climate

President Donald Trump has touted his Trump Accounts as a great investment vehicle to help young people build up savings, but one financial reporter argues that they are not living up to his promise.

“My 1-year-old son qualifies for a Trump Account, and I’ve opened it to claim the $1,000 government deposit,” reported The Wall Street Journal's Adam Michel on Monday. “But I won’t be putting any of my personal after-tax wages in it, and neither should most parents. That is a shame. Trump Accounts are a good idea, poorly executed. A simple reform could make them worthwhile.”

Michel argued that Trump Accounts are flawed because they tax the money going into them and tax the money coming out of them.

“The accounts accept after-tax dollars from parents and other authorized individuals, but when the child turns 18, they convert to traditional IRAs for retirement,” Michel wrote. “That means the gains (along with the original $1,000) are taxed at withdrawal as ordinary income rather than at the lower capital-gains tax rate, which would have applied if the investment weren’t in a Trump Account. You pay taxes on the front end and the high rate on the back end. No deduction, no capital-gains rate, no flexibility.”

Describing a 529 as a better investment in terms of education savings than Trump Accounts, Michel concluded that Trump could easily fix this, and if he does not the Trump Accounts will amount to little more than a one-time gift to their recipients.

“The fix is easy: Lawmakers should pick a lane,” Michel said. “Make contributions tax-free and then tax the withdrawals. That is how a traditional IRA works. Alternatively, keep the after-tax contributions and make the withdrawals tax-free, like a Roth. Either path would give parents an incentive to add their own money. While they are at it, lawmakers should drop the lock-up rules and penalties, and instead let the savings roll into a more flexible account at age 18.”

Michel concluded that without those changes, "the $1,000 handout is where it stops. The rest I’ll save elsewhere."

In May, a financial journalist for TheStreet pointed out a different problem with Trump Accounts.

“The federal government is less than two months away from opening Trump Accounts for private contributions on July 4, 2026, and a debate over what should go in them has begun,” TheStreet's Damilola Esebame wrote at the time. “White House and Treasury officials have discussed allowing wealthy donors to contribute shares of stock directly into the children's savings accounts, a shift that could reshape the program.”

Yet as Esebame observed, Trump Accounts upon being launched only accepted cash and invested it into low-cost S&P 500 index funds that cap the expense ratios at 0.1 percent. Even at the time, the White House and Department of Treasury began discussing altering the rules about how the accounts were managed so that stock shares could go directly into children’s savings accounts.

“If the rules change, millions of children already enrolled may end up with a completely different type of account,” Esebame said. “What you need to understand is how this fight over stock donations could affect the money designated for your child.”

When President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, much of the political world was shocked — but a new study reveals one forecasting framework that anticipated that outcome.

“Many voters rely on prospective voting, a process of evaluating candidates based on anticipated future performance,” wrote PsyPost's Karina Petrova on Monday. “Researchers have found that these forward-looking assessments become a primary driver of voter behavior in open-seat contests. Voters look ahead at what policies and leadership styles the new candidates might bring to the office.”

In a study led by Macromedia University of Applied Sciences researcher Andreas Graefe, the scientists created a so-called “Issues and Leaders model” to figure out why voters make the choices they do rather than simply profiling their support for different candidates at specific points in time.

“The Issues and Leaders model focuses entirely on two variables: issue-handling competence and leadership perception,” Petrova explained. “To calculate issue-handling scores, the model requires three conditions to be met. Voters must be aware of an issue, they must perceive it as important, and they must trust one candidate more than the other to manage it.”

The study revealed that near the end of the 2024 election between Harris and Trump, the Democrat actually had a slight advantage over Trump when it came to perceptions of her overall competence, even though she initially trailed Trump by 20 points in July (when she first entered the campaign).

“The final forecast generated by the model on Election Eve predicted a near tie, with Trump receiving 50.2 percent of the two-party popular vote and Harris receiving 49.8 percent,” Petrova wrote. “This cautious projection stood in contrast to many conventional polling averages, which generally showed Harris retaining a slight lead. Ultimately, Trump won the national popular vote by approximately 1.5 percentage points.”

In short, it seems that Harris was able to close the gap between herself and Trump, but simply did not have enough time to do so fully.

In the paper, which was published in the scholarly journal Research and Politics, argued that its conclusions can be used to anticipate future election results.

“A particularly notable insight is the role of leadership perception in forecasting Trump’s narrow victory,” Graefe wrote. “While Harris held a modest edge on issue competence, Trump maintained a consistent lead in leadership perception—a factor that gained predictive weight closer to the election. The model anticipated Trump’s advantage before most polling averages reflected it, highlighting its potential to signal electoral dynamics that might otherwise be overlooked.”

Graefe added, “Beyond forecasting accuracy, the model offers practical value by providing a real-time lens into campaign dynamics. By emphasizing prospective voting, it helps identify evolving voter priorities and candidate strengths. This makes it a potentially useful tool not just for forecasters, but also for campaign strategists, journalists, and political observers.”

Earlier on Monday, The Guardian reported that the coalition which elected Trump is starting to fray. Citing numbers from the 2024 election, it pointed out that "Trump won 66 percent of white voters without a college degree." Today, though, it found via a CBS News poll that "54 percent of that demographic disapprove of his performance. That was up from 45 percent disapproval in February (before Trump began bombing Iran) and up sharply from 32 percent in February 2025."

A conservative commentator argued that President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, instead of seeming all-powerful, are instead appearing to the world as “impotent.”

“The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl,” wrote The Dispatch's Nick Catoggio on Monday, referencing the Soviet Union’s infamous mishandling of a nuclear power plant leak in Ukraine in 1986. “In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.”

After adding that the nuclear meltdown in 1986 was more consequential than the Reflecting Pool’s algae growth in 2026, Catoggio noted that the Reflecting Pool crisis occurred because the White House valued cronyism over competence.

“Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs,” Catoggio wrote. “Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.”

Despite using hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” without killing the algae, Catoggio argued that Trump made himself look worse by blaming saboteurs without basis instead of his own ineptitude for the blue sealants cracking and being ripped off in chunks.

“Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers,” Catoggio continued. “And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Yet Catoggio concluded that the fundamental problem facing Trump is his own inability to get things done, whether in cleaning up the Reflecting Pool or winning the war he waged against Iran.

“Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now,” Catoggio wrote. “The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.”

He added, “The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.”

This is not Catoggio’s first harsh critique of Trump and his administration. Earlier this month he noted that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, despite being ostensibly as right-wing as Trump, refused to kowtow to him — and that this further reflects his waning power.

“After 10 years of degrading bootlicking obeisance by the president’s many courtiers, it was startling to see someone who needs a relationship with Trump assert her dignity against his insults,” Catoggio said regarding Meloni’s harsh reply to Trump’s insistence that she “begged” him to “take a picture with him.”

When Meloni rebuked Trump by saying that neither she nor Italy begs for anything, Catoggio commented that “casually demeaning someone because he bears them a grudge is as instinctive to Donald Trump as applying bronzer or bloviating about ‘strength.’”

He continued, “But those who need to stay on his good side — like, say, every Republican official in the country — are doomed to follow the Ted Cruz career arc between 2016 and 2021, broadly speaking. That is, if Trump insults your wife, you find a way to let it slide and salute when he asks you to help him stage a coup.”

Meloni refused to play along, though.

“And so the prudent, if pathetic, thing to do when an imperious postliberal goblin insulted you was to bite your tongue,” Catoggio wrote. “Not Meloni, though. She’s had enough.”

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to seize the Smithsonian Institution, one of America’s most prestigious collection of museums, and to use them to whitewash the United States’ history on issues like slavery.

“When President Trump summoned Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for lunch at the White House on August 28 of last year, Bunch’s advisers assumed that the end was near,” The Atlantic’s Clint Smith wrote on Monday. “Trump had spent months threatening the Smithsonian’s independence; just nine days earlier, he’d written on Truth Social that ‘the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.’”

Bunch, who unambiguously believes that slavery was a negative for America, was also the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is known to have pushed back against attempts by Vice President JD Vance and Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL), who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, as well as others in the Trump administration to scrub so-called “woke” ideas in the museum that they described as a “divisive ideology.” Trump also tried to fire the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, even though the Smithsonian is meant to be independent of the government.

Despite these challenges, Bunch was able to avoid winding up in the administration’s crosshairs, at least for a while. Yet as various key personnel step down from the museums’ boards, Smith anticipates that Trump may ultimately get his wish of hiring loyalists who will reshape the museum to his liking.

“The current and looming vacancies, and the need for congressional and presidential approval, raise the possibility that Trump could attempt to install new board members who are loyal to his agenda,” Smith wrote. “(Trump’s March 2025 executive order said that the White House would work with officials ‘to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.’)”

Smith added, “In April, The New York Times reported that the regents had agreed on nominations for some of the replacements, but the House committee responsible for reviewing and vetting the nominees before they move to the full legislature for approval had yet to receive the names under consideration—intrigue that suggests some manner of strategy, although it’s far from clear whose. Minutes from board meetings earlier this year show that the regents have voted to give existing members additional duties because of the current and expected vacancies.”

Despite these pressures, Bunch vowed in an internal memo to staff that “we remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans. We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”

Earlier this month, federal Judge Angel Kelly ruled against Trump’s attempts to remove historic content that is featured at national parks. Trump specifically targeted content that discussed America’s history of racism, including slavery.

"To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, Defendants must do more than express disagreement with the Court’s prior ruling; they must make a strong showing that they are likely to prevail on appeal," Kelley explained in response to the administration’s objection to being forced to allow the National Parks Service to accurately represent American history.

She added, "To establish irreparable harm, Defendants bear the burden of demonstrating that, absent a stay, they will suffer irreparable injury that is substantial, certain, and inadequately remedied by monetary damages or later appellate relief. ... Here, Defendants raise three theories: (1) the Injunction Order hampers government speech by preventing the National Park Service (“NPS”) from proffering its preferred narrative at National Parks; (2) implementation of the Injunction Order is practically infeasible and costly; and (3) the Injunction Order conflicts with a recent order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit regarding Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, PA, thus subjecting Defendants to inconsistent obligations with respect to that site. The Court is unpersuaded by these arguments and explains why."

President Donald Trump is worse than the mafia, a news anchor argued on Monday, because at least the mob tends to be competent.

“I actually think the comparisons to the mob are unfair, because as violent as the mob is, they — historically — can be more competent than that,” MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace said on Monday. She was referring to Trump’s failed attempt to renovate the Reflecting Pool. “This was a botched redecorating of a monument.”

She added, “It doesn't belong to Donald Trump. It doesn't belong to any president in office. He's the steward of it for four years, and he ruined it.”

Journalist Scott MacFarlane continued that Trump’s arrests of people he claims without evidence sabotaged the Reflecting Pool are baseless and not even serious cases.

“They're not major cases,” MacFarlane told Wallace. “They are U.S. Park Police or federal law enforcement citations. If the Department of Justice wants to make these major cases and charge these people with felonies, they have to go to a grand jury. And though grand jury deliberations are secret — held in a closed room — you might hear the laughter outside the grand jury room if they try to bring this case to a D.C. grand jury. It's not going to fly.”

He added that people who visit the Reflecting Pool notice “a smell that's emanating now that is reminiscent of a high school locker room. You have a police force, a National Guard presence, that is profound. It's never bad to have federal law enforcement near a gathering place, and a lot of people are gathering there to rubberneck at the damage. But it's like a jewel heist from the Muppets — the caper's gonna happen. You have so many police hanging out there, and it seems to be a misappropriation of resources.”

In contrast to Wallace, former US Attorney Barbara McQuade argued earlier this month that Trump acts very much like a mob boss.

“He uses his power to try to control others, especially would-be critics,” McQuade argued, speaking to The Guardian. “He uses any leverage he can get, inflicting pain to try to coerce them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment. He’s done it with law firms and the media and universities and even foreign allies with tariffs.”

As one example, she cited how Trump attempted to punish the State of Michigan because of local politicians there opposing him.

“He has threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge between Detroit and Canada and there’s an owner of a private span next to it who made a million-dollar donation to the MAGA SuperPac at around the same time,” McQuade observed.

A candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump claimed that he tried to commit voter fraud, but did not provide any evidence that such fraud is an actual issue.

Georgia State Sen. Greg Dolezal, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, told the Charlie Kirk Show in a February broadcast only recently discovered that he and “a number of friends” submitted fraudulent mail-in ballot applications that included forms signed by children. Their goal was to prove that they received ballots in return to prove that Georgia’s system facilitates fraud.

Notably, Dolezal did not furnish any evidence to verify his claims.

“Earlier this year, Dolezal introduced Senate Bill 568 (SB 568), a proposal that would have assigned early voters to a single location, required voters to use hand-marked paper ballots and expanded the public release of voter information,” Democracy Docket reported. “While that bill failed two votes short of the majority needed, Dolezal has continued attempting to revive Republicans’ push to overhaul Georgia’s elections.”

They added, “During a special legislative session Saturday, Dolezal proposed an amendment to an election bill that would require counties to manually recount every voter cast in the top two races on a ballot before certifying an election. The GOP-controlled Senate approved the amended bill and the House is considering the measure Monday. If passed, the recount requirement would apply to the races for governor and U.S. Senate in November.”

In his appearance on the Charlie Kirk Show, Dolezal said that “the way you get an absentee ballot is you would sign your name to a ballot request form, send it in, and they’d send you a ballot. They’re supposed to check the signatures. Well, we know essentially that they didn’t check the signatures because myself and a number of friends botched our signatures, had kids sign signatures, do all that, send our ballots in the ballot request forms, and in every case, we got a ballot back.”

He did not identify the friends who helped him, elaborate on how voters names were supposedly swapped, explain how the effort was organized or discuss if any of the ballots issues were completed, cast or counted.

“So, yes, we do have essentially a Republican, governor or secretary of state, General Assembly,” Dolezal said. “We’ve moved the needle a good bit. We did move on voter ID, and we have passed some good things, but there has been really no interest in looking at what happened in 2020.”

Democracy experts argue that Trump is trying to spread misinformation about voter fraud so he can falsely claim that any election lost by Republicans was stolen. He falsely claimed that the 2016 Iowa GOP caucuses were stolen when he lost them, that he actually won the 2016 presidential election popular vote when he did not and that he won the 2020 presidential election when he did not. On that last occasion, he attempted a coup after being defeated by then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 midterm elections by sowing doubts about the validity of likely Democratic victories.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

President Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool scandal speaks to deeper systemic failures in his presidency, at least according to one Marine veteran.

“With the news that the Trump administration’s attempt to beautify the Reflecting Pool is looking like a spectacular backfire, a lot of people said it was a perfect analogy of how things are going in general,” wrote Joslin Joseph, an Iraq war veteran and recipient of the Military Reporters and Editors award for Best Commentary-Opinion, in an editorial for The Hill.

Joseph added that Trump “likes to get things done, but he doesn’t get them done right.” In the case of the Reflecting Pool, Trump reportedly focused on getting the pool done as fast as possible and hired his personal associates rather than contracting the process out to the highest quality business willing to perform at the lowest bid. From there, Joseph connected Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle to his recent attempts to wrap up the war he waged against Iran.

“Just like the Interior Department’s claim of crystal clear water, the Trump administration is now selling the American public that the job he set out to do in Iran was done right, despite evidence pointing to the contrary,” Joseph wrote. “Although the Reflecting Pool and Iran are on different levels of importance to the American people, the outcomes from both so far are an indictment on how poorly Trump’s ‘get things done and worry about the fallout later’ approach goes.”

In addition to his shunning of expertise and planning with the Reflecting Pool and the Iran war, Joseph also pointed to Trump’s DOGE destroying government agencies “without understanding how the government worked only to see the effort fail to cut spending and waste,” as well as his “Liberation Day” tariffs that raised prices, harmed the economy and were in some cases found to have been illegal.

“Getting things done is laudable, especially with the gridlock that has plagued Washington for a while,” Joseph concluded. “But competence, accountability and judgement are still needed to get things done right. If you don’t have those, you end up with sweetheart deals for Iran and a reflecting pool that looks like a swamp.”

Joseph is not alone among individuals scoffing at Trump’s attempts to renovate the Reflecting Pool. Despite the president pressing charges against people for supposedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool — claims that he has made without evidence, and despite the physical implausibility of someone making a 100-yard gash in the sealant as he alleges — commenters by and large do not seem to believe his claims.

"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” conservative journalist David Frum posted on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."

A top former government official, like Joseph, connected Trump’s Reflecting Pool failure to his broader shortcomings as an administrator.

"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade said on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."

A long-time expert in swimming pools knows the culprit behind the Reflecting Pool "vandalism" that caused an ongoing algae bloom.

For the past several weeks, CNN has welcomed on "Swimming Pool Steve," a second-generation pool builder who has a YouTube channel dedicated to explaining aspects of swimming pools and hot tubs.

Speaking to host Boris Sanchez on Monday, Steve Goodale said there would always be an algae problem in the Lincoln Memorial's Reflecting Pool.

"Let's start with the algae leak theory," Sanchez began. "What is more likely: that someone planted this algae or that it occurred and spread naturally?"

"Well, somebody definitely planted the algae and it was the very first bird that landed in the water," said Goodale. "You know, in an open-air environment like this, there's no stopping the algae from coming. It's going to be in the water. It's just how are you going to deal with it knowing that it will be expected."

The way to fix it, he explained, is a multi-pronged solution: the pool must be drained and the immediate remediation would likely follow. The algae problem is likely to be back-burnered, he said, while they figure out the problem with the liner.

Monday morning a baby duck was found dead in the pool's water, prompting Sanchez to question whether the new chemicals put in the pool could be the culprit.

"It would really come down to a matter of concentration," said Goodale. "And again, we're talking about, you know, 6.5 million gallons of water or more. So, it would take an awful lot of product to get to dangerous levels of contamination here. It's why hydrogen peroxide would be commonly used for an open-air, clear water environment like this, because it is kind of the safer of the options. It's why we don't use something like chlorine, which wouldn't be as safe for the wildlife."

He also passed along his sympathies for the tragic death of the baby duck.

Sanchez then asked about Trump's claims of vandalism and the "300-foot gash" that was carved into the liner. Goodale explained that the material used is one that would require considerable equipment to produce the gash Trump described.

"You know, in my experience, and, you know, when I heard that it had been vandalized as well, my reaction was surprise as I really tried to understand the mechanism of damage that would cause this kind of vandalism," he said.

Goodale said it would be noticeable and require advanced equipment like power tools.

"This is a robust, strong puncture-proof material," Goodale said of the lining installed by Virginia-based contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings. "That's why it was likely chosen for this application. It's why it's used in commercial and industrial applications. So it would take, absolutely, a concerted effort. I don't know exactly — what it would take, but it would take a concerted effort to cause significant damage like that."

In an earlier conversation, CNN reporter Manu Raju called on the White House to release footage of the vandalism that caused the gash.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to include a missing quotation mark and correct a typo when spelling "The Guardian."

Speaking for his podcast Can’t Be Censored, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he is leaving the Republican Party — and he blames President Donald Trump’s ostensible support for Israel.

“I would not support the Republican party, there's no chance I would support the Republican party,” Carlson declared in his Thursday episode, with him reposting the clip on X on Monday. “How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States. I voted Republican my entire life, I have been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party, but there is no defending this. I'm out.”

Carlson argued that, by starting a war against Iran in February, he prioritized Israel’s interests over those of the United States. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, Carlson asserted that the president was unduly influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to enter a war that America has “effectively lost already.” He added that he believes Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was funded by individuals whose “loyalty to Israel” does not align with American foreign policy priorities.

The right-wing podcaster’s split with Trump over Israel is part of a broader pattern on both sides of the aisle. A February poll taken by Gallup found support for Israel has dropped among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. Independents support Palestinians over Israel by 41 to 30 percent and Democrats do so by 65 percent to 17 percent. Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, by 70 percent to 13 percent, but this still counts as a 10-point drop since 2024. Overall American support for Israel has fallen from 46 percent to 33 percent in favor of Israel in 2025 to 41 percent to 36 percent against Israel in 2026.

Speaking exclusively to AlterNet, former Harvard law professor, former lawyer for Trump and Zionist activist Alan Dershowitz argued that rising anti-Semitism on both sides of the aisle will compel Israel and the Jewish community to become “stronger” and more cautious about the future.

“The alternative is to be strong,” Dershowitz told AlterNet. “The alternative is to prepare for the worst. The alternative is for Israel to be completely self-reliant, for Jews not to expect help from other people, but to do it on their own, the way they did it when they were the best musicians, the best chess players, the best inventors, the best entrepreneurs.”

He added, "I think Jews have to realize that they're not going to get, they can't count on the kindness of strangers, and they shouldn't give up any of their security in the name of public relations.”

When asked about the rise of anti-Israel sentiment from both the right and left, Dershowitz characterized it as anti-Semitic and compared the current historical moment to the World War II era.

“The antisemite to the right, antisemite to the left have more in common than they are different,” Dershowitz said, then comparing the current movements to those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “And that goes back to [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler. Stalin and Hitler had only one thing in common, that they both hated Jews.”

Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s war against Gaza has led to 72,835 fatalities as of May, according to the World Health Organization. The initial Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7th led to 1,195 Israeli deaths, including 815 civilians, as well as 251 additional civilians who were taken hostage, according to Human Rights Watch.

Speaking with AlterNet in March about the tendency to blame Israel for America’s war against Iran, Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna said that one can criticize Israeli government officials without being anti-Semitic just as one can criticize American government officials without hating America. The challenge, he added, is discerning when those criticisms are used to denounce all Israelis, delegitimize Israel’s right to exist or hold Israel to a double standard compared to its predominantly Muslim neighbors.

“I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself.”

He continued, “If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”

Ironically, Israel itself is starting to turn on Trump, with many Israelis believing that his tentative settlement with Iran will leave the nation as powerful as before and just as capable of attacking Israel directly or through proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. As restaurateur Daniel Dorfmann, an Israeli in the town of Metulla which is close to the Lebanon border, angrily told The Guardian, “Everyone was very pleased with the war [against Iran] but the US agreement is really not good for Israel … It’s a big mistake.”

While Carlson is officially leaving the Republican Party over Israel, this is not his first deviation from the GOP on policy matters. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Carlson challenged Republicans for seeming to prioritize capital over labor.

“My intention in writing it was to remind the Republican Party that these are now issues of concern for you, because for a hundred years you represented capital over and against labor,” Carlson told Salon at the time regarding an editorial he composed on the need for the party to be more pro-labor. “I mean that’s kind of the purpose of the Republican Party. They used to represent the investor class, right? So the conventional criticisms of the Republicans as the party of management were 100 percent true, obviously.”

He added, “What I wanted to remind Republican lawmakers was that it’s no longer true, that’s not your constituency anymore. You have a new constituency and it’s people who are primarily wage earners and primarily — not low income, but lower income.”