Trump’s thought police may already have your name in their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around 300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes but, rather, people who they think may commit crimes in the future. Thought and opinion crimes.

Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:

— Purge government institutions of professionals and replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear Leader that they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutstaffel, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)

But key to their entire identity and supporting their base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the nation that they must be suppressed.

If you’re a democrat or lean that direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[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.”

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or Tradwives.

But that was just the beginning.

Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.

The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening Center.”

And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s” unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who are queer or otherwise support the queer community.

One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever, even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and operating within the DOJ and FBI.

And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes:

“Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”

Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me.

America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them.

Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.

The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.

Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless: sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.

Well, 8 PM Tuesday came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.

Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.

In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.

The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).

He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.

You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthy underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.

And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.

His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.

There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.

His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.

His Cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea, but also to slather him with praise and adoration.

Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.

When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City, he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.

Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.

The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.

Putin’s bloody, vicious attack on Ukraine is now justified; if America can threaten it, why are you criticizing Russia? And when Xi decides to take Taiwan, who will dare stand up to him when he threatens nuclear annihilation? Not to mention the dozens of tinpot dictators who now feel similarly liberated.

And the bonus for Trump is that nobody’s talking about his allegedly raping 13-year-olds, his sons getting into the defense contractor gravy train, his bitcoin and selling-pardon grifts, his destroying the White House’s East Wing, his hanging his picture all over DC like he’s Saddam, his inflation, the price of gas, his hanging Putin’s picture in the White House along with our past presidents, or any of the other daily obscenities and indignities his regime visits upon us.

Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.

His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).

He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.

But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.

We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as

have already publicly called for.

Trump is tearing America apart with his threats against Iran and comment that domestically, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” He’s also succeeded in intentionally pitting Americans of different races, religions, and across the rural/urban divide against each other.

As Michael Corthell noted on the Essay X² Substack:

“There was a time when Americans expected political leadership to involve sobriety, judgment, and at least a passing acquaintance with reality. That time now feels like one of those lost civilizations historians whisper about, somewhere between Atlantis and the Republican Party of 1956.”

While it’s worked to the advantage of the GOP, the fossil fuel and private prison industries, and the billionaire class for four decades or more, it’s extraordinarily dangerous to our nation and our children’s future.

That’s because a society can’t function when its people don’t have faith in its institutions, and it’s even more of a challenge for a democracy, a form of government which only exists “by the consent of the governed.” When people lose faith in their nation’s institutions, the result is both social and political chaos much like America is experiencing right now.

I saw this over and over again when doing international relief work back in the 1980s and 1990s: in failed and failing states, people not only distrusted their governments, but were openly disdainful of them and their elected and bureaucratic officials.

Out of that distrust grew a plethora of conspiracy theories that tried to explain why things got so bad, and those often led to political violence (I saw this in Haiti and Colombia), authoritarian takeover (I witnessed this working in Russia) and, in two cases where I worked (Sudan and Uganda), actual civil wars.

America is now going through something similar. For example, prior to Reagan’s presidency, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” Pew found in 2024 that 85% of Americans said most elected officials “don’t care” what people like them think, and only 4% said the political system is working “extremely” or “very” well.

That’s absolutely unsustainable without radical change.

We’re also experiencing a crisis of confidence in America internationally, as nations that were formerly allies across the planet are now openly questioning whether they can ever again trust us after all the betrayals, trash-talking, and Putin-fluffing coming from Trump and his lickspittles.

Tariffs, destroying USAID, and silencing The Voice of America have devastated our soft power and credibility around the world, moving dozens of countries away from us and toward mostly China and Russia.

All of which raises the question: How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess?

Three factors that burst onto the scene in a big way in the 1960s led us to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which brought us to today’s crisis.

— The first was the invention of neoliberalism in the 1940s, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
— This was followed by the creation of the Libertarian Party a few decades later as a lobbying vehicle against rent control by the real estate lobby.
— And, finally, in the 1980s a handful of fossil fuel billionaires jumping into politics to fund think tanks, media, and politicians who’d preach the doctrine that, as Reagan famously said, ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Prior to these interventions, the New Deal consensus had brought Americans together around the idea that the purpose of government was, to quote the Constitution’s Preamble:

“[T]o form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Neoliberals, Libertarians, and rightwing petrobillionaires like David Koch (who ran for VP in 1980 on a ticket of shutting down pretty much all domestic spending, presaging Trump’s recent rant that the only legitimate function of government is to run the military) all began the refrain that government is essentially evil, because they all objected to paying taxes to “promote the general Welfare,” or losing profits to regulations that prevented harms to workers and average Americans.

An army of sycophants and spokesmen was mobilized from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to the “stars” of Fox “News” and its imitators. Soon, the word spread. As Limbaugh used to joke, social programs were actually evil because:

“What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he’ll never get up!”

Men with wealth beyond the imaginings of Midas were telling average white working Americans that it wasn’t the GOP’s tax cuts and Republicans’ destruction of unions that crushed them, but brown-skinned immigrants, women, and Black people who wanted to “steal” their jobs, invade their homes, and rape their daughters.

The foundation of Trump’s 2024 campaign was the ad repeated on loop asserting that Kamala Harris wanted government to pay for trans surgery for people in prison. Don’t think about being robbed by billionaires; there are queer people out there who just want to live their own lives!

By the end of the George W. Bush presidency (and his and Cheney’s lies that led us into bloody quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq), most Americans had decided they couldn’t believe or trust our government. Then Trump came along and, presumably on Putin’s orders, told the world that we couldn’t be trusted internationally, either.

Just like with domestic politics, our nation can’t effectively function internationally if other nations also don’t have faith in our institutions. The Reagan Revolution, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party have destroyed both our faith and the world’s faith in the institutions of America and thus put our democracy at serious peril.

Part of that peril is that Donald Trump is now threatening to turn America into an “illiberal democracy” police state with rigged elections like Russia and Hungary. And it’s Americans’ cynicism that is his main weapon.

As John Mac Ghlionn wrote this week for The Hill about how hard a serious recession could hit Americans:

“The cultural confidence that once carried societies through genuine hardship – the belief that sacrifice was worth something, that tomorrow warranted patience – has faded into a nihilism that is difficult to condemn in people who arrived at it honestly.

“A society that still believes in endurance can survive contraction. A society built entirely on consumption faces a harder test.”

The solution is straightforward, and it appears we’re moving quickly in that direction, just like we did in 1932 as we woke up and chose to move out of the Republican Great Depression.

First, Americans must realize that these nihilistic ideologies promoted by billionaires and massive, monopolistic corporations are grounded in lies. We’re not a society of selfish individual consumers driven primarily by greed; we’ve historically been here for each other, and that’s why our government was first formed. It worked best during the 1933-1981 New Deal era, when the Middle Class went from around 10% of us up to around two-thirds of us. And it was crippled by the Reagan Revolution, which has cut it down to around 43% of us.

Second, the Democratic Party needs to re-embrace the social and economic goals of the New Deal and Great Society that brought us Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, free and cheap college, etc., etc. Put “we, the people” first and again restrain the toxic impulses of billionaires and corporations through appropriate taxation and regulation.

And third, we must repudiated the GOP’s corrupt ideology at the polls this fall and bring into office a new generation of FDR-style progressives who are committed to undoing Reagan’s, Bush’s, Musk’s and Trump’s damage and rebuilding American institutions so they’ll once again work for the average family.

It may seem like a big lift, but more and more Americans are waking up to the Great Grift billionaires and their Republican toadies have been running on us for the past half-century. A new America is possible!

Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Barron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…)

One day, we’ll look back on last Wednesday’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.

Because what’s now vividly clear — and increasingly dangerous — is that Donald Trump isn’t just prosecuting a war against a major, wealthy, modern, 2,500-year-old Middle Eastern empire that is politically and militarily aligned with Russia and China: he’s doing it while he’s visibly unraveling.

Go back just a few weeks.

On February 28th, as the first strikes loomed, Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” He was calling for total conquest or a quick hit in the same sentence, the same breath.

By March 1st, he’d shifted. The war had “always been a four-week process… it’ll take four weeks — or less,” he said, according to the Washington Post. That same day, it became “four to five weeks.”

On March 2nd, he claimed we were already “ahead of schedule,” still referencing that timeline. But on social media, tracked by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, he added something else entirely: wars, he said, could be fought “forever.”

Really? Forever. Four weeks. Two days. I guess we’re just supposed to pick one?

By March 7th, he was calling the war “a short excursion” (the proper word is “incursion”) while also saying it would continue “for a little while.” On his Nazi-infested, failing social media site he bragged that “we’ve already won.”

On March 9th, he said the war was “pretty well complete.” In an interview summarized by TIME, he insisted there was “nothing left in a military sense,” even as the fighting continued, and he predicted it would end “very soon.”

Two days later, March 11th, he declared, “We’ve won… in the first hour, it was over.” Then, on March 13th, it would last “as long as it’s necessary” — but also “not long.” By March 17th, he was rewriting history, claiming it had been “essentially largely over in two or three days.” And yet by March 31st, he was telling Reuters it would take “two weeks, maybe three” more.

And now he’s using genuinely obscene and entirely un-American language like “bomb them back to the Stone Age” that seems to invoke nuclear war.

This isn’t strategy, spin, or political 3-D chess: something is deeply wrong with this man, and American troops and Iranian schoolchildren are dying because of it. And it’s not just Trump’s critics or “liberals” noticing his rapidly increasing mental deterioration.

Laura Ingraham — hardly a member of the resistance, but a longtime Trump ally and one of the most reliable voices in the billionaire Murdoch media ecosystem — raised the question of Trump’s ability to “understand the complexity of this” out loud on her show.

“Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” she asked. “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get?”

Meanwhile, major conservative figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and other online and podcast-based influencers who once embraced Trump are starting to peel away, disturbed by the chaos and the drift toward a wider war that never would have happened if we’d had a rational president in control of his faculties and willing to listen to the experts around him.

None of this surprises longtime Trump watchers like his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote about his “decompensating” mental state:

“This isn’t a joke; this isn’t one more thing we can sweep under the rug. This issue, which is infinitely more important and serious than the... emails, needs to be on the front page of every newspaper…”

Trump is running the United States the same way he ran his businesses, but worse. Impulsively, recklessly, and with a long, well-documented history of failure. This is a man, after all, who bankrupted casinos; businesses so structurally profitable that, in normal hands, they’re almost impossible to kill. A man whose corporate history is littered with collapsed ventures, unpaid contractors, lawsuits, and burned partners.

Back then, it was just his own inherited wealth that he was destroying. Now he’s ruining America’s economy, our international standing, and has set up a military disaster in the most volatile region of the world. All while it appears he’s melting down.

Nuclear-armed powers are watching and American troops’ lives — and potentially millions of others — are now on the line. Trump’s lifelong pathological lying, his sociopathic disregard for anybody but himself, and his impulsivity are now all colliding with literally life-and-death stakes that make wrecking an airline, a steak business, or a casino seem insignificant.

First of all, he appears increasingly drunk on power, both in person and online. The bizarre, overblown language of his social media posts — “we’ve already won,” “militarily WON,” his declarations clearly detached from observable reality — increasingly read like something from a spoiled, over-emotional, always-got-his-way adolescent. Tearing down the East Wing. Running multiple grifts. Attacking foreign countries. Picking unnecessary fights with allies. Hanging Putin’s picture in the White House.

Second, unlike his first term, this time Trump’s surrounded himself entirely with toadies who are absolutely terrified to tell him no or even gently contradict him. The guardrails to impulsive or destructive behavior, the professionals and experts who surrounded him nine years ago and restrained him, however imperfectly, are long gone, and what’s left is an horror-movie-funhouse echo chamber of groveling flattery and silent, breath-holding fear. His cabinet meetings are downright shocking. He’s forcing Marco Rubio to wear shoes that don’t even fit.

And third — the part nobody in the GOP or the billionaire-owned rightwing media wants to say out loud — is the reality that he’s pushing 80, and it’s showing.

The contradictions are sharper, his claims more disconnected from reality, and his rhetorical tics like “more powerful than anybody ever imagined” feel like they’re coming from somebody who’s genuinely disoriented. His public comments and posts are becoming more erratic, more grandiose, and more uncoupled from the real events that the rest of us can easily see. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except nobody near him has yet been willing to point out his nakedness.

This isn’t a partisan critique: I’m just observing a pattern that others have noticed as well. And it’s accelerating at a uniquely dangerous moment in world history.

James Madison warned us that war is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” War, he noted, concentrates political power, erodes accountability, and creates the possibility that a president can essentially turn himself into a dictator.

So, that’s where we are now: a war launched and incoherently narrated by a man whose own words seem to randomly fall all over themselves. Who’s visibly losing it in real time.

A commander-in-chief who treats our troops like they’re objects, toy soldiers with tin tanks and planes, rather than human people with families and hopes for the future.

A government that’s drifting toward disaster, with congressional Republicans and his cabinet members too terrified to even squeak out the tiniest objection or concern.

This has gone way beyond politics; we’re now talking national — and, perhaps, planetary — survival. It’s way bigger than one sick old man who slathers his face in orange makeup and compulsively plasters everything around him with gold paint.

Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk.

Because the cost of continued inaction here isn’t some abstraction; it’s already being paid in American blood and treasure, and could easily lead to an escalation that no one can deal with if it really starts to spin out of control. The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer.

There are two immediate constitutional remedies: Impeachment and removal from office, or the 25th Amendment.

If even a handful of Trump’s cabinet members can summon the courage to deal with the reality that we all saw last Wednesday, they could force him into retirement. Alternatively, if enough Republicans in Congress choose country over career, they could impeach him and thus end this crisis before it spirals further.

But the clock is ticking, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia are already warning their people, and strongman autocrats like Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are rubbing their hands gleefully as America crashes and burns.

If we’re serious about avoiding a wider war — or worse, a global one — we may not have the luxury of waiting for November’s election; we need to push a few brave Republicans (if we can find them) to join all the Democrats and take action now.

Because last week's speech not only failed to tell us where this war is going but starkly shoved in all our faces the reality of how far gone the man leading it already is.

I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.

It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).

But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the right-wing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:

“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism. It’s not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently.”

The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the nation.

When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.

This is why partisan lies used to seize and hold power are so corrosive: they destroy a nation’s sense of shared reality.

While it’s nearly impossible to identify any meaningful lies Democrats depend on to win elections, increase media profits, or pass special-interest legislation, there’s a long list of rightwing lies that serve those exact purposes:

— Tax cuts for billionaires help average people,
— Unions are bad for workers,
— Climate change is a hoax,
— Welfare fraud is widespread and mostly committed by Black “welfare queens,”
— Social Security is going broke and lifting the cap on what billionaires pay won’t solve the problem,
— The 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
— Immigrants bring more crime than native-born citizens,
— Deregulation doesn’t produce harms but by increasing profits helps society,
— National single-payer health insurance can’t work in America (even though it mysteriously works just fine, better than what we have, in dozens of other democracies),
— America was founded as a Christian nation,
— Men are superior to women,
— White people are superior to people of color,
— Vaccines are dangerous and COVID isn’t,
— Voter fraud and voting by non-citizens is widespread,
— Guns will keep your home and children safe,
— Rich Jews are funding a program to “replace” white workers with dark-skinned people,
— Increasing the minimum wage destroys economies and causes severe inflation.

Each one of these lies is repeated regularly by Republicans on TV and hosts of right-wing talk shows as if they’re true to the point where MAGA voters can recite them in their sleep (and when they’re carrying tiki torches).

As America learned when Fox “News” was forced to admit in court that their top talent was lying directly to the camera for months about the 2020 election, these lies are typically planned, organized, intentional, and can produce millions in revenue for the media and its stars.

Not to mention supporting billions in profits for aligned industries like fossil fuels and tobacco that depend on people believing lies to keep consuming their products.

Republican lies can also swing elections, like when a PAC aligned with George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign promoted their Willie Horton ad arguing that a prison furlough program that led to a white woman being raped and murdered by a Black man was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’ fault when, in fact, it’d been started by a previous Republican governor.

Rightwing lies have taken America into or prolonged wars, as we learned when Nixon lied about his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, Reagan “rescued” medical students by invading Grenada, George HW Bush had a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lie on national TV about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, Bush and Cheney lied us into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Trump lied us into attacking Iran and killing hundreds of innocent children.

Republican lies can even create self-fulfilling prophecies, like how when both Obama and Biden each came into office Republicans and rightwing media immediately started loudly claiming the US southern border was “now wide open” and that lie, repeated over and over again by conservative politicians and media, made its way down to South and Central America and caused people there to believe it and then to migrate north.

It’s particularly problematic when Republican lies become loyalty tests for public office. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse have been asking every Republican-promoted federal judge nominee to come before the Judiciary Committee the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Not even one single candidate has yet answered with the simple truth that Joe Biden won, fair and square, a result that was even litigated 60 times and proven before the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The problem Republicans, right-wing billionaires, and conservative media have is that if they simply told the truth about any of the things in the list above — that they really do support more pollution and raw bigotry while exclusively working to enrich the already morbidly rich — they’d quickly lose their audiences and their voters.

The fix, therefore, isn’t particularly complicated, even if it does require discipline.

Every anchor, every host, every journalist, and particularly every guest on radio or TV who lets one of these lies slide past without correction needs to be called out for it.

Not “some people disagree,” or “Democrats say otherwise.” Lies like these require a flat-out, factual, on-air correction: “That’s not true, and here’s the proof.” There really are differences between the two major parties, and only the GOP consistently uses demonstrable lies to get their way.

When hosts or Republican guests refuse to respond to that in good faith, when they treat a documented lie as just another “perspective” worthy of equal consideration, they have to be outed.

The Founders understood — as much as they loved free speech — that democracy can’t survive without a press willing to tell the truth. What we have today in far too much of our media landscape is the opposite: a press that’s either owned by billionaires invested in the lies or so terrified of being called “liberal” that it’s stopped holding liars accountable.

So, when you see this happen, pick up your phone and tell the network, station, host, or politician exactly what you just witnessed. And amplify it on social media.

The deep truth here is that decades of Republican lies have only worked because so many in the media — and so many of us who consume media — have let them pass unchallenged.

The facts are on our side. Americans, when presented with the actual substance of these issues without partisan labels attached, consistently support the positions Democrats hold and Republicans lie about.

And remember, every one of the lies on the list above exists for one reason only: because without them, the people telling them couldn’t win an election, hold an audience, get tax cuts and deregulation, or make more money.

So, correct the lies at the dinner table. Share articles like this one that document them with receipts. Support the journalists and outlets brave enough to call partisan and corporate liars out by name. Show up for protests. And, most important, vote this fall like your democracy depends on it, because (as the old cliché goes) it does.

Turn on your local billionaire-funded right-wing media (it’s ubiquitous, after all) pretty much any day of the week and you’ll hear a similar rant, uttered with the same grinning certainty:

“ICE is going to surround the polls this November, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

They’re not floating it as an idea or something up for debate. They’re not raising it as a question of legality or even practicality. They’re promising it, celebrating it, and daring those of us who believe in democracy to try to stop them.

Steve Bannon says it nearly every broadcast. Hate-monger Jesse Watters applauds it on Fox “News” in prime time. Professional victim Ben Shapiro calls it reasonable. Newsmax, owned by two billionaires and Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, hosts commentators who treat it like a done deal.

They’ve decided, in the open and on camera, with a swaggering confidence that no Republican will dare stand against them, that armed, masked thugs will stand at the entrance to your neighborhood polling place this fall, just like the Klan did in our great-grandparents’ generation in the South. Especially if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Hispanic voters.

And if you or some of your neighbors are frightened enough to turn around and avoid the building or even simply stay home, well, that’s precisely the point of this awful echo of some of the worst of America’s history.

The 150+ billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return to the White House now own the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, and enough of our nation’s media to make their threat feel like it’s simply inevitable. As I’ve pointed out before, they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building a media and think-tank infrastructure to keep working people confused, divided, and willing to believe whatever bull---- they’re fed.

But what these wannabe fascists don’t own yet, at least not completely, is your right to vote. And, looking at the prospect of a Blue Tsunami, that’s exactly what hard-right Republicans are working to fix before November.

“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon announced on his podcast back in February, and he’s been repeating it in variations ever since.

Fox “News’” Jesse Watters thinks it’s a splendid idea. Ben Shapiro is fully on board. Newsmax hosts have been cheerleading it for weeks. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s criminal attorney — stood at CPAC and asked, with feigned innocence, why anyone would object to armed, masked goons menacing people by standing outside polling places. You know, just like in the 1920s and the 1880s in the Deep South.

They’ve wrapped the whole scheme in the claim of “election integrity,” which is the same language every authoritarian in history has used when he decided the wrong people were voting too easily. It was the underlying logic and rationalization for Jim Crow in previous generations.

The real target of this obscene scheme isn’t some mythical army of illegal voters: as the Heritage Foundation discovered, they literally don’t exist in any meaningful way. Their real target is you, particularly if you’re not a straight white man, and the one of the several tools they’re planning to use is raw, naked fear.

And it’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, assembled by people who have every political incentive to find a crisis, has documented exactly 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Sixty-eight cases across four decades in a country of 330 million people having cast billions of votes.

And when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security conducted an internal review specifically to build the legal and political case for this “emergency,” they came back with the same answer: there is no evidence of widespread fraud. None.

The “crisis” Republicans have been using to justify making it hard to vote since the 1960s is entirely fictional. The emergency was cynically manufactured by rightwing operatives including William Rehnquist and proclaimed in 1980 by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich. But the armed thugs they want to plant at your polling place will be very, very real, and their effect on who decides to show up and vote will be very, very real, too.

What they’re proposing is also, not incidentally, a federal felony.

Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 592 — a law written in the aftermath of the Civil War by horrified legislators who’d personally watched armed and officially deputized members of the Klan threaten Black voters with nooses and at gunpoint — makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and the loss of any elected or appointed position to deploy armed federal personnel to any polling location, anywhere in America:

“Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.” (emphasis added)

That law has been on the books for more than a century because the people who wrote it understood that the moment we let the government sanction terror at voting locations, we no longer have a real democracy. Which, of course, is exactly the point of these rightwing fascists.

The cruelty of the scheme becomes even clearer when we consider how closely what ICE has been doing resembles previous generations’ experience of the Klan. A 2025 Supreme Court “shadow docket” ruling written by Pillsbury Doughboy imitator Brett Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo says ICE can profile Americans based on how dark their skin is, where they work, or how they talk — the so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” — and what’s followed has been a wave of well-documented harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens.

A 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, for example, was stopped by masked ICE agents while walking from work to lunch in Minneapolis, shackled, and violently dragged off to a federal building — as he repeatedly protested that he was a US citizen and carried in his pocket the proof of it — before being threatened, humiliated, and ultimately released. He repeated “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen” the entire time, but the agents, hungry for their bonuses and high on functional Vice President Stephen Miller’s racism, didn’t care.

A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens beaten, shackled, or dragged off at raids and protests, and that’s probably just the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.

According to the Cato Institute, 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention since October 2025 had no criminal convictions whatsoever. You don’t need a scientific study to know what happens to Latino voter turnout when an ICE thug is the first thing you see when you walk up to cast your ballot.

The Brookings Institution found around 75 percent of Latinos across the country can speak Spanish well enough to be flagged under ICE’s “Kavanaugh Stop” profiling criteria, making enormous numbers of Latino citizens vulnerable to harassment and detention based on nothing more than how they sound. Not to mention that Brett Kavanagh’s diktat allows for harassment and arrest based on the color of their skin.

And Republicans know it. That suppression of the vote isn’t an incidental side effect of this GOP plan. It is the plan.

And what gets suppressed along with those votes is everything that working people in this country depend on to survive.

This — in addition to trying to keep Trump, his grifter family, and his toadies out of jail — is also the most recent way Republicans are going after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs that built the modern middle class.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute documents how the states with the most aggressive voter suppression are also the same states with the lowest wages, the weakest labor protections, and the highest rates of poverty.

Red states with aggressive voter suppression have, in fact, the highest rates in the nation 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

That’s not a coincidence, and, for social scientists, it’s not a mystery. When working people can’t vote union rights evaporate, so corporate bosses don’t have to negotiate with their workers. When working people can’t vote, the minimum wage stays frozen, healthcare gets stripped, unions get busted, and social services are cut to pay for tax cuts so the morbidly rich keep all the money they’ve made from the labor of the people at the bottom.

Research from Equitable Growth has gone even further, showing a direct causal link between higher voting rates and higher minimum wages, more generous state support programs, and lower income inequality overall, which is why Blue states consistently have the highest standards of living in the country.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, by breaking down barriers that kept Black workers from the polls, actually reduced the Black-white wage gap. When five corrupt, racist Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of that Act in 2013, the racial wage gap got worse again.

The ballot box isn’t just a civic ritual. For working people, it’s the democratic lever that moves everything else. It’s how you get a raise, keep your healthcare, and make the people who write the rules answer to the people who must live under them.

That’s why what Bannon, Trump, and his billionaire backers are doing is so nakedly corrupt. They know that if Black, Latino, and young voters, along with hourly workers and people in the communities ICE is currently terrorizing, all show up in November, the GOP will experience an electoral bloodbath.

When their congressional allies lose their majority, the billionaires’ and Trump crime family’s looting gets interrupted. Two years of ruinous tariffs, Medicaid cuts, tax giveaways to the morbidly rich, and the demolition of every federal agency designed to protect workers rather than owners all face a reckoning. Trump’s lickspittles — including his Attorney General — face prison, just like over 40 of Nixon’s aides and his Attorney General did.

That’s what they’re in an absolute panic about. That’s what armed, masked thugs at the polling place are designed to prevent.

I’ve spent enough time studying the history of authoritarianism, both in literature and in countries I’ve visited or worked in, to recognize what this moment represents. Every Putin-, Orban-, and Trump-style strongman who’s converted a democracy into an authoritarian state started by making “certain people” afraid to participate.

Today’s Republicans aren’t even original in their obscene threats of implied violence at the polling places. For almost a century after the Civil War, this was completely normal in the previously Confederate South.

And as the Klan taught previous generations of Americans, intimidation also doesn’t need to be legal to work. The chilling effect lands the same way whether or not the statute books say it’s permissible, which is exactly why they’re planning this in open defiance of federal law, and exactly why we have to name it for what it is: an attack on our constitutional right to determine our own leaders and thus our own nation’s future.T

Standing in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.

Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.

That omission isn't an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.

An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.

When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).

I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades. What my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.

It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.

Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:

“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”

Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.

All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.

Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.

A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.

Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”

Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.

And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.

Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.

The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.

For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.

According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.

Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).

Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.

At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.

The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.

Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?

Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.

And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.

That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.

The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.

Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.

It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”

Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.

Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clearly intimidating threats.

“They made a big show of pointing a camera way out their window so that I could see them taking pictures of my house,” three-term State Representative Brad Tabke told the newspaper. His child was home alone at the time, and the action, according to Tabke, frightened him. In an article written by Allison Kite, the newspaper added:

“Tabke said he saw what appeared to be federal immigration agents outside his home at least a half dozen times, sometimes with binoculars.

“Tabke is one of several Democratic lawmakers who said they were targeted or harassed during the Trump administration’s months-long immigration crackdown in the state. One DFL lawmaker told colleagues that federal agents hurled misogynistic epithets at her, even after she informed them she was an elected official. Another DFL legislator said an agent — with whom she had never interacted — greeted her by first name, while another said agents walked around her home taking photos.

“‘It was all a way of threatening and being very menacing in a way that perhaps would inhibit us from advocating the way that we had been,’ said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.”

One of the things I’ve written about both here and in several books over the years is how authoritarian movements don’t suddenly stand up and announce themselves. They never pop up with a manifesto that says, “Hello, we’re here to end your democracy!”

Instead , they typically arrive on the scene complaining about a problem, one they’ve often manufactured or at least exaggerated themselves, and then offer a solution that — just by coincidence — happens to require them to have a little more power, a little more reach, and a little more presence in places they weren’t before.

Then they do it again. And again. Until one day, the country’s people look around and discover the institution that was supposedly fixing a temporary crisis has become a permanent, unaccountable force operating everywhere, terrorizing the populace, and answerable to no one but the guy at the top. You could call it “creeping fascism”.

That’s exactly what’s happening with ICE at America’s airports right now. And when Donald Trump told reporters this Monday, with evident pride, “ICE was my idea,” he wasn’t just taking credit for solving a sudden logistical crisis. He was telling us what kind of country he’s building and what kind autocratic of leader he’s become.

A five-week Republican-caused partial government shutdown has left nearly 50,000 TSA agents working without pay. More than 480 have quit, thousands more call in sick daily, and airport security lines at Atlanta, Houston, and JFK have stretched to five hours or more. It’s a genuine crisis affecting millions of ordinary American travelers.

And it’s a crisis Trump has had the power to end every day since it started by simply demanding and signing a clean funding bill, which Democrats have repeatedly presented to Congress and Republicans have repeatedly blocked.

Instead, Trump and shadow-president Stephen Miller sent in their ICE thugs.

ICE agents were deployed to more than a dozen airports on Monday, according to the New York Times, wearing vests with their agency’s name, standing near identification processing locations, walking through terminal halls, generally scaring and intimidating people.

The Times notes that there was an obvious alternative if Trump actually wanted airport security help: U.S. Customs agents are already in airports doing security checks and passport verification, they’re trained for the environment, and deploying them to ID checkpoints would have been, as former ICE official Darius Reeves told the Times, “a less politically charged decision.”

But Trump didn’t want a less politically charged decision: he wanted ICE, which has become, essentially, his own private army, as he told us himself.

That’s because, as the Times makes clear in its reporting, Trump has been openly using ICE to pursue goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement.

This past year, he’s sent officers into large Democratic-run cities like LA and Chicago in highly visible operations to wreak havoc and terrorize those communities. He most recently rushed teams to Minneapolis specifically to pursue Black Somali immigrants he’d been trash-talking in comments widely denounced as nakedly racist.

And in a June directive he posted on social media, he told his masked, heavily armed ICE thugs that targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would “help Republicans” electorally, describing those cities as “the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.”

That’s not immigration policy: that’s political warfare. And it’s a project the world has seen repeatedly in the past, one that has never, ever turned out well. This is, in fact, a fascist playbook with an astonishingly well-documented history.

When Heinrich Himmler took over the Schutzstaffel or SS in 1929, it had fewer than 300 members and its official job was protecting Hitler at his rightwing political events. The word itself simply means “protection force.”

Himmler, however, built it into something else entirely: an elite armed force whose members were screened personally for absolute personal loyalty to Hitler. Not loyalty to Germany, not even to his political party as an institution, but to the man. Similar to the way the Trump regime is now asking job applicants who they voted for and if they agree that Trump won the 2020 election.

And then, whenever a crisis arose, real or manufactured, the SS expanded into that vacuum.

Hitler rewarded the SS by letting it operate in a way that was largely independent, effectively subordinate to no law except his personal authority. It could shoot down a man or woman on a city street, for example, and simply seize the evidence with no obligation to share it with local authorities. It’s officers and executives routinely ignored the law, local official objections, and even court orders.

Very much like how ICE is now doing with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, refusing to give Minnesota or Minneapolis police and prosecutors access to evidence.

From that point forward, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum documents, Himmler received authority directly from Hitler to carry out “ideological policies that the laws of the state might not permit.” Within two years, the SS was completely immune from control by any normal police force in Germany.

It had its own separate funding. It ran the detention camps, had full access to all domestic intelligence on immigrants and protestors, and operated in any city it wanted with no regard to the desires or complaints of local law enforcement. It became, as historians describe it, a state within a state, answerable only to one man.

The parallels to what Trump is doing with ICE aren’t incidental. They’re both intentional and shockingly structural.

UCLA immigration law professor Hiroshi Motomura identified two sweeping changes to ICE under Trump’s second term: first, the agency now operates under rules traditionally lawful and accepted only at the border, not inside the USA. Now they’ve gone national.

Second, ICE has been given a separate $75 billion budget, specifically insulated from the shutdown that’s starving the TSA. The legitimate airport security institution, TSA, was deliberately defunded.

But Trump’s personal enforcement force is flush with cash and expanding its footprint daily. Himmler ran the SS on a separate budget track too, precisely to keep it outside the legal and constitutional constraints that bound every other German institution.

And then there’s the matter of the masks. Trump told reporters Monday that he’d suggested ICE agents at airports not wear the face coverings that have become standard in their domestic operations over the past year. The masking, he said, “was not good for travelers coming off planes.”

So now president of the United States is personally directing the aesthetic presentation of what appears to be his own personal federal “protection force” law enforcement agency to calibrate how intimidating its presence should be in any particular given context.

He wants the masks on when ICE is smashing in doors and dragging people out of their communities in the middle of the night. But he wants the masks off when ICE is standing in airport terminals full of spring break families.

It’s the same force. But the performance changes based on the political effect he’s going for.

That is not how a law enforcement agency in a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. But it is how a personal army like the SS worked.

Former senior ICE official Deborah Fleischaker, who served in the Biden administration, told the Times flatly:

“President Trump cannot help himself and is using ICE as a political battering ram.”

And former Baltimore ICE office head Darius Reeves, no liberal, predicted it will become “the most hated federal law enforcement agency.” Or, I’d add, like the SS, the most feared.

The Times notes that even within ICE, something has shifted:

“[T]he swing in the second Trump administration has aligned the agency with Mr. Trump himself.”

Not with the law, Congress, or the Constitution. With one man, Donald Trump. That’s the SS model.

That’s precisely what “My honor is my loyalty” meant when Himmler put it on the SS’s belt buckles as the organization’s motto. The loyalty wasn’t to Germany; it was personal, to the Führer (absolute leader), and it placed the organization categorically above and outside of the normal rule of law.

As I’ve written before, historians who study how democracies become dictatorships point out that the most dangerous moment is always when the authoritarian leader’s moves are still “just barely” within the range of what people can rationalize away.

The TSA crisis is real, for example, albeit manufactured by the Republicans in Congress. People want their airports to work. Trump says ICE is “just helping out.” All of that is arguably true, and yet it’s precisely what made the SS’s early expansions into various security and “helping police” situations so easy for ordinary Germans to rationalize.

You don’t see the 40+ deaths in Trump’s prison camps so far this past year when you’re watching orderly men in uniforms keep a crowd moving. It just seems like order is being restored.

But look at what’s actually being built here. ICE has a $75 billion budget that insulates it from democratic accountability through the normal, constitutional appropriations process. It’s deployed against Democratic cities to create terror for explicit political purposes, according to the president’s own words.

It’s directed by a “border czar” who reports personally to Trump. Its agents are being sent, at the president’s personal instruction, into the country’s most public spaces, now including America’s most high-profile airports. And its most visible recent operations have included killing American citizens in Minneapolis with zero accountability, collecting DNA from protesters it’s arrested, and smashing car windows and front doors to make arrests without the warrants the Constitution requires.

This isn’t an immigration agency anymore, any more than the SS was a bodyguard unit by 1938. It’s now a personal enforcement force, and the president just told you so himself. “ICE,” he said, “was my idea.”

The solution here is straightforward: Congress must pass a clean funding bill to pay TSA agents today. And Democrats have been trying to do exactly that for weeks. And then, when the spineless Republicans are out of office, the agency needs to be eliminated or reformed from top to bottom.

Tomorrow’s No Kings 3 protests are our opportunity to let our opinions be known; show up in the streets. They’re working hard to build a force that doesn’t have to answer to voters at all and the next nine months or so may be our last chance to stop it from becoming a full-blown American version of the SS.

This is the moment they’re counting on you to stay home. Don’t.

When a gentle, thoughtful, holy man like Pope Leo XIV denounces what Trump has done by killing thousands in an illegal and unnecessary war of choice — he called it a “scandal to the whole human family” yesterday — the world knows our president has descended into something truly and profoundly evil.

There’s a single through-line connecting everything happening to us right now, and it all has to do with the damaged, broken, deranged man in the White House.

— Our gas prices spiking toward six dollars a gallon and above.
— Masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs brutalizing brown and Black people, immigrants and US citizens alike, and murdering or killing almost a hundred human beings since Trump was sworn in as they build hundreds of massive concentration camps across the US.
— Trump’s tweets yesterday implying that Democrats may be their next occupants, calling members of the party “America’s greatest threat after Iran” much as Hitler did just before throwing members of opposition parties into camps in Germany in 1933/1934.
— Our grocery bills creeping higher every single week, with price explosions and famine coming as the world runs low on fertilizers now blocked in the Strait of Hormuz.
— TSA officers working without a paycheck snarling our security lines while food banks quietly open at our nation’s airports to feed those unpaid agents and their families.
— American soldiers and innocent civilians dying in an unconstitutional, unauthorized-by-Congress, internationally illegal war crime against a country that posed no imminent threat to us, with not a single ally on the planet willing to stand beside us, as over 20 countries have now been drawn in creating an eerie echo of WWI.
— And now, in one of the most breathtaking acts of strategic self-destruction in American history (it’s almost as if Putin is orchestrating the entire thing), we’re literally paying Iran and Russia billions of dollars every day to kill our men and women in uniform.

That throughline isn’t bad luck or complicated geopolitics: it’s one sick, sick man.

A man forged by a brutal, loveless father who raised his children with contempt instead of care. And a mother who was never there.

A man mentored by Roy Cohn — the most psychopathically ruthlessly and amoral mob-affiliated political fixer of the twentieth century — who taught him that reality is whatever you assert it to be if you say it loud enough and repeat it often enough, that you should never admit fault, never apologize, and always attack.

A nepo-baby who’s moved through 79 years of life without ever once having to genuinely live with the consequences of his decisions, because there was always more inherited money to paper over the wreckage, more creditors to stiff with an army of lawyers, more gullible Republican marks to con, more toady sycophants to exploit, more people so simply in awe of his wealth or afraid of his bullying that all they can do is tell him what he wants to hear.

As I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Fred Trump didn’t raise a president. He raised a wounded child who never grew up emotionally, but learned as an adult to use naked brutality to weaponize his own psychopathy. Who delights in the deaths and killings of others, who loves to watch people’s homes and cities blow up as if he were a 10-year-old playing a video game.

And now that man has control of the most powerful military in the history of human civilization and is gleefully running roughshod over the guardrails against such power abuses that our Founders and Framers wrote into the Constitution.

Consider what this man has done to America and the world in just the past year:

He launched the largest U.S. tariff regime since 1932 (which provoked the Republican Great Depression), a chaotic, impulsive, constantly-shifting wall of taxes on our own imports that Harvard economists say have raised retail prices on clothing by more than 17 percent, building materials by more than 10 percent, and on household goods across the board.

The Tax Foundation calculates it as an average tax increase of $1,500 per American household this year (it was more last year). Walmart — not even remotely a progressive institution — reported that inflation on the general merchandise they sell has shot up more than three percent last quarter and said explicitly that Trump’s tariffs drove it. Goldman Sachs economists found that tariffs pushed inflation up by half a percentage point in 2025, and JPMorgan warned that what businesses have been absorbing is now getting passed to you, the consumer, rapidly.

Your grocery bill isn’t going up because of supply chains or some imaginary “global force.” It’s going up because a lifelong grifter who’s never read an economics textbook or the Constitution decided that tariffs were a display of strength, and strength is the only currency the wounded man raised by Fred Trump — a man once arrested at a Klan rally — has ever trusted.

He’s also used tariffs and threats of tariffs to intimidate countries into giving him gifts, bribes, and help for his boys to make billions in crypto and to build foreign hotels and golf courses in the most blatant corruption of the White House since the Republican Teapot Dome scandal (and Albert Fall was a piker compared to Trump and his family).

Then there’s the illegal war he conspired with Kushner, Netanyahu (and perhaps Witkoff’s buddy Putin) to wage against Iran. On February 28th, without a declaration from Congress, without a single NATO ally willing to join us, without any nation on Earth signing on, without going to the United Nations, and without any provocation or attack on America or American interests, Donald Trump lied our military into launching an assault on Iran falsely claiming they were about to attack the US.

This was not a targeted strike like the earlier effort to knock out their nuclear enrichment facilities: this is an actual war. A war that’s now killed at least 13 American service members and seriously wounded more than 200 (and those are the official numbers, which former military officials are already calling deeply under-reported). And thousands of innocent civilians.

A war that has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply flows, sending Brent crude to $112 a barrel — up more than 80 percent since January — and pushing retail gas prices up nearly a dollar a gallon, with United Airlines cutting 5% of their flights because they’re already planning for oil to hit $175 a barrel (the result of the destruction of oil facilities by Iranian retaliation) and stay there through at least 2027.

He’s the first Western leader since Adolf Hitler to launch military attacks against multiple countries in rapid succession, without legislative authorization, without genuine self-defense justification, and without a single meaningful ally. That’s not hyperbole or hysteria on my part: that’s the actual series of events compared with very real history.

And the Republican Party — the party that once claimed to stand for constitutional government and congressional authority over declarations of war — has largely fallen silent or, in the case of bloodthirsty fools like Lindsay Graham, cheered on what may well become World War III.

To deal with the oil price explosion his illegal war created, the billionaire who runs Trump’s Treasury Department has now lifted sanctions on Iranian oil currently at sea, freeing up roughly 140 million barrels worth over $14 billion to the government of Iran: the government whose forces are killing American troops right now.

At the same time, Trump’s also quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil, handing Vladimir Putin — whose drones have been raining down on Ukrainian civilians for years and whose intelligence is helping Iran kill American troops — a financial windfall that European allies called a “betrayal” and that the Kremlin greeted not with thanks but with a demand for more.

An Israeli policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies said it plainly to NBC News: “The U.S. is funding a war against itself.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “sickeningly, shamefully stupid.” Former NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor called it “the biggest, dumbest concession ever given to Iran by the US.” Even Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace posted: “Bombing Iran with one hand and buying Iran oil with the other.”

It’s like the old definition of insanity: we’re paying Russia and Iran — simultaneously — while Americans in uniform bleed and die at their hands in the theater of war that Donald Trump created without permission, without allies, and without a plan.

The families of those 13 dead Americans know that. The 200-plus wounded know that. The families of thousands of dead Middle Eastern families know that. And every American paying five dollars a gallon or more is quickly figuring it out.

This is what a lifelong grifter does when he’s never experienced real consequences for his actions in his entire life.

Not when he bullied people at prep school, not when he used a phony bonespurs X-ray to get out of serving in Vietnam, not when he cheated on every one of his three wives, not when he was tied to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, not when he ripped off his customers and refused to pay his vendors, not when he bankrupted dozens of companies including two casinos where he was busted for money laundering (who does that??), not when he lied his way into office, not when he solicited Russia’s help to win the 2016 election, not even when he tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6th 2021.

He acts. He declares victory. And when reality pushes back he always finds someone else to blame and then figures out a scheme to monetize the mess.

When Trump kept insisting throughout the first weeks of the war that we’d “won,” even as U.S. bases burned in Baghdad, he wasn’t lying strategically; he was doing the only thing his psychology has ever equipped him to do: lie his way through a crisis and wait for the sycophants around him to pick up the pieces.

There have always been people so in awe of his wealth and power that they’re willing to do what he wants no matter how bizarre or destructive: that’s the lesson his mentor Roy Cohn taught him that’s never left him. He’s left a trail of them — people broken by their association with him — behind him; just look at the folks who served in his first administration who’re now looking at financial ruin and even prison.

Meanwhile, here at home, the TSA has been going without pay since February 14th. Over five weeks. These are the men and women who show up every single day to keep weapons off our planes, and they’re sleeping in airport parking lots because they can’t afford the gas to drive home.

A food bank opened at Pittsburgh International Airport to feed federal employees who are not getting paid. At major hubs like Boston Logan, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Seattle-Tacoma, and Atlanta the lines are brutal, the sick-call rates are skyrocketing, and at least one senior TSA official warned this week that some airports may have to shut down entirely if the impasse doesn’t break.

Senate Democrats have put clean, standalone bills on the Senate floor to pay TSA officers — and only TSA officers, nothing else — six separate times. No tricks. No riders. No conditions beyond “pay the people keeping our airports safe.”

Six times, Republican senators — by name, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Eric Schmitt of Missouri — walked to the floor and blocked them. Every single time.

The Republican argument is that Democrats won’t vote to fund the entire DHS, including ICE. What they aren’t saying is why Democrats won’t do that: because ICE agents have been operating without visible identification, hiding their faces behind masks, busting into American homes without warrants, and murdering American citizens in the streets with absolutely no accountability.

Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others dead at the hands of masked goons who refuse to identify themselves and then flee the scene.

Democrats aren’t blocking TSA funding because they’re playing politics: they’re refusing to write a blank check for an agency that a federal judge — a Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia — found had violated court orders in 96 cases in 74 different situations in January alone.

Republicans are choosing to let TSA officers go without pay rather than agree to require ICE agents to wear a name badge or take off their masks. That’s the actual choice these ghouls have made in service to the madman in the White House.

That’s what’s happening in the United States Senate right now, in plain sight, while a psychopathic man hits little balls around at his shabby golf motel and posts to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site about his imaginary 100 percent approval rating.

This is what the death knell of a republic sounds and looks like when it’s torn to shreds from the inside. Complete with the upcoming gold coin bearing his face, like he thinks he’s Julius Caesar.

Armed, masked, anonymous stormtroopers (Stephen Miller says, “We are the Storm!”) and massive military vehicles with chemical weapons in the streets of American cities, and the steady, deliberate dismantling of every norm and institution and guardrail that stood between a wounded, entitled, pathologically dishonest man and unchecked power handed him by six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court.

The tariffs gutting working families. The illegal war with no consultation of Congress or the American people or our closest allies. The sanctions lifted on Iran and Russia to cover for the oil-price chaos the war created. The federal workers going without pay while Republicans block the bills that would help them.

All of it driven by the compulsions of one pathetic man who was broken in childhood, finished off by Roy Cohn, and handed the keys to American democracy by a political party that decided racism and raw power mattered more than our country.

Democracy doesn’t survive with mere passive observation: it requires enough people showing up in the streets, on social media, in the media, and at the ballot box to refuse to let it die.

This is not a moment for spectating, hand-wringing, or prevaricating. The world’s house is on fire, and we’re all inside it.

Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been named multiple times in the Epstein files. He made a shocking joke in the White House, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan last Thursday, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.

The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.

Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.

First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.

Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.

“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”

Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.

Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.

“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.

That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.

Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kirsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them fourteen billion.

That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: the entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.

Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.

Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.

The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.

Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.

TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.

Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10 percent in the private workplace today.

Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class — a single family’s wage-earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension — at around 60 to 65 percent of American families. Today it’s under 45 percent.

Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.

This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties — with the broad support of the American people — passed Voting- and Civil Rights laws, we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces, and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.

First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George HW Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.

The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and ICE raids, generating hysteria about Brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.

Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.

Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement — which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights — into the GOP. Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.

The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”

"What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

Robertson replied:

“Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.”

Falwell then doubled-down:

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:

“I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”

And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn — a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House — traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).

“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”

Forget about the teachings of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on-stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!

The NRA and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.

Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.

The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians. The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.

No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.

Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.

Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).

White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.

There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:

“Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI's division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would ‘very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of’ their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month.’”

And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.

“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.

Former President Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.

In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote — particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students — while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”

It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.

The Brennan Center documents how:

“As of Janu­ary 14, legis­lat­ors in at least 27 states have intro­duced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrict­ive [voting] provi­sions.”

Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.

Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.

The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.

And they’re poisoning our social and news media.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”

As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.”

Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok (which has banned my show). There’s a network of “nearly 1300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really rightwing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual rightwing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.

Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi, and other autocrats and rightwing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.

Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.

Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.

Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.

Rand Paul, who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand-deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.

This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.

This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.

The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.

And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”

As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.

FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower — two Democrats and a Republican — renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.

They taught us that civic engagement — voting and participating in our political system — is the best antidote to fascist poison.

Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.

Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-DEI laws and book bans.

This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully sixty percent of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.

Time is short and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.

Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in Blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!

There are several clear winners from Trump’s attack on Iran:

— Russia, who can again fund its violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims its unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine;
— Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country;
— the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010;
— the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions;
— Don Jr. and Eric, who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train;
— Donald Trump himself, who’s succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page;
— and Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.

The losers include:
— The credibility of the United States and the rule of international law;
— the families of 13 dead and 140 injured American soldiers and airmen,
— the families of at least 160 dead Iranian little girls and thousands of other dead civilians in a dozen countries,
— American taxpayers who’re paying for the bombs;
— and future prospects for world peace.

But the biggest winner may be Jared Kushner, who apparently pushed Trump to initiate the war while he’s trying to solicit $5 billion from the same Arab states that have been begging American administrations for decades to attack Iran.

Back on March 5th, I speculated here on Hartmann Report that Kushner and Witkoff had been negotiating with Iran in bad faith, possibly to get the Iranian leadership to meet together in one place so Netanyahu (who used to sleep in Kushner’s bedroom) could kill them all with a missile strike.

Three years earlier, I laid out the backstory of how Kushner allegedly helped MBS take over the Saudi kingdom and was richly rewarded with $2 billion to fund his new investment venture.

Now, The New York Times is reporting that Kushner is back at the Arab trough, trying to pick up an additional $5 billion for his company from the same states that have been begging America to attack Iran for decades.

This represents a massive and apparently corrupt conflict of interest, as Congressman Jamie Raskin and Senator Ron Wyden pointed out when they called for an investigation into Kushner acting as an unregistered foreign agent in violation of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. They wrote:

“This revelation is deeply disturbing, as Mr. Kushner appears to be influencing U.S. foreign policy by acting as a political consultant to the Saudi government while also accepting their money. … Mr. Kushner’s proximity to President Trump and the potential for political interference warrants the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, in a brilliant imitation of Vladimir Putin, is threatening news organizations for their reporting on the War. He seems upset about news stories that Trump may have ignored warnings from his top generals that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if we attacked them; those reports appear to be well-sourced.

And it appears it was Kushner who was one of the main cheerleaders for this war, risks to world oil supplies and the possibility of the conflict igniting WWIII be damned.

Trump himself said that Kushner had advised him that Iran was preparing to strike America, something that’s patently impossible; they don’t have any missiles capable of reaching the United States and had just offered to sign a new deal promising never to develop any. Nonetheless, Trump — in an eerie echo of Bush’s lies about Iranian WMD — told America:

“Within a week, [Iran was] going to attack us, 100 percent. They were ready. They had all these missiles, far more than anyone thought, and they were going to attack us.”

Did I mention that Kushner is asking the Saudis and Emiratis for another $5 billion? As Popular Information reported:

“Kushner’s largest investor is the Saudi Arabian government, which provided Kushner with $2 billion in funding in 2021. Each year, Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, $25 million, as a ‘management fee.’ Meaning he has received in excess of $100 million from the Saudi government over the last few years.

“Notably, ‘Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump’ in February, advocating a U.S. attack,’ according to reporting in the Washington Post. Trump’s comments reveal that Kushner used his role in Geneva to push Trump toward the outcome favored by his biggest client. Affinity Partners also received more than $200 million from the UAE. According to CNN, behind the scenes, the UAE was also lobbying Trump to strike Iran.”

Never before in American history have US negotiators had massive personal financial stakes in the outcome of their own negotiations. It’s a clear violation of the Constitution’s and US law’s ban on foreign emoluments, and possibly numerous anti-bribery laws.

With Congress paralyzed by terrified, spineless Republicans refusing to even look into the possibility that billionaire Trump, billionaire Kushner, billionaire Witkoff, and billionaires in the Middle East have thrown America into war just to enrich themselves, the burden has fallen on the American press.

Which has produced the predictable squeals from Carr and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” propaganda channel, and from Whiskey Pete Hegseth, giggling about how things are going to change when David Ellison takes over CNN.

Threats notwithstanding, our elected officials need to step up now to defend both the First Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, and the lives of our men and women in uniform.

Even lacking subpoena power, Democratic leadership should convene shadow hearings to investigate this possible double-dealing that’s already killed Americans and threatens to plunge the entire world into flames.

At the very least, they should spend a few weeks holding public, on‑the‑record hearings into whether this Iran war is being steered from Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Kushner’s investment firm instead of the Pentagon.

With their Benghazi spectacle that followed the death of four Americans, Republicans taught us that when our officers and enlisted people die abroad, Congress has a duty to drag every decision‑maker before the cameras; Democrats should apply that same standard now, and ask under oath whether Trump, Kushner, and their billionaire partners are profiting from a war they helped ignite.

The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud.

Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington.

Risk.

Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.

For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist.

We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.

Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids.

That didn’t used to be the case.

During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.

I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed nearly 60,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.

The draft lottery meant that millions of young Americans suddenly had skin in the game of war. College campuses erupted in protest not because students were uniquely radical but because they knew they might soon be the ones crawling through rice paddies under machine gun fire in a war that the country had, by then, fully realized was based on lies.

The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war.

In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.

But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished.

When only a tiny slice of Americans are at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.

The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Ronald Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today.

Afghanistan lasted 20 years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.

Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III.

The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly 90 million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.

And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan.

Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy.

All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.

Now, imagine a different system.

Imagine that the United States had a national draft that applied equally to everyone. Rich kids and poor kids. Red states and blue states. The children of senators, CEOs, and television hosts alongside the children of factory workers and teachers.

This is how it works today in Norway (includes women), Sweden (includes women), Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Israel (includes women), South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and Sweden young people can opt to serve in the nonprofit sector (like hospitals or environmental work) instead of the military.

The draft provides a right of passage into adulthood for young people, something found in the history of every society. Those who serve for a year could be rewarded with free college or trade school. They’d get out of their local bubble, see the world, meet and work side-by-side with people who don’t look or speak or pray like them.

These are all good outcomes of national service.

And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders.

If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month?

History suggests the answer is no.

Countries with universal service become more cautious about war because the entire society feels the consequences. Parents ask harder questions, students organize, and communities demand clear, explicit, detailed answers about why a conflict is necessary and exactly what victory would look like.

Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now America doesn’t have that.

Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.

That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work.

The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:

“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”

They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.

“The Congress shall have Power…to declare War…”

When there was a national consensus, and only then, would we go to war. Citizen soldiers were supposed to ensure that war remained a last resort rather than a convenient tool of foreign policy. This BS like Republicans today are doing as they hold briefings for Congress behind closed doors would have horrified them.

And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard.

Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice.

The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.

The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden.

But a fair national draft would change that overnight.

It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third.

Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.

As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear:

“If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”

Eight of our American service members are dead and more than 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, airmen, and marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:

“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

When asked about the reports, Donald Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:

“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”

His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and who has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Vladimir Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC:

“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:

“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”

As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.

Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”

Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?

That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Jeffrey Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

In 2019 the Washington Post revealed that throughout his last presidency, Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As the New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. [Konstantin] Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” the Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Manafort, asking FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on Gen. Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Sen. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As the Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on Aug. 2, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, the New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, the Wall Street Journal reports, has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by the Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, D.C. for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe on Sept. 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As the Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off Gen. Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

The big question is, “Why?”

We got more lies on Tuesday morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense.

To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read.

And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.

And now the corporate media will spend two days on this and then move on to whatever shiny object the White House throws next. That isn’t an aberration: it’s the GOP’s entire strategy. This is who they are and have been since Reagan pioneered the scam: a PR machine front for an iron-fisted oligarchy.

I’ve been studying authoritarian movements for 40 years, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. I’ve written about how Hitler rose to power, how Mussolini consolidated his grip on Italy, how the Confederates took over the American South, how strongmen from Budapest to Brasília have used the same playbook again and again.

And the first page of that fascist and neofascist playbook is always the same: “Destroy the concept of shared truth.”

Not any particular truth. Not “this lie” or “that lie.” The concept of truth itself. Make people so exhausted, so confused, so beaten down by the constant barrage of contradictions, lies, and naked bulls--- that they give up trying to figure out what’s real. Make cynicism feel like wisdom and encourage your “influencers” to make it cool. Make “nobody knows anything” feel like a reasonable way to understand what’s happening.

Because once you’ve done that, once you’ve convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.

• You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame the victims.
• You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you.
• You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to disappear.
• You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class people.
• You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make America Healthy Again.
• You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard of living.
• You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual initiative” and “independence.”

Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever perfected it.

Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself. Most of it was built for him, over a period of 50 years, with billions of dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have to answer for any of it.

In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became the blueprint for the takeover of America by the richest men in the country. Powell told the business community that they were losing America, that universities, the press, and the courts were all turning against “free enterprise,” and that if corporations didn’t fight back systematically and aggressively, capitalism itself was at risk.

What followed was one of the most consequential 50-year projects in American political history, every bit as nation-changing and dangerous as the Confederate movement of the 1840s.

• Think tanks were funded to produce “alternative” academic research that would always reach the “right” conclusions.
• Conservative media was built from the ground up, from 1,500 AM talk radio stations to Fox “News” to the rightwing takeover of social media, all to create an information ecosystem where Republican voters would never have to encounter an uncomfortable fact.
• Public schools and Civics classes were defunded and attacked, because an educated citizenry asks too many questions.
• Local newspapers, the institutions that actually hold local power accountable, were starved out of existence.

Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg.

This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy.

And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.

Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires.

And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine. Unless it’s defeated along with Trump, it’ll just produce another Trump, a smarter one, one who doesn’t make his lies and corruption quite so obvious.

The numbers around this project are staggering. Thirty thousand naked lies or misleading statements Donald Trump made during his first term alone. The Washington Post counted them: over 30,000.

That’s a man who woke up every single morning with the intention of deceiving the American people. That isn’t occasional dishonesty or spin: it’s a psychopathy — pathological lying — deployed as a governing strategy.

And it worked for Trump, just like it worked for Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán before him.

• He told people that Barack Obama, a man who released his birth certificate, a man whose Hawaiian birth was verified by state officials, a man who graduated from Harvard Law, was secretly a Kenyan. Millions of people believed it then and millions still do to this day.
• He told people three million illegal ballots were cast against him in 2016 and that he won in 2020. While repeated investigations by reporters, federal agencies, and even courts (including the Supreme Court) found no evidence, he keeps saying it anyway.
• He told people Covid would disappear. “One day, like a miracle, it’ll just go away.” Over a half-million Americans are in the ground because of the lies Trump told during those early critical months when action could’ve saved lives.
• And then he told us all the biggest lie of all, the lie that almost ended the American experiment with democracy. When he lost in 2020 — lost fairly, lost decisively, lost in a contest that his own Attorney General, his own Homeland Security officials, his own judges said was legitimate — Donald Trump told his followers the election had been stolen.

Sixty-plus lawsuits, thrown out by every court that heard them. Even his own people told him the fraud claims weren’t true.

Nonetheless, he lied about it anyway. Louder. On repeat. For months.

And on January 6th, 2021, his mob stormed the United States Capitol, our Capitol, the symbol of 250 years of democratic governance, because this twisted man had spent months pouring gasoline on their rage and then lit the match at a rally a few blocks away.

People died. Police officers were beaten and four of them died. Members of Congress hid under their desks. And Donald Trump giddily watched it on television and did nothing for hours.

That’s who’s running the United States of America right now.

His supporters will tell you, as they always tell you, “that was then.” Move on. Stop living in the past. But here’s the thing: he never stopped.

• Back in power, he’s now claiming inflation was at record levels when he took office. It wasn’t.
• He’s claiming gas prices have dropped below two dollars in some states. They haven’t.
• He says climate change is a hoax. It’s not.
• He’s reviving the zombie lie that undocumented immigrants vote in American elections, a claim that multiple rigorous studies (including by the Heritage Foundation) have demolished but Republicans keep reciting, because it serves the GOP’s purpose of making Americans distrust their own elections.
• He’s pushing discredited claims linking vaccines to autism. He’s the President of the United States and he’s telling parents not to trust medicines that have saved millions of lives, based on a sham study that was retracted decades ago because the author fabricated the data.
• He’s claiming America pays for nearly the entire NATO alliance. We don’t. We pay a significant share, but 29 other nations contribute. This isn’t a matter of interpretation; it’s arithmetic.

These aren’t gaffes or misstatements. They’re deliberate lies. Each one chips away at some aspect of American life and governance, at trust in elections, trust in science, trust in institutions, trust in the basic idea that we can all look at the same facts and reach the same conclusions.

That’s the goal of these billionaires who fund the GOP and put Trump into office. And their buddy, Vladimir Putin, whose bots so heavily populate our social media. It’s always been their goal. And it was their goal long before Donald Trump came down that escalator.

And then there are Trump’s toadies and lickspittles, the hangers-on. Let’s not let the enablers off the hook, because this machine doesn’t even remotely run on Trump alone.

Pete Hegseth, an alleged alcoholic wife-beater whose own mother called him “an abuser of women” who, she wrote, “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” was handed the most powerful military in human history despite having no meaningful qualifications for the job. He was confirmed by Republicans in the Senate in what future historians will call one of the greatest acts of institutional cowardice in American history.

This is the man who stood in front of cameras after Minab and said Iran was the only side targeting civilians. One hundred and sixty dead children. Footage of an American Tomahawk missile. And Pete Hegseth looked America in the eye and lied.

Hegseth, Vance, Noem, Bondi, Miller, Vought, et al, aren’t confused or mistaken. They absolutely know what they’re doing and what lies they’re telling. And they’re counting on enough of us being too tired, too overwhelmed, too beaten down by 50 years of relentless Republican dishonesty to push back.

Don’t be.

Democracy isn’t a building. It’s not a flag or even a Constitution, as important as that document is. Democracy is a shared agreement, an agreement that we’ll resolve our differences through votes and not violence, that we’ll be governed by facts and not whoever yells the loudest, that when we disagree about what happened we can at least look at the evidence together.

That agreement didn’t just happen into existence; it took over three centuries to build. It was, as I write in The Hidden History of American Democracy, built on the Enlightenment and Native American idea that reason matters, that evidence is meaningful, that human beings are capable of governing themselves when they’re told the truth and well-informed.

This 50-year project I’m describing has been a direct assault on that very idea of self-governance. Defund the schools. Kill the local press. Teach people that experts are “elitists,” science is opinion, and government is always the enemy. Then stand back and watch what happens to a democracy that’s been hollowed out from the inside.

Donald Trump is what happens. CBS is what happens. An unprovoked war against Iran is what happens.

Our nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution understood this. They knew that a free press and an educated citizenry aren’t luxuries: they’re the load-bearing walls of the republic. Knock them out and the whole thing comes down.

We’ve been watching someone kick at them for 50 years. Trump is just the most recent, least sophisticated, and grossest wrecking ball they finally decided to throw at us.

And 160 children in Minab are dead, and the men responsible are pointing their fingers at the country they bombed and saying, “Iran did it.”

Trump is basically inviting Iranian partisans to attack America with the ferocity and style of 9/11, hoping it’ll provoke a “rally around the president” moment like Bush got and the Reichstag Fire did.

As fascism expert Timothy Snyder writes:

“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections.”

This is what it looks like when a democracy is in genuine danger.

The rightwing lie machine was built to make you feel like nothing you do matters. Like it’s all just too big. Like you’re way too small. Like the liars always win, so, “Why bother?”

That’s both the first and the last lie they need you to believe.

Don’t.

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.

That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as the New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on Feb. 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.

And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of Feb. 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Kushner's American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”

The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Ronald Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is under way and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.

The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.

History doesn’t repeat, as Mark Twain allegedly said, but it sure does seem to rhyme. And right now, the rhyme between the first year of the George W. Bush presidency and the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is staring us in the face and it’s getting scary.

After “Poppy” George H.W. Bush finished his 1991 “little war” against Iraq, he left American troops stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Those soldiers on what Osama bin Laden considered sacred Muslim soil — the home to Mecca — became his primary grievance against America.

He said so publicly, raving at the New York Times and anyone else who’d listen. American men were drinking alcohol and looking at pornography and thus defiling Saudi holy land, he said, and American women were showing their bare arms and driving cars in a country where such things are absolutely forbidden. When Bin Laden declared war on us, he meant it as part of a religious and moral crusade.

That war came home on September 11, 2001, and it arrived at a miraculously convenient moment for an otherwise hapless George W. Bush. The new president had taken office under a cloud of illegitimacy after five Republicans on the Supreme Court, two of them appointed by his own father, stopped the Florida recount — that would have handed the election to Al Gore — and thus gave Bush the presidency.

Millions of Americans believed the 2000 election had been stolen, between Jeb Bush purging 90,000 Black voters from the Florida rolls just before the election, and the five Republicans on the Court handing Bush the Oval Office. His approval ratings were mediocre at best, he had no mandate, and he struggled to find any sort of an agenda beyond more tax cuts for billionaires that could excite the public.

Then the towers fell, and overnight Bush became the most popular president in the history of modern polling: his approval rating hit 90 percent. The man who’d been floundering became, overnight, a “wartime president,” which was exactly what he’d wanted all along.

Back in 1999, Bush told his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that if he ever got the presidency, what he really needed was a war:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief ... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.”

Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on the US gave Bush his “chance to invade,” his war capital. He spent it to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and to drive an even larger tax cut for billionaires than originally anticipated.

Exposed by the Downing Street Memos, his administration had fabricated intelligence, ginned up fake connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of his lies, but Bush got his “successful presidency.”

Now look at Trump.

His poll numbers right now are worse than Bush’s were in the summer of 2001; worse in many regards than any president in polling history. His approval ratings on literally every topic — from immigration to ICE to taxes to inflation to healthcare, etc., etc. — are underwater and sinking.

Further, there are allegations that the FBI is sitting on evidence related to claims Trump raped at least one and possibly two 13-year-old girls. His family is openly monetizing the presidency, with his nepo sons and son-in-law cutting real estate deals and cryptocurrency schemes with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE while Trump pushes — against the advice of our intelligence agencies — to send advanced AI chips to those same countries.

The corruption is so brazen it barely qualifies as corruption anymore. Trump and his lickspittles have pulled off what was previously unimaginable: the reinvention of government as a machine to generate profit for the ruling family — much like Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq and Vladimir Putin has done in Russia — all right out in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ICE agents are terrorizing communities across the country, beating and intimidating American citizens, deporting legal residents without due process, and violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments so routinely that constitutional scholars have stopped being shocked and started being terrified. Reports of ICE-related deaths of American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are piling up as the Trump regime refuses to cooperate in state-level murder investigations.

On top of all these crises, the electoral landscape for November is looking catastrophic for Republicans. Trump and the GOP are staring down a potential wipeout in the 2026 midterms, which is why red-state legislatures are gerrymandering with abandon, why Trump is floating proposals to nationalize elections, ban mail-in voting, and station ICE agents outside polling places in minority neighborhoods.

These are not the actions of a confident political party that believes it’s doing what’s best for average Americans. They are, instead, the actions of people who know they’re on the verge of losing power and facing accountability, and are therefore willing to destroy our very democracy to hold onto power.

So, Trump desperately needed something to change the subject. And right on cue, he launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, apparently at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own desperate need to remain in power to keep himself out of prison for his own bribery and corruption scandals.

The bombing of Iran gave Trump a few days of wall-to-wall war coverage, pushing every other scandal (including Epstein) below the fold. It was a classic wag-the-dog maneuver, but so far it’s worked well enough to dominate the news cycle.

But here is where the rhyme with 2001 turns frighteningly dark.

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director, has fired or reassigned almost the entire FBI team responsible for tracking Iranian threats inside the United States. The specialists who spent years building intelligence networks to monitor Iranian-linked operatives on American soil have been purged from the agency, fired unceremoniously.

At the same time, Trump has let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse, leaving critical counterterrorism functions in limbo as Republicans in Congress refuse — at his insistence — to act. He’s systematically dismantled the very apparatus that exists to prevent a terrorist attack on the continental US or our assets around the world.

Ask yourself why. Why would a president who just bombed Iran simultaneously gut the very intelligence infrastructure built by previous administrations to detect and prevent Iranian retaliation? Why would you poke a hornet’s nest and then fire the guy with the EpiPen?

Unless you wanted to get stung.

The logic is almost too ugly to contemplate, but it tracks perfectly with recent history. Bush needed 9/11 and got it, and it saved his presidency. Trump needs something equally dramatic to reset his collapsing political fortunes.

A spectacular Iranian-sponsored attack on American soil, or even a major domestic attack by a radicalized actor inspired by the chaos Trump himself has created, would instantly transform him into a Bush-like “wartime president.”

It would push the bribery, the rapes, the constitutional violations, the ICE killings, and the election rigging off the front page overnight. It would give him emergency powers he has already shown he’s more than willing to abuse. It would give Republicans a reason to “rally around the flag” and postpone the reckoning that November 2026 currently promises.

This is not some wacky conspiracy theory: it’s simply pattern recognition. When a president provokes a hostile nation, then fires the people whose job it is to protect us from that nation’s retaliation, the conclusion is either staggering incompetence or something far more sinister.

We can’t afford to wait and find out which one it is.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains right-wing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Donald Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim. As Raw Story is reporting:

“Yeah, he’s just a repulsive creature,” said one of the guys filling in for the late hard-right crusader. “We gave him citizenship for some stupid reason, and he rewards us by dumping on an American icon and an American hero. Yeah, you know what? I’ll give my primary support to whoever says, we’re going to try to find a way to strip this person’s citizenship and send him back to some dump.”“Yeah, we should, actually, we should,” his buddy agreed. “He’s a foreigner that, to Blake’s point, for some reason, in our stupid immigration system, he was allowed in. Then he’s allowed to come in here and smear the memory of Charlie Kirk, the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
“And listen, those are the freedoms that have been bestowed upon him by a superior country and culture than his own,” he added. “And yeah, whatever, he’s British or whatever his, you know. But he’s a Muslim.”
“And so, yeah, we have a superior culture than Mehdi Hasan’s, and yet he’s come in here, and he’s been bestowed with the same freedoms that American citizens have long enjoyed.”

Mehdi Hasan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’d absolutely destroy these two snowflakes in a debate. Which is why, of course, they’re not debating him but simply trash-talking him.

This neofascist call to use the power of government to punish a person for their speech is about as un-American as it gets. And it’s also right in line with the reactionary conservative impulse that goes back more than two centuries.

In the Adams/Jefferson election contest of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I point out in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today, partisan newspapers were absolutely relentless in their personal attacks against Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams fared better because, during the previous two years of his presidency, our second president had shut down around 30 anti-Federalist/anti-Adams newspapers and thrown their publishers, editors, and writers in prison for speaking ill of him. One died in jail, another fled the country, and others were financially destroyed. Adams even jailed the town drunk in Newark, New Jersey, for a comment he made to the bartender, making Luther Baldwin one of the most famous alcoholics in American history.

Then-Vice President Jefferson responded to a friend who asked, during Adams’ initial crackdown, how he felt about it all and he responded with a pithy expression of what has been, for most of America’s history, the true American credo:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.“The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When I was 16 years old, I published a little anti-war newspaper called The Jurist that a friend of mine and I distributed in our high school. My father — a fervent Republican activist — printed it on his mimeo machine, even though he totally disagreed with pretty much everything I wrote about the Vietnam War. In one issue I went too far, attacking the school’s principal for “suppressing our free speech”; he kicked me out of school.

It turned out well for me as I’d been on an advanced-track since Sputnik went up when I was in second grade, so I transitioned straight to community college that year, and my Republican father defended me all the way. As he would have defended anybody whose opinions differed from his.

Barry Goldwater would have agreed with my father (we went door-to-door for him in 1964 when I was 13), as would have most Republicans of that era. William F. Buckley welcomed lefties on his Firing Line show that Dad and I watched together every weekend.

But don’t try to tell today’s Republicans about pluralistic democracy or the importance of dissent in a free society. There’s nothing conservative about these right-wingers who embrace hate, violence, and the use of government force to shut up those with whom they disagree; that’s pure neofascist reactionaryism.

They and their Epstein-class billionaire backers will apparently be much happier if Trump can succeed in flipping America into a Putin-style autocracy and use the force of government to crush all the remaining anti-Trump voices.

Operation Epstein Fury — with a bonus to help Bibi get re-elected so he doesn’t have to face charges for his criminal behavior — is rolling on as Donald Trump ignores the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war.

He’s also violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that dictates the president, if he reacts to an actual attack on America like Pearl Harbor, must notify Congress within 48 hours and have authorization within 60 days. In this case there was no actual or even imminent attack against America.

To further confuse things, Trump is throwing the Iranian protesters under the bus by saying that he’s willing to talk with the Iranian regime now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, much like he crapped on pro-democracy voters and protestors in Venezuela when he kept that repressive regime intact after illegally removing Nicolás Maduro and promising democracy.

This conflict is also now spreading. Khamenei was to many Shia Muslims around the world something akin to what the Pope is to Catholics (there’s no equivalent among the Sunni Muslims). Imagine the Catholic world’s fury if a country had assassinated Pope Leo XIV: we’re now seeing Shia protests and outrage from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Lebanon.

And here at home, Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election.

Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.

Four Americans are dead and five in critical condition because of Iranian retaliatory strikes, as are civilians in several other US-aligned countries in the region. Along with around 200 young people in Iran after we bombed a girl’s school and a gymnasium.

And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war:

“Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”

America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill, but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter:

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.“No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime president’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a president in peacetime.

And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Every Republican president since Reagan has had his own “little war.” Now it’s Trump’s turn, after all the times over the years he warned that if Barak Obama was ever in trouble he’d start a war with Iran to distract us:

“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)
“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)
“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)

Given that Baron, Don Jr, and Eric Trump all apparently suffer from hereditary bone spurs and no Trump has ever served as a “loser” or “sucker” in our military (and his grandfather came to America as a German draft-dodger), it’s unlikely this war will mean anything other than profit-making opportunities for the Trump children.

But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people.

Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?

Trump apparently thinks so; not only will it distract from the news reports that he allegedly raped at least one and maybe more 13-year-olds — allegations he denies — and his corruption and bribe-taking but it also carves another “screwed Congress” notch in his belt.

There was no attack on America, as required by the War Powers Resolution. There wasn’t even a serious possibility of an attack on America.

Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: this is a crime by Trump and Hegseth against our Constitution and our laws and requires a strong congressional response such as impeachment.

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”

Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.

For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.

That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.

Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:

“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”

But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.

Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.

So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:

“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”

Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!

Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.

Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.

Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.

Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.

They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.

And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.

And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.

Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws, agreed to massive financial penalties, but was thrown into prison nonetheless. Not long after, Trump granted him clemency as Binance worked out a $2 billion stablecoin deal anchored in a Trump entity.

Or take Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road operator serving a life sentence. Ulbricht ran what was allegedly the world’s largest hub for trading in illegal guns, narcotics, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, Trump gave him a pardon, stunning the legal world.

Other recipients have included well-connected political allies and donors, such as former Las Vegas council member Michele Fiore — convicted of wire fraud — whose sentence was vacated despite a jury verdict, and extremist figures like Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys pardoned after participating in the January 6 insurrection.

Even British billionaire Joe Lewis was pardoned for insider-trading convictions, again showing how Trump’s clemency has disproportionately flowed to the wealthy and well-connected.

None of this should surprise Americans; a jury of his peers found Trump’s little personal corporation guilty of felony tax fraud and fined it over a half-billion dollars (which apparently has yet to be paid). And he was personally convicted of 34 felonies involving falsification of business documents in a successful effort to rig the 2016 election by preventing the public from learning of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.

Since his inauguration just 14 months ago, Trump’s personal wealth has increased by an estimated $4 billion. Not bad for a guy who could have been headed to prison if he hadn’t gotten elected president. After all, both Brazil and South Korea just gave their former presidents long prison terms for trying to pull off what Trump tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021.

This is the most corrupt administration in the history of America, with Trump following Vladimir Putin’s formula for becoming wildly rich step-by-step. And somehow Fox “News” and the rightwing echo chamber never seem to report on any of it…

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the State of the Union and from his office the following morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking.

This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base namings and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props: they’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty.

Trump’s attack on De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.”

“Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Vladimir Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy, and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it.

The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.

That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.

Tennessee Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts, who’s eyeing running for Governor, has proposed legislation that would put women in that state who’ve had abortions in the electric chair. Republican policy has already killed hundreds of pregnant women: those who live in a red state with an abortion ban (almost all of them) are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or immediately after childbirth than women who live in states that allow abortion.

The founding principle of America is freedom, a word that’s been a touchstone for the GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan. Thomas Jefferson identified what his generation meant when using that word when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Today, however, all three of these rights that secure freedom’s predicates — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — are under assault by Trump and his Republican lickspittles.

So much for “Life”: Masked, armed ICE thugs have murdered two American citizens and multiple immigrants on the streets of our country in the first few weeks of this year, and women are dying in red states for lack of healthcare as Republican lawmakers substitute their obsession with controlling female bodies for the judgement of physicians.

An estimated 50,000 Americans — men, women, children — die every year in this country for lack of health care (and another 500,000 families are wiped out in bankruptcy) because Republicans refuse to even consider a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has.

Or “Liberty”: Trump’s secret police are compiling lists of people who’ve protested against them, are routinely smashing in front doors and car windows and imprisoning people without the warrants the Fourth Amendment requires, and are now even demanding — again, without judicial warrants — that all of the big social media companies turn over details on anybody who’s criticized ICE online. All of the companies, it appears, are complying out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them.

Or “the pursuit of Happiness”: Two entire generations are crippled with student debt since the Reagan Revolution ended free or cheap college in America; only about a tenth of Americans have the protection of a union since the GOP declared war on organized labor in 1981; and while you and I are paying income tax rates approaching 50 percent in some states, billionaires and giant corporations pay virtually nothing.

Our freedom to know what’s happening in the world and within our government is under attack by an administration that echoes Stalin’s “enemy of the people” and Hitler’s “Lugenpresse” (“lying press” or “fake news”) language as it sues and arrests journalists like Don Lemon for doing their jobs. Funding for NPR/PBS was ended, at the same time Trump surrendered the foreign information wars to Russia by killing off the Voice of America.

Our freedom to live without being poisoned is under attack by Trump’s regime gutting clean air and water protections while Bob Kennedy cheerleads Trump’s expanding production of cancer-causing herbicides like glyphosate.

Our freedom to vote is under direct assault by Republicans who want to purge from the voting rolls women who changed their names when they got married, as well as literally hundreds of smaller attacks on our right to vote across the Red states.

Our freedom to live without fear of our homes being destroyed by extreme weather is gone, as Trump and his GOP toadies gut our protections from greenhouse gasses, kill off Biden’s green energy programs, and bring back expensive coal to produce electricity.

Our freedom to be represented by people the majority of Americans want in office is similarly crippled: as reporter Greg Palast points out, if the 4+ million citizens who were either purged from the rolls or whose votes were challenged and thus not counted in the 2024 election had been able to cast their ballots, we’d have Kamala Harris as president and a Democratic-controlled House and perhaps even Senate.

Our freedom to live in a world at peace has been kneecapped by Republican administrations that lied us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan, now threaten war with Iran, and keep increasing military spending while pleading poverty when it comes to the needs of working people and their communities.

Our freedom to live in a nation free of corruption has been destroyed by the most corrupt administration in the history of America. Tom Homan taking a $50,000 bribe. Pam Bondi taking a $25,000 bribe. Kristi Noem and her boyfriend (both married to other people) flying around at taxpayer expense in a lavish “flying bordello” 737 with two plush bedrooms. Trump’s and Witkoff’s kids making billions off corrupt deals while “representing America” overseas.

Our freedom to a stable economy free of manipulation by the morbidly rich is gone, as the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts have run up a $38 trillion national debt. We’re paying more now in interest on the national debt — over a trillion dollars a year — than it would cost to solve much of the problems of homelessness, student debt, and healthcare in this country. All so over $50 trillion could be transferred from the middle class to the Epstein billionaire class over the past 40+ years.

Our children’s freedom to a safe, secure childhood has been shattered by decades of Republican obeisance to their donors in the weapons industry; kids are regularly thrown into a state of terror by active shooter drills in their schools and the knowledge that in America — and only in American — the bullets could start flying anytime, anywhere.

Our right to religious freedom — and freedom from religion as well — is under daily assault by wealthy Christian nationalist fanatics and hypocrites like “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth forcing extremist Christianity on our troops and states forcing the Ten Commandments on their own schoolchildren. (A list of commandments that have all been violated by our current president.)

Even our businesspeople are losing their freedoms: Trump is now threatening publicly traded Netflix with “consequences” unless they remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from their board. He’s extorting millions in “donations” and “gifts” from corporate CEOs while making billions for himself and his corrupt family. And small businesses across the nation are being crushed by monopolies that 45 years of Reaganism have allowed to flourish.

When American oligarchs and their rightwing media shills rant about “freedom,” they mean freedom from taxes and regulation so they can get richer and poison the world for profit while they systematically crush workers. They’re calling for an end to personal and corporate responsibility, but only for themselves.

Freedom isn’t a slogan (although Republicans have abused it as one for decades): it’s found in the lived experience of average people.

When Americans can no longer feel safe in our bodies and homes, secure in our votes, stable in our economy, and confident in our education and healthcare, then Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” have become aspirational again rather than actual.

Which appears to be exactly how the neofascists who’ve taken over the GOP want it

Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.

In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.

When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.

Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.

Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”

It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to c--- on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”

And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.

Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.

This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.

It’s produced headlines like these:

• “How oligarchs seized Central Europe’s media”
• “Serbia: State Influence on Media Ownership: Igor Žeželj and Telekom Srbija”
• “Media in the Balkans: the rise of oligarchs”
• “Media Oligarchs Go Shopping”
• “The Media in Indonesia: Journalism Between the State and Oligarchs”
• “Slovene Media Owned by Oligarchs, Corrupt Politicians”

And now, here in the United States:

• “When Billionaire Government Contractors Are Also Media Moguls”
• “Musk and Bezos Get Their Billion-Dollar Federal Contracts After Sucking Up to Trump”
• “Meta Gains Approval To Supply AI Services to US Government Departments”
• “Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive”

To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.

We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.

Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.

As Colbert joked this week:

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”

And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”

But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.

Axios and Raw Story report that:

“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”

Miller and Eskew added:

“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”

State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.

In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.

Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.

And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.

In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.

If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.

Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.

We’ve only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon’s. I believe we’re on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come.

The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Donald Trump. When asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators she’d indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant that included:

“Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein.“Donald Trump — The Dow — the Dow right now is over 50,000. The S&P at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

Nobody was buying it any more than when Trump said on Wednesday of this week, “I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing.”

Instead, both became punch lines for comedians and have Republicans hiding to avoid being interviewed.

And on Thursday we saw the bookend of this Watergate-like tipping point, when the former Prince Andrew was arrested by the British police. They didn’t even give the royal family an advance notice, didn’t invite him to come and be questioned, but instead just showed up and took him away, then tore apart his residences looking for evidence.

Consider the analogy.

The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown.

Early reporting in the mainstream media largely dismissed the initial furor of Democrats over their headquarters’ offices being broken into as partisan huffing and puffing, because almost nobody thought Nixon himself had anything to do with the crime.

Conservative media at the time ridiculed Democrats’ concerns as political opportunism, calling the event — as Nixon himself said — “A third-rate burglary.” The legal system was largely disinterested, beyond holding the burglars themselves to account for a crime where it wasn’t clear that anything was even taken from the offices.

And the Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.

What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.

We’re damn close to that moment now.

The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex.

This week, reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least four times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews ­(case number 3501.045) had mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.

The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.

Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.

Late in the evening on Aug. 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone.

I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.

And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.

A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.

Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And allegations of child rape are a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.

It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.

And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.

Bondi and Patel insist the Epstein investigation is closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refuse to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defies over 4,400 court orders and refuses members of Congress or the press entrance to its brutal concentration camps. Trump goes after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family make $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucks up to Putin.

Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.

The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).

That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.

Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.

Donald Trump‘s Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “on life support” as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father’s and husband’s ordeal?

This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it — and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it — the more they do it. We’ve been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

Then I laid out the mechanism behind that, the way men like Trump who want to become dictators co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán did when they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary.

Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed a rather strange rhythm in the news. A judge orders a man like Kilmar Abrego Garcia released and the Trump regime simply finds another way to hold or punish him. Another court blocks a deportation, and administration officials announce they’ll try again using a different legal strategy.

The result is that, as of last week, courts around the country have ruled more than 4,000 times that Trump’s ICE detentions were unlawful, and yet the detentions continue — more than 70,000 people so far, including families and children — while larger facilities are being built every day to hold still more people.

Nothing going on here in America resembles the movies we all watched as kids. Nobody announces the end of the Constitution and the rise of a new dictator or regime. The courts still appear to otherwise function, lawyers still argue their cases, and judges still write opinions explaining why the regime has overstepped its authority. Sometimes, like with the judge who just ordered Trump’s lickspittles to restore the history of George Washington’s slave-holding, their opinions are even blunt and scathing.

On paper the system appears intact, but in practice something subtler has been happening with greater and greater frequency, particularly since last summer: the rulings by the judges and the outcomes that seem to contradict them slowly drift apart. The legal system, in other words, is beginning to crack and fail under the strain of their constant “unitary executive” attacks that use the Project 2025 arguments that Trump is above the law.

This is how the end of democracy begins.

Most of us were taught a reassuring civics lesson when we were young. We were told that when our government acts illegally, we can simply go to court and the court would fix the situation. The lawsuit may take time, but once the judge decides, the matter is settled.

That belief is the quiet foundation beneath every other freedom enjoyed by the citizens of any functioning democracy. We rely on it when we speak, when we vote, and when we criticize or ridicule those in power. We assume that somewhere in the background, operating quietly but irresistibly, there exists a constitutional place where the arguments end and the court’s decisions hold those in power to account, restoring balance and maintaining our democracy.

But that’s a damn fragile assumption that hasn’t been tested in our lifetimes because we haven’t had a lawless president before, so we can easily fail to recognize it.

However, the men who wrote the Constitution — who’d actually lived under a very real tyranny — understood the fragility of that assumption through their own personal experience. They’d lived under a corrupt government that repeatedly insisted it was acting lawfully while colonists instead experienced exploitation, abuse, and brutality.

In the 1770s, history books tell us, British officials could always produce a justification for their actions. Doors were kicked in under broad and often specious warrants or no warrant at all, people were sent to prison in rigged trials, and the local judges who didn’t work for the King but stood for the rule of law were brushed aside because the King and his men said so.

Even though the British authorities always claimed a legal excuse for what they were doing, people still felt pushed around and powerless. The problem wasn’t that there were no laws, but that the regime could keep doing whatever it wanted while everyone argued about whether it was actually allowed. Just like Trump and his toadies are doing as you read these words.

Alexander Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 78 when he explained the peculiar weakness of courts in any republic. The judiciary, he wrote, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” [emphasis Hamilton’s] Courts don’t command armies or control money; they issue their decisions and depend on the rest of government — and the approval of the public — to carry them out.

That arrangement only works so long as everyone agrees that a court’s judgment ends the matter. The moment officials discover they can treat a loss in court as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding stop sign, the character of the entire system changes from democracy to something else altogether.

Nothing dramatic needs to occur for this transition to begin. Elections continue to happen, politicians and pundits offer complaints and justifications, and the legal briefs pile up in the courthouse files. But the practical effect of a ruling weakens, because the losing side — in this case, the Trump regime — simply continues under a new rationale so the argument starts all over again, while they keep doing what they were doing before they were challenged.

We see this with ICE routinely violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as I detailed yesterday. With Trump defying the law and withholding monies appropriated by Congress. With Whiskey Pete Hegseth murdering people on the open seas day after day in defiance of both American and international law. With “Blankie” Kristi Noem refusing to hand evidence in the Good and Pretti murders over to local authorities, and “Have You Looked At The Dow?!?” Pam Bondi refusing to hand evidence of Trump-aligned billionaires’ participation in Epstein’s gruesome crimes over to Congress.

And it usually begins with the emerging dictatorship going after the weakest groups among the population.

Hitler’s first victims — in his first weeks in office — were trans people, the same group Republicans whipped up hate against to seize office last year. Putin went after “outsider” Chechens, who weren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Russian. Orbán campaigned and won election on a slogan of “build the wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep out brown-skinned Syrian refugees (and he then built the wall when in office).

History tells us that tyranny invariably begins with attacks on those easiest to ignore, the marginal, the disliked, the politically powerless, like the “Mexican murderers and rapists” Trump turned into electoral gold in 2016. Most citizens simply shrug when they hear about it, because they don’t imagine themselves ending up in the same position.

But once emboldened with their early successes, within short order tyrants and their toadies always move on from the weakest to arresting and punishing those who might restrain them through legal or public pressure: lawyers, entertainers, reporters, pundits, students, professors, universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and eventually opposition politicians.

Over time, a dictatorial regime’s habit forms: act first, deal with the consequences later. Kill a few people in the streets. Jail a couple of judges and politicians. Prosecute a smattering of reporters. Defund democratic institutions like NPR, VOA, and USAID. Gut the social safety net to throw the working class into crisis so they’re otherwise occupied.

And through it all, keep ignoring the court orders and relentlessly move forward in the project of deconstructing the democracy that was carefully built and nurtured for centuries before.

Losing in court or even at the ballot box becomes mere delay instead of defeat, until eventually the public grows accustomed to seeing courts disagree with the government while the government just plows ahead anyway.

When that happens, the line between democracy and tyranny has first, quietly, been crossed. If not stopped right away, it’s all downhill from there.

Before that line is hit, elections actually change the direction of public policy because politicians and bureaucrats are committed to listening to public opinion, following the law, and obeying the courts.

After that line’s been crossed, elections merely alter political theater, as the machinery of tyranny continues grinding forward. The forms of democracy remain, but their corrective power fades, not because judges stopped ruling, but because rulings stopped controlling events.

Just ask any modern Russian or Hungarian. Or read the history of Europe in the early 20th century.

As a German professor told reporter Milton Mayer in the early 1950s of his experience living through the rise of Hitler:

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

None of this means a democratic country suddenly flips into tyranny on some particular, identifiable day, whether proclaimed or not. It means that freedom depends on whether citizens, officials, and institutions stand up to the wannabe tyrant and demand that legal decisions have real-world consequences.

In other words, public opinion is the last wall a tyrant must shatter. It’s where, when it prevails, tyranny is finally stopped. And that is you and me.

The founders’ ultimate safeguard of our democracy was neither heroism nor violence (Second Amendment nuts notwithstanding), but the shared expectation that the law binds the leader even when he protests. When that expectation falls apart, when the judiciary’s orders are routinely ignored, Hamilton’s warning becomes more than a theory and the nation’s democracy only survives if the public loudly demands its judgments be honored.

Understanding this tells us what we must do now and next.

• We must pay attention when courts order the government to change course, and raise hell when the Trump regime ignores those orders.
• We must regularly call our elected officials and demand that they require legal rulings be followed, particularly if they’re Republicans and such a position may be politically costly to them.
• We must support local and national leaders who defend our court’s decisions instead of treating them as optional obstacles.
• And we must participate in the civic pressure between elections that keeps the constitutional machinery honest, because voting alone can’t overcome a regime that’s learned it can disregard the referee whenever it wants.

A free republic doesn’t depend on its leaders never overreaching; it depends on overreaches producing immediate and painful consequences. The danger moment arrives quietly, however, when a nation gets comfortable with the idea that the leader and his sycophants can keep breaking the law even after courts and public opinion told them they must stop.

Hamilton warned us the courts possess judgment but neither sword nor purse, and Jefferson told us our government exists solely by “the consent of the governed.”

Whether those judgments still govern events in America has always been up to us.

This fight isn’t really about immigration. It’s about whether the Constitution still restrains government power at all.

When elected officials call it a “nonstarter” to require federal agents to get a judicial warrant before kicking in doors, to give people bail or a trial before they face long-term prison, and to allow protests, they’re not debating border policy, they’re testing whether the Bill of Rights is still binding or has become merely decorative.

The Bill of Rights was written to put friction between the state’s power to use force and the people it governs. To restrain government.

If that friction can be removed so government can attack any one disfavored group, then constitutional rights stop being universal guarantees and turn into conditional privileges. And once that shift happens, history — and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem — show us that the groups of people who’re unprotected never stays small for long.

This week’s news which highlights this crisis is that Republicans have shut down the Department of Homeland Security because they say Democrats’ call for ICE to follow the law and the Constitution is “a nonstarter.”

Seriously. Here’s the first sentence of the Democrats’ demand that Republicans say is so unreasonable:

“DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.”

Right now, ICE is kicking in doors and smashing windows of cars in order to attack and arrest both citizens and non-citizens alike. They do it because they say they can. And to arrest, detain, and imprison people they claim they can issue their own phony, made-up “administrative warrants” and don’t need a judge or court to see any evidence or say a word.

This is complete bull----, and it’s genuinely astonishing that Republicans are backing them up. The Fourth Amendment isn’t complicated. Here it is, in it’s entirety (notice it does NOT say “citizens” but says “people”):

“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.”

That’s it. Every word. And it applies to any “person” who happens to be in the United States. Nonetheless, ignoring 250 years of American law and history, DHS General Counsel James Percival said:

“[I]llegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”

His argument is that kicking in the front doors of the homes of people where undocumented immigrants may be staying, or smashing the windows of their cars, is not “unreasonable.”

This is a classic example of how law can get twisted into gibberish by a criminal regime like we are currently suffering under. And it doesn’t even include the right to a trial by jury, the right practice journalism, or the right to protest, all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Yesterday I told you about something the people who started this country learned from bitter experience and their deep reading of history: a wannabe fascist government (like Donald Trump is trying to turn ours into) doesn’t have to openly break the law to destroy liberty.

It just has to have enough sycophants in positions of power to ignore the law so it no longer restrains the government’s awesome power.

To modern Americans that may sound like an abstraction, but it’s critical. Government is the only institution that has widespread cultural approval to use violence, to imprison or even kill us, and to tear our lives apart in search of alleged criminal activity.

The whole point of a democracy is to restrain that power and prevent it from ever becoming so concentrated in a small number of hands that it can be abused for the benefit of one group over another.

Our movies and old newsreels of the Nazi era seem to tell us that we’ll recognize tyranny when there are tanks in the streets, newspapers are shut down, elections are canceled, and we see public executions of protestors.

But that’s not how tyranny usually works in its middle stages, like the one we’re in now.

At our founding, for example, the British Empire never announced, “Colonists have no rights” the way ICE’s lawyer is now proclaiming that immigrants aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Parliament repeatedly insisted the opposite. Americans were British subjects, protected by British law, and the king’s officials repeated that constantly.

And yet, nonetheless, British agents kicked in doors without meaningful warrants. People were faced with almost daily violence. British agents monitored, followed, and often beat or arrested people who protested. Newspapers were shut down and writers arrested. And the courts couldn’t meaningfully restrain officers acting in the name of the Crown because their authority was both granted and limited by a single man, the King.

Everything existed inside a legal framework, and the British repeatedly insisted that it was the colonists, not their own agents and troops, who were “breaking the law.”

That’s what finally snapped the colonist’s patience. It wasn’t a single outrage like the Tea Act or the Boston Massacre — although those highlighted the oppression they experienced — but their final realization that every complaint they filed was answered with a legalistic explanation of why the abuse was justified.

Read the Declaration of Independence — which I quoted yesterday — closely and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Jefferson doesn’t just list harms. He listed systemic, undemocratic structural and jurisdictional moves: judges who were dependent on the ruler, military power that was put above civil authority, the denial of power to local courts, tax laws that only benefited the rich, and people transported for trial elsewhere.

The issue wasn’t cruelty or British abuse of power, although both were terrible. It was that the very structure of authority, the system, had been arranged so law was constantly being rewritten on the fly, tweaked to confront defiance, and abused to enhance and justify government power over people’s lives instead of limiting it.

That distinction, after the Revolutionary War, shaped the Constitution that came next.

We tend to treat the Bill of Rights as a moral document, a statement of national values, but the people who wrote it were being much more practical than philosophical. They were building a machine they believed would make tyranny as a governing method impossible.

They assumed — again, based on their own experience and their reading of history —that every government would always want to expand its own power because every government throughout history always had.

That’s why they wrote our Constitution the way they did: to establish a structure, a system, that’s bigger than any politician (including the president).

• If the government wants to arrest or imprison someone, it must first charge them with a specific crime.
• If it charges them, it must present valid evidence to an independent judge or jury.
• If it presents evidence, the accused can confront it and has a mandatory right of defense counsel.
• Before force like arrest, home invasion, or imprisonment is used, the courts must review and can even prevent it.

Those protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the overall three-branch structure of our government weren’t there out of kindness or to enhance public morality. They were put into the highest law of our land to produce serious friction — a proverbial “throwing sand into the gears” of our system — that would slow down any politician’s or party’s rush to destroy democracy.

They understood that when politicians and bureaucrats have to explain themselves in public, when they must justify their actions, they’re less likely to abuse people the way the King of England had done during their era.

Perhaps even more important, the Founders and Framers of our Constitution also knew from history that when any group seizes enough power to rise above the law, the republic itself is on its last legs.

Once a segment of society (like the Epstein-billionaire-class or ICE) reached that point — whether because of government employment or vast riches — they knew that the system would be distorted and democracy could die, even if the black-letter text of the law remained intact.

When that happens — as we’re seeing today with Trump having ignored more than 4,400 court orders — court’s rulings become technically binding but the government feels free to ignore them.

The British abuse of the colonists in 1773 is an ancient echo of what we see in Minneapolis today where the FBI just this week officially refused to turn over evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to the local authorities who, under the law, have jurisdiction over murder.

Under this Trump regime federal government officials now refuse to comply with the Constitution, the law, with court orders, and with even normal American expectations for human decency. They shop around for friendly judges, laugh at court orders, and daily ignore the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

This is exactly why early Americans were obsessed that the due process provisions in the Bill of Rights must apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just allies, not just the respectable. The moment any government starts to decide who receives full legal protection and who the law can either abuse or elevate, it has quietly shifted into that second operating mode the King of England was asserting in 1773. What our nation’s founders called “tyranny.”

History shows what happens once the law restrains some and elevates others above itself: the category of both the abused and the exempt expands. Both always expand, because power, once exercised, becomes precedent. What began as an exception becomes “normal.”

The Founders knew republics — when corrupted by rich, unscrupulous men — drift into this new mode. Like in modern-day Russia and Hungary, elections continue, laws remain on the books, courts keep ruling and yet the poor, the workers, the dissenters, the protesters get crushed while the rich and well-connected — the Epstein billionaire class — rise above any accountability whatsoever.

Which raises the harder question we, as Americans suffering under this regime, must confront right now:

If our government can commit violence, violate the Constitution, lie to the public on a daily basis, repeatedly lose in court, and yet continue acting however they want because the structure now allows it, is there some specific point or line where we’ve officially moved from democracy to tyranny?

It turns out, history tells us that such a line exists. Political philosophers have argued about it for centuries, but the people who wrote our Constitution were quite certain they knew roughly where it lay.

History also tells us there is a line, a point where a democracy stops being a democracy. The people who wrote our Constitution believed that line is crossed when those in power can ignore the law and face no consequences.

It’s passed when rights can be denied to some, when court orders can be brushed aside, and when the government can use force without meaningful oversight. And when that happens, our republic itself is in danger.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that threshold and explain what it means for us today, because whether we’ve crossed it or not determines whether normal political remedies like elections and legal processes can still function — or ever again function — the way most Americans still assume they do.

At 3:07 in the morning the pounding started.

Not a knock or a doorbell: it was the kind of impact meant to wake the neighbors and erase any doubt that resistance would be pointless.

Within seconds armed men were inside the house, shouting orders, refusing questions. No explanation, no warrant presented, no charges read. Just urgency, intimidation, and removal.

The people taken that night would eventually learn something chilling: under the legal theory being used, what happened to them wasn’t considered a violation of their rights at all.

It was 1773 in Boston.

That idea is not new to America. In fact, it’s exactly the governing method that pushed the colonies into revolution.

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence weren’t reacting to isolated abuses. They were reacting to a system, one designed to make resistance legally impossible while violence remained technically lawful.

Every clause they listed, every amendment that followed in the Bill of Rights, was aimed at preventing that same mechanism from ever taking hold here again.

To see why, look at what Thomas Jefferson wrote, in The Declaration of Independence:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …
“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws...
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
“For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: …
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …
“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” [emphasis added]

It’s also why the Framers of the Constitution added the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to our Constitution, which include:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. …
“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.
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” [emphasis added]

Individually, each of the following modern incidents can be argued about. People debate the details, the legality, the motives.

But our nation’s Founders feared something else entirely: not separate abuses, but a governing structure where each action reinforces the next until law itself stops restraining power.

That’s the pattern our Founders were trying to outlaw. And it’s the pattern that explains why courts keep ruling against these actions by the Trump regime, yet they continue anyway.

Consider where we are today.

• Trump’s masked, “absolutely immune” fascist goons are kicking in doors and smashing car windows and violently seizing people without judicial warrants in open violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the highest law of the land.
• They’re building massive databases of people they consider “domestic terrorists,” surveilling protestors and, most recently, demanding that social media sites turn over to them the identities of people who post anti-Trump and anti-ICE messages.
• They’re visiting the homes of people who’ve attended protests to intimidate them.
• Their Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are tweaking social media algorithms to amplify pro-Trump, pro-ICE messages and shadow-banning those opposing them. Other Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are buying up major news sites and spinning the news and opinion they publish to normalize all this.
• At the same time, Trump, the 13 Epstein-class-billionaires in his cabinet, and the 150+ Epstein-class-billionaires who supported his ascent to power are grifting billions out of our economy while gutting healthcare, education, housing assistance, green energy, and any other programs that might support a middle class and a clean environment.

Most Americans are reluctant to say that America is now a fascist country, hoping that the next election will bring Democrats into power and constrain Trump and his lickspittles.

The senior-most leaders of Canada and Europe, however, think we’ve passed the point of no return. And they’re acting on that belief.

As Dean Blundell notes:

“Ottawa plans to increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP over the next decade. That would mark the largest sustained defence build-up since the Second World War. Not 2 percent. Not incremental NATO compliance. Five percent … This is not a procurement tweak. This is Canada reverse-engineering decades of structural reliance on the American military industrial complex.”

Similar sentiments and actions were echoed at the Munich Security Conference this past week.

The final report from the Conference says of America:

“More than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction…” Trump and Vance are “demolition men,” and even when compared to Putin are “the most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions.”
Trump’s policies “will pave the way for a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not the wider mass of people who have placed their hopes in disruptive change.”

Outside of optimistic Democrats in the United States, it seems nobody in the world — and particularly Canada and Europe — thinks the United States will back away from becoming a violent police state. They believe the alliance between Trump, Epstein-class-billionaires, and Putin has won and America has permanently changed.

After all, as Reuters reported last week:

“Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.
“The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal.”

The biggest growth industry in America right now is building concentration camps to hold people who have never faced a judge or jury — in open violation of our Constitution and the Bill or Rights — and never been charged with or convicted of any criminal statute.

Europeans, who’ve seen this movie before, don’t believe for a second that within a year or two those camps will be limited to brown-skinned immigrants. They expect that people like you and me will soon be in them as well.

After all, Trump right now is trying to put eight members of Congress, a state judge, the form FBI and CIA directors, New York’s Attorney General, his own former National Security Advisor, his Federal Reserve Chairman, a Fed Governor, New Jersey’s former governor, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, and reporter Don Lemon in prison.

Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both former allies of Trump who’ve called him out, have recently tweeted that they are not suicidal, just like opposition leaders in Russia used to do in the early days. Even Republicans are realizing that Trump’s role model is Vladimir Putin.

As alarmed democracy advocates around the world point out, the list of people Trump wants in prison or dead seems to grow daily: he’s actually trying, right now — in a very real way that our media seems to be largely ignoring — to put each one of those people into an actual prison. Just like Hitler did, Mussolini did, Pinochet did, Putin did, Erdoğon did, Xi did, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, as Republicans are trying to pass a law that would prevent at least 20 million people, mostly married women and low-income Americans, from voting this November and in 2028, the nation’s top law enforcement official, Kristi Noem, just this weekend told a group of reporters that Republicans are doing it because:

“When it gets to election day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Most Americans still assume elections alone will decide whether this stops, but our allies abroad — who’ve seen this movie before in their own countries in their grandparents’ lifetimes — appear far less certain. They’re acting as if the United States has entered a phase nations rarely reverse once fully established.

Our best hope now is that America’s Founders anticipated this very possibility.

They understood that a government could learn to operate in a way where individual actions seem debatable but the overall direction becomes irreversible. That’s why they embedded one final safeguard, not in the ballot box, but in a structural limit on power itself.

Almost nobody talks about it anymore.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that safeguard and why, once a government crosses a particular threshold, winning elections no longer automatically restores the system that existed before.

Because if we’re already past that line, like the Prime Minister of Canada and the leaders of Europe were saying out loud last week in Munich, the question Americans are arguing about right now is not the one that will actually determine what happens next.

Donald Trump, the GOP, the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet, and the ~150 billionaires who made him president again are all on the side of oligarchy. And we’re already most of the way there, thanks to five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

As President Jimmy Carter told me 11 years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.” [emphasis added]

Democracy is when the will of the people is regularly converted into policy and law by their elected representatives. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Oligarchy, on the other hand, is when the morbidly rich own the government and dictate policy, the “consent of the governed” be damned. We’ve been creeping in that direction since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, when rich people stopped paying taxes, corporate consolidations exploded, unions were attacked and wages stagnated, and it began to cost a fortune to get decent healthcare or a good education.

But the danger of oligarchy isn’t just that rich people get richer and the rest of us get poorer, which has been the steady trajectory of the Reagan Revolution for 44 years. As I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, oligarchy is almost always just a transitional system.

It doesn’t last, because working class people eventually get tired of being ripped off by the morbidly rich. Which is exactly what we’ve been seeing with our political system for the past two decades: whichever candidate — the best examples are Barack Obama and Trump — who promises “change” gets elected, because the people are angry about the morbidly rich oligarchs having taken over the government and turned it exclusively to their own benefit.

In some countries throughout history, that anger is translated into revolutions and civil wars. More often, however, it follows the course it is on right now in the United States: extreme polarization, seizure of the news and political system by the rich to hang onto their oligarchy, and millions of frustrated citizens showing up in the streets.

As Jack London put it in The Iron Heel, the oligarchs “own the Senate, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures” leaving the middle class’s supposed power as “an empty shell.” The rich and powerful boast, “We are the Iron Heel, and none can withstand us,” and insist that morality itself largely flows from “the class interests” and “feelings of superiority” of those on top.

Eventually, however, it gets more and more difficult for an oligarchic government to hang onto power because people hate oligarchy.

The government toadies of the oligarchs then must either move back toward democracy by making real concessions to the people like FDR did — giving them better wages, taxing the rich, making healthcare and education free or cheap, breaking up the monopolies — or they have to clamp down and put an end to the protests.

We’re seeing that being played out right now in America, as protestors are beaten, gassed, arrested, and even murdered right in front of us, with the agents of the oligarchs — ICE in this case — suffering no consequences whatsoever.

Similarly, Trump just tried to get six members of Congress thrown into prison for saying that military people shouldn’t follow illegal orders, which actually is the law of the land. Don Lemon is being arraigned for daring to do his job as a reporter. In a spectacle resembling Russia or Belarus, the regime’s goons now gas, beat, and kill people with absolute impunity.

This is how every tyrant in modern history — from Germany in the 1930s to Russia in the early 2000s to America today — makes the transition from democracy to oligarchy and finally to absolute tyranny.

Germany called them Brownshirts. Russia called them Rosgvardiya or the KGB/FSB, and here in America we call them ICE. They’re the shock troops, loyal exclusively to Dear Leader, whose job is to crush public dissent on behalf of oligarchs who, like Fritz Thyssen in 1930s Germany, believe turning the country into a dictatorship will make them even richer and more powerful.

Elections still happen, flags still wave, politicians still give speeches about freedom. But the real power concentrates at the top and, when the people begin to seriously push back, the government becomes violent, using terror and imprisonment as its main weapons.

After the state murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (with no consequences) and the violent gassing, beating, and detention of thousands of protestors, the demonstrations in Minneapolis began to thin out. Fewer and fewer people are willing to be exposed to poisonous gas, get their bones broken, be thrown into brutal detention, or even be outright killed. And who could blame them?

Make no mistake: this is the direction Trump and today’s Republican Party are taking America as quickly as they can. Already we have more people in concentration camps than Hitler did by 1939, and the oligarchs have been looting our country and crushing the middle class ever since Reagan invited them to take over in 1981.

• 45 years of massive tax cuts for the rich totaling over $35 trillion have been put on our nation’s credit card (our national debt) by Republicans, overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and making the ultra wealthy richer than any king or pharaoh in history.
• On Thursday, Trump gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses because the fossil fuel industry crossed his palm with cash. He’s done the same with other environmental regulations, worker safety rules, and is handing billionaires control of our media left and right.
• Corrupt, oligarch-friendly judges groomed by billionaire-funded legal networks populate the Supreme Court and about half of our appeals courts, consistently siding with concentrated wealth and state power instead of the rights of ordinary citizens.
• To prevent the people from fighting back at the ballot box, Republican legislatures across the country have passed laws making it harder to vote, are purging voter rolls, restricted ballot access, and are redrawing districts to entrench GOP rule. There’s now Republican-sponsored legislation before Congress that would disenfranchise tens of millions of married women and low-income voters.
• With Trump following Putin’s playbook, we first saw family separations and detention camps that human rights observers say are actually concentration camps. Children were taken from their parents as a matter of policy, and entire communities were demonized by Trump, Vance, et al with racist rhetoric about “invasions,” “infestations,” and lies like, “They’re eating the dogs and cats!”

That kind of language isn’t accidental. It prepares a country to see some people as “others” not deserving of human rights, accept government-sponsored cruelty, and view a police state as a “protective force” (Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or SS is “protection force” in English). It normalizes and speeds the transition from oligarchy to outright dictatorship.

And they know all about the psychological tools they’re using to bring about this transition here in America. Throughout history, racism and misogyny have been the oligarch’s favorite tools. Divide working people by race, religion, and gender so they’ll never unite to challenge the oligarchs.

Even our foreign policy has been transformed from one that advocates and supports democracies around the world to supporting and lionizing authoritarian leaders while attacking our democratic allies. Trump undermined NATO, cozies up to brutal strongmen like Putin and Middle Eastern dictators, and treats global alliances and tariffs like protection rackets to push other countries to subsidize his family building another hotel or golf course.

And through it all, we see a steady erosion of trust in elections themselves, what Thomas Paine called the beating heart of democracy. Trump’s lickspittles and his billionaire-owned media outlets promote claims of “widespread voter fraud” with quite literally no credible evidence. And now they’re using that same bull---- to try to rig this fall’s election.

So, what do we do? This year, forget about third parties or skipping election day, and vote for every Democrat on the ticket.

We all get it that the Democratic Party isn’t perfect. There are corporate sellouts in the Party like the so-called “New Democrats” and “Problem Solvers.” Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seem to lack backbones. There are compromises that frustrate Americans who want real action and a restoration of the middle class.

But at least the Democratic Party is still operating inside the democratic tradition. It supports expanding voting rights, not restricting them. It backs labor organizing instead of union busting. It pushes to reduce the influence of dark money instead of unleashing more of it. It fights for clean air and to stop climate change. It appoints judges who respect precedent and civil rights rather than dismantling them.

When Democrats win, there’s space to fight for more democracy. When Republicans aligned with Trump win, the fight becomes about whether democracy survives at all in America.

In a two party system like ours, refusing to vote because one candidate or party isn’t pure enough usually doesn’t create a better option; it simply strengthens the faction that’s openly comfortable with authoritarian tactics and oligarchic economics.

If we want a country where working people have a real voice, where votes are counted and respected, where diversity is seen as strength instead of threat, we have to defend the imperfect democratic coalition we have. And that means voting for Democrats this fall, and supporting them now, almost without exception.

Of course, we want to demand better values, universal healthcare, bold climate action, serious campaign finance reform, free college, and real taxes on the morbidly rich. We have to organize, protest, and push our representatives with regular phone calls and other actions. That’s how democracy grows stronger.

But we also have to understand the stakes when we talk with friends and neighbors, support candidates, and step into the voting booth.

A vote for MAGA Republicans, or a failure to vote, is a statement in favor of the normalization of racism, the rigging of our voting system, and the continued consolidation of ever more wealth and power in the hands of billionaires. A vote for Democratic candidates, even weak ones, is a vote to keep the democratic experiment alive long enough to improve it.

This isn’t just another election cycle, it’s a crossroads: we must pick democracy or continue to embrace oligarchy fueled by Citizens United.

That’s the choice. History will remember which side we chose, and our children and grandchildren must live with the consequences.