texas voter suppression

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the three or four wealthiest people in the world, with a net worth hovering around $260 billion to $277 billion, is devoting some of his wealth to fighting California’s wealth tax on billionaires.

So far, he’s spent $57 million trying to defeat the measure.

Brin’s actions — along with Elon Musk’s $250 million “investment” in getting Trump reelected in 2024 — should be Exhibits A and B in why America needs a wealth tax.

First, let’s stipulate that there is nothing inherently wrong about being a billionaire, a multibillionaire, or even, as Musk is likely to become, a trillionaire.

Wealth isn’t a “zero-sum” game in which these vast accumulations at the top depend on the rest of us losing an equal amount. In fact, the super-wealthy may help the rest of us do somewhat better than we were doing before.

Even though the wealth of the top 0.1 percent has soared in recent years, the bottom 50 percent are doing somewhat better than before. (See chart here.)

But wait.

The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game. The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less political power in everyone else’s hands.

It’s almost impossible to separate wealth from power, because the wealthy turn their fortunes into campaign contributions to politicians who will change laws to their liking and stop laws they’d detest — such as higher taxes on the super-wealthy. The wealthy also finance public relations campaigns and think-tanks to persuade the public of the wisdom of their positions.

Billionaire spending on presidential elections has soared even faster than billionaire wealth. And if you believe they’re donating because they want people with great integrity and excellent character to be elected president, consider that most billionaire political spending in 2024 went to Trump.

They’re donating because they want to protect and enlarge their fortunes and don’t want politicians elected who support higher taxes on them.

Nor do they want politicians elected who support stricter anti-monopoly legislation or who would make it easier to form labor unions or stop climate change (all of which might reduce the profits of, say, Google).

Take Sergey Brin and his $57 million against California’s tax on billionaires — which, not incidentally, was proposed because California must now pay more for Medicaid for lower-income Californians, because Trump and his Republican lackeys enacted a giant federal tax cut whose benefits have gone mostly to the wealthy.

Brin has become a major Republican donor. Last May, he donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee.

Why? Because the Republican Party is more dedicated to protecting and enlarging the wealth of the super-wealthy than is the Democratic Party.

By spending his fortune trying to stop California from taxing billionaires, Brin is illustrating why we need to tax billionaires. He’s making the argument for a billionaire wealth tax more clearly and articulately than anyone else possibly could.

Thank you, Serge.

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/.

President Donald Trump is so unpopular right now, he is heading toward a historic defeat in the upcoming midterm elections, a longtime Republican strategist recently argued.

“Donald Trump's poll numbers and his coalition are falling apart,” Steve Schmidt, who advised the previous Republican chief executive President George W. Bush said in a Tuesday Substack post. “It's simply staggering — unprecedented, even. Across the entire coalition, his voters are running. The Trump catastrophe is starting to land, and it's starting to be felt at the gas pumps. Everything is going to get more expensive, not less expensive, as the summer rolls on. Because Trump's war in Iran — the war of choice that he's losing — the impact of it? Well, we haven't even begun to start feeling it.”

Schmidt ticked off other midterm elections that historically went poorly for the incumbent, even more so than is usually the case, such as in 1974 (when President Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal), 1994 (when President Bill Clinton lost control of both houses of Congress due to the so-called “Gingrich Revolution”) and 2006 (when President George W. Bush suffered historic losses due to the unpopular Iraq War).

“In 2026, there will be a tsunami that outdoes them all,” Schmidt predicted. “In Ohio, we're going to see a Democratic governor and the return of Sherrod Brown to the United States Senate. In the state of Iowa, we're going to see a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator. And it's not just there. David Jolly in Florida has an outstanding chance to be the governor of the state. Lindsey Graham — a bloodthirsty wacko with no principles whatsoever, whatsoever — can be defeated in South Carolina.”

After quoting Trump saying that he may not leave office when his term expires in 2029, Schmidt added that “that's what the election is about: people who revere the Constitution, as opposed to revering or fearing Donald Trump.” Although Trump and his supporters insist he is doing a great job, “when the American people get to say, ‘Hey, how's he doing after two years in power?,’ and the answer to that question is found in the polls.”

He concluded that Trump has “the lowest net approval ratings ever for the president of the United States. That is approval minus disapproval. The lowest previous record, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll, was Trump at 24 points underwater — and that was all the way back in term number one.”

Other political experts have also noted that Trump is suffering in the polls. According to The Hill’s Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil, “President Trump’s surging disapproval rating is threatening to become a liability for downballot Republicans as the party looks to keep its fragile GOP trifecta in November. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday found the president at a new high in his disapproval — 62 percent — while 37 percent said they approved of his job helming of the country.”

They added, “On Trump’s handling of the cost of living and inflation, 76 percent and 72 percent disapproved, respectively. In addition, 66 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war. The polling, coupled with low marks he’s received in similar surveys, risk jeopardizing GOP candidates in an election cycle already shaping up to look like the 2018 midterms fueled by anti-Trump sentiment.”

Because Trump is so determined to keep control of Congress, some experts worry that he will try to steal the midterm elections.

Robert Kagan, a conservative historian who has written extensively about American foreign policy, warned CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February that President Donald Trump is likely to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections and in so doing take America “one big step into dictatorship.”

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

President Donald Trump’s political brand is based on convincing unexceptional people that they are better than they actually are, but one critic says he's doing so at the expense of exceptional people who happen to belong to marginalized communities.

“Donald Trump is literally hypnotizing mediocre people into thinking that they are meritocratic geniuses, while telling highly accomplished Black, Brown, and Asian people that they are nothing — that everything they have was given to them by those same mediocre people,” liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid said on Tuesday in an episode of “The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Joy-Ann Reid.” The pundit elaborated that Trump and his administration promote the idea that white men do not need to prove their merit because, by virtue of being white men, they are already exceptional.

“They're literally seeing a deficit of white men even trying to go to college now, because they're being told: you don't have to do anything, you just have to be,” Reid said. “You just have to exist as a white man and you're qualified to do anything. You can be a neurosurgeon — just walk in there, use your brilliant European brain, and start operating on people. You're fine. You don't need to know anything. But Black people, according to the late Charlie Kirk, can't even be a pilot — even after going to school to become one. If they're sitting behind the wheel of a Cessna, the claim is they don't know how to do it, that they were just pulled off the street and thrown into the chair.”

Not only do these arguments hurt ordinary people by encouraging discrimination, Reid argued; they also hurt the American economy and do damage to the government when second-rate leaders inevitably stumble at their jobs.

“So they're telling women and people of color: you're not qualified to do anything. But white men are being told: you're qualified to do everything," Reid said. "So you're having people walk into positions they're not ready for. This is Donald Trump doing exactly what they claimed affirmative action did to Black students — setting them up to fail by placing unqualified people in positions beyond their preparation. That was their theory. And that's literally what's happening to these mediocre white guys now.”

Reid offered up the Trump administration as the clearest example.

“RFK Jr. cannot help but fail because he's not qualified for the job,” Reid said. “Pete Hegseth cannot do anything but look like an idiot because he's not qualified for the job. When you're not seeking the most qualified people, you're setting all of these men up to fail — including the President of the United States.”

Reid is not alone among liberal pundits who argue that Trump’s appeal relies in part on elevating mediocre men into believing they are great. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte made a similar point in July on “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent.”

“So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves,” Marcotte said. “…I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call ‘the elites,’ who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them.”

President Donald Trump’s meddling has delivered a distilled crop of Trump clones in Indiana Republican primaries Tuesday. But the problem for many Republicans, is that few people outside Republican primary voters even like Trump anymore, or his clones.

“Indiana Republicans who defied Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme paid for it Tuesday, as primary voters ousted five of the seven state senators the president targeted with primary challenges after they voted against his redistricting push — a decisive show of force that suggests his hold on the GOP base remains firm even as his approval rating has hit a new low,” wrote MS NOW reporters Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis.

These contests, for state Senate seats in Indiana’s part-time legislature, would ordinarily draw little national attention, reported MS NOW. But after a December vote in which a bloc of Indiana Republicans resisted the White House’s pressure campaign and voted against an unpopular gerrymandering of the state’s two Democratic-held congressional districts out of existence, Trump set out to make examples of them. And his vindictive war on state legislative GOP proved a success in the primaries.

Trump endorsed challengers against seven of the eight sitting GOP state senators who voted against his gerrymandering scheme: Jim Buck, Spencer Deery, Dan Dernulc, Greg Goode, Travis Holdman, Linda Rogers and Greg Walker, reports MS NOW. However, Trump’s iron hold on Republican voters in the GOP primaries may not reflect an advantage in many general elections.

“Beneath that is a larger question, one that will only sharpen as his second term wears on: whether a president who is constitutionally barred from running again and whose approval ratings are the lowest of his tenure still commands the fear that built his hold on the GOP in the first place,” said Woodall and Davis.

And while Republican voters set the scale for which Republican run in general elections, Trump’s poll numbers are so low that only three out of eight Americans support him, compared to five out of eight who oppose him. This bodes poorly for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections — and it could be an additional anchor when Democratic opponents begin quoting Republican primary winners’ sycophantic claims of support for an unpopular president to independents and Democrats in a few months.

A prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump has Georgia election workers in his sights.

“Fulton County, Georgia, is trying to fend off a subpoena from a federal prosecutor in North Carolina seeking contact information for thousands of poll workers from the 2020 election,” The Guardian’s George Chidi reported on Tuesday. “The subpoena, issued in April by Dan Bishop, the interim US attorney of North Carolina’s middle district, demands the county provide rosters of election staff members who served in the November 2020 election, including their identification by name, position, residential and email address and personal telephone number.”

Fulton County attorneys are responding by trying to quash the federal grand jury subpoena by saying it is a politically motivated act of harassment, adding that even if election fraud had occurred in 2020 it would now be past the statute of limitations.

“Election workers are the referees of our democracy, and they’re going after the referees,” Michael McNulty, policy director for the voting rights organization Issue One, said in a statement. “This is about intimidation of election officials for 2026, and taking executive branch control of elections in 2026. Election workers are supposed to be getting gratitude and protection from the federal government, not being targeted by it. This is a sign of authoritarianism, not a democratically oriented government.”

In January, the FBI raided Fulton County’s clerk of courts and board of registration to seize about 700 boxes of original 2020 election materials, claiming they were part of a criminal investigation. Kurt Olsen, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lawyer from the 2020 election, initiated the raid. As conservative columnist George F. Will recently explained, Trumpers continue to push the lie that the 2020 election was stolen despite all of their claims being disproved.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In addition to relitigating the 2020 presidential election, some observers believe Trump is laying the foundations to overturn the 2026 midterm elections if Republicans lose seats as anticipated.

According to The Hill’s Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil, “President Trump’s surging disapproval rating is threatening to become a liability for downballot Republicans as the party looks to keep its fragile GOP trifecta in November. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday found the president at a new high in his disapproval — 62 percent — while 37 percent said they approved of his job helming of the country.”

They added, “On Trump’s handling of the cost of living and inflation, 76 percent and 72 percent disapproved, respectively. In addition, 66 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war. The polling, coupled with low marks he’s received in similar surveys, risk jeopardizing GOP candidates in an election cycle already shaping up to look like the 2018 midterms fueled by anti-Trump sentiment.”

Former White House press secretary Sarah Matthews says she believes a recent report claiming President Donald Trump and the White House are coaching staff on how to stonewall investigations from an inevitable Democratic Congress after November.

“They see the writing on the wall,” Matthews told a panel at MS NOW’s “The Weeknight.” “They know that the midterms are going to be brutal for them. … [W]ith these midterms coming up, voters feel a lot of buyer's remorse. They feel like they've been bamboozled by this administration. Everything that Trump said he was going to do on the campaign trail, whether that was bring down prices or be the peace candidate, he's done the complete opposite of it.”

“I think there's a very good chance that we could see both chambers flip, and that means trouble for the Trump administration, because they are going to now face accountability for the first time, which obviously we have not seen them face with Republicans in Congress,” Matthews continued. “I mean, Trump knows that he's been able to have them in the palm of his hand with Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump has even called himself, effectively, the Speaker of the House, because he knows that they are just completely worthless and not doing anything. And so I think that they're worried.”

Matthews added there are endless items for which Democrats can investigate the president, whether it is allegations of corruption with lucrative deals and contracts awarded to Trump family members or the handling of the Epstein files and the administration’s failure to investigate or prosecute “a single person in the files.”

“There is a plethora of things that Democrats could go after for investigations. So, it makes sense that White House lawyers are talking to these folks and trying to prepare them for this, because I think that this is going to be their reality when we have a new Congress.”

Matthews added that there were sure to be “loyalists who will refuse to cooperate,” and who are already digging for loopholes, but she warned loyalists’ legal jeopardy is not over once Trump is out of the White House.

“The thing is that even when Trump leaves office, that doesn't mean that accountability is over. There still is a real possibility that he could face — and all the other Trump administration officials — could face accountability after the fact. The statute of limitations will not expire when he leaves office and they can only get away with it for so long.”

- YouTube youtu.be

People who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to believe in a debunked conspiracy theory that has been widely linked to violence, according to a recent study.

“Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans’ support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in ‘obedient’ voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens,” scholars Jesse Rhodes, Seth Goldman and others wrote for the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. They added that, because Fox News frequently promotes this theory, the article’s authors decided to study “the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT.” After surveying more than 1,000 people over a period of more than a year, they concluded that “whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not,” a phenomenon consistent with what they dubbed a “Fox News Effect.”

“Our study extends this research by exploring whether exposure to Fox News is associated with stronger support for key tenets of the GRT among whites,” the authors wrote. “Using results from a panel survey of American adults, we found that whereas pluralities of whites support core aspects of the GRT, majorities and sometimes supermajorities of Fox News viewers express support for these beliefs. We then tested the robustness of this bivariate relationship with multivariate OLS regression and discovered that exposure to Fox News was associated with greater support for the GRT, controlling for demographic and political characteristics.”

To explain the link between watching Fox News and supporting the Great Replacement Theory, the authors wrote that “undocumented immigration is best understood as a ‘hard’ issue and, as a result, public opinion is more likely to be susceptible to strike elite influence,” adding later in their paper that “studies of mass opinion have shown that Americans have low levels of information concerning the scope of undocumented immigration to the United States and the factors that account for the recent increase in unauthorized migration to the country. Given this lack of knowledge and the consistently positive coverage of the GRT on Fox News, it is no surprise that Fox News viewers have opinions closely aligned with the core tenets of this troubling belief system.”

In the United States, the Great Replacement Theory was cited as the rationale behind a number of mass shootings including a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, a 2019 attack on a Poway Chabad center, a 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart and a 2022 shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

“According to the study text, scholars point out that individuals who subscribe to these beliefs also show an increased inclination to endorse violence as a political tool,” PsyPost’s Karina Petrova wrote when describing the study. “The perpetrators of several mass shootings targeting minorities in the United States have cited the theory in their writings. Because the ideology frequently emerges alongside acts of violence, understanding how the beliefs spread has become a major concern for social scientists.”

Despite the serious consequences of the Great Replacement Theory, Trump has appointed a number of high-ranking officials who support it. When one of them, Jeremy Carl, withdrew his nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizational Affairs because of his pushing of GRT, he defended himself by saying “I mostly just kind of saying this ... to troll the libs.”

Adding he wanted to take “some genuine ironic distance,” Carl claimed that “I don’t actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. I’m trying to kind of push people.” Yet he later added that Democrats “hyperdiversify the country.”

The IndyStar reports Indiana’s high-populated Marion County appears to be topping recent primaries as President Donald Trump made moves to remove Republican incumbents who bucked him on a recent push for a mid-decade gerrymander.

“Even though a few Marion County residents may still be waiting in line to cast their votes, voter turnout is trending toward 15 percent, Dan Goldblatt, communications director for the Marion County Clerk’s Office, said shortly after 6 p.m. Tuesday,” said IndyStar reporter Katie Wiseman.

While that number might seem low, Wiseman reports Indianapolis' primary elections only see 7-8 percent voter turnout, according to Goldblatt.

“[The year] 2026 has already seen a higher voter turnout than the presidential primary election in 2024, which was 13.55 percent and the last primary midterm election in 2022 which saw only 10.78 percent voter turnout according to Marion County voter data,” wrote Wiseman.

The New York Times reports that voters in deep-red Indiana went to the polls today to cast ballots in the state’s primary elections — which rarely receive attention outside the Midwest. But this year, President Trump changed that.

“The president is seeking to oust seven Republican state senators whom he deems insufficiently loyal,” reports the Times. “They had helped defeat a redistricting effort that could have boosted the party’s chances of maintaining control of the U.S. House, so Trump found seven challengers to endorse instead.”

It did not appear to matter that many of the candidates “in the president’s cross hairs are staunch conservatives with long track records,” the Times added.

The night’s results, reports said the Times, “will serve as a test of Trump’s ability to bend the Republican Party’s rank-and-file to his will.”

But once Indiana is done, Trump is not, adds the Times. In the coming weeks, the president also hopes to oust more well-known Republicans in Louisiana and Kentucky.

However voters decide, IndyStar reports Trump has riled them in either one direction or the other.

According to a top defense expert, President Donald Trump’s Iran war has made it impossible for millions of Americans to ever trust their government’s foreign policy again.

“For decades, the U.S. government has been willing to start wars but not strategically and transparently manage them, consistently misleading its citizenry to justify adventurism abroad,” Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow for Defense Priorities, wrote for Reason on Tuesday. “The conduct of the Trump administration in the current war with Iran is no exception.”

Langlois added, “President Donald Trump's claims of ‘victory’ as the war persists through a blockade and multiple troop surges without a clear win-case highlights how optics designed to mislead dictate Washington's approach to war today. This war could mark a crucial lesson and potential turning point, however, forcing the nation to come to grips with the real costs of violent conflict.”

The foreign policy scholar explained that Trump’s loss of credibility over the Iran War did not occur in isolation. In fact, for more than 60 years, American foreign policymakers have made unpopular decisions that eroded the public’s ability to believe their words.

“Unable to achieve already unclear objectives and trapped in a quagmire of its own making, Washington has chosen destruction as the war's defining characteristic,” Langlois observed. “The evolution of the war in this direction reflects the ‘body count’ rhetoric used by the White House during the Vietnam War, in which a narrative of mass killing and destruction was believed to bolster perceptions of American victory. In reality, it only obscured the quagmire, prolonging an already lost war in a conflict with no military resolution in the first place.”

Comparing Vietnam to Iran, Langlois concluded that “a strategic loss cannot be defined as a win. A lie is still a lie. That victory is and will be hollow.”

Langlois is not the only foreign policy scholar to raise the alarm about the president’s Iran war and how its ongoing unpopularity could hurt America’s foreign policy.

“Trump’s Easter Sunday blast at the Iranians thus offered a stark contrast with even his most profane predecessors,” presidential historian Barbara A. Perry recently wrote for The Atlantic. Perry quoted Trump’s Easter Day social media post to Iran in which he wrote “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—— Strait, you crazy b------, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

While presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were notoriously profane in private, Perry pointed out that they were very careful about protecting the office’s image and credibility by not speaking like that in public.

“All previous presidents have wanted to appear serious, dignified, and statesmanlike when speaking to their fellow Americans and the world about war,” Perry wrote. “Not every commander in chief can rival Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—or even Franklin D. Roosevelt describing Japan’s ‘unprovoked and dastardly attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941’ as a ‘day that will live in infamy’—but the others have all tried.”

MS NOW Anchor Nicole Wallace and panelists took turns ruining President Donald Trump’s look of impatience with voters while he obsesses over his various pet projects around the U.S. Capitol.

“This is who he is,” said Wallace, referring to a photo of Trump hoisting a design of his beloved White House ballroom and flaunting it to the media. “He doesn't give a hoot about your economic despair, couldn't care less and has no clue how much eggs cost or anything else. He’s angry at you for caring about the price of gas, is angry at you for caring about losing your health care, is angry at Marjorie Taylor Greene for caring about the promise about ‘no forever wars,’ is angry at Tucker Carlson for calling BS on him, betraying his voters on all those. All of the above.”

“But what does he care about enough to carry it around in his pocket?” demanded Wallace. “We've really never seen him produce a picture of any of his children or wife, for that matter. But he carries [a photo of the ballroom] around everywhere he goes.”

“It's not about the dollars,” said former Democratic Strategist Dan Kanninen. “It's about his focus — and it's not on you. In fact, to your point, he's angry that voters want to pull him away from this pet project, and he has loathing for them. I think that’s coming through [to voters] at this point.”

At this, Wallace played footage of an earlier interview she’d conducted with Bulwark Editor Sarah Longwell, where Longwell shared insight about souring reaction from people who had voted for Trump in 2024.

“The focus groups allow you to hear people say, ‘it makes me want to cry like it is causing me pain. I have to choose between whether I can get groceries or whether I pay for my kids to be able to, to, to participate on the soccer team,’” said Longwell, quoting respondents in Bulwark surveys. “Last year … [people] were like, ‘well, he's not fixing things, but Rome wasn't built in a day. We have patience. Give him some time.’ That is not how they sound now. Now they sound like, ‘What is he doing in Iran? What is he doing with the ballroom? Why is he focused on all this other stuff? Nothing's getting better for me.’”

“I mean, tragically, things aren't going to get better anytime soon,” Wallace estimated.

- YouTube youtu.be