Bank

Trump’s history of bankruptcy now his greatest gift to America: economist

An MS NOW economist could not let a discussion about the national debt slip past without properly tagging the president responsible for the brunt of it with a parting snap on Tuesday.

Henrietta Treyz, director of economic policy at Veda partners, reminded MS NOW anchor Katy Tur that President Donald Trump had a huge hand in putting the nation on the cusp of financial failure due to the nation’s exploding debt.

“It's hard to wrap your head around because it doesn't really make sense. And I'd also note that President Trump is personally responsible for $12 billion — excuse me, $12 trillion — worth of the deficit that has been incurred throughout American history just in the last six years,” barked Treyz, speaking of an IRS audit revealing a 35 percent drop in revenue in just one year after Trump and DOGE wiped out agency jobs.

“So that's 30 percent of all of it. That is because they've passed tax cuts and the tax cuts are inordinately expensive,” continued Trez. “And that is kind of the rub here. The President, the Republican Party, they aren’t cutting your taxes. These are taxes that you owe. So from the IRS, they're not finding new ways to tax you. They're just collecting what they've already agreed upon. So, if you're looking for fraud, waste and abuse to cut, this is literally it. And they have created it.”

A host of self-inflicted economic wounds have, among other things, led to the national debt surpassing $40 trillion. In fact, according to a recent report, the debt has ballooned so badly that even economists who previously didn’t focus on deficit issues are increasingly alarmed.

“One camp of economists has been warning about the perils of high debt for years: Budget hawks predicted that if the country kept spending and didn’t raise taxes enough to keep pace, the resulting fiscal crisis could be devastating,” wrote The Atlantic's Will Gottsegen recently. “But others — the doves — have brushed it off. Their perspective was that as long as the U.S. GDP was growing faster than the interest rate it was paying on its debt, the Treasury would be able to keep rolling over its bonds without too much of a problem. For much of the 2010s, this was essentially the status quo, and debt panic was muted.”

But national borrowing rates are rising because of deficit panic, Gottsegen added. There is now concern about the expansion of the national debt and the government’s ability to sustain it.

“Investors are starting to think of long-term Treasurys as riskier than they once did, and they’re demanding more money in exchange for taking on America’s debt. At the same time, the federal government has shown no real appetite to pull its two main levers for reducing the debt: cutting spending and raising taxes,” Gottsegen said.

Meanwhile, Trump has exhibited little knack for money by declaring bankruptcy on multiple business ventures, including multiple Atlantic City casinos, as well as Trump Airline, Trump Steaks, and Trump Magazine, as well as “Trump University” —a fraud scheme that ended in a $25 million settlement to reimburse defrauded students.

“He stiffed contractors, defaulted on debts, and used the legal system as a weapon against people who were owed money,” the Alternet reported. “And when his own businesses collapsed, daddy's money was there to catch him. Most people, if they had that track record, would be in prison or working as a car salesman somewhere. But Trump had inherited enough wealth that he could never actually fail.”

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Even the best propaganda can't rescue Trump from Americans' wrath

A new University of Massachusetts-Amherst opinion poll, conducted August 21-26, finds profound American disillusionment with President Donald Trump, with his Iran War, and with its economic fallout in their lives.

Apparently the Ellison family’s attempt to drum up support for Donald Trump and his Iran War by buying up CBS News and gutting it as a respected news organization was a costly failure. Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and his various pro-Trump organs, from Fox Cable News to The Wall Street Journal, have not pulled the wool over the public’s eyes in the ways that Murdoch hoped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of the effort he expended convincing the American people to go to war with Iran, saying he had a thousand hours on US television , but while he may have prevailed on the gullible and avaricious Trump to fall on that country like a ravenous wolf, he did not succeed in altering the views of the American public on the desirability of such a war. The only significant impact of Netanyahu on most Americans has been to convince them that the Israeli government is a combination of genocidal maniacs and welfare queens that Americans should cut off economically and perhaps even militarily.

The UMass poll asked a weighted sample of respondents how well Trump has handled his Iran War. The response of 55% of those asked this question was “not well at all.” Ouch. Another 13% replied “not too well.” So 68%, over two-thirds, think he has done a piss-poor job on his Iran War, which was his war of choice. Two-thirds is the percentage needed in the Senate to impeach and remove a president, so if our representatives actually mirrored public opinion, Trump would be toast.

That question had to do with Trump’s handling of the war. Asked whether they approved of the war on Iran, a majority, 54%, said they strongly or somewhat disapproved, and another 20% were noncommittal, which I would interpret as not actively supporting the war even if they didn’t particularly oppose it. Those statistics yield a picture of a war that nearly three-fourths of Americans either oppose or about which they just don’t care. It isn’t what the commander of a war would want to hear from his own public.

Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well.

A majority think the war was a mistake and question whether it has made the US safer or forestalled an Iranian bomb.

Another way of putting it is that only about a quarter of respondents think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.

The UMass report on the opinion poll noted that Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, said, “Americans are overwhelmingly negative about Trump on the Iran situation.” He continued: “Only 1 in 4 Americans thinks he is handling Iran well. The real divide is increasingly between Trump’s hardcore MAGA base and almost everyone else. Among Republicans who identify very strongly with MAGA, 87% approve of Trump’s handling of Iran. But that falls to 58% among Republicans who are ‘somewhat MAGA’ and just 30% among Republicans who say they are ‘not MAGA at all.’ The more loosely attached Republicans are to the MAGA identity, the more skeptical they are of the war.”

Conducting a war in the Middle East, as even the cowboys in the G. W. Bush administration recognized, requires at least some allies. But Americans don’t think Trump plays well with other children. Asked how he has handled working with allies in global affairs, 52% say “not well at all” and 12% say “not too well,” showing that nearly two-thirds view his foreign policy performance negatively.

Based on this sounding, we can further project that Americans are even more angry about the main fallout of the failed war on Iran, which is high inflation. Fully 80% of respondents said that the Iran War has increased the cost of gasoline and groceries. Asked about how Trump has dealt with inflation, 57% responded, “not well at all.” A further 18% said “not too well.” That is 75%, fully three-fourths, who disapprove of his handling of inflation. Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well, and I presume they are wealthy investors in Trump’s casino stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 14-16% so far this year.

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Americans were fooled by a Pentagon scheme no one is talking about

What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it?

Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.

They were paid to push the Bush administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and other lies to build support for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the president and vice president had lied us into.

The hired guns got their talking points from the Pentagon, and internal documents called them “message force multipliers.” One participant later described it as “psyops on steroids.” Barstow disclosed how this was pure propaganda, noting:

“[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.”

Those unnecessary and illegal wars cost America the lives of about 7,000 troops and 7,600 contractors, led more than 30,000 service members and veterans of those conflicts to later commit suicide, 52,000+ wounded for life, and added roughly $5 trillion to our national debt with an estimated $2 trillion in veterans care and interest still to be paid.

Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his work and Congress — responding to widespread horror among the public that America would start targeting the civilian and voting population with propaganda the same way Hitler routinely did in the 1930s and Putin does daily in Russia — passed 10 U.S.C. 2241a, which says simply:

“Funds available to the Department of Defense may not be obligated or expended for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law.”

Ever since, every Pentagon appropriation has carried a similar restriction known as Section 8001, following a similar prohibition passed 74 years ago as the Federal Labor-Security Act of 1952 which says:

“No part of any appropriation . . . shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

Propagandizing the American people has been a crime for more years than Hegseth has been alive: there shouldn’t be any doubt that our government using our tax dollars to target us with psyops is illegal. But don’t bother telling that to Whiskey Pete. He apparently doesn’t care.

This past Sunday, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post (Pentagon Secretly Installs Military Influencers in Civilian Roles) that Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly moving several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, all while refusing to answer any questions about what they actually do.

What we do know is that most have been using their public personas to push stories favorable to Pete and Trump and to trash-talk opponents of this administration’s policies.

Just like another influencer, this one a deaf Utah housewife with nearly a million followers on social media and until June an accredited Pentagon reporter. Since July, though, she’s been a “special government employee” at the Department of Defense, something that she didn’t bother to disclose to her audience when she started the DSA Explorer, an interactive map of Americans she claims are associated with the antiwar Democratic Socialists of America.

The Pentagon refuses to explain what she does for them or which office she runs this McCarthy-esque operation out of; she claims it’s a private project.

It brings to mind Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who said in Congress in 1948, as he tried to “restate the existing prohibitions on domestic dissemination” of American-produced propaganda designed to hit Russia:

“By law, the USIA cannot engage in domestic propaganda. This distinguishes us, as a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity. … The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”

If authorizing and paying for all of this with our tax dollars is a crime, it doesn’t seem to bother Whiskey Pete. Of course, he’s never been all that concerned with following the law.

It’s also a crime in both American and international law to murder survivors of a shipwreck, even if you caused it in a war, but that didn’t stop Pete from ordering a double-tap on one of the boats he was targeting in the Caribbean.

Law professors told TIME magazine that intentionally killing a shipwrecked person is a war crime, and that absent an actual armed conflict it’s simply criminal murder, punishable by life in prison. Congress asked for the video of the killing and the written orders, but fifteen months later neither Congress nor the American public have seen either one.

Or the killings of the unnamed and unidentified men piloting small boats who’ve never been charged with a crime or faced any sort of due process.

Or the Signal affair, where the Pentagon’s inspector general (before being demoted) concluded that Hegseth illegally transmitted the number and strike times of manned American aircraft over hostile territory through a commercial app on his personal phone hours before those aircraft flew.

Pete declined to be interviewed, never turned over the phone, and some of the messages had auto-deleted before anyone could capture them.

When the Bush administration secretly paid Armstrong Williams to push No Child Left Behind, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Bush’s Education Department had violated Congress’ multiple prohibitions on government-funded propaganda directed at American citizens.

They also ruled that by spending money Congress hadn’t specifically authorized, the Bush administration had violated the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1350, a class E felony which carries two years in prison for the people who break it and goes back to 1905. (Bush declined to have his Attorney General prosecute his Secretary of Education.)

And here is Whiskey Pete doing it all over again.

Back in 2018, when a federal grand jury determined that Putin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg had built fake American social media profiles to influence American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, they criminally indicted thirteen Russians and three Russian companies. Although they didn’t have Pentagon email addresses, they were doing essentially the same thing on behalf of Trump that these retired military officers are accused of.

It appears that history is repeating itself, although this time it’s Hegseth doing it instead of Putin.

Odds are close to impossible that Trump will have Todd Blanche indict Pete for these crimes, any more than Bush was willing to indict his Education Secretary Rod Paige over the Armstrong Williams crime. But there are other options.

— Any member of Congress can request the GAO to investigate and issue a formal legal decision on whether any of these arrangements violate Section 2241a and Section 8001.

— The Defense Department’s inspector general can be made to produce for Congress the appointment memoranda, position descriptions, ethics opinions, timekeeping records, and compensation for every “special government employee” and “highly qualified expert” hired into Hegseth’s office since January 2025.

— There’s also the Office of Special Counsel, which can take Hatch Act complaints about federal employees engaged in partisan political activity.

— And then there’s impeachment. A cabinet secretary is a civil officer of the United States under Article II, Section 4 and thus vulnerable to impeachment and removal from office. While rare — only US Grant’s Secretary of War, William Balknap, has been impeached (in 1876) for corruptly using his office — but it’s still an option should Democrats take over Congress come January.

And, in fact, there are already two articles of impeachment that have been dropped in the House against Whiskey Pete.

Shri Thanedar filed H.Res. 935 in December over the campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and Yassamin Ansari led fourteen members in filing H.Res. 1177 in April, containing six articles covering the “unauthorized war against Iran,” “violations of the law of armed conflict and the targeting of civilians,” “the reckless handling of sensitive military information,” “obstruction of congressional oversight,” and “conduct bringing disrepute upon the armed forces.”

Impeachment doesn’t have to just be about getting a conviction and removal from office. Even if it never makes it to the Senate, the process in the House forces evidence into the permanent public record under oath, and establishes for history that a crime was committed, even if it was never punished.

Both impeachment resolutions are sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where congressional Republicans are trying to pretend they don’t exist.

Meanwhile, Hegseth appears to be exploring a run for president. Talk about deluded! And yesterday, Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, resigned, apparently because he is disgusted with Hegseth’s lack of competence and management skills.

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'They are looting us' and your Social Security is next: scholar

Since starting his second term, President Donald Trump has earned between $1 billion and $2 billion off being in power, by far the worst profiteering ever committed by an American president. He also created a $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters, and his children have used his foreign policy connections to make money on everything from Kazakhstan tungsten mines to an environmentally-protected island in Albania.

This is just the start. Trump and his supporters also reportedly have designs on Social Security, which recently ran a $2.5 trillion surplus, to allowing his cronies to take over the oil fields of Venezuela months after invading that nation without provocation. His tariffs also create what President Grover Cleveland described in 1894 as a "communism of pelf," a situation where he and his buddies profit from levying increased rates on imported goods while everyone else is left with higher prices.

None of this is normal. It is, according to one expert, a "kleptocracy," or a government in which those in charge blatantly steal from the people. It needs to be opposed whether you are a democratic socialist like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a mainstream liberal like President Barack Obama, a mainstream conservative like President Ronald Reagan or a far rightist like commentator Tucker Carlson.

To better understand our kleptocratic status quo, AlterNet spoke with Dr. Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University in Qatar professor who specializes in distributive justice and has written fantastic books like The Problem of Property: Taking the Freedom of Nonowners Seriously, A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments and Economics for Social Workers.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length, context and clarity.

MATTHEW ROZSA: I've spoken to experts who are concerned that, for lack of a better word, looting is what they have in mind, namely that Trump and his cronies plan on privatizing Social Security into cryptocurrency and other vehicles from which they can personally profit while the American taxpayer gets screwed. Do you share that concern?

DR. KARL WIDERQUIST: Yes. From the level of corruption I've seen in the Trump administration, I certainly think they would want to do that.

ROZSA: How can the ordinary American citizen understand this? Because I find that when discussing this as a journalist, it is frequently difficult to translate these complicated issues into layperson's terms.

WIDERQUIST: Okay. Social Security has basically been a promise that the generations made to each other for 90 years now, that each generation, the workers will produce goods and we're gonna just give elderly people money to buy them. And they don't have — the elderly people don't have to do anything back for those people who are producing them. Then when they retire, they're gonna get some money and they'll buy that from the next generation. That's been a promise. There is no savings in Social Security. There's very, very little. What we're saving really is a promise. We're just saving the promise to spend this money for elderly people. If they start taking the money out of the trust fund — it's just in bonds, which all bonds are as a government promise.

If they start taking the money out and putting it into private investments, even good ones, not necessarily corrupt ones, what that is doing is putting the risk — it's lowering the promise that we give to elderly people, putting a risk on them. Hey, if the markets go up, maybe you'll do pretty well in retirement, but if the markets go down, the loss is on you. We're not promising to take care of you when you're elderly. A lot of private pensions have gone that route. And a lot of elderly people are not as well off as they were when we had defined benefits pensions, when private companies promised, "We will take care of you in retirement until you die." And now they're saying, "Well, we'll give you a little bit of money now.

You put that in some savings, maybe it goes up, maybe it goes down, then you're on your own. We forget about it." That's what privatization, Social Security — it means not only that, but it also means a chance for government cronies to make money off, which is corrupt enough. We've got donors, so-called donor class, giving these bribes we call campaign contributions to Congress. And then Congress makes laws, "Okay, we're gonna put the Social Security Trust Fund in your investment." That's corrupt enough. But now when you just have people, "Well, I'm the president and we're gonna put it — we're gonna have people invest in the stuff that I'm selling, even though it's stuff like Trump coin, it's likely to go to zero when he leaves office." That's just another level.

ROZSA: I now want to talk about a different subject in terms of economics, the tariffs that Trump has levied against Canada and a number of American longtime trade partners. Before I discuss the economic impact, I have a much simpler question. How can you contextualize Trump's protectionism within the broader paradigm of American economic history?

WIDERQUIST: Well, the United States used to be the leading industrial producer in the world, and it switched to being a leading financial economy and lost a lot of its production leading at around the same time. Part of that was inevitable. I mean, part of the reason we were such a leading economy was, in 1945, there were maybe four major industrial areas in the world, and three of them were in trouble because of bombings in World War II. We had the only one that was intact yet. The US is gonna lead the world. For the rest of the world to come back, the United States could never again have the dominance that it had in the 40s and the 50s. But the United States has fallen off in industrial capacity.

It's made enough with, with financial, when it's leading in financial stuff. A lot of things are owned here, a lot of management is done here, and a lot of banking and things like that is done here. Whether that's ultimately sustainable or not, to boost an economy that's doing less and less production, I don't know. But we are becoming just one of many powerful economic nations, not the only one, not the biggest one on the block. And it's sort of the pushback of a fading power is what we're seeing. He's trying to move around. And he's pushing back in really the wrong way. If you really wanna maintain US as an industrial leader, you invest in industry.

And instead, he's trying to bully people around and say, "Maybe we can squeeze a little more money out of people." That's not gonna work. He's already, in the first Trump administration, got Canada to revise the NAFTA treaty and let him put his name on it. Now he wants him to do it again. There's just so far you can push people, until they start to say, "Well, this is a matter of national pride, maybe national security, you're threatening to invade us and make us the 51st state. This is national security. We've gotta fight this with everything we have," which makes me think that Canada's bound to win because they're fighting for their lives. If what he means by the 51st state is true, we should take it seriously. There might be. Whereas what the US is looking for is money.
Well, we're losing money doing it. The method of doing this is, we're both gonna lose a lot of money in the short term. Well, we're likely to give up a lot more than a country that has good reason to believe it's gonna be internationally humiliated and maybe invaded if it is.

ROZSA: My next question is about the impact of these tariffs on ordinary consumers, particularly people who are likely to have voted for Trump, such as farmers. What is the impact?

WIDERQUIST: Well, the supply chains go back and forth across the border — you've gotta know what's going back and forth across the border. You've gotta really be an expert in very specific industries. Some goods might pass the border three and four times. You'd take oil from Canada and put it in a combine in the United States to make wheat, and you send it up to Canada for processing, send it back to the United States to sell it as food, not to mention adding a bunch of packaging who knows where. You have a really complex supply chain. So tariffs aren't as simple as these. Used to be it was our industries and their industries, put a tariff on their industries, that's gonna help our industries, at least in that sector.

But now that there's not really this identical — there's not so many identifiable sectors. Like the automobile industry that's moving stuff back and forth from Canada all the time, you might be helping industries that are wholly contained in the United States, such as mining or something like that. They're probably gonna make a lot of profits, but there's only so much they can mine. So other industries that rely on mining — they're all paying more. So you're gonna help a few US industries a lot, and you're gonna hurt a lot of other US industries and consumers even more than you help those. So no, I don't see this as a good prospect for a lot of people who voted for Trump.

ROZSA: I appreciate, again, your thoroughness. Now I want to talk about how Trump has cut taxes for the rich. Republicans since the days of President Reagan have insisted that trickle-down economics is the way to create prosperity. Are you seeing any evidence of that or are you seeing evidence of the opposite?

WIDERQUIST: No, I mean, we've been trying trickle-down economics for going on 50 years now. And it's not trickle-down. The people in the middle and the bottom of our economic distribution are not much better off than they were 50 years ago, whereas our economy has doubled just since the '80s, 40 years. So we've got an economy that's more than doubled in 50 years, and almost all of that increase has gone to the top 1%. It hasn't trickled down. There's no reason to believe it's gonna start trickling down now. We need — if we want the middle-class person, the low-class worker, we want all Americans to share in this — we've gotta have redistributed taxation of the top 1%, tax them so they can't be using as many helicopters and buying as many houses that they do, to free up that land and those resources so the rest of us can buy them and share in this growth that every American has contributed to over the last half century.

ROZSA: Now my question is about what seems to be the kleptocracy that's in place. Trump has profited more than $2 billion since taking office. People who are close to the president have similarly made a killing. Would you argue that we are in a state of literal kleptocracy in this country?

WIDERQUIST: This is a kleptocratic administration. And it is surprising how many of his supporters are sticking with him on this. Usually when somebody goes this far, eventually they lose support. Since Trump appeared on the political scene, it was always about when he was going to go too far, and he went farther than anybody else into narcissism or just idiotic policies and never seemed to go too far. This level of blatant corruption that obviously hurts, largely in ways that are at the expense of his constituents. Sooner or later, this is gonna come home. I don't think he's gonna live to see it, at this point, the way so many people are sticking with him. It's things like Trump coin.

And that's just one of the most blatant examples. If you're super rich and you're buying Trump coin, you're getting access to Trump — you're actually buying something like that. But if you're just a Trump supporter and you're buying Trump coin, you're buying that because somebody you trust has told you that this is a good investment, and it's a terrible investment. But yet there are people holding onto their big losses on Trump coin, believing that somehow it's the Democrats that have made Trump coin go down the valley. Sooner or later, people are gonna figure this out. If you're doing stuff that isn't so obviously selfish, you can get away with this stuff for longer. Hitler did things that were more and more immoral and still kept his supporters, even grew his supporter base.

And people didn't really turn against him till he lost the war. And very often then a lot of the people that turned against him, lost him, turned against him, not for all those in world policies, but for losing war. And for this to really get discredited, he's gonna have to do something that really obviously hurts his own supporters. Getting a little bit of corruption here and there. Compared to the size of the US government, I suppose this is still too small. But sooner or later, people are gonna realize they didn't get what they wanted out of it. They might have gotten brown people kicked out of the country.

They might like that. But they're not getting the prosperity that they were promised that all these policies were written. As a matter of fact, a lot has been taken from it.

ROZSA: My next question is about how Canada plans on retaliating with targeted tariffs. The early reports indicate that they are going to go after people in states that are more likely to have voted for Trump. Do you believe that could be the tipping point that turns many of his supporters against him per what you discussed a moment ago?

WIDERQUIST: It's hard to tell because they could — well, they could blame Canada. They might blame Canada instead of blaming Trump for that. So it might not be. But I do believe that Trump will have to blink first because Canada can go to its people and say, "We're doing this to protect our nation from foreign bullying." And that people are getting united across the political perspective behind that. If Trump is going to people and saying, "We're doing this because we're gonna make more money," and we're making less money as long as this war goes on, both sides will make less money. Both sides will suffer economically. Canada has got a good reason to tell its people, "We gotta stick this out, this economic suffering, we gotta stick it out to win." The United States has, "Oh, we're gonna — you're losing money now, you're gonna make more money later." Well, if they don't start seeing that pretty soon, they're gonna have to abandon this policy.

Whether that'll lead to abandoning Trump is another question, but I do think they'll abandon this policy.

ROZSA: My next question is, you are an expert on universal basic income. Do you believe that the conditions created in America through Trump could make Americans more amenable to universal basic income? I'm thinking specifically of how Trump keeps promoting AI.

WIDERQUIST: I'm not someone who thinks that it's AI that's gonna be the tipping point for basic income. I think we're long overdue for a basic income because the wealth of the world have just been taking and taking and taking from the less privileged of the world, the middle class and the lower class put together. The prospect that AI is gonna come and take all our jobs and then that's gonna make everybody say, "Aha, now we need basic income." I, sure, I'd like everybody to do that, but I'm not confident it will. There's a lot of other ways people could respond to it. I think more what's coming out of this is he's destroying so much of the existing liberal order — the neoliberal order — that people are gonna be open to new ideas.

They're not just gonna want to rebuild Lyndon Johnson's welfare thing. They're gonna be looking for new ideas, and basic income is one of those new ideas.

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NYT columnist drops scorched-earth takedown of 'ridiculous' 2028 GOP field

The GOP is lining up a number of "ridiculous" presidential hopefuls for 2028, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, who argued that these potential candidates show how the party has failed to learn the real "lesson of Trump" from his 2016 victory.

In the latest analysis video shared to his personal YouTube channel, columnist Jamelle Bouie reiterated his belief that Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are "ridiculous" as 2028 GOP contenders, incapable of recreating Trump's appeal to voters. Vance, in particular, he lambasted as a "sweaty and pathetic" figure in the Trump administration who has "no juice" when it comes to politics.

"I have a lot of contempt for those two guys, and I just don't think their presidential ambitions are going to go very far," he summed up.

Bouie noted, however, that this is often countered by others who warn not to laugh off certain GOP hopefuls, given that many laughed off Trump's chances in 2016. This, he argued, misses the point of what Trump actually had in his first presidential race.

"I think that's wrong. I think that is the wrong conclusion to draw from Trump's political success," Bouie said. "I think a lot of people who didn't think Trump could win did so because they could not see his appeal. They looked at him, and they said, 'How could this guy possibly get any traction?' And they're taking that lesson that they were wrong about that and applying it now to every Republican you might run. But the lesson of Trump isn't actually that you should never dismiss anyone's chances ever when it comes to, say, winning a Republican primary. The lesson of Trump is to take seriously what voters are telling you about the people they say they like. Take seriously that that person might have real political skills and talent, and Donald Trump clearly did."

Trump, he explained, had spent decades prior to his 2016 campaign, becoming ubiquitous to many as an American cultural figure, first as a mass media symbol of success in the 80s and 90s, and then as a game show host with The Apprentice in the 2000s. By the time he announced his candidacy in 2015, he already had a pre-established base of supporters who believed, however misguidedly, that he was a strong businessman with outsider political potential.

"All of those things together made him a truly formidable opponent," Bouie said. "It's understandable that it was hard to see because he was and is a buffoon and an idiot and a bigot, but nonetheless, those are real political assets. And that's the reason to have not dismissed Trump."

He added further: "Does any Republican right now have anything comparable to that? Absolutely not. Does any Republican right now even have the kind of popular base and support that could allow them to challenge Trump? Let's say Trump endorses someone else and they want to win. Could they do anything to stand against Trump? Probably not."

Hegseth, he noted, also has the downside of presiding over the Iran war, "quite possibly the most consequential strategic defeat in American history."

"That is not a guy who wins a presidential nomination," Bouie argued. "You don't generally win elections having lost wars. Very hard to do... Vance is the vice president, which gives him a huge leg up against any competitor. Vice presidents very often do win nominations. But as I said before, Vance has no juice. In the one election he's run in, he ran pitifully behind every Republican statewide and was dragged across the finish line by Donald Trump."

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Body language expert reveals physical signs of Trump’s 'strange' relationship

A psychologist specializing in body language broke down the visible cues by President Donald Trump and his scandal-plagued assistant Natalie Harp, revealing the signs of a "strange dynamic" between the pair.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist, who has released numerous videos using his expertise in interpreting body language to examine Trump's behavior and well-being. While most of his videos have focused on Trump's signs of neurological decline, his latest video delved instead into his headline-grabbing relationship with Harp, the young assistant whose devotion to the president has been likened by many to an obsession.

Harp first entered Trump's orbit during his years away from the White House, and since his return, she has become perhaps his closest assistant, carrying around a portable printer at all times to share flattering reports and information with him, and maintaining considerable power over the information he sees. She has also alarmed staffers and Secret Service members over her devotion to him, leading the latter to raise concerns about her behavior becoming a security risk.

In his latest video, Garrison started by examining a recent piece of footage in which Harp was standing near Trump as he gave an address.

"One thing you may notice is that Natalie Harp is constantly smiling," Garrison said. "Now, you've only watched her for a few seconds, but you're going to see the same facial expression throughout the rest of this, as well as other video clips of her. She is always smiling. So, why is that? Why is it that President Trump would need somebody that is constantly smiling? Primarily because he's looking for constant admiration. He's looking for immediate feedback to say, 'You're doing great. Everything you do is great.' And keeping a facial expression like this, keeping this smile all the time, helps him [get] that."

He added: "And I don't want people to think I'm being critical that she is smiling. That's really not what I'm saying. But the point is that he doesn't care about authenticity. He doesn't want genuineness. What he wants is unusual amounts of loyalty. He wants devotion. He wants admiration. And so having somebody that keeps this look all the time is going to help feed that for him."

Garrison also highlighted a point in the clip where Trump noticed that Harp was standing near him, after which he began to look back at her more often. This, Garrison explained, was likely because she "truly is a source of comfort for him." Trump never appeared to show any different emotion when he looked at her, because to him, "people like this are objects."

"They are to be used," he explained. "So when he looks back at her, it may provide him security, but he's not going to feel the need to smile or nod or give any sort of recognition because he doesn't see it as a two-way street like that."

The instances of Trump looking back at Harp continued throughout the clip, adding to the sense that her presence was "regulating" for Trump in some way. Garrison also noted how her smile appeared to get bigger when the president tried to make a joke, and how she was "constantly" nodding in affirmation even when he was not looking at her. Another woman standing next to Trump in the clip was also nodding frequently, but Garrison argued that this was normal given that she was part of the conversation, whereas Harp was showing signs that "she's just so used to reaffirming everything that he says."

"It seems like almost by default she's constantly nodding her head along with every single statement he makes," Garrison added.

Later, he contrasted Harp's behavior with that of First Lady Melania Trump, using footage of her alongside her husband at the Freedom 250 race in Washington, D.C., where she appeared "disengaged" from her husband, looking away from him often and keeping her hands in her pockets.

"Melania Trump, on the other hand, is a lot more aloof," he explained. "She seems to resist physical touch from him. She seems to move away. She seems to show that she's quite irritated with him at times. And obviously, the dynamic is different. But I thought it would be interesting to contrast the two of them because the response that he's going to get is going to be so dramatically different. And Trump may actually be somewhat psychologically reliant on Harp at this point because of that constant sense of admiration."

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Panic as Trump’s rotten economy sends traders 'scrambling'

President Donald Trump can brag all he wants about the economy and make the biggest boasts at campaign stops, but Bloomberg says Wall Street investors just aren’t buying it.

“Traders are scrambling to shield their portfolios against further losses in Treasuries, as worries over the budget deficit and inflation push yields toward multiyear highs,” reports Bloomberg.

“Right now, it’s difficult to see a change in fortune for bonds,” said David Roberts, head of fixed income at Nedgroup Investments. “Certainly, a long-term solution to the Iranian situation would help.”

But that’s not coming, by the look of things, and investors are rushing to shore up what looks like a terrifying floor rattle involving U.S. treasury investments, prompted by Trump’s soaring debt and bad policies.

“The rush to hedge comes on the back of a global slide in bond prices, which are being squeezed by a range of catalysts including ongoing fiscal challenges and a war-fueled oil price surge that has further stoked inflation fears,” reports Bloomberg. “Investors have been particularly keen to avoid longer-dated tenors, which are more sensitive to inflation risks: The 30-year yield has averaged 4.96 percent year-to-date, on track for the highest annual level since 2004, according to Bloomberg data.”

It also appears investors have no faith in the once respected words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose reputation appears to have taken a nosedive since he started working for Trump.

"Within days of Mr. Bessent’s confirmation, at least, it was obvious this was a misjudgment," The Bulwark's economics editor Catherine Rampell told The New York Times last week. "… Now, after criticizing his predecessor for allegedly trying to juice the economy ahead of an election, Mr. Bessent appears to have attempted exactly that.”

Bessent announced that the U.S. Treasury would ramp up repurchases of its long-term government bonds to reduce their interest, in an effort to save Republicans from a grueling midterm race.

“But Bessent’s plan backfired. Instead, after a brief dip, bond rates rose," Rampell said.

“Investor unease over bond prices has persisted even after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced expanded buybacks last month in an effort to keep yields contained,” confirmed Bloomberg. “Options skew on long-bond futures, which is favoring puts, shows that traders are starting to pay a higher premium for hedging a bond market selloff over a rally.”

“Bond anxiety will likely persist at the long end, not the short end that the Fed controls,” Ashok Bhatia, CIO and global head of fixed income at Neuberger Berman, told Bloomberg.

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Trump's massive new economic boast exists only inside his head

Donald Trump is not very good at running the economy, but he does have a great imagination about how he runs the economy. Trump continually boasts about the incredible amount of foreign investment coming into the country. It was $20 trillion last I heard, but it might be up to $30 or $40 trillion the next time Trump decides to boast about it.

This boast has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Contrary to what Trump says, there is no boom in auto factories or any other factories coming into the United States. Factory construction has actually plummeted since Trump came into the White House, after booming under Biden.

The looniness about the investment boom should be kept in mind when considering Trump’s deal to take control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s oil. Trump is promising that this deal will both lower gas prices and be used to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserves that he has largely drained as a result of his war on Iran.

If Venezuela doesn’t honor this deal, what will a future administration do, take them to court? Or will they send US soldiers to die for Venezuela’s oil?

While people are naturally offended by the blatant imperialism in this deal, that is precisely the reason why there is not much cause to be concerned. The basic story is, because the deal is so transparently an effort by the United States to steal oil from a country that it controls militarily, it is virtually guaranteed that as soon as the country is not run by a U.S.-installed dictator, Trump’s deal will be dumped in the trash.

This point was well-made by Venezuelan economist and opposition leader Ricardo Haussman (also cited in a piece by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic). The deal is seen as a joke by pretty much everyone in Venezuela.

If Venezuela doesn’t honor this deal, what will a future administration do, take them to court? Or will they send US soldiers to die for Venezuela’s oil?

In terms of its immediate impact, there is not some spigot that can be turned on that will get massive amounts of Venezuela’s oil flowing. It’s currently producing around 1.25 million barrels a day. While it has massive reserves, its production facilities deteriorated badly as a result of U.S. sanctions. The country was largely unable to get needed parts, and it lacked funding because it was prevented from selling its oil to much of the world.

Oil production can only get back to its 3 million barrel a day turn-of-the-century pace with billions of dollars of foreign investment. It is unlikely that this deal will make companies happier about putting large sums at risk. Any investment will only pay off over many years, long after Trump will be out of office.

It also is not plausible to use Venezuela’s oil to refill the Strategic Reserves. Venezuela’s oil is very heavy and highly acidic. The Strategic Reserve is designed for light, alkaline oil. It could not easily store Venezuela’s oil.

In short, file Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal with the $60 trillion in foreign investment pouring into the country. It exists only in his head.

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Trump official describes millions of voters as 'underachievers'

President Donald Trump has been using "Red Scare" techniques in the 2026 midterm elections, characterizing all Democrats as democratic socialists regardless of whether they actually are (like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani) or not (Michigan US Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed). Now Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is describing people who support candidates like Mamdani — and perhaps even like El-Sayed — as being underachievers.

“When you talk about socialism here in the U.S., and when you look at the demographic of those voters, they are over-educated and under-earning,” Bessent told Fox Business' Larry Kudlow while speaking at the Group of 20 finance ministers' summit in Asheville, NC.

He added, “These are underachievers who are jealous of those who want to go and work every day."

One irony of this argument is that many experts perceive Trump's own policies as socialistic, at least insofar as he directly meddles in the economy rather than allowing the free market to work unimpeded.

“I don't think of it as communism, although the Trump administration is actually a very big-government presidency — taking stakes in big companies and trying to manage them in a fairly inappropriate way,” Dr. Ed Gresser, the Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the liberal-leaning think tank Progressive Policy Institute, told AlterNet in July. “So it's a bit odd to see them drumming up fears of socialism, since that's very much in the background of a lot of what they've done."

Gresser was not alone in saying this.

“Trump operates with a form of crony capitalism,” Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, a former top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, told AlterNet in July. “The people who get US contracts, the people who get preferences on tariffs, are those who have influence with him. It ranges from the absurd — where the guy who did the coating for the swimming pool gets a no-bid contract to do the reflecting pool — to all the other no-bid contracts. That's all crony capitalism. And certainly, opening this up could create more opportunities for that.”

Meanwhile a former Republican National Committee Chairman argued that Trump implements socialistic policies for his supporters, but denies it to others.

“Y'all know the Farm Bill is socialism; y'all know that, right?” Michael Steele said on MS NOW in August. “I mean, when you start talking about socialism, it's socialism for you. It's not socialism when I'm accessing the system and I'm getting that SNAP check, and I'm getting that welfare check, and I'm getting that free lunch program, and I'm getting those things that, because I cannot afford it, are part of a safety net. And I wish we would just fundamentally get off our lazy behinds and start understanding how this government uses all of those tools to provide for its citizens.”

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'How could he?' GOP senator says red state voters being are 'hurt' by Trump

On Tuesday, a Republican senator revealed that one of President Donald Trump’s latest moves has “let down” and “hurt” MAGA voters. This is according to Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), who said the president’s decision to import beef has “pulled the rug” out from under South Dakota Trump voters.

"In South Dakota, these folks — they love the president,” Rounds told reporters. “He's like a relative to them, and they just feel like as a relative he just pulled the rug right from underneath them. They're hurt. I mean, they feel like they've been let down. Like, how could our friend, this guy that's as close to us as they've ever been to a president, how could he do this to them?"

Rounds’ statement was in response to Trump recent executive order allowing 300,000 metric tons of beef to be imported tariff-free. These imports must be sold at “25 percent below the market price,” which American beef producers fear will undercut their already suffering business. With this in mind, Rounds spoke about the issue multiple times on Tuesday, in the morning telling reporters, "It feels like the administration pulled the rug right out from underneath a lot of our farmers and ranchers, and this is not going to help. The best way to help is to allow that American cow herd to grow, and the way you do that is you offer more grass.”

While Trump is ostensibly importing beef to lower skyrocketing meat prices at the grocery store, experts say it is unlikely to have a major impact. As Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University who studies meat pricing, told CNN, “I think it’s easily overstated how much it might help." He explained that the cost reductions will be limited because 300,000 metric tons of beef is only equivalent to around 2 percent of domestic beef consumption. What’s more, explains CNN, “the tariff exemptions only apply to beef trimmings, which are blended with other cuts to make ground beef. That means exempting only beef trimmings will limit any overall price cut for consumers, said Tonsor. On top of that, the impact will also depend on whether the imports add to the supply of beef or simply replace beef that processors would have otherwise bought from US suppliers.”

Rounds raised more issues with the Trump administration on Tuesday. When asked about Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s decision to quit over his disagreements with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Rounds said, “I'm hearing the same rumors everybody else is, that he was frustrated with some of his top generals being released, and that's not the first time I've heard that." According to Rounds, “That points to questions that we're going to be asking when we get back [in session] in terms of: where is the leadership at? We've had some very good generals that are no longer there that we respected, and that had a huge amount of foundational knowledge in terms of moving us forward as far as the change in capabilities that we need to incorporate into the overall fighting force.”

He also noted that he was “frustrated” that Democrats had been excluded from defense discussions. “It needs to be both Republicans and Democrats at the table,” said Rounds. “I think the administration needs to change its focus, and needs to bring this back to a bipartisan effort with regard to the defense of our country.”

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Inside the strategy to tear down Trump's legacy with a 'sledgehammer'

President Donald Trump is struggling in the polls due to the ongoing unpopularity of his war in Iran and stewardship of the American economy. Yet according to a former Republican speechwriter, his biggest political fear should be having all of his achievements reversed by a potential Democratic successor in the White House.

The Bulwark's Tim Miller declared on his podcast that he expects "someone in 2028 to take the mantle of 'I have the authority now from the Supreme Court' going to tear this shit down one brick at a time."

He added, "We're going to fund it to bring people in, everyone. I don't know what any tools are. Their jackhammer. I want a mallet. What's a big mallet called? A sledgehammer. There's big demolition excavators."

Fellow Bulwark commentator Jonathan Last added "Like the ones that are big enough to be in a quarry, right? By the German company that makes them. And I actually feel like the next Democratic president should take his oath of office, not from Congress, but actually while seated in the pilot's chair for a giant demolition excavator. With a hard hat. Take it."

At the same time, Miller expressed concern that the Supreme Court is so partisan that they will allow Trump to do far worse things to America rather than stop him.

"Let's say the president went to Fort Knox," Miller said. "Stole a bunch of gold bars, took them for himself... Gave them to Ivanka. Ivanka flew to Albania, sold them on the private market. And then some good government group files an objection to this. And the Supreme Court takes them. They're like, well... They don't actually have any standing over Fort Knox."

Last agreed and speculated that, if a Democratic president tries to reverse Trump's achievements, the same Supreme Court that has argued Trump can do whatever he wants will suddenly be upset with a Democrats' liberal use of power.

"They will get around to the actual constitutionality when a Democrat tries to tear it down," Last said. "Right. So they'll punt, punt, punt until it's fait accompli. So it's just done. Like, well, I can't really rule on it. It's finished. Can't go on the merits."

Indeed, Trump has already managed to undo the legacies of several of his Democratic predecessors while in office. His war against Iran was often framed as a rebuking of President Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal and his $40 trillion debt runs in contrast to President Bill Clinton's four budget surpluses and successful debt reduction.

"Clinton convinced Democrats in Congress to double down with larger tax increases for wealthy people, raised the corporate tax rate, increased Medicare taxes for wealthy people, and hiked the federal gasoline tax," Clinton's economic adviser Dr. Robert J. Shapiro wrote in August. "It worked: Those changes, along with strong economic growth, increased federal revenues 54 percent after inflation over his two terms. Clinton also convinced Democrats to cut defense spending by 12 percent on a sustained basis, another first."

Prison sentence for secretive pro-Trump mega-church leader raises concern

On Monday, August 31, a court in Seoul, South Korea sentenced Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly the Unification Church) leader Han Hak-ja to two years in prison on charges of political bribery, embezzling church funds and making illegal political contributions. And according to The New Republic's Elle Hardy, Hak-ja's legal problems have "raised questions about the dwindling church's continued influence in the Trump administration."

Hak-ja is the widow of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who died in 2012. The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) has long been known for its far-right politics, from defending President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal to allying itself with President Donald Trump. But according to Hardy, Trump's recent favorable comments about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un are complicating the FFWPU/GOP alliance.

"Prosecutors had sought a 13-year sentence, which would have essentially meant life behind bars for the aging leader of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or FFWPU, formerly known as the Unification Church," Hardy explains in The New Republic. "The sentence was something of a surprise, as the church had expected the court to agree to the prosecutors' request. Han was found guilty of political bribery of former first lady Kim Keon Hee and another conservative politician, with the church apologizing for causing 'big concerns and disappointment to the people' but vowing to appeal Han's conviction."

Hardy continues, "Han, her chief of staff, Won-ju Jeong, and former church deputy Yoon Young-ho were accused of embezzling over $7 million in church funds through false accounting between 2017 and 2025, with investigators seizing a further $26 million in funds hidden in a safe in Han's bedroom. Han was acquitted of these charges, leading to the greatly reduced sentence."

Hardy notes that Hak-ja "embarked on a campaign to convince the Trump administration to intervene on the grounds of Christian persecution" and that her "pleas rest on more than her faith."

"They bring into focus the church's 50-year ties to the Republican Party and the fact that many senior figures in the Trump court — including the president himself — have been lavished with the church's largesse in recent years for appearances at its conferences," according to Hardy. "Moon's fervent anti-communism and seemingly endless pots of money helped the church gain substantial influence during the Cold War across Korea, Japan, Latin America, and the United States."

But Hardy points out that Trump's "recent re-embrace of" North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "hasn't helped matters for any side."

"The current administration in Seoul feels ever more isolated from its greatest ally, and Korea's powerful conservative Christian right is dismayed that the president is embracing its great foe and the longtime source of its strong military alliance with Washington," Hardy observes. "Last week, Trump further inflamed tensions with a Truth Social post attacking South Korea for refusing to join his war against Iran, noting that he has 'a very good relationship' with Kim Jong Un…. So far, Han's allies in Washington have remained conspicuously quiet — but given their long-standing financial arrangements, that’s unlikely to last long."

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The Supreme Court is trembling over the next election

With its latest ruling on the Trump administration's attempt to seize control of the midterm election, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority once again advertised its contempt for democracy and the Constitution. By allowing the president to proceed with his bureaucratic war on mail balloting -- even as many states are about to send those ballots to voters -- the court majority not only violated the constitutional stricture against federal control of elections but threatened to impose partisan meddling and White House chaos on the democratic process.

While the high court has yet to deliver a final decision on the Trump executive order at issue, the majority bestowed an undeserved legitimacy on the president's openly stated and nefarious plan to derail an election that appears certain to deliver a negative judgment on him and his party.

The court's action, although temporary, raised the deepest concern about the intentions of Chief Justice John Roberts and the "conservative" bloc (whose version of conservatism no longer extends to upholding legal precedents or constitutional norms).

Americans rightly worry that the court will allow or even encourage President Donald Trump to deny voting rights, intimidate voters, and tamper with balloting, if only because the court majority has so relentlessly expanded his authority and exempted him from ordinary oversight.

In one decision after another, they have awarded him the powers and immunities of a monarch in a casual manner that would have made the founders retch.

Indeed, the majority has consistently lent its authority and reputation to his dictatorial ambitions, while increasing the power of the wealthy in politics and diminishing or eliminating the protections afforded to society's least powerful groups. Making many of these bad decisions worse is the justices' recent habit of issuing important rulings on the "shadow docket," unsigned and unexplained, which undermines their integrity and shields them from criticism. It is hard to know how to evaluate a decision when no logic or law is offered to undergird its validity.

It would not be unlike the Roberts right-wingers to upend this election with a shadow docket ruling, a cowardly maneuver they have adopted in more than two dozen cases since Trump returned to the White House -- and ruled in his favor in more than three out of four.

Everyone should understand that if the Supreme Court majority intercedes now to sway an election that may bring Democratic control of both houses of Congress, they are indulging a gross conflict of interest to protect themselves. No longer can these justices be regarded as disinterested umpires. The Republican justices in particular -- specifically Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and the chief justice himself -- must dread the advent of a Democratic Senate that will investigate their festering conflicts of interest.

The grossly unethical payments and benefits accepted by Thomas are by now notorious. But how many Americans are aware of the disbarment complaint now pending against Roberts before the District of Columbia bar? Evidence delivered by a whistleblower to support that complaint shows that Jane Sullivan Roberts, the chief justice's spouse, earned more than $10 million between 2007 and 2014 as a "legal recruiter" for a headhunting firm for elite firms that had appeared before the high court hundreds of times.

Roberts failed to recuse himself from cases argued by lawyers who firms had remunerated his wife's company -- and mislabeled her commission income from that outfit as "salary."

After Business Insider published the whistleblower documents three years ago, Roberts amended his public disclosure to reveal the commission deal and also admitted for the first time that he owned equity in his wife's subsequent employer -- information he had omitted in three previous filings.

How would a Democratic House and Senate confront the shifty characters who now adorn the top bench? Congress might consider and perhaps enact judicial reforms requiring the justices to meet the minimum ethical standards enforced in the lower federal courts. While those standards at present don't apply to the Supreme Court, Democrats have vowed to take up court reform as a top priority should they win in November.

Be assured that the justices have heard about that promise. Do not doubt that the court's majority fears a season of terribly embarrassing and possibly ruinous scrutiny could be just over the horizon.

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Neurobiological mechanism exposes Trump’s 'psychological grip' on MAGA

In right-wing media, many pundits are debating the MAGA movement's post-Donald Trump future and wondering who its next leader will be. The names being mentioned typically range from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to Vice President JD Vance. But the group Leaving MAGA has a totally different focus: getting disillusioned Trump supporters, includes conservatives, out of the MAGA movement altogether. And according to The Guardian's Fabiola Cineas, a crucial part of Leaving MAGA's approach is understanding the "psychological grip" the movement has on people.

Rich Logis, Leaving MAGA's founder, is himself a former Trump supporter who is now a scathing critic of Trump and MAGA. Logis views MAGA as more than a political movement — he believes it functions like a religious cult. And Leaving MAGA is offering psychological support for ex-MAGA supporters as well as members of their family.

Cineas, in The Guardian, explains, "Leaving MAGA's weekly online support group isn't for people in MAGA — it's for the people who love them. That includes spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, friends and extended family who have watched someone close to them become 'not the person who they once were,' said facilitator Julianna Forlano."

Therapist Forlano, according to Cineas, "has worked with families of people with narcissistic personality disorder and in addiction recovery." And she employs "a framework used in addiction and recovery circles, treating the psychological grip of constant fear-based media and conspiracies like a disease."

Cineas reports, "According to Forlano, people overcome with this type of fear adopt a 'with us or against us' mindset and can easily turn against family members.

"The mechanism is neurobiological, she said: people who consume a steady diet of fear narratives become fearful in general, adopt a 'with us or against us' mentality and start treating loved ones as threats," according to the report.

Forlano told The Guardian, "What's happening in families and in marriages, and between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons has to do with behavior ... The mind is functioning as a dope seeker."

MAGA Republicans showing cult-like behavior, according to Forlano, can quickly become enraged — even over something totally benign.

Forlano told The Guardian, "You could say something as simple as: 'The tomatoes in my garden aren't growing,' and that person will respond by saying: 'Well, climate change is a hoax' ... The supportive nature of the community has been healing. It helps people find their footing again."

Since getting out of the MAGA movement, Cineas notes, Logis "now supports Democrats." And Leaving MAGA member Stephania Messina, according to the Guardian reporter, went from being part of the far-right evangelical Quiverfull movement to joining the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Messina told The Guardian, "It wasn't my job to vote or to know who to vote for. I was just supposed to submit to my husband and do what he thought was necessary. I was being indoctrinated into Christian nationalism."

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Economic civil war erupts in Trump administration as 'showdown' nears

On Friday, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve delivered a speech that revealed a growing civil war within the administration and may have put him on a “collision course” with President Donald Trump. This is according to the American Conservative, which explained on Tuesday how the fight over economic policy is headed toward a “showdown.”

“Kevin Warsh gave his first major speech as chairman of the Federal Reserve on August 28 at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium,” writes the American Conservative. There Warsh offered “clues about the Fed’s future direction — as much as he might prefer not to — and perhaps even set himself on a collision course with President Trump.” As the magazine elaborates, Warsh has gone to “war” against the concept of “forward guidance,” which is “Fed slang for broadcasting monetary policy moves well in advance” and has been regular practice over the past two decades. While Warsh explained that it was “intended to maintain calm in the markets during economically tumultuous periods,” he “believes it has overstayed its welcome, as markets have become too reliant on this information, locking the central bank into whatever policy it foreshadowed regardless of subsequent changes in circumstances.”

“As he noted at Jackson Hole last week, forward guidance can in fact lead markets, businesses, and households astray, obstructing the ability of policymakers to make rate decisions based on hard data,” writes the Conservative. “Emphasizing the need to find the proper relationship between financial markets and the Fed, Warsh added that: ‘The Fed needs clear market signals, as unfiltered as possible from market internals: the level and change in asset prices across sectors, the prices and trading volumes of Treasury securities, the foreign exchange value of the dollar, the cost and availability of credit, and the price of a broad set of commoditie.’”

The Conservative notes that “In the reference to Treasury securities, one cannot help but see a jab at Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent maneuvers. In August, the national debt rose to exceed $40 trillion, while 30-year Treasury yields jumped to almost two-decade highs. The increasing burden of the debt on government financing has pushed up interest rates, as buyers price in the risk of non-payment. By buying back some of these long-term bonds, Bessent hopes to bring down yields on the long end of the yield curve (the normally upward sloping curve showing the difference between short- and long-term bond yields) and thus lower borrowing costs for the government.”

That effort failed, and Warsh is now making it clear that he is “against distorting such an important signal as the Treasury yield.” According to the Conservative, “Warsh has continued to highlight the central bank’s focus on price stability over the employment side of the dual mandate. In his Jackson Hole address, he characterized the labor market as ‘stable,’ and spent considerable time digging into the various inflation indicators that remain concerning. He reiterated that ‘the responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank. And that is where it belongs.’”

Financial experts interpreted this as a sign that rate hikes are on the way, which is exactly the opposite of what Trump wanted when he appointed Warsh to the Fed. According to the National Conservative, the president has pushed for rate cuts despite high inflation. So far he has blamed the “very political” Fed board for resisting his demands, saying that “Kevin is fantastic,” but if Warsh raises interest rates as expected, it would “place him directly in the president’s crosshairs.” At the same time, however, “posturing as an advocate for rate maintenance or cuts will likely undermine his credibility with markets.”

“To maintain his inflation hawk credentials,” the magazine concludes, “Warsh may have to upset his president.”

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Trump in 'survival mode' as he turns on MAGA base: Haberman

President Donald Trump and his shrinking administration are increasingly acting in "survival mode," reporter Maggie Haberman explained on MS NOW, with one of his latest outbursts showing just how much he no longer cares about his MAGA base.

Haberman is a longtime reporter and author best known for her close coverage of Trump and his political career, including her explosive new exposé of his second term, Regime Change. On Tuesday morning, she appeared on MS NOW's Morning Joe and was pressed about several new developments surrounding the president, including his recent statement lashing out against his voters for opposing data centers. Hatred for these AI-focused building projects has become remarkably consistent across partisan lines, leaving Trump in a tough bind given his efforts to court the AI industry to his side.

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign," Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday.

When asked about the comment, Haberman invoked a notable quote from former President George W. Bush, who once joked to a group of wealthy donors that they were his base. Now, she added, "the tech leaders have become Trump's base in many ways," noting the parade of "just one tech leader after another, coming and paying tribute to the president" early on in his second term.

"And he has gotten very enmeshed in that," Haberman said. "He did become, pretty quick overnight, an evangelist for AI after being really concerned about it. But now, yes, you have a scenario where he is saying things that most people who voted for him, a number of people who voted for him, are very loud that they don't want. And there's just — his information ecosystem is very small."

Haberman was also pressed about the odd circumstances surrounding the GOP's midterm convention, a first-of-its-kind event set to take place September 9-10 in Dallas. Many observers have noted that these events will be taking place on the same nights as major opening games for the new NFL season, likely drawing significant attention away from them. Haberman chalked this error up to Trump's increasingly small inner circle being more focused on "survival mode" and not being able to see the bigger picture.

"That was an error that some people around him privately acknowledged was something they had not been paying attention to," Haberman explained. "But again, it speaks to how small his circle is. It speaks to how tiny this group of people, who are not just making decisions in the government, but who are advising him politically, is; they're not looking at broader pictures like this. They are in survival mode. And again, that's fine for themselves. But you have all of these members of Congress, you have senators who are complaining privately. Some are fine doing this, some do not want to. They don't want to come off the trail. They don't want to give instant ad copy to democrats of their, you know, faces of them sitting in this crowd while the president says whatever he's going to say."

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Bush’s refusal to call out Trump adds another failure to his mired legacy

When George W. Bush left office, he was among the most unpopular presidents in American history, and he faded into the background, spending his days painting. He remained silent during President Barack Obama's administration and during Donald Trump's presidency and critics wonder why.

Writing for The New Yorker, Jacob Weisberg argues that Bush’s enduring refusal to directly condemn Donald Trump isn't principled post-presidential restraint, but a politically convenient silence that comes out of fear, family loyalty and a fixation on repairing his own legacy.

Weisberg describes Bush as someone whose public values stand in stark contrast to those of Trump's, with his support for immigration, free trade, diplomacy, civic decency and global health. Yet, Bush has consistently avoided naming or even challenging the president, even after he issued startling cuts to Bush's long-running program to help reduce HIV/AIDS in Africa. Weisberg can't understand why, as the only living former Republican president, Bush is refusing to allow the GOP to be remade in Trump's image.

"Trump came after PEPFAR on his first day back in office," recalls Weisberg. "On January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14155, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and Executive Order 14169, freezing foreign aid, including PEPFAR. After Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development, the primary steward of American health assistance abroad, uncertainty hovered over what remained of the program. According to Brooke Nichols, a professor of global health at Boston University who specializes in the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, cuts to PEPFAR cost more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand lives within a year — nearly a quarter of the approximately seven hundred and eighty thousand deaths caused by Trump’s foreign-aid cutbacks as a whole."

Bush remained silent. Even now, as data shows the startling impact of eliminating PEPFAR, Bush is silent. It was Obama, along with U2 singer Bono, who attended a "thank you" video conference to praise USAID workers fired by the Trump administration.

“Is it in our national interests that twenty‑five million people who would have died now live?” Bush asked. “I think it is, and so do you.”

Yet, Weisberg writes, "Bush wouldn’t name the man ending the program or give permission for the video to be released publicly."

Once Trump took office, he trashed many of the Bush-era Republican positions, like building international alliances, trade and a more empathetic rhetoric toward immigrants. Trump had campaigned on “America First,” tariffs, and hard-line immigration policies. In the early days, Bush would occasionally offer indirect rebukes. After the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Bush condemned “bullying and prejudice” while giving a eulogy for his father, the report recalls. Still, he never named Trump.

When Trump fans marched to the U.S. Capitol and began beating police officers and breaking into the building, all Bush would say publicly was that the violent uprising was “a sickening and heartbreaking sight,” recalls Weisberg. Bush said the violence was “reckless behavior” spread by political leaders who relied on “falsehoods."

Bush is old-school, the columnist argues. He's made it clear that he doesn't believe former presidents should comment on current presidents, even one as extreme as Trump. Weisberg calls it a cop-out. There are no binding historical rules that demand it, as became clear during Joe Biden's administration when Trump went on the attack almost daily. Former Republican presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover were willing to bash their predecessors.

Weisberg said that it's possible Bush may fear provoking Trump, want to protect family members from threats, avoid harming the political career of his pro-Trump nephew George P. Bush or simply lack interest in reentering partisan fights. Bush could also fear that his legacy won't be seen as positive after he brought the U.S. into an unpopular war based on false information. Bush's failures around Hurricane Katrina and the economic crisis are still fresh in the minds of Americans. So, Trump could easily revive Bush's failures were he to weigh in, even impact fundraising for Bush's presidential library.

Weisberg closed by maintaining that Bush should set aside all trepidation and lend his voice to returning his party to a more logical position. Otherwise, he runs the risk of adding another failure to his legacy.

"Trump was burning his house down, and all Bush could bring himself to say was that it was a shame to see it destroyed. Perhaps he will paint portraits of some of the victims," Weisberg said.

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Don Lemon’s lawyers detail 'government misconduct' in motion to dismiss case

Former CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane reported on Tuesday that Don Lemon's lawyers are demanding the Justice Department dismiss its case against him.

The former CNN host, along with other local reporters, has been in an entrenched battle with a Minneapolis prosecutor claiming that journalists reporting on a protest at a church were part of the protest. They all vehemently deny the charges and have produced interviews and videos from that day to back up their legitimacy.

There has been an ongoing concern among the defendants that Justice Department lawyers may have misled the grand jury to secure the indictments against the journalists. Lemon and the other reporters, including targeted investigative reporter Georgia Fort, asked for access to the grand jury transcript to more closely examine what the grand jury was told and by whom.

Last week, the judge ruled that the grand jury transcripts be released to her for review.

Now, Lemon's lawyers want the case thrown out based on those materials, MacFarlane saw in the court filing.

Lemon's attorneys claim that the "government improperly posted defamatory comments & prejudicial photographs of certain defendants on social media," including social media posts by former Attorney General Pam Bondi.

"A continuation of the X post by the White House reposted commentary by former Attorney General Pam Bondi which stated that federal agents had executed the arrest of Ms. Armstrong 'at my direction,'" the court filing said. "The post also contained text stating, 'UPDATE: A second arrest has been made at my direction. Chautyll Louisa Allen has been taken into custody.' The White House also posted on its X page a photograph of Ms. Allen being arrested. The photograph appears to show Ms. Allen in a room where she is confined with two agents on each side."

"The Defendants are now on notice that the Government will not hesitate to publicize information about their cases — true or not. This could certainly have an impact on whether witnesses are willing to come forward to testify in this case (acknowledging witnesses' reluctance to testify when presented with 'spectacle' and 'repercussions')," the filing continues.

Lemon, along with the others named, was charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act), which prohibits physical obstruction to interfere with people seeking or providing reproductive health services or exercising religious freedom at places of worship. Protesters began shouting during a church service and journalists were there to report on it. After the fact, the Trump administration said that they were protesting along with the other people and thus violated the FACE Act.

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He's insane: The leaked backlash that could wreck Trump’s second term

Last week, I said the president is insane. Donald Trump has been proving the point since.

  • On his social media site, Truth Social, he posted an image of a map with Lake Ontario crossed out in red and "Lake America" superimposed over the lake in gold lettering.
  • In another instance, he posted an AI-generated video of himself kicking over a sign for Lake Ontario, installing a new one reading "Lake America," then dancing to "YMCA."
  • He posted an AI-generated video of a platoon of Canada geese armed with machine guns, carried with human arms, invading Canada, presumably, to rename Lake Ontario. The geese have Trump-style golden hair. This is all done to the "Hawaii Five-O" theme song.
  • He posted an AI image of himself wearing sun glasses and a black suit, carrying a machine gun, while bombs are going off in a background scene that I guess is supposed to evoke a desert village in Iran. Over the top of that is written: "NO MORE MR NICE GUY."
  • Last night, he posted a video of Kharg Island being "blown to smithereens." It is clearly an AI-generated video of Iran's main oil depot being destroyed, but Trump does not say so.

When the second Trump term began, such "trolling" might have been "cuter," to use the word Aaron Blake chose to describe the "renaming" of Lake Ontario. But with a never-ending war, and with never-ending inflation on account of a never-ending war, the cuteness is gone.

Even so, Trump keeps doing it, apparently expecting a different result.

Because he's insane.

And it's getting worse.

There is a bipartisan backlash against AI and data centers. Communities nationwide are pushing back. Yet today, Trump said critics just want to be "backwards and poor." He added: "If [communities] want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. ... If you kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame."

The economy lost a monthly average of 27,000 jobs over nine months ending in March of this year, according to new government data. Economist Danielle DiMartino Booth told Fox that number stands in contrast to the minimum number needed – 36,000 – to cover population growth. Yet Trump repeatedly brags that "there are more people working today in the United States of America than at any time in the history of our country." (Yes, there are more people working today than in the past, because more people exist today than in the past.)

And expect more shock at Stop & Shop. On Sunday, Axios said analysts warn "that global food inflation would hit 5 percent in the first half of 2027, nearly double what it was in the first half of 2026." I guess that's no problem. “I inherited very, very high costs, and they’re all coming down now,” Trump said August 4. “The food, the groceries, it’s all coming down.”

USA Today columnist Rex Huppke said this morning that "as the midterm elections draw near, Trump and Co. have nothing to brag about. We know this because Trump brags more than anyone, and all we’re getting from him is garbage and insipid distractions.”

True, but the distractions are no longer a sideshow.

They're the main event now.

Because he's insane.

Is it any wonder that top military brass have no confidence in the commander-in-chief? The Post reported Sunday on a secret internal memo called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book in which Pentagon leaders said the war against Iran, which has reached the six-month mark, is unsustainable and risks weakening America's ability to confront threats elsewhere in the world, namely China. One source told the Post that the war is "too much for too long."

The Post: "The US European Command, the US Pacific Command and the US Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a 'non-concur,' those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless."

Translation: They'll do as they're told, but they believe the war is over. Iran won.

Why would they have confidence?

  • The Strait of Hormuz is closed.
  • Iran is intractable.
  • Global allies are alienated.
  • Global adversaries are laughing.
  • Munitions are depleted.
  • Military morale is in the toilet.

But most of all, the people in charge are not trying to win. The "secretary of war" cracks "jokes" about transgender people in uniform. The vice president tells Trump whatever he wants to hear. The commander-in-chief busies himself posting AI-generated videos of Kharg Island being "blown to smithereens." War is hell. War is hard. Trolling is much more fun.

Military leaders basically held a no-confidence vote on the commander-in-chief, and he lost.

Because he's insane.

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Scalia panic sparked a secret Supreme Court plot to hide its history: NYT

The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 is mainly remembered for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) blocking then-President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the seat — and keeping the seat open until Obama left office. But according to the New York Times' Jodi Kantor, there was another significant event at the High Court that year: a plot to hide part of SCOTUS' history.

Kantor, the Times, explains, "In early 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly of a heart attack on a Texas ranch, sending his Supreme Court colleagues into a period of grief and uncertainty. Behind closed doors, they had to contend with another piece of unsettling news. Justice Scalia, the leading light of the conservative legal movement, had left no plans for his working papers, according to five people aware of the situation. For a Supreme Court justice, this was the equivalent of dying without a will. With no instructions for creating an archive or opening it to the public, the definitive inside account of his work — and the Court's — could be lost or emerge with uncomfortable speed."

According to Kantor, Scalia's colleagues "entered into private negotiations to try to head off any such situation in the future."

"In a series of memos and conference meetings," Kantor reporters, "Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led the surviving justices in discussions about imposing a more uniform seal for their own papers, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

The absence of instructions from Justice Scalia and ensuing confidential conversations, which have not previously been reported, help explain why the nation's highest court can be so difficult to understand. The ultimate record of the Court's work is considered the personal property of each justice, to dispose of or share as he or she chooses. And many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come."

Kantor notes that unlike the U.S. government's executive branch, the judicial branch has "no laws to determine what the justices save, shred, burn or reveal, or when."

"People familiar with the episode after Justice Scalia's death, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the Court's sensitivity over disclosure of internal workings, recalled that a consensus was reached, but had differing memories of its terms and how solid or lasting it was," according to Kantor. "Still, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just a few years later, provides a clue: Her Supreme Court papers went, at her direction, to the Library of Congress on the condition that no case file would be opened until every justice involved in the matter had died, a restriction that could lock away many documents for decades."

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Military leaders in 'denial' over Trump danger: ex-Air Force chief

Military leaders are taking a major risk by treating President Donald Trump's power grabs as normal, one former Air Force secretary wrote for the New York Times, calling their "denial" strategy a "cop-out that is putting democracy at risk."

Frank Kendall III is a military veteran who most recently served as the Secretary of the Air Force under former President Joe Biden. On Tuesday, he published a new op-ed relaying his growing concerns about the air of normalcy that still pervades the military under Trump.

"I attended a military retirement ceremony last month at which Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the presiding officer and featured speaker," Kendall wrote. "It was eerily, even alarmingly normal. In a large room full of current and retired senior military officers, everyone was playing the same game of 'Let’s pretend everything is fine.'”

He continued: "Denial is one of the two approaches the nation’s senior military leaders seem to have taken to cope with Donald Trump’s presidency. When they aren’t ignoring how abnormal things have become, they turn to the other approach, claiming that they have no responsibility for the actions the armed forces have been ordered to take because those orders were 'policy' choices outside the scope of their duties. This is a cop-out, and it is putting our democracy at risk."

Kendall further explained that Caine himself has advocated for military leaders not to "say whether the military should do the things the president wants," but rather to simply "tell the president and the secretary of defense whether the military can do whatever civilian leadership asks it to do." The reality, he argued, "isn’t that simple," as the administration has already been engaged in actions that these leaders "should consider outrageous and unacceptable," citing the bombing of boats in the Caribbean and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Now, concerns are mounting about Trump's desire to deploy troops in American cities, to quash protests, seize election equipment or do something else equally nefarious. Kendall claims to have heard major concerns about the state of things in the military from less senior members.

"Many lower-level officers I have spoken with are privately appalled but afraid to challenge what they are seeing," Kendall wrote. "The collective hope seems to be that if they can all just go on as if nothing unusual is occurring, that this time will pass and nothing bad will happen to them — no loss of position, no demotion or forced retirement, no loss of reputation, no removal from a promotion list by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth."

He later concluded: "Our senior military leaders, including General Caine, might face even tougher tests from here. Although General Caine has indicated that there are no plans for the use of troops in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility. No pretense of normality, no artificial distinction between policy and military matters, and no lawyer’s justification can relieve our senior military leaders from their oath, the burdens of their conscience, or of the judgment of the men and women they lead, the American people and history. From all of these, there is no place to hide."

Recent reports indicate that top military leaders have internally expressed the opinion that the war with Iran is effectively over, and that the U.S. has lost, though they also remain committed to carrying out any orders they received despite this depleted confidence.

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