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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the receipts came in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dollar for dollar, like a well-oiled machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me back to Rome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.

Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.

As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.

The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.

When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to U.S. military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.

Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).

I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII), got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan, and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every 3 years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.

Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.

And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.

The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.

They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.

The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom ninety percent of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top one percent since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on — now requiring two paychecks — by its fingernails.

In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom ninety percent fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made.

The one fully socialized, fully government-run healthcare system we do have in this country, the Veterans Administration, works so well (it has the highest happiness/approval rating of any other healthcare system in America) precisely because it isn’t run for profit, which is exactly why the Republicans are now busy gutting it.

And during the George W. Bush years they took a run at Medicare itself, creating Medicare Advantage scam through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private insurers to “manage” the care of our parents and grandparents.

We can see now how that’s going. A federal watchdog reported this month that the biggest for-profit insurers are denying pre-approval for post-hospital care at rates between fifty-one and eighty percent, with more than a third of those denials reversed the moment somebody appeals, which tells you the care should have been approved in the first place.

A Senate investigation found those same insurers overcharged taxpayers by $83 billion in a single year while denying sick seniors the rehabilitation they were promised. But the health insurance industry oligarchs made out like bandits; several are now billionaires or worth hundreds of millions.

And now the administration is importing that very same denial machinery into traditional Medicare through a “test” program in six states that literally pays contractors a bounty for every claim they refuse.

This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) DNC consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”

Forty-five years of this has produced a country where, thanks to the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, with on-the-take Clarence Thomas the deciding vote, billionaires can legally own politicians outright. And that’s exactly what they’re doing: just look at the billions that flowed to Trump and the GOP in 2024 and ask yourself who that government really works for.

Oligarchy, as history teaches and as I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, is never a stable form of government. It’s a transitional stage because sooner or later ordinary people figure out they’ve been stripped of any real say, and they rebel.

When that moment comes — and, frankly, it’s here now in America — the oligarchs and the politicians they own face exactly two choices:

— They can pull back and let the people back in, the way America’s elites grudgingly did in the face of the Republican Great Depression when they swallowed the New Deal in the 1930s.

— Or they can stomp the middle class rebellion flat with an iron fist via police, the courts, and lawsuits against the media and those who speak out, the way Vladimir Putin did in Russia in the early 2000s.

Donald Trump and the lickspittles who work for him have very plainly chosen the iron fist.

His Justice Department is prosecuting anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota on conspiracy charges while the federal agents who shot and killed two American citizens during that same operation walk free, and a jury in Texas just handed protesters fifty to a hundred years in prison on “terrorism” charges.

His DOJ even tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters before a grand jury to force them to burn their sources, backing off only after the papers fought back in sealed court filings, an effort that can be reissued the instant he wants it back.

The blueprint for all of it, Project 2025, is the latest plan to drag America back to the dog-eat-dog, mostly poor and powerless country we were before Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the middle class was a sliver rather than a majority and the rich owned everything and made most of the decisions.

What the overpaid corporate Democratic Party consultants miss, and what Trump’s own pollsters figured out years ago, is the shape of the actual American electorate.

Political scientists who map voters find that the single largest bloc of white voters is neither “conservative” nor “liberal” but both. As Trump’s former PR guy Anthony Scaramucci told us all a few months ago:

“Trump told me something once that I haven’t forgotten. He said, ‘You Wall Street guys are imbeciles. You’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You know what MY base is? Socially conservative and fiscally liberal.’”

A meaningful share of white voters (probably a bit over half, looking at Trump’s two successful elections) carry real prejudice — hate — against either non-whites, queer people, or both, which is precisely why Republicans run almost entirely on trans panic and on demonizing Black “welfare queens” and brown immigrants, because those are about the only issues left on which they’re aligned with that bloc.

On the economics, though, as Scaramucci and Trump noted, that same white voting bloc wants the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-era middle class back, the secure one we had before Reagan started tearing it all down in 1981.

That’s why Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.

But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bull anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability — which I read as blowback against oligarchy — and Tuesday in New York the floor under corporate Dems who’re still singing the Reaganomics song gave way again.

And it isn’t only New York. Progressives took a House primary in Pennsylvania last month, swept races across Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, and on Tuesday night knocked off four incumbent state legislators in New York alone, while Bernie Sanders kept drawing the biggest crowds of his life on what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.

So we’re watching two parties move in opposite directions at once.

The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots, away from the Clinton-era deals with Wall Street and the Davos set, away from Obama’s bargain with the insurance giants, away from the bipartisan habit of bankrolling distant wars, including the weapons still flowing to Israel’s assault on Gaza, because people here can’t make rent, go to college, or see a specialist without a 3-month wait and a homelessness-threatening bill.

Opposition to that war inside the Democratic coalition has gone lopsided, and the base has noticed that its leaders — mired in big money — missed the moral question entirely. What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda.

Just look at the last two days: on Tuesday the Senate found the spine to pass a war powers resolution reining him in on Iran, and by Wednesday night, after Trump reportedly screamed at Bill Cassidy in a closed-door lunch, the Senate turned right around and reversed itself when Cassidy lost his spine and flipped his vote and Rand Paul ducked into a cowardly “present.”

November will tell us which direction the majority of Americans actually want to go, assuming Trump’s many efforts to rig the outcome don’t all succeed (and I’ll get into those efforts in detail in a future piece).

For now, though, we all should understand what these primaries and the wins that are shocking the Schumer/Jeffries crowd actually represent.

After forty-five years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.

We’ve been here before, and now at the end of the third of these 80-year cycles, Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in. We’ve done it before and we can do it again, this time with Zoomers leading the way.

Today America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally.

Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself.

He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

He staged a violent, brutal UFC cage fight on the White House lawn to satisfy his own bloodlust. He sent a fleet of eighteen-wheelers loaded with white supremacist PragerU’s cartoon versions of American history rolling across the country. And this weekend, on the same National Mall where Americans once gathered to mourn Lincoln and to hear Dr. King, he’s throwing what he actually called, in his own words, “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago we declared our independence from exactly this. From a man who conflated himself with the country. From a ruler who believed the government, the honor, the lives and sacrifice of generations were his personal property, to be used for his own personal glory and profit.

When our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, they paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.

The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.

One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, he encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.

The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.

The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.

New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.

New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.

Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.

They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.

So on our 250th birthday — with draft-dodger “Corporal Bonespurs” and his lickspittle Republicans’ corruption and refutation of democracy so painfully obvious — it’s worth asking the question directly, the one this whole grotesque spectacle forces on us:

Do the Redcoats (at least in philosophy) once again rule America?

Does today’s America reflect the belief that all people “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” as Hegseth purges our military of Black and female officers? As ICE terrorizes anybody whose skin isn’t white with their “Kavanaugh Stops”? As a man gets three decades in prison for hiding anti-fascist literature?

Are we a nation ruled by MAGA-aligned oligarchs or by We, the People?

By overwhelming majorities, Americans want:
— cheaper and more universal healthcare and drugs,
— quality, secular public schools and free higher education available to all,
— the right to unionize and a livable minimum wage,
— protections from discrimination,
— freedom from fear of death by firearms,
— a clean environment and immediate action to mitigate the climate emergency,
— affordable housing,
— an end to corporate monopolies that lock small business out of the marketplace while generating obscene profits for Epstein-class oligarchs,
— a humane end to our twin crises of homelessness and untreated mental illness,
— medical-based (rather than prison-based) programs to help people suffering from addiction,
— morbidly rich individuals and giant corporations to pay their fair share of taxes,
— strengthened Social Security and real Medicare,
— the right to vote without challenge or interference,
— the right to abortion, IVF, and birth control,
— and punishment for leaders who lie us into wars, commit torture and rape, and try to overthrow our republic by deceit and violence.

If we were truly a democratic republic — the imagined goal of the Declaration and Constitution — we would have already joined every other developed democracy in the world in having these things.

Instead, we are the developed world’s outlier.

How is this possible in a nation that has, for over two centuries, proclaimed itself a republic where — within the bounds of the protected rights of minorities — the will of the majority is supposed to be enacted into law?

With a Republican-controlled House, and a filibuster enforced by Republicans in the Senate (who represent 41 million fewer Americans than their Democratic Senate peers), and six Republican toadies to billionaires on the Supreme Court, can we honestly say — as Jefferson proclaimed — “that to secure these rights” of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” our state and federal governments are today “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”?

Tomorrow we celebrate the legal and formal declaration of a war — the second-bloodiest in American history — that we fought to separate ourselves from a brutal warlord, the King of England, and the morbidly rich oligarchs who propped him up.

We’ve never fully acted out the ideals the Founders and Framers borrowed from the Huron and Iroquois — as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy — but throughout our history we have been moving forward in fits and starts for over two centuries.

At least we were moving forward until the Reagan Revolution, when a small group of billionaires and industrialists put together a plan, authored in 1971 by Lewis Powell (who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972), that billionaires and Republicans on the Court and in Congress have been following like a blueprint ever since.

And the consequences have been devastating, a naked repudiation of the ideals of July 4, 1776.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s — as unions flourished and Eisenhower and Kennedy used a top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich to build freeways, airports, and tens of thousands of gleaming new schools and hospitals across the land — Americans had a lot of trust in our government. Around 80 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted our government, a number similar to that of the citizens of virtually all the western European countries.

Today, the Pew Research Center says, only 17 percent of Americans say they trust our government. Fewer than half of us even know today that we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

How did this happen?

For the morbidly rich and big corporations back in the 1970s, this average American’s trust in a government that was then maintaining high tax rates and — through the newly-created EPA, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act — holding corporations accountable for their pollution and poisonous products, was, they believed, an existential threat to their wealth and power.

Thus, in response to the growing environmental and consumer movements kicked off by Rachel Carson’s 1961 book Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, giant corporations and the morbidly rich people they created set out to destroy Americans’ faith in our tax-and-regulate form of government.

As Lewis Powell wrote in his infamous 1971 Memo arguing that businesses and very wealthy individuals needed to mobilize to stop this “assault” on American business:

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

Powell then quoted a May 1971 article profiling Nader (who wrote the foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies) in Fortune magazine:

“The passion that rules in him — and he is a passionate man — is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that be is not talking just about ‘fly-by-night hucksters’ but the top management of blue-chip business.”

This was no less, Powell declared in his next paragraph, than:

“A frontal assault … on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system…”

His solution, as history shows, was for big corporations and the morbidly rich to create a network of think tanks to alter public opinion, to build a filtering organization to help pack the courts, to create rightwing media empires — particularly in the realms of television, social media, and talk radio — to replace trust in government with cynicism, and to insert “business-friendly” rightwing teachers and professors in schools and colleges while purging woke “liberals.”

After Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and five corrupt Republicans overturned Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act and legalized corporate campaign donations in a decision Powell himself authored (Bellotti), corporations began sponsoring politicians willing to put deregulation and tax cuts at the top of their agenda in exchange for large campaign contributions and other forms of support like cushy jobs after leaving office.

Clarence Thomas, after taking millions in “gifts,” then cast the 2010 deciding vote in Citizens United to destroy the few remaining remnants of law preventing naked bribery of public officials; in 2024 he and his Republican colleagues tripled down on corrupting our form of government in Snyder by declaring that bribes paid out after politicians and judges do the bidding of rich people or corporations are mere “gratuities.”

The key to making the entire project work was destroying citizens’ faith in the government our ancestors (I’m a member of SAR) fought to create in 1776, because Powell and the tobacco and fossil fuel oligarchs who owned him believed government was taking too much of their taxes (at that time the top income tax bracket was 74% and corporate income taxes could max out at nearly 50%), and regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment were cutting into profits.

If they could get the American people to reject government and instead embrace corporations “sponsoring” public goods like research centers, hospitals, and civic centers; privatize Medicare (through George W. Bush’s Medicare “Advantage” scam); privatize public education through vouchers, the Ten Commandments, and charter schools; and have public parks, stadiums, museums, and other institutions turn to billionaires for charity instead of depending on tax dollars, then they could eventually get their taxes lowered and those pesky regulations crushed (as the corrupt Republicans on the Court did in 2024 by blowing up the Chevron deference).

The Powell Memo brought into being a plethora of rightwing think tanks, radio and “news” networks, and advocacy organizations that today litter the top hits on any search of government-mediated topics from free trade to tax policy to “right to work for less” assaults on organized labor.

Their efforts show up regularly in news stories, college textbooks and courses, and thousands of opinion pieces published across the internet, in major national publications, and on social media every day. Rightwing talk radio — with some individual hosts getting over a million dollars a year in subsidies — has provided a steady drumbeat of “government can’t do anything right” for almost forty years.

The result of this corrosive social and political poison has been that Powell and his billionaire acolytes were successful in turning average Americans against their government and its leaders. So successful that, as one 2022 poll famously showed, “62% of Republicans say Putin is a ‘stronger leader’ than Biden.”

Powell’s work also set the stage for the 1981 Reagan presidency, which lowered income taxes so much that today’s average billionaire pays around 3.4 percent, radically cut the corporate tax rate while de-funding the IRS, and slashed regulations, particularly on the fossil fuel and chemical industries.

Reagan famously said, in 1986, that “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

In other words, don’t trust the government we proclaimed, fought for, and many of our ancestors died to create on this day in 1776: instead, appeal to your friendly local corporation or billionaire for help.

Reagan also kicked off the modern neoliberal era by negotiating the GATT (leading to the WTO) and his VP, George HW Bush, negotiated the NAFTA agreement that began the process of moving over 60,000 mostly-unionized factories and over 15-20 million good-paying union jobs out of the US and into low-wage countries.

While destroying faith in government has worked out well for transnational corporations and the morbidly rich, its main side-effect has been to empower demagogues and enemies of democracy like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the prime-time lineup at Fox “News.” Half of Republican voters now say they’re ready to reject democracy altogether.

The Trump v US presidential immunity decision by six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2024 that set the stage for “Führer Trump” raises an urgent question on this 250th Fourth of July:

“Can we even recover our republican democracy, the one generations of Americans have fought and died for?”

Republicans (state and federal) have passed hundreds of new laws, all with the approval of five or six (depending on the year) corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.

They’ve also proposed or passed numerous laws so severely criminalizing voter registration drives that the League of Women Voters has abandoned their efforts in multiple Red States.

Republicans have criminalized protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and even — outrageously — given a “get out of jail free” card in numerous Red states to people who intentionally kill protesters like Heather Heyer. As just one example, a headline at Truthout bluntly states:

“DeSantis Signs Bill Ending Vehicle Driver Liability For Hitting Protesters.”

In Idaho, a local Republican Party followed other Red states in running a fundraiser called “Trigger Time with Kyle” where enthusiastic MAGA donors could fire assault weapons at black human-like targets alongside the man who was acquitted — after bizarre jury instructions by a rightwing judge — of murdering two nonviolent people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

The head of the Heritage Foundation even proclaimed the Republican Party’s possible willingness to slaughter Americans who oppose their Project 2025 agenda.

Today’s Republican Party no longer believes in democracy or the core ideals on which this nation was founded: they reject “equality before the law” of all human beings, and the concept that our government derives its power and legitimacy from “the consent of the governed.”

Instead, like the Loyalists and Tories during the Revolutionary era, and the traitor Confederates in the 1860s, they’ve sworn their allegiance and fealty to the rich and powerful; to would-be monarchs and dictators like Trump and Vance; to armed militias and bullies seeking to whitewash American history, intimidate voters, and control our schools and public institutions.

And now six Republicans on the Supreme Court have given Trump and future presidents craven enough to use them king-like powers over the very agencies Congress created to protect the rest of us and our environment.

If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it’s because there’s a sizeable group of right-wing Americans who will proudly tell you (and have even proclaimed to judges in January 6th trials) that’s exactly what they believe they’re doing.

In both of those two past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of a pluralistic democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people.

On the other side were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake; that the rich and powerful should rule and only white male landowners should vote or hold political office.

This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.

— Rule by the rich, ignoring “the consent of the governed.”
— The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by, and for the wealthy few.

And they’re pushing us there hard and fast:

— A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican Party.
— A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.
— Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of brutal fascism — are on local radio and television in every American city, every single day, and similarly dominate the secret algorithms of Social Media.
— The single largest source of threats of violence and murders by terrorists in America today are committed by white-supremacists aligned with the GOP who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.

Tragically, for the third time in our nation’s history, patriots who believe in the ideals of July 4, 1776 must defend America against those who don’t.

Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War. Tim McVeigh is their hero. They celebrate the anniversaries of Waco and McVeigh’s bombing. They honor Hitler’s birthday. They have their “fourteen words” which show up in one after another mass shooter’s manifestos.

They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and have slaughtered Hispanics (El Paso), Jews (Tree of Life), and Blacks (Mother Emmanuel). They terrorize Asian American, queer, and Native American communities for sport. They applaud ICE.

They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Russian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s. At a Republican rally last year they were openly waving swastika flags and, when asked to denounce them, Florida’s governor instead claimed the reporter asking the question was trying to “smear me as if I had something to do with it.”

We had our third chance in 2024, and we let it slip. Trump won, and he came back not chastened but emboldened, surrounded by the same billionaires who bankrolled his rise and are now getting their return on investment in spades.

Everything the Loyalists and the Confederates and the Redcoats ever wanted — rule by the rich, contempt for the ballot, a leader who answers to no one — is being assembled in front of us in real time.

But here’s what the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots always forget: the people who signed that Declaration were, at first, losing too.

They were outgunned, outspent, and written off. But they won anyway, because enough of them decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort. We get to make that same decision now, peacefully in the streets, in the 2026 midterms, and in every town council and school board and courthouse where these people are trying to plant their MAGA flag.

When “moderate” voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and even (for God’s sake!) Bill Kristol, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.

Dissent — like in the colonies before 1776 or the Old South leading up to the Civil War — is no longer allowed in the GOP. Authoritarianism like that celebrated by King George III and his then-Colonial-toadies now prevails. Oligarchy has completely seized the Party.

These are, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, “the times that try men’s souls.”

Seven months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, General George Washington had lost New York to the British, was encamped at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware River opposite Trenton, New Jersey, and 11,000 men had just deserted his army and fled back to their homes. A brutal winter was upon him and the brave men who stayed with him including one of my ancestors.

In response, Thomas Paine, knowing the consequences of losing the war, wrote a pamphlet titled The American Crisis that Washington ordered read to all American troops across every field of battle. It said, in part:

“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…”

We must not let the right-wing billionaires, politicians, and their masked terrorists prevail.

These oligarchs and their lickspittles are daily working to destroy our public schools, end freedom from religious domination, and eliminate our right to vote or trust that our politicians and judges are working for us instead of billionaires and giant corporations.

When Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked to his friend William Ellery that, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” But Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, commented to Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry, a short, thin man, “With me it [the hanging] will all be over in a minute, but you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”

Will any Republican in today’s House or Senate — the bodies those men created — find even a fraction of the courage of those who founded this nation? Will Democratic candidates repudiate big, dark, and foreign money and embrace the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society, the ideals that Paine wrote about in Agrarian Justice and The Crisis?

This July 4th let us all remember, as Paine wrote in words that inspired a new nation and ultimately changed the course of history:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Tag, we’re it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.
“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.
“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

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

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

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

Hundreds of people died last week across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse.

Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

In nature, there are natural predators and natural prey; foxes and rabbits are the classic example.

Rabbits, like most prey animals, have wired into them by evolution a response called “tonic immobility”; we used to think that when a rabbit or mouse was seized by a fox or eagle and went limp that they were playing dead (“thanatosis”) but, in fact, we now know their body is suddenly flooded with hormones, chemicals, and nervous reactions that essentially put them into a coma to either/both fool the predator or avoid experiencing the pain of being torn to pieces.

Predator animals — including humans — also have this instinct/mechanism; we see it when people “faint from fright” or are paralyzed by PTSD. But it’s far less frequently activated in predatory animals, particularly social animals like apes and humans, largely because we invent social systems to discourage predation.

Among modern humans, according to psychology, predation against other humans is a form of psychopathy, twisting the predator instinct our species once used to hunt food, instead, against others of our own kind, whether it be via physical/sexual violence or via theft and fraud.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his dear old friend and advisor Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787:

“If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

To prevent this psychopathic predation within our societies is why we created governments. I’m reminded of the years Louise and I spent living in Europe where the landscape is dotted with castles and walled cities built not to defend against wolves and bears but against other humans.

It’s been this way for millenia; the castles and walled cities of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were designed to keep out invading human predators, be they the Huns, Vikings, Ottomans, or Crusaders.

Modern cities, as technology improved, developed the equivalent of walls to keep the predators out; airborne missile defense systems and the like.

But the problem we Americans now face — one that citizens of modern nations have faced in various parts of the world for centuries — is that our government, seized and then run by psychopathic predators, has become predatory itself rather than protective.

For example, JD Vance, who once wrote proudly about how when his father left the family and his mother was stealing drugs from the nursing home where she worked he and his sister existed on food stamps (SNAP benefits), is now “actively working to strip American children who were just like him of their SNAP benefits…”

And now our federal government is hand-delivering notices that “You may have violated federal law” to people who’ve criticized ICE murdering American citizens in Minneapolis.

That is what is happening today in America, with the Trump family, Republican politicians, massive monopolistic corporations, and the Epstein/Oligarch class extracting billions from us at the same time they threaten us when we protest. The top headline in yesterday’s online edition of The New York Times, for example, was:

“Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.”

Predation has also become the new American business model as well; everything, it seems, is a hustle design to prey on us.

We pay a fee for our car to open remotely or have navigation; to use a word processing or other necessary program; or must surrender all of our private information simply to have a laptop operating system function properly, even though we paid thousands for the hardware.

But as much of a problem as corporate predation has become (largely through the GOP’s Reaganism, neoliberalism, and Clinton’s Third Way deregulation), the biggest danger is government predation, because — unlike Microsoft or Apple or a car company, which can each just hustle a few bucks from us every month — government has the power to take all of our money, end our freedom and lock us up, and even — as Alex Pretti’s and Renee Good’s families learned — kill us with impunity.

This is where America stands today. The Trump regime, and those states controlled by Republicans more generally (which are almost universally the poorest, with the highest rates of illiteracy, poverty, STDs, unwanted pregnancies, murder, rape, and other violent crimes), have turned predatory.

They are using the weapons of theft and violence (which our government holds legally) against us citizens when we protest their modern forms of predation: their corruption, ICE violence, encouragement of predatory corporate behavior, and general rigging of the system to the benefit of the Epstein/billionaire class and the politicians it owns.

Now we find that even people protesting against ICE and other Trump regime abuses are being arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, people posting about these outrages are being visited by DHS to intimidate them, and the Trump regime promises to rig the upcoming elections.

It’s a problem as ancient as our government itself. As Jefferson also wrote in that same letter to former Continental Congress member Edward Carrington:

“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.”

This is why the acquisition/control of our news and social media sites by morbidly rich Epstein/billionaire class predators — whose first loyalty is to their peers rather than democracy — is so dangerous to both our republic, the poor, and what’s left of our middle class.

It’s why Trump taking hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel and other industries and then either ignoring their lies and their poisoning our planet or their theft from us via banking and insurance predation is so destructive of both faith in government and life itself.

It’s why the 50-year-long project funded by American oligarchs to pack our courts (particularly the Supreme Court) with toadies and ideologues, to build rightwing media empires, and to seize control of our universities and public schools has done such violence to our society, be it in school massacres, women dying because doctors are afraid to provide lifesaving reproductive care, or working families watching their children inherit a nation with fewer rights, fewer opportunities, and a planet pushed ever closer to ecological collapse.

So, what do we do?

I agree — as have generations of Americans — with Jefferson’s comment 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.”

We must, in other words, do everything we can to stop, block, and even prosecute the predators among us who’ve seized outsized control of both our government and our economy.

— To take on the fossil fuel industry and the Republicans who continue to both defend and subsidize it and its executives, who should be investigated for their decades of lies about global warming that are, today, literally killing thousands around the planet every day.

— To rebuild the New Deal and Great Society programs that neoliberals in both parties have been tearing apart for 45 years.

— To replace the predators in the insurance and banking industries with a Medicare For All style national healthcare program and free or affordable higher education like my parents’ generation enjoyed.

Public opinion polling and recent elections show that Americans are waking up; our work — our obligation as both citizens and decent human beings — is to assist and speed along that process by speaking out.

We must demand better of our elected representatives: work to strip our electoral system of the dark and billionaire money five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized in Citizens United; strengthen the right to unionize while raising the minimum wage; rebuild a green electrified America; end the cap on Social Security taxes; and assist the growing progressive movement within the Democratic Party.

Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.

It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us.

The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.

Tulsi Gabbard launched this whole investigation to dig up proof of Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated lie that voting machines stole the 2020 election from him. What her people reportedly found instead was that some states are running outdated equipment that ought to be patched, and that there’s no evidence anywhere that a single vote was flipped or manipulated.

So the one document that could actually help election officials harden their systems before Election Day has been buried, precisely because it tells the opposite of the story the president wanted told.

And consider who now controls that report. Gabbard stepped down this spring, and last week Trump installed Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a man who runs the federal housing agency and chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has no intelligence background whatsoever, and didn’t even hold a security clearance until days before he walked in the door.

He reportedly showed up early asking for a list of every employee so he could decide whom to fire, floated cutting hundreds of intelligence jobs (a Putin dream for decades), and wondered aloud whether he could carry the President’s Daily Brief home with him.

Trump has been remarkably candid about why Pulte is there, telling reporters that his new spy chief may “find out some things about the rigged elections.”

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials in both parties, warned that Pulte appears hand-picked precisely because he embraces the same 2020 lies Gabbard chased for eighteen months and never could prove.

Elections lawyer Marc Elias put it more bluntly, calling the appointment a straightforward attempt to seize control of our elections, and Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, called Pulte a “national security threat”.

So, the person who’ll decide whether that voting-machine report ever sees daylight, and what gets done with the weaknesses it describes, is now the president’s hand-picked election man, a guy who at Housing was willing to violate the standards of his office and common decency to dig into Letitia James’ and Adam Schiff’s mortgage records just to make Trump happy that he could then punish them with lawfare.

That by itself would be a scandal in any other administration: a regime that talks about election integrity from sunup to sundown is sitting on the very report that could improve it. But the worry that’s been keeping voting-rights lawyers awake runs in a direction most Americans haven’t yet let themselves imagine.

Back in February, the Guardian’s George Chidi walked through how this could unfold.

After the FBI raided Fulton County’s election office and hauled off 2020 materials, Trump went on Dan Bongino’s podcast and announced that Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over” elections in fifteen places.

That same week we learned Gabbard had quietly trucked voting machines out of Puerto Rico to hunt for vulnerabilities. Set those moves next to each other, as the Campaign Legal Center’s Bruce Spiva did, and the pattern becomes shockingly clear.

“This is not a coincidence,” he said.

Trump’s March executive order declared a national emergency over supposed foreign interference in our elections, invoking a 2018 order called EO 13848 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Miles Taylor, who helped draft 13848 when he was at Homeland Security and is a regular guest on my radio/TV program, told the Guardian they wrote it “to create a mechanism for sanctions, not to empower the director of national intelligence to fiddle with elections.”

But that law lets a president block the use of “property” like voting machines and tabulators that he claims are tainted while an investigation grinds on, and he never has to prove a thing. He can, in other words, selectively seize the machine that registered your vote this November and refuse to release it until long after people are sworn into office.

Disinformation researcher Joohn Choe validated that concern, pointing out that this fall the federal government could start seizing machines across the country, classify the supposed evidence, and then tell judges it can’t reveal what it’s looking for or how long it’ll take because national security forbids it.

“States would not be able to certify what they would not be able to access,” Choe said.

Picture what that would do to a close election. If federal agents declared a swath of digital voting machines (from heavily Democratic parts of swing states or in critical elections) off-limits in the last week of October, you’d get a cascade of emergency court hearings, county election directors scrambling to print and hand-count ballots they never planned for, early voting collapsing in the targeted places, and the results of a handful of razor-thin House races hanging unresolved for weeks.

Trump wouldn’t need to flip a single vote to steal a chamber of Congress; he’d only need to make the counting impossible in the right districts at the right moment, then let the chaos and the lawsuits do the rest.

That’s the scenario Eric Levitz mapped out in a chillingly plausible Vox analysis that’s been circulating among election experts. The old fear was that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military to grab ballots on election night: this version the experts now consider more likely is quieter and far harder to fight.

As Derek Clinger of the University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative put it, Fulton County points toward a seizure of ballots “conducted with the appearance of a legal process,” which is both more probable and tougher to challenge while the clock is running.

Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told Vox that anyone still doubting this administration is laying the groundwork to interfere in our elections should now have those doubts erased.

And this is where that buried report comes back into the picture. A federal document, stamped with intelligence-community authority and describing machine “vulnerabilities,” is exactly the kind of prop a White House could pull out of the drawer in late October and wave in front of the cameras as the official-sounding justification for declaring machines compromised and votes thus not counted.

No source has yet reported that’s the plan, but that’s sure my read of where these pieces point. And with Trump it isn’t hard to imagine how a report written to chase a lie, then held in reserve, could end up serving as the excuse for the very seizure the experts are warning about.

The Founders saw this coming, which is why they deliberately handed the running of elections to the states rather than to a national executive who might tip the scales. The federal judge who permanently blocked Trump’s March order last fall said exactly that, but Trump and his toadies appear hell-bent on ignoring this court as they have so many others over the past 18 months.

And every strongman of the last century who set out to capture a democracy began by capturing the machinery that decides who won, almost always under the banner of an emergency and an investigation.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in the early 1980s, I spent evenings with older Germans who’d been young in the 1930s, and the thing that haunted me wasn’t the violence they described. It was how ordinary each step felt while it was happening, how every move was cloaked in legal language and official reassurance, right up until the morning they understood the ballot no longer meant anything.

It’s all starting to come into focus: the report in the drawer, Pulte parked atop the intelligence community, the Postal Service rewriting its rules to choke off mail-in ballots in the very states that lean Democratic, the demands for voter rolls, and the gerrymanders.

And all of it springs from the one hard fact that the American people have spent the better part of a half-century rejecting what the GOP is selling:

Without his treasonous deal with Iran to hold the hostages, Reagan never would have become president; without his brother purging 10,000 Black people from the rolls weeks before the 2000 election, George W. Bush would have lost to Al Gore; without Russia and Facebook skewing the messaging toward Trump in 2016, Hillary would have become president.

Fifty years representing $40 trillion in trickle-down tax cuts put on the national debt and then shoveled into billionaires’ money bins while everyone else’s wages flatlined, fifty years of culture-war crusades against queer, Black, and Hispanic people designed to keep working folks fighting each other instead of looking up at who’s picking their pockets: the voters have finally had enough of all of it.

They want their damn middle class back, the one we had before Reagan killed the unions, stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, gutted higher education, told us government was the problem, and the morbidly rich among us started pulling away from the rest on the foundations of their tax cuts.

A party with something real to offer ordinary Americans wouldn’t need to seize the machines and gut the mail to hold onto power: the rigging is their confession that they’ve already lost the argument.

The special elections held so far this cycle have mostly gone against Trump, and his earlier schemes to rig the maps and purge the rolls have run into one legal wall after another, which is probably what’s driving these extreme measures.

Even Chuck Schumer says Democrats already have teams of senators and lawyers war-gaming every angle of attack, with people in place “to make sure they count the votes fairly.” The courts and the states still hold the line, but a line only holds when the people behind it are paying attention.

So pay attention, and then act. Call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand that the ODNI report be released now, while there’s still time to patch the systems it describes, instead of being saved as a weapon for October to set aside our votes.

Check your own registration and find your polling place at vote.org, keep an eye on your state’s election rules through openstates.org, and program the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, into your phone before the fall so you’ll have it the moment something looks wrong at your precinct.

Like the early 2000’s in Russia and Hungary, this is the season when democracies are either defended or quietly lost, and the defending falls to ordinary people like us who refuse to look away.

If this piece helped you understand what’s at stake, share it with the friends and family who still think the midterms will simply happen the way midterms always have, and forward it to someone who can volunteer as a poll worker or an election observer this November.

The more of us who see the drawer they’re hiding this report in, the harder it becomes for anyone to use it against us. Support independent journalism, subscribe and share the Hartmann Report, and let’s make sure every vote in 2026 is cast, counted, and honored.

This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “a--hole.”

What set the newspaper off wasn’t the war, or the self-dealing, or the cruelty toward immigrants: it was Trump’s lie about a photograph. He pathetically told an Italian network that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had “begged” him repeatedly for a picture at the G7 in Évian, that she’d wanted it so badly he “felt sorry for her” and went along.

Meloni, who until a week ago was Trump’s closest ally in Europe (and the only one who came to his inauguration), called the story “completely fabricated” and said neither she nor Italy ever begs. Her foreign minister cancelled his trip to Washington in protest.

And a conservative Italian newspaper looked at the most powerful man on Earth inventing a petty, humiliating story about a friendly head of state for no reason anyone could name but his own wretched, needy, emotionally-stunted ego and decided that therefore there was exactly one accurate word for him.

A newspaper in Milan, run by people who’d probably vote for him if they had the chance, will say in a banner headline what our own press, knowing far more about this man than they do, still treats as unspeakable.

So let’s do what our major papers won’t, and lay the record out in plain English:

— A jury in Manhattan found Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll, and the federal judge who presided, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in his own ruling that what the jury concluded Trump did amounts to “rape as ordinary people understand the word,” even if it didn’t fit New York’s narrow penal statute.

— We have him on tape, in his own voice, bragging that his fame lets him grab women. And continuously trash-talking female reporters.

— We have the Eric Trump Foundation, set up to raise money for children dying of cancer at St. Jude, quietly paying hundreds of thousands of those donated dollars to his father’s golf courses and steering more than half a million to other groups tied to Trump interests, while donors believed every dollar was going to sick kids.

— We have a “university” that wasn’t a university, shut down after he paid twenty-five million dollars to settle fraud claims from the students it fleeced.

— We have a memecoin he launched days before his inauguration that enriched his family and a handful of insiders by hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, even as the small-dollar believers who bought in on the strength of his name watched the thing collapse by more than ninety percent.

— And we have a shooting war against Iran that began in February, with American bombs and a dead Iranian Supreme Leader, that Congress never voted on and that the Brennan Center for Justice called flatly unconstitutional.

Every one of those facts has been reported, sourced, litigated, and confirmed, and they’re really just the tip of the corruption and criminality iceberg which also includes 34 felony convictions and the apparent sale of pardons. And yet pick up the average front page on any given morning and you’ll find the man at the center of all of it described as “controversial,” or “polarizing,” or “unconventional.”

You’ll read that he “made claims” or “stoked tensions” or “broke with norms.”

Press critic Margaret Sullivan and journalist Aaron Rupar gave this habit a name a couple of years back: they call it “sanewashing,” the steady translation of genuinely deranged, asinine conduct into the calm, gray vocabulary of normal politics, and the Columbia Journalism Review has documented how reporters keep reaching for euphemism precisely when the moment calls for the plain word.

Why do they do it?

— Part of it is the old religion of objectivity, the conviction that a serious reporter never uses a sharp word about a politician no matter what that politician does, as though neutrality between an arsonist and a fire department were the height of professionalism.

— Part of it is fear. Like Putin in his early days, Trump sues, and the corporations that own our biggest networks and newspapers would rather write him a check than fight him in court even when they’d likely win, and every settlement teaches the next editor to soften the next headline. Scholars who study democratic collapse have watched this dynamic up close, and they’ll tell you that newsrooms grow reluctant to use the accurate word for a man precisely as the accurate word becomes most necessary.

— And part of it tracks back a half-century to RNC Chairman Rich Bond telling Republicans to scream “liberal bias” every time a newspaper or reporter told a true story that reflected poorly on Republicans. “Work the refs” was his instruction.

I lived in Germany for a stretch in the 1980s, and one of the things I noticed reading the papers there was how brutally unafraid European journalists were to call a powerful person a fool or a liar to his face, in print, right there in the headline. It wasn’t recklessness. It was memory.

Germans of that generation knew exactly what happens when a press decides that the polite thing, the cautious thing, the access-preserving thing — as had happened there in the 1930s — is to keep describing a dangerous man in reasonable language, until the day comes when it’s too late to describe him any other way.

But today in America, a handful of giant corporations and right-wing billionaires have come to own most of what Americans read and watch, and that concentration now quietly shapes the boundaries of what those outlets will say about the powerful people they both report on and often fear.

The Italians still have a mainstream press scrappy enough, and independent enough, to call a spade a spade. We used to.

The Founders didn’t protect the press in the First Amendment so it could practice stenography. They gave it that protection so it would tell the country the truth, bluntly, when the powerful would rather it didn’t, and so it would be the thing that warned us before the danger arrived rather than after.

A free press that won’t name what’s in front of its own eyes isn’t being fair. It’s failing at the one job the Constitution set aside for it.

Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power.

This time, for the first time since 1968, it may be different.

In August of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated an end to the Vietnam War with both the North and South Vietnamese. Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon for president in that year’s election and planned to announce the deal in September or early October. He was running ahead and would’ve easily won the presidency with the peace deal.

Unfortunately, Nixon learned of the deal. His people reached out to the corrupt South Vietnamese administration and promised them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the peace deal as planned. The FBI had been wiretapping the South Vietnamese and intercepted one of the conversations and handed it over to LBJ.

President Johnson called Everett Dirksen, the head of the Senate Republicans, and pointed out that Nixon was trying to “commit treason.” Dirksen agreed and promised that he’d reach out to Nixon to try to stop it. He failed, and Nixon went ahead and sabotaged the peace deal, leading to another ~24,000 American and ~400,000+ Vietnamese deaths before Jerry Ford ended the war in 1975.

Johnson told Dirksen that he didn’t want Americans to know that Nixon was committing treason to become president because he was afraid it’d shatter our faith in the American system; Dirksen agreed, and the secret went to their graves, only to be revealed to the public 25 years later when the LBJ library published the audiotapes of their conversations.

If Democrats had known, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Nixon, but LBJ didn’t think there was enough time (he was probably right; Nixon would have just denied it and claimed it was a political hit job, fake news). So Nixon became president and, with his appointments of justices Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court making it majority Republican for the first time since the 1930s, changed the course of American history.

Then it happened again.

In November, 1979, Iranian “students” took the US Embassy and its staff hostage. Two months later, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was elected prime minister of Iran on a platform of “release the hostages and normalize relations with the United States.” President Jimmy Carter reached out to Bani-Sadr and the two of them began the process of organizing the release of the hostages.

As Bani-Sadr later told The Christian Science Monitor after he fled to America, that year Ronald Reagan was running against Carter for the White House and his campaign reached out to the mullahs, who were the real power base in Iran, and offered them a deal. They had all this US-manufactured military hardware the Shah had bought and they desperately needed spare parts and compatible missiles; Reagan would help cement the power of the radical new regime by selling them the weaponry they needed if they’d just help him become president by hanging onto the hostages until after the election.

Carter and Bani-Sadr knew the mullahs had suddenly turned against releasing the hostages but didn’t learn until 1981 that it was because the Reagan campaign had committed treason to humiliate Carter and win the 1980 election. Reagan became president, illegally sold the Iranians weapons for the next five years (Iran/Contra), and used the money to illegally fund neofascists in Central America. He then declared war on unions, cut taxes on the morbidly rich, cut education funding, and flipped us out of the New Deal that had built the American middle class, leading straight to today’s widespread poverty and oligarchy.

The hostages were released by the mullahs on January 20, 1981 when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn into office — to the minute — by way of sealing the deal.

If Democrats had known before the election, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Reagan, but nobody learned even the rough details for a year, and it wasn’t until former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes made his confession to The New York Times in 2023 that we finally got solid confirmation from an American source. Reagan’s treason and 1980 election theft, then 43 years in the past, became a one-day story.

And then it happened again.

In 2000, Bill Clinton’s Vice President, Al Gore, was running against Texas Governor George W. Bush and the election was such a squeaker that it all came down to one state: Florida. Which was then run by George’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush.

Jeb ordered his Secretary of State (and the Florida head of George Bush for President) Katherine Harris to obtain a list of mostly-Black and Hispanic felons from George’s Texas penal system and run it against the Florida voter roll. The result was at least 10,000 — and by some estimates as many as 70,000 — mostly Black voters purged from the Florida voter list and unable to vote.

As a result, George W. Bush won Florida — and the presidency — by 537 votes. George’s father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas (whose wife was taking interviews for positions in George’s White House), was the deciding vote on the US Supreme Court to ignore/violate the 10th Amendment and stop the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (which would have revealed how Jeb/Harris had rigged the election).

If Democrats had known at the time, they could have shown up in the streets and stopped Bush, but nobody learned even the rough details of the GOP election rigging for several months when BBC reporter Greg Palast broke the story to an international audience and, a year later, a recount done by a group of newspapers found that Gore would, indeed, have won the recount.

All of which brings us to today.

Trump is openly trying to rig this fall’s election, as multiple mainstream outlets have documented. He’s put “election deniers” willing to commit crimes against democracy into critical positions, crippled the two offices in the Executive branch responsible for election integrity, ordered the Post Office to refuse to carry ballots in Democratic-run states with mail-in voting, is positioning ICE agents to intimidate voters, launched a national gerrymandering campaign, and has a handful of other threatened sleazy actions.

Republicans want to outlaw married women voting if they haven’t gone before a judge to change their last names (the SAVE Act), and Trump is trying to build a national voter database — in defiance of the Constitution — so he can help Red states with Blue cities purge their Democratic voters.

Unlike with Nixon, Reagan, or Bush, however, this time we know. We can see this coming. They’re doing much of it right out in the open. And that’s a huge advantage that we all must prepare for.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican president who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961).

By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security.

So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

It’s going to get worse — these guys are now legitimately afraid of suffering the same fate as Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell (who went to prison) — but, once again, this time we can see it coming.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cable TV host did an extended rant a few days ago about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting last week that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of s----” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin, the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to 10 years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then, the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes, like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.

A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.

Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.

And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”

A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.

Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.

Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.

Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.”

Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.

Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president.

The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be.

That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.

Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too.

He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.

The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.

The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.

The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.

On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.

— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million people could be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.

All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”

The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.

The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.

We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.

— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.

Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.

The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.

The whole point of the experiment that began 250 years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.

The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought they’d reclaimed the country for the Confederacy. They had a Republican president who looked the other way, a sympathetic press in many regions, governors in their pocket from Florida to Oregon, and a self-image as the only “real Americans.”

Their movement collapsed within a couple of years because Grand Dragon David Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder and the scandal pulled the curtain back on what they really were. Epstein files, anybody?

The lesson wasn’t that fascist movements collapse on their own; it was that ordinary Americans, when they finally saw clearly what was being done in their name, refused to keep going along with it.

Call your representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reversed before the scam “work requirements” hit on December 31.

Support the food banks in your community: they’re about to be overwhelmed when the SNAP cuts take effect this winter. And if you live anywhere near Washington this June, you can decide for yourself whether to be on the Mall while Trump turns the 250th anniversary of American independence into a MAGA pep rally with a cage fight chaser.

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capital city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU's Students for a Democratic Society.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest,” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to getting and maintaining an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbids them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies, but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcast day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.
— Declare an “emergency.”
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
— Bypass Congress.
— Bully or ignore the courts.
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
— Send people to foreign concentration camps.
— Build concentration camps within the United States.
— Prosecute lawyers and judges.
— Assert control over universities.
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life, and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.

The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula — violence as entertainment — will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.

Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”

We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.

The courts are packed with Trump toadies, thousands of lawyers have been purged from government, the FBI is now weaponized against Americans, Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist Defense Secretary, our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property, and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.

And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible — the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine — but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.

But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.

This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Bernie Sanders, now owns, controls, or soon will control:

“TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.”

Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the SEC, FCC, and FTC to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).

Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.

We all must become truth-tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.

We are all Scott Pelley.

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in Monday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. He notes:

“A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’”

Katy Tur opened an hour of her MSNOW show with French’s article; she similarly was wondering what happened that has so torn our country apart. Could it be that we’re just not as well educated about our history as we once were? Is it the economy? Demagogues like Trump in politics?

Millions of words have been rightly devoted to this sort of inquiry, but most miss the most obvious answer: it’s the billionaires, stupid. Follow along and I think you’ll get it.

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez-faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful.

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward, FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack from a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a right-wing radio station in every city and town, right-wing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that the government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since.

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford '70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of 10 the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — p----- off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+ employees compared with its size at Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis it created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too.

Peter Thiel, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”

Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.

In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.

The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.

The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.

But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.

The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.

Their efforts worked; just 10 years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:

“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)

The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.

However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:

“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”

And the answer I got back was:

“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:

“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”

Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose. So they could “speak” freely with millions thrown into elections, corrupting our democracy to their benefit and our detriment.

Two years earlier, in Buckley v Valejo, the Court had struck down the 1970s campaign contribution limits Congress put into law after the Nixon bribery scandals. They ruled that wealthy Senator James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) could use his own money to finance his election campaign because his money was functionally the same thing as his First Amendment-protected free speech.

Which led straight to Clarence Thomas — the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, then on the take from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting rightwing billionaire — to cast the deciding vote in Citizens United.

That bizarre decision blew up hundreds of campaign finance and other good-government laws, claiming that there should be virtually no limits on the money morbidly rich individuals, corporations, and even foreign entities could pour into US elections.

Clarence Thomas even cited the Bellotti case and, thus, its reference to Santa Clara to justify handing our democratic processes over to the richest people and biggest companies in the nation.

And now we’ve arrived at terminal insanity. As Reuters reported on Tuesday:

“A judge in Delaware, where many big U.S. companies are incorporated, ruled on Tuesday that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections was not violating the state’s constitution.
“Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.”

More corporations are incorporated in Delaware than any other state in the nation because of that state’s lax corporate laws and low corporate taxes: there are more corporations in the state than people.

And now they can vote.

I wrote Who Stole the American Dream? to wake people up to the corruption of our democracy by the rich and powerful, particularly the corporate “artificial beings” that keep buying off judges and politicians because of corrupt Supreme Court cases citing that corrupt headnote, starting with Santa Clara and then going to Covington and then straight-lined to Bellotti and Citizens United.

The entire thing is a fraud, a 140-year-long scam, as knowledgeable legislators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren will tell you in a New York minute.

And it needs to be overturned.

There are a few ways to do that, the most effective being a constitutional amendment, but reorganizing the Supreme Court and even strong legislation can take a bite out of it. I detail them all in the book, and good government groups like Move to Amend and Public Citizen have been on this case for years.

The situation, after all, has become so bad that I suggested in my book Rebooting the American Dream (which Bernie read from on the floor of the Senate in his famous filibuster) that members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR-style patches to let folks know which corporations are “sponsoring” them.

If we don’t get active and take back our democracy for humans, corporations may one day vote one of themselves into office and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court will probably simply nod along.

America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.

We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.

And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.

If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.

Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice you picking his pocket. H---, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.

Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.

One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.

The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.

The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.

That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.

There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.

Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo.

Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.

These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.

From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at it’s core.

Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.

The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the 10 states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured.

Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.

And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind.

The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.

Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky.

The Princeton economist Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on poverty, has observed for years that life expectancy in much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta is now lower than in Bangladesh or Nepal. White working-class men in the Mississippi Delta and the West Virginia coal country can now expect to live fewer years than men in countries we call “impoverished.”

And the political response from the Republicans? They keep electing racist white politicians to refuse Medicaid expansion, slash food stamps, hand tax cuts to their morbidly rich white men, and triple down on the very cultural grievances that the Delaware study just demonstrated, in laboratory conditions, are the precise mechanism by which they’re being conned.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where in 1956 my father finally got a job at a tool-and-die shop with a union contract and health insurance that covered the whole family without a copay. None of us got rich, but none of us went bankrupt when somebody got sick, either.

The country my dad worked in had marginal income tax rates above 90 percent on the very wealthy, no billionaires to speak of, and a healthcare system that, for everyone covered by a union job or a public employer, looked something like what Canada or Germany has today.

In Michigan, like in most states of that era, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be non-profits, run for the public good and heavily regulated.

Then Reagan came in, busted the unions, slashed the top rates, deregulated the insurance industry, and let the banksters loose on what had been a largely nonprofit hospital and insurance sector. The fifty-one healthcare billionaires we have today are the direct, foreseeable result of those choices.

I wrote a book about all of it, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and the math hasn’t changed: every dollar in the bank account of a Frist or a Stryker or a UnitedHealth executive is a dollar that didn’t go to a nurse, a clinic, or a sick kid in Tupelo.

The Delaware study explains why we can’t seem to vote our way out of it. The morbidly rich Republicans who actually benefit from the system know exactly what they’re doing when they fund Fox “News,” Heritage, Turning Point USA, and the entire infrastructure of right-wing media that pumps racial grievance into white American living rooms twenty-four hours a day.

They’re running LBJ’s con at industrial scale. Convince a guy in Tupelo that Medicaid expansion is a handout to Black people in Jackson, and he’ll vote to keep his own daughter uninsured.

Convince a retiree in The Villages that single-payer means giving healthcare to dark-skinned immigrants, and she’ll defend, with every breath she has left, the very system that’s overcharging her for the drugs keeping her alive.

It works because “conservatives” have found it’s a very useful con to make themselves rich and maintain political power, and the fifty-one billionaires it produced are the ones writing the checks to make sure it keeps working.

Every other developed country has figured out that healthcare works better, costs less, and produces longer lives when it’s run as a public good rather than a profit center.

Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, and Debbie Dingell have a Medicare for All bill sitting in Congress right now, with hundreds of co-sponsors and the active support of National Nurses United and most of the rest of organized labor.

Californians are about to vote on a billionaire wealth tax that would partly fund healthcare and education by clawing back a five-percent slice of accumulated wealth from people who’ll never feel its absence.

The arguments are made, the policies are drafted, the funding mechanisms are costed out. The only thing missing is enough Americans willing to recognize the con LBJ named sixty-six years ago and refuse, just once, to fall for it.

LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026.

The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.

After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy — and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cower before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win?

What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or, simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator,” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela, and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”
Not patriotism.
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.

Power.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again.

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.

Now it’s our turn.

Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.

The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!

Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Hunter “walked out of China with $1.5 billion” because his father was vice president, even though no evidence ever surfaced that the elder Biden touched his son’s business dealings, nor that Hunter ever pocketed anything close to that sum.

This week, Donald Trump landed in Beijing for a three-day summit with Xi Jinping with his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara on Air Force One, alongside more than a dozen of the wealthiest CEOs in America: Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and many others.

The Trump Organization, which Eric runs, has flirted with Chinese business deals for years, and Eric’s American Bitcoin company works directly with Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain.

Hunter Biden’s cup of coffee looks like a teetotaler’s glass of water next to this rolling roadshow of self-dealing, where every executive on board is openly there to negotiate his own deal while Beijing’s officials size up the willingness of the family of the most powerful man in the world to sell out America for a few billion dollars.

That’s the thing about Trump. He brags about corruption, lives on corruption, and treats every lever of the federal government as a personal slot machine, yet because he yelled “drain the swamp” loud enough in 2016, half the country still believes he’s the guy fighting the corrupt part of the establishment.

He isn’t fighting it; he is it, only stupider, more openly larcenous, and more contemptuous of the public good than anyone who’s ever held the office.

Consider what he’s done just in recent months.

In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies he himself runs, over the leak of his tax returns during his first term while his own appointees were running the IRS. He’s suing himself, in other words, for damages he then expects his own Justice Department to pay him out of taxpayer money.

According to reporting in The New York Times and New Republic, Trump’s DOJ is now negotiating a settlement that may include dropping all IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses, which would amount to a get-out-of-tax-fraud-free card signed by the very man whose taxes the IRS is required by law to audit every year.

ABC News is now reporting that he also wants $1 billion to give to the January 6 rioters. Perhaps as prepayment for his “army” that will attack people during this November’s elections?

This is naked corruption on a scale we've never seen. The federal government's now a personal piggy bank for one criminal man and his violent cult.

Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren rightly called it “a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin.”

Trump’s corruption extends to his civil debts too. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his motion to undo the $83 million defamation judgment won by E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury found Trump had sexually abused and then defamed.

Now Trump’s lawyers are floating a brand new theory: maybe the Department of Justice should substitute itself as the defendant under the Westfall Act, on the theory that defaming a woman he abused “is part of the official duties of the President of the United States.”

Because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation, this would vaporize Carroll’s judgment entirely and let Trump walk away free. Trump’s corrupted DOJ, naturally, is willing to argue it. That’s what happens when you corrupt the Justice Department into your personal law firm.

The same corrupt Justice Department is also doubling as Trump’s cortupt personal revenge machine. There’s been a fresh corrupt indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a beach photograph of seashells that prosecutors claim, against all credulity, was a coded threat to kill Trump.

The DOJ corruptly raided John Bolton’s home and indicted him on classified documents charges.

They corruptly went after what they called the “Seditious Six,” the Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding service members they have a duty to refuse illegal orders, until a grand jury embarrassingly refused to indict.

Senator Adam Schiff is being corruptly investigated by the DOJ for alleged mortgage fraud that his attorneys call “transparently false, stale, and long debunked,”

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is under a corrupt investigation, New York Attorney General Letitia James is under a corrupt investigation, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was under a corrupt investigation until even Trump’s corrupt Republican allies told him the optics were getting bad before the midterms.

That’s the corrupt behavior of authoritarian regimes, not constitutional republics. But corrupt Republicans appear just fine with all of it.

Meanwhile, the Trump family’s corrupt World Liberty Financial crypto empire has cleared something north of $5 billion in valuation after a flood of corrupt foreign and corporate money, including a $2 billion stablecoin deal from a state-owned Emirati fund that, as 60 Minutes reported, corruptly routed itself through a coin issued by the president’s sons.

Shortly afterward, Trump corruptly pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering crimes that included moving funds for Hamas, Iranian-linked terrorists, and child sexual abusers. He has apparently helped the Trump family business; former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer called the Zhao pardon, simply, “corruption.”

And the corrupt $400 million White House ballroom? It’s funded by Lockheed Martin (with $33 billion in federal contracts in 2025 alone), BlackRock, Google’s parent Alphabet (after settling a $24.5 million lawsuit/shakedown with Trump), Palantir, Coinbase, and a parade of crypto firms, tobacco giants, and defense contractors whose names the White House corruptly tried to keep secret until a court ordered disclosure.

Every one of those companies has business in front of the federal government Trump personally oversees, and every check is a bribe by any honest definition of the word.

This corruption is the political opportunity of a generation, and I keep waiting for Democrats to wake up to it.

Péter Magyar just defeated Viktor Orbán in Hungary by running a Navalny-style anti-corruption campaign on the single through-line of criticizing the “state capture system” Orbán built with his billionaire cronies.

When I was working in Russia, I watched Alexei Navalny build his political career almost entirely around exposing the corruption of Putin and his oligarchs through his Anti-Corruption Foundation, the same foundation that got Navalny murdered for becoming too effective.

Back in the 1980s, working for a German relief organization in the Philippines, I watched Cory Aquino bring down the entire Marcos kleptocracy by running on corruption alone. They literally bumped me off the plane — several days in a row — in their rush to leave the country.

From Bolsonaro’s first Brazilian victory on the back of his “Operation Car Wash” call for clean government to Volodymyr Zelenskyy riding Ukraine’s anticorruption EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” into the presidency, to Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Nast smashing the Tammany Hall machine, the anti-corruption frame has been the most reliably winning political message of the last 125 years all over the world.

It will work here, too. In fact, it’s already working: Trump’s “drain the swamp” lie was the cynical perversion of a real anti-corruption message, and that lie put him in the White House twice. Democrats now have the much easier job, because the corruption being exposed is real, vast, well-documented, and entirely on the other side.

But, and this is where Democrats keep tripping over their own feet, they have to be willing to clean their own house first.

When John Fetterman takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from AIPAC and its allied PACs and then joins Republicans to demand the US keep arming Netanyahu through a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and ultimately dragged us into a hot war with Iran, that’s the kind of corruption that lets Republicans laugh in our faces every time we accuse them of being on the take.

And it’s particularly disheartening to younger voters who’re awakening for the first time to the impact of politics on their daily lives.

When Senate Democratic hopefuls Haley Stevens and Angie Craig accept tens of thousands of dollars from donors employed by the very corporations (Lockheed, Comcast, Microsoft, Coinbase) that are paying for Trump’s ballroom, the message we’re trying to send on corruption gets muddled.

When AIPAC openly brags that it’s the top donor to the Democratic Party and to the Black, Hispanic, and progressive caucuses on the Hill, that’s not a moral failure on AIPAC’s part: lobbies will lobby, and five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized it. But that doesn’t make it right.

If we want to win on corruption, we have to be willing to refuse it ourselves, or at least make overturning citizens United the declared number one priority of the entire party.

This doesn’t require unilateral disarmament, but it does require bold, public, and loud promises and the initial actions necessary to follow through on them.

Bernie Sanders has shown for decades that in some districts/states you can fund a serious national campaign out of small dollars alone, and a growing group of Democrats have followed his lead in refusing corporate PAC money. That ought to become the rule, not the exception, and it ought to start now, at least with primaries.

Every Democrat in America should be hammering the GOP’s corruption every single day from now through November 2026 and on into 2028.

Consider the opportunities:
— Eric Trump’s seat on Air Force One,
— the $10 billion settlement that’s about to flow from the Treasury into Trump’s personal pocket,
— the DOJ’s attempt to bail Trump out of his E. Jean Carroll debt,
— the revenge prosecutions of Comey and Bolton and James and Schiff,
— the Zhao pardon,
— the ballroom bribes,
— the multibillion-dollar crypto self-dealing,
— and the Kushner-family Saudi sovereign-wealth payouts are all sitting on the public ground in plain sight, and every Republican on a 2026 ballot owns every bit of them.

While we’re naming their corruption every day, we’d better be ready to name the corruption inside our own party too, because the Democrats who run on cleaning up Washington while taking AIPAC checks and ballroom-donor money will never beat Trumpism.

Only an honest, anti-corruption, small-dollar, working-class Democratic Party can do that, and it’s the kind of party Magyar, Aquino, Zelenskyy, and Navalny would all have recognized.

It’s still simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid.”

The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow its playbook virtually to the letter has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most.

Scott Yenor wants:
— To make gay sex illegal in America again,
— Divorce to be “difficult to get or proscribed,”
— Adultery and sex between unmarried consenting adults criminalized, and
— The Civil Rights Act to be “scaled back” so that businesses, schools, and “every other institution in the country” can once again discriminate against women, queer people, and minorities the way they used to.

And just a few months ago, the Heritage Foundation, the same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, hired Yenor to chair its American Citizenship Initiative.

When pressed about Yenor’s record, reported in detail by The Guardian and LGBTQ Nation, Heritage didn’t quietly walk anything back. They instead invoked their “One Voice” doctrine, which means that what one Heritage staffer says is what the institution stands for, and they loudly stood by him.

Even some of the foundation’s allies winced publicly to The Atlantic, but Heritage reportedly didn’t budge. This is what billionaire-funded Christian nationalism looks like in 2026, and it’s been the project, almost without interruption, ever since the Reagan Revolution

Most Americans don’t know how the Heritage Foundation came to exist; I’ve been telling this story on the radio for more than two decades because it matters. In 1971, a tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American “free enterprise system” was under attack from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

His prescription was that corporate America needed to fund its own intellectual infrastructure, think tanks and university programs, legal centers, and media outlets that would shift the country’s political center hard to the right and protect billionaire wealth from democratic accountability.

Two months after writing that memo, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court.

In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors read the Powell Memo, decided American business was “ignoring a crisis,” and wrote a $250,000 check to launch the Heritage Foundation alongside Paul Weyrich, the man who later coined the phrase “Moral Majority” and famously told a room of 1980 evangelical leaders that conservatives don’t actually want everyone to vote because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Heritage was, from day one, a vehicle for translating Powell’s memo into operational policy, and that founding circle of donors, Coors plus Bradley plus Olin plus Scaife plus Koch, never really left.

According to a DeSmog analysis of Project 2025’s funders, six billionaire family foundations bankrolled Heritage’s blueprint for the second Trump administration: Bradley, Coors, Koch, Mellon, Seid, and Uihlein.

Same families, same project, more than half a century of the same handful of fortunes funding the same grinding assault on democracy, women’s rights, civil rights, and any policy that would tax great wealth or restrain corporate power.

What’s new is how openly they’re saying the quiet parts now.

Heritage’s 90-page tract “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the subject of a thorough investigation by Billie Jean Sweeney for Important Context, lays out a vision that overturns marriage equality, denies the existence of trans people, eliminates no-fault divorce, and uses federal Medicaid dollars as a weapon against any state that disagrees.

The document opens with the sentence “The Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers,” which gives you a pretty clear sense of where they’re going. They’ve invented a problem they call a “birth dearth” and identified the culprits: women being educated, women working outside the home, women using contraception, women existing as autonomous people.

As Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, said recently, “One in three Americans is under-babied.” White Americans, of course.

Anybody who’s read 1930s European history will recognize what’s going on here.

The Nazi regime’s Mutterkreuz, the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother,” handed out medals to Aryan women who produced four or more children while sterilizing those it considered unfit, and the Lebensborn program ran maternity homes designed to manufacture “racially valuable” babies for the Reich.

Heritage isn’t there yet, but the ideological architecture is the same: women as reproductive vessels for a state-defined ideal, with the full weight of federal policy bent toward forcing them into that role.

Civil rights attorney Michelle Uzeta, who runs the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, told reporters the through-line is “government-sponsored devaluation of entire communities, informed by eugenic thinking,” and that’s not hyperbole, that’s what the documents say when you read them carefully.

The operational arm at HHS is staffed accordingly. Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director and a self-described Christian nationalist who co-authored Project 2025, has spoken with revulsion of “the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”

Calley Means, a former Heritage research analyst, is now senior White House advisor at HHS. His sister Casey Means, whose surgeon general nomination Trump just withdrew on April 30 after Senator Bill Cassidy refused to support her, told Tucker Carlson that birth control “shuts down” a woman’s “life-giving nature,” and Trump immediately replaced her with another vaccine-skeptical Fox News contributor, radiologist Nicole Saphier.

Natalie Dodson, a named Project 2025 contributor, runs the Office of Population Affairs that decides Title X family planning rules, and the first Trump-era domestic gag rule, in effect from 2019 to 2021, forced 981 clinics out of the program and cut the network’s patient capacity in half, leaving six states with no Title X provider at all. The current administration has signaled it will repropose the gag rule, and Trump’s 2026 budget proposes eliminating Title X entirely.

The most useful place to watch how the playbook actually operates on the ground is Missouri.

Voters there passed a constitutional amendment in November 2024 protecting abortion rights with 52 percent of the vote, and the Republican-controlled legislature simply ignored them and referred a counter-amendment to this November’s ballot that would repeal the protections voters just enshrined.

To boost their odds, they bundled in a permanent ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors, even though Missouri law already bans that care. It’s pure ballot candy, bolted onto an abortion ban specifically because polling shows the trans-care provision boosts support for the abortion ban among voters who otherwise wouldn’t go along.

Divide and conquer, in other words, weaponized at the ballot box to overturn the explicit will of the voters.

This is what I wrote about in The Last American President: the slow, methodical, billionaire-funded conversion of American constitutional democracy into something that more closely resembles a “Christian” white supremacist oligarchy with a theocratic veneer.

The people running this project are not hiding it anymore. Yenor isn’t hiding it, Vought isn’t hiding it, and Heritage’s “Saving the Family” tract isn’t hiding it either.

They’re telling us, in their own words, that they want to recriminalize gay sex, eliminate no-fault divorce, force women back into the home, gut the Civil Rights Act, and use federal funding as a chokehold on any state that resists.

And while Heritage and its think-tank allies map out the cultural policy, their allies in Congress are working to rig the franchise itself so that the populations most opposed to all of this can’t actually vote any of it down.

The SAVE Act, which Republicans in the House passed in expanded form on February 11 as the SAVE America Act, would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office in order to register or re-register to vote.

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack ready access to those documents, and the League of Women Voters puts the number of American women whose paperwork doesn’t match their current married name at 69 million, all of whom would suddenly need to dig up a birth certificate, a marriage license, proof of a legal name change, and matching photo ID just to vote.

Trans Americans, naturalized citizens, older Black Americans born in the pre-civil-rights South who were never issued birth certificates in the first place, college students, military families stationed overseas, rural voters who’d have to drive hours to a county office, and the millions of working-class citizens who simply can’t afford a passport would face the same wall.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the bill’s chief Senate champions, has publicly tied its passage to Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms, which is about as close as a politician gets to admitting on the record that the entire point of the bill is to keep women, trans people, young voters, and Americans of color away from the polls so the Heritage agenda doesn’t get voted down by the majorities that consistently oppose it.

Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman sat around joking about Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom like a couple of wealthy guys at a country club joking over cocktails as the republic burns outside the window.

Maher dismissed the outrage by calling the cost “couch money.” Fetterman rolled his eyes and reduced the backlash to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They practically patted each other on the back for being the last two supposedly reasonable men in American politics.

Calm down, peasants, they were essentially saying. It’s only a $330 million gilded palace add-on for a man who already treats the presidency like his private casino.

This is what elite detachment looks like in America now. Smug. Self-satisfied. Historically illiterate.

No, Bill. People are not angry because Trump likes chandeliers. They’re angry because symbols matter in politics. They always have.

Americans are watching a president who already wrapped himself in gold-plated excess try to build a massive gilded ballroom while millions of working people can’t afford rent, healthcare, childcare, or groceries. And then they’re being told by multimillionaire celebrities that noticing the symbolism somehow makes them irrational.

That’s not “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it’s something called “civic awareness.”

The founders of this country fought a revolution against aristocracy. Against kings and inherited power wrapped in luxury and spectacle. Thomas Jefferson warned repeatedly about the rise of an “artificial aristocracy” built on wealth instead of merit. Teddy Roosevelt spent years warning Americans about concentrated wealth turning democracy into oligarchy and got us the estate tax (which today’s Republicans have crippled).

But now we have political celebrities and media entertainers sneering at ordinary Americans for recognizing the obvious.

A golden ballroom attached to the White House isn’t just a ballroom: it’s a statement about power.

Authoritarians throughout history have always understood and exploited the power of spectacle. Palaces. Towers. Gold. Giant halls. Arches. Statues of themselves. Grand architecture designed not to serve democracy but to glorify the ruler who built it.

The point is psychological, to elevate the leader above ordinary citizens. To make power feel untouchable, royal, and permanent. And Donald Trump has spent his entire public life desperately trying to achieve exactly that aesthetic.

Gold elevators. Gold furniture. Gold ceilings. Gold logos with his name stamped onto everything he touches, like a monarch branding his kingdom.

So when critics recoil at the idea of a gilded Trump ballroom attached to the People’s House, they’re not reacting to drapes and drywall. They’re reacting to what it represents: the transformation of democratic government into personal branding for a strongman billionaire.

Maher dismisses $330 million as “couch money.” That’s easy thing to say when you’re rich enough to spend more on wine tonight than many Americans spend on groceries each month. But the real issue is even bigger than the raw dollar amount: it’s about moral obscenity.

America has veterans sleeping under bridges. Public schools are begging parents for supplies. Seniors are rationing their insulin and blood pressure meds. Young people are crushed under student debt. Entire towns are being poisoned by corporate greed while on-the-take and in-the-pocket politicians like Fetterman shrug.

And in the middle of all that, the political and media elite want the public to admire a gold-plated ballroom because apparently excess itself has become a form of patriotism.

This is what the post-Reagan Revolution neoliberal rot has done to our society. Morbidly rich people and their lickspittles like Fetterman now tell us that opulence is wisdom, that billionaire aesthetics are inherently admirable, and that criticism of grotesque displays of wealth is “envy by the peasants” instead of concern about the survival of our democracy.

The progressive critique of this sort of ostentation has never been about “hating success.” It’s always been about opposing concentrated power that masquerades as virtue.

A teacher contributes more to civilization than a real estate grifter hustling his name like a luxury perfume brand. A nurse contributes more than a billionaire tax cheat hiding profits offshore. A union worker building roads contributes more than another hedge fund parasite gaming markets from his Manhattan penthouse.

Tragically, America’s media culture increasingly treats wealth itself as proof of greatness. Trump didn’t invent that sickness; he simply weaponized it.

And what makes Maher and Fetterman’s comments especially galling is the contempt buried inside them. The assumption that ordinary people are stupid. Emotional. Hysterical.

If you object to a billionaire president building a gaudy palace extension while inequality explodes, you must have “TDS.”

What an insult to history. Was it “George III Derangement Syndrome” when Americans rejected monarchy? Was it “Robber Baron Derangement Syndrome” when progressives fought the Gilded Age oligarchs? Was it irrational to notice that extreme concentrations of wealth led to the Republican Great Depression and inevitably distorted democracy?

Because that’s the real issue here, not one ballroom or building project.

Trump’s Epstein Golden Ballroom is a symptom of a much deeper crisis in American life. Politics has become theater, governing has become branding, and citizens are being trained by billionaires to think of leaders not as public servants but as celebrity rulers whose excess should inspire awe.

That’s poison to a republic. And people who call themselves conservatives should be disturbed by it, too.

In my dad’s generation, conservatism claimed to value humility, restraint, civic virtue, and suspicion of concentrated power. Now self-described conservatives cheer for billionaire spectacle like courtiers applauding the king’s newest palace wing… or his invisible clothes.

Meanwhile working-class Americans are told to fight culture wars against their neighbors while the ultra-rich consolidate wealth at levels not seen since the 1920s. That isn’t populism: it’s aristocracy with a flag pin.

The White House was never supposed to be Versailles. The presidency was never supposed to be a throne wrapped in gold leaf and ego. A republic survives only when leaders remain citizens among citizens. The moment political power becomes inseparable from personal grandeur, democracy starts slipping into something darker.

People aren’t angry because Trump likes ballrooms, but because too many powerful people like Bill Maher and John Fetterman no longer remember what America is supposed to be. Americans aren’t “deranged” when they recognize the stench of oligarchy wrapped in gold paint and sold as patriotism.

If you’re so insulated by wealth, celebrity, and proximity to power that you can look at a billionaire turning the White House into a monument to himself and shrug like it’s no big deal, then maybe you’re the ones who’ve lost touch with reality, not the millions of Americans who’re still fighting to keep this country from sliding, like Russia has already done, into a gilded version of rightwing authoritarianism.

We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.

This follows John Roberts and Sam Alito blatantly using phony, cooked numbers to justify eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, lying to our faces and then laughing at us like they did with the Dobbs decision and Citizens United.

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

Today’s GOP version of that could be:

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”

In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.

They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:

“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”

We’ve seen this movie before, but always in the past on the state level.

In the 2000 election, for example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris requested a list of Texas felons from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s Department of Corrections. She then ran that list of Texas felons — more than 50% Hispanic and Black — against the Florida voter roll list.

The result, as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election, around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns.

When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.

Some GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. So far, the Trump toadies have hoovered up the intimate details on tens of millions of voters living in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.

Sometime between now and the election, the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.

As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. Using the phony rubric of voter fraud, purging voter rolls has been, since the 1960s, a go-to strategy the GOP borrowed from the old Confederacy.

What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media. As Dissent in Bloom documents, twelve states have already passed statewide versions of the SAVE America Act:

“New Voter ID laws in AL, AZ, FL, GA, KS, LA, MS, NH, OH, SD, UT and WY restrict voter access without a secondary form of ID or a passport. About 146 million Americans don’t have a passport. Millions more do not readily have access to their birth certificates.”

This is a large part of how Putin cemented single-party-rule in Russia, by carefully controlling who’s on and who’s purged from that country’s voting rolls. And Trump and Putin are talking on the phone frequently.

Trump and Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, war with Iran, privatizing Medicare, giving Social Security to Wall Street, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, ICE killings and concentration camps, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic areas (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically big Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

For example, in Ohio the state changed polling places for voters in heavily Black Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the 2023 special election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled “Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions.”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio’s state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little effort in Ohio got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of this kind of dirty trick in the upcoming elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line to vote, losing out on income.

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs in those same states typically run fewer than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well; so far they all stand.

But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As the Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

Demos added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

This card-mailing strategy is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in the 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute decision when the five Republicans then on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State (and now Senator) Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Republican Secretary of State Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Blue cities within Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading to his 50,000-vote win that year against fellow gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:

“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election. Those “watchers” probably invalidated millions of mail-in votes (nobody has kept track of the numbers).

This year, Trump promises an “army” of “election integrity” inspectors to double-check mail-in signatures in Blue states, while the Post Office will no longer automatically postmark ballots on the they’re dropped off.

While some of these poll watchers will also be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Whether any of this is part of the “autopsy” the DNC did on the 2024 election that Chairman Ken Martin is refusing to release is unknown, but it certainly should be. And Democrats and all of us in the media need to start calling it all out loudly.

For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for right--wing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.

Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.

So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:

— Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
— Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
— Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
— Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
— Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
— Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
— Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.

Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.

So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll right-wing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.

They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.

This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.

Here's what happened this week.

— While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. Former B-lister reality TV and Fox star Sean Duffy revealed Friday on Fox & Friends — the same way he announces most things — that he and his wife, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, spent seven months shooting a road-trip reality program called The Great American Road Trip while he was, in theory, running the Department of Transportation. The corporate sponsors are a Cabinet ethics nightmare laid out in a press kit: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast, and United Airlines, meaning the airlines and defense contractors he’s supposed to regulate were paying him to bring their cameras on family vacations.

This is the same Sean Duffy who presided over historic air traffic controller shortages and a government shutdown that forced 13,000 controllers to work without pay, with 10-percent flight reductions at the country’s 40 busiest airports. People nearly died this winter because his agency couldn’t keep towers staffed while he spent more than half his Cabinet tenure shooting infomercials for the industries he’s supposed to be regulating. In any functioning government, this would be a forced resignation by Monday morning. In Trump’s America, it’s a Friday Fox segment with the kids.

— Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives.

Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at a minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House.

Forty-five years of Reaganomics and grievance politics have produced a Republican Party that confuses chest-thumping with strategy. Now its Dear Leader is hurtling toward an oil-crisis cliff at the end of the month with one hand on a nuclear threat button he doesn’t even begin to understand and the other on a phone tweeting about butterflies falling beautifully into the sea. Vladimir Putin, watching Trump rattle nuclear threats while his own CIA reports the war is already lost, must be sleeping like a baby.

— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them.

Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy.

The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try.

— Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated.

As the Brennan Center and the Guardian have now shown, that line was lifted almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Trump’s Justice Department, and it depends on phony junk methodology that calculates turnout against the entire over-18 population, including non-citizens and people with felony convictions who legally cannot vote. Use the methodology experts actually use, and Black turnout in Louisiana exceeded white turnout in only one of those five elections: 2012.

The two years Alito cherry-picked were 2008 and 2012, the two times Barack Obama was on the ballot. Roberts pulled the same slick trick to claim there’s no more racism in America in Shelby County back in 2013. This right-wing Court isn’t reading evidence; it’s writing the conclusion first and then shopping the DOJ or 17th century witch-burning judges for numbers or examples that fit.

And Roberts apparently has the gall to whine that it hurts his feelings when people call his Court partisan. Save the tears, Mr. Chief Justice; save them for the millions of Black voters whose ballots your project just helped the Confederate states dilute.

— A billionaire is reportedly negotiating with Trump over which CNN anchors he should fire. Two press freedom groups — the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — filed with Delaware a demand on Thursday for Paramount Skydance’s internal records, citing reports that Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s bankrolling the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger with his nepo-baby son, told White House officials he’d “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN if regulators wave his deal through. Translation: axe the anchors Trump hates — Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar were the names floated — and run the newly-rightwing CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN’s air as a kind of pro-Trump-regime consolation prize. We’ve already watched the CBS version of this.

Days after Stephen Colbert called Paramount’s settlement of a bogus Trump lawsuit a “big fat bribe,” CBS canceled The Late Show. High-profile reporters have walked, ratings have crashed, and now they want to do it again at CNN. This is what state-aligned media looks like in real time: billionaires offering up newsrooms as personal favors to a corrupt neofascist president who, like Stalin and Hitler, calls journalism “the enemy of the people.” The First Amendment was not supposed to come with an unless Trump complains clause.

— ICE apparently just murdered a man in custody and we only know because a witness refused to be silenced. In January, Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died in a Texas ICE facility. The Trump administration immediately ruled it an attempted suicide. But a fellow detainee, identified by Zeteo only as “Texas” for his protection, tells a very different story. He and roughly nine other detainees in the adjacent room could hear Campos repeatedly begging for his medication, then officers entering the room and grabbing him. The last words “Texas” says he heard from Campos were that he was being choked. Days later, an ICE officer reportedly threatened him for talking, then made good on the threat by relocating him to another facility. He has yet to be interviewed by a single law enforcement official.

This is exactly what authoritarian regimes like Russia (Trump‘s role model) do: they detain people without due process, kill some of them in custody, and silence the witnesses. The only thing standing between us and the full version of that picture right now is the courage of one man who decided he wasn’t going to keep quiet and the journalists at Zeteo willing to publish him. Remember their names when this is over.

— Forget corporate Democrat Rahm Emanuel: Maine’s Graham Platner is what the future of the Democratic Party actually looks like. Robert Reich makes the case at Common Dreams that the corporate-funded Democratic establishment desperately wants you to believe nominating recycled triangulators like Emanuel is the route back to power. Maine voters say otherwise. Platner — a Marine with four combat tours, an oyster farmer who’d never held an office higher than town harbormaster — is running for the Senate seat Susan Collins has occupied since 1997, and his viral August launch raised $1 million in its first nine days.

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, Martin Heinrich, Ro Khanna, and Reich himself have endorsed him (you can include me on that list, too). Schumer’s hand-picked alternative, Gov. Janet Mills, was forced out of the primary entirely.

Platner’s pitch is the one establishment Democrats have refused to make for 45 years: that the real enemy isn’t the other party: it’s the oligarchy itself, the billionaires who fund both sides, and the politicians (Collins very much included) who sell out their voters to keep getting paid. That’s the lesson the DNC has been refusing to learn since 1992. You don’t beat fake populism by running corporate cardboard. You beat it with the real thing.

— Ted Cruz just admitted out loud what Republicans have been whispering about Social Security for 50 years. At the Milken Institute’s billionaire-studded global conference in California this week, the Texas senator dropped what he himself called the “dirty little secret” of the GOP’s so-called Trump Accounts: they’re a Trojan horse for Social Security privatization. Cruz waxed nostalgic about 50 years of conservatives trying — and failing — to get their hands on payroll tax revenue, lamented the collapse of George W. Bush’s 2005 privatization push, and predicted that within five years, parents will demand to divert their Social Security contributions into Wall Street-managed Trump Accounts “just like” the ones their kids got under the 2025 budget law.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent already said the quiet part out loud last summer, calling the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” And as an SSA insider told The New Yorker this week, the playbook is two-handed: gut the Social Security Administration with one hand while pointing at the smoking ruin with the other and saying, “See? It doesn’t work — let Goldman Sachs run it.” Just 15 percent of Americans support privatizing Social Security; even the MAGA base wants their checks to keep coming.

So Republicans, true to form, are doing it anyway; they’re just lying about it until the trap snaps shut. Ted Cruz, drunk on Milken Institute champagne, finally admitted what FDR warned us about back in 1936: the same Wall Street crowd that crashed the economy in 1929 has been trying to get its hands on Social Security ever since the day it was signed. Eighty-nine years later, they’re closer to privatizing all of Social Security than they’ve ever been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics.

This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year.

We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.

ICE brutalizes mostly Hispanics, including children, sending them to foreign torture camps, deporting them to Congo and other war-torn hellholes, and keeping over 70,000 — including thousands of children — in brutal, primitive conditions that in some cases would get an animal shelter closed down.

Republicans shrug it all off — or revel in it— while attacking and dismantling DEI and “woke” as anti-white-male, as if it’s all just fine with them. Bring up the topic and you’re accused of being a snowflake.

What the hell is going on? Why have American men — particularly white men — seemingly gone violently nuts over the past generation or two? Why do they revel in images and memes of violence and follow so-called “manosphere influencers”?

This is being driven by three factors: economics, racism, and misogyny that have been brought together in this moment as a perfect storm.

Republicans understand this well — after all, they are driving it — and if Democrats fail to figure the dynamic out and offer clear, specific, concrete fixes, they’ll continue to get beaten at the polls, and the problem of political violence will expand, no matter how badly Trump and the GOP screw things up.

First, there’s the economics.

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and declared war on the New Deal and unions while cutting income taxes on billionaires from 74% to virtually nothing, a massive $80 trillion transfer of wealth began. It wiped out worker protections, froze wages, ended most pensions, and — over the past 45 years — has taken the middle class from two-thirds of us down to around 43 percent of us.

To add insult to injury, men who once defined their masculinity by their ability to singularly provide for their families now have to rely on their wives working to keep a household together. And even that wasn’t enough for Republicans; today over half of working Americans are a few paychecks away from homelessness or bankruptcy as a result of these GOP policies and tax cuts.

Rush Limbaugh was the first to identify this back in the 1990s, calling women who worked and demanded equal rights and pay “Feminazis.” He legitimized that sort of rhetoric, blaming the emasculation of working class men at the hands of corporate bosses on their wives and other women in the workplace.

Republicans in Congress joined the chorus, publicly and proudly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply and entirely says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” They continue to block it to this day.

Trump’s famous claim that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because “when you’re a star, they let you do it” added to the Republican permission structure, giving modern rape culture a huge boost.

But Republicans didn’t just blame the collapse of the middle class on women in the workplace; they also claimed that Blacks and Hispanics were “stealing jobs” and “driving down wages” to deflect attention from the GOP-aligned fatcats whose singular agenda is to “control labor costs” to increase profits and add to billionaires’ money bins.

On this issue of race, there are two clear factors. The first of these reminds us of the last era of widespread white adoption of organized racism when President Woodrow Wilson sponsored a White House screening of the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation in 1915 and then embraced an eugenics movement that was explicitly grounded in ideas of a racial hierarchy of intellect and talent with whites on top.

The result of the President of the United States endorsing white supremacy that year was immediate and widespread: membership in the Klan, which had been moribund for a generation, exploded from an estimated 400,000 to over four million in fewer than two years. Klan marches coinciding with the Fourth of July and other patriotic holidays became commonplace events in American cities (30,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, DC in 1925, for example) until the fever was broken by World War II.

Donald Trump and the racist lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with have created a similar permission and endorsement atmosphere over the past 15 years, starting with the racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama he rolled out in March of 2011.

Now Trump’s even more explicitly and publicly racist, routinely using the epithets “thug” and “low IQ” to smear any Black person he thinks opposes him. Most recently he applied both to Hakeem Jeffries — who graduated from NYU Law School Magna Cum Laude and holds a Masters degree from Georgetown — this past weekend. (Trump refuses to release his own college transcripts.)

Trump’s explicit beyond-dog-whistle racism now echoes through the ranks of his white supremacist regime. The last Black Republicans will leave the House of Representatives this year, and six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court just let former Confederate states destroy any vestige of Black representation in the South through extreme gerrymandering.

Whiskey Pete Hegseth is purging the senior ranks of our military of Black and female officers after Trump allegedly said he “didn’t want to be seen” with one, Stephen Miller is on a jeremiad to purge America of Black and Hispanic immigrants, Black history is being stripped from our national monuments and museums, and federal contracts are being denied to any organizations with a policy of encouraging diversity in the workplace.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that pasty-white South African immigrant Elon Musk has put up around 850 arguably racist tweets to his social media platform just in the past six months, many warning of the coming extinction of white people in America. They found:

“More than half of those posts have used the word ‘white.’ The billionaire has posted on X about race nearly daily — 166 out of 197 days — from last October to mid-April, The Post analysis found.”

The apparent reason for Musk’s panic and this recent explosion of virulent racism in America isn’t limited to Trump and the racists he’s surrounded himself with. America is browning, largely because of a 1965 change in our immigration laws that ended racial quotas, and white people are noticing.

Since that year, 59 million people have legally immigrated to America, shifting the white population from 85% white in 1965 to 58% white today. Within a decade, if current trends continue, we’ll be a majority-minority country, as Texas already is. This has caused a panic among those like Trump and his white billionaire buddies who think that race defines what they call “culture” and lament the loss of “Anglo-Saxon cultural values” (code for white people).

So, what are Democrats and people of good will to do? I have three suggestions to dial back white male America’s embrace of political and racial violence, and with a sufficiently large electoral majority all three can be pursued simultaneously.

First, bring back a healthy middle class. This isn’t rocket science: FDR did it in the 1930s and 1940s, and Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all expanded his New Deal.

This would involve:

— Rolling back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for corporations and the morbidly rich, restoring tax rates as they were in 1980 when our national debt was less that one trillion dollars and we were on a steady path to paying that off.

— Joining every other developed country in the world in offering a free or low-cost national healthcare system and offer free or low-cost college to anybody who can qualify, while ending all student debt as Joe Biden tried to do.

— Enforce anti-trust laws, repeal the “right to work for less” Taft-Hartley Act, and outlaw the billion-dollar union busting industry while enforcing workers’ right to representation and democracy in the workplace.

Next, deal with the “race problem” in America by passing legislation outlawing gerrymandering and other ways Republicans politically disenfranchise non-whites. Strengthen anti-racism laws and have the FBI go after racist groups rather than persecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Launch a national education program about America’s racial history to build understanding and empathy among white people and empower the newly emerging majority.

Finally, to deal with misogyny, as a society we must work to redefine masculinity around competence and contribution rather than control of women, a message President Obama once took on. Being a man isn’t about being the sole breadwinner; it’s about being reliable, emotionally literate, and capable, being someone who shows up for family, work, and community. And bring back DEI — which principally benefited white women — and put it back into law.

For half a century, Republicans have bled white working-class men dry, hoovered up their wealth and given it to the Bezos’ and Zuckerbergs, and fought to keep the middle class from re-emerging in a way that might slightly dent corporate and billionaire profits.

The acceptance of political violence, the rising racism, and the open misogyny we’re seeing across America aren’t a mystery but are the predictable result of 45 years of GOP policy that gutted the middle class and then sold white men the lie that women, Blacks, and immigrants were the ones to blame.

It’s time the Democratic Party started telling Americans the truth and setting out a clear vision to remedy these decades of Republican vandalism that have brought us to this perilous, violent moment in our nation’s history. Share this article widely so more Americans can see clearly who’s actually been robbing them, and join me in the fight for a Democratic Party willing to tell the truth and finally solve this growing crisis of political violence.

Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.

Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.

The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow.

They want fighters.

Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.

Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’ endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’ establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.

That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:

“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”

And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a 10-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.

It would make:
— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;
— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;
— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;
— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;
— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;
— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;
— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;
— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;
— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and
— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.

That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.

Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.

“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.

Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a platform that tried to tell working-class voters that things were basically fine, right before Donald Trump ran ads in the Rust Belt about NAFTA and how nobody in Washington gave a damn about them. The post-1992 neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t lose because it was too progressive: it lost because it kept refusing to be progressive at all.

Meanwhile, look at what the Republicans have actually done with the power voters keep handing them. They’ve:
— Cut taxes on billionaires and corporations so dramatically that the national debt just officially crossed 100% of GDP, the highest peacetime level since the years right after World War II.
— Rigged elections through aggressive voter purges and partisan gerrymandering, with help from a Supreme Court that just this week further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
— Cheered on foreign wars, including the “magnificently stupid” current Iran war Platner himself has denounced, while running interference for the daily war crimes happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
— Allowed the Trump family to turn the presidency into a multi-billion-dollar grift machine of meme coins, crypto launches, stablecoins, and foreign payoffs while millions of Americans skip prescription doses to make rent.
— Kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009, and even went to this corrupt Supreme Court to kill Joe Biden’s student debt relief.
— Taken hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel industry while heat domes, hurricanes, and wildfires are killing thousands of Americans — most recently children in Texas —every single year.
— Taken millions more from the gun industry while terrified schoolkids hide under their desks.
— Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version that Jesus would’ve flipped tables over, while hustling for huckster televangelists, performatively demanding mandatory school prayer, Ten Commandments postings in every classroom, and Whiskey Pete pitching prayer every weekend in every barracks.
— Deployed armed, masked thugs to intimidate and murder American citizens while building a massive series of concentration camps across the country.

That’s the record American voters across the political spectrum need to know about, and Democrats should be shouting from the rafters. A wishy-washy Democrat saying “well, we’ll try, but we really don’t want to p--- off the Republicans by impeaching Trump or Clarence Thomas” — like we saw in 2024 — is never again going to work.

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

The lesson for the DNC, DCCC, the DSCC, and every damn consultant who’s suggested running on an anodyne “don’t make waves” agenda without naming who’s screwing everyday Americans is clear: the New Affordability Agenda isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.

It tells voters exactly who’s stealing from them and offers concrete steps progressive candidates will fight to actually deliver. That’s the formula Bernie Sanders has been pushing for three decades (and did for 11 years weekly on my radio program), the formula AOC and Zohran Mamdani just rode to victory in New York, and the formula Platner just used to blow Janet Mills out of the water.

So, reach out to your Democratic member of Congress and senators and tell them to sign onto the New Affordability Agenda. Tell them you want fighters, not neoliberal wusses.

If you’re in Maine, help Graham Platner finish the job and send Susan Collins home in November. And if you’re anywhere else, find the populist progressives in your state’s primary and back them, too, or sign up to run yourself.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

It’s now on the rest of us to follow their lead.

The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …
“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.

Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.