We have been subject to the sociopath for a year and a half — 18 months of the most loathsome, least competent, and most corrupt person ever to be president of the United States.

We’ve watched him take a meat-axe to every major institution of our democracy, draw the nation into a never-ending war, establish a murderous domestic police state, reject renewable energy in favor of the dirtiest possible fossil fuels, make billions off his presidency, and cause most Americans to become poorer and less economically secure.

But here’s the good news. The sleeping giant of America is finally awakening.

Trump’s poll numbers are plummeting. They’re now at record lows. Even many Republicans have had enough. Progressives are winning election after election around the country.

The sleeping giant has always remained asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some acts so disrespectful of the common good, some brutalities so noisy, that the giant has no choice but to awaken — blinking both eyes and then roaring, “What the hell is going on here?”

The first time I saw him awaken was during the witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy. He awoke again when the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop the Civil Rights Movement. Again when the Vietnam War was taking the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. And again when Richard Nixon threatened our system of government.

Each time the sleeping giant of America has awakened, the good sense of the American people has stopped whatever it is that awakened him. Again and again, we put the nation back on track toward democracy and social justice.

Trump isn’t gone yet, of course. He has another two and a half years. But he’s on his way out. He’ll soon be a cringeworthy irrelevance, a fat lame duck, excrement on the sidewalk of history.

In a few years, Trump’s gilded monuments will be razed, his name removed from every building and pediment, his pathetic attempts to glorify himself turned into bad jokes, his legacy object lessons in why big money must be banned from politics and dastardly dickheads like Elon Musk kept away from the levers of government power.

Trump will still cause a great deal of damage over the remainder of his term, the way a wild pig who’s been gored wreaks mayhem before it expires.

So this is no time to let down our guard or become overly confident about the coming midterm elections.

Quite the contrary. One hundred days from today must be a historic repudiation of Trump and his entire disgusting regime.

The blue wave must be a tsunami — inundating everything Trump may attempt to do to hold on to the House and Senate, overwhelming whatever lies he may tell about the election, and enveloping him in a rejection that’s so unmistakeable, a rebuke so unequivocal, a reproach so unambiguous as to cause the great giant of America to get up and dance.

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/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the receipts came in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most beautiful human experiment in the world is turning 250. Democracy lasting this long is cause for celebration, but an alarming drop in intelligence suggests its future birthdays are numbered.

For nearly a century, average IQ scores in the U.S. rose consistently, but recent evidence flips this trend on its head.

Studies now show a measurable decline in cognitive scores among Americans across most fields. Northwestern University researchers report that test scores in three out of four cognitive domains have gone down. Another confirmed a steady decline in average IQ scores — with each new generation scoring about five points lower than the one before.

Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, explores this dumbing-down process. Analysts today note how it culminated in the election of a functionally illiterate reality TV host as president, an ignorant man who reduces complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus them, black vs. white, patriots vs. scum, opinion vs. science, etc. No doubt our lowered intelligence led 77 million Americans to vote against their own interests; polls before the 2024 election suggested half the country, lied to by Fox News, was about to engage in self sabotage.

Trump’s base today is comprised of Christians who defend Trump’s debauchery; poor people who donate to a billionaire’s Ponzi schemes while he illegally pocketed nearly $2 billion in profits; and pensioners who still don’t grasp that tax cuts for the 1% threaten their own entitlements.

Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors, yet somehow, that fact doesn’t seem to compute. To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us. But stupid seems to be spreading in the U.S., and data suggest that excessive sensory stimulation may be the reason.

Our politics reflect a cognitive decline, but what is causing the decline?

Trump’s declaration, “I love the poorly educated” is a self-own as the U.S. slumbers toward Idiocracy, a funny-not-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500 who have lost the ability to think. In the movie, Americans elect as President a dimwitted pro-wrestler- President Camacho- because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.

Funny as that movie is, America’s declining cognition, reflected in falling logic, language, and reading comprehension levels, is serious. In 1850, unwashed kids aged 6 to 18 were crammed into a smelly one-room school house with no AC and no technology- and often no books- yet still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.

Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate rooms for each grade, and teacher/student ratios historically unheard of, student comprehension levels are falling instead of rising. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13 year-olds hit their lowest scores in decades.

It’s our hand held devices, stupid

The explanation may be found in a growing reliance on smart phones, social media and electronic devices that offer addictive and excessive visual and audio stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.

Observational studies in human learning have shown a direct link between a child’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life and his subsequent attentional deficits as he gets older. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase cognitive and behavioral deficits overall. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.

More studies are needed on how excessive online stimulation affects cognition and mental health, regardless of age, and Congress may (shockingly) do something about it. In 2023, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill to study how cell phones affect mental health and cognitive development, but it did not advance to a vote.

Over-stimulation, overall, reduces our ability to think

It seems logical that over-stimulating the human brain with loud colors and noises would, over time, reduce our capacity for nuanced and critical thinking. Just as over-reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, over-exposure to electronics and addictive but thoughtless social media can atrophy the learning centers of the brain.

Smart phones aren’t the only culprit. Recent studies have also shown that high levels of noise, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and loud, omnipresent television, also leads to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.

It’s been reported that 100 million people are exposed to dangerous environmental noise due to traffic, personal listening devices and other sources. Noise pollution has emerged as a risk factor for depression, cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system leading to emotional stress, anxiety, cognitive and memory defects.

It seems the entire nation could use a long walk in the woods, or an extended visit to one of our 429 national parks — sans devices.

Education levels are affecting U.S. politics

America’s growing political divide may have more to do with education and cognition levels than policy differences. By wide margins, the mostly highly educated Congressional districts in the U.S. elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.

According to data compiled by Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most highly educated Congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump even though Democrats deliver kitchen table results that benefit them most: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, healthcare, and industry regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly off aircraft at 16,000 feet.

Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his advocacy of democratic reforms.

As he astutely observed, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Even though Trump’s former advisors widely regard him as an undisciplined moron, he has a preternatural skill: the manipulation of ignorance.

Call it a conman’s intuition.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The United States is not a grotesque, racist country because of Donald Trump. It is a grotesque, racist country because of the absolutely deplorable people who support him.

There is no him without them.

Read that again.

Without his disgusting supporters, the America-attacking Trump would have been nothing but another wealthy, women-abusing white guy using the money that was handed to him by his sugar daddy to try to stay relevant hawking his broken products, bankrupting start-ups, begging for attention, and cheating on the golf course in the relative obscurity of his leveraged, tacky Florida country club, where the golden bathrooms are overflowing file-holders for all his lost causes.

In other words, he would have been just another filthy-rich Republican …

Except Trump, and his nuclear-powered narcissism just wasn’t content with all that, and desperate for any kind of relevance decided he’d start dealing America’s best-selling product during the past four centuries: hardcore racism.

He knew if he could get his orange little hooks into people and get them to believe he was every bit as big a racist as they were, there wasn’t a single thing he couldn’t claim for himself in America, including the presidency.

“Show us your birth certificate, Barack Obama …”

I have written variations of this piece before, because I have decided that it can never be written about enough. If I have my way, these words will serve as seeds to continue growing a movement and amplifying the powerful words of great artists past and present, who have spent their lives climbing mountains to make sure their message echoes across a country that so badly needs to hear it.

As an aging white man with a pen, I cannot think of a more important topic to lean into, because as long as the color of a person’s skin matters more than their character, we are all living in poisoned, debilitating air.

As long as this idiotic, toxic thing can be exploited to divide us, and hold people down, we are proving without a shadow of a doubt that human beings are the least evolved of God’s living creatures.

Do I expect this bigotry will stop because of the words I put to paper? Of course not.

But that misses the point, too, because this really does need to end just as soon as possible, people, and we all should be doing what we can to put the brakes on it. There is nothing stopping us from doing at least that.

How long will we continue to live with this national emergency?

Just the other evening, during a fake wrestling match on our White House grounds — go ahead and read those 14 words again — a frontal-lobe challenged wrestler named, Josh Hokit, thanked Trump directly for hosting the pathetic event before adding: “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Let’s stop right there for a second.

THIS is what has become of our once hallowed White House grounds. It is now a ghastly plantation, where horrid racism is given the oxygen it needs to breathe by a beady-eyed loathsome orange master who died inside years ago.

It truly is a white’s house.

Trump, wrinkled orange chin jutted forward and celebrating himself while he burns America and the world to a crisp, accepted the bigot Hokit’s words as if they were a bouquet of roses, and smiled.

He smiled.

The President of the United States smiled when a former First Lady was publicly insulted on public property with one of this country’s most insulting, and sickening racist tropes, and all on taxpayers’ dime ...

In other times during my many decades on this earth that ghastly snapshot would be everywhere by now, and roundly condemned by members of both political parties. It would be the beginning of a scandal that would not end until bare minimum, the White House issued a public apology, and showed contrition for such a grotesque, bigoted act.

Except as we close in on America’s 250th birthday, the white’s house has not done any of that.

They have not done any of that because they know that their abhorrent base — many of whom are your white family and friends — love every bit of it.

Turns out, Trump knows them better than you do.

He knows that dragging brown people down lifts them up, and makes them feel good about themselves.

These people didn’t vote for Trump three times because they thought he would improve their lives — there’s been ample proof none of that happened — they did it because he was going to make the lives of the people of color in his country just as miserable as possible.

There’s more than enough proof to back up that claim.

People of color were going to get knocked down and stay down this time. There would be no more voting rights or equal rights measures, because they had inconvenienced enough white people’s lives.

This was all favoritism, not fairness, and in their polluted minds there was nothing fair about lifting people up, who had been held down in chains. Couldn’t these ungrateful Black people have the decency to thank them for removing those chains? Hadn’t these poor white people done enough already?

Well, this time Black people were going to finally learn their lesson and their place in America. This time they were going to be publicly insulted on our White House lawn, caged, and have their voting districts removed. Any institutions, whether it be universities, companies, or media empires that didn’t go along with this would be threatened and severely punished if they dared to speak out against it.

These friends and families of ours — in my case, former friends and family — who STILL support all this are bigots, plain and simple. THEY are America’s greatest sin.

And I know what a few of you white people are thinking right now. I can hear your shuffling feet and pathetic excuses from here. “Well, sure my husband supports Trump, Earl, but I know for a fact he doesn’t like it when Trump does racist things like that.”

Which of course makes it worse.

Because if you vote for, or give safe harbor to a person who acts like a bigot, you are a bigot. You actually know better, but are content to quietly let the cancer spread.

You aren’t the bigger person, you are a sniveling coward.

If one of your husband’s friends told him that you looked like an ape, how would you expect him to react?

Remain friends with the disgusting creep, or belt him in the mouth?

The people I know who support Trump are broken, and simply refuse to be fixed. They somehow think it is their right to inflict themselves on the rest of us, and be just as cruel and odious as they want to be.

It’s all a big, damn joke to them.

These people are cheap shots. Weak. They tried playing me for just another white guy who would go along with all their noxious, racist bile they had done such a clever job of hiding up until 2016. After a decade of screaming at them, I have finally just had to let them go on off and wander in their darkness.

I am no longer worried that my pointed words hurt these people, I am much, much more disheartened that they can’t feel them at all.

So what to do about all this, besides publicly and loudly condemning it and them, while shaking the people who don’t consider this at all? What to do besides standing with people who are worth our loyalty, love and attention?

Vote for Democrats.

I know, I know … but listen to me:

Democrats for all their flaws have passed every important piece of legislation in my lifetime. They give, they don't take. They are not perfect because nobody is.

We simply have to overcome the Republicans’ attacks on America and stand up for her by turning out in overwhelming numbers at the polls to win as many elections as we can.

Again, I realize I am not breaking any news here, just underlining it, and sending it out in boldface type. This means voting for — and better yet working for — the Democratic candidates on the ballot.

Read that again, because I swear to God, if I hear Democrats griping about the candidates who have won their primaries fair and square, I am going to gnaw my keyboard in two, and then come looking for you.

Do you STILL think Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been a far superior president to the repulsive Trump???

I am already seeing this highly stupid crap going on and it positively blows my mind. We stand to lose it all in November unless we can get out of our own way and not let the search for the perfect get in the way of the common good.

Democrats, left-leaners and Independents like myself need to stick together like glue until November. We must become inseparable and walk as one.

That starts RIGHT NOW.

Yes, I have been constructively critical of Democrats in the past, because the party desperately needs some tough love. I do what I can between elections to make sure my team is ready to win, but when election season rolls around the Democrats get my love and my vote every single time.

Anybody who can’t do at least this, needs to stop pretending they are above it all, and start realizing they are part of the problem in America.

Actually it is worse than that: They are bigots.

Do not make me explain this to you again.

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.

On June 1st, despite a ceasefire ostensibly underway in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s prime minister launched a major escalation against Lebanon, including threatening airstrikes against the Lebanese capital. The US president called the Israeli leader, furiously demanding an end to Israel’s escalation. Six days later, Israel attacked Beirut’s southern suburbs, long understood to be a red line for Hezbollah. The Lebanese resistance organization launched a limited response, sending 11 rockets towards Israel, almost all of which were intercepted; no one was hurt or killed. Trump called Netanyahu again, telling him in a brief call that now that Iran and Israel had each “had their fun,” that Israel should stand down.

Commentators across the Middle East and beyond debated whether Netanyahu would abide by Trump’s demand. What virtually none of them mentioned was that Trump had refused to even mention his most important pressure point: that if Israel resisted his order to stand down, the US would simply stop sending tons of weapons and tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. The close but sometimes divergent interests of the Middle East’s two powers, the global and the regional, was on full display.

It’s now been 106 days since Trump launched his preemptive and illegal military attack on Iran. On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to the fury of a new war in the Middle East after the United States and Israel had launched their joint assault against Iran, with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu standing shoulder to shoulder against their common foe. Claiming unbridled hegemony was on the agenda for both.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals.

Today, with yet more fresh promises of a so-called “peace deal” that is nearly ready to be signed by Trump and Iranian leadership, the Israeli military is bombing the suburbs of Beirut despite ongoing claims of a “ceasefire.” Trying to understand the current doom loop, it’s vital we remember how we got here.

In the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with an unknown number of other top military and political leaders, was assassinated with a ballistic missile. Just an hour later, the US fired a Tomahawk missile directly at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the northern Iranian city of Minab—killing 156 people, 120 of them children, and destroying the school. The war’s official reasons, initially, were to eliminate the ostensible threat of Iran creating a nuclear weapon, and to destroy its conventional military capacity. The no-daylight US-Israeli partnership, Trump and Netanyahu as BFFs, the collaboration between the US and Israeli warplanes, bombers, drones, missiles… all seemed seamless and perfect.

Three months later, and half a dozen or so “ceasefires” announced, renounced, ignored and denounced, headlines around the world gleefully recounted a Trump phone call with Netanyahu. Focused on Israel’s escalating bombing of Lebanon threatening to derail the latest US-Iran ceasefire, the June 1 call reportedly started with Trump telling Netanyahu “you’re f------- crazy—you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.“ The US president then went on to his ”Everybody hates you now“ remark. ”Everybody hates Israel because of this,“ he reportedly said.

Trump acknowledged saying it, and then, as is his usual style, moved on, quickly reclaiming his friendship with the Israeli prime minister. As was true with so many earlier ceasefires, Israel continued its massive bombing and its brutal occupation of south Lebanon, making a US-Iran ceasefire impossible. In the meantime, throughout the months of the war, commentators, politicians of all stripes, journalists and analysts across the globe were struggling to figure out what that war was actually being fought for.

War for What?

Real fear of an actual nuclear bomb was certainly not the answer. After all, US intelligence agencies have agreed for years that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Despite that clear assessment, US B-2 stealth bombers still dropped 14 of their 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on Iran’s civilian centrifuges at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz at the end of Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025. Trump and his supporters bragged of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then, eight months after that, in the early days of the US-Israeli 2026 war, those B-2s were back in the air, dropping more 30,000-pound and some smaller versions of the bunker-busters on Iran. Seems they don’t believe even their own intelligence agents.

They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game.

Rationales for the sudden war in 2026 (launched in the midst of US negotiations with Iran for a long-term ceasefire) were tossed around like confetti, ranging from stopping a nuclear threat (which of course didn’t exist because Iran didn’t have, wasn’t trying to make, and hadn’t even made a decision to try to build a nuclear weapon), to ending Iran’s support for its regional allies, to destroying Iran’s navy, to crippling its missile capacity, to protecting Iranian civilians or maybe encouraging a popular uprising, or perhaps even full-scale regime change. Later, once Iran had responded to the attacks by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump shifted to trying to justify the war as a means of forcing the reopening of the Strait, in effect waging the new war to get back to the situation that had existed until the US and Israel launched the war in the first place.

Not a Senseless War

None were very convincing arguments. The popular view emerged that this was a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that was wrong—there was a purpose. Actually, there were several. The Israeli prime minister has shaped his political career, for more than 35 years, around the claim that only he could bring down the Iranian regime, falsely claiming it as an “existential threat” to Israel. (In fact, even if Iran changed its internal decisions and decided to try to build a nuclear weapon some day, it would not represent an existential threat to Israelis but only to Israel’s 47-year-old nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.) Netanyahu needed the war to continue—any ceasefire, under any conditions, would weaken him politically.

On the US side, some of the war’s goals had to do with the personal obsessions of the president and his minions. Trump’s fixation on expanding US power around the world, and more importantly being seen as presiding over a return to the glory days of unchallenged US global domination, remain a driving force—as does his determination to “get a better deal” than Obama did with the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2015. For his self-defined “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, the pageantry of a powerful military—not only “the most lethal” force in the world but more white, more male, and even more slim than any other army—could compensate for Hegseth’s lack of experience. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all roads lead to regime change in Cuba—and supporting all of Trump’s military assaults, including attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping the president and seizing the oil resources of Venezuela, bombing Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, all help set the stage for his life-long goal of destroying the Cuban revolution.

The Search for Hegemony

All those personal obsessions likely played some roles. But the US-Israeli war on Iran is also rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals. While Trump has shown himself for years as far more committed to maximizing his own and his family’s wealth and power than he is accountable to any particular faction of US capital or US elite power (except perhaps “the billionaires,” writ large), the trajectory of imperial expansion, especially in an era of greater and rising powers around the world, continues to shape much of US policy.

That is where the search for hegemony comes to the fore. For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon. That means asserting its power—a derivative power, given its strategic dependence on the United States, but power nonetheless—to seize land, dispossess and expel whole populations, and exert permanent control over countries, economies, and people—whenever, wherever, and for however long it chooses. Without being held accountable.

For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon.

To be recognized as the regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, Israel needs to not only “mow the grass” in Lebanon and in Gaza (as well as arming and empowering ideologically driven settlers in the West Bank to escalate their violent seizure of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of its population), it needs to continue to weaken, threaten, and when possible (with US backing) go to war against Iran, its sole challenger for regional control.

Mowing the Grass

Israelis—military and government officials, academics, journalists and others—routinely use the term “mowing the grass” to describe Tel Aviv’s consistent attacks against Israel’s neighbors. The phrase was first coined to describe Israel’s brutal 22-day assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, that began the day after Christmas 2008 and killed more than 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians and including 300 children. Since then, it describes the frequent attacks on Gaza or Lebanon—ostensibly aimed at militant organizations but designed originally to kill massive numbers of civilians, displace hundreds of thousands or millions from their homes, and destroy huge swathes of homes, schools, churches, mosques, businesses—to remind everyone who it is who actually holds power.

Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

Iran has historically been the main obstacle preventing Israel from consolidating that regional hegemonic role, and part of Netanyahu’s political power depends on his ability to keep the US-Israeli “special relationship” strong and to deal effectively with Iran. So going to war against Iran in complete and willing partnership with the United States serves to strengthen his still-shaky political position. What’s different now is that Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

So Netanyahu remains committed to continuing this war against Iran, opposing ceasefires regardless of their terms—and most recently, escalating attacks against Lebanon precisely because they could prevent or shatter any ceasefire. Following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in 2024, UN peacekeepers on the ground documented more than 10,000 Israeli violations of the agreement in just the first year. When a wobbly US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, 2026, Israel responded with massive force against Beirut, launching more than 100 airstrikes within 10 minutes across the capital and killing 357 people, many of them civilians and at least 101 of them children and women.

Back in the USA….

For the United States, going to war against Iran could strengthen Washington’s longstanding commitment to maintaining global domination—a goal particularly relished by its power-obsessed and erratic president. The war was designed to both demonstrate and bolster the US role as unchallenged global hegemon. And doing so arm in arm with Israel, the regional version.

What a team they thought they would make. What they didn’t reckon with was the reality of Iran—its military, its government, its people. While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

For example, Iran’s relatively few strikes on US bases and sometimes domestic facilities in the surrounding US-backed Gulf states had political consequences beyond their comparatively low levels of casualties. They showed how “protection” in the form of US military bases, weapons and troops in those countries did not keep their people safe, but rather laid a target on their backs. Most especially, Iran’s few direct attacks on ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz early in the war, had the much broader effect of shutting down the vital waterway entirely, as shipowners and insurance companies refused to take the risk.

Miscalculations

When Israel carried out its guided missile attack on the first day of the war, killing the supreme leader and a number of other top officials, the cheering in Washington and Tel Aviv reflected the assumption that the decapitation of the government would lead to chaos and its inability to function. The cheerleaders were wrong. As Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr noted in Foreign Affairs, the US and Israel “expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.” Not only did Khamenei’s son take over his father’s position, but younger military, political, and business leaders filled in the gaps across the structures of power.

And while the Iranian leadership had been significantly weakened by public mobilization against both governmental inability to solve the escalating economic crisis and its increasingly repressive attacks against protesters, it appears it was not further weakened by the US-Israeli assault. As Nasr and Bajoghli describe the situation, the public anger of January 2026 in response to escalating repression of the mass uprisings, didn’t disappear with the US-Israeli assault. They wrote:

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger has not disappeared. The grief, frustration and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the 4th century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the 7th century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.

Palestine

There was another reason for the US-Israeli war, that explains at least the timing, if not the overall rationale—Palestine. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for two years and eight months. There are now more than 73,000 known, identified, named Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by Israeli bombs, tanks, bullets, drones, missiles, almost all paid for (and to a large degree produced) by US taxpayers. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what were once the cities, towns, refugee camps of the decimated Gaza Strip. The statistics belie the lives lost—babies, elders, children. Journalists and health workers in staggering numbers. And Israel’s genocide continues, people are still being killed by Israeli bombs, tanks and drones, as well as deliberately-imposed shortages of water, food, medical supplies, shelter.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler. It is precisely the level of impunity, the absolute lack of accountability for any of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, that has given Israeli and US leaders the confidence to go ahead with what many have called the “Gazafication of Iran” and the “Gazafication of Lebanon” without fearing there might be a price to be paid.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler.

The international arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders (Israel assassinated the Hamas leaders who were similarly charged) are ignored in most of the US-allied countries that Netanyahu and his former defense minister might want to visit. South Africa’s unprecedented effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for its violations of the Genocide Convention resulted in a powerful preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly do constitute genocide. Israel was ordered to carry out specific actions—starting with an end to killing people in Gaza—but it has yet to face any consequences for ignoring those orders. And no one knows when the final ruling might be issued—or if it will lead to some level of enforcement, either in the United Nations, by a coalition of governments, or, most likely by a newly-enraged, newly-engaged global civil society ready to move with ever greater energy, strategic clarity and political power to impose serious consequences on the governments and individuals responsible for the first genocide in history to be carried out openly, proudly, and visible to the world.

War Over War

For now, while the war against Iran continues, it looks like both Israel and the United States are moving into a different phase. They are still looking to claim power, still working to reshape political relations and consolidate regional and global power across the middle east. But rather than simply escalating again, as Israel still is in Lebanon, or continuing a grinding daily assault as it still is in Gaza—both actions armed and paid for by the US—they are facing some changed circumstances. Just maybe Washington and Tel Aviv are finding that it’s harder than they thought to re-order the whole Middle East—and to do that in tandem is harder than ever.

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely. Turns out Iran is not Venezuela. Netanyahu has massive public support among Jewish Israelis for continuing the war in Iran, though support for the war in Lebanon is not so popular. (It should not be forgotten that after 18 years of occupying South Lebanon, Israeli troops were finally pulled out in 2000 primarily because the government could not survive the mobilization of Israeli mothers angry that their sons in the IDF were occasionally being killed by Hezbollah’s retaliation actions..)

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely.

At home Netanyahu may be able to get away with claiming victory over Iran even if a ceasefire is imposed, by continuing Israel’s longstanding practice of assassinating Iranian scientists and political/military leaders, and occasional bombing raids. But Israel’s plummeting losses in the war of global legitimacy are certainly not likely to be reversed any time soon. The most recent Pew survey indicates sky-high majorities holding negative views of Israel and Netanyahu around the world—up to 95% in Pakistan, 78% negative in Sweden and Spain.

The global Palestinian rights mobilizations and the even broader movements for ceasefire and an end to genocide of course play a major role. Social movements and civil society activists around the world will continue to hold up the ICJ decisions and the UN General Assembly resolutions requiring governments to impose arms embargoes, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

And as the Strait remains closed and food shortages mount in the poorest countries, as Arab governments fearing public opposition at home reduce their ties with Israel and reject expansion of the Abraham Accords, and as Israel continues to kill Lebanese and Palestinian families, Trump’s claims will be less likely to be believed. With the mid-terms only a few months off, his claims of “We’re the winner, we won” are already ringing increasingly hollow. It doesn’t mean he won’t make the claims, it just means they’re not going to work.

For Trump, given the unexpected level of resilience in Iran, Tehran’s access to a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones that are doing real damage to Gulf Arab states hosting US bases and troops, and its willingness to close the Strait as a pressure point with global ramifications, it’s going to be difficult to claim this war as a victory.

The search to consolidate regional and global power continues. It’s a big part of the reason the US and Israel are launching new wars and escalating longstanding attacks. People are still losing lands and lives as these hegemons rely on war to consolidate their positions. But neither Israel in the Middle East nor the United States in the world are unchallenged. They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game. The search for hegemonic power is far from settled.

Let’s start with some questions today, before we arrive at the answer.

What if Kamala Harris had become president, promptly leveled the historic East Wing of our White House, and then spent each day like a petrified drama queen shrieking that taxpayers should purchase her a new ballroom?

What if Harris had spent her time in office plastering her face and name on inanimate objects, while food prices she promised to lower spiraled out of control, and then belittled the people who dared mention this?

I’m not done.

What if Harris and her administration had spent their time attacking science and vaccines and then did nothing as Measles — MEASLES — made a deadly comeback across America?

What if Harris had become president and picked silly and insulting fights with our NATO partners who have been with us since WWII, while threatening to invade Greenland like some petulant child?

What if after running a campaign on no new wars, Harris appointed a drunken, racist talk show host to be her Secretary of Defense, who then proceeded to commit a series of war crimes, shared top-secret intelligence with God knows who, brazenly blocked military promotions of women and people of color, and then led a moronic war in Iran that has only succeeded in making America a more dangerous and expensive place?

Sorry, I’m not done yet.

What if instead of supporting Ukraine during their heroic fight on the frontline of democracy that benefits America, Harris berated its leader and then rolled out the red carpet for the murdering fascist, Vladimir Putin, on U.S. soil?

What if instead of prosecuting law and order, Harris appointed HER personal lawyer as OUR attorney general and then went about spending billions of taxpayer dollars to reward the traitors who attacked us on January 6, 2021?

Can you imagine?

What if Kamala Harris had become president and leveled idiotic tariffs on every country she could locate on a map that resulted in making things more expensive for Americans?

What would all those sanctimonious MAGA farmers say about that?

What if instead of answering questions from the media, Harris called them names like piggy, and enemies of the people?

What if after becoming president Harris stayed awake at night hate-posting unhinged bilge directed at 70 percent of America?

What if Harris had become president and got into a bitter feud with the Pope?

What if we found out Harris had been mentioned more than 30,000 times in the Epstein Files, and was a longtime friend of the child-rapist?

What if Harris had become president and spent the first 17 months in office spending more time at Walter Reed Medical Hospital than she did with her husband, and then publicly bragged about passing basic cognitive tests while being held up on swollen ankles?

Can you imagine????

What if Kamala Harris had become president and invited thousands of Blacks to immigrate to America from South Africa, after saying she was closing our borders?

What if Kamala Harris had become president and led a government-wide attack on rural white voters by making it as hard as possible for them to vote?

What is Harris had become president and depicted herself as Jesus Christ in a social media posting?

What if Harris had become president and filled her cabinet with unqualified rightwing talk show hosts and billionaires, whose only talents are filling their bottomless pockets with our money?

What if after becoming president, Harris did everything in her power to strip people of their healthcare, and medicare and medicaid benefits to benefit corporate raiders?

What if after becoming president, Harris set about putting actions in place that will pollute our air and drinking water …?

OK, I’ll stop there, my friends, because we all have things to do this morning while we carry on through the most insane, destructive timeline in American history.

The truth is none of those things would have happened had Harris — or ANY — Democrat been elected president, because we — Democrats and Left-Leaners — would have never allowed it, nor elected anybody — much less a convicted felon — who even hinted at these appalling attacks on America, Americans, and our standing in the world.

It must be said often, and out loud that in 2026 America, our two major political parties are publicly held to completely different standards.

In fact, one of them is held to absolutely NO standards at all.

Read that again.

This is indisputable, and we simply must get to the point where we accept at least this much, or we are done for good.

Finished.

That this ongoing and brutal numbing of our sensibilities has somehow been normalized to such a truly terrifying degree by our media, as well as the people and institutions who are charged with monitoring the America condition and the threats facing her citizens, is a terrible, terrible tragedy, it really is.

The annihilation of the barriers that used to separate good from evil and right from wrong have transformed America and its insane military might, into the most dangerous country in the world. When anything can be justified — even an attack on OUR OWN CAPITOL — everybody is in deep trouble.

We are spiraling out of control, and on the brink of losing our democracy for good, and the people who dare to pay attention — the blessed woke — know it.

That is most likely you.

This disregard of the truth, and just plain human decency is taking a terrible toll on average, good-hearted people in this country who have watched, jaws dropped, the past decade as millions have been given permission to willingly surrender to their very worst instincts, while following a grotesque man and party that are leading us to our bitter end.

That many of them are friends and family has been almost too much to bear and comprehend. How long have they carried this disease inside them? Can they be cured?

Either way, they and their debilitating weakness, and a busted media that tries to understand and excuse them, are to blame for our demise.

We feel powerless to get through to them to stop their madness, because they have been provided cover and coddled by the people and institutions I mentioned above, who have somehow accepted this as our new normal.

They are weak in mind and heart. They are the lowest among us, and refuse to lift themselves up, or even consider the damage they are doing to a country that they think even less of than themselves.

Well let me tell you something: I have no trouble stepping on them to get to higher places where we can properly survey the damage they have caused and set about repairing it.

I will not get over this or them. I will call them out and our condition in America for what it is: hideous.

The normalization of this ongoing rot inside our White House simply has to stop — or bare minimum be recognized for it is — if we are to have any hope of carrying ourselves as a half-decent nation making an honest run at once again searching for the common good.

That starts with recognizing the truth, and shouting it out, instead of normalizing chaos and odious behavior.

And if that truth hurts the people who are wrecking our society, then there is still a sliver of hope, because at least we will know they aren’t completely dead inside.

These aren't normal times we are living in unless we just surrender and accept that they are, my friends.

Well, I just can’t let that happen.

Can you?

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.