Democrats should be loudly calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump now, run on it in November, and then, when they take the House, actually do it.

Because what he’s is doing right now is not “norm-breaking,” or “provocative rhetoric,” or even the oft-quoted “Trump being Trump.” It’s an open assertion of unchecked power, limited — in his own words — only by his own “personal morality.”

His shocking interview in the New York Times was decisive. That isn’t how a president speaks in a constitutional republic. Instead, it’s a classic example of how a strongman, a wannabe Mussolini or Putin, speaks as he tries to reinvent the nation so the law becomes optional when it comes to him, his flunkies, and his billionaire buddies.

When asked if there were any limits on his power, he told the Times’ reporters, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He added, “I don’t need international law.”

And he’s acting it out in real time, creating his own private, unaccountable, masked army (or death squad) that’s actively terrorizing American citizens and being used to punish the cities and states of any politicians who dare stand up to him or call him out.

Not to mention his petty revenges: last week, he cut off billions in childcare and other low-income funding to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York in direct violation of the law and the Constitution because those states’ leaders had the temerity to defy him.

The Founders saw this coming. They obsessed over it, and relentlessly warned us future generations about it. And they built a solution for it into the Constitution they drafted in the summer and fall of 1787: impeachment.

James Madison, in Federalist 47, cautioned that the greatest danger to liberty wouldn’t come from a foreign invasion, but, instead, from a president who turned the powers of government into instruments of personal will:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Alexander Hamilton, no radical by any stretch, wrote that impeachable offenses are those which “proceed from the misconduct of public men” and injure society itself. He hoped, in Federalist 68, that no man with “[t]alents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would ever reach the White House, but that’s exactly what we’re now watching in real time.

And, no, impeachment is not some “unprecedented Democratic overreach.” Republicans have demanded impeachment of Democratic presidents for nearly a century, and tried multiple times, most recently just two years ago.

• Republican legislators screamed about impeaching Franklin D. Roosevelt over his threat to pack the Supreme Court if they didn’t stop knocking down his New Deal programs.
• They floated impeachment of Harry Truman for going into Korea without a formal declaration of war.
• They threatened both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with impeachment over the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and the War in Vietnam.
• They introduced impeachment resolutions against Jimmy Carter over the Panama Canal treaty.
• They campaigned openly to impeach Barack Obama over his “dictatorial” executive orders and the “communist” Affordable Care Act.

The idea that impeachment is too “divisive” to even discuss now is a naked lie, and a very convenient one for authoritarian Republicans. What’s different today isn’t the tool of impeachment; it’s the target.

Trump has now made explicit what Richard Nixon tried to pull off but failed: that his presidency exists above the law and he can freely ignore both domestic and international law. Nixon at least had the decency to mutter it privately, once even telling David Frost that, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump has put it into public policy.

When a president claims the law doesn’t restrain him, as Trump has done — when he treats Congress’ approval as if it were optional, federal judges as if they were political enemies, treaties as inconveniences that can be gotten around or even ignored, and war powers as personal prerogatives — impeachment stops being political theater and becomes a constitutional necessity.

While I vehemently disagree with Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires, gutting USAID and other agencies, and inflammatory rhetoric (among dozens of other things), this is not about policy disagreements.

It’s explicitly about his unilaterally making war without congressional authorization, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, dangling pardons and financial opportunities for his allies but the law as vengeance for his critics, and the obscenity of his mass pardons for the criminals who attacked our Capitol on January 6th.

It’s about, in other words, a president who’s told us all, bluntly, that legality and government power — including the power to execute a woman who was just driving home after dropping off her child at school — flows from his own definition of “morality,” his “own mind,” and no other source, the American Constitution be damned.

He’s asserting the “morality” of a man convicted of fraud, adjudicated a rapist, repeatedly accused of sexual assault, who gleefully takes bribes of gold, Trump hotels, and jet planes and rewards the bribers with tariff reductions, American weapons, and other benefits.

This is how Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán transformed Russia and Hungary from democracies into strongman single-party autocracies, and Trump is eagerly following their examples (and apparently taking their regular advice).

Here’s an example of what articles of impeachment could read like, a version that could be read into the Congressional Record tomorrow:

Articles of Impeachment Against Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

Article I — Abuse of Power and Usurpation of Congressional War Authority

In his conduct as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of his office by initiating and directing acts of war without authorization from Congress, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

President Trump ordered and executed military actions against the sovereign nation of Venezuela, including strikes within its capital and the seizure of its head of state, without a declaration of war or statutory authorization from Congress. In doing so, he substituted his personal judgment and the desires of his donors in the fossil fuel industry for the constitutional role of the legislative branch, nullifying Congress’s exclusive authority to decide when the nation enters hostilities.

Such conduct is not a policy disagreement but a direct assault on the separation of powers. The Framers vested the war-making power in Congress precisely to prevent unilateral, impulsive, or self-interested uses of military force by a single individual.

Wherefore, President Trump has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government and has committed an abuse of power warranting impeachment and removal from office.

Article II — Contempt for the Rule of Law and Constitutional Limits on Executive Power

Donald J. Trump has asserted that his authority as President is constrained only by his “own morality,” explicitly rejecting the binding force of domestic law, treaty obligations, and international legal norms ratified by the United States.

By publicly declaring that neither Congress, the courts, nor the law meaningfully constrain his actions, President Trump has advanced a theory of executive power fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution. Treaties ratified by the Senate are, under Article VI, the supreme Law of the Land.

A President who claims legality flows from personal judgment rather than law announces an intent to govern as a sovereign, not as a constitutional officer.

This conduct constitutes a profound breach of the President’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Article III — Corrupt Use of the Justice System for Political Retaliation

Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of the presidency by directing or encouraging the use of federal law enforcement and prosecutorial authority to target political opponents for retaliation and intimidation.

The President has publicly demanded investigations and prosecutions of political adversaries while signaling protection for allies. Such conduct weaponizes the justice system and undermines equal justice under law.

This pattern of conduct constitutes an abuse of power and a violation of the public trust.

Article IV — Subversion of Democratic Institutions and Checks and Balances

Donald J. Trump has engaged in a sustained campaign to undermine the independence of the judiciary, the authority of Congress, and the legitimacy of constitutional constraints on executive power.

By encouraging attacks on judges, disregarding statutory limits imposed by Congress, and treating oversight as illegitimate, the President has sought to weaken the institutions designed to restrain executive excess.

Such conduct represents a betrayal of constitutional responsibility.

Article V — Abuse of the Pardon Power to Undermine Accountability for an Attack on the Constitution

Donald J. Trump has abused the pardon power by issuing broad clemency to individuals who participated in or supported the January 6, 2001 attack on the United States Capitol.

While the pardon power is substantial, it was never intended to erase accountability for a violent assault on Congress itself. This use of the pardon power undermines deterrence, encourages future political violence, and weakens constitutional governance.

Conclusion

In all of this, Donald J. Trump has demonstrated that he will place personal authority above constitutional duty, power above law, and loyalty to himself above loyalty to the Republic.

Wherefore, Donald J. Trump warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

Then comes the part Democrats keep flinching from: begin a loud and public campaign for impeachment. After all, just this week he told Republicans that his biggest fear if the GOP loses control of the House is that he’ll be impeached for a third time.

On Thursday afternoon, I got one of Trump’s daily fundraising emails. This one didn’t ask if I’d yet made a donation to get my name on the list for my “tariff rebate check” like others this week and last but, instead, said (and the bold type is also bold in his email):

“Dems plan for 2026 is simple but disturbing to EVERY MAGA Republican:
1. Flip the House
2. Flip the Senate
3. IMPEACH PRESIDENT TRUMP
4. Kill the MAGA agenda permanently”

He’s not just talking about impeachment; he’s fundraising on it! Democrats, frankly, should do the same.

I realize that a conviction will never pass the current Senate (although we may be surprised if he keeps doing and saying truly crazy and offensive things), but it’s important to get this into the public dialogue and prepare the ground for next year.

That’s why Democrats must tell voters now exactly what they intend to do with power if they win it this coming November (or before, if the GOP loses any more House members).

And they need to stop pretending that through some weird magic our democracy can be preserved by silence, caution, or simply hoping that this convicted felon will suddenly discover restraint or cave to a judge’s demand.

There is a real possibility, by the way, that today a handful of Republicans in the House could decide that preserving Congress’ war powers, the power and independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law matters more than protecting one aging politician. After all, yesterday five Republicans in the Senate voted against Trump on his Venezuela oil-stealing campaign and nine in the House voted against him on healthcare. It happened with Nixon, and it can happen again.

But it won’t happen if Democrats continue to treat impeachment like a dirty word instead of a constitutional obligation.

Yes, it’ll anger Trump’s base and rightwing media will go nuts. But his base is already filled with rage and rightwing media will do what they do no matter what, impeachment or not. Democrats need to stop cowering.

So let’s say what needs to be said without euphemism or apology:

Democrats should introduce articles of impeachment now, run on them this November, and then actually do it.

The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website this week, purporting to tell the history of the January 6 insurrection attempt. It opens with this (which, interestingly, appears to be 100 percent AI-generated):

“The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump — despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.“In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power. This gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy.”

The most dangerous lies a government can tell aren’t about how tax cuts will create prosperity or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although those were bad. When a malicious, corrupt government wants to truly break down trust in a society to more easily seize and manipulate it politically and loot it economically, it inevitably tells lies about the past.

Because once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support.

That’s what makes the Trump administration’s new official White House website about January 6th so chilling. This isn’t spin or selective memory: it’s an industrial-scale, government-run attempt to erase the memory of a violent insurrection and replace it with a fantasy narrative where Donald Trump and the attackers were the heroes, the police and Mike Pence were the villains, and Joe Biden simply winning the election was the real crime.

The site claims that January 6 was marked by “minimal violence”; that the rioters who smashed doors and windows, smeared feces on the walls, urinated on carpets and papers on Democratic members’ desks, contributed to the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others were “peaceful”; and that the police officers trying to prevent the mob from greater violence weren’t brutally assaulted but instead “allowed” the “protesters” into the Capitol.

The White House claims the police “aggressively” fired “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions. Video evidence shows officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building — actions that facilitated entry — while simultaneously deploying violent force against others. These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”

One section even argues that the real injustice wasn’t the beating of officers with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and fists, but that Trump’s violent supporters were later prosecuted at all.

Another section claims that the January 6th defendants were victims of “political persecution,” while the police officers who defended the Capitol were the aggressors.

These are simple, blatant lies, something we’ve grown to expect from Trump and his people but are shocking, nonetheless.

More than 140 police officers were injured so severely that day that they were hospitalized. We watched officers crushed in doors, dragged down stairs, tased into heart attacks, beaten, eyes gouged out, and left bleeding on the ground. We heard their screams live on television.

Multiple courts reviewed thousands of hours of video and multiple juries sent hundreds of Trump’s thugs to prison. Multiple judges — many appointed by Republicans — called January 6th an “attempted coup” and an attack on America’s constitutional order.

And now our government itself — today in the hands of a billionaire wannabe dictator and his lickspittles because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let billionaires buy an election — is trying to tell Americans none of it was real.

History would like to have a word with us about this despicable attempt at revisionist propaganda.

In Nazi Germany, the regime’s most important lies weren’t about economics or foreign policy; they were about violence. Nazi street thugs were recast as patriots while the victims of their violence, including socialists, gays, immigrants, and Jews, were reframed as the provocateurs.

When the Nazi state lied about who committed violence and why, it taught its citizens that paramilitary force is legitimate when used by the “right” people.

In the Soviet Union, people didn’t necessarily believe the government’s lies, but that didn’t prevent the USSR’s dictatorship from holding power. Instead, it produced something worse: mass cynicism.

A common joke in Russia about the two major newspapers — Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”) — was “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestia there is no truth.” (В ‘Правде’ нет известий, а в ‘Известиях’ нет правды.) When citizens assume the government is lying all the time, truth stops mattering, participation becomes mere theater or social climbing, and power becomes untouchable and, thus, increasingly brutal.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the goal of constant lying during the Nazi era wasn’t persuasion about the rightness of Hitler’s pronouncements, laws, and flunkies but widespread public disorientation.

When people can no longer tell fact from fiction, she pointed out, they stop resisting and retreat into a sort of semi-tribal existence. Loyalty to “your” particular tribe replaces the rule of law.

And that’s exactly what this lie-filled January 6th website is doing.

By declaring that Trump’s mob was innocent and the American criminal justice system is corrupt, it sends a clear message: violence in service of Trump will be forgiven, even celebrated, going forward into the future.

This is an old tactic that dictators have used since the days of Ancient Rome. Putin today has motorcycle gangs called the Night Wolves, for example, who terrorize “liberals” and gays in Russia with impunity. It’s not hard to imagine the militia members in America who’re now being recruited by ICE being turned loose on the rest of us in a similar way once the “immigration emergency” is “resolved.”

The police who defend democracy, these White House lies tell would-be vigilantes, will be abandoned by the very government that employs them, while the courts that are the historic arbiters of the law will be smeared and ignored. Elections that should reflect the will of the people will instead be treated as optional suggestions rather than binding decisions.

We’ve seen this movie before in America, too. After the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” mythology rewrote an armed rebellion to preserve slavery into a noble struggle for “heritage.” That lie didn’t heal the country, but instead justified the rise of the Klan and a century of racial terror, voter suppression, and political violence that endures to this day.

These official lies about January 6th are laying the groundwork for the same kind of future for those of us who may oppose the Trump regime and its successors.

This isn’t just about salving Donald Trump’s fragile, 10-year-old ego. It’s also a setup to condition the public to accept the next time Republicans lose an election and respond with violent attacks.

The message isn’t subtle: if January 6th was “peaceful,” then January 6th is within the new norm and can — or even should — happen again. If police were the villains, then police can be ignored next time. If courts are corrupt, then their verdicts don’t count when they’re inconvenient to these new American fascists.

A democratic republic can survive policy mistakes and bad presidents; G-d knows we’ve had our share of both. What it can’t survive, though, is a government that looks straight into the camera and tells its people that violence didn’t happen when everyone watched it live.

In other words, this depraved new website isn’t just a lie: it’s an invitation.

When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of Trump’s ICE goons Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.

As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood” — as in “Do Good” — to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.

When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.

Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.

Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.

Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.

In Essay #6, in 1772, Dogood wrote:

“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.”

Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.

Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.

And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.

For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.

James Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system — splitting the government into three co-equal parts — that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).

Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that yesterday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.

To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. … [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”

Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she/Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.

This isn’t an uniquely American problem: it’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: when state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz noted, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.

Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.

If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.

Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they’ll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump.

Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.

That memory of Ludwig and his architectural obsessions has been haunting me lately, and it’s frankly astonishing that more people in the media aren’t asking the same question I’m bringing up here (and people are constantly calling into my radio/TV show about): “Is Trump losing his sanity?”

I’m not talking about his well-documented lifelong narcissism, his sociopathic inability to feel or even understand the pain of other people, his bullying, or even his compulsive lying, greed, and lechery. This is about whether he’s fit for the job he’s holding or is losing his touch with reality in a way that endangers both our nation and world peace.

When Trump held his press conference announcing the invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, a reporter asked the most basic question imaginable: Who is running Venezuela now and going forward?

Trump first claimed that he was in charge, but then when other reporters asked for details he waved his hand toward the men standing behind him and said, “They are.”

Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Gen. Dan Caine, and Pete Hegseth.

The expressions on their faces told the real story: Surprise, confusion, and even alarm. This was clearly, visibly news to them. Shocking news, even.

Did he just decide to lie his way through the press conference like he’s done so much of his life? Didn’t he realize this was a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution? Did he think for a moment that he’s the king of the Americas? Or the world?

The next day we discovered the truth their expressions revealed; there was no plan for governing Venezuela, or even trying to via an occupation Iraq-style. There was no congressional authorization; in fact, he told the oil companies before the raid but didn’t bother to inform Congress. (Although the oil companies now say he’s lying.)

There was no public debate and no involvement of any visible constitutional process involved in this invasion and body-snatch. Under our federal system, the president doesn’t get to just improvise an occupation or administration of a foreign nation from a podium.

Even Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush didn’t try to pull that off; all sought congressional authorizations for their wars and each gave explanations that at least gave a hat-tip to the traditional American values of democracy, peace, and the rule of law.

Congress, after all, declares war under our Constitution, as well as controlling the purse that makes that war possible. Even the idea of “running” another country would require massive legal, diplomatic, and military frameworks, and now we discover that none of that stuff existed. Instead, apparently, Trump had an impulsive thought or idea and just blurted it out.

That moment should have set off loud alarms throughout Washington and should have shot across our media like a meteorite. Instead, it drifted by as simply another strange episode in a presidency that’s taught us to pretend the abnormal is now normal.

Democrats (and a few Republicans) condemned Trump’s claim that he was running Venezuela; Republican politicians are now twisting themselves into pretzels to try to justify it. Reporters were simply confused. It’s nuts.

And in just the few days since then, Trump has openly threatened to seize Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. These aren’t policy proposals. They also aren’t rooted in American or international law, military or political strategy, or diplomacy.

They are, instead, Mad King Ludwig-like expressions of personal fantasy, of imperial imagination, of a man who appears increasingly convinced — who actually believes — that all power in America and perhaps around the world flows from his will alone.

And then there’s Trump’s bizarre online behavior, like posting over 100 times a night, and promoting a tweet saying that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz hired a hit on State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, close personal friends of Walz’s.

Or his refusal to consider the last Venezuelan election winner, María Corina Machado, to run the country because she “stole” the Nobel prize from him.

Rachel Maddow on her television program suggested the real reason Trump invaded Venezuela was simply because he could. Like a child, or a mad king, he wanted to play with his soldiers, watch them kill people and blow things up, and he doesn’t want anybody to tell him that he can’t.

And, I would add, eventually he plans to turn them on people like you and me. Once he’s made sure they’ll do anything he demands, no matter how bizarre, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. That’s why he’s now going after Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and other members of Congress for telling soldiers they don’t have to follow illegal orders.

Lev Parnas, who once worked closely with Trump and still hears from people inside his orbit, writes that Trump is receiving regular intravenous infusions of a new Alzheimer’s medication, administered through veins in his hands, whose known side effects include “sleepiness” during the day, “poor judgment,” and “impaired impulse control.” It could explain the bruises, the CT scans and MRIs, and the regular cognitive tests that the medication requires.

Not to mention the increasingly bizarre and grandiose behavior.

I’m not diagnosing Trump, but I am watching — a shocked world is watching — a pattern of behavior that is becoming more erratic, more impulsive, and more detached from constitutional reality week by painful week.

This also isn’t a partisan observation; I’m describing precisely the scenario the Framers and a later Congress worried about when they designed safeguards for presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment wasn’t written for removing villains but rather for those moments when a president can’t or won’t reliably discharge the duties of his office but doesn’t have the good grace, insight, or ability to step down himself.

But constitutional tools are only as strong as the people willing to use them.

Bavaria in the 19th century had fewer options than we do. It had no elections to depose Mad King Ludwig, and no amendment laying out a clear procedure for replacing him.

For years, Ludwig had ministers serving him who watched how crazy he’d become but nonetheless delayed, rationalized, and hoped the problem would solve itself. It wasn’t until the damage became so great, as the state trembled on the verge of bankruptcy, that it was impossible to ignore any longer.

Modern America, on the other hand, has elections, courts, and a theoretically independent Congress. And we have the 25th Amendment. What we lack right now, however, is courage in the GOP and Trump’s cabinet.

Republican members of Congress know that a president can’t unilaterally invade or administer foreign nations on his own whim or impulse. They know that threatening annexation destabilizes the entire world, and Trump’s handed both Putin, Netanyahu, and Xi the rationalizations they all crave to expand their own empires.

Even Republicans know that governing by impulse isn’t strength but, instead, represents a very real danger to our republic. And yet they remain silent, calculating that confronting Trump is riskier to their careers than indulging him is to the country.

That GOP calculation is the real threat.

Trump’s love of military spectacle also fits perfectly — and dangerously — into this pattern. Like Ludwig staging operas and medieval fantasies in his version of the Kennedy Center, Trump treats America’s armed forces as props in his own pathetic personal drama. Rallies, salutes, parades, flyovers, and dramatic announcements substitute for deliberation, applause substitutes for legitimacy, and the human costs, the constitutional limits, and the long-term consequences are all fading into the background.

Neuschwanstein still stands today, beautiful and empty, a monument to what happens when fantasy replaces governance. Bavaria survived despite Ludwig, not because of him. Twenty-first century America, however, doesn’t have the luxury of turning its current ruler into a picturesque lesson (complete with a Ludwig-style ballroom) after the damage is done. A nuclear-armed superpower can’t afford indulgence that’s pretending to be patience.

The Constitution isn’t self-enforcing and doesn’t rise up on its own when norms are trampled. It instead relies on people in positions of authority to choose responsibility over fear; that’s why federal officials and our soldiers pledge their allegiance to our Constitution rather than to our government or any particular administration or person.

We hold the rulebook sacred, not the rulers.

If Republicans continue to refuse to even acknowledge the danger in front of them, history suggests the reckoning will come anyway, just at a far higher cost.

Bavaria eventually acted, not because it was easy but because delay had become more dangerous than dealing with a psychologically incapacitated and emotionally stunted ruler. The question facing the United States today is whether we’ll learn from that history or insist on repeating it.

Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they’re stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown.

When Donald Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.

There was a brief, shining moment when Russia was a democracy. I visited there at the time. Starting with Mikhail Gorbachev and lasting about a decade, Russia embraced the ideals of the European Enlightenment, which itself was inspired by the North American colonists’ contact with Native American tribes who had been practicing democracy for millennia.

Then Vladimir Putin came along, began suing media outlets and large law firms into bankruptcy so his oligarch buddies could take them over, packed the courts and rigged the elections, and finally outlawed dissent, calling dissenters “the enemy within” and “domestic terrorists.”

Instead of power flowing from the people up, it began to flow from Putin down, turning the Russian democracy into an autocracy, functionally a dictatorship with the patina of democracy because they still have elections.

Putin, via an oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, gave a man named Paul Manafort $10 million in 2005 to install a Putin-friendly president (Viktor Yanukovych) in Ukraine as the first step to essentially turning that country into a vassal state, the way they’d already done with Belarus, Chechnya, Georgia, Transnistria, Syria, and Kazakhstan.

When, in 2014, the Ukrainian people threw out Yanukovych and voted for democracy, Putin invaded and seized Crimea, one of the most strategically important parts of the country (and where my daughter went to college), a preface to his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine proper.

With this was born the Putin Doctrine:

1. Russia’s policy decisions, both foreign and domestic, are dictated by Putin’s whims, not by the will of parliament (the Duma), or what’s best for the country or its people. He protects and enriches his family and friends while punishing his enemies.2. The rule of law internationally is irrelevant to the new Russian state; instead, “might makes right.” If another country has something you want, or you don’t like the way it’s being run, just invade, or send millions of bots and internet trolls via social media to disrupt its society and politics (see: Brexit and Trump 2016).
3. The world is now multipolar, with the “great powers” of Russia, China, and the United States having final say in political and military activity in their regions regardless of objections from local governments. Russia will control Eurasia and eventually all of Europe; China will control Asia and eventually Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and the US will be the ultimate power in the Americas, both North, South, and Central.

Manafort, meanwhile, came back to America and ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for “free” while shuttling insider political information to Russian intelligence to exploit with social media trolls and paid podcasters.

While there have been times in America’s past when we’ve flirted with this sort of worldview, it’s never been made official US policy. Even when we’ve attacked other resource-rich countries, we’ve at least provided an excuse grounded in “making the world safe and advancing democracy.”

That’s because the United States, both international and domestically, used to stand for the principles of the European Enlightenment. They included the idea that democracy was the natural state of humanity, ordained by what Thomas Jefferson called “Nature’s God”; that power would be diffused across three co-equal government branches; and that the public good would take precedence over the desires of the president’s or politicians’ friends.

The Putin doctrine — fully adopted by Trump and his lickspittles with his media lawsuits, the invasion of Venezuela, and his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) that identifies Democrats and anti-ICE protestors as potential domestic terrorists — tears all that down.

Trump’s adoption of the Putin Doctrine ignores our history of democracy at home and the promotion of democracy abroad, saying instead that whoever has the stronger military rules the region.

It abandons the “rules based order” that the United Nations proclaimed in the 1950s — which has prevented another world war for 81 years — and says instead that if you can successfully capture the head of a foreign state (no matter how good or bad he or she may be) you should simply go ahead and do it.

Adolf Hitler was following his own version of the Putin Doctrine when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, kicking off World War II. The oligarchs of the Old South were following it when their Confederate Army commenced the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. And now Trump has made America officially embrace it.

Our Founders never envisaged a future where an entire political party would be captured by a small group of oligarchs politically led by a demagogue, who would then abandon the ideals expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution.

As Dan Sisson and I document in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction, America’s Founders considered the demagogue part of the equation, but thought Congress and the Courts would protect the nation; they never imagined that six corrupt Supreme Court justices would rewrite the Constitution to give a president immunity for all crimes committed in the Oval Office after making legalized political bribery the official policy of the country.

As Christopher Armitage points out, about the only government institutions that are trying to preserve democracy in America now are the Blue states. And they have considerable power, because Trump can’t pardon state-based prosecutions even when they’re against officials in his own federal government.

Now that the Trump regime has seized almost complete control of the GOP, has its friends in charge of most of our major media and law firms, has corrupted our federal justice system, has deployed masked secret police across the country, and is challenging voters’ rights at multiple levels, America needs the Blue states to get more coordinated to push back against MAGA’s Putin-like behaviors in Red states.

Each of us who lives in a Blue state has an obligation to reach out to our state’s politicians and demand that they stand up to this corrupt, illegitimate regime. As Armitage notes, we must push them to:

“Prosecute federal officials who commit assault, kidnapping, or civil rights violations in your state. Build public revenue streams that don’t depend on federal funding. Expand state safety nets to catch the people federal cuts will drop. Demonstrate what good governance looks like.”

The differences between the quality of life in oligarch-run Red states and Democratic-run Blue states have become so conspicuous it’s amazing they’re not more widely known:

• Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Trump-supporting Red states only produce 29 percent of our income and wealth.
• The median family income in Blue states is $74,243. In Red states it’s $63,553. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.
• Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are better educated, with 36 percent of their population having some college education compared to Trump’s counties at 25 percent.
• Residents of Blue states live 2.2 years longer, on average, than residents of Red states.

Republican/oligarch-controlled Red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

• Spousal abuse
• Obesity
• Smoking
• Teen pregnancy
• Sexually transmitted diseases
• Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
• Bankruptcies and poverty
• Homicide and suicide
• Infant mortality
• Maternal mortality
• Forcible rape
• Robbery and aggravated assault
• Dropouts from high school
• Divorce
• Contaminated air and water
• Opiate addiction and deaths
• Unskilled workers
• Parasitic infections
• Income and wealth inequality
• Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
• Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
• People on welfare
• Child poverty
  
• Homelessness
• Spousal murder
• Unemployment
• Deaths from auto accidents
• People living on disability
• Gun deaths

America stands at a crossroads, as the Trump regime moves us closer every day to replacing our democracy altogether with a Russia-like federal autocracy.

There’s no Abraham Lincoln in charge of our government, so it falls to us and our Blue states to enforce the rule of law, stand up for democracy, and show the skeptics and “dark enlightenment” billionaire Tech Bros that the will of the people still matters here.

That doesn’t require waiting for the election this fall or in 2028; it just needs the governors and administrations of the Blue states to stand up against Trump’s embrace of the Putin Doctrine and preserve what’s left of our democratic traditions.

Ballotpedia has a good site where you can drill down to the contact information for your state’s elected officials to let them know you want them to push back hard.

Good luck: the fate and future of the American Experiment may well rest in your hands.

It’s not just a brand new year; it’s a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election.

Just a week ago, for example, Trump’s Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it’ll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they’re received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get “processed,” which may happen days later.

In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state are enthusiastically purging voters from the rolls as they get ready for this fall. Remember, reporter and economist Greg Palast found, using official federal and state numbers, that in 2024:

Kamala Harris“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

You’d think we each have a right to vote, rather than voting being just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways.

Supreme Court Republicans on the ruled, for example, that we have a right to own a gun. As a result, before a state or local government can take away your gun, they must first go before a judge to prove the necessity of doing so.

But, Republicans on the Court tell us, Republican secretaries of state can eliminate your right to vote without even telling you; how does that make sense?

14th AmendmentAfter all, the to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

The 19th Amendment references “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 26th Amendment is all about, “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote…”

ConstitutionAdditionally, the , in Article I, Section 4, says that Congress can make federal laws that overrule state laws restricting or regulating voting:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…”

And, sure enough, Congress did just that in 1993 when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Act because, among other things, it provided for the option of instant voter registration when a person gets a driver’s license in every state in the union.

Now known as 52 U.S. Code § 20501, this law of the land opens with:

The Congress finds that -(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right
(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right and
(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.

And it wasn’t a particularly contentious law when it was passed: every Democrat present in the Senate voted for it (Rockefeller missed the vote) as did all but two Republicans.

So how did we get from the Constitution repeatedly asserting a “right to vote” and Congress passing a law that unambiguously proclaims that right, to the current state of affairs where states regularly and methodically deprive citizens of their “right” to vote and instead claim that it’s merely a privilege?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, much of the blame rests with the most conservative and regressive of our federal institutions, the Supreme Court.

The first real test of the NVRA came in 2018, when Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, went on a voter-purge binge (that hit Black, student, and elderly neighborhoods particularly hard) and was sued by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for violating Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

In a bitter 5-4 decision, the Republican majority ruled in Husted v Randolph that purging voters because they failed to return a junk-mail-like postcard was entirely legal.

It’s a practice that was called “caging” back when Karl Rove’s guy was allegedly doing it and it was illegal then but has, since that Court ruling, spread to pretty much every Republican-controlled state in the nation.

They’ll identify a part of the state that they consider particularly “prone to fraud“ — in other words, filled with a lot of Black and brown people — and mail postcards that look like junk mail into those precincts. When people failed to return them, they are automatically removed from the voting rolls. In most cases they don’t even know they’ve been purged until they show up to vote and are turned away.

Justice Samuel Alito’s decision was particularly biting, claiming that the arguments made by the citizens who’d lost their right to vote were “worse than superfluous” and their argument that they shouldn’t have to regularly check in with the Secretary of State’s office to stay on the voter rolls represented logic “no sensible person” could agree with.

Sensible or not, in his dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that around 4 percent of Americans move every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters — nearly 20 percent of its 8 million registered voters — as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll....”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was even more scathing.

“Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters,” she wrote, “including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.”

She then quoted the “right to vote” NVRA preamble noted above, and, essentially, accused the conservatives on the Court of helping Republicans in the states they controlled engage in massive racial and economic discrimination in the voting process.

“[This decision] entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate. … Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote.”

The “right to vote” took another hit when the State of Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a recount of the 2000 presidential election but five Republicans on the US Supreme Court ignored the 10th Amendment (“states’ rights”) and stopped the recount.

That was a good thing for George W. Bush because when the Florida vote was later recounted by a consortium of newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, they found, as the Times noted on Nov. 12, 2001:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won...”

Nonetheless, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dismissed all the nation’s concerns about the Court flipping the 2000 presidential election in that totally partisan 5-4 decision, writing in his opinion:

“[T]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Which casts us in a pretty terrible light. As Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) points out:

“The constitutions of at least 135 nations — including our fellow North American countries, Canada and Mexico — explicitly guarantee citizens the right to vote…”

Instead, Raskin notes, because of five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court we’re in the company of countries like Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, and Pakistan.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda and they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to suppress the vote and thus rig the system.

That’s why they’ve already successfully passed previously-unthinkable major voter suppression laws in 18 states and have them pending in many more. They’ve changed the law in Georgia and several other states so that they can now throw out the votes from entire neighborhoods or cities where they don’t like the outcome; all they have to do is vaguely assert a “suspicion of fraud.”

Between the massive gerrymandering effort the GOP has launched nationwide and the Post Office’s changes that’ll hit Blue states with high levels of mail-in voting (some only have mail-in voting), the next few elections are going to be a real challenge for Democrats.

Additionally, as you’re reading these words, millions of voters are being purged from the rolls in Red states, particularly in Blue cities with significant minority populations.

As a result, this fall we’re going to have to show up in absolutely overwhelming numbers just to get squeaker victories in these now-heavily-rigged Republican-controlled states.

Unless enough of us stand up, speak up, and get active to regain control of Congress this fall and push legislation protecting American voters, Republicans will continue to eviscerate the voting right they’ve now turned into a privilege until it becomes completely meaningless.

And that will signal the end of America as we know it.

This week, both Donald Trump and his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”

As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.

There was a time when you bought things.

You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

That America is disappearing.

Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.

Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job — a college education — has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt — the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students — and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.

That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: it reports on you.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone — banking, work, navigation, healthcare — being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multi-billion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.

Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.

And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy — all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits — America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

It’s gotten so bad that apps — which also acquire and then sell our data — have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99 percent instead of the 1 percent. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy — not billionaires — sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: we simply rented our way out of it.

Here we go again, only this time it appears to be the Working Families Party that’s fixing to help elect Republicans. They’re proudly proclaiming that by the 2028 presidential election they hope to have candidates on the ballot in 18 states. The party’s national director, rapper/musician Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, told the Guardian:

“Less and less (sic) people are identifying as being a Democrat or Republican. The brand of the Democratic and the Republican parties are underwater consistently. I don’t think there’s been a better and more right time for a third party to emerge in this country that speaks to the interest of everyday working people. I believe that our time has come.”

You’d think by now we would have learned that having progressives seize control of the Democratic Party is a hell of a lot more successful strategy for rebuilding our democracy and our middle class than running against it. In Florida in 2000, for example, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida — and thus the White House — by 537 votes.

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states like Florida not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate John Kerry instead.

Vanity candidate Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College over Hillary Clinton that year, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had progressives not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president, and we never would have been lied into two illegal wars, given trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, or gotten John Roberts and Sam Alito on the Supreme Court.

Had progressives in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared the trauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths; Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch on the Court; another $5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires; and the ongoing DOGE assault to our democracy.

America would be a very, very different country with a progressive Supreme Court and an expansion, rather than the destruction, of New Deal and Great Society programs that built and sustained the middle class. In other words, ironically, we’d be a lot closer to the goals of the Green Party today if they’d never run a presidential candidate in those elections.

This is not to say the Democratic Party is perfect. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin is now hiding an autopsy of the 2024 election, there are still on-the-take Democrats in the neoliberal Problem Solvers’ Caucus and taking piles of cash from AIPAC and corporate PACs, and in many states genuine progressives in the mold of FDR and LBJ are still viewed by the party’s bosses with a jaundiced eye.

But America — with our 250-year-old operating system — is one of only a handful of democracies worldwide with first-past-the-post (FPTP) winner-take-all election systems, which pretty much force a nation into a two-party system. Under those circumstances, a third party will always pull votes (and, thus, victories) away from the main party it’s most closely aligned with philosophically.

This is why Republican donors have historically been so enthusiastic about supporting the Green Party and Democratic donors occasionally pitch in for the Libertarians.

Reporting from AP, CBS, and others document a broad 2024 GOP-linked network that helped Stein and Cornel West with ballot access and legal support in swing states including Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and others, often using Republican-aligned lawyers and consultants who have also worked for Donald Trump or state GOP organizations.

In 2016, so many Republican donors and politicians had helped fund Stein’s effort that the federal election commission forced her to return a fraction of it, almost a quarter-million dollars.

Most likely they’re now courting the Working Families Party, following Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win running on both the Democratic and Working Families tickets in New York (Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families ballot.)

But while the synergy of Working Families and Democrats worked in New York, that was only because it’s one of a tiny handful of states (including Oregon, Mississippi, Connecticut, and Vermont) that has fusion voting or its equivalent, allowing a single candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple parties.

Whether New Yorkers voted for Mamdani on the Democratic ticket or the line for the Working Families Party, the result was the same: a vote for Mamdani.

Anywhere else in the country, though, it would have been a vote drawn away from the Democratic Party because when the Founders put our system of voting together our form of democracy was a new thing. Voting was a novel experiment, by and large, after Europe had been ruled for almost two millennia by kings and queens.

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party “parliamentary democracies” in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — every one of them countries that became a democracy after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on.

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for the higher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to the main, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by the system and my vote for Gore becomes the one that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including my hometown of Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation at the federal level would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining the Democratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and actually elect more progressives to office, something that can only be done within the Democratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the party that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, the end of legal apartheid, and that built the world’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers” or, to a lesser extent, the neoliberal “New Democrats.”

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP.

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying our planet.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Zohran Mamdani, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within the Democratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, they know we must first take over the DNC. (Yes, Bernie is an independent and Zohran prefers the Working Families party, but both ran as Democrats.)

In other words, every one of us should be working to get inside the Democratic Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party and the MAGA movements, and it’s what progressives must do today with the Democratic Party.

No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting. And this is not a small or incidental issue: the stakes for 2028 may well include the continued survival of America as a democratic republic.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind the movement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

And, hopefully, the Working Families Party folks will turn down all the Republican money that will be dangled in front of them and choose not to run candidates in places where there isn’t either fusion voting or instant runoff voting.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates.

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 28 percent, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:

1. They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;
2. They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100 percent of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);
3. They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;
4. And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ’80s and ’90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91 percent top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70 percent of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in the Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his eight years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218 percent increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86 percent to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for two years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

On Christmas of all days, Donald Trump chose to call Democrats “scum.” Not criminals. Not misguided. Not wrong. Scum. A word we usually reserve for things we scrape off the bottom of a shoe or skim off polluted water. A word whose entire purpose is to dehumanize.

That moment matters far beyond the day’s news cycle, and far beyond partisan politics. It matters because leaders don’t just govern; they model.

Psychologists and social and political scientists have long pointed out that national leaders function, at a deep emotional level, as parental figures for their nations. They set the boundaries of what is acceptable. They establish norms. They shape the emotional climate children grow up breathing.

America has lived through this before, both for good and, now, for ill.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this instinctively. In the depths of the Great Depression and the terror of World War II, he spoke to the country as a calm, steady parent. His fireside chats didn’t just convey policy; they conveyed reassurance, dignity, and solidarity.

He treated Americans as adults capable of courage and sacrifice. He named fear without exploiting it. The result was not weakness, but national resilience.

A generation raised under that moral tone went on to build the modern middle class, defeat fascism, and help construct a postwar world that valued democracy, human rights, and shared prosperity.

Contrast that with the bigoted, hateful, revenge-filled claptrap children have heard for the past decade from the emotionally stunted psychopath currently occupying the White House. Hours after calling you and me “scum,” he put up another post calling us “sleazebags.”

How presidential.

Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about the dangers of concentrated power and the military-industrial complex, modeling restraint and foresight.

John F. Kennedy appealed to service, famously asking what we could do for our country. Lyndon Johnson, for all his flaws, used the moral authority of the presidency to push civil rights forward, telling America that discrimination was not just illegal but wrong.

Even Ronald Reagan, whose policies I fiercely opposed, spoke a language of civic belonging and optimism rather than open dehumanization.

Go back further, to the Founders themselves, and George Washington warned against factional hatred and the corrosive effects of treating political opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens.

John Adams argued that a republic could only survive if it was grounded in virtue and moral responsibility. Thomas Jefferson wrote that every generation must renew its commitment to liberty, not surrender it to demagogues who feed on division.

They all understood something Trump doesn’t, or is so obsessively wrapped up in himself and his own infantile grievances that he doesn’t care about: the psychological power of example.

Donald Trump has spent ten years modeling for America the exact opposite of leadership.

Ten years of cruelty framed as strength.

Ten years of mockery, insults, and grievance elevated to the highest office in the land.

Ten years of praising strongmen, including Putin, Xi, and Orbán, while attacking democratic institutions.

Ten years of targeting Hispanics, Black Somali immigrants, demonizing refugees, and encouraging suspicion and hatred toward entire communities.

And now he’s giving us the example of using ICE not simply as a law enforcement agency, but as a masked, armed, unaccountable weapon of state terror aimed not only at brown-skinned families, but at journalists, clergy, lawyers, and anyone else who dares to document their abuse.

Kids graduating from high school this year have never known anything else. That fact should alarm every parent.

Children learn what leadership looks like long before they understand policy debates. They absorb emotional cues, and notice who gets rewarded and who gets punished.

When a president calls fellow Americans “scum” and suffers no consequences, the lesson is clear: cruelty is permissible if you have power. Empathy is expendable. Democracy is a nuisance. Accountability is optional.

This is how normalization works. What once would have been unthinkable becomes routine. The outrage dulls. The abnormal becomes background noise. And a generation grows up believing this is simply how adults in authority behave.

History tells us where that road leads: dehumanizing language precedes dehumanizing actions.

Every authoritarian movement begins by teaching people to see their neighbors as less than fully human. Once empathy vanishes, abuses become easier to justify, and violence becomes easier to excuse.

That’s why we all — parents, grandparents, and citizens — have a special responsibility right now.

We can’t assume our nation’s children will automatically recognize how dangerous and abnormal this moment is; instead, we have to name it for them.

We have to tell them, plainly and repeatedly, that this is not what healthy leadership looks like.

That calling people “scum” and “sleazebags” is not strength. That praising autocrats while undermining democracy is not patriotism. That power without empathy is not leadership; it’s merely a simple pathology known as psychopathy.

And we must model something better ourselves.

Disagree without dehumanizing. Stand up without tearing others down. Teach that democracy, in order to work, depends on mutual recognition of one another’s humanity.

Remind our kids that America has, in its best moments, been led by people who understood their role as moral examples, not just political operators.

And that when CBS, Fox “News,” the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Facebook, X, and other billionaire-owned rightwing media and social media pretend this is normal, they’re spitting on the graves of our Founders and participating in a gross violation of the basic norms of human decency.

Trump’s Christmas message wasn’t just offensive. It was a warning.

The future lays before us now, and if we care about the country our children will inherit, we can’t let this moral vandalism to go unanswered.

Given how the Republicans who run Congress let health insurance premiums for over 24 million Americans explode by not acting last week before going on vacation, it appears former Congressman Alan Grayson was right. The GOP Healthcare Plan is simple and straightforward:

“Don’t get sick.“If you do get sick, die quickly.”

And it appears Trump is handily helping us all along with that “die quickly” part, promoting both cancer-causing chemicals in our environment and food supply as well as pushing for more greenhouse gasses to kill more of us with droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires via climate change.

The EPA requires the country’s largest industrial facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions, which have been a major source of information for those tracking America’s progress toward mitigating climate change. Now, Trump’s proposing to gut that requirement, so we’ll no longer know how badly Big Industry is polluting our skies and wilding our weather.

Additionally, he wants to radically increase the amount of cancer-causing formaldehyde we can be exposed to, has already ended reporting requirements for heavily-polluting factory farms (ammonia and hydrogen sulfide), and is prioritizing polluters over our national parks.

Last year, you’ll recall, Trump told a group of fossil fuel executives that if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d do whatever they wanted. Apparently he’s now following through, right down to killing off wind farms.

The long and winding story of how we got here is one every American should know.

While many trace the beginning of the modern rightwing fascist-friendly MAGA-type movement to the 1954 Brown v Board decision and the way Fred Koch put the John Birch Society on steroids, another interesting origin story for today’s GOP base is grounded in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In the years immediately leading up to the 1970 creation of the EPA, pollution in America had gotten so bad it was impossible to ignore and was quickly becoming a political issue.

Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, a book about how DDT was killing birds worldwide, that electrified Americans and launched the nation’s first real environmental movement. The following year, smog killed 400 New Yorkers, and Lake Erie had largely died because it was so polluted.

In 1969, a spark from a passing train lit the Cuyahoga river on fire, and that same year a massive oil spill off the California coast covered over 400 square miles of beach and coastline with oil, killing hundreds of thousands of birds and other wildlife.

Car exhaust, scientists reported in 1969, was so severe it was causing large numbers of birth defects and cancer. Major American cities like St. Louis smelled, as TIME magazine reported at the time, “like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire.”

Richard Nixon, a canny politician who’d always had a pretty good take on the pulse of America, stepped up in 1969, creating the Environmental Quality Council. That was well received but didn’t make a dent in the problem, so Nixon did what was probably the only good deed for America of his presidency and helped create the EPA in 1970.

The wealthy oligarchs of American industry — particularly fossil fuel and chemical industry oligarchs — hated the EPA from the get-go, but this was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court had legalized political bribery.

Environmental regulations cut into their profits, and they felt persecuted after generations of their predecessor fatcats had poured their poisons into our air and water without a peep from the government. It was almost as infuriating as having to pay a 74% income tax on everything they earned after their first million (in today’s dollars).

In response to public opinion, the sentiments of the morbidly rich back then went along the lines of, “So what if kids got cancer? We didn’t live in the neighborhoods of our refineries and manufacturing facilities: screw them! They should be happy we keep them employed and shut up about all this hippy-dippy environment stuff!”

Regulating polluting industries and fossil fuel emissions was all the rage in the 1970s, and average working people loved it. But the billionaires hated it. As the EPA historian noted, by the time Russell Train had become the EPA Administrator in 1973, they were starting to get organized and active:

“During Train’s tenure at EPA, clean air issues continued to cause contention between environmentalists and industry representatives.“‘The entire environmental program was under siege by the energy crowd. It was a major accomplishment that we were able to keep environmental programs on track,’ said Train.
“Many efforts to trim EPA’s authority — to kill requirements for tall stacks, to curtail efforts to prevent significant deterioration of air cleaner than national air quality standards, and the like — were beaten back.”

That was also the year that America’s industrialists got serious about taking tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell’s Memo’s advice: the rich needed to step up and start buying off politicians and judges, seize control of the media, and use their endowments to stock universities with rightwing professors while pushing out the old-line liberals.

They got a big boost in 1976 (Buckley) and 1978 (Bellotti) when five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations buying off politicians was no longer considered criminal bribery: from those years forward it was, instead, “Constitutionally protected First Amendment free speech” and corporations were no longer legal fictions but fully “persons” who could claim protections under the Bill of (Human) Rights.

Lewis Powell himself, in fact, wrote the 1978 Bellotti decision giving corporate “persons” — including foreign corporations — the right to pour unlimited amounts of “dark money” into political campaigns. (Five corrupt Republicans on the Court would double down on this in 2010 with Citizens United.)

The fossil fuel billionaires, however, were still groaning under what they believed was an unending regulatory assault. The EPA was demanding that they clean up refineries that were spewing tons of cancer-causing benzene into the air, stop dumping radioactive and arsenic-containing coal tailings and drilling waste into rivers, and limit the exposure of workers. It was all too much.

So the fossil fuel billionaires and their fellow travelers got organized. They set up and funded policy think-tanks in every state in the union, each one devoted to the two main goals of the billionaires who birthed them: deregulation and tax cuts.

The challenge was convincing Americans that regulations were bad things, and that rich people should have their taxes cut from the 74 percent rate. That top tax bracket, after all, was the main thing preventing billionaires from grabbing all the money that was instead, then, going into the homes and pockets of unionized working-class people.

The think tanks got to work, backstopping the GOP at every opportunity. Money flowed to Republican politicians, both state and federal. A small army of commentators was organized, some of them scientists and economists willing to go on-the-take, to convince Americans that regulations weren’t something that would protect average people but were, instead, instruments of socialism or communism.

Their factotum, Jude Wanniski, even came up with a bizarre new economic theory and a “Two Santas” tax strategy that included techno-sounding phrases like “trickle down” and “supply side” to justify massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich.

The agencies like the EPA that were doing the regulating would, henceforth, be known as the “deep state,” a designation so creepy that few would choose to defend them.

After Reagan stopped enforcing antitrust laws in 1983 and Clinton deregulated the media in 1996, an army of radio and TV hosts were added to the mix, with over 1,500 local rightwing radio stations and Fox “News” rising into prominence. By 2000, Republicans were openly campaigning on platforms promising deregulation along with giant tax cuts for the “job creator” billionaires.

Now sufficiently indoctrinated to believe up is down, Republican voters became the nation’s useful idiots.

The think tanks told them climate change was a hoax, and they believed them. Trump told them the economy during his tenure was “the best in the history of the world” (it was only mediocre before the pandemic hit) and they believed him. He said he needed to cut taxes on the morbidly rich by around $5 trillion, and Republican voters nodded their heads in agreement.

Alexander Hamilton is often quoted as saying, “Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.” It’s become the motto of the brahmins of the GOP, who only stand for their own greed and that of their wealthy patrons.

The white Republican base has been so lied to and abused over the past forty or so years that they’ve become easy marks for the predators in both big business and the GOP.

They’ve ceased to stand for anything other than blind obedience to Republican politicians, who lie with impunity (The Washington Post has identified over 30,000 lies Trump told while in his first term in office, for example), and as a result they’re “falling for anything” right in front of God and the world:

• Democrats running child sex rings out of a DC pizza parlor? Sure! Let me bring an assault weapon!
• Teachers hate kids and are hell-bent on screwing up their lives. Of course: why else would they study for all those years for a job that pays squat?
• Treating a deadly new virus with horse de-wormer or a drug that kills the malaria parasite? Why not? Better than having to wear one of those terrible masks! How about injecting bleach? Sounds reasonable!
• There’s even been a recent explosion in the antisemitic claim that Jews run the world and are intent on “replacing” white Americans with Black and Brown people, justifying the brutality of ICE.
• Even as never-before-seen violent weather is destroying Red state communities, they continue to vote for Republicans who refuse to do anything to slow down the ferocity of climate change.
• Republicans who claim Christianity bind themselves to a man who committed adultery with all three of his wives, repeatedly ran fraudulent businesses and charities, quotes Hitler, and tore babies from their nursing mothers and then sold them into fake adoption charities that trafficked over 1,000 of them to nobody-knows-where to this day.

The indoctrination of the Republican voter is so complete that when Trump gutted over 100 environmental regulations during his last term — making it more toxic and dangerous to live or work in America and putting our children at risk of childhood cancers and birth defects — there wasn’t a peep. Most Republican voters don’t even know it happened, although the New York Times kept a list of the regulations he killed that you can read here.

And now, instead of gutting the regulations, he’s gutting the entire Environmental Protection Agency.

And it’s not like America’s wealthiest oligarchs are having second thoughts. The Ford Foundation sponsored an investigative report by The Guardian into the political funding policies of our 100 richest billionaires. While most people know about Koch, Soros, and Gates, few have ever heard most of the others’ names.

But the majority of America’s morbidly rich are totally down with the GOP’s poisonous and brutal agenda. As The Guardian reported:

“Our new, systematic study of the 100 wealthiest Americans indicates that Buffett, Gates, Bloomberg et al are not at all typical. Most of the wealthiest US billionaires — who are much less visible and less reported on — more closely resemble Charles Koch.“They are extremely conservative on economic issues. Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes — which apply only to the wealthiest Americans. Opposed to government regulation of the environment or big banks. Unenthusiastic about government programs to help with jobs, incomes, healthcare, or retirement pensions — programs supported by large majorities of Americans. Tempted to cut deficits and shrink government by cutting or privatizing guaranteed Social Security benefits.”

So why don’t Americans know who’s manipulating our political system and why? Again, from The Guardian:

“The answer is simple: billionaires who favor unpopular, ultraconservative economic policies, and work actively to advance them (that is, most politically active billionaires) stay almost entirely silent about those issues in public. This is a deliberate choice. Billionaires have plenty of media access, but most of them choose not to say anything at all about the policy issues of the day. They deliberately pursue a strategy of what we call ‘stealth politics.’”

So, here we are.

America’s billionaires got the tax cuts they wanted: instead of paying 74 percent like before Reagan, or even the high 50 percent range like most European billionaires, the average American billionaire pays around 4 percent in income taxes, which is probably a hell of a lot less than the average Republican voter.

The fossil fuel billionaires also got much of the deregulation they wanted and the Supreme Court justices they’ve bought off with million-dollar vacations and parental homes have gutted the Chevron deference and thus ended the EPA’s ability to seriously regulate the fossil fuel industry altogether.

As a result, since Reagan over $50 trillion has been transferred from the paychecks and homes of working class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent while our environment continues to deteriorate. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress, relying on the largesse of the fossil fuel billionaires and their industry colleagues, fight every attempt by those concerned about our children’s environmental future.

This 50-year-long plot executed by some of the richest men (with few exceptions, they’re almost all men) in America to gut income taxes and environmental regulations has been a stunning success. Without the burden of income taxes, they’re now richer than any humans ever before in the history of the Earth. Richer than the pharaohs, richer than the Caesars, richer than any king in European, African, or Asian history.

Do they care that they’re leaving the rest of us a dying planet? That their actions have created a toxic brew of paranoia and distrust — along with an obese orange-faced monster — that’s on the verge of ending the American experiment? That Americans are dying every day from the pollution and climate change their products produce?

Apparently not, at least as long as they can keep their tax cuts and deregulation. Oxfam International, for example, “found that 125 billionaires create more emissions through their investments and lifestyle than all of France.”

Mission accomplished, America’s rightwing fossil fuel billionaires. And thanks for nothing.

The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found:

“A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.“… 51 percent of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36 percent) don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17 percent are not sure…
“Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57 percent want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election…
“Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78 percent would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…” (emphasis added).

I was on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:

• When, in 1957, my dad bought the house I grew up in, the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than ten times the average wage.
• When my Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, we owned a bit over 22 percent of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control only about 4 percent of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
• From the 1930s right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
• When I ran my first seriously successful business in the early 1970s, it cost me around $35/month for comprehensive health insurance for each of my 18 employees; at that time hospitals and health insurance companies were required by Michigan law (where I lived; most other states were identical) to be run as non-profits. Today, health insurance can be as much as one-fifth of a company’s payroll expense.
• When Reagan came into office in 1981, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65 percent of us were in the middle class (up from around 20 percent in the 1930s). Today, after 44 years of Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43 percent of us are middle class .

FDR’s great — and successful — Democratic Socialist experiment following the Republican Great Depression was to drive the economy from the bottom up, reversing the “Horse and Sparrow” trickle-down economics and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations that provoked the Great Crash.

He did that by:

• Expanding the notion of the commons — the stuff we all collectively own and is administered or funded and regulated by government — to include free public education nationwide (and cheap college), old-age retirement (Social Security), and public power and transportation systems (Tennessee Valley Authority, federal support for local transit, roads and highways).
• Legalizing unions, an effort that was so successful that when Reagan came into office fully a third of us had good union jobs and, because they set the local wage floors, two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union wage and benefit package.
• Establishing a minimum wage on which a single worker could raise a family of three and still stay above the federal poverty level (today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25: adjusted with the Consumer Price Index, that $1.60 minimum wage in 1968 is equivalent to about $14.90 an hour in 2025 dollars).

In the years since, we’ve continued to expand the commons by establishing national single-payer healthcare systems for low-income people (Medicaid) and retired people (Medicare), both of which came out of LBJ’s Democratic Socialist program that he called The Great Society.

Meanwhile, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats have pushed back against these Democratic Socialist programs that made the American middle class the first in the history of the world to exceed more than half the population.

• Reagan’s war on unions has cut our union membership down to well under 10 percent in the private sector.
• His gutting federal funding for education has exploded college costs to the point where three generations are saddled with over $2 trillion in debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
• Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich (from 74 percent down to 27 percent) and corporations tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to $2.4 trillion) just in his eight years; since then the four GW Bush and Trump tax cuts have, when combined with Reagan’s, produced a $38 trillion national debt so big that we now spend more on servicing their debt than we do on our defense budget or would on administering a national healthcare system.

Back in the 1940s, after the incredible success of the New Deal, President Roosevelt wanted to further expand the commons by expanding the scope of his Democratic Socialist programs. Just before he died, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included:

• “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the nation’s industries, shops, farms, or mines. (Unionization and an above-poverty-level minimum wage.)
• “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. (Ditto and government as the employer of last resort.)
• “The right of every farmer to raise and sell products at a return that gives his family a decent living. (Don’t manipulate farm prices with stupid tariff wars, etc., and make the government the purchaser of last resort.)
• “The right of every businessperson, large and small, to trade free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. (Break up the giant corporations and encourage average people to start small businesses, including with loan supports.)
• “The right of every family to a decent home. (Today this would mean no more corporations, hedge funds, and foreign billionaires owning single-family homes to squeeze us dry by jacking up rents.)
• “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health. (FDR favored a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All.)
• “The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment (i.e., robust Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance).
• “The right to a good education.” (Free or inexpensive college, quality public schools in every community.)

Much to the chagrin of my Republican-activist father, my grandfather (a 1917 Norwegian immigrant) frequently and proudly described himself as a socialist. When I asked him what he meant, he always pointed me to FDR, the New Deal, and his proposed Second Bill of Rights.

And here we are again.

My grandfather’s generation saw up-close and firsthand the tax-cutting and deregulation binge of the Roaring 20s (which were only “roaring” for the morbidly rich), and then had the lived experience of watching FDR put the country back together and create the world’s first widespread middle class.

Millennials and Zoomers today are seeing the same thing, between the Bush Housing Crash of 2008, the botched Covid Crash of 2020, and the GOP’s relentless program to drive the wealth of the nation into the money bins of the billionaires who own that party.

They see the example of most European countries, where the commons includes college (many will actually pay you a stipend to attend), healthcare, and daycare/preschool, and union density is often well above 80%. Housing is subsidized or heavily regulated, leading several to have essentially ended homelessness. Giant corporate monopolies are prohibited and local small businesses are encouraged.

Europeans call these programs Democratic Socialism or social democracy, and young Americans clearly are enthusiastic about bringing the “European Dream” to this country.

My sense is that — much like in the 1930s — a significant majority of Americans are sick of the neoliberal “let the rich run things because they know best” b------- that Republicans, “Tech Bros,” and a shrinking minority of on-the-take Democratic politicians embrace.

Meanwhile, nobody’s sure why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is refusing to release the autopsy they did of the 2024 election, producing speculation it may have uncovered examples of Russian and Republican manipulation of both voters and the vote, but I’m guessing the real reason is that the neoliberals who largely run the DNC saw feedback that reflected the Rasmussen poll I opened this article with.

The exploding popularity of progressive politicians from Zohran Mamdani to Bernie Sanders, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t an anomaly; they’re a signpost to both electoral and governing success for the next generation of genuinely progressive Democratic politicians.

The White House has always mattered because of what it represents. It was never supposed to be a palace; it was meant to be the people’s house, a physical reminder that power in America is borrowed, temporary, and accountable.

That’s why the news that Donald Trump is turning it into a $400 million monument to himself should stop every American cold.

This isn’t a routine renovation. What Trump first floated as a ballroom has ballooned into a massive two-story complex with sweeping staircases, private residential quarters, and a secure bridge connecting it directly to the presidential residence.

Streets around the White House will be shut down for years. Historic gardens are being ripped out. A magnolia planted by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 is gone. Jackie Kennedy’s legacy is treated like landscaping debris.

And this thing won’t just sit on the White House grounds: according to the National Park Service, it will dominate them. It visually overwhelms the West Wing and the Executive Mansion.

That detail matters. Symbols matter. And this symbol screams something Trump has been telling us for years. In his mind, this country isn’t about shared sacrifice or common good, it’s about power, spectacle, and who gets to live above the law and above the rest of us.

While Trump is building himself a palace, millions of Americans are deciding whether they can afford to see a doctor. Parents are cutting pills in half. Seniors are rationing insulin.

Working people are drowning under rent, groceries, student loans, and insurance premiums that climb every year. We’re told health care just wasn’t meant to be, that there’s no money for universal care, no money to make life affordable, no money to help people survive.

Funny how there’s always money for marble, steel, and ego when Trump (or any other dictator, anywhere in the world) is running the show. This is how authoritarianism announces itself, and he’s not even trying to be subtle about it.

Strongmen don’t just seize power, they remake the landscape to reflect it. They build grand halls and private corridors, while separating themselves physically and psychologically from the public. They hang huge banners with their faces on them from public buildings.

And now he’s even slapping his name on the Kennedy Center. It’s obscene.

Look around the world and you’ll see the pattern repeated again and again of civic spaces turn into monuments and humble government buildings becoming fortresses. Leaders of this type — if you could call them “leaders” instead of “tinpot dictators” — stop walking among the people and start hovering above them.

Trump isn’t inventing anything new. He’s following a playbook as old as the Egyptian pharaohs and the Roman emperors.

The “secure bridge” to gain access to the building from the White House residence alone tells you everything you need to know. This is about insulation, about never having to mix with the public, about power flowing smoothly behind locked doors and away from protest, dissent, and accountability.

A president who believes in democracy doesn’t need that, but a president who fears or even hates the people — but craves the wealth and power a corrupt Supreme Court has said he can grab at will — does.

The White House was intentionally modest by design: it was a rebuke to kings and emperors. The White House’s first residents — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — refused to live like royalty because they understood that democracy depends on restraint. Jefferson used to answer the front door in his pajamas.

Trump understands the opposite. He believes any symbol of his own personal power should look expensive, imposing, and permanent, like Trump Tower and his gaudy golf motels. That’s why this project matters far beyond architecture: it’s a declaration of values.

And notice what had to be erased to make room for it. Historic gardens. Living symbols of past presidents who believed in stewardship rather than self-glorification.

Authoritarian types like Trump and Putin don’t preserve history, they overwrite it. They don’t see themselves as part of a long democratic story, but instead put themselves at the center of it.

There’s a lawsuit now from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pointing out the obvious, that no president gets to tear apart the White House without review. Not Trump. Not anyone.

Yet a federal judge appears ready to let it move forward, asking only that designs be submitted after the fact. That’s how democratic guardrails weaken. Excess becomes normalized, deference replaces oversight, and power gets a pass because Trump insists he’s a special boy.

This is what Americans are reacting to, even if they don’t always have the language for it. People feel the imbalance in their bones.

They hear Republicans telling them to tighten their belts while loosening their own and those of the morbidly rich who own them. They see suffering framed as unavoidable while luxury is treated as destiny. They understand, instinctively, that something is deeply wrong when a president builds himself a palace while calling unrealistic things like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and providing healthcare to the people.

This moment matters because of what it reveals about the direction Republicans and the morbidly rich are taking our country. A democracy is supposed to make power feel smaller than the people, as the old quote usually misattributed to Jefferson notes:

“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

Trump wants to make power seem untouchable and the people to fear him and his masked goons.

This isn’t about taste or aesthetics. It’s about whether America remains a republic or slides toward something darker. When leaders wall themselves off, elevate themselves physically above the public, and replace shared civic symbols with personal monuments, history warns us where that road leads.

The White House belongs to We, the People.

Every garden, every hallway, every inch of it exists because this country has repeatedly, for over 250 years, rejected kings. Turning it into a private palace while Americans are told to accept illness, debt, and precarity as fate isn’t just obscene, it’s a warning.

Democracies don’t collapse in a single moment. They erode as excess is excused and power forgets who it serves. This project is Trump saying the quiet part out loud: He’s not here to govern with us, he’s here to rule above us.

And Americans are right to reject that.

America’s 465th mass shooting in 2025, this one at Brown University in Rhode Island, should remind us all that it’s insane that the GOP passed and George W. Bush signed into law the so-called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in 2006 that largely gives immunity from liability lawsuits to the gun industry (and only the gun industry).

It’s time to end the predator-state coalition in America, of which this is just one glaring example.

Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that “money is free speech” protected by the First Amendment and “corporations are persons” protected by the entire Bill of Rights, pretty much every industry in America has poured cash into politicians’ and judges’ pockets to be able to freely rip us off. Or, in the case of the gun industry, kill our children.

Even though a clear majority of Americans want stronger gun laws, our politicians have colluded with the gun industry to give us the exact opposite, as I detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

But it’s not just the gun industry.

When greedy banksters crashed our economy in 2008, Bush made sure not a single one went to prison, in stark contrast to the S&L scandal/crash in the 1980s: between 1988 and 1992 the Department of Justice sent 1,706 banksters to prison and obtained 2,603 guilty verdicts for fraud in financial institutions.

In 2008, however, after Bush and his cronies cashed their “contribution” checks, hundreds of banksters walked away with million- and even billion-dollar bonuses. Steve Mnuchin, who allegedly threw over 30,000 people out of their homes with robo-signed documents, was even appointed Treasury Secretary by Donald Trump and later given a billion dollars by the Saudis to invest.

Are you regularly hearing about these horrors on social media? Probably not, because prior to 1996, social media companies (then it was mostly CompuServe and AOL) had to hire people like me and Nigel Peacock to monitor their forums, make sure people followed the rules and told the truth. Nobody was the victim of online predators, and the company didn’t run secret algorithms to push rightwing memes at you and shadow-ban progressive content.

That year, however, after generous contributions to both parties, Congress passed a bill that gave Zuck and his buddies almost complete immunity from liability, which is why social media is now so dangerously toxic that Australia just banned it for kids.

Similarly, every other democracy in the world does your taxes for you and then lets you know their math so you can check it. In several European countries it’s so simple it’s basically a postcard; you only respond if you think they’re in error. The US is the only developed country on Earth where there’s a multi-billion-dollar industry preparing people’s tax returns for them.

For example, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland returns are pre-filled and can be approved via text message or an online portal in minutes. In Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and France tax forms are similarly filled out in advance by the government; you just sign and mail them back. And in Estonia, widely seen as a digital government pioneer, filing taxes takes minutes and is done with a simple online form that a fifth grader could complete.

Here in the US, Democrats thought this was a fine idea — it would save time and money for both taxpayers and the IRS — and so Biden rolled out a program where people with few deductions could simply file their taxes online for free.

Republicans, however, being on the take from the billion-dollar tax preparation industry, objected; they didn’t want the financial gravy train to stop because that would mean less of the money charged us for tax prep would end up in their campaign coffers, not to mention the fancy vacations, meals, and other lobbying benefits they can get.

So, the Trump administration announced — after tax prep company Intuit “donated” $1 million to Trump’s “inaugural” slush fund — that they’re killing off the free filing option; going forward, pretty much everybody must either learn enough tax law to deal with the IRS themselves or pay a tax preparation company.

And then there’s the health insurance industry, a giant blood-sucking tick attached to our collective backs that made $74 billion in profits (in addition to the billions paid to its most senior executives) last year by denying us payments for doctors’ visits, tests, procedures, surgeries, and even organ transplants.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens and thus provide it at low or no cost.

That’s it. We’re the only one left. We’re the only country in the entire developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they lose everything and must declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “health care” than any other country in the world: about 17 percent of GDP. Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11 percent, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all come in between 9.3 percent and 10.5 percent.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22 percent of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10 percent and would cover every man, woman, and child in America. And don’t get me started on the Medicare Advantage scam the Bush administration created that’s routinely ripping off seniors and destroying actual Medicare.

And if disease doesn’t get us, hunger might. One-in-five American children live in “food insecure” households and frequently go to bed hungry at a time Trump and Republicans are cutting SNAP and WIC benefits and grants to food banks.

The amount of money that America’s richest four billionaires (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg) added to their money bins since 2020 because of the Reagan/Bush/Trump tax cuts is over $300 billion: the cost to entirely end child poverty in America is an estimated $25 billion.

And, because of the body and brain damage hunger and malnutrition are doing to one-in-five American children, child hunger in the US is costing our society an estimated $167.5 billion a year in lost opportunity and productivity.

So, why do we avoid spending $25 billion to solve a $167.5 billion problem? Because of the predator-state coalition, which was legalized and enabled by five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

The predators don’t want you to know this stuff, of course, which is why they’ve bought up or started over 1500 radio stations, hundreds of TV stations, multiple TV networks, multiple major and local newspapers, and thousands of websites to bathe us in a continuous slurry of rightwing b------- and pro-industry talking points.

And then there are the monopolies that Reagan legalized in 1983 and the Bush and Trump administrations have encouraged. Before that, we had competition within industries, and most malls and downtowns were filled with locally-owned businesses and stores.

Grocery stores, airlines, banks, social media, retail stores, gas stations, car manufacturers, insurance companies, internet providers (ISPs), computer companies, phone companies, hospital chains: the list goes on and on.

All — because of their monopoly or oligopoly status — cost the average American family an average of over $5,000 a year that is not paid by the citizens of any other developed country in the world because the rest of the world won’t tolerate this kind of predatory, monopolistic behavior.

Trump has even managed to turn immigration into a predatory scheme, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs to a masked, secret police force and Republican-aligned private prison contractors, as he gleefully inflicts brutality on dark-skinned immigrants and American citizens alike.

It’s time to roll back the predatory state, and it’d make a hell of a campaign slogan for Democrats running next November and in 2028. End Corporate Personhood and the legal bribery of politicians and judges.

Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.

There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.

Wednesday night’s speech demonstrated it. He didn’t need to trash-talk Joe Biden, or try to claim that the country was “dead” when he came into office, or exaggerate his accomplishments, or lie about the state of things. None of that was necessary.

He didn’t need to put depreciating comments under the pictures of prior presidents in the White House, or replace Joe Biden’s picture with a autopen.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength.

These are the kind of things junior high school boys do. And not even most junior high school boys; just the really dysfunctional ones. The bullies. The ones who are desperate to be part of the in crowd, but always on the outside looking in. The ones no one wants as friends.

This man is sick. And he’s inflicting his sickness on our country. And he’s surrounded himself with sick people, or at least with people willing to tolerate his mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness.

As well as people who share his sickness: There’s also clearly something wrong with man-children like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kash Patel.

With these men, it goes beyond the normal sellout type of person willing to do anything for wealth and power, the kind of behavior we see in people like Pam Bondi or the administration members who’ll swear that the 2020 election was stolen.

There’s a deep cruelty combined with a pathological insecurity and a level of hate and intolerance for others that’s shocking. Anybody who’s ever played any sort of role in leadership is looking at this administration aghast. The leaders of the rest of the rest of the world must be in shock.

There’s a deep sickness at the head of this government. The childishness. The violence. The bloodlust that we see off the coast of Venezuela. The willingness to sanction rape and murder and land grabs in Ukraine. The enthusiasm to bring our country to the brink of war. Plastering gold-painted geegaws all over the White House.

And then Wednesday night Trump goes off for 20 minutes quite literally shouting at the country like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn. Ranting about Black Somalis. Bragging about nonexistent victories and peace deals. Just making s--- up.

No president of the United States has ever behaved this way. Probably no governor or mayor has ever gotten away with this kind of psychopathology and obscene behavior.

It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating America.

It’s setting a terrible example for our young people. Children who were just entering the early years of public school when Trump first ran based on a racist rant in 2015 are now graduating from high school thinking that this is normal.

That, in and of itself, is a disaster for their and America’s future.

And now he has an “armada” poised off the coast of Venezuela trying to provoke a war with that nation.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that he was right in the middle of it all with Jeffrey Epstein, and is now frantically trying to avoid questions about the teen modeling agency and talent show he owned back in those days.

He’s gutted America’s principal agencies of soft power, the Voice of America and USAID, strung Ukraine along for almost an entire year as their people get slaughtered, and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of naked bribes from foreign autocrats and American business leaders.

He’s deployed masked, secret police into our cities who are gleefully brutalizing brown-skinned people and anybody who tries to document their hugely unAmerican activity.

He kowtows before Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi, and embraces murderous dictators who’ve ordered the killing of an American journalist and routinely cut the heads off of their own people. He tore down the East Wing of the White House in defiance of federal and local law, history, and respect for “The People’s House.”

It’s reached the point where we’re now confronted with a hard truth: This isn’t about left versus right anymore or even politics as usual. It isn’t about tax policy or border policy or whose yard sign we prefer.

This is now about whether we’re willing to normalize sickness in power.

Whether we tell ourselves comforting stories because confronting the actual reality in front of us is frightening.

Whether we allow cruelty, lying, and instability to become the cultural baseline simply because calling it out makes dinner conversations awkward or costs us friends or clicks or donors.

Turning points in history don’t usually announce themselves with marching bands. They creep in while decent people look away, hoping the fever will break on its own.

But it never does. Fevers break only when the body fights back. Democracies survive only when citizens decide that character still matters, that truth still matters, that children deserve better examples than tantrums and threats and gold-plated vulgarity.

Silence is not neutrality: It’s consent.

If you’re reading this, you still have agency. Use it. Talk to your neighbors. Support journalists and organizations willing to tell the truth. Show up, vote, organize, refuse to laugh it off, refuse to excuse it, refuse to become numb.

Demand leaders who are adults, not bullies. Who are steady, not sick. Who see power as a responsibility, not a toy.

This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength. When we remember that democracy is not self-executing; it requires citizens who are awake, engaged, and unwilling to surrender their moral compass for the illusion of order.

We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to be brave enough to say: this is wrong, and we will not accept it.

The future is watching us right now, and one day our children will ask what we did when it mattered. Let’s make sure we have an answer we can live with.

The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”

And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.

Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.

The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.

Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)

Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.

Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:

“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”

The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin

“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land

Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.

All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.

As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. And America’s Founders believed it.

Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”

And we get there through voting.

This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.

But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.

“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.

With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51 percent threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Dr. Tim Roper told me:

“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic:

“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“

Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.

When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).

It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.

This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.

As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.

America is in or on the verge of a seriously bad recession and the Trump regime is hiding the numbers — the signs are everywhere. His incoherent tariffs, massive tax breaks for billionaires, and gutting the Inflation Reduction Act are kneecapping our economy.

In response, Trump visited Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania and tried to pitch himself as a champion for the little guy, the middle class, small farmers, and working people.

Which raises the question: who do Trump and the GOP really work for?

— Vladimir Putin was furious that the Biden administration had been providing Ukraine with weapons systems, including air defense munitions and HIMARS rockets, so in March of this year Trump abruptly suspended delivery of most US military aid and Republicans in Congress never restarted it.

— American billionaires didn’t want to pay their damn taxes, so Trump and the GOP gave them trillions in new tax breaks with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill while increasing the taxes paid by the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

— After giving the Trump family gifts, trademarks, and patents, President Xi Jinping of China wanted Nvidia chips to help bring his military and AI capabilities up to where he could easily defeat a US effort to defend Taiwan, so Trump changed the rules, so Xi could get his chips and Republicans in Congress are refusing to stop him.

— Both Putin and Xi were constantly irritated by the Voice of America broadcasting truthful news and pro-democracy programming so Trump killed off the broadcasts, is shutting down the stations and transmitters, and Republicans in Congress are letting it happen.

— Massive airline monopolies hated the $200-$775 per incident that they had to pay passengers as compensation for being bumped or having flights cancelled, so Trump had his reality-star FAA head undo the rule.

— Putin and Xi hated the “soft power” America got by saving millions of lives around the world every year with anti-poverty, anti-AIDS, and famine relief programs across the Third World, so Trump killed off the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Republicans in Congress didn’t object.

— Rightwing billionaires who don’t believe they should have to pay taxes to “subsidize the little people” didn’t want Trump and Republicans to extend the taxpayer-funded subsidies of the Affordable Care Act that kept insurance rates down (House Speaker Mike Johnson called them a “boondoggle” even though they keep rates low for millions of his Louisiana constituents), so Trump and the GOP obliged by refusing to continue them.

— Saudi Arabia, massive American fossil fuel corporations, and petrostates like Russia were offended by the Paris Agreement and other United Nations and Biden efforts to phase out petroleum and mitigate climate change, so Trump and the GOP pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement and refused to attend the most recent COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil.

— The morbidly rich wanted to be able to pass their massive fortunes to their trust-fund babies without paying estate taxes, so Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a tax cut that primarily benefits the 400 richest families in America, costing our nation trillions that will be added to our debt and paid for by working-class people.

— Fossil fuel billionaires and their corporations were worried that the money Joe Biden allocated for green energy projects might cut into their future profits, so Trump and the GOP slashed trillions from them, as well as subsidies and rebates for saving energy and electric vehicles.

— Rightwing billionaire-funded media operations were offended by how NPR and PBS kept showing up their lies, so Trump and congressional Republicans cancelled federal funding for the networks. Rightwing billionaires are enthusiastically buying up as much of the American media landscape as they can.

— Billionaire Elon Musk was reportedly facing billions in regulatory costs and fines that he was able to get rid of when Trump and Republicans hired him to start and run the DOGE program that gutted our government to the benefit of Russia and China.

— Bitcoin billionaire Changpeng Zhao was serving a lengthy prison sentence for violating federal anti-money-laundering laws, but Trump pardoned him when he promoted a new stablecoin issued by a crypto firm that made billions for the Trump family.

— Giant corporations and their morbidly rich owners wanted to screw their workers so they could increase their profits, so Trump and congressional Republicans took more than 100 individual actions that cut pay, gutted union protections, and slashed benefits for workers but helped the most massive corporations.

— Big banks that make billions every year on interest from student loans hated Biden’s efforts to pay them off and reduce interest rates, so Trump and congressional Republicans rolled them back and are ending the last of the loan forgiveness programs.

Have Trump or congressional Republicans done anything of major consequence to help out average working people or small businesses in the 44 years since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?

Nope. Instead, the neoliberal Reagan Revolution has seen the American middle class go from over two-thirds of us to around 43 percent of us today, and it takes two paychecks to have the lifestyle a single one could produce in 1981. Only the morbidly rich have benefited from every GOP action during all these years. And Trump is making it all worse.

The 2026 elections are coming sooner than most realize, which is why Republican secretaries of state are vigorously purging the voting rolls in their Blue cities. Double-check your registration every month at vote.org and make sure everybody you know is informed and ready.

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know, the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.

We’re now there.

It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.

At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.

In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.

A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20 percent of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.

Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.

As the National Security Desk writes:

“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”

Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:

“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”

David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by the New Republic:

“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”

Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:

“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:

“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”

Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.

And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.

Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.

Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.

NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.

And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.

These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.

Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”

This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.

Pass it along and help wake up our country.

Amnesty International’s new report on the U.S. detention sites Alligator Alcatraz and Krome is a warning flare for every American who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and the basic dignity of human beings.

We’ve seen governmental cruelty before in our history, but these facilities mark a new level of calculated dehumanization on U.S. soil, and Amnesty is calling it what it is: torture, enforced disappearance, and a deliberate system designed to break people.

What makes this report so chilling isn’t just the details, although they’re horrifying enough. It’s that the government has begun giving these places cute, theme-park-style nicknames like “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Cornhusker Clink,” as if they’re attractions instead of concentration-camp-style black sites.

Authoritarian regimes always begin by softening the language, making the abuses sound like logistics, law enforcement, or processing rather than cruelty. If you want to condition the public to accept state violence, you start with euphemisms.

Investigators found people packed into filthy tents and trailers where toilets overflowed onto the floors and into sleeping areas. Water was sometimes rationed. Food quality was lousy. Insects swarmed at all hours. Lights were left on day and night. Cameras reportedly pointed at showers and toilets, in clear violation of privacy and human dignity.

This wasn’t an accident. These were choices.

The so-called “box” at the Florida concentration camp may be the most grotesque example. It’s a two-by-two-foot outdoor metal cage where detainees, shackled and already vulnerable, were left in blistering Florida heat, exposed to mosquitos and biting flies, denied water, and forced to endure punishment sessions lasting up to 24 hours.

These are exactly the kinds of stress-position torture techniques our nation once condemned when used by dictatorships abroad. Today they’re being used in our name, by our government, on our soil.

At Krome, Amnesty documented prolonged solitary confinement, routine shackling even during medical transport, denial of legal access, and a pervasive system of intimidation and retaliation. Medical care was often delayed or unavailable. People needing lawyers were blocked from communicating with them.

This is not a “processing system”: it’s a punishment regime. It’s brutality done with your and my tax dollars and in our names.

The report makes clear that these are not isolated violations: they’re the design.

This administration has woven cruelty into policy, permitting state-run detention networks to operate as if constitutional rights simply evaporate when you cross a razor-wire perimeter.

The crisis for American democracy isn’t just that the camps exist; it’s that they’re being normalized, bureaucratized, branded, and replicated. Amnesty warns that DHS is already planning more such sites, using “emergency” authorities and no-bid contracts to create an extrajudicial detention network beyond the reach of meaningful oversight.

This is exactly how authoritarian systems evolve. They never begin with political opponents: instead, they begin with people the majority already sees as powerless. Immigrants. Refugees. The poor. Non-citizens. Those without family or money or social standing.

When the public tolerates a government treating one group of human beings as disposable, that system is inevitably expanded to inflict that same treatment on others — dissidents, politicians, people like you and me — whenever it becomes politically useful.

We’ve seen this in nation after nation that slid from democracy into authoritarianism. The first victims are always those considered “outsiders” or “threats to the order” the regime promised to maintain.

Once the public is desensitized to cages, beatings, disappearances, and secret courts, it becomes frighteningly easy to redirect those same tactics toward dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, activists, and political opponents.

This Amnesty International report isn’t just a humanitarian alarm bell: it’s a constitutional one.

When due process is suspended for one class of people, it’s suspended in principle for all. When the government can hide detainees in swamp camps with no legal representation, it’s already established the machinery necessary to detain anyone it wants to silence. When the public is conditioned to see cages and brutality and think “this is fine,” the moral system of a nation starts to collapse.

We forget that the Constitution doesn’t protect itself; it’s protected by norms, culture, public outrage, legal oversight, and a shared belief that the state doesn’t get to brutalize human beings no matter who they are.

When those norms erode, when brutality becomes invisible-but-known or acceptable, authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a drumbeat. It arrives quietly. It arrives bureaucratically. It arrives through “temporary measures” and “emergency facilities” and “processing centers” set up for “those people over there.”

Amnesty is demanding the immediate closure of Alligator Alcatraz and any similar state-run black sites. They call for an end to emergency-authorized detention, a prohibition on outdoor punitive confinement, the restoration of access to legal counsel, real medical care, due process, judicial oversight, and a halt to no-bid construction of new concentration camps in America.

These aren’t radical demands. They’re the bare minimum for a nation that claims to believe in the rule of law.

Because if we let our government continue to create a network of secretive, cruel, extrajudicial detention facilities for one set of powerless people today, tomorrow it will inevitably turn those same systems against anyone who challenges their power.

That is how every authoritarian regime in history has done it.

And unless we stop it now, it’s how this one will, too.

Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and more than 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

• Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
• Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
• Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
• Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
• Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
• Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Kristi Noem?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

I mentioned it in an October Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Russia-style police state here in America.

I was wrong.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Dec. 4 memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as five years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

With so little pushback to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s domestic cruelty and violence that highlights Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and mega-yacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.

As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:

“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.

That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.

It’s no coincidence.

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.

No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.

It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.

It’s why — with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating — those countries are still functioning democracies.

The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.

Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.

Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.

If you haven’t already, join us.

Young people are furious. A survey released last week by the Harvard Institute of Politics finds that under-30 Americans are “a generation under profound strain” who’ve lost pretty much any confidence in government or corporate institutions.

By a 57 percent to 13 percent margin they told pollsters America is on the wrong track, and only 32 percent agree that the US is a healthy democracy or even one that’s “somewhat functioning.”

Fully 64 percent of young American adults say the system is either in trouble or has completely failed. Pollster John Della Volpe summarized the Institute’s findings:

“Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”

Which raises the urgent question: How the hell did we get here from the widespread prosperity of the postwar years?

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because they saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Richard Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS, which I had joined. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91 percent and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders focused on running their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with:

• modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation;
• nearly free college, trade school, and research support;
• enforcement of antitrust laws which produced healthy small and family businesses;
• unions protecting a third of America’s workers so fully two-thirds of us had a living wage and benefits on a single salary;
• an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports paid for with tax dollars that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class. Young people saw a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them, and wealthy people were doing well, too.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It was a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then seize control of the institutions of America.

Those groups, inspired by Powell, decided to take his advice and infiltrate our universities, create a massive, billion-dollar conservative media infrastructure, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to collect millions of votes, and turn upside-down our tax, labor, abortion, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented, billionaire-owned GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts for the rich, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, ending Roe v. Wade, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered citizens (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “dependent on the government”).

Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 44 years of Republicans’ so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud — as our young people are yelling at us — that it hasn’t worked. For example:

• Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74 percent it was in 1980 down to 37 percent it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 44 years from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65 percent of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 44 years of Reaganomics, it now takes two full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

• Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, wherever they wanted, it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill corrupt politicians. Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about American history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. We regularly terrorize young people with active shooter drills; the number-one cause of death for American children (and only American children) is bullets tearing their bodies apart.

• Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools, purged our libraries of books, and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

• Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.” And forget about trying to explain to them the difference between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, and the modern-day governments of Russia, Hungary, and China. Or what Trump and his cronies are up to.

• Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80 percent of a student’s tuition — so that students would have “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families.

While students are underwater, the banksters who own Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable student loans, the consequence of legally paid-off legislators (because of Clarence Thomas‘s tie-breaking vote in Citizens United).

• Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and thus “more efficient.”

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, inflation-causing price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s hard to find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many being sucked dry by hedge funds or private equity as we enter the cancer stage of capitalism. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants and the door to entrepreneurialism is largely closed to Zoomers.

• Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Stock buybacks used to be called felony stock manipulation, but Reagan legalized the practice in 1983. As a result, every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, communities, and even the businesses themselves suffer the loss.

• Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small handful of billionaires and often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as young people will tell you, are generally absent.

• Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve for payment and which they’d reject. They said this “pre-approval” process would “lower costs and increase choice.”

Instead, in all of the entire developed world — all the 34 OECD countries on four continents — there are ~500,000 medical bankruptcies a year … and every single one of them is here in America. And now, as Republicans fight to prevent the renewal of Obamacare subsidies, millions — particularly young people working low-wage jobs — will simply be forced to drop health insurance altogether.

• Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are still lying as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization (around a third of us) we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment (now only a tenth of us have a union).

• Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion all right; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were blown up, torn down, or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying union jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

• Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their wealthy donors in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. By purchasing the GOP, they succeeded in delaying action on global warming for at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

• And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech and corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights.” Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by those five billionaire-bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

So now Donald Trump tells our young people that it’s time to make take the next big step — to reject democracy — as the logical outcome of the Reagan Revolution.

He says if we just abandon the rule of law and make him an uncountable emperor for life; punish with prison his political enemies; make women, Blacks, and Hispanics second-class citizens; end immigration for everybody except white South Africans; and forge alliances with dictators around the world, that life in America will become wonderful.

It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this GOP b-------.

The bottom line is that we as a nation have now had the full Republican experience. We’ve done pretty much everything they suggested or demanded.

And as a result, young Americans are increasingly disgusted when they hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that the GOP damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever these sanctimonious Republicans are calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and pre-teen girls to give birth against the threat of imprisonment, hiding Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell, or burning books.

Or having masked secret police kidnap people, including children, off the streets of our cities and throwing them into god-awful hellhole prisons.

Not to mention Trump’s sinister “revenge” campaign against the Americans he sees as his “enemies,” his eliminating pollution controls that protected our environment in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel industry donations, and giving his billionaire donors another massive tax cut, to be paid for by the same next generation who’re protesting against him.

America’s young people are over it, Republicans, and they’re going to reboot this nation to fulfill its potential and promise.

A new, progressive America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and the GOP and its billionaire owners can’t stop it much longer.

=I don’t know why this wasn’t above-the-fold news all across the country over the past few days as the details of the “peace plan” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff took to Vladimir Putin this week came out.

Kushner, it appears, had added in a provision that would have forced both Ukraine and Russia to take actions that would specifically benefit Saudi Arabia, a country that is paying the presidential son-in-law at least $25 million a year.

Can you imagine what the response would have been if George Marshall, while negotiating the 1948 Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII, had been personally taking millions from, say, Saudi Arabia, and thus inserted a provision ensuring that country could permanently benefit from the peace plan?

Given that then-President Truman and Marshall were Democrats, it’s safe to predict that the GOP would have melted down, but so would have the press. After all, the early-1920s Teapot Dome scandal — then one of the most infamous in US presidential history — only involved an oil company bribing the then-Secretary of the Interior with around $300,000.

The brutal kingdom of Saudia Arabia owns agricultural land in many far-flung places, from alfalfa farms in Arizona to 400,000 acres in Western Ukraine devoted to growing grain for export. The only way to get that grain to the Black Sea where it can enter world markets is via barges down the Dnieper River, which cuts across Ukraine.

So, as Judd Legum points out over at Popular.Info:

“Point 23 of the peace plan that Kushner helped draft fulfills Saudi’s policy objective: ‘Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.’”

Which should have provoked a collective “What the hell?!??” across the planet and ring alarm bells in newsrooms from Tokyo to Topeka to Tallinn but has instead been largely met with a shrug.

“Of course,” politicians and the press seem to be saying, “it’s the Trump family. What did you expect?”

And, indeed, the corruption and self-dealing of the Trumps is breathtakingly world-class, run at a scale beyond anything ever seen in America.

• Remember when Jimmy Carter almost lost his peanut farm, his only major asset, because he’d put it in a blind trust and the guy he’d entrusted to run it screwed operations up badly leaving the Carters a million dollars in debt?
• Or when Saint Ronald Reagan put his small fortune — $700,000 ($2.7 million in today’s dollars) — in a blind trust and didn’t have a clue what was happening with it for the next eight years?
• How about when the Bulgarian president gave President George W. Bush a puppy and the dog was sent to the National Archives before placement to ensure conformity with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

Presidents not taking and keeping gifts or money from foreign governments, in compliance with that Clause and associated federal anti-bribery laws, has a history that dates back to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. But complying with any law has never been a strong suit for the Trump Crime Family.

Donald Trump tried to convince us in his first term that he was complying with the law by calling a press conference where we were treated to huge stacks of papers and manilla file folders supposedly representing his complex estate that he was handing off to his kids, but we soon learned it was entirely a scam: Trump was getting checks to sign every two weeks in the Oval Office, and all that paper and those folders were blank.

This second term he’s not even trying. He extracted millions of dollars from his suckers followers in exchange for his and his wife’s so-called digital coins (they’re just “collectible” digital images); the value of those “coins” has now fallen by 86 percent (Donald) and 99 percent (Melania) respectively. And don’t get me started on the so-called “Trump Phones” scam.

But those are chump change compared to the billions he’s accumulated in crypto, and the billions being thrown at Trump-branded/licensed properties being negotiated or built right now in over 20 countries including India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Vietnam, Serbia, Romania, Uruguay, and the Maldives.

Or the $400 million plane Qatar gave Trump, along with the billion-dollar Trump-branded resort they’re building for him, which were followed by the US giving that country — and only that country — an astonishing NATO-style security guarantee that our soldiers will shed their blood to defend that kingdom’s potentates.

So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Jared, after taking $2 billion from the Saudis along with his $25 million/year “fee,” would insert a paragraph into the Russia/Ukraine deal that would benefit the Saudi crown prince who’s been his top benefactor.

And, even more astonishing, that he is serving in this position without any legal authority in violation of federal law. As Legum explains, if he’s a private individual it’s a felony crime for him to negotiate with a foreign government, and if he’s acting on behalf of our government he’s a “special government employee” and therefore subject to the Emoluments Clause.

Either way, what he’s doing is deeply illegal. As well as apparently deeply corrupt.

But where’s the press on this? And when will Democrats begin an investigation into it?

Inquiring minds want to know…

The Trump White House just showed us something every American should find chilling, no matter what music they listen to or what party they vote for.

They took a video of aggressive ICE arrests, slapped Sabrina Carpenter’s song on top of it, and posted it like it was a victory lap. Then, when Carpenter objected and said the video was “evil and disgusting” and told them not to use her music to benefit an “inhumane agenda,” the White House hit back with a statement that sounded like it came from a playground bully, not the seat of American government.

They didn’t debate her point. They didn’t defend policy with facts. They went straight to dehumanization and insult, calling people “illegal murderers, rapists,” and saying anyone who defends them must be “stupid” or “slow.”

That’s not just ugly: it’s a warning.

Because the biggest story here is not a celebrity clapback; it’s that the White House is using the power of the state to turn human beings into a violence-normalizing punchline, and using America’s culture as a weapon to spread it.

This is what rising authoritarianism looks like in the age of social media.

A democracy survives on shared reality and shared humanity. It survives when the government understands that it works for the people and must be accountable to the Constitution, to due process, and to basic human decency.

But what happens when a government starts producing propaganda like it’s a teenage streamer chasing clicks and the president runs the White House like it’s a reality show operation, right down to the televised Cabinet meetings?

We get a machine that can normalize cruelty. We get a public trained to cheer at humiliation. We get outrage as entertainment. And we get the steady erosion of our ability to ask the most important questions in a free society.

Was this legal? Was it justified? Was it proportional? Was it humane? Were innocent people caught up? Were families separated? Was there due process? Is it even constitutional?

Those questions disappear when the government turns an ICE arrest into a meme.

There are, of course, serious crimes in every society and violent criminals should be held accountable under the law. But that isn’t what the White House statement was doing. It was, instead, engaged in something far more ancient, cynical, and dangerous.

It was trying to paint everyone in that video with the worst label imaginable so the public stops caring about what happens next.

That’s how they get permission — both explicit and implicit — for abuses.

If the audience for Trump’s sick reality show is told, “These are monsters,” then — as we’ve most recently seen both with ICE here domestically and with people in small boats off the coast of Venezuela — any cruelty becomes acceptable.

Any killing becomes a shrug. Overreach becomes a punchline. And following the rule of law becomes something we apply to our friends while we throw it away for people we have been taught to hate.

That is exactly why authoritarians always start by dehumanizing a target group.

And it always spreads.

Trump started by demonizing and then going after immigrants. Then he demanded fealty (and millions of dollars) from journalists, universities, and news organizations. He demonizes his political opponents to the point they suffer death threats, attacks, and assassinations. And if Trump keeps going down this same path — as Pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned the world — it’ll next be you and me.

Consider this regime’s cultural warfare program. The White House has reportedly used music from multiple artists without permission and now brags that they’ve used those creators’ work to bait outrage, to “own the libs.”

All to drive attention, create spectacle, and turn governance into a constant fight as they punish anyone in public life — today it’s Sabrina Carpenter — who dares to speak up.

This is intimidation pretending to be a joke. If you’re an artist, a teacher, an organizer, or just a person with a platform, the message is simple: “We can drag you into our propaganda machine whenever we want, and if you object we’ll mock you and send an online — and often physical — mob after you.”

That’s a chilling reality, and it matters in a democracy. People start to think twice before speaking. They start to retreat. They start to self censor.

And that’s the Trump regime’s first goal.

Then there’s the distraction, particularly from a cratering economy and Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell.

With this strategy, borrowed from the Nazis (as my guest on the radio show Monday, Lawrence Reese, noted in his book The Nazi Mind 12: Warnings From History), culture war isn’t a sideshow anymore, it’s part of a larger strategy.

When the government posts a meme like the one where ICE used Carpenter’s music, it isn’t trying to inform us: it’s trying to trigger us. It’s trying to bait us into amplifying the clip, fighting over the celebrity angle, and losing sight of the real issue.

And that real issue is Trump’s and the GOP’s insatiable lust for state power and the wealth that power can allow, bring, and protect.

Armed agents. Detention. Deportation. Families. Fear. Mistakes that can’t be undone. Human beings who can be disappeared from their communities with the tap of a button and a viral soundtrack. Or killed by “suicide” in a jail cell when they threaten to go public.

If we care about freedom, we can’t just stand by and say nothing while this regime turns ICE’s violence into content.

Because once a government learns it can win political points by broadcasting humiliation, it’ll do it again. And it’ll escalate. It’ll push the line farther and farther until we wake up one day and wonder how we got here.

So what do we do?

• First, stop amplifying their propaganda on their terms. Don’t share their clips as entertainment, even to condemn them without context (no links in this article). When you must talk about it, talk about the power being abused, not the celebrity drama.
• Second, demand oversight. Call your members of Congress (202-224-3121. Demand hearings on ICE media practices and the use of official government accounts and our tax dollars to promote dehumanizing propaganda. Demand transparency on how these videos are produced, approved, and distributed.
• Third, support civil liberties groups and immigrant rights organizations that challenge abuses in court and document what’s happening on the ground. Democracy requires watchdogs like them when the people in power act like they’re above the law.
• Fourth, get inside the Democratic Party and vote — and help others vote — like it matters, because it does. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, governors, attorneys general, and members of Congress all shape how far this culture of cruelty can spread. Authoritarians rely on fatigue and cynicism: Don’t give them either: participate.

And finally, speak up. Sabrina Carpenter did, and she was right to. Not because she’s a pop star, but because she named the moral truth that the White House is trying to smother with what they pretend are jokes.

When a government starts celebrating the humiliation of vulnerable people, it’s telling the world that it no longer sees itself as the servant of a democratic republic. Of all the people. Instead, it now sees itself as the applause-hungry enforcer of a bloodthirsty tribe.

If we let this become normal, we will — one day soon — no longer recognize our country.

This is the moment to draw a line.

Not just for immigrants. Not just for artists. For the Constitution. For due process. For human dignity. For the idea that in America, power is accountable.

Call. Organize. Vote. Let’s not let cruelty become America’s official language.

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters." — President Grover Cleveland

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." — President Theodore Roosevelt

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

In a recent Wall Street Journal report, “The Ultrarich Are Spending a Fortune to Live in Extreme Privacy,” reporter Arian Campo-Flores pulls back the curtain on a disturbing new reality: our country’s wealthiest citizens now inhabit a parallel America of private jets, members-only restaurants, “sky-garage” condos, and luxury wellness centers they can rent out entirely for themselves.

These aren’t just perks; they’re a full-blown escape from public life. The ultra-wealthy no longer wait in lines, navigate public institutions, or share community space with ordinary Americans.

And that’s the real danger: once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy.

America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself.

• It happened in the 1850s when the plantation aristocracy rose up, destroyed democracy in the South, and then tried to conquer the entire nation.
• It happened again when the Robber Barons of the Roaring 20s crushed unions and helped trigger the Republican Great Depression.
• And it’s happening today in the aftermath of the Reagan/Bush/Trump Revolution, as billionaire fortunes have exploded over the past 44 years and the American middle class has collapsed.

What’s different now is that modern oligarchs aren’t just accumulating money; they’re disappearing into a privatized world where only the ultra-wealthy (and their servants) exist.

The WSJ article shows us how: private jet portals that bypass public airports and the TSA, restaurants where only the chosen enter, wellness centers rentable like personal playgrounds, condos where your car rides up the elevator with you, curated social clubs guaranteeing you never encounter an unfamiliar (or less wealthy) face.

This isn’t luxury. This is withdrawal, an intentional retreat from democratic society.

But beneath the marble floors and private butlers lies something even more sinister: wealth hoarding as a form of pathology. As I’ve argued before, extreme wealth accumulation often mirrors a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called “hoarding disorder” in the DSM-5.

Ordinary hoarders afflicted with this mental illness fill their homes with newspapers and empty tin cans; billionaire hoarders fill offshore accounts and investment portfolios with billions they can never use, driven by the same compulsive “more, more, more” impulse.

Historian Michael Parenti described this perfectly: wealth becomes an addictive, monomaniacal hunger that consumes every other human concern.

When people suffering from this pathology then also use their wealth to seize vast political power, society pays the price. And thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Bellotti and Citizens United (as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America), these damaged hoarders can now use their fortunes to buy politicians, distort laws, functionally stop paying taxes to support the public good, and reshape our entire society just to serve their addiction.

They construct or acquire vast media properties solely to convince ordinary people that deregulating toxic businesses and cutting taxes on billionaires will somehow benefit them. They then invest millions in politicians who repay them with billions in tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.

As a result, Americans suffer the consequences: collapsing wages, millions without healthcare, skyrocketing poverty, underfunded schools, rampant gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, deadly pollution, poisons and chemicals in our food and water, and a middle class that’s been gutted and left gasping.

The WSJ article then reveals the final stage of this sickness: once the morbidly rich have extracted so much from society that it begins to crumble, they abandon society entirely.

When the richest Americans want nothing to do with public spaces, those spaces begin to deteriorate. Public airports, public hospitals. Public lines. Public restaurants. Public parks and neighborhoods. Public transportation. Public institutions of any kind.

A democracy can’t survive when its wealthiest citizens refuse to share a common world with the people they govern.

We’ve defeated oligarchs before.

• President Grover Cleveland warned of corporations using their “iron heel,” to become “the people’s masters.”
• President Teddy Roosevelt condemned the “invisible government” of the morbidly rich.
• FDR denounced the “economic royalists” who tried to overthrow democracy for profit.

All confronted their eras’ mentally ill hoarders, broke their power, taxed their fortunes, and built the foundations for a middle class that became the infrastructure of American stability.

Now that responsibility falls to us.

Members of today’s billionaire class are richer than any kings or pharaohs in history, and — thanks to decades of Republican deregulation, four corrupt Supreme Court rulings, and Reaganomics tax-slashing — are far more politically powerful.

They’ve used corrupt Supreme Court rulings to twist America’s laws so that their wealth is protected, their taxes are minimal, their influence is enormous, and their responsibility to the public is nonexistent.

This WSJ article isn’t just a window into their private world, it’s a warning flare. A democracy where the powerful live above and beyond the public realm is no democracy at all.

The path forward is the same one that saved us in the 1890s and 1940s: name the crisis, confront the hoarders, break up monopolies, end billionaire-funded political corruption, restore progressive taxation to put the country back together, and rebuild the middle class.

We can do it. We’ve done it before. In future posts I’ll be detailing many of the steps that have worked in the past here in America and succeed today in other countries.

Thursday was probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in our lifetimes. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that eerily echoes this moment and may give us some hope?

Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-style ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.

In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?

My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War II straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days. American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.

In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into two different wars. The first is an external war against Venezuela, using America’s drug problem as an excuse. The other is something very much like a 21st-century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans, with his masked secret-police ICE army at the forefront.

Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.

George Bush Jr wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba.

But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.

Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes the pilots of small boats off the coast of Venezuela and anti-ICE protestors in his fantasized “war zones” like Portland for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped Adams carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.

The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.

In the late 1790s, Adams was president and Jefferson was vice president. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called the Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-30 era).

Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House.

Adams was leading the US in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.

Adams’ rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.

On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.

“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote again to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.

Jefferson later wrote in his personal diary how it would — like today, with California and Illinois leading the charge against Trump’s neofascist agenda — fall to the states to prevent the loss of American democracy:

“Their usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the [Democratic] Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch.”

Democratic Republican Congressman Albert Gallatin submitted legislation that would repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalist majority in the House refused to even consider the motion, while informing Gallatin that he would be the next to be imprisoned if he kept speaking out against “the national security.”

Adams then shut down almost 30 newspapers, throwing their publishers, editors, and writers in prison. The most famous to go to jail was Ben Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. Within a few months, Adams had effectively silenced the opposition.

Then he went after average citizens who spoke out against him.

Adams and his wife traveled the country in a fine carriage surrounded by a military contingent. As the Adams’ family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes.

Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said, “There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

It was the darkest moment in our new nation’s short history. But then a new force arose.

When Adams shut down the Democratic Republican newspapers, pamphleteers — that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications — went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging the state governments to stand tall with Thomas Jefferson.

One of the best was a short screed by George Nicholas of Kentucky, “Justifying the Kentucky Resolution against the Alien & Sedition Laws” and “Correcting Certain False Statements, Which Have Been Made in the Different States” by Adams’ Federalists.

On Feb. 13, 1799, then-Vice President Jefferson had a courier hand-deliver a letter and copy of Nicholas’ pamphlet to his old friend Archibald Stuart (a Virginia legislator, fighter in the War of Independence, and leader of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans).

“I avoid writing to my friends because the fidelity of the post office is very much doubted,” he opened his letter to Stuart, concerned that Adams was having his mail inspected because of his anti-war activities.

Jefferson pointed out that “France is sincerely anxious for reconciliation, willing to give us a liberal treaty,” and that even with the Democratic newspapers shut down by Adams and the Federalist-controlled media being unwilling to speak of Adams’ war lies, word was getting out to the people.

Jefferson noted:

“All these things are working on the public mind. They are getting back to the point where they were when the X. Y. Z. story was passed off on them. A wonderful and rapid change is taking place in Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York. Congress is daily plied with petitions against the alien and sedition laws and standing armies.”

Jefferson then turned to the need for the pamphleteers’ materials to be widely distributed across states that might resist Adams.

“The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness in the course of the present summer,” he wrote, “if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. Under separate cover you will receive some pamphlets written by George Nicholas on the [Alien and Sedition] acts of the last session. These I would wish you to distribute....”

The pamphleteer — today he would have been called a Substack writer — was James Bradford, and he reprinted tens of thousands of copies of Nicholas’ pamphlet and distributed it far and wide. Hand to hand, as Jefferson did with his by-courier letter to Stuart, was how what would be today’s independent progressive writings are distributed via email.

In the face of the pamphleteering and protests, the Federalists fought back with startling venom. It was led by a media machine — the remaining newspapers — largely owned by wealthy Adams backers as the Jefferson-backing newspapers had been shut down and their publishers and editors imprisoned.

Vicious personal attacks were launched in the Federalist press against Jefferson, Madison, and others, and President Adams and Vice President Jefferson were no longer on speaking terms. Adams’ goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Jefferson’s Democratic Party, and he had scared many of them into silence or submission.

“All [Democratic Republicans], therefore, retired,” Jefferson wrote in his diary, “leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President.“Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of [Democratic] Republicans in phalanx together, until the legislature could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain, than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the [Democratic] Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the [Democratic] Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair; and the cause would have been lost forever.”

But Jefferson in the Senate and Gallatin in the House held their posts and fought back fiercely against Adams, thus saving — quite literally — American democracy. Jefferson and Madison also secretly helped legislators in Virginia and Kentucky submit resolutions in those states’ legislatures decrying the Alien & Sedition Acts. The bill in Virginia, in particular, gained traction.

As Jefferson noted in his diary, between his and Gallatin’s resistance in Washington, DC and several state governments standing up against Adams’ having shut down their newspapers and using the army to threaten their protestors:

“By holding on, we obtained time for the legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions, saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period, can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country however.“The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the XYZ imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself.”

The efforts of that century’s truth-tellers made great gains. The states were fighting back, even challenging Adams’ massive, naked power grab and war-mongering. As Jefferson noted in a Feb. 14, 1799 letter to Virginia’s Edmund Pendleton:

“The violations of the Constitution, propensities to war, to expense, and to a particular foreign connection, which we have lately seen, are becoming evident to the people, and are dispelling that mist which X. Y. Z. had spread before their eyes. This State is coming forward with a boldness not yet seen. Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted [to Adams], have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President.”

Americans and several state leaders were so angry with Adams, Jefferson noted, that the challenge was to prevent people from taking up arms against Adams’ Federalists. He worried out loud that the resistance may, if it erupted into violence, give Adams an excuse to declare an insurrection and totally end democracy:

“New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State [of Pennsylvania], we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit.”

Like today’s progressive movement led by people like Bernie Sanders, JB Pritzker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, and Elizabeth Warren, Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than police violence or even threats like Trump‘s war-mongering against Venezuela today.

“But keep away all show of force,” he wrote to Pendleton, “and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition. If we can keep quiet, therefore, the tide now turning will take a steady and proper direction.”

A week later, Feb. 21, 1799, Jefferson wrote to the great Polish general who had fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kosciusko, a close friend then living in Russia. War for political purposes was the great enemy of democracy, Jefferson noted, and peace was its champion. And the American people were increasingly siding with peace and rejecting Adams’ call for war.

“The wonderful irritation produced in the minds of our citizens by the X. Y. Z. story, has in a great measure subsided,” he noted. “They begin to suspect and to see it coolly in its true light.”

But Adams was still President, and for him and his Federalist Party even a “little war” with France would have helped tremendously with the upcoming election of 1800. And in France some leaders wanted war with America for similar reasons.

Jefferson continued:

“What course the government will pursue, I know not. But if we are left in peace, I have no doubt the wonderful turn in the public opinion now manifestly taking place and rapidly increasing, will, in the course of this’ summer, become so universal and so weighty, that friendship abroad and freedom at home will be firmly established by the influence and constitutional powers of the people at large.”

And if Adams’ rhetoric led to an attack on America by France?

“If we are forced into war,” Jefferson noted, “we must give up political differences of opinion, and unite as one man to defend our country. But whether at the close of such a war, we should be as free as we are now, God knows.”

The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book, The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.

The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power in 1801 and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.

As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.

All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians and states — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.

America has been burdened by lying presidents before, and even one who tried to destroy our Constitution like Trump is today threatening to do. But in our era — like in Jefferson’s — we are fortunate to have radical truth-tellers and political allies to warn us of treasonous acts for political gain.

If we stand in solidarity with today’s truth-tellers, and more politicians step forward to take a leadership role, then it’s entirely possible that with the elections of 2026 and 2028 American democracy can once again prevail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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