inequality

A New York Times panel of columnists say America is heading toward its 250th anniversary, but many of its citizens and residents are not feeling celebratory, especially with billionaire President Donald Trump working to make it a celebration for only one certain class of people.

Columnists Michelle Cottle, David French and Jamelle Bouie took turns decimating the failure.

“The weird special event for our birthday boy, Mr. President, two weeks ago, with the U.F.C. fight and all of that — … that [was] not meant for the broad public. Like, you had to have a Paramount+ subscription to even watch it, first of all. It was meant for just a subset of even his own supporters,” said Bouie. “It wasn’t any kind of attempt to bring the country together under common civic rituals. And to me, that’s an intentional thing. They’re thinking of the 250th as an attempt to kind of glorify — and I use that in a religious way — Donald Trump, and not as an opportunity to, despite our many divisions and fractious nature and all that, think about our common origins and our common purpose.”

The White House doesn’t “conceive of all Americans as being American in the same way,” said Bouie, with the dividing line being whether or not you support Trump’s political project.

“It’s this constant stratification,” said French, referring to the celebrations very limited appeal of UFC wrestling and one or two acts of hard rock country singers. “It’s this constant sense of a pecking order, and then this constant sense there is always, always in the back of their mind something that goes like this: ‘How can we do this in a way that will make other people mad, that will make our enemies mad? How can we make our enemies mad today?’ As opposed to, ‘How can we bring the country together today?’ It really does seem to be an absolute communications priority of this administration to just go ahead and decide to tick people off on purpose, as long as it’s the right people.”

“That strikes me as at the root of the president’s movement all along,” said Cottle. “Whatever you think of his politics, it’s all about ticking off the elites, which is hilarious because he is an elite of sorts. He’s just an elite who’s always had a chip on his shoulder and has never really fit in.”

“Right, and elites here are defined in a purely cultural, nonmaterial way,” said Bouie. “For these people — if you are, like, a barista with an English degree, making $15 an hour, you’re an elite because Netflix producers like to make shows for you sometimes. Whereas if you are a billionaire buying pardons for your buddies, you’re not an elite, because the cultural tastemakers supposedly look down on you.”

“What Jamelle said was exactly right about elites,” said French. “You can be an underemployed Brown English or art major grad, and that’s an elite. And if you own five car dealerships in, say, Hattiesburg, Miss., you’re just a working man. … Somebody who might be on the elder board of a church, the head of the local Kiwanis Club, or, you know, has their name on a building in a local college, right? And they will view themselves as the scrappy underdog because, you know, the gender studies department in Oberlin looks down on them.

“Oh, my God, boo-hoo-hoo,” erupted Cottle. “That’s all I’ve got to say to the president, just boo-hoo-hoo. Get over it, OK? Get over yourself.”

Dispatch writer David M. Drucker dropped some truth on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” show on Saturday, explaining exactly why Republican leaders in the Senate are finally defying President Donald Trump by refusing to pass the SAVE Act.

Passing the act, which critics say will severely constrict voter access, will require unprecedented moves in the Senate, including the dismantling of the Senate filibuster and the removal of the Senate parliamentarian. Neither of that’s going to happen, however, because Republicans in the Senate can see the future whereas Trump — who is pushing 80 — sees very little future at all.

“What I find silly about this, but it kind of shows you where the President's head is at — which is the same place it's always at —,” he said suggestively, “is that what Republicans do unto you today, Democrats can do unto you tomorrow.”

“So go ahead and fire the parliamentarian, go ahead and scrap the filibuster. Democrats are going to be in power again sometime soon. Look at the past 25 years. This goes back and forth. And they will trash this bill. They'll [install] universal mail-in balloting. They'll do all these things that will force Texas and Florida and Idaho and all these red states to govern elections the way they want. We just played ping-pong doing this. So, the whole thing is just ridiculous,” Drucker said.

Drucker added that Trump’s time would be much better spent helping his party focus on economic issues to smooth Republicans' slide into the midterms — only that’s not going to happen, he said.

Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kent.), who Trump had removed in the Republican primaries for daring to release the Epstein files, said on Thursday that Republicans can expect “an absolute shellacking” in November because “we’re wasting the opportunity that voters gave us.”

Drucker agreed on Tuesday, writing that Republicans hoping for Trump to pivot to the economy would be better off spending their time hunting “proof” of the “tooth fairy.” The very next day, Trump stomped a Congressional effort to pass a housing bill that would make home ownership for affordable.

“I am prescient, man,” Drucker told the MS NOW panel. “[Trump] is … a complicated political figure, but not a complicated man. He is singularly focused on his things that interest him and his grievances.”

“[H]e is approaching this presidency doing everything that he ever dreamed he might want to do from the very beginning,” Drucker added. “He never had any use for Congress from the very beginning. He never took well to criticism from voters, and so this is how he has been, and this is how he will be to finish out his last two and a half years.”

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As education officials in Texas ban hundreds of books that run afoul of their interpretation of Christian morality, the State Board of Education on Friday approved a required reading list that forces the state’s more than 5 million public school students to read from the Bible.

The Republican-controlled SBOE voted 9-5 with one abstention to approve the list, which includes passages from the Book of Exodus as well as the Shepherd’s Psalm and the myths of Adam and Eve and David and Goliath.

“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” Republican board member Brandon Hall—who is also a youth pastor at Cavalry Baptist Church in Springtown—said during a Thursday press conference in Austin.

That “truth” omits or marginalizes climate change, US imperialism, women’s history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and racism.

Evelyn Brooks, the only Republican SBOE member to vote against the required reading list, told CNN on Friday that she believes the board’s move is “unconstitutional.”

“Teachers need to have their autonomy,” she said. “They’ve been selecting books for decades.”

In 2023, Texas’ Republican-controlled Legislature passed HB 1605, which mandated the creation of a K-12 required reading list and directed the Texas Education Agency to develop state-owned textbooks. Those texts, called Bluebonnet Learning, contain lessons on Christianity starting in kindergarten. The SBOE approved Bluebonnet Learning as an optional curriculum in late 2024 and is currently working to correct thousands of errors in the curriculum at a cost of over $8 million to Texas taxpayers.

The SBOE action comes amid a legal battle over SB 10, a law signed last year by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. US District Judge Fred Biery, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, subsequently issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. Texas families also sued to block the legislation. However, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is running for US Senate—demanded that schools comply with the law.

Public schools “exist to educate students with diverse faith backgrounds, as well as those who adhere to no faith doctrine,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) said Friday. “Public schools are not Sunday schools, and elected officials have no business using state power to elevate one religion above all others. A required reading list that overwhelmingly favors Christian texts while excluding the writings and literary traditions of other faiths, not to mention the perspectives of millions of nonreligious Americans, sends an unmistakable message about who belongs and who does not.”

FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor asserted that “a mandatory public school reading list should never function as a Bible lesson.”

“Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she added. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Rabbi Joshua Fixler at Congregation Emanu El in Houston told CNN Friday that “this list is full of Christian texts that are inappropriate for public school classrooms.”

“As a rabbi and a parent of Jewish kids, I think it is vital that this board make a distinction between teaching about religion and teaching religion,” he added. “This list will force teachers to cross that line.”

Fort Worth high school teacher Chanea Bond told The Associated Press on Friday that the SBOE’s required reading list is “very old and very white.”

“It is very narrow and does not represent what classrooms in Texas look like,” she said. “Going through most of high school without ever having much value put into voices that sound like yours kind of sends a message that your voices aren’t valuable.”

Salon reports the specter of Jeffrey Epstein appears to be looming over the Republican Party as the GOP struggles to maintain it’s delicate House and Senate majorities.

Republicans have seized on Epstein’s ties to Democratic figures like former President Bill Clinton, but it appears that Epstein lingers most heavily over the party with a president whose name peppers the Epstein files, and who worked so obviously to keep the files under wraps. Trump also labored to remove Republicans who favored exposing the Epstein files in Republican primaries.

This is giving Democrats an additional edge in a race that is already swinging heavily away from Republicans who have failed to reign in President Donald Trump’s various power grabs and his monetizing of the White House.

“The revelations from the files further fueled the widespread, bipartisan exasperation among voters with the wealthiest elites,” reports Salon. “The Epstein issue, two Democratic pollsters told The 19th, is rare for its high salience and far reach even among less politically engaged voters — and for the high levels of bipartisan agreement on the need for more action.”

Surveys from Navigator Research and progressive pollster Data for Progress buttress that argument, with both polls showing majorities of voters — including a majority of Republicans — believe “there hasn’t been enough accountability connected to Epstein’s crimes” and they want to see more arrests and prosecutions. The March Navigator poll, in particular, revealed the share of Americans who said they believed Trump administration officials should resign over the Epstein matter increased when they were informed about officials in other countries being arrested, fired or forced to resign over their Epstein connections.

“What has happened with the Epstein files is such a clear distillation of the frustration that Americans across different partisan ideologies, even Republicans, even MAGA Republicans, and certainly independents, feel that there’s a different set of rules — or that really no rules at all — for the elite who just seem to get ahead,” said Melissa Toufanian, managing director at Navigator.

The Navigator survey, revealed that half of Americans, including two-thirds of Democrats and nearly 60 percent of independents, said they believed the government was “definitely” covering up additional wrongdoing by Epstein. And 72 percent of Americans, including 70 percent of independents, 67 percent of non-MAGA Republicans and 57 percent of respondents identified as MAGA Republicans, demanded more arrests and prosecutions related to Epstein.

Sixty-four percent of surveyed adults, including two-thirds of independents and half of Republicans, said they believed Epstein’s crimes were “unsurprising and the result of a broader problem.”

This is giving Democrats a definite edge in the midterms after the party battled the White House and it’s foot-dragging Republican defense team in the House to release the files last year.

“It really cuts across every political divide in a way that we almost never see on other issues,” Toufanian said.

The number of red state candidates running on Epstein and the “Epstein class” demonstrates this, reports Salon. Texas Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico and Ohio Democratic senatorial candidate Sherrod Brown appear to be getting good mileage out of their Republican opponents by campaigning against the Epstein class, as is Noah Taylor, an Army veteran running as a Democrat for the Senate in Kansas, and Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska.

“Osborn, who is challenging Sen. Pete Ricketts, issued a news release pointing to a campaign rally in which Ricketts and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas appeared together, calling them ‘birds of a feather who are content to carry out the agenda of the billionaire Epstein class,’” reports Salon.

And it definitely does not help that voters were not only highly aware of the Epstein files issue but were able to name specific figures connected to it, including Trump, who they believed to be part of the Epstein class, according to Data for Progress research.

For more than two decades, the Supreme Court has issued a long series of wins for plaintiffs seeking to protect their religious practices. On June 23, 2026, though, the majority delivered an uncommon defeat in this contentious area.

I keep getting phone calls from politicians wanting to know what I make of the extraordinary victories at the polls this week of young Democratic Socialists. Here’s what I tell them:

The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick.

Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America.

Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism.

Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C., and a bevy of newly-elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.

Pitted against these economic populist in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine after the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism.

In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II.

It runs vertically from bottom to top.

Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.

Sanders’s, AOC’s, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.

Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP.

They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent-controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.

I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties.

One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist.

There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.

But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.

The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.

Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and is has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.

Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “we’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.

Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.

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/

The Boston Globe reports Two Republican candidates for statewide office, including the state party’s de facto nominee for attorney general, won’t appear on the September primary ballot after the commission that oversees ballots took issue with hundreds of nomination signatures they submitted.

The result comes as a shock considering President Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s purported war on voter fraud in what critics say is actually a ploy to remove Democratic voters from rolls.

Despite the party’s crusade, however, Anne Manning Martin, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, the party’s endorsed candidate for attorney general, were both knocked off after the commission found problems with enough of the signatures they had collected.

“In accordance with the Ballot Law Commission’s decisions, the names of Anne Manning Martin for Lieutenant Governor and Michael C. Walsh for Attorney General will not be printed on the September 1, 2026, state primary ballots,” said Deb O’Malley, a spokesperson for Secretary of State William Galvin’s office.

The commission invalidated 1,021 signatures of the 10,677 Walsh turned in to the secretary of state’s office, leaving him hundreds of signatures short of the 10,000 required to make the ballot.

For Manning Martin, the commission invalidated 1,279 signatures her campaign submitted, leaving her with only 9,413 “valid signatures.”

“A general review of the certified signatures on the nomination papers also demonstrates they are likely fraudulent,” the commission wrote in the decision.

The Globe reports this decision is “the latest development in the signature fraud controversy that has now decimated the Republican ticket, knocking off two candidates for lieutenant governor and eliminating the party’s sole challenger to Attorney General Andrea Campbell.”

“The state Republican party, already struggling to field candidates down-ballot, is now only officially challenging for three of the six statewide constitutional offices, all of which are currently held by Democrats,” The Globe reports.

MAGA influencer and podcaster Tucker Carlson was happy to laud the hard feelings between President Donald Trump’s digital media manager Alex Bruesewitz and ultra conservative columnist and Fox News pundit Mark Levin on his Friday podcast.

In addition to discussions topics about how hard the nation appears to “discriminate” against white people and foreign influences on social media, Bruesewitz and Carlson eventually got around to the topic of Levin, who has criticized Trump’s disastrous invasion of Iran as well as a few other Trump policy disagreements.

“Mark Levin hates Trump. He's always hated Trump, has worked against Trump openly for a decade. And then Trump does something that he agrees with and he's [suddenly] the gatekeeper and Trump's best friend,” said Carlson. “Now he hates Trump again and he's attacking Trump. How long does Trump continue to be friends with this guy?”

Carlson himself has roundly criticized Trump’s invasion of Iran and warned that the invasion could escalate into a major world war if Trump followed through on his threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. But this discussion was about Levine.

Bruesewitz pointed out that Levin is “trying to get me fired, by the way,” before claiming Trump is “unique” in that he can handle when people criticize him,” in blatant contradiction to facts.

“Oh, he can? … He doesn't think they’re ‘low IQ crazy people’? Carlson demanded incredulously, referring to Trump’s insult of Carlson’s own criticism a matter of weeks ago over Iran.

“Only some,” Bruesewitz admitted, before going on to describe Levin as “part of the Republican Party that has been left in the past.”

“They are desperately trying to remain relevant and they use conflicts, whether it's in the Middle East … for example or the conflict in Ukraine. They use these issues to have a little relevance to maintain their presences on Fox News. But the people aren’t with him and you see that in polling. You see 60-something percent of Americans support [Trump’s] MOU [ending the Iran war]. You look at Mark Levin's twitter feed he acts like everybody's against it. Nobody’s against it except for Mark and his friends, who are probably coordinating in their messaging and talking points.”

“I always try to remind myself Mark Levin is not a player in any affairs, global or local,” Carlson said in agreement. “He's irrelevant and his job is, like, to make me mad and suck me into his fantasy world and I should just ignore this and you clearly already figured that out.”

“Don't take the bait,” Bruesewitz advised.

Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio appears to be feeling more venom than usual. On Friday Catoggio lit into the no-explanations secrecy with which President Donald Trump and his lieutenants conduct business, particularly the quick removal of four-star Gen. Chris Donahue.

Donohue was the top Army commander in Europe who led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, Catoggio said he was also famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021.

Before his removal the Atlantic reports he was “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict.

“Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing,” said Catoggio. “… Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.”

But there’s no official explanation coming on why exactly Donohue is out — and you’re not going to get one in this administration, said Catoggio.

“[E]lecting a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government,” Catoggio said. “You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.”

Under Trump, “the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that,” said Catoggio. “‘TRUST IN TRUMP,’ the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

And that’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired, said Catoggio. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation they’re entitled to.

“The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work,” Catoggio added, referring to DOGE running “roughshod” over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what was getting cut or why. It also explains the complete silence behind dozens of “outrageous” federal pardons being issued without explanation, just like Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war, and his disastrous war on Iran.

“Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him,” said Catoggio. “If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.”

Former Republican and current Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller showed no mercy to MAGA podcaster Megyn Kelly after her attack on Haitians this week.

“I think you're kind of nice to Megyn Kelly there because what Megyn Kelly is doing is she's being a rancid b——,” Miller said on his Friday afternoon Bulwark podcast with guest host Jane Coaston. “That's what she's doing. I'm sorry but, like, that is all she's doing.”

The former NBC daytime talk host took to her SiriusXM “Megyn Kelly Show” and denigrated Haitian immigrants living in the U.S.

“And half of you people, more than half, you won't assimilate. We don't want you,” Kelly said. “We don't care if you're offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to f—— Haiti. Sorry. I'm just I'm thinking about our friends in Ohio who've been dealing with these … Haitians for years now. Drunk driving all over their towns and killing people.”

“This is the whole cats and dogs thing,” Kelly then added, citing a soundly debunked claim by President Donald Trump that immigrants were eating cats and dogs prior to his 2024 re-election. “They don't want to live like Americans live.”

Coaston called Kelly’s rage insincere because she was merely doing it for money.

“It's a performance for an audience. It's fake. This is what [they] want,” said Coaston. “This is what [they] want to hear from you … and we want this from you and it will benefit you financially to do this. If it didn't, she wouldn't be doing it.”

“We have evidence of all of this because do you remember when she was working for NBC?” Coaston asked Miller.

“Yeah, it was a totally different character,” said Miller. “She was like a totally different character. She was loving trans children, having them on the show. There's like a soft morning mom after school drop off [kind of vibe]. She did the wine dancing.”

Kelly’s tenure on NBC was short-lived, however. In 2018, she was criticized for on-air remarks she made on Megyn Kelly Today related to the appropriateness of blackface as a Halloween costumes, saying “that was okay as long as you were dressing up like a character." She also defended Luann de Lesseps's use of blackface to wear a Diana Ross Halloween costume.

Kelly issued an email apologizing for the remarks after catching backlash. But three days later, NBC canceled Megyn Kelly Today. She had only been with the network for about a year.

Kelly is just an actor, said Miller, who contributes nothing to the nation, unlike the immigrants who actually arrive and work hard.

“She is perpetrating a lie. That is what is underscoring the tragedy that's happening to these people that are being sent back to Haiti for no reason. They're being menaced by our government for no reason. They're in the country working hard, going to church. raising their families,” said Miller. “… Megan Kelly, you didn't build s——. She has not built any lasting cultural touchstone. She's added nothing to the culture. All she's trying to do is rip the country apart, undermine what made America special.”