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President Donald Trump has solidified his control over the Republican Party by successfully pushing out GOPers who criticize him in party primaries. Yet in the process, according to a recent analysis, he may cost himself the 2026 midterm elections.

“It’s far from clear that Mr. Trump’s winning streak in the Republican primaries will translate into victory in November, when the party will need the support of voters outside of Mr. Trump’s base — many of whom are deeply dissatisfied with the economy and the Iran war,” reported The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs on Sunday. “Already, there are signs that his hold over Republicans in Washington may be slipping.”

Kanno-Youngs reported that Senate Republicans blocked both Trump’s proposed $1 billion ballroom and his proposed $1.8 billion fund for Trump supporters and Trump-linked institutions that claim to have been persecuted by Democrats.

“The split-screen illustrates an emerging paradox of the Trump presidency,” Kanno-Youngs added, after mentioning Trump’s recent string of legal defeats. “He has an iron grip on his most loyal supporters, even as his overall popularity slips.”

One former GOP party official warned that Trump’s ability to control the Republican Party and then steer it in any direction he chooses is endangering their long-time political prospects.

“The challenge of the administration right now, is the issues that they bring up, that Trump brings up, are not where voters are,” Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, told Kanno-Youngs. “They don’t need a ballroom, they don’t need a weaponization fund, they need lettuce to be affordable.”

Despite Trump traditionally having near-unanimous support among Republican voters, a recent Quinnipiac survey found that only 73 percent of Republican voters still widely approve of the job Mr. Trump is doing. His overall approval rating has been stuck in the 30s, with most voters opposing Trump’s war with Iran and blaming him for America’s ongoing economic woes. Even worse, Trump has publicly expressed indifference to voters’ concerns.

“When it comes to Iran, he said he does not think about the economic hardship of Americans — ‘not even a little bit’ — and that he does not care about the midterms,” Kanno-Youngs reported.

Since the start of his second term, Trump has successfully primaried out Republicans considered to be stronger in the general election in favor of potentially weaker ones who he perceived as more supportive of him. The targeted incumbents include Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Rep. Thomas Masie (R-KY) and a group of Indiana state legislators who opposed his gerrymandering plans.

"He is one of the least popular presidents in modern polling history, and simultaneously, the most dominant force in the Republican Party,” journalist Colby Hall, the founder of Mediaite, recently wrote in a column for his ColbyHall.com website. “Neither fact is canceling out the other. His approval numbers are collapsing again. Depending on the poll, they are now approaching the lows he hit after January 6. He is underwater on inflation, cost of living, immigration, and now Iran. The broader electorate is plainly exhausted by him, the still very high price of a gallon of gas, and the bread and eggs he promised to make cheaper on Day 1 of his second term."

Hall added, "At the exact same moment, Trump casually ended Sen. John Cornyn's political career with a single endorsement of the far more MAGA-coded Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas. Ironically, Trump helping Paxton win the primary delivers his MAGA faithful a short-term win while putting the seat itself in real jeopardy. Democratic nominee James Talarico is a much more plausible threat to Paxton than he would have been to Cornyn, and a Republican Senate majority that looked safe a week ago no longer does."

President Donald Trump bragged about his intelligence shortly after midnight on Sunday — but, in the process of doing so, made a fundamental mistake in explaining just how intelligence is measured.

“I’m glad the president did well on the MOCA exam, but it’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test, so a score of 26 or higher represents normal cognitive performance, not extreme intelligence,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Professor of Medicine and Surgery Interventional Cardiologist at GW School of Medicine, posted on Sunday. “None of the questions are high difficulty.”

Reiner was responding to a post the president posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, earlier on Sunday.

"The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good,” Trump wrote. “Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’”

He added, “Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row. All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Earlier this month, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who formerly taught psychiatry at Tufts University — told AlterNet that he views much of Trump’s recent behavior as indicate of cognitive decline.

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Abraham told AlterNet. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

Dr. Abraham added that, while Trump used to modulate his rhetoric for public opinion, his recent verbiage suggests that he struggles to “internalize certain control over his language.” For example, Trump at one point repeatedly mixed up Iceland and Greenland in a recent speech.

“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” Abraham explained.

Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2020, when there were widespread concerns about both Trump’s and future President Joe Biden’s cognitive fitness, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe broke down why Americans have a right to be familiar with their elected officials’ mental fitness for duty.

"The so-called 'concerns' that Trump, his family, and his acolytes are raising about the former Vice President aren't worthy of response," Tribe told Salon at the time. "I've known Biden for years and detect no loss of intellectual acumen. His slips of the tongue are legendary and, even if slightly more frequent these days, are nothing compared to the constant truly idiotic slips of the brain that characterize Trump. Had we not grown sadly accustomed to Trump's mangling of language, logic, syntax, and sense, we'd all be running for the exits."

President Donald Trump is closely aligned with Silicon Valley oligarchs, from directly receiving their largesse in campaign donations to aggressively pushing their AI technology on Americans. Yet a recent report in The Hill reveals that, despite these ties, some of those same oligarchs feel awkward about their relationship with the president.

“While several tech leaders are making their relations — both good and bad — with the president public, [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman has largely kept quiet about the president and the extent of his relationship with him,” reported The Hill's Miranda Nazzaro on Sunday. “It comes as OpenAI prepares an initial public offering, and Altman faces his own blowback from the anti-AI movement.”

Similarly X CEO Elon Musk, despite relying on Trump for government contracts, had a public falling out with the president after clashing over spending bills and blame for political failures. Eventually the two reconciled, with each walking back their negative statements about the other, and Nazzaro noted that “in the largest and latest sign of reconciliation, Musk was one of two executives aboard Air Force One with Trump for the China state visit earlier this month."

Dario Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, wound up on Trump’s bad side when he refused to allow his AI to break ethical codes in its work with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his Pentagon. Amodei even later said, in a memo leaked by the Trump administration, that he believed Trump had targeted him because Anthropic neither donated to his campaign nor engaged in “dictator-style” praise of Trump, as did many of his competitors. Amodei later apologized to investors for his split with Trump and has since reconciled with the president, remaining in the loop on AI policy.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos started out as anti-Trump, particularly through his leadership of The Washington Post during his first term, but later revealed himself as pro-Trump when he killed an op-ed supporting Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Bezos has subsequently gone out of his way to praise Trump, earlier this month describing Trump’s second term as “more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.”

He later told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “Trump has lots of good ideas. He’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

Nazzaro also talks about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, both of whom have also cultivated ties with Trump to advance their business interests. By contrast venture capitalist David Sacks is one of Trump's closest AI advisers, and is widely regarded as pushing Trump to support the AI CEOs agenda.

Indeed, as protests against AI have surged, Trump has worked toward making it illegal to protest the development of AI.

“In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists,” wrote Wired's Daniel Boguslaw on Sunday. “More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.”

Despite the attempts to suppress anti-AI sentiment, AI proponents like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield and music executive Scott Borchetta were roundly booed when they promoted AI during college commencement speeches. Semafor recently reported that anti-AI sentiment in America is overwhelming, suggesting that the college students’ hostility mirrors that of the American public at large.

“Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it,” Semafor reported. “Partly, they are turned off by AI’s upending of the job market. ‘Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,’ said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far. ‘What am I doing with my life?’”

Ever since President Donald Trump created a $1.8 billion slush fund for those among his supporters who claim to have been persecuted by the government, a host of controversial characters have applied for benefits.

“The $1.8 billion fund was created by the Justice Department in a settlement with Trump in his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns,” wrote Forbes journalist Sara Dorn on Sunday. “Trump dropped the case in return and also agreed to drop two separate civil claims related to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The money would come from a pool of taxpayer funds Congress established in 1956 to pay people who won lawsuits against the federal government.”

Dorn added, “Trump has repeatedly claimed he wasn’t involved in creating the fund and that his lawyers negotiated it. He defended it in a post on Truth Social last week, claiming he ‘gave up a lot of money’ in allowing it to move forward, but instead he is ‘helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!’”

The list of Trump supporters seeking payouts include former Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo, former Rep. George Santos (R-NY), political consultant Roger Stone, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, lawyer Mark McCloskey, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, Jan. 6th rioter Adam Johnson, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL), former Trump campaign aid Sam Nunberg, anti-abortion activists, Moms for Liberty, Michigan fake electors and numerous additional Jan. 6th insurrectionists.

The large list of applicants are there for a number of reasons. Lindell, Peters, Tarrio, Johnson, the Michigan fake electors and the Jan. 6th insurrectionists all tried to help Trump overturn his democratic loss in the 2020 presidential election. Caputo and Nunberg claim to have been wronged during the investigation into Trump’s ties to the Russian government. Santos and Blagojevich are elected officials who resigned in disgrace due to corruption scandals unrelated to Trump. McCloskey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges after he and his wife waved guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. Still others on the list have various claims of being persecuted by the federal government for their beliefs.

In the end, all of them may be disappointed. On Friday a federal judge in Virginia has temporarily blocked disbursement of the $1.8 billion fund on the grounds that the fund may be illegal. On June 12 the Trump administration will need to appear before the court to prove that the $1.8 billion fund does not constitute a form of self-dealing.

"Because full briefing of the issue will enhance the ability of the Court to make a sound decision, plaintiffs Expedited Motion, is DENIED and defendants' request for additional time is GRANTED; however, to ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the Anti-Weaponziation,” Brinkema wrote. “Fund while plaintiffs' Motion is pending it is hereby ORDERED that defendants be and are ENJOINED from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the dispersing of any funds from the Fund…’ the order says.”

The judge added in a footnote, ‘It is important that the status quo be maintained until plaintiffs' pending Motion has been resolved, especially as plaintiffs allege in their Expedited Motion that defense counsel 'was unable to provide assurances of how long [the] status quo would last' and declined plaintiffs' 'request that the government commit to not transferring money to the Fund or processing or paying claims until at least June 19 to allow for less compressed briefing in this case.’”

President Donald Trump is not cool anymore, culturally as well as politically, according to a recent analysis.

Trump’s so-called “fair” to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary is losing talent because top pop culture figures, even non-liberal ones, want nothing to do with Trump, wrote MS NOW’s Jeff Slate on Sunday. Slate reviewed how Bret Michaels, Morris Day, the Commodores and Young MC have cancelled their planned appearances, with several of them stating they were not aware that it was a pro-Trump event.

Then slate focuses on Martina McBride, a Grammy-nominated singer known for her wholesome and seeming neutral image.

“I’ve spent my entire career singing songs about real people with real issues,” McBride wrote in her statement. “I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to be a voice for those who have felt like they didn’t have one. It greatly upsets me that any fan who has been moved by my music may now feel like I’m abandoning the meaning behind those songs. I assure you, that is not the case.”

Slate then broke down why this is relevant in terms of understanding Trump’s place in the current zeitgeist.

“This was major news, and MAGA world took notice,” Slate wrote. “Remember that it was only a year ago that contemporary country star Carrie Underwood happily accepted an invitation to perform at Trump’s second swearing-in ceremony, despite not insignificant backlash from progressive fans.”

He added that McBride’s public statement “feels bigger than one festival. She isn’t some over-the-hill casino entertainer. The 59-year-old songstress is a traditional, conservative-coded country artist. McBride has sold many millions of records over her decades-long career, with songs that frequently mix classic country themes of God and faith with heartbreak, hope and resilience.”

Yet he concluded that “something, clearly, has shifted. And fast. Despite what some of her loudest critics are now implying on social media, McBride does not have a track record of supporting leftist causes. Instead, her decision highlights in the starkest of terms just how culturally corrosive Trump has become during his second term. That’s what a war of choice, soaring gas and food prices, stagnating inflation, and an aggregate job approval rating in the 30s can lead to.”

In addition to being controversial because it is tied to Trump’s brand, the festival is also under scrutiny due to allegations of corruption.

“For one million dollars or more…donors to Freedom 250 can secure an invitation to a private reception hosted by Trump himself,” reported Washingtonian. “As the New York Times explained earlier this year, Freedom 250 allows ‘people and companies with interests before the Trump administration’ to make ‘tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters.’”

After the report came out, Democratic senators began a probe into the organization’s finances, writing that “government-sponsored civic commemorations should not serve as platforms for political messaging or partisan activity, nor should they create opportunities for donors to exert influence with federal decision-makers under the guise of patriotic celebration.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to gut America’s emergency disaster response organization has left the United States vulnerable to upcoming natural disasters — and now Trump is scrambling, likely too late, to fix his problem.

Describing the decision of his past Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, to withhold billions in money from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), CNN’s Gabe Cohen reported that “Vice President JD Vance suggested it was FEMA’s inability to get money out the door that truly did her in. By the end of last year, FEMA was sitting on more than $15 billion in unspent funds, according to sources and internal figures reviewed by CNN. Lawmakers across the country, including many Republicans, were left fuming after months of asking for disaster money that had been awarded yet still awaited Noem’s signature.”

Cohen added that “during her 13 months running DHS, Noem, along with her de facto chief of staff Corey Lewandowski, waged war on FEMA, throttling operations, stalling payments, and driving out most of the senior leadership and by one count roughly 20% of the workforce. Amid the havoc, multiple sources told CNN the agency failed to make critical payments — from basic utilities to security operators that protect dangerous materials like anthrax.”

Realizing that America is now uniquely vulnerable because the upcoming summer will likely bring with it natural disasters from wildfires to tropical storms, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is reportedly working frantically to reverse many of the budget cuts and bureaucratic red tape that Noem had implemented.

“Court records in a separate lawsuit show DHS coordinated much of the overhaul over dozens of chats on the messaging app Signal, some of which have been wiped, with lawyers raising concerns that evidence was destroyed,” Cohen reported. “In a remarkable turnaround, Trump has tapped Cameron Hamilton to lead FEMA — for the second time. In May 2025, Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, was fired from his acting role atop the agency after telling lawmakers he didn’t support the administration’s plans to abolish FEMA. His exit accelerated an already chaotic effort to dismantle the agency — just as his return underscores the level of damage control the White House is now attempting.”

As one DHS official told Cohen about Hamilton, “If you’d asked me 11 months ago, I would have said it’s more likely we deport him than he gets that job.”

Later Cohen reported how “in May 2025, CNN reported that an internal review found FEMA was ‘not ready’ for hurricane season. Hamilton pushed back on efforts to degrade the agency but by then, plans to oust him were already in the works.”

He added, “Just hours before Hamilton was set to testify on Capitol Hill, he learned security was preparing to cut off his badge access. DHS told him it was a mistake; Hamilton believed his removal was imminent, three sources said.”

Last year it was reported that Noem vowed to “eliminate” FEMA, with Trump laying off hundreds of staff that focused on resilience and preparedness. At the time, this was reportedly motivated in large part by the administration’s determination to downplay the effects of man-made climate change. The president also signed an executive order requiring state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and ordered agencies to “streamline” their efforts to address disasters.

President Donald Trump now “owns” the Republican Party, according to conservative commentator Margaret Hoover — and it is clear that the party does not know what will happen after he is gone.

“I don't know what's going to happen with the future of the Republican Party,” PBS’ Margaret Hoover told her husband, The Bulwark’s John Avlon, during a Bulwark appearance on Sunday. “What I do know is Donald Trump completely owns the primary process and owns the party. There's been a complete and total co-opting, but that's also not new — we absolutely knew that.”

Hoover went on to describe how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, despite his numerous scandals and perceived electability problems, trounced the incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the recent GOP primary after Trump endorsed Paxton over Cornyn. Hoover described Cornyn’s concession speech after losing as “a class act,” adding that “he was very humble and completely a team player, doing the exact opposite of what Trump had done to him, which was just completely run all over him.”

She added, “I think it's a sign of somebody with dignity and respect. But I also think what I see over and over again is that the electeds at the highest levels and the appointees at the highest levels don't understand how fully corrupted the whole process has become until they interact with it head-on — and then they either go quietly into the night, or they have a seat in the peanut gallery on cable news, but they're not actually in the bowels of policy and the important places where decisions are being made about the future of our country.”

After Avlon noted that Cornyn did so poorly that he only won a single county, and even that county only had eight votes cast in it.

“It's a complete trouncing,” Hoover replied. “And also, Cornyn — in the context of the Republican Party corrupted by Trump — had been one of the guys who, I'm sure in his own telling of his narrative to himself, tried to collaborate with Trump as much as he thought he politically needed to, and yet stand up to Trump in places where he felt it was important, in order to be able to look himself in the mirror.”

Last month CNN’s Aaron Blake reported that Trump is increasingly unconcerned with how his politics come across in terms of winning the midterm elections, instead acting unilaterally on controversial issues even though many of his fellow Republicans are alarmed that he is harming their future electoral prospects.

“The Iran war is a case in point,” Blake explained. “Trump launched it without bothering to build a consistent case for it to the American people. The objectives have regularly shifted, and Trump seems unfamiliar with basic details.”

Blake continued, “He has threatened Iran with apparent war crimes and even warned last week that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ — before averting that course.”

He added that, in addition to his Iran war, Trump has threatened war against Denmark, posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ and engaged in a one-sided beef with the popular American-born pope, Leo XIV.

“The most recent events have led even some former Trump allies — like ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Candace Owens and Alex Jones, as well as first Trump administration employees Ty Cobb and Stephanie Grisham — to warn that the president is crazy or insane. Some of them and others on the right have even floated the unlikely solution of removing Trump from office using the 25th Amendment,” Blake explained. “A majority of Americans seems to notice his behavior too. A recent poll from Reuters and Ipsos showed 61% — and even 3 in 10 Republicans — agreed that Trump has ‘become erratic with age.’”

Blake concluded, “Other polls suggest rising concerns about Trump’s mental acuity.”

It’s impossible to understand American politics without also understanding the American economy (and vice versa). Politics and economics may be different disciplines, but they’re two sides of the same coin.

This came home to me again when I saw Thursday’s report on the U.S. gross domestic product.

Numbers can be pretty boring, but bear with me. Worker compensation — wages and benefits — grew 0.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026. Corporate profits grew 2.7 percent.

When you adjust for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019. Corporate profits have risen 50 percent.

Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947. Profits’ share is the highest since 1950.

Most people who depend on wages for a living are struggling, while a small minority at the top who own most shares of stock and private equity — that is, people who rely on capital gains — have never had it as good.

The trend toward lower wages and higher profits began in the 1980s, increased in the 2000s, picked up speed after the pandemic, and is about to explode as Artificial Intelligence takes over.

In coming months, three companies centered on AI will go public — SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — with expected valuations of around $1 trillion each (reflecting the gargantuan profits investors expect). But what about workers?

This is not just morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical letter devoted to the effects of AI, released this week.

It also threatens the future stability of our economic and political system.

What accounts for the increasing shift of the American economy from wages to profits, even before AI?

One big reason is monopolization. The economy has become concentrated in a few giant corporations with the power both to raise prices and keep wages down.

Sure, there are still lots of small businesses and mom-and-pop operations. But the gravitational center of the U.S. economy is now Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Kroger, United Health, Cigna, CVS, AT&T, Verizon, ExxonMobil, Chevron, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR.

These giants control large swathes of the economy. They also exert significant political power. They’re like black holes in space, sucking in vast sums of money.

Their political power makes it impossible to know whether government policy is based on the public interest or private gain.

Consider Trump’s war in Iran and its resulting surge in energy prices. The energy-price rise has caused after-tax disposable income to drop and the profits of energy companies to soar. Did Trump decide to go to war because he thought it necessary, or because Big Oil nudged him into it?

Workers, meanwhile, no longer have any countervailing power. In the 1950s, over a third of workers in the private sector were unionized. That gave them enough bargaining power to claim a significant share of the total economy. Now, only 6 percent of workers are unionized. Their bargaining power has been further eroded by their easy replacement by lower-wage workers in Asia and by software. AI will further erode it.

This trend is not sustainable. It feeds growing anger at the system, which demagogues like Trump exploit for their own ends.

What should be done? Let me list five steps (I’ll go into each in greater detail in coming months).

1. For one thing, we’re going to need a new era of antitrust. Giant corporations will have to be busted up.

2. We’ll also need to tax those at the top, especially on the value of their ownership of capital. (California voters will likely be asked to vote on a billionaire tax in November.)

3. We’ll need to regulate AI and simultaneously provide a universal basic income to cushion those who lose their jobs because of it.

4. Universal health care will be a necessity (perhaps via Medicare for all) along with subsidized childcare and eldercare.

5. Finally, we’ll need to distribute capital far more widely, so that the broad American public has a palpable stake in the rip-roaring stock market and the AI tsunami.

None of these fixes will be easy. Even if all are implemented, they may still be insufficient.

But, my friends, we have no choice but to try. We’ve already witnessed what mass anger can do to America, in the form of Trump. Unless we act soon, we’re likely to have Trumps, or worse, as far as the eye can see.

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/

Sooner or later in every armed conflict, someone will trot out the well-worn aphorism that “Truth is the first casualty of war.” And certainly, in the Iran war truth beat a hasty retreat as soon as the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran and Lebanon on February 28.

At one point in “Pressure,” meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) explains to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) that an impending storm will make it impossible for the Allied troops to successfully invade Normandy as planned. As he attempts to break down the meteorology, his competing scientist Irving P. Krick insists on rudely interrupting with his own ill-informed point-of-view. Eventually Stagg tells Krick what he — and the audience — needs to hear: That Krick is “a confident moron.”

With a single insult, Scott’s Stagg sums up both the chief lesson of “Pressure” and its primary pleasure as a source of entertainment. Much like a similar recent World War II-themed blockbuster, “Oppenheimer,” “Pressure” is at its core a story of hard-working, well-informed scientists fighting against arrogant ignorance. While the primary ignoramuses in “Oppenheimer” were political reactionaries and Krick is merely a blowhard, both emerge as antagonists because their hostility toward experts imperils the security and values of the free world.

Directed by Anthony Maras, who co-authored the script with David Haig based on the latter’s stageplay of the same name, “Pressure” follows Eisenhower, Stagg, Krick, Eisenhower’s secretary Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon) and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis) in the days before the June 1944 Normandy invasion known today as “D-Day.” The Allies would be unusually dependent on favorable weather to win the battle, so Eisenhower demands to know what the weather will be. Krick, using so-called “analog” maps that rely on past weather conditions to predict future ones, anticipates sunny skies and clear weather. Stagg, by contrast, relies on sophisticated data collection to anticipate a jet stream will push a major storm into the area.

The main drama in “Pressure” therefore involves the clashing egos of Stagg and Krick (who are equally full of themselves) as well as their clashing intellects (in which Stagg is clearly Krick’s superior). Eisenhower is thus placed in the unenviable position of needing to figure out which one is more reliable. From this potentially dry premise, “Pressure” creates a deeply engaging and fast-paced work of art.

I am not alone in this assessment. Ali, a 13-year-old self-described “history buff” who lives near the Pennsylvania theater where I saw “Pressure,” was very enthusiastic, gushing about how much she enjoyed seeing history brought to life and explaining she chose “Pressure” because it was the only film in theaters that looked interesting. Seven other theatergoers echoed her view, and that was only a small sample of the (for a Friday matinee) surprisingly packed auditorium.

To be clear, “Pressure” does not get the history 100 percent correct. Retired meteorologist Glenn “The Hurricane” Schwartz, who worked for the eastern Pennsylvania NBC affiliate from 1995 to 2022, broke down several aspects of the history that the film missed. It does not mention “pioneering meteorologist” Sverre Petterssen, a key part of the team who Schwartz explained “confidently predicted a bad storm for the 5th. Petterssen literally ‘wrote the book(s)’ on weather forecasting that I actually had to use as a [meteorology] undergrad in 1972!" It overlooks Krick’s post-war disgrace, not even mentioning it in the ending credits text. As Schwartz explained, he interviewed Dr. Francis Davis, who served “on Krick's team. Amazingly, Krick bragged about his role in the D-Day forecast EVEN THOUGH HE WAS DEAD WRONG! Even Davis admitted as such in my 2002 interview. ‘....it didn't work out very well.’” He later added that "Krick was so controversial and his ‘analog’ methods were so criticized by the meteorological community that he was about to be the first person ever thrown out of the American Meteorological Society for violating their Code of Ethics. He resigned instead. His methods live on in the private company, Planalytics, which happens to be located in the [Philadelphia] area. And believe it or not, AI appears to use analogs to make their forecasts, which happened to beat the National Hurricane Center and ALL computer models last season."

For Eisenhower buffs, perhaps the most notable omission is the widely substantiated (but technically unconfirmed) affair between the general and Summersby. Shortly before her death, Summersby admitted that she had to "disguise as best I could the intimacy that had grown between General Eisenhower and me. It was better that way.” While that omission was arguably defensible during Eisenhower’s lifetime, it becomes considerably less so in a movie intended to accurately reflect their interactions. One does not need the steamy indulgences of Oppenheimer’s affair in “Oppenheimer” to at least get that part right.

Yet there is also much for history and science buffs to love about “Pressure.” When it comes to the fundamental contours of the plot, science, military strategizing and overall history, “Pressure” is accurate. In the words of Dr. Michael E. Mann, the Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, “weather forecasting back then, before the age of numerical weather forecasting (which began in 1950 courtesy of the ENIAC computer at my university, Penn) was fairly primitive. It mainly consisted of using printed out weather maps and the elementary approaches we teach students in introductory courses on meteorology, which consists of taking the surface features (highs and lows), estimating the upper level steering winds, and predicting where those lows and highs are going to end up days later (it’s called the ‘steady state’ approach to forecasting).”

Perhaps most notably, “Pressure” subtly but firmly establishes the link between ignoring science and supporting reactionary political structures. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle’s G. Allen Johnson, Fraser explained that “it is a story that speaks to us 80-some years later. We see soldiers deployed again. We ask ourselves why, and then we ask ourselves why compared to 1944. The reason for even fighting (World War II) at all was to end fascism. To partner with nations and allies, later to become NATO, NASA, civil rights. I could go on.”

Maras elaborated on the scientific point.

“Eisenhower had those magnanimous examples of leadership that I think the world could benefit from now,” Maras told Johnson. “He took seriously the points of view of experts. We live in a specialized world, and it’s less about what any leader in particular knows and it is more about having the wisdom of who to trust and why you trust them.”

Dr. Federico Finchelstein, University in Exile Research Professor and Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, told AlterNet that this link is far from coincidental. Indeed, Eisenhower himself famously liberated many concentration camps during the Holocaust so that the Jewish community could prove the atrocities that happened, and explicitly recognized the junk science used by Nazis to rationalize their oppression.

“I can say that historically fascism has had an ambiguous relationship with science,” Finchelstein said. “It instrumentalized rational means to achieve irrational ends. Science per se was not a problem for them insofar as it did not contradict their unreason, their ideological irrational being. Current wannabe fascists, including the Trumpists, tend to do the same but they are even more anti-science and more irrational regarding their means.”

While Krick is not a fascist, his ignorance is part of the same erroneous line of thinking that informs the Allies’ fascist foes. They first come to a conclusion, then retroactively create a logic to support it. Good leadership requires following the facts, even when they are inconvenient and especially when they disprove one's own prejudices. As Eisenhower himself famously told President John F. Kennedy near the end of Eisenhower’s own administration, the Allies won because they had better meteorologists than the Germans.

As President Donald Trump attacks the reality of man-made climate change and slashes federal funding to science programs all over America, this message is both relevant and poignant. Eisenhower was a firm supporter of funding scientific research and education.

“Science education is not only crucial for students with science ambitions,” Schwartz explained. “It's important to understand the basics of how science works to responsibly argue about climate, for example. And scientific research is crucial for the advancement of any branch of science. Cutting observations, research, or efforts to improve forecasting would horrify Eisenhower today.”

Or as Mann told AlterNet, “Not only did Eisenhower understand the importance of embracing science; he understood the pernicious consequences of bigotry and the importance of fighting back against it.” Connecting that point to today, “look no further than the latest effort by Trump and the polluters that he represents (and their hired propagandists) to attack the work of the international climate science community by misrepresenting the latest findings regarding the threat of climate change.”

At one point I quoted Eisenhower to Mann as a way of explaining how the film’s message is relevant to the Trump era.

"High-quality professional personnel in science, engineering, teaching, languages, and other critical fields are necessary to our national security effort,” Eisenhower said in 1958. “Each year, nevertheless, many young people drop out of high school before graduation. Many able high school graduates do not go on to college. This represents a waste of needed talent."

Mann replied, “Right on the money.” If I had to summarize “Pressure” in four words, those are the ones I’d choose: “Right on the money.”

President Donald Trump spent six hours on late Saturday seemingly doing nothing but posting on his Truth Social account — and many of those posts seemed to reinforce the notion his priorities are out of whack with those of the American public.

“President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes,” reported The Daily Beast’s Olivia Ralph on Sunday. “The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was ‘Executive Time.’”

The more than 50 posts were described by Ralph as “ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.”

The journalist added that “among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race.” Ironically experts have noted that Washington opposed having his face on currency during his own lifetime because it was perceived as monarchical, insisted all electorally defeated presidents had a moral obligation to peacefully give up power and only sought two terms to avoid concentrating power in his hands. By contrast, Trump is trying to put his face on a new $250 bill, was the first president to attempt a coup when he lost an election and has argued (incorrectly) that the 22nd amendment does not bar him from seeking a third term.

Perhaps Trump’s other most notable post was a repeat, depicting a giant version of his face eyeing the Danish province of Greenland along with the words “Hello, Greenland!”

“Trump has repeatedly argued that having Greenland as U.S. territory is vital for national security, though both Greenlandic and Danish leaders have forcefully rejected any suggestion that the territory could be acquired by the United States,” Ralph wrote.

This is not the first time that The Daily Beast has chronicled Trump’s late-night postings. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported that he is posting so much, it suggests the president may not be getting enough sleep.

“Donald Trump’s late-night and early-morning posting habit is now so prolific there were only five days in April when he could have had a full night’s sleep,” Fiallo wrote. Describing a “breathtaking scale” to the president’s posting during April, Fiallo broke down how “at this point in his first term, the president had posted 250 times in April 2018. This April, he made 565 posts on Truth Social—an average of about 18 a day.”

Fiallo added, “It is not just the number of Trump’s posts that the Daily Beast analyzed, but also their timing and nature: A third of his social media output now comes during the night.” In total the president posted on Truth Social on 189 occasions between 9 AM and 6 AM local time throughout April, indicating that Trump posted at least once at night on more than four out of five nights that month.