Trump, Vance and Musk are avatars of a dark and dangerous force

James Carville recently suggested that Democrats need to do more to reach out to young men, as though pandering to testosterone-fueled grievance and entitlement is the key to winning elections. Let’s be blunt: that’s a bullshit, dead-end strategy that risks ratifying the very worst elements of a crisis in masculinity that’s corroding our politics, poisoning our culture, and endangering our democracy.

And it’s coming from the top, down.

Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist, according to the judge in his case. A New York jury found him liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a civil case, and he’s remained unapologetic. Then he moved straight to pardoning other men in his orbit, even convicted ones like Roger Stone and a rapper with a history of alleged sexual assault. And now he’s telling us to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein wasn’t an outlier: he was a prototype. A predator who operated in plain sight, protected by the powerful, and normalized by the elite. His crimes weren’t hidden; they were ignored, downplayed, and rationalized until they became impossible to deny.

The recent revelations about the scope of his network, and the prominent men it touched, show how deeply entrenched rape culture is not just at the fringes of politics, but at its very core.

Trump pardoned multiple anti-abortion criminals as well as Ross Ulbricht, who ran the world’s most notorious market for illicit drugs (that some allege could also have been used for human trafficking); Trump's administration apparently helped free Andrew and Tristan Tate, rightwing influencers accused of rape in Romania, from prison in that country, so they could return to America to help promote the GOP to their young male followers.

Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit. Pornography has become the de facto sex education for millions of boys. A ten‑year‑old with a smartphone has unfettered access to violent, misogynistic content that normalizes coercion and degradation.

This isn’t just a parental issue, it’s a cultural emergency. This content is shaping how an entire generation understands sex, power, and consent.

And Trump’s “best friend” Epstein was an avatar of that twisted worldview.

Trump and Epstein were reportedly best buds for years, partying together, traveling together on Epstein’s private jet, enjoying the same grotesque perks of unchecked wealth.

Both political parties have brushed shoulders with predators, but only one is building a platform that protects them by law. Virtually every Republican in the House of Representatives just voted to conceal the information about Epstein our government currently has.

And now, Elon Musk echoes that same ideology with a techno-eugenic twist, building a brood while normalizing control over women’s bodies in the name of “saving civilization.”

Musk is openly using white women as baby incubators. Musk has fathered at least 14 children with four different women. He’s talked openly about a global “underpopulation crisis” and described his mission to produce a “legion-level” brood of children before the apocalypse. He’s recruited mothers via X, and allegedly dangled millions in hush-money deals. This isn’t family values: it’s eugenic breeding with a Big Daddy tint.

That’s also largely what the so‑called “Tradwife” movement is selling. On social media and in right-wing circles, we’re seeing a resurgence of the Traditional Wife persona; it’s not really about choice or liberty as they try to sell it, but hierarchy. White women are expected to go “back to the kitchen and bedroom,” producing more white babies in a panic about the “browning” of America.

This fixation on race and reproduction mirrors the same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric promoted on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets that fed the Charlottesville rally and inspired mass murderers in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and El Paso.

From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” our president has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women.

JD Vance has similarly pushed the tradwife meme, arguing that:

“I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

That “single” job is the key; he’s not talking about economic advancement in the middle class but, rather, pitching the idea that dad should work and mom should stay home to cook, clean, and attend to the kids.

And, like in the 1950s and before, it’s all undergirded by state violence. Jessica Valenti writes with clarity and horror at her Abortion Every Day Substack, documenting how Red states are now arresting women for miscarriages and far, far worse is on the horizon.

Law enforcement officers in Red states are now interrogating women who seek care for pregnancy complications, Republican Attorneys General are demanding records of miscarriages and abortions even from Blue states, and doctors are afraid to treat women in crisis, leading to a doubling in the use of blood transfusions (women almost bleeding to death) in Texas since they passed their draconian abortion ban. It’s deliberate, and it’s escalating.

And now Republicans in Congress and the states are openly talking about bringing back enforcement of the Comstock Act of 1873, the Victorian-era law banning not just abortion but contraception and obscene materials, as I wrote about in The Cold Dead Hand of Anthony Comstock.

Meanwhile, the fetal personhood movement backed by Trump and Vance is becoming mainstream. As vice president, J.D. Vance spoke at the 2025 March for Life rally, declaring “I want more babies in the United States of America” and aligned himself with the GOP’s agenda of fetal personhood, a policy that could make IVF, contraception, and even most miscarriage treatment illegal.

This is a deliberate, systemic reinforcement of toxic masculinity, an ideology of power, control, and domination.

It shows up in incel forums, Proud Boys gatherings, Andrew Tate videos, and in the halls of Congress. It’s being sold to young men as an antidote to their anxieties, be they economic, social, or existential.

From Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, rape culture isn’t fringe: it’s the foundation. And it’s a lie.

Some Republicans will pretend to claim that they just want to return America to the Leave It To Beaver world of June Cleaver, the happy homemaker of 1960s TV. What they don’t like to point out, though, is that in the 1960s most women didn’t have much of a choice.

When Republicans say that your grandmother stayed with your grandfather and should be your role model, they fail to point out that women three generations ago really had few choices unless they were independently wealthy.

Employers could refuse to hire women because of their gender as recently as 1964; home sellers and real estate agents could refuse to sell a house to women up until 1974; it wasn’t until 1988 that the law said landlords could no longer refuse to rent to women. Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized until 1993.

When Louise and I got married in 1972, she couldn’t get a credit card or sign a mortgage without the signature of me, her brother, or her father. She couldn’t serve on a jury, get a no-fault divorce, or enroll in an Ivy League college. And if she’d had an unwanted pregnancy, she’d be out of luck until 1973’s Roe v Wade decision.

In 20 states, Republicans have succeeded in removing from women one of the most important options that allow them to stay in the workplace: abortion of an accidental or unwanted pregnancy. Now they’re going after birth control. And their war on DEI is just another aspect of their war on their own women, as white women are the main beneficiaries of the DEI programs Republicans are demanding corporations and government agencies end.

Republicans are even working hard on ending no-fault divorce: as Vance said, women should stay home and serve their husbands even when those men are physically or emotionally abusive.

They ignore the reality of an 8 to 16 percent decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws, a roughly 30 percent decrease in intimate partner violence, and a 10 percent drop in women murdered by their partners. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Republican legislators are also pushing back hard against equal-pay-for-equal-work laws, calling such efforts DEI, again arguing that women shouldn’t be on the job in the first place.

These are all aspects of a crisis of masculinity and rape culture that Republicans are exploiting to the detriment of both women and the men who’re buying their perverted siren song.

Thus, Democratic consultants’ calls to “reach out” to young men without challenging these ideas are dangerous. They can be interpreted as code for validation, not transformation.

What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect.

And there are real exemplars out there.

Look at former Sen. Jon Tester, Montana farmer and Marine vet, who fights for working families without preening bravado. Look at former President Joe Biden — yes, him — who has comforted grieving mothers and lent moral clarity and empathy where so many others have failed. Look at single fathers, teachers, firefighters, nurses, community organizers: men who show up because they care, not to conquer.

True masculinity uplifts. It nurtures. It protects without demeaning. It leads with humility. It affirms the full humanity of women.

That’s the kind of man worth celebrating and inviting young men to be. Not the guy who calls himself a “legion” builder, or hustles violent porn on the internet and brags of his conquests on YouTube, or thinks women exclusively belong at home to “raise the babies.”

Democrats shouldn’t pander to wounded pride. They shouldn’t validate grievance or reinforce entitlement. They should, instead, challenge men to grow up; to become allies in a fight for justice, equality, and democracy.

Redefining masculinity isn’t a side project: it’s central to reclaiming our national soul.

Let Republicans hold up Trump, Musk, and Tate as their sick, twisted role models. Democrats should amplify the real men: the compassionate, the just, the fierce protectors of freedom and equality.

Let’s reject the calls coming from multiple corners to “reach out” to codes of rape culture. Instead, let’s lead the way to a future where strength means service, power means accountability, and freedom means equality for everyone.

Supreme Court's democracy hijack is one step closer to complete

Earlier this month, Louise and I vacationed across several different cities and rural areas in Norway, the country from which my grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1917. The place was immaculate, modern, and, astonishingly, seemed entirely free of homelessness. Official stats say around 3,000 people lack housing across the entire country. That’s about the number you’ll see sleeping on sidewalks in a single Los Angeles neighborhood.

Depending on the city, it looked like half or more of the cars on the road were electric. Norway has mandated that, starting this coming January, all new cars sold in that nation must be zero-emission. Charging stations are everywhere. Already, 89 percent of all new cars sold there last year were fully electric.

But the real eye-opener wasn’t the electric cars or tidy sidewalks; it was the democracy. Norway is a functioning democratic republic, but not in the American sense where billionaires run the show to their own benefit.

It’s a country that practices democratic socialism, a term that causes conniptions among Fox “News” anchors and libertarian think tanks but simply means this: The people vote for leaders who actually implement policies the majority wants.

Sadly, that’s not the case here pretty much at all, at least since the Reagan Revolution. Back here in the United States, six billionaire-corrupted Supreme Court justices just told us that democracy doesn’t matter anymore. That the desires of millions of Americans can be rendered meaningless, especially if billionaires and their puppets want it that way.

Yesterday, this Trump-packed Supreme Court quietly — in an unsigned ruling on their badly-abused so-called “shadow docket” with no public debate and no explanation — handed down one of the most destructive rulings in modern history.

In a 6–3 decision, the justices green-lit Trump’s plan to gut the Department of Education, firing 1,400 people, freezing $6.8 billion in funding, and throwing the constitutional guarantee of equal access to education under the proverbial bus. It also flies in the face of the constitutional requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” by spending money Congress appropriates and keeping open agencies Congress created.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was scathing, calling the ruling “indefensible” and warning it would “cripple the federal government’s ability to ensure civil rights are enforced in education.”

The highest court in our land just sided with a twice-impeached, sexual-assaulting, insurrection-inciting president to dismantle the very agency responsible for making sure children with disabilities get accommodations. That Black and Brown, Jewish and Muslim students aren’t systematically discriminated against. That poor children in poor neighborhoods can still get a good education. That people with massive student debt can get some small breaks. That schools have at least some federal oversight.

Compare that to Norway.

While American billionaires are buying legislators and court decisions to keep their taxes low, their subsidies for the fossil fuel industry flowing, and to crush unions, Norwegians are investing in their people.

Nobody in Norway ever goes bankrupt from medical bills. College and trade schools are free. Unions are everywhere, wages are high, and stiff taxes on the morbidly rich ensure that public services like education and healthcare are publicly funded rather than run by greedy corporations and billionaire CEOs.

How do they do it? Why is it so different there compared to here?

Because in Norway, and across most of Europe, democracy is real. Citizens are automatically registered to vote. Elections are free of voter suppression, and dark money is illegal. Politicians are answerable to the people, not to fossil fuel barons or Wall Street banksters.

And so, people can vote for legislators who can actually give them what they want:

  • Universal healthcare
  • Free higher education
  • Robust public transit
  • Workers’ rights and living wages
  • Climate action, not climate denial

Meanwhile, in America, six corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court have become an unelected, billionaire-funded wrecking crew that’s gleefully tearing down every public institution that threatens plutocratic rule.

This disparity, this tragedy, is no accident here in our country.

As I’ve written about for years and most recently detailed in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it began in the modern era with Lewis Powell’s 1971 Memo, a blueprint for corporate America to seize the courts, media, education, and politics. Nixon rewarded Powell by putting him on the Supreme Court the following year, and the rest is tragic history.

From Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United, this court and its billionaire benefactors have redefined bribery as “free speech” and legalized the wholesale purchase of politicians. And, of course, Supreme Court justices.

This week’s shadow docket ruling is just the latest in that decades-long march toward oligarchy and, now, dictatorship.

The irony? The majority of Americans want a Norway-style system.

  • 66% support Medicare for All
  • 58% support free college and student debt cancellation
  • 64% support taxing the ultra-rich more heavily
  • 60% of workers say they’d join a union if they could

So why don’t we have it?

Because six corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, and the corrupt rightwing billionaires who bought them and support their lavish lifestyles, won’t let us.

They’ve legalized voter suppression, gutted campaign finance laws, blessed gerrymandering, and are now attacking public education, the very foundation of a functioning democracy.

The lesson of Norway isn’t that the people there are somehow better. It’s that they’ve built institutions that respect the will of the majority and block the power of the morbidly rich. And when their democratic institutions are under threat, they act.

In America, we must do the same.

  • End lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and put in term limits.
  • Ban dark money in politics.
  • Rebuild public education, not dismantle it.
  • Tax the morbidly rich.
  • Expand and protect voting rights.

This isn’t a left-right issue; it’s a democracy-versus-oligarchy issue. And this week’s Supreme Court ruling should be a five-alarm fire.

If we want a country that looks more like Norway and less like the feudal state Trump and his bought-off justices envision, we’ve got to fight for it.

The billionaires may have the Supreme Court, the White House, and Congress, at least for now. But we still have the numbers.

And in a democracy, that still means something, if we make it mean something.

Trump is testing how far he can go

Trump’s threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship is a “test.”

Kids do it all the time. Throw a tantrum in the store demanding cookies and if the parents don’t remove them from the store right away, every visit will see the tantrums escalate. Testing the boundaries. When the test succeeds, the boundaries get moved and a new boundary gets tested, on and on until finally the child’s behavior is so egregious he’s stopped. Or he always gets away with everything and grows up to be Donald Trump.

We learn this early.

We’ve seen a series of these tests coming from the Trump administration, following the very specific and consistently repeated pattern that history tells us played out in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, el Sisi, and pretty much every other person who took over a democracy and then, step-by-step turned it into a dictatorship.

Trump started testing racism as a political weapon when he came down the elevator at Trump Tower and spoke about “Mexican murderers and rapists” in front of what media reports said was a crowd he’d hired for $50/person from a company that provides extras to movie and TV production companies.

While his initial goal was reportedly to get NBC to renew The Apprentice and pay him more than Gwen Stefani, his racism test work out shockingly well; suddenly he was a serious contender for the party that had inherited the KKK vote when Democrats abandoned the South with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960s.

Another test was whether the exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies that he and his family had used to hustle real estate could work in politics.

He quickly discovered that GOP base voters — after decades of having uncritically (slavishly, even) swallowed lies about trickle-down economics, “evil union bosses,” and the “importance of small government” — were more than happy to embrace or ignore, as the occasion demanded, his prevarications.

From there, Trump tested exactly how gullible his most fervent supporters — and the media that fed them a daily diet of very profitable outrage and hate — would buy into a lie so audacious, so in defiance of both the law and common sense, so outside the bounds of normal patriotism, that they could be whipped into a murderous frenzy and kill three police officers while trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.

The nation and our press reacted as if he’d failed that test, but when he was able to cow enough senators to avoid being convicted in his impeachment trial, he knew he’d won.

Now he’s again testing how far he can go.

George Retes is a 25-year-old Hispanic natural-born American citizen and disabled Army veteran working as a security guard at a legal marijuana operation in California. When it was raided by ICE, he got in his car and tried to drive away to avoid getting in the middle of what he saw as trouble.

Masked agents chased him down, smashed the window of his car and pepper-sprayed him in the face, dragged him out of his car, and disappeared him.

Testing.

Will Democrats make a stink? Will the media make it more than a one-day story? Will any Republicans break rank and stand against his excesses? Was it even mentioned on any of the Sunday shows? How far can he go next time?

So far, Trump thinks he’s winning these tests. The outrages are coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of them, just like in Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.

Retes wasn’t the only US citizen who’s been arrested or detained by ICE; they’ve gone after a mayor, a member of Congress, and even assaulted a United States senator.

A 71-year-old grandmother was assaulted and handcuffed by masked agents. Axios documents others; as the CNN headline on the story about other US citizens being snatched notes: “‘We are not safe in America today:’ These American citizens say they were detained by ICE.”

Testing.

After years of hysteria on the billionaire-owned sewer of Fox “News” about our nation’s first Black president deploying “FEMA Camps” to detain white conservatives, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in Las Vegas, ranting that FEMA Camps set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and...confiscating guns.”

He murdered those innocent concert-goers, he said, to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” saying, “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”

Now those detention facilities conservatives feared has come into being, as Republicans in Congress just funded concentration camps like “Alligator Auschwitz” in multiple states across America.

Visiting congress members claim inmates are packed over 30 to a cage, with Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz reporting her horror when she was shown that, “They get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit.”

Testing.

We recently learned via CBS News from a whistleblower and now-released texts that Trump’s former lawyer and now-nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, Emil Bove, then working in the Justice Department, advised the administration officials to tell federal courts “fuck you” when they ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran hellhole concentration camp.

For months, the administration appears to have followed his obviously unconstitutional and illegal advice. Republicans want him on the federal bench anyway.

Testing.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia — who Trump official Erez Reuveni said had been deported “in error” — described how he was treated in that El Salvadoran concentration camp, telling his attorneys and the court that he’d been repeatedly beaten, then forced to kneel from 9 pm to 6 am “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”

He had committed no crime and was deported in open violation of a federal judge who demanded the plane either not take off or return before landing in El Salvador. The Trump administration simply and contemptibly ignored the court’s order.

Testing.

In a White House visit, Trump told the El Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele (who refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”), that he wants to send American citizens to that country’s torture centers.

“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump said as the two men laughed. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”

Testing.

Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities are also holding US citizens like Andrea Velez, 32, who was snatched by masked agents during a raid in Los Angeles. As LA’s ABC News affiliate Channel 7 reported:

“Velez, a marketing designer and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was arrested Tuesday morning after her family dropped her off at work. According to her attorneys, Velez's sister and mother saw her being approached and grabbed by masked men with guns, so they called the Los Angeles Police Department to report a kidnapping.
“Police responded to the scene near Ninth and Spring streets and realized the kidnapping call was actually a federal immigration-enforcement operation.”

She’s out of the detention facility now, but on $5000 bond; ICE apparently has plans for her future.

Testing.

And now Trump is telling us he wants to strip a natural-born US citizen comedienne — who’s made jokes about him that pissed him off — of her US citizenship, “Because,” he says, “of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”

If he can do it to Rosie — if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test — he can do it to me or you.

Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; by July of that same year, a mere six months later, he’d revoked the citizenship of thousands for the crimes of being “socialists,” “communists,” Jews, or journalists and commentators who’d written or spoken ill of him. Trump appears to be just a bit behind him on that timeline.

Testing.

Trump wants NPR and PBS defunded as soon as possible, having issued an Executive Order to that effect, and has ordered his FCC to launch investigations that could strip major TV networks of their broadcast licenses if they continue to report on him and his activities in ways that offend him. He shut down the Voice Of America, ending America’s promotion of democracy across the world. He kicked the Associated Press out of the White House press pool.

Testing.

Trump has declared large strips of land along the southern border to be federalized territory and put the American military in charge of policing the area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits the military from performing any sort of police function against civilians.

Testing.

When students spoke out on campus against Trump ally and longtime Kushner family friend Bibi Netanyahu’s murderous assault of Gaza and support for settlers stealing West Bank land from Palestinians, armed and masked federal agents began arresting those students, imprisoning them for their First Amendment-protected speech.

Then Trump went after their universities, bringing several to heel just as Orbán has in Hungary and Putin has in Russia.

Testing.

Yesterday, six Republicans on the Supreme Court said that Trump could wholesale mass-fire employees of the Department of Education, essentially shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress in defiance of the constitutional requirement that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Sotomayor wrote the dissent, flaming in extreme alarm at her colleagues:

“[This decision] hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. … The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”

Or maybe the six Republican justices on the Court are just scared? After all, judges across the country are being threatened, having pizzas delivered to their homes in the middle of the night by way of saying, “We know where you live.” This after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot at their New Jersey home by a gunman disguised as a pizza delivery driver. Her husband was also shot, but survived.

A few months ago, after one of Trump’s rants against judges who rule against him, Judge Salas told the press:

“Hundreds of pizzas have been delivered to judges all over this country in the last few months. And in the last few weeks — judges’ children. And now Daniel’s name was being weaponized to bring fear to judges and their children. You’re saying to those judges — ‘You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like Judge Salas’ son?'”

Testing.

What’s next? Will we see Americans who’ve spoken poorly of Trump on social media arrested like both Orbán and Putin do?

Will more students end up on the ground or in jail?

Will more judges be charged with the crime of running their own courtrooms in ways Trump and ICE dislike?

More mayors arrested?

More Democratic senators taken to the ground and handcuffed?

Will Americans start being disappeared in numbers that can’t be ignored? Deported to El Salvador and South Sudan?

Will journalists be destroyed by massive libel suits or imprisoned for what they write?

Will more judges bend to Trump’s will because they’re either terrified or, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, have apparently become radicalized by Fox “News” or other rightwing propaganda outlets?

The way we all react to these tests will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?

President Obama says Democrats need to “toughen up.” While true, it would have been nice to hear “tough” words of outrage, warning, and leadership from him and Kamala Harris over the past six months. And Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

But now — as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act — it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.

See you on June 17th — this Thursday — for some “good trouble.”

Trump has pushed us to the brink of recession, fascism, and World War III

The headlines this week are wild: Trump is threatening nutso tariffs against America’s traditional trading partners (although none for Russia, of course), demanding that our allies proclaim their willingness to go to war with China, and — along with his billionaire buddies — looting our government while immiserating small business and the American middle class.

As a result, America stands today at an extraordinarily dangerous crossroads economically, politically, and geopolitically. We’re talking a second Republican Great Depression, fascism, and the very real possibility of a third world war.

As the Trump administration abandons manufacturing and building out America’s infrastructure in favor of financial speculation and deregulation, we’re hollowing out the very foundations of real wealth. Simultaneously, the GOP is doubling down on policies that have repeatedly crashed our economy, stripped support from working families, and handed more money and political power to the morbidly rich.

Now, with economic stagnation looming and international tensions escalating, Trump’s erratic and belligerent approach threatens not just recession but war. If Democrats and people who love America and democracy don’t find their voice — and fast — we may be sleepwalking not only into a massive economic disaster, but into a global conflict that could define the rest of this century or even bring about the end of western civilization.

There are a few basic principles that undergird this argument. I’ll walk through them here, building the case brick by brick, and ending with the most important task before us.

First, let’s get back to basics. There are only two primary ways to grow a nation’s wealth: by extracting resources from the earth or by manufacturing goods, adding value to those resources. Everything else — lawns getting mowed, nails getting done, stocks getting traded — may move money around or improve quality of life, but don’t grow the actual wealth of a nation.

For example, I wash your car and you mow my lawn. We exchange $20 bills. It’s nice, it’s neighborly, but it didn’t grow our nation’s economy at all.

Now, suppose you go into the ground and mine and refine iron ore, and I use some of it to make an ax. You’ve turned rocks into raw material. I’ve turned that into a tool that can build homes, cut timber, or create more tools.

That is real wealth creation. That ax becomes part of the wealth of our country; that’s what Adam Smith meant in The Wealth of Nations when he pointed out that economies grow when labor transforms nature into value, as I explained in detail on the Hartmann Report.

A third, indirect way to grow national wealth is through government investment in the infrastructure that supports those two main drivers. Roads, bridges, rail, and ports move goods. Broadband and schools cultivate talent. Green energy projects power the nation. Free college, health care, paid sick leave, and maternity leave make for a healthier, more well-educated, and thus more productive workforce. Strong regulation prevents scammers, monopolists, and fraudsters from distorting or hijacking markets.

Without these supports — especially when the bulk of national income is being siphoned off by the morbidly rich — productivity slows, innovation stalls, and economies become brittle. History is replete with examples of this type of collapse from ancient Rome to Europe stumbling into World Wars I and II.

The Democratic Party has largely understood this since the industrial revolution, as did the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railroad and funded over 70 free “Land Grant” colleges like MSU across the nation.

From FDR through Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, Democratic presidents have consistently invested in the physical and human infrastructure that powers wealth creation. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill, the WPA and CCC, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act all fit this pattern.

Even Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, got it, although he was his party’s modern exception. He built the Interstate Highway System and warned Americans against the possibility that the military-industrial complex could corrupt Congress. His vision was of a balanced, productive America, not one dominated by war profiteers and Wall Street gamblers.

But the Republican Party since the 1920s (with the exception of Eisenhower) has marched in the opposite direction. From Coolidge and Hoover to Reagan and Trump, they’ve pushed a different story: that government is the problem and taxes are theft. Reagan kicked off the insanity with his massive tax cuts and neoliberal rhetoric. He didn’t just demonize government; in 1983, he legalized stock buybacks, something previously considered felony criminal stock manipulation. This move transformed American corporations from engines of productivity into tools for enriching shareholders and executives.

This launched a massive shift in our economy. Financialization began to replace manufacturing as the central engine of growth. Instead of making things, our largest corporations became obsessed with gaming markets, flipping debt, and enriching insiders. Wall Street and monopolies (also allowed by changes Reagan made in our law) overtook and then devastated Main Street, and the real wealth of the nation thus started to stagnate.

At the same time, Republicans attacked the very institutions that supported productivity. They gutted unions, fought to privatize Social Security and Medicare with their “Advantage” scam, deregulated the banking and energy sectors, and worked tirelessly to cripple the regulatory state. When Obama created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to prevent another financial crisis, for example, Republicans moved swiftly to kneecap it. Under Trump, they’ve largely succeeded.

Now Trump is back, and he’s doubling down on Reaganomics with a vengeance. He’s illegally refusing to release funds from Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing initiatives. He’s gutting environmental and workplace protections. And he’s promoting speculative financial schemes like Bitcoin, an unregulated, easily manipulated asset class that benefits insiders like his children and wealthy friends.

Ten of the last 11 recessions occurred under Republican presidents. That’s not a coincidence. The Financial Times recently pointed out that today’s America under GOP leadership now resembles a country suffering from “Dutch disease,” a term coined when the Netherlands’ economy was distorted by a single natural resource boom.

Instead of natural gas, our export is debt and the dollar itself. Our economy has become addicted to issuing Treasury bonds while cutting taxes for the morbidly rich.

In a healthy economy, windfalls get invested in productivity: roads, R&D, education, healthcare for working people. In today’s GOP-run economy, however, they’re getting funneled into yachts, stock buybacks, and political influence. Economists call this the “voracity effect”; a dynamic where powerful groups extract so much from the economy that they ultimately destabilize and then crash it. It’s economic cancer.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a $4 trillion giveaway to the wealthy, exemplified this perfectly. It wasn’t tax reform: it was looting.

But the biggest potential crisis is that this isn’t just bad economics: it’s dangerous geopolitics.

History shows that when working people lose access to opportunity and stability, populism and extremism rise. They demand scapegoats and embrace demagogues. In early 20th-century Europe, economic collapse and inequality paved the way for authoritarian regimes. The result was two world wars.

We’re now staring into the jaws of what political scientists call the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power (China) threatens a dominant one (the U.S.), and conflict becomes almost inevitable. Combine that with economic unrest, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Trump is already stoking this fire.

According to the Financial Times, his administration is pressuring Japan and Australia to pledge support for a potential war over Taiwan. His undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, is demanding troop commitments while simultaneously throwing U.S. alliances into chaos.

Worse, Trump is floating bizarre geoeconomic weapons: charging allied nations for access to U.S. financial markets, forcing them to buy long-term Treasury bonds, and tying military protection to economic tribute. He killed our main source of soft power, USAID, and has silenced the Voice of America.

This isn’t diplomacy: it’s shakedown politics dressed up as strategy. As the Financial Times reported, it’s part of Trump’s wider attempt to abandon cooperation in favor of coercion.

These are the hallmarks of an empire in decline, and that amplifies the danger of both domestic fascist takeover and a third world war.

When a nation abandons real wealth creation, concentrates power in a corrupt elite, abandons its public infrastructure, and pursues reckless foreign policy, the mass of people become outraged.

They rarely understand who did this to them — giving autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Trump the opportunity to assign blame to minorities and attack their political enemies — but they do know they’ve been screwed.

As public sentiment boils over and billionaire-owned media like Fox “News” and billionaire social media owners like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk use invisible, secret algorithms to increase their own profits by promoting and amplifying raw hate and rage, the outcomes, as we’ve seen throughout history, are predictable:

  • Minority and political scapegoats are blamed.
  • Borders are militarized.
  • Political violence explodes.
  • Journalism gives way to propaganda.
  • Financial crashes trigger democratic backsliding in the name of “emergency measures.”
  • War looms.

This is the road Trump and his toadies in the GOP have put us on.

Trump is poisoning our economy while destabilizing international diplomacy. He just fired 1,200 career professionals from the State Department, crippling our ability to engage in diplomacy and maintain peace.

He’s wrecking the low-wage workforce and our food supplies through immigration crackdowns and ICE raids.

He’s slowing growth and destroying small businesses with tariffs and erratic trade policies.

All while planning to expand ICE into an unaccountable, masked, nationwide secret-police-style paramilitary force that is already being used to suppress dissent and attack Democratic politicians, while it continues to terrorize immigrant communities.

Democrats and people of conscience must do more than hope the courts will stop this; the courts will not save us. We must speak out with moral clarity, economic fluency, and relentless courage.

We must call this what it is: a full-scale assault on our economy, our democracy, and the world order that’s prevented a third world war for nearly 80 years.

We must make it clear that Biden’s investments were beginning to rebuild our productive base, and Trump is trying to salt the earth.

And we must act. Talk to your neighbors. Write letters. Post on social media. Show up to town halls. Demand that your representatives speak the truth.

If we don’t, the noise machine on the right will define the narrative. If we wait, it may be too late. July 17th will be another huge opportunity; please show up.

The 2026 midterms aren’t just another election, and neither are the hundreds of state and local off-year and special elections that’ll be happening this year. They may be our last chance to change course.

We could lose more than our democracy. We could lose the very idea of America and, with it, the peaceful world we’ve anchored since 1945.

Tag, we’re it.

This cult leader shows how Trump is taking us to a very dark place

Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).

Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.

Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.

Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.

This is an old story in new packaging.

Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.

Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.

He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.

Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”

That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.

All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.

Trump operates from the same playbook.

His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.

And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth.

Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.

Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”

It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.

When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.

Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.

And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.

We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.

Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.

Trump has followed that playbook to the letter.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.

These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.

It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.

His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.

And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.

So what comes next?

Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.

Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.

We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.

But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.

History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.

Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.

We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.

Militia attacks on weather radars are fueled by the right's assault on reality

In Oklahoma, a domestic militia calling itself “Veterans on Patrol” is systematically targeting weather radars. Their leader, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, claims the military is controlling the weather through Doppler radar systems and that these machines are part of a divine affront — a “weather weapon” — that is “mocking God Himself.”

He’s encouraging his followers to sabotage these radars under an operation he calls “Leaning Tower.” This isn’t just fringe paranoia: it’s part of a growing anti-reality insurgency that threatens our democracy itself.

Let’s be blunt: this is insanity. Not just in its content, but in its consequences. And yet, it’s not isolated. It’s one of many conspiracy-fueled campaigns that now animate parts of American life, often backed by violence or intimidation. From QAnon to flat-earth nonsense to vaccine “skeptics” now within the Food and Drug Administration, we’re watching a dangerous erosion of truth, a collapse of shared facts, and an outright assault on the institutions that protect life and liberty.

What’s happening here isn’t just about weather radars: it’s about reality itself.

When people are told not to believe their own eyes, not to trust scientists, doctors, journalists, or even the National Weather Service, society begins to crack. And the people exploiting those cracks — including some of the Trump administration’s most senior officials (see: Bob Kennedy and Stephen Miller, among others) — know exactly what they’re doing.

Veterans on Patrol isn’t just anti-science or anti-government; it’s anti-democracy. It joins a growing list of extremist groups peddling lies and hatred: anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, antisemitic, misogynist, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim. It wraps its destruction in the flag and cloaks its violence in religion. And when Meyer boasts about being responsible for “a lot more than” taking down a radar, we’d be fools not to take him seriously. Oklahoma, after all, remembers Timothy McVeigh.

This latest attack rendered a critical radar system “instantly obsolete,” according to meteorologist David Payne. That radar was designed to save lives, particularly in tornado-prone Oklahoma. When it’s destroyed, people will die. Period. This is not free speech: this is domestic terrorism.

But here’s the deeper issue: this attack is only a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the deliberate poisoning of the American mind with fantasy and fear by a network and system of media and social media owned by anti-democracy rightwing billionaires and filled with Russian trolls. And when truth dies, democracy soon follows.

Because democracy — as Thomas Jefferson so accurately pointed out (“Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government”) — depends on an educated public operating on the basis of shared truths and actual facts.

You can’t have a functioning republic if half the country believes extreme weather is a “liberal weapon” and the other half knows it’s the result of an atmosphere warmed by fossil fuel emissions. You can’t govern when reality itself is disputed. And you certainly can’t maintain civil peace when people are being radicalized into acts of violence based on complete and utter delusion.

The fossil-fuel-billionaire-funded radical right’s war on truth isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. When lies are repeated often enough, they become gospel to those who want to believe them.

Right-wing media outlets, extremist influencers, and opportunistic Republicans have learned — as Josef Goebbels famously preached — that a lie can be more powerful than the truth when it aligns with grievance, fear, and identity and is repeated often enough.

The problem isn’t just gullibility. It’s that these lies are weaponized. And when they take hold, facts become negotiable, science becomes suspect, and even saving people from storms becomes controversial.

Just look at how the “mainstream media” consistently omits from their reporting on Trump’s tariffs that they’re a clear violation of the Constitution and was explicitly called that in an unanimous decision by the US Trade Court, as Robert Hubbell points out so eloquently.

Or when the media ignores the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 14th amendment violations of ICE’s random, masked, warrantless arrests and incarceration of brown-skinned people, including those with Green Cards at the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp, along with those with full, court-ordered permission to be here in America.

What does this mean for democracy?

  • A shattered consensus on truth makes informed voting impossible. If voters can’t agree on basic facts — like whether the atmosphere is heating up or whether a vaccine works — how can they make rational decisions at the ballot box?
  • The weaponization of delusion breeds violence. Just like the January 6th attack on our Capitol, these radar attacks are fueled by conspiracy and rage. They don’t just damage property, they destabilize the rule of law.
  • When truth is optional, tyranny becomes inevitable. Autocrats thrive in the fog of misinformation. The more confused and divided a people are, the easier they are to control, thus the daily Trump Reality Show.
  • Public trust collapses. Scientists, educators, journalists, and public servants all become suspect. That vacuum gets filled by cult leaders, armed militias, and political demagogues.
  • Democracy becomes unrecognizable. Without a shared sense of reality, debate becomes pointless, compromise becomes impossible, and elections become battlegrounds instead of ways to determine a rational direction for our shared future.

So what do we do?

We fight back with truth. Unapologetically. Loudly. Persistently.

We stand up for science. For journalism. For civic education. For basic decency.

We hold platforms accountable that spread lies, tweak their algorithms secretly to promote anti-democracy messages, and reject the persistent “mainstream media” cowardice of both-sidesism. There aren’t “two sides” to facts. There is reality and there are lies.

We support platforms, networks, media, newsletters, programs, writers, speakers, politicians, and movements that promote the truth and push back against the creeping fascism that is rapidly overtaking our nation.

So we must loudly and persistently call this out for what it is: an attempt — which has so far been successful at destroying democracy in nations like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey — to engage in social and political sabotage. It’s radicalism, a form of domestic terrorism whose target is democracy itself.

And it’s time to say: enough.

Because without truth, we don’t just lose the weather forecast.

We lose our nation.

This is authoritarianism in a designer suit

History rarely announces itself. It creeps in quietly, cloaked in the language of “law and order,” “national security,” and “patriotism.” But every now and then, it screams.

Last week, it screamed.

Donald Trump, now seated once again behind the Resolute Desk, and his Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, have openly threatened CNN with criminal prosecution for reporting on the existence and use of an app — ICEBlock — that alerts undocumented immigrants about nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

This app, which is publicly available, and the reporting around it — likewise rooted in public records — is suddenly being framed as a “national security threat.”

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: the President of the United States and his administration are threatening to jail journalists for doing their jobs.

This isn’t just an authoritarian flirtation. It’s a shot across the bow of American democracy. And it should chill every citizen who still believes in the sacred protections of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in our constitutional republic.

There’s a reason the Founders placed freedom of the press in the very First Amendment. They understood that tyranny doesn’t announce itself with tanks in the streets (although Trump has brought us that, too, in DC and Los Angeles): it begins when dissent is silenced and truth becomes optional. When the government gains the power to determine what is and isn’t “acceptable” journalism or citizen monitoring of government actions, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon compiled an “enemies list,” weaponizing the IRS and FBI against journalists and political opponents. But even Nixon — infamous as he was — never dared prosecute a major news network for reporting publicly available facts or proudly announces criminal investigations of individuals monitoring the police.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act, legislation used to imprison dissenters and suppress anti-war journalists during World War I. Bernie Sanders’ hero, democratic socialist Eugene Debs, was thrown into prison for protesting our involvement in World War I and ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell.

In 1950s McCarthyist America, journalists who didn’t toe the anti-communist line were blacklisted, surveilled, and driven from their careers.

Historians — and even high school history classes — correctly identify Wilson’s and McCarthy’s excesses as a terrible moments in our past, moments that should never, ever be repeated.

But now, in 2025, we are revisiting that time with a new beast entirely: a populist authoritarian with open contempt for constitutional constraints, emboldened by a cult of personality, and empowered by six corrupt Republicans on a Supreme Court that has told him he can openly commit crimes without fear of prosecution.

Compounding this crisis of democracy is a billionaire-owned right-wing media ecosystem that no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

Trump is not unique in history, but the confluence of power, propaganda, and post-truth politics he embodies is dangerously unprecedented in America.

The most terrifying part of this episode is not that Trump is threatening CNN. It’s that every other newsroom in America is now taking notice and some are immediately bending the knee.

For example, CBS’s new president, David Ellison (son of billionaire “MAGA Larry” Ellison) reportedly just gave give $15 million to Trump and promised, according to Trump himself, another $15 million in “free advertising” for his hateful MAGA message.

When a president targets a media outlet for reporting on a publicly available app or quoting anonymous officials, the effect isn’t just on that outlet. It reverberates throughout every editorial board, every reporter’s notebook, every newsroom budget meeting.

They ask themselves: Should we cover this story? Will we get sued? Will our reporters get subpoenaed? Is it worth the cost, risk, or even the hassle?

This is the “chilling effect” in action. And it is exactly what authoritarians want and dictators get.

They don’t need to jail every journalist or even every protestor or opposition politician. There are only around 1,500 political prisoners in Russia, a country with a population of 143 million. That’s all Putin needed to cow the press and the political opposition — and the people in the streets — into silence.

Ask journalists and activists in Mexico, where threats and violence have silenced entire newspapers. Or in Russia, where one law criminalized the reporting of the word “war” to describe the Ukraine invasion and the entire nation’s press immediately bent the knee. Or in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán turned independent press outlets into government mouthpieces. It always starts the same way: with “exceptions,” “investigations,” “national security,” and “fake news.”

Sound familiar?

Let’s talk about what CNN actually reported. The so-called “ICEBlock” app was not a secret Pentagon tool. It’s publicly downloadable. It informs undocumented immigrants — many of whom have lived and worked here for decades — about where ICE raids might be happening. You know, the same way Waze tells drivers where police speed traps are.

CNN and The New York Times also reported on internal U.S. government discussions about military options in Iran, again, based on information already circulating through D.C. and partially leaked by officials themselves. It was nothing that would’ve shocked the Ayatollah.

But Trump saw a headline he didn’t like, and Noem saw a political opportunity to play tough cop on immigration. So now, instead of debating immigration policy or Middle East strategy, we’re talking about jailing journalists and suing news outlets.

Let me repeat that: jailing journalists. Not pressuring them. Not criticizing them. Prosecuting them.

Here’s the thing. All Trump needs is a few ambitious prosecutors, a distracted electorate, and a media too scared — or too worried about its bottom line — to fight back.

This is authoritarianism in a designer suit. And it’s already here.

Right-wing billionaires have bought up local newspapers and radio stations, converting once-independent voices into megaphones for MAGA talking points. “Citizen journalists” on social media — and Russian troll farms — parrot conspiracy theories generated by AI-enhanced bots that are then amplified by secret algorithms. The line between “news” and “propaganda” has blurred beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, genuine investigative reporters — those who dig into government corruption, environmental devastation, and police abuse — are under constant threat. Financially. Legally. Sometimes physically.

Just ask the journalists shot or arrested during Black Lives Matter protests. Or the ones surveilled by ICE for uncovering abuses in detention centers.

This isn’t about CNN. It’s about whether truth still has a place in the American conversation.

If this prosecution threat succeeds — whether through actual charges or through the intimidation it provokes — the consequences will be draconian.

  • Whistleblowers will go silent. Why leak evidence of government wrongdoing if the journalists who publish it are dragged into court and forced to reveal their sources?
  • Investigative journalism will wither. Why invest time and money into reporting if the legal risks outweigh losing your job or going to prison?
  • Civic ignorance will grow. Without trusted sources of information, citizens turn to whatever confirms their biases: YouTube grifters, Twitter trolls, or state-run propaganda.
  • Corruption will thrive. From corporate polluters to racist sheriffs to masked agents of the state, the worst among us flourish in darkness.

This is how democracies die, not with a bang, but with a threat and a few individuals or organizations destroyed to “make them an example.”

So what do we do?

First, we demand that every member of Congress — Democrat and Republican — publicly condemn this threat against CNN. Silence is complicity.

Second, we urge our courts to defend the First Amendment with the vigor it demands. The press must remain free from government intimidation, or it is not truly free.

Third, we support independent journalism with our wallets. Subscribe. Donate. Share their stories. The corporate media won’t save us. We the people, must.

Fourth, we organize. Not just around press freedom, but around every interconnected pillar of democracy under threat: voting rights, judicial integrity, environmental justice, and yes, immigration reform rooted in compassion, not cruelty.

And finally, we remember: The Founders gave us a roadmap. We the People are the ultimate check on tyranny.

But only if we show up. Only if we speak out.

July 2, 2025, when Trump made that threat, will go down as a dark day in American history, unless we choose to make it a turning point.

Trump’s assault on the press is not a sideshow. It is not a distraction. It is the whole game. Control the narrative, and you control the country. Silence dissent, and you can do anything.

The American experiment survives only as long as we defend the institutions that make it possible. And a free press is not just one of those institutions: it’s the first line of defense.

So today, we stand with CNN. Tomorrow, it might be ProPublica. Or Mother Jones. Or your local paper. Or this site.

When the truth becomes a crime, then we are all criminals. And in that case, I say proudly: print the truth anyway.

Let them come.

Trump led a distracted America to its hour of crisis

Donald Trump didn’t just try to overturn an election. He’s trying to overturn the very ideal — and reality— of what has historically made America great.

While the media fixates on trade, Epstein, and floods, we’re all missing the real story: Trump’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” campaign is a direct assault on everything that once made this country a global leader and a moral force.

His goal isn’t to restore American greatness: it’s to dismantle it, to trade it away to strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and to drag the United States into the emerging authoritarian axis that now includes Hungary, India, Turkey and others abandoning democratic norms.

Other than illegally and unconstitutionally refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress and shutting down congressionally mandated agencies, he’s really not running on ideas or solutions. He’s running on vengeance, his visceral hatred of checks-and-balances democracy and love of king-like autocracy by decree.

He’s flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against American citizens, and may well do so as we approach the 2026 elections.

He’s reinstated Schedule F, firing tens of thousands of competent, non-partisan civil servants and replacing them with unqualified MAGA loyalists.

He’s seized sweeping control over formerly independent agencies, effectively criminalized dissent within them, and six corrupt toadies on the Supreme Court have shielded him from accountability for life.

This is not a platform to lead a constitutionally limited democratic republic as our founders envisioned: it’s a roadmap to end it.

And this time, he’s surrounded by people who know exactly how to do it.

In 2017, Trump didn’t understand how government worked. But now he has the rightwing-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” and a cadre of true believers who’ve spent the past eight years learning the levers of power.

Their clear — and often explicit —goal is nothing less than the destruction of the New Deal and the postwar liberal order (both domestically and internationally, dismantling environmental protections, civil rights enforcement, and the rule of law itself, all while concentrating power in the hands of one man who brags that he is America’s new king, posting memes of himself wearing a golden crown.

Trump’s economic policies are gutting what’s left of the middle class. His tariffs on imports is not a tax on foreign countries; they’re a tax on American consumers, one that is driving up the cost of everything from groceries to cars as you read these words.

Like his 2017 tax cuts, his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is designed to benefit billionaires and corporate monopolies while sticking working families and our children and grandchildren with the costs.

It’s the same old story that Reagan pioneered with his trickle-down bulls--t: punch down, enrich the top, and distract the public with rage and fear.

But now it’s also on the world stage where Trump’s actions have become truly catastrophic.

America once led the free world against the forces of tyranny and dictatorship. We defeated fascism in World War II, and a neofascist form of communism with the Cold War.

Trump wants to reverse all that. He’s openly threatened to withdraw from NATO. He told a crowd he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies that “don’t pay up.”

He praises Putin as “smart” and “savvy” and takes instructions from him almost weekly. He calls Xi Jinping a “brilliant” leader and gratefully accepts gifts from him like copyrights for his daughter’s business. He brags about his friendship with Kim Jong-un. And he dismissively treats Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine — the largest democracy in Europe that is under vicious attack daily — like a nuisance to be bargained away.

He said he’d end the Ukraine war in 24 hours but has repeatedly refused to arm our ally in any meaningful way that might cause Putin to back off or even force him to the bargaining table. He won’t say how, or whether he supports Ukraine’s sovereignty. In one interview after another, he dodges the question of whether he wants Ukraine to win.

In a Fox News town hall, he said he’d tell Zelenskyy, “No more. You got to make a deal.” But what kind of deal? Trump has never acknowledged that Russia invaded illegally, that it annexed Crimea and now occupies vast swaths of eastern Ukraine, or that Putin is committing war crimes.

Zelenskyy signed a deal to give Trump Ukraine’s minerals, presumably to be mined by Trump’s donors and cronies, and then Trump and Hegseth ignored the promised weapons and air defenses that were supposed to come in exchange.

He’s never once condemned Putin for his soldiers stealing over 100,000 Ukrainian children from occupied territories and transporting them into Russia — often as their parents screamed and begged — one of the few countries in the world were child pornography is legal. He refuses to even acknowledge the use of rape by Russian soldiers as a weapon against the women and families of Ukraine, or Russia’s use of banned chemical weapons on the civilians of that nation.

Instead, he implies that a “deal” would mean pressuring Ukraine to give up land in exchange for so-called peace. That’s not leadership. It’s surrender.

And it’s part of a larger pattern.

Trump doesn’t believe in democracy, at home or abroad. He doesn’t admire freedom. Instead, he admires power and the men who brutally wield it. He envies them. He wants to emulate them. He wants to reinvent his administration and, ultimately, our nation in their image. And he’s moving rapidly in that direction.

He craves — and is increasingly seizing — the raw, unchecked power of autocrats who can silence the press, jail opponents, and rule by decree. That’s also the world he wants America to join; not the democratic alliance of free nations we’ve been a part of for 249 years and shed the blood of millions of our soldiers to defend, but the rising axis of authoritarian states, from Russia and China to Hungary and, increasingly, Modi’s India and Erdoğon’s Turkey.

Under Trump, the United States wouldn’t lead the free world. As European leaders and democracy advocates around the world are increasingly saying out loud, he wants to help dismantle it.

As the brilliant columnist Martin Wolf writes for the Financial Times:

“In just under six months, only an eighth of his term, Trump has made huge strides in his war on everything that made the US successful. Only the MAGA base, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping should feel happy. The most coherent part of the program is the attempt to turn the US into an autocracy.”

He is dismantling America’s scientific leadership, destroying our universities and public schools, gutting our social safety net, rigging our future elections, legitimizing corruption for himself and his high-level cronies, building a network of concentration camps across America, and has created a massive federal police force of masked, unaccountable agents with a larger budget than Russia’s entire military.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become a vessel for this neofascist, authoritarian transformation.

What was once the party of Eisenhower and Lincoln is now the party of Orbán and Putin.

Sniveling, cowardly Republican leaders like Mike Johnson and John Thune know exactly what Trump is doing. They’ve seen the damage. They’ve read the indictments and his multiple convictions and liability for everything from election fraud to sexual assault. They watched January 6th unfold in real time and once condemned it…for a few weeks. Now they celebrate it.

Because they’re too afraid to confront him, too hungry for power and the wealth that comes with it, too complicit in the lie. So, like Germany’s leaders in the 1930s, Russia’s in the early 2000s, and Hungary’s in 2012, they fall in line, endorsing and supporting a man — and the a---kissers who surround him — who tried to overthrow democracy in 2020 and is promising to do it again, this time with far more efficiency.

We can’t count on the courts to save us; six Republicans on the Supreme Court have already committed their lives to this man and his cause.

We can’t assume the Constitution will defend itself. The Founders gave us a framework, but they assumed we’d have the civic courage to use it, and that’s still an open question.

Democracy doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes. It crumbles through neglect, cynicism, and complicity. History is replete with the tragic stories of nations that sleepwalked into autocracy because their citizens assumed “someone else” would stop it.

We are not exempt from that pattern. If anything, with the cheerleading of billionaire-owned media (Murdoch-owned Fox “News” actually embedded giddy reporters into the massive assault on Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park), we are seeing it amplified daily.

Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s a product of decades of assaults on government by conservative billionaires and the think tanks and institutions they have structured, their twisting of facts, their use of the new tool of social media and subsidized podcasters to pervert what was once our shared truth.

He’s the culmination of a movement that wants to replace pluralism with hierarchy, accountability with loyalty, tolerance with hate, and cooperation with domination.

He doesn’t want to lead America; he wants to own it, and then trade it for a seat at the table with the world’s worst, most corrupt, and wealthiest dictators who are, at this moment, handing him hundreds of billions in Trump property construction projects and bitcoin bribes.

This generation’s protests are not about the price of eggs or gas, or even the cost of college or healthcare, as terrible as those are. They’re about whether we still believe in the American ideal as expressed in our founding documents and improved in every generation until now.

Do we still believe that government should be of, by, and for We the People and that we are the sovereigns, not some corrupt, orange-faced billionaire above us? That no man is above the law? That democracy, flawed as it is, is worth defending?

Or are we — particularly the white people among us — ready to give all that up, to join the new authoritarian order, and hope the strongman goes easy on us because of the immunity we believe we’ll get from the color of our skin? Like the “Good Germans” did in 1933”

Trump has told us what he intends to do and is already, at this early stage, well into a radical transformation of our republic. He’s not hiding it; indeed, he brags about it daily.

The question we confront today is whether we are seriously paying enough attention to the lessons of history, whether we care enough, and can gather enough people into the streets, whether we can mobilize enough voices in social media and the public square, and whether enough concerned citizens will show up at the ballot box and fight back against voter suppression, to stop him.

Because if we don’t, this won’t be another four-year detour like his last administration. It will be the end of the American experiment, and the beginning of something far darker.

Franklin’s warning still echoes: “It’s a republic, if you can keep it.”

The time to keep it is now, and the “Good Trouble” demonstrations on July 17th will be our next opportunity to demonstrate our will…or to shrug our shoulders in resignation.

Will we rise to the occasion? Will we turn back this terrible tide, like Mexico, Brazil, and Chile have taken steps to do? Like Greece and Spain did? Like South Korea did so recently when they impeached and imprisoned a president who tried to turn that nation into a dictatorship?

The world is watching and so too, perhaps from some distant place, are the people who birthed this nation. As are our children and grandchildren.

Let’s not fail them — and ourselves and our fragile planet — in this hour of crisis.

This guy's freaking out — and that means we're in big trouble

James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency” around next year’s elections, it’s time to sit up straight.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power. “The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said — and he’s not wrong.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.

Donald Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.

Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.

Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.

Let’s break it down:

— In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”

— In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.

— Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.

— Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.

If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.

And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.

Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.

In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.

That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.

While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Cleta Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.

Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.

And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.

Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”

He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.

And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.

Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.

So what do we do?

As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.

We need:

— Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.

— Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.

— Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.

— Election monitoring from independent and international groups.

— And, when Democrats are again in power (G-d willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.

If Trump succeeds in today’s ongoing massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.

So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.

Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.

Trump won't need to cancel the midterms if this GOP plot succeeds

James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency,” around next year’s elections, it’s time to sit up straight.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power.

“The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said, and he’s not wrong.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.

Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.

Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.

Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.

Let’s break it down:

  • In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”
  • In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.
  • Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.
  • Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.

If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.

And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.

Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.

In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.

That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.

While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.

Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.

And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.

Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”

He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.

And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.

Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.

So what do we do?

As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.

We need:

  • Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.
  • Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.
  • Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.
  • Election monitoring from independent and international groups.
  • And, when Democrats are again in power (G-d willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.

If Trump succeeds in today’s massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.

So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.

Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.

Is this the worst Trump Supreme Court decision?

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Trump can continue to break the law — both US and international law — by having his secret police agents snatch people off American streets, “disappear” them into immigration prisons, then deport them to foreign concentration camps.

Lacking national injunctions, this cruel and inhumane process can now only be stopped one person at a time, one court at a time, at least until the six Republicans on the Court get around to deciding a person’s fate. And they’re now on vacation until October.

Students of history like Jim Stewartson have seen this movie before.

When the Enabling Acts gave the Hitler regime the power to arrest people and disappear them into concentration camps or worse without judicial oversight, Heinrich Himmler came up with what he thought was a neat way to deal with political dissidents: “Night and Fog.”

Nacht und Nebel was designed to instill such terror among the occupied population that it would cause people who might otherwise protest the Nazis violations of law and human rights to self-censor and remain quiet. As Himmler himself wrote:

“The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation … serves this purpose.”

Field Marshall Keitel was equally enthusiastic, writing:

“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported … secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Pee Wee German may well have studied this history, as it appears the US deportation schemes to foreign hellholes like El Salvador and South Sudan are explicitly designed to produce terror among brown-skinned immigrants.

The group Human Rights First documented how “disappearances” are one of the main weapons being used by ICE to spread terror in immigrant communities:

“The Trump administration has used a pattern of disappearances to detain, remove, and expel people to countries which are not their countries of origin, and for which no removal proceedings have been conducted nor the required fear screenings. These actions are part of a broader effort to subvert due process and the checks and balances that are central to the U.S. Constitution.

“Among those impacted in these first few months of the administration have been countless asylum seekers, including people fleeing persecution by repressive governments, religious-based persecution, anti-LGBTQI attacks, and other harms.”

As Teresa Reyes-Flores of the Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition told the National Immigration Project:

“ICE’s actions show a blatant violation of due process and basic human rights. The families were disappeared, cut off from their lawyers and loved ones, and rushed to be deported, stripping their parents of the chance to protect their U.S. citizen children.”

Similarly, Fatima Khan of the Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants noted:

“ICE’s actions today go far past the typical inhumanity of their detention operations in Louisiana. They ignored their own protocols on legal access and protecting children’s rights to enact an expedient deportation they know to be unlawful. Not only that, they disappeared these families before any U.S. Court could stand up for its children. We should all be mortified.”

Congresswoman and former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (and regular guest on my radio/TV program) Pramila Jayapal chaired a meeting of the Immigration, Enforcement, and Security Subcommitte titled Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Lawless Third Country Disappearances

As you may expect, it featured testimony about people snatched by face-hidden thugs who were simply never heard from again.

Emily Witt documents for The New Yorker:

“More than 500 people are believed to have been detained, many disappearing without trace for days or being quickly transported out of state.”

It is deeply troubling that immigration enforcement in the United States has reached a point where officials from the Trump administration openly advocated for tactics resembling forced disappearances that have characterized history’s most obscene fascist regimes.

Reports from civil rights groups and journalists have documented instances where individuals were taken off the streets or from their homes without warning, transferred out of state, and left incommunicado from legal counsel or family for extended periods. These actions were not isolated errors: they are deliberate strategies aimed at instilling fear across immigrant communities, particularly those made up of Black and brown people.

What makes this moment even more alarming is the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that strips lower courts of the authority to halt deportations or removals, no matter how unlawful or abusive. With judicial oversight diminished, there is a clear and present danger that enforcement powers could be used arbitrarily and punitively.

The use of fear — rather than law — as a governing principle corrodes the foundation of due process and equal protection under the Constitution. Nonetheless, Border Czar Tom Holman bragged:

“Illegal immigrants should be afraid.”

History has shown us that when any government exercises the power to make people “disappear” as a tactic of social control, it opens the door to authoritarianism. The moral test of a democracy is how it treats its most vulnerable, not how aggressively it punishes them. In light of this ruling, resistance may now fall on the shoulders of citizens, legal advocates, and local governments to uphold basic rights that the federal system appears increasingly willing to ignore.

We cannot look away. Particularly since six Republicans on the Supreme Court just abdicated their responsibility to enforce the law and the Constitution, this is the moment to stand up, speak out, and organize.

Call your members of Congress and demand legislation that restores judicial oversight and protects due process for all people, regardless of immigration status.

Support organizations on the ground providing legal aid and sanctuary. Show up at protests, city council meetings, and community gatherings to bear witness and push back.

And most importantly, vote — up and down the ballot — for leaders who believe that America should be a nation of laws, not of fear. If we fail to resist now, we risk becoming a country where the knock at the door in the middle of the night is no longer the stuff of history books, but a lived reality for anybody who dares speak out against Trump and his thugs.

Republicans just declared war on Grandma

Societies are typically organized along one of two lines: “We” or “Me.” We societies drive wealth and rights from the bottom up. Me societies do it from the top down, much like the kingdoms of old.

It’s a choice every nation must make. Franklin Roosevelt turned America into a We society with the New Deal; Ronald Reagan began the process of turning us into a Me society with the Reagan Revolution. And his and the GOP’s efforts are now coming to full fruition.

Imagine this:

Your grandmother — 87 years old, Alzheimer’s setting in, barely able to recognize your face — is being wheeled out of the nursing home she’s called home for three years. Not because she’s better, but because the home is closing. The Medicaid funding dried up. The next available care facility is three hours away and it doesn’t take Medicaid. You work full-time. You have kids. You don’t have the money, or the time, or the training to care for her full-time.

This isn’t fiction. This isn’t a thought experiment. This is exactly what Donald Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress are planning with their grotesquely misnamed “One Big Beautiful Bill.” A better title? One Big Ugly Betrayal.

Don’t be fooled by the branding. This bill is neither “big” nor “beautiful” for the 71 million Americans who rely on Medicaid.

And in a particularly slick move, the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps/SNAP will not kick in until January 2027, two months after the midterm 2026 elections, so people won’t notice the damage before they vote next year.

It’s big only in its cruelty and the size of its handouts to billionaires. And it is ugly in every moral, economic, and democratic sense of the word.

This is what happens when advocates for a Me society gains control of the levers of power.

For four decades, we’ve seen a war — not just on the poor, not just on the working class — but on the very idea of a We society.

A nation built on the idea that, as Paul Wellstone used to say, “We all do better when we all do better.” That we look out for one another. That government exists not to enrich the already-rich, but to ensure a decent life, dignity, and democracy for everyone.

That We vision is faltering under the Trump/GOP/billionaire siege.

The Republican Party — now fully captive to the whims of the morbidly rich and authoritarian ideologues — has declared war on our social contract. Their weapon this time? A trillion-dollar axe to Medicaid.

Let’s be clear about what this means:

  • Nursing homes closing — thousands of seniors thrown into chaos, often with nowhere to go.
  • Rural hospitals shutting down — entire regions left without emergency care.
  • Caregiver shortages — remaining homes stretched beyond capacity, residents waiting in soiled sheets for help that won’t come.
  • Families shattered — daughters and sons quitting jobs to care for elderly parents, financial ruin replacing retirement plans.

All so morbidly rich billionaires can afford a bigger yacht and another $50 million wedding spectacle. All so hedge fund managers can stash more profits in the Caymans. All so the American oligarchy can squeeze one last dollar from a country they’ve already plundered beyond reason since Reagan took an axe to unions, taxes, and the middle class.

And Mitch McConnell has the audacity to say: “Get over it.”

No. We won’t “get over it.”

We will not “get over” watching our parents and grandparents discarded like garbage because a handful of billionaires want another tax cut.

We will not “get over” watching our communities hollowed out, our hospitals shuttered, and our democracy drowned in dark money.

And we will not “get over” the cynical, deliberate destruction of our shared future, done behind closed doors, rushed through Congress, and shrouded in lies.

This isn’t just a policy debate. This is an ideological war.

On one side: the We society. A vision born out of the Great Depression, hardened in the fires of World War II, and realized in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP: programs that say, “We are in this together.”

On the other side: a Me society. A cult of greed that sees solidarity as weakness and democracy as an obstacle. A worldview that reveres wealth and sneers at compassion. That says: “If Grandma can’t pay, let her rot.”

The GOP’s Me society didn’t arise by accident. It was sold to us by think tanks funded by billionaires, by media owned by corporations, by politicians whose campaigns are financed by the very people they’re supposed to regulate. It’s the Powell Memo and Project 2025 come to life.

And now, we’re at the crossroads.

This is the moment. The inflection point.

  • Call your representatives.
  • Organize.
  • March tomorrow.
  • Tell your neighbors what’s happening.
  • Don’t let this cruelty pass quietly.

Because this isn’t just about Grandma. This is about who we are. About whether we believe in democracy — real democracy — where every voice matters and no one is left behind.

Or whether we surrender, finally and completely, to the rule of billionaires and bankers, the Fox “News”-fueled poison of hate and greed, the slow-rolling destruction of the American dream.

The arc of history doesn’t bend itself. It bends when we bend it with action, with solidarity, and with outrage channeled into purpose.

History is watching.

So is Grandma.

Let’s not fail her.

Alligator Alcatraz has troubling echoes — of Dachau

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our family. The crematoriums shocked our children, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps. The ovens were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera.

The death camps, it turns out, were all located outside of Germany so Dear Leader could deny responsibility for them. You know, like Gitmo.

Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (aka the “GOP Donor Fellatio Act”) contains a 13-fold increase in ICE’s budget, turning it into the largest single (secret, masked) police force in America, along with, in aggregate, close to $100 billion to build a new series of “detention facilities” all across America.

If this passes, soon the country will pockmarked by concentration camps. As Trump said on Tuesday:

“Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron’s doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.”

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.

Trump is back in the White House. The Republican Party controls Congress. And with a permanent “immigration emergency” in place, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running point on an experiment in authoritarian governance.

Alligator Alcatraz is the proof-of-concept.

Rising in a remote wildlife preserve in Big Cypress National Preserve — Indigenous land, no less — Alligator Alcatraz is expected to hold thousands of undocumented migrants. Some reports say 1,000 at launch; others say 5,000. Either way, it is the largest civilian detention project built on U.S. soil in a generation.

It’s surrounded by dense marshland, home to pythons and alligators.

“Let them try to escape,” Trump smirked at a recent rally. “They better know how to run from an alligator.”

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.

But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”

The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains:

“From the very beginning, the camp was a place of brutality. During the first years, most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime.”

They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.

The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.

Sound familiar?

Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.

That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.

Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.

That means asylum seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.

And if you believe this won’t expand — if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America — then you haven’t read a history book lately.

Stripping people of their citizenship is called denaturalization, and it was one of Hitler’s favorite tools against his enemies and Jews, who were referred to as “undesirable foreign elements” and denaturalized en masse in 1935.

Trump’s DoJ just updated their guidelines relating to the 25 million American citizens who first came to this country as immigrants and then obtained citizenship through the naturalization process. It used to be that you could only lose your citizenship if you committed a serious enough crime.

And, on Tuesday, Trump said:

“Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together.”

So now, the DoJ says, Trump can choose to denaturalize anybody and then immediately send them to Alligator Alcatraz:

“Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue [may be stripped of citizenship]. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.” (emphasis added)

And as a special bonus, the memo notes that stripping American citizens of their citizenship is a civil, not criminal, process so you are not entitled to have a lawyer or any of the other normal aspects of legal procedure like a trial that we generally think of as our rights. Franz Kafka would be proud.

Dachau didn’t just hold communists. Over time, it expanded to include denaturalized Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and anyone who opposed Nazi policy. It became a national crucible of cruelty. It normalized the idea that “certain people do not deserve legal protections.”

That is the fire that Alligator Alcatraz is stoking today.

How is this being done? Through a cunning abuse of emergency powers.

Florida has been under a rolling immigration “state of emergency” since 2023, a legal status that allows the governor to bypass environmental protections, override public procurement processes, and redirect funds without oversight.

Sound familiar? It should. The Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree to grant themselves emergency powers in perpetuity. One crisis, one convenient boogeyman, and suddenly all democratic guardrails are removed.

Today, DeSantis is using FEMA funds intended for hurricane victims to build migrant cages. Tomorrow, it could be protesters. Journalists. Teachers. You.

This isn’t alarmism. It’s precedent.

Let’s talk about the location, because it matters.

Big Cypress is a remote and largely inaccessible swamp, home to endangered species, sacred Indigenous land, and — now — a prison surrounded by natural predators.

Human rights lawyers and journalists will find it hard to access. Escapes will be all but impossible. Oversight will be nonexistent. That’s by design.

Dachau, too, was deliberately chosen for its isolation. As the memorial website explains:

“The camp was constantly expanded and served as the prototype and model for all later concentration camps.”

It became a template. A blueprint. And its very existence reshaped what the German public considered “normal.”

Alligator Alcatraz is the same. A testing ground. If it succeeds — not as a legal institution, but as a political spectacle — there will be more. One in Texas. One in Arizona. One in Arkansas. Maybe even one in your backyard.

The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.

The message that some people are less than human. That caging them is acceptable. That they deserve no rights, no hearing, no compassion. Just mud and barbed wire.

That was the logic behind Dachau.

And it’s becoming the logic behind Trump’s America.

This facility is being built not to solve a problem, but to create one. To manufacture outrage. To train the public to see brown-skinned immigrants not as workers or families or survivors but as invaders. Intruders. Animals.

And that’s when the door opens for something far worse.

We cannot afford to wait. We cannot afford to be polite. The time for half-measures and technocratic rebuttals and “strongly worded letters” is over.

America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp — literal and figurative — where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.

Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison. It’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really?

The answer, as always, is up to us.

We must engage:

  • Lawsuits: Civil liberties groups and Indigenous tribes must continue challenging this facility in court. Environmental statutes, tribal treaties, and international human rights laws can still be leveraged.
  • Documentation: Journalists must risk everything to document the construction, conditions, and policies of Alligator Alcatraz. We need eyes in the swamp, or darkness will reign.
  • Direct Action: Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and national mobilization must become central. This is a fight for the moral compass of our country.
  • Language: Stop calling this a “detention center.” Call it what it is: a political prison. A migrant concentration camp. Words matter.
  • History: Teach your neighbors about Dachau. Show them how it started. Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”

Democracy doesn’t fall all at once. It decays from the inside. It erodes at the margins. It disappears not with a bang, but with a shrug.

The United States of America has reached a threshold. We can step back and reaffirm our commitment to human dignity, to due process, to liberty and justice for all.

Or we can cross into the swamp. And never come back.

Dachau was the beginning of something monstrous. Let Alligator Alcatraz be the end of something: the end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, and the start of a renewed resistance.

Because if we wait too long, we may wake up one day and discover we are no longer the land of the free, but only the home of the caged.

Here's the real reason Republicans hate the middle class

A Pew poll published last week finds that 59 percent of Americans say the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts taxes for billionaires and raises them for working-class people — and was passed by the Senate on Tuesday — “would hurt lower-income people and 51 percent think it would hurt middle-income people.”

And they’re right. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill will measurably reduce the income and spending power of low- and middle-income people while giving a ~$4 trillion gift to the morbidly rich.

Americans have figured this out: according to a Fox “News” poll published last week and reported by Newsweek:

“Only 38 percent favored the bill, while 59 percent opposed it, a 21-point gap against the bill. About half of all voters believed the legislation would be detrimental to their families, and just a quarter thought it would deliver any benefit.”

So, why would Republicans want to further reduce the size and wealth of America’s middle class?

Turns out, there are two good reasons that answer that question.

The first and simplest is that ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it legal for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians, the GOP has done the bidding of the morbidly rich to the exclusion of everybody else.

And there’s considerable truth to that argument. The Court opened that door with their Buckley and Bellotti decisions in the late 1970s, laying the foundation for Ronald Reagan’s war against unions and working people and his so-called “Reagan Revolution” on behalf of the wealthy.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in the Diamond Alternative Energy v EPA case that was decided on June 20 and made it easier for the fossil fuel industry to challenge environmental regulations:

“This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens. … Our ruling will no doubt aid future attempts by the fuel industry to attack the Clean Air Act. … I worry that the fuel industry’s gain comes at a reputational cost for this Court, which is already viewed by many as being overly sympathetic to corporate interests. …

“For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the Court softens its certiorari standards when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests, looking past the jurisdictional defects or other vehicle problems that would typically doom petitions from other parties. This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants — workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others — will further fortify that impression. …

“The Court’s remarkably lenient approach to standing in this case contrasts starkly with the stern stance it has taken in cases concerning the rights of ordinary citizens. … The Constitution does not distinguish between plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce and those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegregated schools, or privacy. But if someone reviewing our case law harbored doubts about that proposition, today’s decision will do little to dissuade them.”

But while it’s true that Republicans have been naked toadies for rich people and big corporations for a century, there’s a larger reason why Trump and the GOP are working so hard to immiserate and impoverish working class Americans.

That reason has to do with something called “modernization theory.”

Back in 1959, one of the inventors of modernization theory, Seymour Martin Lipset, famously wrote:

“The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”

Lipset argued that industrialization led to unions and higher wages, which in turn funded higher-education opportunities and urbanization, which both grew a larger middle class. As people’s material conditions improved, Lipset noted, their focus shifted from survival issues like food and shelter to more aspirational elements like democratic values, civil and human rights, representation in government, and the rule of law.

In other words, the wealthier the middle class becomes, the more it will demand a vibrant democracy and a government that represents its interests.

On the other hand — and here is the GOP‘s real goal — if you can do away with or diminish the wealth and political power of the middle class, you can more easily loot the government and act exclusively in the interest of the morbidly rich.

As Barrington Moore noted in his book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: “No bourgeois [middle class], no democracy.”

In 2003, researchers Carles Boix and Susan Stokes found strong evidence that wealthier countries are more likely to be democracies, and once established, democracies are far more stable in richer nations. Similarly, in their book Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy", Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson prove that when economic growth empowers new classes (especially the middle class), those groups will demand political reforms.

Using examples including South Korea, Taiwan, Eastern Europe, and Tunisia, multiple cross-national studies using World Bank income data and Freedom House democracy scores show a strong correlation between per capita income and democratic governance; as people become wealthier they more vigorously demand a small-d democratic political system.

This happens because middle class people have economic security, giving them the time and energy to demand their rights; want property protections, honest courts, education, and fair governance; and typically have relied on meritocratic systems (education, hard work) to achieve their status instead of using corruption or inherited wealth and privilege.

By 1981, the American middle class was at its peak because of a 74 percent top personal income tax bracket, a 50 percent top corporate income tax rate, a strong and healthy social safety net, cheap healthcare (because hospitals and insurance companies were required to be nonprofits in most states), and free or near-free college.

Democracy was also arguably at its peak; for the previous 40+ years Congress had passed, one after the other, bills that primarily benefitted average working people and the middle class. Voting was easy, women and minorities were empowered, and we led the world in education and innovation.

This is not, however, what many wealthy oligarchs want, particularly those who become politically active.

Instead of democracy, they want government to protect their wealth and privilege to the exclusion of “the rabble.”

Instead of paying the cost of a government large enough to guarantee the emergence and sustenance of a middle class, they want tax cuts and subsidies for their businesses. Instead of rights for average people, they want police and courts that will, as Justice Jackson noted, focus instead on their unique wants and needs.

When Reagan came into office in 1981 about a third of American workers had good union jobs, meaning that about two-thirds of all American families lived good middle-class lives on a single paycheck (because the union jobs established the wage and benefits floor for non-union employers who had to compete with them for workers).

That was the year the GOP declared war on working-class people because, in the estimation of the Nixon- and Reagan-era Republicans, our democracy had gotten out of hand.

Workers were demanding good pay and benefits; women, racial, and gender minorities were demanding equal rights; and students demanded an end to the war in Vietnam.

Conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley saw these demands as symptoms of a “cultural decay” caused by working class people having more wealth and leisure time than they were “intellectually and culturally capable of handling.”

So, in 1981 the GOP set about dismantling the American middle class with their so-called Reagan Revolution.

 Donald Trump Donald Trump, seen in the Oval Office at the White House. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein  

The result is that today only about 45 percent of Americans are in the middle class, and it takes two jobs to establish that same lifestyle; since Reagan took office fully $50 trillion has been transferred from the homes, savings, and retirement accounts of working class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent.

As the social scientists cited above found, when the middle class shrinks below a certain threshold its demands for democracy are replaced by populist demands for, essentially, revenge.

“Who did this to us?” is the battle cry, and the GOP’s ready answer — first emerging in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh, going on steroids in the 1990s with Fox “News,” and pounded on by Donald Trump ever since he first came down that escalator in 2015 — is, “It’s the immigrants, Black people, uppity women, college students and professors, and the union bosses.”

MAGA — particularly its white racist base — bought it hook, line, and sinker, leading us to a massive tax-cut bill, court decisions that screw working people and the environment, and an explosion in hate crimes and politically inspired violence.

The bottom line is that the GOP opposes democracy because it interferes with and complicates their very well paid efforts to suck up to — and legislate on behalf of — the morbidly rich. And they disdain the middle class (but love the uneducated poor) because the larger the middle class the louder come the demands for fairness in the distribution of the common wealth and democracy.

So, the next time somebody asks you why Republicans hate the middle class, let them know that, “It’s the democracy, stupid!”

Trump got played as NATO finally figures him out

Claiming that Donald Trump is a sociopath has become so common it’s pretty much a cliché these days. That said, most people don’t know what sociopathy is or what they can expect from — or how to identify — a sociopath.

I did a deep dive into Trump’s childhood and history to discover the roots of his behavior — and how we can deal with it and repair America from it — in my newest book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.

What I found was fascinating and provides an easy way for people with no training in psychology to identify not only Trump’s problem but to figure out who else in their lives may incline toward sociopathy (CEOs are particularly notorious; some suggest it’s what makes them ruthless but successful).

The easy way to describe sociopathy to a lay person is to explain that if young children were tested for the condition they’d often test positive, which is referred to by professionals (and the DSM) as “Antisocial Personality Disorder” (ASPD).

That’s because their personalities are still developing and they haven’t yet fully developed empathy, impulse control, or a stable sense of morality, traits that are still emerging during childhood and adolescence.

This is why clinicians are careful not to diagnose children with sociopathy or ASPD outright; instead, they may diagnose Conduct Disorder, especially if the child shows persistent patterns of aggression, deceit, or cruelty. If these behaviors continue into adulthood, and particularly if they begin before age 15, the diagnosis may later shift to ASPD/sociopathy.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), adults with ASPD or sociopathy display a consistent and persistent set of characteristics. Those include a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others; chronic violation of social norms, rules, and laws; deceitfulness, impulsivity, and aggression; and a near-complete lack of remorse or empathy.

But the simplest way to explain this is to simply note that adult sociopaths usually tend to act like young children. Consider Trump’s public behavior. He:

— Ignores or apparently doesn’t care about the rights of other people or the impact of his actions on others. He’ll send non-criminals to a hellhole concentration camp in El Salvador or deport them to South Sudan, even though it may be a death sentence — and is certainly an open door to torture — apparently without a second thought or twinge of conscience.
— Defies social norms, bragging about sexually assaulting women and how he could murder somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
— Ignores or tries to get around laws and court orders with apparent delight.
— Lies about those actions and decisions that hurt others or even damage our nation.
— Makes things up on the fly, chronically lying when it’s not even remotely necessary.
— Bullies judges, lawmakers, people who work for him, and anybody he considers disloyal.
— Almost never, ever admits errors or wrongdoing and is so constantly wrapped up in himself that he doesn’t know how to experience what others are feeling.

This is the behavior of a child who’s not yet been socialized, and in Trump’s case it’s rooted deep in his childhood, having been raised by a troubled father and a distant mother.

The leaders of Europe’s NATO countries appear to have figured this out (as did Putin, Musk, and the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris before them); when Trump showed up in The Netherlands this week, they lavished him with praise and positive attention, instead of shunning and implicitly or subtly ridiculing him like they did five years ago.

His response was exactly what they wanted; reconsidering aid to Ukraine and suddenly changing his position to embrace the US’s commitment to the mutual defense provisions embodied in Article 5 of the organization’s charter.

This doesn’t mean that Americans should coddle Trump’s tantrums, demands for revenge, and petty grievances. He will always and obsessively be preoccupied with getting his own childish needs met, and at the top of that list is avoiding discomfort and complexity.

Like the bully he is, when he’s seriously confronted — at least so far — he’ll back down (TACO) if the confrontation threatens to consume lots of his time, trouble, or money. This is why consistent and ferocious opposition to his most puerile actions is absolutely necessary.

History teaches us that when self-centered national leaders aren’t constrained by their own people, the results are usually tragic. During his first presidency, Trump had largely surrounded himself with normal adults who succeeded in moderating his behavior and restraining his worst impulses.

This time, however, he’s succeeded in surrounding himself with people just as pathetically child-like, morally and developmentally, as he is. They’ll lie, cheat, or bully on his behalf, as we’ve recently seen with the public statements of many of his most senior officials.

As we’ve seen with their attacks on and arrests of a state judge, member of Congress, US Senator, and Newark’s Mayor, among others, when a troubled man like Trump succeeds in surrounding himself with other people who share his developmental stunting — and has disposed of “the adults in the room” — the results can be horrific.

The next three-and-a-half years will be both critical and dangerous for the future of democracy in our republic both because of Trump’s psychopathology and the willingness (or even enthusiasm) of the people around him to facilitate his infantile rages and desires.

In the book — and in future articles here — I lay out a variety of ways Americans can deal with this national mental health crisis and the consequences with which it hits average working class people. The first and most important step, though, is to identify his disability and spread the word.

Not only is that the first step toward constraining him and those around him, but it’ll also help voters avoid electing more troubled man-babies to public office in the future.

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