving and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 that replaced them.

It appears that Trump’s plan to either sabotage or completely suspend the election of 2028 (with 2026 as a testing ground) is straightforward, a play in three acts.

First, he’s having his ICE and CPB people engage in as provocative behavior as possible, trying to produce a violent response from the citizens of Chicago or any other city where they can pull it off.

The apparent reason for this and his many lies about cities in flames and chaos is because he wants an excuse to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, and either lock down or suspend altogether for the duration of the “emergency” the next presidential elections in 2028.

Steve Bannon is already claiming Trump will be president in 2029; Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have both specifically referenced this possibility.

And it appears the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court may be planning to help him out with his project of using the military to end democracy in America. There’s now a debate about whether the phrase “regular forces” in the law Trump’s using to deploy troops includes ICE, local/state police, federal police agencies like the FBI, or military forces. The Court has asked for further arguments from both sides on the issue, with filings completed by Nov. 10th.

Second, once Trump’s thugs have stirred up enough opposition in the streets of one or more major cities to justify it, he’ll then drop the hammer with troops in a way that may well make Kent State look like a high school play.

The resulting violence and chaos will give him the excuse he needs to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, something he has repeatedly referenced in the past few months.

Third, with the authority of the Supreme Court and the Insurrection Act behind him, he’ll suspend the elections “until the present emergency subsides” and essentially declare himself king for life.

And now he’s ordered his so-called Department of War to begin testing nuclear weapons. He’s not only trying to lock down America and turn us into a dictatorship, but he clearly has serious plans to use the threat of nuclear war to further solidify his hold over America; presidents during or on the edge of a time of war have extraordinary emergency powers.

Just ask the descendants of Eugene V. Debs, who President Woodrow Wilson threw into prison for opposing World War I (then called “the Great War”) and who then ran for president from his jail cell.

The question then becomes: “Who will he choose as America’s allies?”

Will it be Europe, Ukraine, Australia, and the democracies of Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea)? Or will it be the authoritarian and nearly-authoritarian regimes of China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Russia, and Israel?

Is Trump leading America into a new Allies vs Axis conflict where the “allies” are the countries run by authoritarians who praise and fund him and his family? If so, is there any doubt he’ll replicate their domestic strategies for political repression and holding power? He’s already echoing Putin’s rhetoric about the “lying press” and “the enemy within.”

Is there any part of Trump‘s behavior that we’ve seen in the last decade that causes us to think he might join with France or Ukraine instead of with Putin or Xi, if given the chance? Just ask Volodymir Zelenskyy or Taiwan’s people about that.

Adding a final touch, Trump announced this week that he’s ordering the National Guard to create “Quick Reaction Forces” in all 50 states specifically to deal with domestic unrest.

He apparently wants a dozen violent Kent State-type events that he can use as an excuse to militarize the entire country, and a shocking number of elected Republicans and rightwing media celebrities are explicitly cheering on such an authoritarian crackdown.

California Gov. Newsom is telling anybody who will listen that the 2028 presidential election will be a “Putin [style] election” if Democrats don’t “stand up” and fight back now to block Trump’s plans to militarize the country and declare an insurrection.

“I’ll tell you what,” Newsom told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in an interview Wednesday, “we won’t have a country. We won’t have an election that’s fair and free if we don’t stand up, we won’t. There will not be a fair and free election — it’ll be a Putin election.”

Trump appears well aware of his weakness, his collapsing poll numbers, and the precipice the American economy is teetering at the edge of. He sees the same disaster coming in next week’s elections — and its presaging the GOP’s 2028 losses — just as clearly as the rest of us do.

And it appears that he has a plan to deal with it, a plan that takes John Adams’ imprisoning newspaper editors, Nixon’s Kent State massacre, and LBJ’s Vietnam War up to such Putin-like levels of intimidation, repression, and violence that the 2028 elections are at risk.

If we let him.

Some data points for your consideration:

• Last Saturday in Chicago’s affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Donald Trump’s secret, masked police violently pulled a 67‑year‑old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding.
• Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime.
• An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths.
• While more than 75 percent of Americans trusted the news 50 years ago, today that number is a mere 28 percent, with only 8 percent of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets.

These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

It’s called the algorithm, and if we’re to survive as a republic it must be regulated the same way we regulate anything else that produces addictive, compulsive behavior that twists and distorts people’s lives.

Possibly the greatest threat to humanity at this moment is the algorithm.

It can twist and wreck people’s minds and lives — tear apart families and destroy countries — in a way that can be more rapid and more powerful than heroin, cocaine, or fentanyl. And yet it is completely unregulated.

An algorithm is a software program/system that inserts itself between humans as we attempt to communicate with each other. It decides which communications are important and which are not, which communications will be shared and which will not, what we will see or learn and what we will not.

As a result, in a nation where 48 percent of citizens get much or most of their news from social media, the algorithms driving social media sites ultimately decide which direction society will move as a result of the shared information they encourage or suppress across society.

When you log onto social media and read your “feed,” you’re not seeing (in most cases) what was most recently posted by the people you “follow.” While some of that’s there, the algorithm also feeds you other posts it thinks you’ll like based on your past behavior, so as to increase your “engagement,” aka the amount of time you spend on the site and thus the number of advertisements you will view.

As a result, your attention is continually tweaked, led, and fine-tuned to reflect the goal of the algorithm’s programmers. Click on a post about voting, for example, and the algorithm then leads you to election denial, from there to climate denial, from there to Qanon.

Next stop, radicalization or paralysis. But at least you stayed along for the ride and viewed a lot of ads in the process.

Algorithms used in social media are not tuned for what is best for society. They don’t follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions, and political systems.

They don’t ask themselves, “Is this true?” or “Will this information help or hurt this individual or humanity?”

Instead, the algorithms’ main purpose is to make more money for the billionaires who own the social media platforms.

If telling you that, as Trump recently said, climate change “may affect us in 300 years” makes for more engagement (and more profit for the social media site) than does telling the truth about fossil fuels, it will get pushed into more and more minds.

No matter that such lies literally threaten human society short-term and possibly the survival of the human race long-term.

As Jaron Lanier told the Guardian:

“People survive by passing information between themselves. We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”

Those of a certain age or students of the advertising business may remember when Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders set off a panic across America in the 1960s, claiming that movies and TV shows were inserting micro-bursts of advertisements that flew below the radar of consciousness but nevertheless changed behavior.

The classic example was popcorn flashing on movie screens with the words “Buy Now!” It provoked a panic in Congress and multiple attempts at legislation to outlaw it before the practice was debunked as ineffective.

But algorithms are far from ineffective. They’re arguably one of the most powerful forces on the planet today.

The premise of several books, most famously Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is that the collection of massive amounts of data about each of us — then massaged and used by “automated” algorithms to increase our engagement — is actually a high-tech form of old fashioned but extremely effective thought control.

She argues that these companies are “intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes. New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify human behavior at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behavior modification.” (Emphasis hers.)She notes that “only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order.” Today, however, “the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed” to meet the financial goals of those engaging in surveillance capitalism.

This is such a powerful system for modifying our perspectives and behaviors, she argues, that it intervenes in or interferes with our “elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future.” (Emphasis hers.)

Social media companies have claimed that their algorithms are intellectual properties, inventions, and trade secrets, all things that fall under the rubric of laws designed to advance and protect intellectual property and commerce.

In my book The Hidden History of Big Brother: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy, I argue that algorithms should be open-source and thus publicly available for examination.

The reason so many algorithms are so toxic is because they are fine-tuned or adjusted to maximize engagement to benefit advertisers, who then pay the social media company, with little or no consideration for their impact on individuals or society.

Even more insidious, a billionaire social media company owner with a political agenda can program his algorithm to promote a particular politician, point of view, or a story that might help or destroy a politician or political party. Or even destroy a nation’s citizens’ faith in their government, media, or in democracy itself.

One way to get this under control is to require social media companies to ditch the algorithm and its associated advertising revenue model, and work instead on a subscription model with a modest fee.

Nigel Peacock and I saw this at work for the nearly two decades that we ran over 20 forums on CompuServe back in the 1980s and ’90s. Everybody there paid a membership fee to CompuServe and there was no advertising, so we had no incentive to try to manipulate their experience beyond normal moderation. There was no algorithm driving the show.

Replacing secret algorithms with subscriptions — or requiring they be publicly available in plain English so everybody can see how they’re being manipulated — would reduce the amount of screen time and the level of “screen addiction” so many people experience.

There’s an absolute consensus among both social scientists, psychologists, and political scientists that reducing algorithm-driven screen addiction would be a good thing for both individual mental health and the cohesion and health of our society.

But lacking a change in business model, the unique power social media holds to change behavior for good or ill — from Twitter spreading the Arab Spring, to Facebook provoking a mass slaughter in Myanmar, to both helping Russia elect Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 — cries out for regulation, transparency, or, preferably, both.

Three years ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Yvette Clarke, (D-NY) introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, which would do just that.

“Too often, Big Tech’s algorithms put profits before people, from negatively impacting young people’s mental health, to discriminating against people based on race, ethnicity, or gender, and everything in between,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), a co-sponsor of the legislation.“It is long past time,” she added, “for the American public and policymakers to get a look under the hood and see how these algorithms are being used and what next steps need to be taken to protect consumers.”

And — let’s not forget — to protect our democracy, our nation, and our planet.

The morbidly rich people who own our social media, focused more on adding more billions to their money bins than the consequences of their algorithms, don’t seem particularly concerned about these issues. Instead, they appear to be intentionally tweaking their algorithms to promote content that agrees with their political views and economic interests (although we can’t be sure because they keep them secret).

But it’s a safe bet that without the “enraging effect” of algorithmic amplification of outrage and hate, Donald Trump would never have become president, most Americans wouldn’t support brutal ICE tactics out of fear of brown people, and we wouldn’t today live in a nation where one in five households have stopped speaking with each other because of politics.

Right now, the Trump administration and Republican politicians don’t want to touch this subject because they believe Zuckerberg, Musk, and others who control the algorithms are using them to the GOP’s advantage.

But that sword can cut both ways, when public outrage reaches the point where it’s more profitable for the tech billionaires to promote anger against those in power than those currently on the outside.

It’s way past time to end the algorithmic manipulation of the American mind.

Pass it along (because the algorithm probably won’t).

Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he’s aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I’ll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker.

We’re living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we’ve already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where “competitive authoritarianism” lives.

That’s the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation’s systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We’re more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.

In the United States today, it’s impossible to ignore how much of that template was laid out by Viktor Orbán to the Heritage Foundation, which embedded core strategies of his authoritarian rule over Hungary into Project 2025, and is now being executed step-by-step by Trump and his lickspittles.

And with ICE making warrantless arrests while brutalizing and now spying on protesters with Stingrays and Pegasus, Putin’s FSB’s secret police are also providing a model for Trump.

We often comfort ourselves with the idea that elections alone guarantee democracy, but the fact is that democratic institutions can be hollowed out from within even as ballots are still being cast.

In Hungary, under Orbán, elections exist, but the playing field is so tilted using tools like gerrymandering that the opposition never has a fair chance, the media was captured by Orbán-aligned oligarchs, and both the courts and the legislature were packed to the point where they lost their autonomy.

That Hungarian model is now being mirrored in America. Project 2025’s blueprint doesn’t call for an overt single‐party take-over; rather it tweaks the administrative levers, centralizes power, bypasses checks and balances, staffs courts, commissions and agencies with loyalists, undermines election administration, and deploys state power to punish dissent while preserving the appearance of normalcy.

Where are we on the spectrum? Much further than many pundits will admit.

We now have elected and Trump-appointed officials who openly defy precedent, judicial rulings, and the rule of law; we have partisan weaponization of powerful institutions capable of punishing dissenters, ranging from the DOJ to the FBI and the IRS; we have dark-money networks influencing everything from policy to courts with the blessing of a corrupt Supreme Court; and we have billionaire capture of most of our media, producing widespread disinformation and naked attacks on the very idea of truth.

That is less a democracy and more a system of “managed competition,” where electoral outcomes are shaped in advance, not determined by a fair contest. In short, the clock is running fast toward a complete loss of democracy, the “autocratic breakthrough” I’ve written about before.

And while millions of Americans show up for protests — which matters — protests alone are nowhere near enough.

In effect, while protesters may feel emboldened and signal a national discontent, in the absence of durable organization, leadership, and strategy the protests are easily absorbed, marginalized, or rendered irrelevant by Trump’s fascist forces and billionaire supporters once the streets are empty again.

This is precisely the gap the Trump-Orbán-Putin model exploits. At the same time the marches are occurring, the foundation of the GOP’s up-and-coming fascist autocracy is being built: the staffing of key agencies, the rewriting of rules under emergency or administrative power, the gerrymandering and court packing, the stealth takeover of local precincts and state and county election commissions.

We must be careful that the dazzle of street energy doesn’t blind us to the quiet but decisive work of tearing down the institutional foundations of authoritarian rule that Trump, the GOP, and their morbidly rich backers are quickly laying. If we’re to stop America’s slide toward fascism we must face that stark reality.

The details underlying Project 2025 echo Hungary’s path with startling specificity. In that country a small, wealthy clique around Orbán orchestrated the capture of media, courts, electoral oversight bodies, and the constitution itself, which they then re-wrote (as Republicans are planning to do to ours when they get control of just a few more states).

Orbán changed campaign finance rules, muzzled the press, and built a client state reliant on personal loyalty rather than democratic accountability. Want a government contract? Toss some money Orbán’s way, or at his family, or to his closest cronies. Want a pardon? Ditto. An exception to rules, laws, or even taxes? Ditto again.

In the U.S. we see an analogous thinning of institutional independence, combined with the same type of cult of personality that always characterizes autocratic strongman governments. Trump’s openly expressed contempt for civil service norms, his threats to independent agencies, Republicans’ ideological staffing of courts all were cloned from the Hungarian template.

And while the U.S. remains superficially democratic — voting still happens — the basis of open, free, fair, competitive elections is under vigorous assault by “tech bros” and other billionaires who openly disdain democracy itself.

Trump announced last week that he’s sending “election monitors” to California and New Jersey — even though these are entirely state and not federal contests — presumably to intimidate both voters and election officials around the balloting happening in those states next week.

Red states are gerrymandering to prevent Democrats from ever again controlling the House of Representatives. As I lay out in The Last American President, voter purges and ballot challenges knocked over 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off the rolls or prevented the ballots they cast from being counted in 2024, giving Trump and the GOP the White House and Congress.

So what must Democrats — and unaffiliated/independent democracy advocates — do?

We have to go beyond showing up in the streets and writing outraged posts on social media (although both do help). Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light.

We need leadership and institutions capable of organizing, strategizing, and executing on multiple fronts: precincts, courts, local elections, media ecosystems, and state regulatory agencies. Protest without public faces and follow-through is like fireworks: beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.

Our challenge is both structural and strategic, and, lacking hundreds of morbidly rich billionaires funding us like Trump has, we’re already way behind.

It’s not enough to oppose; we must propose, build, and defend. Like Bernie Sanders is constantly pointing out, we must fight for reforms that fortify democracy: enforce campaign finance transparency, build public horror of concentrated media and money power, demand independent courts, safeguard election administration from partisan capture, and work to guarantee that our vote is harder to take away than our guns.

We must train a generation of leaders who don’t just show up for the “march” but stay for the precinct meeting, the town hall, the election board challenge. We must invest in institutions — particularly the DNC — that outlast ephemeral flare-ups of outrage and build resilient and genuinely progressive democratic infrastructure.

This is, after all, a progressive populist moment, as the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City and crowds showing up for Bernie and AOC’s Anti-Oligarchy Tour show. We just have to join it fully and ride its power.

Here’s the plain truth: any movement that wants democracy to prevail must realize that its job is just beginning when the banners are raised and the cameras roll. The billionaire-funded rightwing movement bent on authoritarianism has its candidates, its loyalists, its media echo-chamber, and its policy train.

This moment demands no less. We can no longer simply debate about policy or personality; we’re in a contest of governance models, of democratic vs authoritarian futures. James Carville recently told Jen Psaki that, “You aren’t scared enough yet!” Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the entire Democratic Party need to hear that message and act now. Along with the rest of us.

The longer we leave the field uncontested, the more power we hand to those with a blueprint. The window is narrowing, and the Hungarian/Russian lesson is clear: when the opposition wins the street but not the state, democracy loses.

All of us who believe in a republic of citizens — not subjects — must work to build not just rallies but infrastructure, not just energy but strategy, not just slogans but institutions.

Join progressive organizations and get inside the Democratic Party. Bring energy, enthusiasm, and passion. If you’re inclined and capable, run for office yourself.

The hour is urgent. The stakes are existential.

When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. The Trump family’s grift is teaching America’s elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, and it’s already distorting our economy.

When I was working for an international relief agency in the early 1980s, I went to Uganda during the war and famine that began when Tanzanian troops invaded to throw out Idi Amin. To get there, I had to pay a $50 bribe to the Ugandan official at their embassy in Nairobi to get my visa.

When I was leaving through the half-destroyed Entebbe airport, three soldiers pointed their automatic weapons at my face and demanded “half” of whatever money I had left before letting me through to the boarding area.

In Haiti, a cabinet-level official tried to solicit a $15,000 bribe from me in exchange for our agency getting permission to operate there (I turned it down). In a remote part of Mexico on a business trip, a police officer drove me off the road to demand $100 or else I’d “spend the night in jail.”

They were all quick, unforgettable lessons in how corruption works: when it becomes the default operating system of a country, it drains not only cash and makes it tough for honest businesspeople to earn a living, but — far more importantly — destroys democracy itself.

That same poison is now spreading here.

The corruption of Donald Trump and his children — the open solicitation of bribes disguised as “investments,” the jet plane, the crypto windfalls, the foreign hotel projects and “licensing fees,” the “donations” and “gifts” that appear tied to pardons, tariffs or regulatory relief — have begun to teach America’s morbidly rich and business leaders that access to our government is now a purchasable commodity.

Remember:

When Apple’s Tim Cook brought a chunk of 24-karat gold to gift Trump, apparently hoping for tariff exceptions?

The long list of corporations that are paying for the Epstein Ballroom, presumably in expectation of better treatment from the Trump regime?

The billions the UAE gave Trump’s kids just before Trump gave them chips they weren’t supposed to have because of national security?

Border czar Tom Homan taking $50,000 in a paper bag from an FBI agent and Trump, Bondi, and Noem laughing it off?

Or headlines like “Close Friend of JD Vance Skirts Normal Channels to Take Over Key Health Research” and “$130M Pentagon Donor Has Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”

Once that expectation of corruption takes hold, it reshapes an entire economy. It tells corporations, billionaires, and foreign governments alike that the fastest way to win contracts or avoid tariffs and other regulations isn’t through innovation or competition but through flattery, payment, or tribute to Donald, his wife, or his children.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s role models of Russia and Hungary.

In Russia, researchers estimate roughly 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s entire GDP vanishes each year into the pockets of Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs, and loyal politicians; some analysts put it even higher, approaching a quarter of the economy when you include the broader shadow sector.

In Hungary, corruption is smaller in absolute size but just as corrosive: public contracts are routinely overpriced by 20 percent or more, and a fifth of companies operate not on market principles but on loyalty to Viktor Orbán. The result is predictable: stagnant productivity, collapsing services, and a hollowed-out middle class as the Orbán family becomes fabulously rich.

Corruption functions like a tax, but one that never funds schools or bridges. It rewards obedience and punishes competence. Once leaders and their families start selling favors, the smart business move isn’t to innovate but to curry favor; the fastest path to profit is proximity to power.

Small businesses get crushed because they can’t afford the “entry fee.” Big ones stagnate because every decision runs through political connections. Ordinary people watch their roads crumble, their wages flatten, and their faith in fairness evaporate. The economy quietly re-optimizes itself around bribery instead of merit, and everyone — except the oligarchs — pays.

That’s where America is today. Trump has already normalized the spectacle of CEOs and foreign leaders making pilgrimages to the White House or Mar-a-Lago with million-dollar checks or lavish gifts. His family’s private ventures, from crypto to foreign hotels to golf resorts, are magnets for anyone seeking goodwill from the man with the power to sign their contracts or reduce their tariffs.

And with five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized unlimited political bribery of themselves and politicians through Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, and Citizens United v. FEC, there’s barely a law left to stop it.

We’ve seen this movie before. In every kleptocracy, every dictatorship throughout history, the leader’s personal enrichment becomes national policy. Regulators are neutered, watchdogs are fired, and the press is bullied into silence through lawsuits, regulation, and oligarchic purchase.

Then come the strong-arm tactics: the intimidation of lawyers, journalists, and opponents under the guise of “law and order.” It’s what Putin did when Alexei Navalny exposed Gazprom’s graft and paid with his life; it’s what Orbán did when he had critics of his corruption prosecuted and bankrupted.

And now, here, attorneys defending protesters are being detained at airports while Trump suspends enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so he, his billionaire buddies, and his family members can profit from foreign deals.

Corruption doesn’t just rot morality; it wrecks economies. When a nation’s leadership is for sale, domestic and foreign corporations start bidding instead of building.

Economists call it “state capture”: private interests rewriting the rules for their own benefit. Studies from the IMF and World Bank show that captured states lose growth, investment, and trust, while inequality soars. In Russia’s case, that loss adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. In Hungary’s, GDP per capita has fallen far behind its once-equal neighbors.

The same dynamic is taking shape here as tax breaks, tariffs, and deregulation are auctioned off to the highest bidders.

For most Americans, this translates into worse schools, fewer jobs, and higher prices. Every time a corporation pays a bribe to secure a contract, it folds that “cost of doing business” into what you and I pay at the store or in taxes. Every time a billionaire buys a loophole or a pardon, the rest of us pick up the tab.

Meanwhile, the honest business owner who refuses to play along loses bids, the worker loses bargaining power, and democracy itself loses credibility. The economy becomes a closed club, guarded by money, loyalty, and fear.

Recovering from this kind of rot isn’t easy, but history shows it can be done.

Countries that have clawed their way back from systemic corruption did it by prosecuting openly corrupt leaders while making the sale of influence difficult and dangerous: forcing transparency in contracts, requiring officials to divest from private holdings, empowering independent prosecutors, protecting whistleblowers, and putting every government transaction online where citizens can see it.

The sunlight approach works because it raises the cost of corruption higher than its payoff.

That’s the crossroads we face now. We can follow Russia and Hungary down the path where 15 to 20 percent of national wealth disappears into private hands each year, or we can defend the idea that government exists to serve the public, not enrich the Trump dynasty.

If we fail, America will cease to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. We’ll become a market; one where laws, tariffs, and justice are just products to be bought and sold by those with the closest access to Trump or his family members.

I’ve seen what that world looks like up close, staring down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at Entebbe Airport. The stakes aren’t abstract. Corruption is the moment when fear replaces fairness, when power replaces principle, and when Americans become “customers” of their own government instead of citizens.

If we let Trump and his circle finish that transformation, America won’t just resemble Putin’s Russia, it will have become just another tinpot dictatorship with a fabulously rich “royal” entourage and a vast class of the struggling, working poor who can’t afford to spiff the First Family.

“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty: The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

—James Madison, Federalist 47

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (emphasis Jefferson’s)
— Thomas Jefferson, commentary on Federalist 48

Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint.

He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked.

If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

That historical reality notwithstanding, “King” Donald has decided, all by himself, to demolish a large chunk of The People’s White House and replace it with a replica of Vladimir Putin’s Winter Palace’s Grand Throne Room so he can entertain billionaires with large, high-dollar fundraisers at the taxpayers’ expense without having to travel all the way to Mar-a-Largo.

He didn’t bother to get permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, nor did he submit plans for what people are now calling the “Epstein Ballroom” to the National Capital Planning Commission as any other historic building in D.C. would do. Loopholes in the law apparently allowed him to do this, however, because previous generations of lawmakers never imagined a president would be so insane as to one day demolish parts of the White House without consulting Congress or the people, so they saw no need to forbid it.

Which leaves only Congress as the single agency that could have thwarted Trump’s imperial plans. As any Constitutional scholar will tell you — as would Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson or Father of the Constitution James Madison — that’s at the foundation of their job.

Congress is supposed to have oversight over the president, to constrain him with laws, budgets, and hearings, and keep his behavior within the law. Like they did when Richard Nixon was bugging the Democratic National Committee, or when Bill Clinton tried covering up his affair, or George W. Bush engaged in illegal torture after lying us into two wars.

They should be demanding answers about Trump’s lawless “murders” (quoting Colombia’s president) of people in the Caribbean, his imposing tariffs in violation of Article I of the Constitution, or his ICE agency’s brutality and illegal warantless arrests.

But to do that — even to have prevented his unilateral tearing down part of the White House — the House of Representatives would have to convene oversight hearings and create such a public uproar that Trump would back down, and there’s a real possibility that could have happened, particularly as Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Thomas Massey (R-KY) are starting to stand up to Trump.

The only problem is that Congress is on vacation. Apparently because Trump ordered it: we all know that if he wanted the House open, it would be open today.

Johnson has shut down the House by sending everybody home and then dragging out the recess. The growing concern is that he’s doing this at Trump’s demand in order to eliminate congressional oversight and thus enhance his now-near-dictatorial power.

Johnson has kept the chamber in indefinite recess during a government shutdown — the first Speaker in history to do so — while refusing to hold even pro forma sessions, seat a duly elected member (Adelita Grijalva, of Arizona), or allow continuing resolutions to reach the floor.

This is against the law — the supreme law — of the land. There is no joint resolution with the Senate allowing for a recess longer than three days, nor has the Senate passed such a standalone resolution. Article I, §5, cl.4 of the Constitution reads:

“Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”

Congress didn’t even suspend its functioning for weeks like this during the Civil War or WWII; it’s literally never happened before.

So why would Johnson take this unprecedented step? What’s the emergency that’s greater than the War of 1812, WWI, 9/11, or any other crisis?

One possible answer is that it’s all about increasing Trump’s power as potentate, so he can do whatever he wants — like demolishing part of the White House — with no criticism or examination, no hearings or testimony, no experts or historians, from the House of Representatives.

By halting committee work, freezing discharge petitions through this naked (and unconstitutional) calendar manipulation, and withholding any date for Congress to reconvene, Johnson — obviously fulfilling Trump’s demand — has placed the entire legislative branch into a political form of suspended animation.

Why does Trump want this? Why does he care about the House of Representatives enough to put Mike Johnson in this difficult, illegal situation? This threat to Johnson’s legacy as Speaker?

The House, which only “exists” as a functional body when formally in session (normal or pro forma), has been rendered incapable of introducing bills, issuing subpoenas, or performing any oversight whatsoever of the executive branch, from Trump to Stephen Miller to Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or anybody else.

And even if the Senate were to step in and “legalize” Johnson’s recess, his dragging it out this long or longer would still have the same impact on weakening what’s left of our democracy and handing more and more uncountable power to Trump.

What Johnson has pulled off is a “procedural” coup: he (with Trump) now controls whether Congress exists at all. His keeping the House in recess concentrates extraordinary power in the Speaker’s office and, by extension, in Trump, whose directives Johnson slavishly follows.

With the calendar erased and committees paralyzed, transparency and accountability over the executive and judicial branches has disappeared; the public can’t track missed votes, can’t demand action, and federal agencies like Vought’s CBO and Noem’s ICE can operate entirely unchecked.

Border Czar Tom Homan suddenly has no oversight. Whatsoever. Ditto for Bondi, Noem, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Patel, Miller, etc.

They can do whatever they damn well please, particularly since they appear to believe they’ll get pardoned if they get caught breaking the law.

Furthermore, the longer this paralysis continues, the more it normalizes an unbalanced government in which the president acts without legislative restraint.

If this continues, or Johnson falls into a pattern of repeatedly recessing Congress whenever Trump requires him to, Trump might as well declare himself king.

Without the House, even the Senate can’t act in a meaningful way; the Constitution requires that all legislation involving money — including any laws or resolutions that may tie Trump’s hands (since virtually all actions must be paid for) — must originate in the House. (Article 7, Clause 1: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…”)

Without ever proclaiming it out loud, Mike Johnson has accomplished what open insurrection never could: the methodical, bureaucratic nullification of Congress itself, eliminating its ability to perform oversight over Trump.

All without even a peep or notice from the mainstream press, who are instead fixated on the government shutdown, seemingly thinking it’s the same thing as, or part of, the House recess.

If Johnson doesn’t back down, or if he does temporarily but this becomes a regular thing, our republic will have been really and truly turned into a kingdom — complete with a massive new throne room — before our very eyes.

When Emmett Till’s mother lifted the veil from her son’s mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning.

The same courage is needed now.

Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein.

She says the FBI — and, presumably, Director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.

She says the Department of Justice — and, presumably, AG Pam Bondi (who turned a blind eye to Epstein’s crimes during the eight years she was Florida’s Attorney General while he was raping children under her nose) — knows the names of those men.

The only ones kept in the dark are the American people.

Wallace’s words should set the country on fire:

“Yes, I know who the names are. Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”

Yet the files remain sealed, and the truth sits buried under bullshit excuses about “ongoing investigations” and “legal process” that are obviously designed to protect one person: Donald Trump. Was he also raping children? Was the Miss Teen USA Pageant he owned back then also part of Epstein’s network, feeding teenage girls to predators?

Is that what House Speaker Mike Johnson is working so hard to cover up? Are they haunted by the Newsweek headline: “Epstein Victim Was Contestant in Donald Trump’s Teen Beauty Pageant”? Is that why Johnson is refusing to swear Adelita Grijalva into office?

Most recently we’ve been treated to the naked lies Patel and Bondi are apparently telling (or shrouding with legalese) about not having “Epstein’s list” at all, something both of them previously claimed existed. Did it simply vanish? Did they destroy it, after Bondi told the press that it was “sitting on my desk right now” back in February?

Virginia Giuffre fought to expose Epstein’s network of predators who were, and still are, protected both by their great wealth and the status that can confer and, now, by the Republican Party itself. Her courage cost her her life, and her death leaves behind both a tragedy and a moral demand.

Her story is not gossip. It’s unambiguous testimony about how men in power like Donald Trump shield themselves from justice. It’s the record of an old boy system that would rather bury the victims than confront the abusers.

Every institution involved in this cover-up is rotting from within. The Republican-controlled House and Senate. Trump’s Department of Justice. His toady-controlled FBI.

We’ve seen this sickness before.

The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests for decades. George W. Bush’s administration lied about torture and murder.

Corporations selling tobacco, asbestos, fossil fuels, and opioids hid reports on their deadly products and hired corrupt “scientists” and paid off mostly-Republican politicians to help them continue killing Americans and our planet for billions in profits. Trump’s administration even tried to bring back asbestos.

There’s not a family in America that wasn’t touched by this criminality and these men’s lies: the asbestos industry’s executives’ coverups killed my father, and the tobacco industry’s executives’ coverups killed my younger brother Stanley.

The formula never changes. When uncomfortable truths threaten people who hold great wealth and power, they use that power to hide the truth. The result is always the same: a deep moral infection that spreads — and often kills — until the public rises up to clean it out.

The Epstein case is not about one man. It’s about a culture of privilege that believes laws are for the poor and justice is for the powerless.

If a large group of men are named in the files as abusers of children, and if the FBI and DOJ know who they are as Virginia Giuffre alleges, then every day of silence is a crime against humanity.

Every Trump administration official who stays quiet is an accomplice. Every Republican representative or senator who hides behind “procedure” and cowers in fear of Trump joins the conspiracy.

America cannot heal by hiding its wounds. Just as Emmett Till’s mother forced the nation to look at the face of violent racism, we must now look at the faces of those men Trump and Epstein traveled with who used children as sex objects and hid behind the power their great wealth conferred.

It may be painful to see, but the truth is always painful before it’s redemptive. The cover-up must end. The files must be released. The names must be spoken.

Those who raped and trafficked children with Epstein — including Trump, if the evidence points in that direction — must face public exposure and legal punishment. They should not hold office, sit on boards, or enjoy the comforts of respectability. They should face justice.

And those who know and remain silent must be held to account as well. We can’t have one standard for the powerful and another for everyone else. A democracy that protects predators because they’re rich or politically powerful is no democracy at all.

The FBI, the Department of Justice, Republicans in Congress, and every public servant with knowledge of these crimes must decide which side of history they stand on. If they choose secrecy, they stand with the abusers. If they choose truth, they stand with the victims and with the conscience of the nation. There is no middle ground.

This is not about revenge. It’s about cleansing the moral fabric of our country. Evil thrives in silence. It feeds on secrecy. When sunlight hits corruption, it dies. The moment those names are made public, the reckoning begins. That’s how justice starts.

Let the people see what’s been done. Let them see who did it. Let them see the truth that Trump and those around him have tried so hard to bury.

Emmett Till’s mother showed us what courage looks like. Now that same courage is needed again. Until the truth is out, until the names are spoken, until justice is real, the stain will remain on us all.

Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he’s the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don’t believe it.

The reason he’s rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he’s so extraordinarily weak.

It’s why he’s breaking laws left and right, from laws against bribery to the Hatch Act to Posse Comitatus.

It’s why he’s trying to provoke a military confrontation with Venezuela, the same as Reagan did with Grenada two days after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.

It’s why he’s trying to distract us from the Epstein Files and the reality that a third of America’s states are in or nearly in recession.

It’s why every time a report comes out about inflation continuing to spike, unaffordable housing, or job growth stalling out, he comes up with some new outrageous shiny object to dangle in front of the media.

Trump, in fact, is pretty much unique among both modern and historic figures who rode elective office to power and then turned their nations into dictatorships. None were as weak as Trump is today when they succeeded in consolidating enough power to eliminate their challengers and lock down the populace. All had a massively larger base. Consider:

Putin: Came to power just a few years after the Soviet Union had collapsed and in the rubble of the nearly incoherent presidency of the severely alcoholic President Boris Yeltsin. When he became acting president in 1999 amid war in Chechnya and economic recovery, his approval rating vaulted from 31 percent to 80 percent in three months. He sustained 80–88 percent support between 2003–2008, with popular acclaim for restoring order and boosting wages and pensions. Even during controversial wars, his approval reflected genuine public trust, peaking at 86–88 percent following the 2008 war with Georgia and 89 percent after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Orbán: His early political career was marked by charisma and reformist credentials. In 1998, at 35, he became Hungary’s youngest prime minister after leading Fidesz — a progressive student movement — to victory. His personal popularity was rooted in perceptions of competence, patriotism, and authenticity amid widespread post-Soviet disillusionment. Even critics acknowledged his ability to project “a modern conservative vision” that appealed to broad swaths of Hungarian society. I’ve written about how I was in Budapest the summer of 1989 when, as a 26-year-old former “student leader,” he gave his first major speech, cementing his then-liberal reformist credentials, eventually catapulting him into power.

Hitler: Germany was in shambles from World War I and the punishing demands of the Treaty of Versailles when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933. A bit over a year later, an Aug 19, 1934 referendum on merging the positions of president and chancellor into a single office with him holding it produced an 89.9 percent “Yes” vote. He built the Autobahn, started Volkswagen, and rebuilt the country from the ashes of the war. Under his massive public works and social welfare programs, unemployment fell sharply after 1933 via public works/rearmament from ~34 percent in January 1933 to ~14 percent by January 1936.

Mussolini: In Italy, Mussolini consolidated mass support through national restoration and charisma, rather than coercion. His Fascist Party drew broad appeal by promising to end postwar chaos and “restore Italian greatness.” Mussolini’s personal image — “manly,” “decisive,” and virile — was widely hailed in the Italian media. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which reconciled Italy with the Catholic Church, skyrocketed his legitimacy among Catholics and conservatives, cementing a decade of popularity across classes. Even the American public, as contemporaneous accounts noted, admired Mussolini’s “efficiency” (“making the trains run on time”) and national modernization during the 1920s.

Looking at our own hemisphere, Fujimori succeeded in destroying democracy in Peru and Bukele did the same in El Salvador, but both solved major crises that gave them over 80 percent approval ratings across their nations when they seized that kind of power.

In Peru, as political scientist Jonathan Schlefer writes for Politico, inflation was so bad that a tube of toothpaste cost as much as a house had five years earlier, while El Salvador was both poor and overwhelmed by gangs that had seized control of most of the country.

By contrast, Trump’s approval rating is consistently low, even though he keeps lying about it as he claims a broad mandate. He didn’t even break 50 percent of the popular vote in 2024, and lost the popular vote in 2016.

As of Oct. 20, 2025, 44.2 percent approved and 52.1 percent disapproved of his presidency, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin. The RealClearPolitics average gives him around 45 percent, while Gallup finds 40 percent, making him one of the least popular U.S. presidents at this stage in all of our history.

His economic approval has sunk to 34 percent, with 62 percent disapproving of his behavior amid inflation and federal shutdown unrest. Unlike his predecessors or authoritarians in other countries that lost their democracies, his base remains intense but small; there’s no evidence of majoritarian enthusiasm existing outside of his core partisan bloc.

The few Republicans willing to defy him and speak up about Trump’s unpopularity (and that of his policies) are often blunt and even see their own popularity increase because of their resistance.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, told Semafor Trump‘s economic policies are ruining America and his popularity:

“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House [of Representatives] if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”

So, how does Trump hold onto power and the loyalty of Republican politicians?

Fear, it turns out, is the cement that’s holding the GOP together under Trump.

His indictment of lifelong Republican James Comey and his pardon of criminal grifter George Santos were unambiguous messages to every Republican politician in the nation. He was saying, in effect

“Stay with me and keep licking my boots and I’ll keep you safe even if you commit horrible crimes; cross me and I’ll destroy you.”

So far, it’s working. But as Schlefer points out in Politico, wannabe strong men like Trump only succeed in destroying democracy in wealthy nations about one in four times. Most often, as we recently saw in South Korea and Brazil, they fail and then suffer the consequences; both former presidents are now in prison.

For Trump and the people who are either excusing or actively participating in his corruption and naked crimes, holding onto power almost exclusively by fear is a dangerous game.

As John Adams noted in 1776:

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion… that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”

But politicians like Trump (and his lickspittles) eventually find themselves trapped by the very fear they’ve used to paralyze their party members into compliance or silence. As Winston Churchill famously said:

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”

This is why Trump, as noted above, is building such a massive police and military presence, along with constructing hundreds of new concentration camps across America.

It’s why he had to fire the commission that oversees the White House before taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It’s why he’s desperately trying to pack courts and government agencies with toadies who worship or fear him; he knows he only has a short window before the country truly fights back against his strongman attempts to turn America into a third world tinpot dictatorship with a “royal” family that’s corruptly made billions off their brief moment in power.

Fearful men always lean on violence and the threat of violence because eventually the spell of the fear they’re trying to cast across the nation is broken.

We saw it in the American Revolution, when 57 men defied the terror King George III had imposed here when they signed their names — producing an instant death sentence from the British crown — to the Declaration that ended, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

When enough people stand up against state terrorism to hit a critical mass (3.5 percent of the population, according to political scientist Erica Chenoweth), others quickly join them. The turnout for the No Kings marches suggest we’re close to that.

Evangelist Billy Graham (who, were he still alive, would certainly be horrified by his corrupt son’s behavior) reminded us:

“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”

So, take heart. The No Kings marches proved both Trump’s widespread unpopularity and the fearlessness of an American public echoing over two centuries of our nation standing up to tinpot despots and wannabe dictators.

We Americans have never tolerated a king or a dictator, and we’re not about to start now.

The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets, explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.

But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.

Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.

The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about SDS, the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.

Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’s success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.

As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.

When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.

Donald Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.

Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.

But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly DEI) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.

Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.

Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.

The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.

That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.

The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements were powered by organizations like the SCLC, SNCC, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.

Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.

Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.

It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The rightwing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.

For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.

They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.

And it paid off.

When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.

While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority rightwing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.

Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.

Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.

Money is speech, the Court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.

The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.

This is not a conspiracy theory: it’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.

The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.

If democracy is to survive, Democrats — and small-d democrats— must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.

Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and — most important — get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.

The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.

Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible — the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement — has gotten us off to a great start.

The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the off-season, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.

Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.

We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.

Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.

These are not slogans: they’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.

And none of this will succeed longterm without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.

Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.

As Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Addams, King, Chavez, Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.

The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.

The No Kings Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.

The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.

Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.

The No Kings Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.

If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.

Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.

That is the revolution worth marching for.

Is the U.S. military already in the early stages of a Trump-led coup against our Constitution?

Inside the Pentagon, loyalty is being elevated above law as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly removes senior military lawyers, the very officials meant to uphold legality and restraint, and replaces them with loyalists.

The purge has also happened to senior military leadership. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, which has overseen the strikes against boats off the coast of Venezuela, is stepping down.

While Adm. Holsey has not said why he’s leaving, it may well be a continuation of the troubling trend of purges of highly qualified senior military officials who may have been inclined to restrain Trump’s illegal and fascistic impulses.

The recent purge of military attorneys, in particular, isn’t routine bureaucracy; it’s the deliberate dismantling of the safeguards that prevent America’s armed forces from becoming a political weapon against America’s citizens and democracy.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of what’s happening right now inside the Pentagon.

At the Washington Post, David Ignatius asks why the military has not spoken out against Trump’s attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela and what I characterize as his unconstitutional deployments of troops against American civilians. Ignatius answers his own question in the article’s second paragraph:

“One chilling answer is that the Trump team has gutted the JAGs — judge advocate generals — who are supposed to advise commanders on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Without these independent military lawyers backing them up, commanders have no recourse other than to comply or resign.”

Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs, are the institutional safeguard against unlawful orders: they advise commanders on rules of engagement, the Geneva Conventions, and the limits of presidential authority.

When an administration starts purging them, we’re not looking at a routine personnel shuffle. We’re seeing the careful dismantling of the guardrails that prevent America’s military from being weaponized against the American people.

This purge began with Hegseth’s February firing of the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. He claimed they simply weren’t “well suited” to provide recommendations on lawful orders. But no criminal charges were alleged, no ethics complaints cited; he simply removed them wholesale.

The message is clear: loyalty trumps legal judgment. Just like in Third World dictatorships. Just like in Putin’s Russia, which increasingly appears to be Donald Trump‘s role model.

Once the old guard was removed, Hegseth quietly moved to remake the JAG corps itself. According to reporting in the Guardian, his office is pushing an overhaul to retrain military lawyers in ways that give commanders more leeway and produce more permissive legal advice.

His personal — not military — lawyer who defended him against sexual abuse allegations, Tim Parlatore, has been involved in this process, wielding influence over how rules of engagement are interpreted and how internal discipline is handled.

At the same time, the Secretary has transformed Pentagon press controls. This week, the Washington Post exposed how Hegseth used Parlatore to help draft sweeping restrictions on journalist access and movement within the Department of Defense.

Under the new rules, similar to the way the Kremlin operates, reporters are required to sign pledges stating they won’t gather or use unauthorized material (even unclassified), or risk losing their Pentagon credentials if they stray. The policy also limits reporter mobility within the Pentagon and curtails direct contact with military personnel unless escorted.

The reaction was swift. Dozens of media organizations — Reuters, the Times, the Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, the Atlantic — refused to sign Hegseth’s pledge, citing constitutional concerns and the chilling effects of such controls. Only the far-right One America News agreed. Meanwhile, the Pentagon Press Association declined to sign and warned that these rules constitute “a disturbing situation” intended to limit leaks and suppress accountability.

Put these moves together and a frightening pattern emerges: purge independent legal advisers who might say “no,” and gag the press before the damage can be exposed. Combine that with increasingly aggressive, unilateral action by the military abroad, and you have the outlines of a strategy for bypassing democratic oversight.

A Trump-forced coup, in other words.

Wednesday, the U.S. Navy again struck what Trump claims was a drug-trafficking vessel off Venezuela, reportedly killing six people. There was no clear congressional authorization, and the legal justification remains opaque. When you remove internal legal dissent and public scrutiny, the threshold to use force becomes dangerously low.

The domestic implications are equally chilling. Trump has publicly said that he wants to use U.S. cities as training grounds for troops, and openly declared he would fire any general who fails to show total loyalty.

A wannabe dictator can’t deploy troops into American neighborhoods if he still has JAGs saying “that’s not legal,” or a press corps reporting on where they go. First he has to make sure there are no internal brakes and no public witnesses. That’s how coups are built.

Defenders will argue this is about “efficiency,” about correcting an overly cautious JAG culture, or about closing leaks. But that’s clearly a lie: real reform would emphasize transparent standards, not loyalty tests.

If the JAG corps must be reformed, it should be done by independent committees, not by one political operator calling shots. If press controls must be tightened for security, those rules should be public, constrained by constitutional guardrails, and open to judicial review, not enforced behind closed doors.

Make no mistake: this is not abstract. JAG officers are a bulwark against unlawful war, war crimes, and misuse of force at home. Silencing and replacing them is not the act of a healthy republic: it’s the early work of authoritarian takeover.

Combine that with gag orders and the purge of senior military leadership that might resist Trump’s illegal moves, and we’re watching the architecture of strongman autocracy being assembled piece by piece.

A military coup doesn’t typically happen in one dramatic moment, even though it appears that way when it reaches a climax. It begins through personnel decisions, institutional erosion, secrecy, and incremental normalization of power. The moment the legal counsel corps stops buffering against rash orders, the moment the press is muzzled, the path darkens.

We’re closer to that moment than many — including across our media — realize or are willing to acknowledge.

So the question now is whether there are still Republicans in Congress who will demand hearings, whether military leaders will raise alarms, and whether citizens will recognize the stakes.

Saturday's “No Kings Day” wasn’t just a slogan. It was a literal call to defend the republic. The time to act is before the tanks roll, not after.

Because what’s happening right now may not look like a coup to the average American, but it is unmistakably the preparation for one.

Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.

In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.

One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber … Great, I love Hitler.”

Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”

These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.

If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.

And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in ICE detention centers across the United States. Seven out of 10 have never been convicted of a crime.

Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.

This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.

And Americans, by and large, are looking away.

History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.

But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.

At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”

By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.

That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”

And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “ detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at Brown people?

They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.

They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.

They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”

But what this really is — and what we must call it without hesitation — is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.

This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.

When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.

If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.

History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.

We like to tell ourselves “it can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.

Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.

And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.

The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.

We must not make the same mistake.

JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”

As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:

The leaders were in their twenties and thirties and held political jobs, including:
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, U.S. Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.

To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.

Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.

The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.

That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.

There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.

America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.

Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.

The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.

So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.

Show up this Saturday for No Kings Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”

This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.

Airport managers need to wake up fast. With only a handful of exceptions, people running airports across America are risking serious fines and being barred from government work for up to five years by broadcasting political messaging on behalf of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

Federal law — the Hatch Act — makes it a crime, punishable by fines and loss of current and future employment, to use government facilities or taxpayer money for partisan political purposes. Yet Noem, who has earned her national reputation as a puppy-killer and by cosplaying “tough cop” with her alleged boyfriend (they’re both married to other people), has pushed out a video to airports across the country blaming Democrats for the current shutdown.

This isn’t just a violation of federal law; it’s also a bald-faced lie.

Republicans today control the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted to end the shutdown, he could do so this afternoon.

All it would take is the same maneuver Republicans have used repeatedly: a Senate rules change allowing passage of their Continuing Resolution to keep the government open, using only 50 votes plus the Vice President.

We’ve seen it before. Betsy DeVos only became Secretary of Education because Mike Pence broke a 50–50 tie in the Senate. Jeff Sessions squeaked through 52–47 as Attorney General. Rex Tillerson and Tom Price were confirmed with slim margins. And when it came to the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell killed the filibuster to ram through Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Democrats, by contrast, failed when they tried to change the rules to pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights acts. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin sided with Republicans to preserve the filibuster, betraying the public interest.

So let’s be clear: this shutdown is not a matter of Senate procedure. Republicans have the power to end it today. They’re choosing not to because they want to strip health care from millions while protecting their $4 trillion tax cut for billionaires.

The 1939 Hatch Act, upheld by the Supreme Court in CSC v. Letter Carriers, outlaws the practice of federal officials converting government facilities into campaign machines. Its penalties are real: removal from service, debarment, suspensions, reprimands, and fines.

Some airport managers understand this, which is why several are refusing to air Noem’s message.

As of today, at least seven airports have declined to run the video at TSA checkpoints, citing policies and laws that prohibit political messaging in publicly funded facilities. Portland International Airport management informed the local ABC News affiliate:

“We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging.”

The Washington Post reports that Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Portland have all also said no, with at least two explicitly pointing to the Hatch Act as the reason.

By distributing this video, Noem has implicated not just herself but also airport managers nationwide, most of whom are now breaking federal law by broadcasting it. They face personal liability, including fines and disbarment from government work.

That they’ve gone along with Noem reflects how normalized lawbreaking has become in today’s Republican politics led by a 34-times-convicted felon and alleged rapist.

The lie about the shutdown itself compounds the crime. Citizens in a democracy must be able to trust their government to tell the truth about who is responsible for policy decisions and why they’re done. When those in power use public money to gaslight the public, accountability collapses. That is exactly why the Hatch Act exists.

There is precedent for enforcement of the Act even at the highest levels. The Office of Special Counsel recommended Kellyanne Conway be fired for repeated Hatch Act violations. Trump ignored it. He also ignored the law when his administration used the White House for the Republican National Convention and when he and Elon Musk went out front of it to hustle Teslas.

Republicans have apparently learned that if they break the law and face no consequences, the law effectively ceases to exist.

If Democrats are serious about defending both the rule of law and what’s left of America’s democracy, they must insist on prosecutions. That means removal from office for Noem, claims against the propagandists who produced and distributed the video, and charges against airport managers who continue broadcasting it. Anything less signals that the Hatch Act — and the rest of American law that could restrain Trump and his lickspittles — is a dead letter.

This is not a partisan point. Imagine if a Democratic administration produced a video blaming Republicans for a shutdown, then forced airports to broadcast it. Republicans would be demanding prosecutions, and rightly so. The law must apply equally or it means nothing at all.

Noem needs to stop lying. She needs to stop breaking the law. And Democrats need to stop pretending this is “politics as usual.” It is not. These are crimes designed to shift blame for a shutdown that is entirely the responsibility of the Republican Party, which could end it tomorrow with 51 votes in the Senate.

If there is no accountability now, America will slide further toward a future where propaganda is pumped through every government-owned screen and speaker. That is what has happened in Russia and Hungary, where public spaces are saturated with partisan messaging and independent voices silenced.

The Hatch Act was written to prevent that fate here. It must be enforced — with indictments, prosecutions, and disbarment — before it’s too late.

For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.

Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.

Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.

Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.

I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.

This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?

There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.

From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.

Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.

This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.

When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.

Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.

German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.

Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled more than 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.

It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.

Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.

But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.

When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”

But it never ends with “them.”

Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.

ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.

Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.

But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.

For a reason.

Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:

“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)

Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.

To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.

This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.

Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.

“Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say ‘Democrat Party,’ with an emphasis on the ‘rat’.”

It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Governor Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US Senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.

If you think Democrats — including registered Democratic voters — aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”

The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.

And if we ever get used to it, God help America.