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The past terrifying week has caused me to wonder: How did America ever get to a point where one man, backed by the military might of the United States, could credibly threaten death to an entire civilization?

I’m also wondering how 19 super-rich American households could have added $1.8 trillion to their wealth in just the last 24 months — roughly the size of the economy of Australia — while the rate of child poverty in the U.S. has more than doubled, from a low of 5.2 percent in 2021 to over 13 percent now?

How have we come so perilously close to climate catastrophe, with spring temperatures in the Western United States already shattering records — and yet governments are spending over a trillion dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and banks have channeled over $3 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement, while there are almost no funds to protect living ecosystems?

How have we allowed artificial intelligence, the most powerful technology the world has ever seen, to threaten millions of jobs; make vulnerable the software that runs our financial, energy, and defense systems; and potentially destroy the human race — while allowing it to amass so much political power that it eludes all guardrails and regulations?

I have served at the highest levels of the U.S. government. I’ve watched our political and economic systems grow and change over the last 50 years, and I’ve spent much of that time writing about their evolution. I’ve never been reluctant to accuse those in power of abusing their authority.

While I have some ideas about how and why our system has sacrificed democracy and critical thought to the false gods of greed and growth (anyone interested in my tentative thoughts is more than welcome to read my recent Coming Up Short), I cannot state with certainty how we arrived at this point.

Yet notwithstanding how we got here, how do we change course? I refuse to accept that we cannot, or that it’s too late.

On Friday, I taught students who are seeking degrees in public policy. They wanted to know why — given all this — I remain optimistic.

I told them that I have faith in the goodness and reasonableness of the American people when they become aware of huge problems that threaten our and the world’s existence. And that the problems I’ve mentioned have now reached such size and dangerousness that the public can no longer ignore them.

We are, I think, coming to a tipping point in how we understand the challenges to our continued existence.

As author Jeremy Lent has written:

“A civilization built on a different foundation would start from an acknowledgment that the deep interconnectedness of all life is not romantic aspiration but scientific fact — confirmed by complexity science, systems biology, and Earth science, and affirmed by wisdom traditions of cultures that never lost that understanding.
From this recognition, different goals follow: not perpetual growth but setting the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerated Earth. Not maximization of returns on capital but the kind of reciprocal, mutualistic relationship with living systems that makes long-term human wellbeing possible.
There is no blueprint that will save us. No one person or group can design in advance what such a civilization will look like in its particulars. But a framework of core principles can orient us — the way a distant horizon orients a traveler moving through unmarked terrain.
You may not yet see the exact path, but knowing the general direction changes everything about which opportunities you embrace and which you recognize as alluring detours.
The trance that keeps us from seeing this is powerful. But it has been broken before. Every paradigm that once seemed like reality itself — the divine right of kings, the natural inferiority of women, the Earth at the center of the universe — turned out to be a myth that was shattered.”

I agree with Lent. It’s time to eschew the myths that contributed to the reelection of the most dangerous person ever to occupy the White House, myths that continue to limit our beliefs and imaginations: that widening inequality and an ever-larger military are necessary and inevitable, that we need a billionaire oligarchy to guide our economy and a “strongman” to lead our government, that a political revolution founded on returning American democracy to the ideal of self-government would be too destabilizing, that continued growth of the Gross Domestic Product is an unmitigated good, and that more “productivity” and “efficiency” are always beneficial.

The most dangerous myth of all is that there is no alternative to the path we’re on, that we have no control over our destiny, and that, just as it was inevitable that we came to where are, our unraveling is similarly inevitable.

I refuse to accept this deterministic myth. The first act of genuine systemic change is to stop believing it.

It’s been a terrifying week, but one that is awakening millions of people.

Thank you for being an ally in seeking a better world.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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

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

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

Go back just a few weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.

Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.

When Trump appointed Atkins chair of the SEC, he was co-chair of the Token Alliance, a cryptocurrency advocacy group, and he owned $6 million worth of holdings in crypto-related businesses.

During Atkins’s time at the SEC, the commission has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to fraud.

It’s also avoided politically sensitive cases — such as, let me hazard a guess, insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies.

Why do I mention insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies?

Because on Monday, March 23, at 7:05 a.m. ET, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Tehran over a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION” to hostilities.

Immediately, the stock market roared to life. The S&P 500 futures soared more than 2.5 percent before the opening bell. And oil futures (bets on the future prices of oil) plummeted, dropping 14 percent in a matter of minutes.

But something very peculiar happened 15 minutes before Trump’s post.

I apologize in advance for giving you a bunch of charts, but it’s important that you see exactly what happened at 6:50 Eastern Time Monday morning.

At 6:49 a.m. ET, traders placed 734 bets on crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange. One minute later, at 6:50 a.m., that number had jumped to 2,168 — equivalent to about $170 million.

At the same time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — West Texas Intermediate futures also saw a huge spike in trading activity.

The same pattern was seen in contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 6:48 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That’s about $150 million in contracts.

A similar spike in trades occurred between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET in futures contracts for the Standard & Poor 500 stock index, the Euro Stoxx 50, and other stock markets.

At 6:50 AM ET, $1.5 billion in notional value of S&P 500 futures contracts were bought.

In other words, 15 minutes before Trump announced that the U.S. would postpone strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the volume of stock market trades mysteriously spiked and the price of oil just as mysteriously plunged.

Yet at that time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — there were no public indications that any serious talks had been taking place between the U.S. and Iran.

So this huge spike in stock market trades and drop in oil futures must have been made by someone, or some people, who had prior knowledge of Trump’s announcement.

This person or these people made a boatload of money off this inside information.

But who was the inside trader, or traders, who placed such huge bets on Trump doing exactly what he did?

Could it be, say, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who is one of the people representing the United States in negotiations with Iran, and is also operating a private-equity firm with over $6 billion in investments, heavily funded by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, especially Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund?

Or Steve Witkoff, who’s also representing the U.S. in these negotiations and who also has his own investment firm?

Or Howard Lutnick?

Or Melania?

Or all of them?

Who knows?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is in charge of policing against such insider trading. On the basis of the trading I mention above, ordinarily the SEC by now would have opened an investigation.

But so far, nothing.

This isn’t the first time spikes in betting have occurred just before Trump did something unexpected.

In January, wagers surged on Polymarket, a crypto-powered predictions platform, as bets were made on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro being out of power by the end of the month. Hours later, he was seized by American forces. (One account made more than $436,000 from a $32,537 bet.)

Why should we worry about people with insider information profiting in the stock market, futures markets, or even crypto-powered predictions markets?

For one thing, it’s unfair. It hurts average investors while increasing the wealth of certain people who know, for example, what Trump is about to do (including Trump and members of his family).

For another, such rigging erodes public confidence in market fairness, which ultimately destroys markets. Put simply, if the public believes the market is rigged in favor of privileged individuals, they may withdraw their investments.

This is why the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to police the market against insider trading.

And why we should all be concerned that the top enforcement officer at the SEC abruptly resigned last week because the SEC’s chairman and other Republican appointees wouldn’t allow her to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct against Trump’s inner circle.

And why what occurred Monday morning, 15 minutes before Trump’s public announcement, is so damned troubling.

Friends, there’s a word for this. It’s called corruption.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

When Republicans started calling our Defense Department the “Department of War” it probably should have been a dead giveaway for what was most assuredly coming next.

When the most bloodthirsty and immoral president in American history, Donald Trump, appointed a high-octane oil slick like Pete Hegseth to lead that shell-shocked department, it should have been dreadfully obvious that human beings, not soaring prices, would be under steady attack as long as this violent regime could hold onto power.

Just 14 months into his vile second term, consumer prices are rising quickly across the board, and we are at war seemingly everywhere because it turns out Trump is the most Republican president in my long lifetime. Trump, unlike his phony predecessors in the GOP like the Bushes, isn’t even pretending he gives a damn about the myriad issues that affect Americans’ daily lives, or even life itself for that matter.

Trump knows what his voters really like, and is delivering it to them wrapped cold in body bags.

When he said with a shrug last week after the first three troops were killed in his sinful Iran War, “There will likely be more [deaths] before it ends. That’s the way it is,” he was telling us just how little he values their lives.

Because that is how it really is with Republicans, and has been my entire life.

In Trump’s world there are the billionaire elites, who prop him up and fill both his bottomless pockets and unquenchable malignant narcissism to overflowing, and there are the expendable “suckers and losers” he abuses like so many of the women who have crossed his crooked path.

Trump and his Republicans don’t value life, they celebrate violence and death, and the more brutal and bloody it is the better. This really needs to be talked about more, because it is true, and that truth — like so many countless people and places around the globe and certainly right here in America — has taken one helluva beating the past decade ...

The “shock and awe” of the senseless War in Iraq was just a warm-up act for what we are getting right now from a monster who ran on “no new wars” but has now attacked eight different countries, on four different continents to give his electorate what they really want, but would prefer we didn’t talk about.

High prices, inflation, and affordability issues were just a polite front for what really gets their cold hearts beating: death, destruction, and plenty of it.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Friday revealed that 84 percent of Republicans favor this illegal war in Iran, because if they can’t have the lower prices they lied to us they cared about, they will damn sure get the pain and punishment they have proven they crave so much.

The truth is Republicans absolutely love this illegal war in Iran, because they will have the carnage from the racist, America-attacking thug they voted for not once, not twice, but three times.

Can we all finally admit that the cruelty really is the point with Republicans?

For the Republican voter, the 2024 election was never about lowering prices. Oh, sure, that would have been a nice little perk, but Trump’s appeal to the average Republican voter was always his unlimited capacity to say and do the very worst things on their behalf.

Instead of bringing them lower prices, he has brought them blood by the bucketful, via public beatings, and murders that make the hair on the back of their necks stand at attention.

Google “ICE beatings” and you can spend the rest of your day watching masked government agents slamming heads into concrete walls and sidewalks, throwing women into the street, dragging people out of their houses by their hair, and crying children being ripped from their parents’ arms.

These voters didn’t vote for Trump in spite of all those horrible things, they voted for him because of them.

No matter how high prices get, or how bad it gets for the working folk in America, Republicans can always, always, always count on their grotesque president taking their anger out on everybody else.

They concocted stories of brown and black boogeymen eating our dogs and cats so when the time came they could justify dehumanizing them and shooting and beating them to death.

The revolting Kristi Noem wasn’t fired this week because of any of the many heinous acts under her charge — including mass murder — at the out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (DHS). No, she was finally let go, because she gave herself, and not her orange, thin-skinned boss a starring role in an absurd $200 million-plus taxpayer-funded ad campaign.

The insane commercials feature the pie-eyed, flounder-lipped Noem celebrating herself by riding around Mount Rushmore on the back of a poor horse, whose life was in danger the minute she clapped a saddle on his back.

Noem did everything Trump wanted during her revolting tenure at DHS, except get caught, and I promise you that the average Republican voter still absolutely loves her for it.

Noem’s firing was no doubt instructive to Hegseth, who has been given carte blanche to devalue as many human lives as possible, including and mostly the troops under his charge, just as long as Trump gets all the credit for bringing the Republican voters the carnage they love.

It should be inconceivable that such a low form of life would be allowed within 1,000 miles of our armed forces, much less commanding them. Under Hegseth’s crooked charge, our military is no longer being ordered to honorably take the high ground, and are instead being threatened to go just as low as possible.

His very presence atop our Defense Department puts our troops in more and more danger each day, because mark my words, the time is coming when their adversaries will dish out the same terrible punishment to them that they have been ordered by Hegseth to inflict on others.

Most of us who wore the uniform in war and peace, did so because we believed in high ideals. We took an oath to follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and march in the footsteps of the thousands of brave souls who came before us, and stormed that beach, or bravely engaged that vaunted enemy carrier group.

War is hell, yes, but it is supposed to be fought with bravery, honor, and under the written laws that guide our military.

What would any of our prisoners of war through the years say about shooting men, who have long since surrendered and are helplessly clinging to the wreckage of a boat, pleading for their lives?

This is the type of thing coming for our troops if God forbid their vessel is ever blown to bits, or their boots ever hit the ground in Iran or elsewhere, because Hegseth and the draft-dodging Trump, have signaled to our enemies that our troops don’t matter much, and there are no longer any rules for engagement.

It is exactly what you would expect from a Commander-in-Chief, who disgraces the graves of our fallen and has never been brave enough to serve anybody but himself.

We are a nation at war with itself, and everybody around us, because that is exactly how the Republican Party likes it.

Violence, war and hate are their hallmarks, and the only things they have consistently delivered to the American public for the past 75 years.

There is nothing new about any of this, except that they’ve finally found a leader who can provide all that with a smile on his face.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

Until yesterday, it wasn’t clear to me why Savannah Guthrie’s mom was still missing nearly a month after her disappearance. Then came images Sunday of the FBI director, Kash Patel, partying with members of the US Olympic hockey team after they won the gold medal.

Then it all started to make sense.

Why wouldn’t Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping remain unsolved given the country’s leading lawman doesn’t take the law seriously? He thinks the FBI gives him access to things other people can’t, as if law and order were an exclusive membership card to an elite club.

Meanwhile, real people suffer.

For all we know, Nancy Guthrie could be dead.

If you haven’t heard, Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded jet to Italy to watch the men’s hockey final. His office said he was checking on security. His people accused reporters of lying when they reported the news. Their boss, with images of his partying, exposed their lies.

Sunday’s episode was only one instance of a larger pattern of lawlessness that's getting so big that the Times noted that Patel has “shown little willingness to curb or even conceal his jet-setting." He "has offered comparable explanations" (ie, lies) "to provide SWAT team protection for his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, a country singer and rightwing activist, as well as for his heavy use of federal resources for travel that has at times appeared to blur professional lines.”

The Times said that "over the summer, he flew on a government jet from the Washington area to Inverness, Scotland, for a getaway at the exclusive golf resort, the Carnegie Club, with friends ... He has also taken flights, at taxpayer expense, to a private hunting ranch in Texas and to a wrestling match in State College, Pa., to watch a performance by Ms. Wilkins.

The Times and others say Patel’s bad behavior comes in spite of “multiple, fast-developing crises.” These include Americans in Mexico being told to shelter in place after a drug cartel leader was killed by the military. Closer to home, police killed a Florida man who tried to enter Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas can. Scott MacFarlane added more context:

The FBI is being pushed by Epstein survivors to do more to investigate some of the people … that have come out in the released batch of Epstein files, which show the circle that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein as he prayed on girls and young women. … All these things, not to mention crime nationwide, opioid crisis, gun crimes, child pornography, drug running, gun running, are happening as the FBI director is ... partying with his buddies.

But I think it’s the other way around. It’s not that Patel’s lawlessness is happening in light of these crimes. They are happening in light of his lawlessness. Why care about the law, or criminal consequences, when the country’s leading lawman shows so much contempt for it?

The Times reported that Patel was cheering Team USA when he tweeted that the FBI would dedicate “all necessary resources” to investigating the Mar-a-Lago incident. The implication is that he’s falling down on the job, as “all necessary resources” clearly didn’t include him.

But consider the message he's sending – that law enforcement is just empty talk. That's more consequential than falling down on the job. With his actions, Patel is saying that as long as you’re hooked up to the right people, you can do all the criming you want. Even if you’re not hooked up, just wait. When the cops are away, the criminals can come out to play.

This message was deepened by Patel’s (almost certainly fictional) claim that he was invited by the men’s hockey team to celebrate their victory with them. A different FBI director would have refused such an invitation out of concern that accepting it would not only compromise the bureau’s standing with the American people but also appear to encourage lawlessness. But public trust means little to a man who acts like he will never face public accountability.

Lawlessness isn’t harmless.

An FBI director who properly feared public accountability would never have let an Arizona sheriff investigate Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance without the FBI’s aid. He or she would have given Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos a choice: save yourself the humiliation of failure by accepting that the FBI is “the premier agency to deal with kidnappings,” as one expert described the bureau, or I will open my own investigation and guarantee your humiliation.

Instead, the FBI joined the investigation many days after Guthrie went missing, a debilitating loss of time, critics told the New York Post, that allowed for serious errors – for instance, surrendering the crime scene too soon, “with everyone from reporters to true-crime sleuths able to walk right up to Guthrie’s front door with no security or crime scene tape.”

As things stand, Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is now approaching a month in duration. Her family seems increasingly desperate. Savannah Guthrie herself is forced to make public pleas to her mom’s kidnappers that yield no results. Nanos and Patel are both humiliated, but only Nanos, who faces future reelection as a sheriff, will be held accountable. Meanwhile, Patel jet-sets on the taxpayer dime, hastening the decline of public faith in law enforcement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How presidential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten years of cruelty framed as strength.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we must model something better ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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