Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.

Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci last week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity.

He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying:

“You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!”

Throughout it all, he retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait.

But the larger story here is what these white supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.

Libertarian crackpot and fake science fan Rand Paul led this attack, ostensibly designed to sweep the headlines away from dead and dying Americans in Iran, the price of food and rent, and the allegations that Trump was raping children. But the real goal was even more monstrous.

What happened in 2020 can only be called an intentional, racially-based mass murder of American citizens, planned and executed by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner for purely political purposes, and virtually ignored by the American mainstream media.

And these ongoing attacks on Fauci — led by proponents (like Rand Paul) of the discredited, pseudo-science theory that “herd immunity” could have solved the crisis if we only let enough people die from Covid — are part of the effort to whitewash that history.

Here’s what really happened that they don’t want you to remember:

Throughout January and February of 2020, Covid was limited to a few clusters here in the US, all in Blue state cities that were major air hubs like Seattle and New York.

March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.

Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes because nobody yet knew for sure how this disease was transmitted or how deadly it would become.

We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.

In March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut down both of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged his son-in-law, nepo-baby slumlord Jared Kushner, with responding to the crisis.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses — along with Dr. Fauci — were our new national heroes.

By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. At Fauci’s suggestion, Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 13th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.

The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, as Dr. Fauci pointed out, the number one consideration.

Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.

They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.

But then came April 7th, just one month later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.

It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.

It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.

Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not white people!

As The New York Times reported on April 7th:

“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…
“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”

White supremacist Republicans and rightwing media responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”

Rush Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:

“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”

And here it was:

“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh giddily intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation!”

It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and are also over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.

It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people were going to die more frequently from coronavirus.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7th front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox “News” — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the following day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now that Black people were the ones most likely to die if we forced people back to work, Tucker said on April 8th:

“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”

“The rest,” of course, were white people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get back to work were disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:

“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.”

On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly white — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere that (mostly white) people could work from home, employers were making accommodations.

But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock quickly because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose. He knew that if he wanted to win that November and stay in the White House, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.

Particularly if they were Black or Hispanic, as were the majority of these “essential” workers, particularly in meat packing.

(The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 10, 2020, found that among 9,919 cases in 21 states with reported race and ethnicity, 87% of all Covid deaths occurred among racial and ethnic minority workers.)

Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as Fox’s “real news guy,” intoned, in response to the report that mostly Black and Hispanic people were dying:

“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”

Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.

Fully 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and the rightwing media knew that most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, priorities were suddenly very, very different.

Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and Hispanic people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease!

On April 12th, just four days after the news that most deaths were Black and Hispanic people in Blue states, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”

On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.

The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid-death and -injuries lawsuits.

Three days after that, the white-billionaire-funded Freedomworks and the all-white House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that:

“[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”

Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to:

“Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”

One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in nearly-all-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.

One that drew particularly high levels of media attention — complete with swastikas, confederate flags, and assault rifles — was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer and her Black Lieutenant General, Garlin Gilchrist.

This was around the time long-standing rightwing white supremacist networks began to awaken and coordinate with each other. They reached out to members of Congress and the Senate and found Republican allies. Trump explicitly encouraged them to require low-wage essential workers to return to their jobs.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill — unnecessarily — at least a half-million Americans with the disproportionately biggest death tolls among working-age Blacks and Hispanics.

NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline:

“Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”

When Rachel Maddow reported that meat-packing plants were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick people were mostly Hispanic and Black.

He essentially said, “No big deal.”

The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio: Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get less sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.

And meat packing plants essential to white Americans’ food supply were places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).

Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly of all races were dying in nursing homes.

But the death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was still relatively low.

It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base while blaming it all on Democratic Blue state governors.

And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, Trump might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified white men supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

That’s right: “An effective political strategy.”

It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Red states, not being coastal travel hubs and generally lightly populated, seemed to have been spared.

And there was an election coming in just a few months, so Trump began explicitly scapegoating Blue state governors for the high death rates.

Just four weeks after Trump changed his policy to force “essential workers” back into their jobs, he went on Fox to argue that Blue states should not get federal assistance because they were mismanaging Covid. As NBC News reported, Trump said:

“It’s not fair to the Republicans, because all the states that need help, they’re run by Democrats in every case. Florida is doing phenomenal. Texas is doing phenomenal. The Midwest is, you know, fantastic…”

He kept at it, for months, leading up to the election in November.

As ABC News reported on September 17, 2020, Trump gleefully pushed Kushner‘s “effective political strategy,” pointing out the low Covid death rates in Red states, adding:

“So we’re down in this [Red state] territory. And that’s despite the fact that the blue states had had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”

ABC News closed that article with a paragraph noting:

“[Y]esterday was the furthest the president has gone in politicizing the pandemic which has claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans.”

As a result of Trump’s and Kushner‘s “effective political strategy” of forcing Black and Hispanic people to bear the brunt of the deaths while blaming them on Democrats, by year’s end the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.

As the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine noted in December 2020:

“Approximately 97.9 out of every 100,000 African Americans have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos (64.7 per 100,000), and more than double than that for whites (46.6 per 100,000)...”

The lasting legacy of Trump’s April 8th change in policy and his encouraging Covid skepticism to get Black and Hispanic people back to work is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness, period.

He’d thrown his unqualified slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner at something even a professional would’ve found the challenge of a lifetime. And then manipulated it to intentionally expose Black and Hispanic people to a deadly disease while helping him in the upcoming 2020 election by going back to work.

More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.

Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic workers and their families, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.

Former Attorney General Kennedy’s grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the administration’s volunteers, who blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker:

“Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the [Blue] states.’”

As that report released from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted in 2022:

“In the first half of 2020, African Americans and Latinos had death rates from coronavirus that far outweighed those of whites. While 62% of the population age 45-54 in 2020 was white, this population accounted for only 22% of coronavirus deaths in that age range. …
“Disparities were even more pronounced in some states such as Louisiana, where in April 2020, African Americans represented 70% of coronavirus deaths despite being only one third of the state’s population.”

And once Trump and Kushner put that death-based reelection strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red state white people started to become infected.

As Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx in mid-April and she reported in her book Silent Invasion: The Untold Story…:

“‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’ His pupils hardened into points of anger… I felt the blood drain from my face, and I shivered slightly.”

Trump’s change — from Fauci’s policy of prevention to a policy of Rand Paul’s beloved “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.

That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.

Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.

But he didn’t do either. All because he knew the virus disproportionately killed Black and Hispanic people and he was willing to let human beings die just to win the election.

And sure enough, as Congress reported in December 2022, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy ­— among Black and Hispanic people.

If that’s not race-based mass slaughter, aka genocide at a Serbian war crimes level, then the phrase has lost much of its meaning.

Now you know the rest of the story, and what’s motivating Republicans like Paul and Hawley to behave so reprehensibly, hoping to cover up their and Trump’s racially-based mass slaughter of Americans.

Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps.

Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

The most recent example is how Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — whose father was CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan back in the day — has endorsed Congresswoman Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the upcoming primary in that state. El-Sayed, a public health official, has worked for Medicare for All his entire career; he even wrote a book about it, Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide. Stevens, a recipient of corporate money, opposes the program.

El-Sayed summarized the situation with a remarkably clear and straightforward statement that highlights the conundrum facing Democratic Party leadership trying to advance elections for both factions:

“I think in this race, at the end of the day, it tends to be that candidates who generally have been funded the same way will tend to go together. Those of us who don’t take corporate money tend to stick together. Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together.”

The media isn’t helping Democrats work through this. CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday about what the Party’s policy positions would be if they regained control of the House or Senate this fall:

“Your party is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, [have] open borders…”

Sweet Jesus. When a real, educated, credentialed reporter can’t distinguish between a teenager with a TikTok account or a looney tunes narcissist from the DSA and the positions held by actual progressive Democratic politicians, things are really grim. (Or maybe Dana is just pre-sucking-up to the Ellisons?)

Yes, the co-chair of the DSA recently went on Fox “News” this week and called for a bunch of stupid policies like abolishing the Senate, ending national borders, and shutting down all our prisons. And, yes, Republicans will be pounding on this, trying to suggest that she was speaking for the Democratic Party.

But she was not. The DSA is not the Democratic Party, and even Democratic Party candidates who endorse “democratic socialism” are not endorsing the DSA or its positions.

There’s literally not a single actual elected Democrat who’s ever called for “open borders” (that’s actually the position of the far-right Libertarian Party) and other than the occasional call for police reform following the murder of George Floyd, none are calling for “defunding the police.” Lefty icon Bernie Sanders, for goodness sake, said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”

Even Republicans (Senators John Thune and Roger Wiker) are making a case for ending military aid to Israel, and a recent YouGov poll found that more than half of all Americans want to abolish ICE and replace it with a more professional and transparent agency to enforce our immigration laws.

So, let’s set the record straight. There’s not a single “far left” progressive position held by actual elected progressive Democratic politicians that has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, most have well over 80% support, and virtually all are supported above 50% by the majority of Americans of all political stripes.

This isn’t “far left”: it’s the radical middle! We’ve been “radicalized” by 45 years of neoliberal policies by both parties that have gutted the American middle class and the American Dream, and want actual fighters who’ll make our country safe for working people again.

We want politicians who’ll return us to the ideal of a single full-time paycheck, regardless of educational attainment, paying enough to buy a house, a car every few years, take an annual vacation, put our kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement.

Two-thirds of us had that when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981 and launched the Republican War on Working People™. Hell, that’s the “Square Deal” that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on over 100 years ago, and the vast majority of Americans still want it!

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While corporate-money-dependent Democrats may oppose Medicare for All or ending student debt or taxing the rich in a meaningful way, progressive Democrats — the ones being vilified right now by Trump, the GOP, the media, and their own on-the-take peers — are clear about most all of their positions. They are that:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan and, no, Trump did not fix that), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like the Supreme Court has ruled it now works if a state wants to take away your gun.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like every other developed country in the world has.

— It’s crazy that one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of America (165 million of us) and he and his peers typically pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90% on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our 20th century scientific and business prowess. And it’s morally and politically wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Healthcare should be a right, like in every other developed country in the world, instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you make.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion (or, like Thomas Paine, no religion) and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the doctor’s office to the voting booth.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment.

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— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system, not a brutal regime that’s literally killing people while it tears our nation apart.

— And it’s completely insane that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would say that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, which is why most Democrats think Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Sadly, many of the corporate-dependent Democrats oppose many of these positions because they’d conflict with the interests of their donors. This is something the Party needs to work out, particularly as voters increasingly make their desires known in primary elections. But few of these positions would have been alien to FDR or LBJ; most are simply a call for a return to the middle.

It’s frankly astounding that Jeffries didn’t explode when Bash threw out all those disingenuous GOP talking points (I sure would have!), but he politely steered the conversation back to affordability and generally spoke well of his progressive peers and candidates. That’s his job, of course.

And it’s also our job. With the billions that’ll be spent this year to convince Americans that progressives are communists who want to abolish the police and have open borders, not to mention the billionaire-owned-media dialing the echo machine up to 11, it falls on us to educate our friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

America needs to break from the past 45 years of bipartisan neoliberalism and once again embrace the values that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson succeeded in putting into law and Republicans and corporate Democrats have been systematically dismantling since 1981 as they brag about “ending welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government is over.”

Average American voters have largely succeeded in waking up to these scams; now it’s our job to infiltrate and wake up the Democratic Party itself. Tag, we’re it!

Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this.

One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed (the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.

But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional/historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.

Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.

This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds.

Until Trump.

The Trump administration cancelled billions in green energy grants over the past months, and, it turns out, with a single exception all of the cancelled grants were in Blue states.

The New York Times caught it in a one-day story that was barely mentioned by the rest of our corporate media; when forced to tell the truth in a lawsuit, the general counsel for the Department of Energy (DOE) came right out and said, explicitly:

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants). …
“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” (emphasis added)

The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright lied under oath to Congress that the cancellations had no political bias in the roughly $7.5 billion gutted across 223 projects in 16 states.

(While Republicans are claiming that Jack Smith “lied to Congress” and should therefore go to prison, there’s no such similar call for consequences for Wright, either from Republicans or our flaccid Democratic leadership.)

On top of that, we now also find that this administration is passing out FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against Trump, as the hard-right CATO Institute documented from the first Trump administration; he’s now back at it again, and this time 25 states and DC are suing.

Additionally, Trump is blocking a billion dollars in Medicaid payments to Blue states, claiming there’s “fraud” there. This as he pardoned over 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud including a $1.3 billion theft from Medicare.

This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdoġon runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works: “Give us your loyalty and we’ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ll be punished.”

And it’s not just the Trump administration that’s ripping up the idea of equal protection and representation under the law that the 5th and 14th Amendments proclaim; Republican-run states across the nation are enthusiastically defying their own citizens just to enrich the oligarchs and industries that feather their nests:

— In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid themselves by ballot initiative in 2020, so Republican Governor Kevin Stitt answered on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures any single county can contribute at 11.5 percent of that county’s last gubernatorial turnout for statutory measures and 20.8 percent for constitutional ones, effectively locking out the millions of Oklahomans who live in the dark blue Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

— In South Dakota, Republicans passed a bundle of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February, and then put the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the bar for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.

— In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run legislature passed HB 1205, which let county elections officials redefine the “actual cost” of validating each signature and jack the fee up to $4.57 per petition in a county like Palm Beach, from under a dollar before: the result was exactly what they wanted, with all 22 active citizen initiatives failing to qualify for the 2026 ballot.

— In Missouri, working people had killed the GOP’s phony “right to work” law by 67 percent in August 2018 and won paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. So, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of both eight months later, and voters now face Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot, which would require a citizen-initiated amendment to win a majority in every one of the state’s eight congressional districts while leaving the Republican-controlled legislature’s own amendments free to pass on a simple statewide majority.

Over the short-term, this sort of corruption works to the advantage of the party using it, and to the detriment of any party that refuses to play the game. As a result, the Democratic Party — which hasn’t endorsed such corruption since the days of Boss Tweed — is effectively bankrupt with a debt of around $2 million as we head into the most important election in our lifetimes.

But the Republican Party — which openly embraces such crude, bare-assed corruption — is sitting on $130 million (almost entirely from oligarchs and giant corporations) and Trump has a SuperPAC with over $400 million (ditto).

None of this could have happened if five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’t completely altered the rules of our politics with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a complete lie told by a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk over 140 years ago (as I document in detail in Who Killed the American Dream?).

It’s as if they’re trying to create a new Civil War here in America. Seriously: history tells us that corruption and regional/political favoritism is one of the leading forces causing civil unrest and often signals or provokes the end of democracy in a nation.

— The 1971 civil war and genocide in Pakistan that resulted in Bangladesh forming and splitting away was caused by a corrupt Pakistani government reducing to as little as 20 percent of central development spending monies for the eastern part of the country — which held 60 percent of the population — keeping the rest for themselves in the west.

— In Northern Ireland, thirty years of killings were provoked by unionist-run councils allocating public housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, as Britain’s own Cameron Commission concluded in 1969.

— When Nigerian politicians unfairly allocated that nation’s oil revenue it led to a famine that killed three million people and led to Biafra splitting away as a separate republic.

— Sudan’s ruling clique similarly ran the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and lost a third of the country to South Sudan (I was there during the civil war).

Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while a generalized rich-versus-poor inequality can tear a society apart, regional inequality is the number one predictor of social and political upheaval and the consequent destruction of democracy in a nation.

The “winning” side begins to more aggressively rig the system to protect their own privileges and keep themselves out of jail, while the “losing” side mobilizes to protest the inequality.

As both double-down on their positions and word spreads about how some regions are being screwed while others get rich, the body politic is thrown into turmoil.

Like we’re seeing right now in America.

A federal judge has already ruled that stripping these billions of green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump did it anyway and are making no apologies or corrections.

We must put a stop to this now; while these cancelled green energy, Medicaid, and FEMA projects are merely three examples of increasingly widespread Trump and GOP corruption, they should still become a national scandal if for no other reason than that they feed this deadly process of regional resentment and political alienation.

In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution dates back to the 1760s) Global Risk Poll of citizens of 140 countries around the world found that one-in-ten (10%) Americans say that politics represents the biggest risk in their lives (above disease and accidents, even).

The average across the other 139 countries was around 1 percent of people who worried politics could harm them (there were a few exceptions; 5 percent of Russians said the same).

And, indeed, our politics can harm us.

There’s the fear of physical violence if you go out in public with a “F Trump” tee shirt or cap or similar bumper sticker, the fear of losing your healthcare this November when the Republican Big Beautiful Bill cuts to Medicaid kick in, the fear of losing your Medicare as the GOP works to strangle and privatize the system with their “Medicare Advantage” scam, the fear of Republicans killing or “reforming” Social Security so they can hand it off to the big banks that own them.

Not to mention the GOP-led campaign to turn our environment over to the fossil fuel industry, our forests over the lumber industry, our streams and water over to the chemical industry, our farms over to the pesticide industry, our children over to the radical Christian school industry, and our economy over to the crypto industry.

Our Republican politicians and the billionaire-owned media that supports them are also constantly telling us who to hate and fear.

If it’s not Willie Horton it’s migrant caravans, Muslim bombers, murderer/rapist “illegals,” or, in 2024, trans people. For this election cycle, Trump, Rubio, Vance, and Miller are telling us we should hate and fear the guy mowing your lawn as well as democratic socialists and “communists.”

Politics is supposed to help and support us, not rip us off, terrify us, or exploit us, but ever since the Reagan Revolution that’s pretty much all that’s happened.

Republican opposition to real reforms has kept student debt sky-high, housing in the hands of Wall Street hedge funds, health insurance rates out of reach for many, child-care unaffordable, and even caused the national system of gleaming new hospitals and public schools that Eisenhower and Kennedy established across America with their 90% top income tax rate to deteriorate or even shut down.

But why? And what can we do about it?

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s was the most prosperous either America or the world had ever seen. Our top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich and 50% income tax rate on corporations paid down our national debt from WWII to a mere $800 billion (less than $1 trillion!) when Reagan came into office, all while funding massive programs across America.

They included power systems like the TVA and Hoover Dam, public schools, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, Public Broadcasting, Head Start, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing projects and VA home loans, hundreds of new airports and train stations, and thousands of smaller efforts. '

The American middle class was the first in world history to reach half the population of any nation; because of FDR’s New Deal, when Reagan came into office fully two-thirds of us were in it, most with a high school diploma and a single paycheck. (Today it’s around 45 percent of us, and it takes two full-time paychecks and a college degree to get there.)

But the morbidly rich self-described “Makers” chafed at having to pay all those taxes to support programs for the working class “Takers” of society, so when Lewis Powell gave them a plan in 1971 to rise up and crush the New Deal and Great Society and turn America into an oligarchy with them in charge, they leaped at it.

They created networks of influential think tanks like Heritage and American Enterprise, media monsters with rightwing TV networks and over 1500 rightwing radio stations, funded universities and seminars, brought corporations and legislators together with ALEC and others, founded and/or funded the Libertarian Party and the Federalist Society, and set out to seize control of the GOP.

It took a few decades, but their bet paid off; several of America’s billionaires are today richer than any human being who’s ever walked on planet Earth, from the days of the Pharaohs to the kings of the 17th century.

The problem the billionaires and the Republicans they own faced, though, was that most Americans loved what those oligarchs called “socialism.” We embraced Social Security, unionization, and the minimum wage with a gusto. We sent our kids to free colleges across the country. We cheered when LBJ got Medicaid and Medicare passed into law over the majority opposition of the GOP in the Senate.

And when oligarchs like David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of ending all of those programs and even shutting down our public school system, all to pay for tax breaks for his billionaires and corporations, they failed. Koch only got about a million votes that year.

So, when Reagan took office they decided that since Americans wouldn’t vote for oligarchy but instead really only wanted “socialism,” the best solution was to so terrify Americans of our neighbors that hate and fear would overwhelm self-interest.

It worked 45 years ago when Reagan railed against “hippie brats“ and “that young buck ahead of you in the grocery line buying steak with his food stamps,” and they’re still doing it!

As Axios reported last week, “Republicans admit the GOP’s midterm forecast is bleak.” But they’re clinging to two goals; suppress the vote with the SAVE Act, all while whipping up voters’ fear and loathing of Democrats:

“‘It’s going to be a hate election,’ a Republican tied to President Trump’s political operation told Axios. ‘Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.’”

The simple fact is that since 1981, when the Reagan Revolution kicked off, there hasn’t been even one single piece of major legislation passed through the US Congress that was written by Republicans and passed by a majority of Republicans and signed by a Republican president whose major beneficiary was the average American.

Seriously, not one in 45 years. I know, because for the past 23 years I’ve run a contest on my radio show for anybody who can identify any such Republican legislative unicorn, and none have won.

The problem is, though, that with so much of our media and intellectual atmosphere controlled by billionaires and their money, most Americans don’t know this. They think that Republicans — because they’re so tight with billionaires and big business — must know how to run an economy, even though ten of the last 11 recessions happened on Republican presidencies, most following giant tax cuts for billionaires, and those high-end tax cuts by Reagan, Bush, and Trump have collectively added over $34 trillion to our national debt.

So how do we dial back the hate and fear, particularly when the GOP is openly bragging to reporters that it’s worked so well for them in the past that they’re going to double down on it this year?

Expose them.

When they try to use hate, label it: “That’s hate-mongering. It’s beneath you.” Tell them you’re disgusted by their efforts to divide us by gender identity, race, religion, region, and nationality. Point out that they’re promoting bigotry, and history tells us that never ends well.

Inform people.

Show them how, since 1933, Democrats have written into law every major federal protection or benefit for working Americans, from Social Security, the minimum wage, and the right to unionize to Medicare, Medicaid, workplace safety, environmental and consumer protections, civil and voting rights, food assistance, Pell Grants, the Affordable Care Act, and beyond.

Without Democratic (and Eisenhower’s) legislative efforts over the past century, there literally would not be an American middle class of any consequence.

And quote Republican President Eisenhower — the last honest Republican president since the Reagan Revolution handed the party to the billionaires — when he wrapped up the last sentence of his farewell address with a prayer:

“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.

Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.

The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.

Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.

That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.

Americans would like to breathe air that isn’t giving their kids asthma and shortening everybody’s lives. The fossil fuel industry has hated the government’s clean air authority for decades. And then, after oil executives were asked for a billion dollars at a Mar-a-Lago dinner and the industry poured at least $75 million into electing Trump, his EPA moved to repeal the “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation underneath every clean air rule we’ve got. The money hit the GOP’s account, and the rules that keep the air breathable started disappearing.

You’d like the option of a clean, cheap electric car that never has to visit a gas station, the kind of thing that saves you money at the pump and doesn’t cook the planet your grandchildren have to live on. Detroit’s old guard and the oil patch preferred you keep buying gasoline forever. And then the same oil money that bought the air rules bought the car rules too, and the tax credits that made electric vehicles affordable, along with the tailpipe standards that were finally cleaning up our cities, were thrown straight into the shredder by the GOP.

Most of us would like to drink a glass of tap water without wondering about the forever chemicals that now even show up in the blood of newborn babies. And then the chemical industry hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal limits ever set on those PFAS compounds got weakened and pushed off into the distance before most people had even heard they existed.

Anybody who’s stood at a pharmacy counter would like their medicine to cost what it costs in every other wealthy country instead of three or four times as much. The drug industry spends more money lobbying Washington than any other business on Earth. And then all that money hit the GOP’s accounts, and the price relief that was finally within reach kept getting whittled down toward nothing.

Working families would like health coverage they can afford and actually keep. And then the money landed in the GOP’s money bin, the big beautiful bill took an axe to Medicaid, the subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable were allowed to lapse, and millions of people who did absolutely nothing wrong lost their doctor.

We’d all like the government to keep funding the research that cures cancers and catches the next pandemic before it becomes one. And then the checks to Republican politicians from billionaires who don’t want to pay their damn taxes cleared, the National Institutes of Health got gutted right alongside the disease trackers at the CDC.

Anybody with an aging parent would like to know the nursing home has enough staff on the floor to answer the call button before dawn. And then the private equity firms that have been gobbling up elder care hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal minimum staffing rule for nursing homes, the one that would have guaranteed a real nurse was actually in the building, got killed.

The people who cut and pack our meat would like to keep all ten of their fingers, and their children would like to stay out of the slaughterhouse. And then the giant meat packers wrote their checks to Republicans, the line speeds got cranked up faster, and the worker protections that were already threadbare got thinner still.

After a train hauling toxic chemicals derailed and poisoned East Palestine, Ohio, the folks in every town along the tracks would like the trains rolling through to be a little bit safer. And then the railroad lobby hit the GOP’s bank account, the bipartisan rail safety bill that came straight out of that disaster died quietly in Congress, and the industry went right back to running ever longer trains with ever fewer inspectors.

A person working full time would like to earn enough to cover the rent. And then the restaurant and retail lobbies hit the GOP’s checking account, and the federal minimum wage sat frozen at $7.25 an hour, exactly where it’s been since 2009, worth a little less with every year that passes.

Workers would like a fair shot at forming a union without getting fired for trying. And then the big corporate money poured into the GOP’s money bin, the National Labor Relations Board was stripped of the members it needs to so much as hold a vote, and the one referee working people had — the NLRB — was pulled off the field.

Young people would like an education that doesn’t come with a mortgage-sized debt hanging over them for the next thirty years. And then the for-profit college operators and the loan servicing big New York banks threw money at the GOP, the student debt relief got strangled in the courts, and the rules meant to stop predatory diploma mills got loosened all over again.

Regular taxpayers would like the morbidly rich to chip in something close to their fair share. But then the billionaires hit both Trump’s and the GOP’s bank accounts at once, the giant tax bill tilted even harder toward the top, and the IRS enforcement money that was finally going to audit the yacht and private jet crowd got stripped right back out, so they can go on not paying.

People who paid into Social Security their entire working lives would like it to be there, with the phone answered by an actual human being, when they finally retire. And then the big banks’ money landed in Republican campaigns, the Social Security Administration got hollowed out, field offices and phone lines went dark, and the same crowd that swears it’s protecting the program made it harder to reach someone at SSA than it’s been in generations.

A young person with a good idea would like to start a small, local business without a trillion dollar monopoly crushing them like a bug. And then the biggest corporations on Earth lined up to fund Trump’s inauguration, his new ballroom, and his library, and the antitrust cops who might have protected the little guy suddenly discovered they had somewhere else to be.

Ordinary investors would like a financial cop on the beat to guard against the next Ponzi scheme and the next collapse that wipes out their savings. And then the crypto industry assembled a war chest north of $193 million and became the single biggest corporate spender for Republicans in our elections as it made billions for Trump and his boys, and the SEC promptly dropped its fraud cases against Coinbase and Ripple while the GOP-controlled Congress rushed the industry’s own wish list into law.

You’d like some say over whether artificial intelligence takes your job, tracks your every move, and answers to nobody at all. And then the tech billionaires launched a hundred million dollar super PAC aimed at erasing the AI safety laws that thirty eight states had already passed, and Republicans in Washington got to work writing exactly the rules Silicon Valley ordered up.

We’d like our national forests and Arctic refuges to still be standing for our grandchildren. And then ConocoPhillips handed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration and got expanded drilling in Alaska for its trouble, and the public land that’s supposed to belong to all of us got auctioned off to whoever could cover the entrance fee.

Parents would like every kid, not just the wealthy ones, to have a good public school right down the street. And then the voucher and privatization money hit the GOP’s account, the Education Department got gutted, and public dollars started flowing to private and religious schools that answer to no one.

Americans once had a public broadcasting system and a genuine range of voices on the radio dial. And then the rightwing billionaire’s money landed in GOP pockets, Congress clawed back the funding for PBS and NPR, and the handful of billionaires who already own most of the rest of the media got a little less competition from the stations that were actually free.

This is supposed to be a country where the government doesn’t get to pick your religion for you. And then the hard-right so-called “Christian” dark money network that spent years quietly buying the federal courts hit its stride, and now the Ten Commandments are being ordered onto the walls of public school classrooms and somebody else’s faith is getting written into your children’s curriculum.

Women would like to make their own decisions about their own bodies, right down to whether and when to build a family through something like IVF. And then the same small circle of rightwing misogynist billionaires who bought the six Republicans on the Supreme Court got the ruling they’d paid for, and a right that had stood for half a century was simply gone.

Every American would like a fair shot in business and in the military based on what they can actually do, not on who they happen to know or the color of their skin. And then the white supremacist billionaire bigots’ money hit the GOP’s account, “diversity” got turned into a slur, and the programs that had pried open doors for people long locked out of them got purged from one end of the government to the other.

Underneath every last one of these sits a single machine. Americans would like their policies decided by voters, by actual human beings casting actual ballots, and not by whoever writes the fattest check.

And then, back in 2010, Clarence Thomas cast a deciding vote in Citizens United, the ruling that let unlimited corporate cash flood our politics, and the family of the Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire who’d been quietly showering him with luxury vacations for years went and increased their own political giving by 862 percent.

That money didn’t just hit one bank account. It bought the very door through which all the rest of it walked.

Every item on this list was a choice various Republicans made in exchange for money.

None of it was weather or fate or the natural order of things falling into place. Each time, a big majority of Americans wanted the better outcome, and each time a very small number of enormously wealthy people wanted the worse one, and each time the wealthy won, because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court turned dollars into speech and corporations into people.

The saving grace is that a check still isn’t a vote, at least not yet, and there are a great many more of us than there are of them.

When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey (as Louise and I did on Saturday), you’ll be bathed in the revelation thatTrump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization.

The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.

First, a tiny bit of backstory:

Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.

In the movie, it’s referred to as Zeus’ Law, and its violation is the thread that runs through the entire three hours. It honors Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, guests, and suppliants. In the Greek religion of that day, hospitality wasn’t mere courtesy but a sacred obligation, and Zeus himself stood behind it as both guarantor and avenger. Any stranger at your door came under his protection, so to mistreat a guest was to offend the king of the gods directly.

The Odyssey is built around this idea of xenia from end to end: you can read the whole poem as a ledger of good and bad hosts. The Phaeacians who bathe and feast the shipwrecked Odysseus without even knowing his name first are the ideal, while the suitors devouring his household in his absence are the great domestic violators, and their slaughter at the end reads as xenia enforced with a sword. The Cyclops Polyphemus is the ultimate anti-host, a creature who eats his guests and openly scorns the gods, which is why his punishment feels like cosmic justice rather than mere revenge.

Theoxenia also appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Iranian pre- and post-Islamic traditions.

Most people who’ve been through Bible School as kids remember how, in Genesis 18, Abraham sees three strangers approaching his tent in the heat of the day and rushes out to meet them, washing their feet, slaughtering a calf, and setting out a feast before he has any idea who they are. Only later in the encounter does it become clear they’re divine messengers, and one delivers the promise that Sarah will bear a son.

The very next chapter gives us the dark mirror image of that generation’s Trump-like behavior: the men of Sodom, who greet the same visitors with violence rather than welcome. In the Jewish tradition this pairing became foundational to hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests, and it’s why later rabbinic thought treats Sodom’s real sin as cruelty to strangers. The lesson drawn by these twin stories is that when you open your door to the stranger, you may be receiving God unawares.

When Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 25 that whatever they did for the least of these — the hungry, the stranger, the naked/homeless, the imprisoned — they did for him, he’s standing squarely inside that Abrahamic story, where the guest carries a hidden divine presence. His parable of the Good Samaritan works the same theme, making the despised outsider the only one who actually fulfills Zeus’ Law. And Paul’s letter to the Hebrews makes the connection explicit when he urges believers not to neglect hospitality to strangers, “for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it,” a direct reference to Abraham’s three visitors.

And it’s also intrinsic to both ancient and modern-day Iranian hospitality traditions. The ancient Persian counterpart to Zeus Xenios is Mithra, the Zoroastrian yazata or divine being whose entire jurisdiction is the law that strangers must be treated well because they could be divine beings in disguise. In living Iranian culture it’s known as mehman-navazi, which literally means “guest-cherishing” the deep-rooted tradition of treating guests with extraordinary honor, expressed in the elaborate ritual courtesy of ta’arof:

مهمان حبیب خداست. Mehman habib-e khodast. The guest is the beloved of God.

When Iranians first met with Kushner and Witkoff and then went to a February 28th meeting in Tehran to discuss the details of the deal offered, the compound where the meeting was taking place was bombed by the US and Israel, killing Ayatollah Khamenei, most of his family, and around 40 senior officials.

This was viewed by many in the region as a basic violation of Zeus’ Law. While the meeting with the strangers took place in Geneva, Switzerland, their offer was brought — like the Trojan Horse — into the home of the Supreme Leader himself and arguably led straight to his slaughter.

On the Muslim street there was real popular fury at this violation, most sharply in Pakistan, where protesters tried to storm the US consulate in Karachi and at least nine people were killed, and in Iraq, as well as with rallies and vigils elsewhere.

Iranian MP Amirhossein Sabeti was explicit about the now-clear danger of continuing to have good-faith negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner:

“Didn’t war happen in the middle of negotiations before? So you want to negotiate again so war happens and our new leader gets assassinated too?”

Last week, veteran reporters Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill shared a shocking allegation they say was presented directly to them by Iranian officials: that the Iranians had informed VP Vance that Kushner and Witkoff, instead of negotiating in good faith, were simply moving the negotiations along in fits and starts that would send the price of oil up and down, all while betting on oil futures.

The reporters laid it out on their Drop Site News Substack newsletter:

“In June, Iran calculated profits from such alleged manipulation had reached $9 billion and formally requested, in writing, that Iran should share in the proceeds.

“‘We have conveyed through intermediaries that $4.5 billion of this sum should also be allocated to the Iranian side,’ the Iranian official said. ‘The exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record.’”

Odysseus paid for his reluctant role in the pillage and rape of Troy — and his coming up with the betrayal idea of the Trojan Horse — by being punished by the gods for twenty years, ten of them a god-cursed wandering through storms, monsters, and the loss of his men.

And that event is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia.

The sack of Troy was not merely a victory but a desecration, a night when the Greeks butchered old King Priam at his own household altar, hurled the infant Astyanax from the city walls, and dragged Cassandra screaming from the temple of Athena, violating in a single evening every sacred bond the gods guarded: the suppliant’s safety, the altar’s sanctuary, the guest-friendship that had bound even enemies.

The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap.

And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning.

And, of course, with Trump it’s not just Iran. His betrayals of trust and tradition include Greenland, Cuba, Ukraine, NATO, Venezuela, Canada, and our own citizens. He even betrayed every one of his three wives, and now he is betraying our Constitution.

One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.

Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW last night:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him last night, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Leticia James to Adam Shiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued the day before yesterday.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.

Tonight at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching tonight, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faces his Senate confirmation hearing today, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor with biweekly phone calls. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for fifty years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether tonight marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked 90 years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there.

Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?

Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”

Lafayette Square is where Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels stood through freezing winters demanding that Woodrow Wilson support women’s suffrage, and where peaceful protesters were gassed and beaten in June of 2020 so Donald Trump could stroll across the park for a photo op, Bible in hand.

For over two centuries, every president since John Adams has had to look out his window at Americans exercising their First Amendment right to tell him exactly what they think of him.

This administration proposes to end that tradition with steel pickets spaced four inches apart, and to have the whole apparatus ready as we head toward a November election that could break the GOP’s grip on Congress or see open corruption of our election by Trump’s goons, which would inevitably lead to mass protests.

Governments that trust their own people don’t wall themselves off from them; fortress states do.

And by a remarkable coincidence, this was the same week that one of the richest men in Russia gave the world a sixty-hour guided tour of life inside a mature fortress state, along with a warning about where that road ends that every American should know about.

The Economist just published an extraordinary profile of Andrey Melnichenko, whose fertilizer, coal, energy, and logistics empire accounts for roughly one full percent of Russia’s entire GDP, and who was the richest man in the country when Putin invaded Ukraine.

For twenty years Melnichenko lived the bargain Putin offered Russia’s oligarchs: stay out of politics and you can keep your fortune, your yacht, your villa in Switzerland. Then came the Ukraine war, the sanctions, and finally the shakedown.

In 2023, Putin’s prosecutors moved to confiscate one of Melnichenko’s Siberian power companies, and the case quietly evaporated two weeks later, right after he donated 32 billion rubles, about $335 million, to a school for gifted children that operates under Putin’s personal patronage.

In a fully realized oligarchy — like Putin has established in Russia and Trump is trying to create here with pardons and government contracts essentially for sale — that’s what legal property rights become: a subscription service, renewable at the pleasure of the man at the top.

Melnichenko told The Economist that he can see only four possible futures for Russia if it stays on the current course Putin is pursuing, every one of them grim:

— It can crawl back to a victorious West as a defeated vassal, which he predicts would provoke the same revanchist rage that the Versailles treaty incubated in Germany a century ago and that led straight to World War II.
— It can settle permanently into China’s orbit as a resource colony with a flag and faint appearance of independence.
— It can fragment into civil conflict, with warlords fighting over the pieces of a nuclear-armed state.
— Or it can finish its transformation into a continental North Korea, a garrison society sustained by rationing, repression, isolation, and what he describes as turning “external confrontation into a permanent instrument of domestic politics.”

That fourth scenario, which he says is under serious discussion inside the Kremlin, describes a government that identifies permanent enemies abroad and at home to justify permanent repression of its own citizens.

Anyone who’s watched masked federal agents disappearing people off American streets, or read this administration’s directives treating its domestic political opposition as a terrorist threat, or looked at the blueprints for that fence around Lafayette Square, has seen the early architecture of exactly that.

And Melnichenko’s preferred alternative for Russia against these four possibilities? He names it, with a candor you rarely hear from men of his class, as “oligarchy in the classical sense of the word.”

Rule by elites. Businessmen, technocrats, and nationalists would govern the country together, cutting deals among themselves because the four alternatives threaten their fortunes and their family dynasties, while ordinary Russians continue receiving what he frankly admits has so far been “a simulation of participation.”

Surprised that a billionaire’s best imaginable future for his nation is rule by billionaires?

Ours have been saying the same thing out loud for years about America. Peter Thiel, the money behind JD Vance’s entire political career, wrote for the Cato Institute back in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he and many of his morbidly rich colleagues have spent the years since funding politicians and projects built explicitly to act on that conviction.

Melnichenko is a useful analyst for this critical time in both Russian and American history precisely because he’s no cartoon villain, and he’s barely ideological at all.

Ammonia from his plants ends up in Russian munitions, he coordinates with Putin’s military and secret police to protect his factories from Ukrainian drones, and he explicitly avoids “moral judgments” about things like democracy because he considers them a “distraction” from “designing systems that work.” Sort of like when Elon Musk said:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.“

Honoré de Balzac gets credit for the observation that, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” and Melnichenko’s own history, which began with an illegal currency exchange run out of a Moscow State University dorm room and protected by moonlighting police cadets, fits the pattern comfortably.

His way of thinking is common among men who’ve accumulated billions: they deal in what works, what maintains stability, what’s most efficient, and who can be bought or brought along, while “esoteric” and “idealistic” concepts like democracy, individual rights, and “the pursuit of happiness” only enter the calculation as variables to be managed.

That same mindset built America’s modern oligarchy. Exxon’s own scientists, for example, predicted global warming with alarming internal memos starting in the late 1970s, and the company’s executives, having weighed the future of our planet and our children against their bottom line, spent the next four decades funding lies to keep us burning their product and filling their money bins.

It was nothing personal: they were simply setting aside empathy while optimizing their own incomes, and the habitability of our planet was simply a variable.

The blueprint for the larger project was drafted in 1971, when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, two months before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, sent a confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce calling on American business to organize, fund, and capture the universities, the media, the courts, and the American political system itself.

Out of that memo grew the think tanks, the “scholars for hire,” and the vast rightwing media machines that have spent five decades teaching Americans to distrust their own government, oligarchs arguing essentially that oligarchy is preferable to democracy.

Reagan’s functional suspension of our anti-monopoly laws in the 1980s then let a handful of men amass fortunes larger than any human beings had ever held, morbidly rich on a scale even the pharaohs never dreamed of, and today those men fund virtually every Republican in Congress along with a distressing number of Democrats.

Their wholly-owned toadies on the Supreme Court have spent the last half-century legalizing the purchase of the American government, a story I tell at length in my new book Who Killed the American Dream?

The foundation was a fraudulent headnote slipped into an 1886 Supreme Court decision falsely claiming the Court had ruled that corporations are persons with rights under the 14th Amendment; Citizens United built on that fraud in 2010 by declaring that corporate and billionaire money is constitutionally protected speech.

But it gets worse: in 2024 the Court’s six corrupt Republicans ruled in Snyder v. United States that officials who take payments after performing favors have merely accepted legal “gratuities” rather than bribes. Yeah, billionaires can now legally give tips to judges and politicians.

And just two weeks ago the same six on-the-take justices struck down the post-Watergate limits on coordinated party spending, freeing the morbidly rich to invisibly pour unlimited money through the parties directly into their chosen candidates’ campaigns, four months before the midterms. Justice Kagan warned in dissent that the RNC and DNC can now simply function as an oligarch’s or corporation’s secret checking account for their selected candidates and the public will never know who bought their election and owns their politicians.

Putin’s oligarchs and ours arrived by opposite roads: his through a state that swallowed its billionaires and ours through billionaires who swallowed their state, but the citizens of both countries ended up in the same place under either arrangement: on the outside, holding a “simulation of participation” while men like Musk buy our elections and the favors our politicians can bestow.

So Americans should ask the question Melnichenko asked about Russia: What futures are actually on our menu? I can count four, and the parallels are uncomfortable.

The first is aristocratic dictatorship. America completes its realignment away from the world’s democracies and toward Moscow, Beijing, and the Gulf monarchies that Trump and Vance so visibly admire, and the world gets run as a cartel of strongmen and sovereign wealth funds while our Constitution becomes a mere decoration. Much of our current foreign policy already points in this direction.

The second is civil conflict that tears our country apart. Prominent voices on the right have been openly fantasizing about civil war for years, and a government that expects to be loved doesn’t need a ten-foot fence around Lafayette Square or gates across Pennsylvania Avenue. Building permanent infrastructure to wall off protest four months before a national election shouts at us that Trump and Vance are planning for a coming confrontation with the American people.

The third is slow imperial decline, the road Britain walked after the two world wars: a once-dominant nation growing gradually poorer, shabbier, and more irrelevant while its aristocracy extracts whatever’s left. This is oligarchy’s default trajectory, the one we’re already on if nothing dramatic intervenes, and it ends with our grandchildren living in a country that used to matter but is now subject to the whims of its oligarchs and more powerful nations.

The fourth is democratic renewal, the road Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt opened and JFK and LBJ paved: breaking up concentrated wealth and power, taxing the morbidly rich, and building the healthcare, education, childcare, and retirement security that working people in Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world now take for granted.

Unlike the other three, this future has a living constituency and a vibrancy that’s been missing from the American political scene since the days of JFK.

Just three weeks ago, voters across New York swept young progressives and democratic socialists into Democratic nominations, toppling establishment incumbents despite millions in super PAC money arrayed against them, because ordinary Americans keep voting for economic democracy whenever somebody credible actually offers it.

Russia is probably too far down the road of tyranny to make a sudden transition like this back to democracy; its independent press is dead, its opposition leaders are in prison, in exile, or in the ground, and even its billionaire would-be reformer can’t imagine anything better than a politer class of elites running the place.

We’re not there yet. Our elections still mostly count, some of our courts still hold, our press is battered but breathing, and we still retain the right, for now, to stand in front of the White House and say, “No!” Every one of those things is on the ballot this November, and the people fencing off Lafayette Square understand that better than most.

Melnichenko offered one more observation that applies as much to Washington as to Moscow:

The Russian regime looked absolutely impregnable in 1913, and again in 1986, and both of those governments were gone within a few years. He quotes former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar’s line that, “Big changes come later than we think but earlier than we expect.”

That’s true of dictatorships, and it’s equally true of oligarchies as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Working people get angry when confronted with an exploitative rule by the rich and then rise up in revolt. We can see this happening in Argentina right this moment.

At that point, a nation’s leadership must choose between abandoning oligarchy and going back to democracy — as we did with Lincoln taking on the oligarchs of the Confederacy in 1861, and FDR’s New Deal presidency in 1933 — or bringing down the iron fist and converting the oligarchy into dictatorship, as Putin did in Russia.

Oligarchy, as I detail in that book, is always a transitional form of government that either reverts to democracy or transitions to dictatorship. It rarely last more than a single generation.

Thus, which kind of sudden change America experiences — the hard snap into strongman rule or the breaking of billionaire power over our government, purging dark money, and a restoration of democracy — will largely be decided by what we all do between now and the first Tuesday in November.

Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”

And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.

Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.

When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.

I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.

That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.

Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem.

They’re both grieving the very same dead dream, reaching up for what my father had when I was a kid: a middle-class life. The difference is that one of them — the MAGA true believer — has been handed a Black/Hispanic/queer/female scapegoat while the other — the progressive — understands that we need to stop America’s oligarchs from their pillage.

But the financial pain underneath, the force driving both to want change, is largely identical, and it’s real.

The whole economic case Republicans made for mass deportation was that clearing out the immigrants would hand American workers a raise. It ignored the Republican destruction of the American union movement, and amplified the exploitable, often-nascent racism many in the GOP’s base already carried.

Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, put it plainly, insisting that illegal immigration had for years “artificially suppressed wages” and gutted the prospects of working-class Americans, especially young white men. That was the promise: a blue-collar wage boom, with a dose of cruelty to speed it up.

Then the receipts came in.

A Brookings analysis found that ICE operations wiped out roughly 668,000 jobs, and that somewhere between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs had belonged to workers born right here in the United States. Construction, hospitality, and food service, the very industries where those anxious young men actually work, got hit the hardest.

University of Colorado economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox went looking for the promised windfall from Miller’s imprisonment and deportation campaign and couldn’t find it. There was no boost in jobs or wages for U.S.-born workers.

If anything, the crackdown hurt working-class men in immigrant-heavy trades like construction, because when you rip a non-citizen bricklayer off a job site you also idle the American electrician and project manager who needed that wall to go up.

So the red-hat guy’s pain is real. His paycheck really did shrink, his rent really is crushing him, his kid really can’t afford the college my dad could.

But the story he was sold about who did it to him is a lie, the same lie they sold his great grandfather in the 1920s when they swore it was Black people coming for his job, or his father in the 1980s when Limbaugh said it was the “Feminazis” who wanted to displace him, now just repackaged with browner faces, tradwives, fake Christianity, and a border.

The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.

You can see the shared wound the moment you take the labels off and ask people about what actual policies they support instead of which political tribe they belong to.

The Century Foundation surveyed working-class Americans, including the ones who voted for Trump in droves, alongside their college-educated neighbors who lean Democratic. On the policies that actually shape their economic lives the two groups were highly aligned, both of them overwhelmingly backing populist economics and hard limits on billionaire and corporate power.

The rest of the polling tells the same story. A CNN survey this spring found 76 percent of Americans naming the cost of living as their single biggest economic problem, with about three-quarters saying the system is rigged for the powerful and three-quarters saying it’s harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago.

A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn’t a “left” or “right” number: that’s my dad’s vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others’ throats.

The irony is that while progressives have properly identified who killed the middle class (the title of my new book), Republican voters believe something entirely different, a story America’s oligarchs have spent literally billions to instill in them.

One rightwing story is that the enemy of the middle class are the Democratic politicians who Republicans are now calling communists: this very week, as I wrote yesterday, Trump is out branding Democrats as dangerous “communists” while democratic-socialist candidates keep winning primaries on Medicare for All, free college, and good union jobs.

And in a coarser corner of the rightwing world where racism is as much an animator (or more) than economic pain, the enemy Republicans are pushing are brown- or Black-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, eating your dogs and cats, and coming for your daughter and your job.

Both are aimed at the same exhausted, squeezed, frightened American who’s living in a rightwing bubble, trapped by Fox “News” as his information source or constantly spoon-fed rightwing outrage via the secret algorithms driving billionaire-owned social media.

And as long as those Americans are glaring sideways at a “democratic socialist” or an immigrant, they aren’t looking at the American oligarchs who actually ran off with all their money.

Because somebody did run off with it. The RAND Corporation added up the damage and found that roughly 50 trillion dollars was quietly shifted from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. Since then it’s up to around $80 trillion.

If wages had simply kept pace with what American workers produce, the typical worker today would be pulling in well over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty, and the economic force driving racism and bigotry would be much weaker.

That money didn’t evaporate. It didn’t get taken by a busboy or a barista or a bricklayer. It was hauled off, in broad daylight, by the architects of forty-five years of Reaganism and neoliberalism, the ones who broke the unions, shipped the factories overseas, and turned healthcare and college loans into profit centers.

That’s who took my father’s single paycheck: not the woman picking our lettuce. Not the kid who just wants to see a doctor or get an education without going bankrupt.

The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.

The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.

That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.

So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.

You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.

Then stop grieving it and start organizing to take it back, because it was never lost. As I lay out in Who Killed The American Dream?, it was stolen, and stolen things can be recovered.

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past 20, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany, my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road, they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

So don’t let this one slide past as somebody else’s problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called “hundred-mile zone.”

There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.

Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in

The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.

A few weeks ago, Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.

“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about 30 seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”

Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.

The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.

They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.

Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:

“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”

Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.

They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.

They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.

They knew.

The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.

So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, 17 months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.

The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the 11 recorded in 2024 to 33 in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.

The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.

Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.

And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.

That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”

Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.

Too many Black and brown people have already arrived from “s---hole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.

If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.

The economic case the administration likes to make is that all of this cruelty is somehow “necessary” because immigrants are “draining the country.” But that, in particular, is simply an establishing lie.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone, and that in 40 states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households living alongside them. Every million undocumented people deported represents about $8.9 billion in lost annual tax revenue, money that funds the schools and hospitals and roads in the very communities now cheering ICE on.

And the criminal rationale, the one that animates every Fox “News” chyron about “foreign rapists,” collapses just as fast: ICE’s own fiscal year 2025 enforcement data shows 127 sexual offense arrests in a country where the FBI logged roughly 127,000 reported rapes by US citizens, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates closer to 443,000 actual incidents of sexual violence every year.

Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order labeling Americans dissenting from his racist, fascist, so-called “Christian” policies as domestic terrorists, and they’ve begun investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for being anti-fascist, or “antifa” when the organization doesn’t even exist.

We’re dismantling due process, abandoning habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, and building concentration camps against a population that accounts for less than a tenth of one percent of the sexual violence in this country. The numbers don’t support the policy, though, because the economics were never the point, other than the number of Black and brown people arriving on our shores since 1965.

This is why people are walking away from their relatives and didn’t show up for July 4th picnics, and why the people walking away aren’t, in fact, “being petty.”

When someone you love votes for a candidate who has promised, in plain English, to do something cruel and unconstitutional and historically catastrophic, and then he does exactly that, and they still defend him, the relationship isn’t being broken by your refusal to overlook it.

The relationship was broken when they cast the vote. You’re just the one acknowledging the damage.

Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.

It’s conscience.

The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.

We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.

Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.

And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.

The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.

Last Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion.

That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined.

The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money.

This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

When Julius Caesar put his own portrait on a Roman coin in 44 BC, it struck the citizens of Rome like a slap in the face. For centuries the Republic had minted gods and dead ancestors onto its silver but never a living man, because a living ruler’s face on the money was understood as the visual representation of kingship, the mark of the very Eastern caliphates and Northern European tyrannies that free Romans claimed to despise and had risen above.

Caesar was dead within a month, stabbed on the Senate floor by men who read that image on their coins as his final abandonment of what Jefferson would have called “republican values.” He’d told them who he thought he was — a king, rather than the leader of a republic — and he’d told them via the one object every Roman handled every day.

It was, essentially, his declaration that Rome was no longer a republic, and history shows it signaled the beginning of the end of the Roman state as one ruled, at least in part, by its own people.

Trump has made the same confession, only digitized, although unlike Caesar he’s (fortunately: we are considerably less barbaric than Ancient Rome) lived to file the paperwork and brag about his picture being plastered everywhere you look.

The striking parallel here runs deeper than the Trump’s “coins” (including the $Trump and $Melania): Julius Caesar and the corrupt emperors who followed him as the Roman empire disintegrated didn’t just stamp their faces on the currency.

They extracted the wealth of ordinary Romans through that currency, shaving the silver content of the denarius a little at a time, spending the debased coins at full value, and letting the savings of farmers and shopkeepers hollow out across generations while the gilded ballrooms and the triumphal arches went up.

The emperor kept the silver. The commoner kept a coin that bought a little less bread every year. It was the cleanest wealth transfer the ancient world ever devised, and it ran straight through the ruler’s own mint.

Now look at what Trump and his hustler sons have built: a Reuters investigation found that Trump’s increasingly brazen criminal family has now pulled roughly $2.3 billion out of four crypto ventures since he returned to the White House, and — astonishing in its shamelessness — that more than a million ordinary MAGA followers who bought into those same ventures similarly lost roughly $2.3 billion.

Dollar for dollar, like a well-oiled machine.

That money didn’t vanish in some market crash or weird Fed devaluation; it moved out of the pockets of a million MAGA true believers who Trump saw as marks and into the pockets of the guy who put his face on the “coin.”

The $TRUMP token is down 97 percent from its peak. A 29-year-old software engineer in California put in $2,000 because Trump’s name read to her as a guarantee, and watched it shrink to under $120.

What took the Caesars three centuries of debasement, Trump managed in eleven months, and he didn’t even have to hide it inside the nation’s money supply.

His MAGA suckers lined up and handed their life savings over, because they thought he was a “brilliant businessman” who’d make them rich. Just like all the thousands of others he’s fleeced over the decades (many of whom ended up suing him).

Then the machinery of the state bent to protect his scams, which is what I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, where I argued that oligarchs rarely bother stealing from the treasury directly when they can simply capture the system that’s supposed to stop them. Handing America over to billionaires and corporations, after all, was the essence of Clarence Thomas’ corrupt deciding vote in Citizens United after he and his wife had taken millions themselves.

And so Trump, his kids, and his wife did it right out in the open, and not a single elected Republican or rightwing media oligarch has so far objected!

— Weeks after the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun poured tens of millions into World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s DeFi venture, the SEC quietly paused its fraud case against him.

— Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire Binance founder who’d pleaded guilty to money-laundering compliance failures, after Binance helped enrich the Trump family’s stablecoin. Two hundred million dollars of foreign money flowed in to the Trumps in that case, investigations disappeared, and pardons flowed out.

Draw that sequence on a whiteboard for any prosecutor and watch them start muttering the word “racketeering.” The silence around all of this is its own kind of obscene tell.

Elected Republicans are either in on the con or terrified of what Trump will do to them — like Caesar would have done in 44 BC — if they object to his fleecing their own voters.

Roman coins were also propaganda as much as currency, and the populace often learned a new emperor had seized power only when his face turned up on the money in their pockets.

Following Julius Caesar, a major job of the Roman mint was to broadcast the ruler’s image and thus remind everyone whose nation, whose empire, this had become.

Our modern version of that old Roman mint are Trump’s toadies who’re hanging banners of his glowering face on federal buildings all over DC and stamping his visage on this year’s passports. Not to mention the Trump gold coins he had minted for America’s anniversary and the talk of putting his face on a $250 bill.

And the right-wing media machine, so quick to fly into screaming outrage when Hunter Biden — not Joe, who took not a penny — made a mere million bucks a year for being on the board of Burisma, have gone strangely quiet about a president himself who just self-reported fleecing a million of his own supporters to the tune of billions.

The same rightwing-billionaire-owned propaganda apparatus that screamed for years about the dick-pics on Hunter’s laptop and manufactured weeks of near-hysterical outrage over Obama’s eight-page disclosure can’t summon even a hoarse whisper about a 927-page one.

Which brings me back to Rome.

In August of 1998, Louise and I spent a day wandering that city, touring the private galleries of the Vatican in the morning with one of the Pope’s personal assistants and standing inside the Colosseum in the afternoon, marveling at the engineering of an empire that ran on conquest and tribute and the flat certainty that some men were born to consume the fruits of the labor of others.

The next day we were driven up to Castle Gandolfo, the papal summer residence in the hills, where I’d been invited to a private audience with Pope John Paul II after a dear friend of his read my book The Prophet’s Way and suggested to him that we should meet. I’ve rarely felt history sit so close, or had such a great honor.

Something about that visit and the historical research I did afterward deeply reminds me of today.

The Catholic papacy rose out of the wreckage of that very Roman empire, and the title the pope now carries, Pontifex Maximus, was originally the title of the Roman emperors, held first by Caesar himself, the same Caesar who first put his face on the Empire’s coinage.

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church wore the empire’s crown and behaved like an imperial power in its own right. And then, slowly, that institution turned itself inside out: today the strongest, most honored and respected voice on Earth against the idolatry of wealth and the machinery of exploitative empire comes from that very chair.

The man sitting in it now is an American, and a genuinely decent human being. Pope Leo XIV has spent this year pointing to the richest enclaves on the planet while condemning the “idolatry of power and money,” warning against the “pursuit of unjust wealth and the illusion of dominion,” and describing an economy that lets a wealthy few live in a bubble of comfort and luxury while everyone else absorbs the losses.

An American pope wearing a Caesar’s title, calling out the sins of the Epstein/billionaire class, while a billionaire American president (and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) wearing a Caesar’s ambitions commits Julius’ crime in a 927-page confession and laughingly calls it “transparency.”

The Romans could have told us how this story ends. When one man puts his face on the money and the buildings, captures the courts, and treats the public treasury as his personal party-fund to build vanity ballrooms and arches, the Republic has already been broken, brought to its knees, no matter what anyone still calls it.

The one advantage we hold over the first century’s Romans, however, is that we still have a vote — at least for now, in defiance of Trump’s and the GOP’s best efforts — and we still get to decide whether the crimes against the nation and his own followers that he confessed to will ever be stopped and prosecuted.

So use it. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them that a president ignoring the Constitution to monetize his office and pardoning his donors in exchange for millions deserves immediate action.

Make sure you’re registered and ready at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org: the people who can actually check this kind of power sit as often in your statehouse as in Washington.

And if this work of mine gave you a clearer way to see what’s in front of all of us, share it, forward it, and post it where the algorithm can’t quietly bury it.

Independent journalism survives because readers refuse to be lied to, and refuse to let their neighbors be lied to either. Subscribe at hartmannreport.com, support the work if you’re able, and pass it along.

This wannabe emperor has told us exactly who he is and who the lickspittles who serve him are. The only question left is what the rest of us intend to do about it.