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Tune into “The TMI Show” with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan, featuring guest KJ Noh, as they dive into China’s latest economic numbers and sizzling US-China topics! KJ Noh is a journalist, political analyst, and peace activist specializing in Asia-Pacific geopolitics, contributing to outlets like CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and KPFA Flashpoints.

Freshly released data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics reveals 5% GDP growth for 2024, hitting the government’s target with a robust 5.4% Q4 surge, fueled by stimulus measures and export booms. But whispers of skepticism linger—analysts like Rhodium Group peg growth closer to 2.8%, citing overstated figures and a shaky property sector. With deflation persisting and consumer confidence wobbling, what’s the real story behind China’s economic engine?

We unpack these numbers, exploring the impact of Beijing’s push for consumption-led growth and looming challenges like youth unemployment and a trillion-dollar trade surplus.

Switching gears, the conversation heats up with US-China tensions, spotlighting President Trump’s threatened 60% tariffs and China’s retaliatory 125% duties. How will these trade war salvos reshape global markets? From semiconductor dominance to geopolitical chess moves, KJ Noh brings sharp insights to the table.

The post TMI Show Ep 120: “China’s Economic Surge & US Trade Tensions” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

It snowed Wednesday night in the Green Mountains, a typically beautiful late-season fluff-fest. Which meant I got to rise at 6 this morning and go for a ski before the spring sun turned it to slush—helpful, because I needed to clear my head a little.

That’s because word came that night that, having dispensed with immigrants, law firms, humanitarian workers, and universities, the Trump administration was now turning its crosshairs on climate advocates. Nothing specific yet, but E&E News was reporting on widespread rumors that the administration planned (on Earth Day no less!) to cancel the tax-exempt status of many green groups:

“There's lots of rumors about what terrible thing [Trump] wants to do on Earth Day, to just give everybody the middle finger,” Brett Hartl, director of governmental operations at the Center for Biological Diversity, said.

An environmental funder granted anonymity to speak freely speculated Trump might try to do to nonprofits what he’s threatened to do with universities.

“The rumors feel credible because this is playbook they use,” the funder said. “That’s why people are taking it very seriously.”

Another environmentalist expressed concern that the administration could attempt to target green groups by defining efforts to limit fossil fuel development as a threat to national security.

The threat comes amid the ongoing decimation of federally funded climate science. In the last few days, for instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has announced it will no longer be maintaining its remarkable map of sea-surface temperatures, while the National Institutes of Health said it was no longer gathering information on the health impacts of global warming.

The NIH said in an internal document obtained by The New York Times that it was the agency’s new policy “not to prioritize” research related to climate change. The document also described the organization’s intent not to fund research on gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, or diversity, equity, and inclusion. N.I.H. employees were instructed to tell researchers to “remove all” mention of the topics and resubmit their applications, even if the main focus was unrelated.

The policy shift on climate change, first reported by ProPublica, stands to drastically limit U.S.-based research into its health effects, which tries to answer questions like whether events like wildfires and heatwaves can affect cardiovascular health and pregnancy.

But now the administration is targeting those who take that science and try to turn it into change. They are the undergunned and outmanned equivalent of the armies of corporate lobbyists, producing the reports and briefing papers that try to stand up to the tide of right-wing media. I know a great many of these people, and I admire their work endlessly; it’s an honor to be counted among them, even if I’m only a volunteer. It was perhaps inevitable that Trump and his team would target us; together we’ve been making life harder for his clients in the fossil fuel industry. And in the new America, if you don’t knuckle under you get a knuckle sandwich. Figuratively speaking. One hopes.

Anyway, there are two questions worth asking. One is, will Trump pay any price for these attacks on climate science and advocacy? He’s not immune to the laws of politics—he clearly paid a price for his absurd tariff policy, which is why he backed off. In the case of tariffs, Trump’s problem was more or less immediate feedback: The bond market threatened to take down the American economy—”got a little queasy” as the president put it—and so he blinked. Slightly longer term feedback will likely come in the form of a recession. The phrase du jour, repeated endlessly, was that he had “touched a hot stove.”

My guess is, very few people would drill for oil without compensation; a great many people will try to defend the planet even if it costs them a lot.

By that standard, one assumes the administration doesn’t fear blowback from a mere hot planet. And yet even if it doesn’t work as fast the bond market, the world’s climate system is now malfunctioning in more or less real time. March was the hottest March on record, topping 2024 by just a smidge; meanwhile, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew at a record pace last year, apparently because overheated forests are losing some of their capacity as a carbon sink. We’re headed toward what is already forecast to be a more-active-than-usual hurricane season. Trump now owns all this in a way none of his predecessors did: They (with the exception of former President Joe Biden) may not have done much about climate change, but they didn’t insist it was a hoax. So when Tampa drowns or Tucson bakes or whatever happens next, it may stick to him in a way it hasn’t before. He’s got no credible scientific defenders (although the climate denial crew did enlist Elon Musk’s Grok 3 AI to write a paper last week). Damage to his brand is at least a possibility, especially if Democrats display even the slightest skill in linking, say, rising insurance premiums to the climate crisis.

The other question is, will this stop the climate movement? Of course it will make things harder, diverting time and attention and money from important work to dealing with lawyers and auditors; I get to work with paid staff at places like Third Act, and they are not just deeply good people, they are also crucial to making volunteers much more effective.

But the conceit of the right-wing has always been that climate scientists and activists are in it for the money, right down to insisting that protesters outside Tesla dealerships have been paid by George Soros. (I’ve taken my “Kia EV’s Rule” sign out several times, and no check yet!) This has always been an absurd claim: Climate scientists are not getting rich, and most activists could make more money doing almost anything else. Meanwhile, oil executives do get very rich indeed (Trump’s Energy Secretary, fracking honcho Chris Wright, is reportedly worth $171 million), and the success of their companies is due in no small part to an endless collection of tax loopholes and federal, state, and local subsidies. My guess is, very few people would drill for oil without compensation; a great many people will try to defend the planet even if it costs them a lot.

We’ll find out. We’re gearing up for the public launch of SunDay, the nationwide September mass action in defense of renewable energy. If you’re in the Boston area, come to Old North Church at 6:30 pm on Saturday April 26 for a launch ceremony (green lantern in Paul Revere’s steeple!); if you’re anywhere else, we’re doing a digital nationwide launch on April 28. Draw us a sun today to help! Here’s this week’s inspiration, from Lisa Gundlach.

For the first time since 2014, and the last time until 2087, Easter Sunday will fall on April 20. The 20th will also mark the last day of Passover, Chinese Language Day, International Cannabis Day, and the 136th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler. There’s a lot going on.

But of all the observances and events that will take place, only one has the potential to alter the course of American democracy. April 20 is the deadline Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Agency head Kristi Noem have for submitting a joint report to President Donald Trump about conditions at the southern border, along with their recommendations for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the National Emergencies Act of 1976.

Hegseth and Noem were given this task by a presidential proclamation declaring a state of emergency at the border, and an accompanying executive order (EO No. 14159) that Trump issued on Jan. 20. The edicts gave the department leaders 90 days to reach their conclusions. Both are based on the theory that the U.S. faces an invasion of undocumented migrants on its southern flank, and are part of a larger set of 51 executive orders, 12 memorandums, and four proclamations Trump promulgated on the first day of his second term.

If any of this comes to pass, it won’t just be undocumented migrants, foreign students, asylum-seekers, and suspected gang members who end up in the crosshairs.

There are some fine distinctions between EOs, presidential memoranda, and proclamations—principally, that EOs are directed specifically at federal agencies and must be published in the Federal Register while the others need not be—but the order and the emergency proclamation work as a package and must be read in tandem. EO 14159 is entitled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” It begins, in the histrionic fashion of the 47th president, blaming former President Joe Biden for the breakdown of our immigration system, declaring:

Over the last 4 years, the prior administration invited, administered, and oversaw an unprecedented flood of illegal immigration into the United States. Millions of illegal aliens crossed our borders or were permitted to fly directly into the United States on commercial flights and allowed to settle in American communities, in violation of longstanding Federal laws.

Many of these aliens unlawfully within the United States present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans. Others are engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities. Many have abused the generosity of the American people, and their presence in the United States has cost taxpayers billions of dollars at the federal, state, and local levels.

To combat the invasion, the EO calls for the formation of joint interagency task forces to expand the use of expedited removal (deportations without hearings) of the undocumented, deny federal funding to “sanctuary” jurisdictions, impose criminal and civil penalties on undocumented persons who fail to register with the federal government, and to devise a plan to carry out such measures within 90 days.

The EO does not specifically mention the Insurrection and National Emergency acts, but the proclamation cites both statutes as sources of presidential power. In addition to the 90-day reporting deadline, the proclamation authorizes the Defense Department to complete construction of the border wall, and to deploy the Armed Forces and National Guard to assist Homeland Security to obtain “operational control” of the border.

Although the proclamation and order seem limited on their face to the immediate southern border, legally they apply to a much broader geographical area. Even without the new initiatives, federal law gives U.S. Customs and Border Patrol the power to conduct searches and make arrests within an “expanded border zone” that extends 100 miles from any external international boundary. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, some 200 million people live within the expanded zone, including everyone residing in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the entire state of Florida. In the interior of the country as well as in the expanded zone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wields the power of arrest.

There have been other periods of immigrant scapegoating and persecution in U.S. history, but this is the first time that immigration enforcement has been officially linked by presidential decrees to the Insurrection Act.

Originally adopted in 1792 as the “Calling Forth Act,” the Insurrection Act on the books today authorizes the president to deploy the Army and deputize the National Guard to suppress insurrections, rebellions, instances of civil disorder, and unlawful “combinations or assemblages” that obstruct the authority of the United States or the ability of any state to enforce the law.

The Insurrection Act operates as an exception to the prohibition of the domestic deployment of federal troops, as codified in the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. It has been invoked 30 times. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln utilized the act in response to southern secession at the outset of the Civil War; and Ulysses S. Grant used it during Reconstruction to respond to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson used the act against striking Colorado coal miners; Herbert Hoover used it against “Bonus Army” protesters in Washington, D.C.; Dwight D. Eisenhower used it to enforce the integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; and George H.W. Bush used it in response to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 to quell mass demonstrations related to the murder of George Floyd, but reportedly was restrained from doing so by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and other “grown-ups” in his first administration. This time around, the grown-ups have left the building. There are no restraints.

Invoking the National Emergencies Act poses additional dangers in Trump’s hands, allowing him to unilaterally activate an estimated 150 statutory powers. These include the authority to waive the minimum comment periods for proposed regulations, seize American citizens’ assets without due process, and, perhaps most alarming of all, shut down or take over private communications systems.

If any of this comes to pass, it won’t just be undocumented migrants, foreign students, asylum-seekers, and suspected gang members who end up in the crosshairs. We could all be at risk.

In the wake of the 2020 uprising for racial justice, many Americans began learning the history of racial violence left out of their textbooks, as widespread protests of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others demanded a reckoning with the country’s legacy of white supremacy. Black communities were finally able to force a discussion into the mainstream media about white supremacist violence and historical events like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which a white mob attacked the prosperous Black community of Greenwood (known as Black Wall Street), burning homes and businesses, killing hundreds, and displacing thousands.

Yet, even as some long-buried histories came to light, others—such as the 1898 Wilmington Coup, when white supremacists violently overthrew a democratically elected, Reconstruction-era multiracial government in North Carolina—remain largely unknown. For a brief period, because of the unprecedented numbers of people marching in the streets, the nation began to confront its past with honesty. However, when the protests receded, so did the media’s focus on Black history. Many critical chapters in the struggle for racial justice remain buried beneath layers of denial and deliberate erasure.

That willful denial was on display in the narrative that emerged surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol building, waving Confederate flags, wearing clothing with fascist slogans like “Camp Auschwitz,” and carrying nooses and other symbols of racial violence. In the attack’s aftermath, many politicians condemned the violence and sought to reassure the nation. Then-President-elect Joe Biden stated, “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.” Even Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, condemned the violence, writing, “This is not who we are as a people or as a country. This is wrong and condemnable.”

When we understand Wilmington, we see that January 6 was not an aberration; it was a continuation of a historical pattern where white supremacy reacts violently to challenges against its dominance.

But these statements ignore the long history of white supremacist assaults on democracy in the United States—a history so deeply embedded that during Reconstruction, amid mass Black political organizing and grassroots pressure, Congress was forced to act. In 1871, Congress passed the Klan Enforcement Act to give the federal government the power to protect constitutional rights from groups like the Ku Klux Klan that used “force, intimidation, or threat” to undermine Black political participation and overthrow democratic institutions. In fact, parts of this very law were cited in lawsuits and criminal prosecutions following the January 6 insurrection. If, as many claimed, “this is not who we are,” then why was a law to stop this kind of violence passed over 150 years ago?

Among the most significant examples of white supremacist political violence in the United States is the 1898 Wilmington Coup. It stands as one of the worst racist attacks in U.S. history, yet is absent from the lessons most students learn in school. The fact that the federal government didn’t invoke the Klan Act to prosecute the perpetrators of the Wilmington Coup demonstrates their complicity in using violence to maintain systemic racism. If people knew the history of the Wilmington Coup, they would understand that white supremacist violence has long been a feature—not a glitch—of the American political system.

Wilmington’s Democracy

In the late 19th century, Wilmington was a thriving majority-Black city where Black men held office, ran businesses, and participated in civic life. This progress was not an anomaly—it reflected the important gains that Black people fought for and won during Reconstruction. In the years following the Civil War, Black communities helped build a new vision for democracy in the South. They established public schools; elected Black representatives to local, state, and federal office; advocated for civil rights; and created thriving economic institutions such as mutual aid societies, churches, and newspapers. Wilmington’s multiracial government and Black political power were forged in this Reconstruction-era struggle.

But this progress was intolerable to those in the Democratic Party, which positioned itself as the party of white dominance in the South. In the years leading up to 1898, a political coalition known as “fusion” emerged, threatening the Democratic Party’s grip on power. As historian LeRae Umfleet explains, “Fusion took disaffected Democrats, which were the Populist Party, and Republican voters, who were the voters of Abraham Lincoln’s party—Black men and progressive white men—and it fused the voting power of those two blocks of voters.” This coalition successfully elected a Republican governor in 1896, marking a dramatic shift in political power that white Democrats sought to reverse at all costs.

Central to their plan was the use of propaganda. As Yoruba Richen, filmmaker of a documentary on the Wilmington Coup, points out, “Josephus Daniels, the publisher of Raleigh’s News and Observer, was one of the architects of the coup. He had the very smart idea—since so many white people were also illiterate—to use cartoons to gin up this myth, this racist trope of the Black man raping white women and taking over government.”

At the same time, Alex Manly, editor of Wilmington’s Daily Record, was running one of the country’s only Black-owned daily newspapers. The Daily Record was a vital resource for Wilmington’s Black community, reporting on their achievements and providing a platform for challenging the era’s pervasive racism. Manly became a target of white supremacists after responding to a racist speech by Rebecca Felton, the wife of a Georgia senator, who claimed that Black men were raping white women and called for lynchings to stop this so-called epidemic.

As Richen explains, “Manly wrote a response saying this is basically BS. He pointed out that, as a man of mixed race himself, unions between Black men and white women often occurred freely because white women were attracted to Black men. He also emphasized that Black women had historically been the ones raped, and no one said anything about that.” This editorial enraged white supremacists and was used by Josephus Daniels and others to justify the coup.

On November 10, 1898, when the violence began, the mob first targeted the Daily Record. White men and boys burned the building to the ground, ensuring the destruction of a powerful voice for Wilmington’s Black community. Manly and his brother narrowly escaped, using their light skin to pass as white. Richen describes the chilling aftermath: “One of the few pictures that we have from the coup is of the Record being burned, with white men and boys surrounding it. It’s very reminiscent of the lynching photos we saw at the time and thereafter.”

The attack on the Daily Record was not only an act of physical violence, but also a deliberate effort to silence Black voices and destroy attempts at multiracial democracy.

The Erasure of the Wilmington Coup

The erasure of the Wilmington Coup from U.S. history textbooks was the result of a deliberate campaign to suppress the truth. White supremacist organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) played a central role in shaping the way history was taught in schools. UDC President Mrs. James A. Rounsaville, at their annual convening in 1909, made their goals plain: “It has ever been the cherished purpose of the Daughters of the Confederacy to secure greater educational opportunities for Confederate children, and by thorough training of their powers of mind, heart, and hand, render it possible for these representatives of our Southern race to retain for that race its supremacy in its own land.” As the PBS article “How to Cover up a Coup” explains, “For millions of students passing through North Carolina’s public schools, learning from textbooks that never mentioned the deadly 1898 coup d’etat in their state, it was as though that event never happened.”

Dr. Crystal Sanders, now a history professor at Emory University, reflected on this erasure: “I took several courses on North Carolina history throughout my middle school and high school career, and I never recall hearing about the Wilmington Insurrection.” This erasure continues today. I recently reviewed the History Alive! textbook, which makes no mention of the Wilmington Coup—deadening students’ understanding of Reconstruction and the white supremacist backlash that followed.

This lack of education is not an isolated issue. As the Zinn Education Project’s report Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction shows, “[I]n more than a dozen states, the Dunning School of false and distorted framing still influences standards and curricula.” The report goes on to explain, “Most state standards focus on government bodies and other elites as primary actors of Reconstruction, rather than the achievements and perspectives of ordinary Black people, whose unprecedented grassroots work in governing, education, labor, health, and more lies at the heart of the era. Most standards also fail to note white supremacy’s role in defeating Reconstruction or connections between that historic period and today.”

Why We Must Remember Wilmington

The Wilmington Coup reveals that white supremacist attacks on democracy are deeply embedded in U.S. history. Erasing this history allows the myth of American exceptionalism to persist, leaving us ill-equipped to recognize—and confront—the recurrence of such violence. When we understand Wilmington, we see that January 6 was not an aberration; it was a continuation of a historical pattern where white supremacy reacts violently to challenges against its dominance.

Learning these truths empowers us to create change. We can choose to struggle for a true multiracial democracy, one where history is taught honestly. When we teach students the truth, we equip them to dismantle the systems of injustice that have persisted for generations—and to build a future where democracy is not just an ideal, but a reality.

In early April, historian Harvey J. Kaye made these remarks at a conference in Barcelona, Spain. Common Dreams has published the transcript with his permission.

In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, I wrote an article titled “Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?” I opened with these words:

Donald Trump’s candidacy and now, presidency, have resurrected a public discourse not heard in this country since the Great Depression—an anxious discourse about the possible triumph in America of a fascistic authoritarian regime over liberal democracy. It’s a fear that the popular writer Sinclair Lewis turned into a 1935 bestselling novel titled It Can’t Happen Here—although, as Lewis actually told it, it sure as hell could happen here in the United States.

However, it did not happen. At least, it did not happen then. Nor did it happen in 2017. But it is happening now.

Why? Arguments vary. Journalists, editorial writers, and all too many academics—so many of whom are actually liberal and progressive Democrats—say it was due to either the Democratic Party’s failure to effectively communicate the truth about the economy or working-class racism, sexism, and generally low cultural standards. What they ignore is that the making of the “crisis of democracy” began five decades ago in the 1970s.

What Americans never heard in the mainstream media was any reference to the 50-year-long class war and culture war campaigns waged by the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals against the democratic achievements of what we might call the Long Age of Roosevelt from the 1930s through the 1960s. They never heard talk of how those forces subordinated the public good to private greed; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; enriched the rich at the expense of everyone else; hollowed out the nation’s industries and infrastructures; produced a devastating recession and lethargic recovery; and pushed the environment to the brink.

So, I offer two questions. Why did it not happen in the 1930s? And why is it happening now in 2025? The short answers are:

First: It did not happen in the 1930s because in 1932 American voters elected the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency and effectively launched the most progressive decades in American history. Call it the Long Age of Roosevelt—an age that extended from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Second: It is happening now because in the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the democratic achievements of that Long Age—that is, a class war versus the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.

All of which poses a critical third question. What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question?

The only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s.

Popularly known as “FDR,” Roosevelt was essentially an American aristocrat—but despite that, he rejected the “Gilded Age” order with its ever-intensifying concentration of wealth and power and its widening extremes of rich and poor. He did so because that order was denying the nation’s revolutionary promise of “a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and a democratic government of “We the People” to the vast majority of Americans.

He had entered politics in 1910 as a progressive reformer. And yet, during the next 20 years, he became not just a liberal in the American sense, but actually a social-democrat and even something of a radical. (Though he never used either word to describe himself.)

He had long worried about what conservative political rule might do to America. And in the shadow of the worst economic and social catastrophe in the nation’s history, he truly feared it would lead to some kind of authoritarianism.

However, he knew U.S. history and he recognized how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the American Revolution of the 1770s and the Civil War of the 1860s, that is, by radically transforming the country. Knowing that, he wrote in 1930, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.”

In his 1932 campaign against the incumbent president, conservative Republican Herbert Hoover, he projected a “New Deal” involving an impressive array of policies and initiatives to not only combat the depression, but also empower working people with economic security and freedom. As Roosevelt would say, “Needy men are not free men.” In fact, he audaciously suggested an Economic Declaration of Rights to redeem and renew the promise of the Declaration of Independence.

As FDR saw it, the only way to truly secure and sustain American democratic life was to progressively enhance it.

Which is exactly what he and a generation of Americans would do. They didn’t simply reject authoritarianism. They phenomenally improved the economic and physical state of the nation and—at the very same time—radically enhanced American freedom, equality, and democracy.

Moreover, encouraged by FDR himself, working people did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They actually pushed him to go even further than he may ever have planned to go—and together they initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.

Consider this. They subjected capital to public regulation and raised the taxes of the rich. They legislatively empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor (which included advancing industrial democracy). They organized and, in their millions, joined labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to both fight for their rights and advance the “We” in “We the People.” They established the Social Security system. They built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds all over the country. They vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams (and provided electric power to almost a million farms.) They repaired and improved the national landscape and environment. And they energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.

All of which seriously antagonized capitalists, and led the richest men in America to organize the Liberty League and spend great sums of money trying to portray FDR as a communist and thereby prevent his reelection in 1936. But they utterly failed to secure popular support.

Roosevelt did not ignore their efforts. He famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” Indeed, when accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, he delivered the most radical speech in American presidential history. Speaking to a stadium crowd of 100,000 and millions more national radio, he said:

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.

I absolutely love that speech, and American working people loved FDR. One Southern textile worker spoke for the majority of his class when he wrote to Roosevelt, saying, “[You are] the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”

Still, for all of the humor, FDR took the anti-democratic threat seriously. In 1938—just before the midterm congressional elections— he went on radio and warned:

As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.

Yes, FDR and those whom Americans would come to call the “Greatest Generation” left much to be done—especially regarding race and gender. But they had equipped themselves to defeat fascism overseas in the 1940s and learned how to democratically rebuild the nation.

Furthermore, the democratic upsurge of the 1930s did not cease during the war years. Americans continued to organize and enlist in labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations.

Encouraged by all that they had accomplished, Roosevelt called on Americans to envision an America and a world characterized by four fundamental freedoms, the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship and Freedom from Want and Fear—which became a theme of the war effort.

And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, he articulated his fellow citizens’ postwar aspirations by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights to include a right to a job at a living wage; a comfortable home; medical care; a good education; recreation; and economic protection during sickness, old age, and unemployment. A proposal that was enthusiastically embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Farmers Union, and all the leading civil rights groups.

But Roosevelt did not assume they could easily secure it. Thinking of the corporate bosses, he predicted the likelihood of fierce “right-wing reaction.” But he also warned—in words that should speak loudly to Americans today—“If such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

FDR won a fourth presidential term in 1944, but passed away in April 1945. Still, the Age of Roosevelt did not come to end. As much as capitalists, Republicans, and Southern Democrats made the most of the Cold War to obstruct the further advance of democracy and social democracy, a generation of Americans, and their children, would not forget what they had accomplished. And in the 1960s, Americans witnessed a new democratic upsurge challenging every aspect of national life.

Pushed by the resurgent activism, and inspired by FDR’s New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, President Lyndon Johnson called for the making of a Great Society and a War on Poverty. A liberal Congress led by Greatest Generation veterans moved to enhance American democratic life.

Congress passed historic civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing acts, and a major reform of the nation’s immigration law. It also made healthcare a right for the elderly and the poor, significantly expanded educational opportunities for children and young people, and enacted laws and created agencies to clean up and make the environment, marketplace, and workplace safer (EPA, OSHA, CPSC). At the same time, the Supreme Court guaranteed and strengthened the constitutional separation of church and state and moved to liberate women to control their own bodies. Plus, many state governments built new schools and universities and, in the Northern and Western states, expanded industrial democracy by granting collective bargaining rights to public workers.

That’s why it didn’t happen. Now to why it’s happening now.

All of this terrified Southern white supremacists, political and religious conservatives, and corporate bosses—and in the early 1970s they were mobilizing to not just counter the democratic surge but also reverse the democratic achievements of the Age of Roosevelt.

Though a series of crises, most notably, defeat in Vietnam, an Arab oil embargo, and an economic recession, shook up Americans, polls showed they remained committed to social-democratic ideals. In fact, workers were staging strikes on a scale not seen since the late 1940s. Yet not only did the Democratic Party fail to mobilize them, younger, prominent Democratic politicians such as Coloradan Gary Hart—soon to be known as neoliberals—were turning against the FDR tradition and the New Deal coalition in favor of engaging professionals, women, and minorities.

Meanwhile, corporate executives, already feeling under siege by federal agencies and labor unions, were experiencing a “profits squeeze” due to the emergence of foreign competition (especially from Germany and Japan). Which led key figures to call on their class comrades to wake up, join together, and launch what the British Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband would call a “class war from above” against government regulation, taxes, labor unions, and what they referred to as the “adversary culture” of environmental and consumer-rights groups, college students, the media, and university intellectuals.

Soon enough, old and new business organizations from the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission (whose members included the future Presidents Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter), undertook major advertising, public relations, and lobbying campaigns calling for deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the size of government—all in favor of “free enterprise.”

We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said.

At the same time, they not only set out to destroy the labor movement by means both legal and illegal (via union-busting consultants and lawyers), but also to invest in pro-business think tanks, public intellectuals, and both Republican and Democratic politicians. And prominent “super-rich” reactionaries funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions like school prayer and abortion and white working people around calls for “law and order.”

If all that was not enough, corporate bosses were moving their operations South and overseas to avoid state regulations, taxes, and union wages. Communities suffered; unions were broken; and wages and benefits were frozen, reduced, or lost. To try to survive, workers, who could not vote to raise their wages, began to vote all the more for conservative politicians who promised to cut taxes.

Unions and environmental and consumer rights groups sought to defend and advance democratic achievements, but the Democratic President Jimmy Carter called for “austerity” and liberating business and turned his back on labor and the environmental and consumer movements in favor of cutting government programs, lowering taxes, and deregulating capital—which effectively paved the way for the so-called “New Right” Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and the age of neoliberalism.

The story of the ensuing decades is that of continuing class war from above and neoliberalism. Of course, we expected it from capital and conservative Republicans. But what Carter the Democrat started, the next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, pursued aggressively. He too betrayed labor by pushing Congress to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement that further devastated American manufacturing in the Northern states. That was just the start. He deregulated the communications industry, enacted a mass incarceration crime bill, ended “welfare as we know it,” (a.k.a Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which began with FDR), and further deregulated banking. When the next Democrat President, Barack Obama, won the White House in 2008 he not only did not fight for the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) which would have made it far easier to create a union.

He also failed to prosecute Wall Street bankers for possible crimes that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Obama pushed through a healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, that gave huge concessions and profits to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and attempted to push through a bill creating a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.

At the same time, in state after state, conservatives have acted to override or circumvent a woman’s right to choose by enacting laws intended to make abortions almost impossible to secure. In state after state, Republicans have sought to suppress the votes of people of color, the poor, and students by enacting voter ID laws. And after years of trying, they finally succeeded in getting a conservative Supreme Court to disembowel the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plus, in state after state, the corporate and conservative rich have smashed labor unions and effectively suppressed the voices of workers by enacting so-called right to work laws—even, as in Wisconsin in 2011, rescinding the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

There have been movements from the bottom up: Wisconsin Rising, Occupy, The Fight for $15, the Moral Monday Movement, the anti-fracking and block-the-pipelines campaigns, and Black Lives Matter. They raised hopes, but they failed to garner the active support of the Democratic Party.

Notably in 2015 one major poll showed that the majority of Americans wanted radical change. Yes, RADICAL change. But the Democratic Party both in 2016 and 2020 found ways to deny the most radical candidate, Bernie Sanders, the nomination. I truly believe Bernie could have beaten Donald Trump both times. But working people, the working class, was, to put it mildly, really fed up with the party that had once been the party of the American working class, that had worked to empower labor and the working class.

Polling continually shows that the working class wants what FDR proposed in 1944. And yet neither party is speaking to working class aspirations. The Republican Party has been speaking to and rallying working-class anxiety and anger. The Democrats have been speaking to professional and upper-middle-class concerns.

We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said: “As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.”

What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question? That the only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s. Act to radically enhance American freedom, equality, and democracy.

LIVE 2 pm Eastern + Streaming After:

Buckle up for “DeProgram,” where hosts John Kiriakou and Ted Rall rip into the Trump administration’s explosive deportation policies, slicing through the chaos of immigration news. This episode unpacks three jaw-dropping stories rocking the nation, exposing the raw edge of America’s border crackdown.

First, the gut-wrenching case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father wrongly deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison despite a 2019 court order, with a federal judge blasting the administration for flouting the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Next, Trump’s team brazenly shares photos of alleged Venezuelan gang members, shaved and shackled in Salvadoran cells, igniting outrage and chilling Abu Ghraib comparisons from human rights groups. Finally, a Texas federal judge slams the brakes on Venezuelan deportations, revealing flaws in Trump’s reliance on a 1798 wartime law to expel migrants, sparking fierce legal battles. Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, and Rall, a fearless cartoonist, deliver razor-sharp analysis, dissecting the policies’ human toll, from shattered families to courtroom showdowns. With over 32,000 arrests since January 2025, a $6 million deal to outsource detainees to El Salvador, and 350 reported deaths in CECOT, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Why is the administration doubling down on defiance? How are communities, from Maryland to Texas, fighting back? This episode is a must-watch for anyone hungry for unfiltered truth on America’s immigration firestorm.

The post DeProgram: “Trump’s Deportation Chaos” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The protests are getting bigger and louder. On April 5, about 3 million people joined 1,400 protests and marches across the U.S., unleashing outrage at this country’s most fascistic, bigoted, and destructive president in memory. Resistance to President Donald Trump and billionaire henchman Elon Musk is all over the place—protests in the streets; mass phone calls, emails, and petitions; social media and news flooded with outrage and growing desperation over Trump’s assault on democracy and government.

In Washington, D.C., state capitals, and city halls, resistance is rising, and an array of nascent movements are budding. A nationwide group calling itself 50501 (50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement) has helped mobilize protests at city halls, state capitals, and in Washington, D.C. Local Indivisible groups, the Federal Unionists Network for federal workers, and immigrant rights organizations nationwide have stepped up actions. One small federal agency even blocked Elon Musk’s teenaged “DOGE” coders from entering the building. Resistance is rising.

While most Democrats seem either dormant or lost, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have mobilized massive crowds in their barnstorming “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, drawing more than 34,000 in Denver, Colorado. The urgency of combating Trump fascism and creating an alternative is palpable and inspiring.

Even as we mobilize in the streets and in halls of power, and fight like hell to stamp out fascist fires, we must begin to build toward something.

Now it’s time to ask—where are these actions going, and how can they build power that can help change conditions now and in the future? What are the strategies beyond displaying our rage and disgust with an administration wreaking havoc and harming countless lives? What do we do and where do we all go after the big protests? As resistance rises, where does all this energy, momentum, passion, and potential power go? When will these movements coalesce, at least strategically when and where they can, to amass far greater numbers and impact?

With most Democrats mired in a reactive mode, looking grimly meager, wavering, and inconsistent in their response, grassroots movements and other resistance efforts are largely on their own, which could ultimately be a good thing. Yes, some Democrats are speaking out and pushing back, but so far with little concrete effect.

Don’t count on the Democrats to lead the resistance. Some, like Sens. Sanders, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas), and others will be allies, but what rises up and builds must be US—all of us. Remember Bernie’s clarion, JFK-like call, “Not Me, Us?” In the face of fast-boiling Trump fascism, everyone who cares about democracy, human and civil rights, and our ecological and existential future, must become some kind of activist, in whatever way we can. Trump’s vicious and vile onslaught is not just a test for the Democrats, it is a test for all of us.

While the initial uprisings provide a torchlight of hope in this dark oceanic tempest, and a growing community of shared outrage and compassion, there must be a move toward greater unity, coalition-building, and strategic thinking that builds concrete impact and power. All these protests, marches, emails, petitions, and social media posts will naturally be somewhat anarchic and disarrayed, but if they don’t build toward power, we won’t have much impact.

Other than blocking or hampering some of Trump’s political and legislative thuggery through the courts, what is the vision? What is the plan?

As I write this, I hear millions of liberals in my ear, insisting the plan is to win back the House, maybe even the Senate, in 2026. I’ll heartily support those efforts. But while winning the midterms will be a steep climb and a ray of hope, there is a real danger—and a dreary loss of power and imagination—in channeling the resistance into the next election cycle. This moment and the emerging movements are far bigger than that.

If the emergent movements can find ways to solidify, coalesce, and build power, they should do it outside of the Democratic Party, even while allying with it. Why? Because the Democratic establishment, while vastly better than Trump and MAGA Republicans for humans and the planet, are profoundly compromised and show no signs of transcending their decades-long immersion in corporate neoliberalism.

Since Bill Clinton captured the party and the presidency in 1992, the Democrats’ enmeshment with neoliberalism and corporate power has been disastrous—giving rise to much of the working-class alienation and rage (no longer just white rage) that helped propel Trump. Think NAFTA and other Democratic neoliberal policies that deepened corporate power and inequality, aiding Trump wins in 2016 and 2024. For anyone wanting a more progressive, egalitarian, and sustainable future, there is a real danger that the Democrats will lean right in 2026 to capture disaffected Trump voters and continue their moribund trajectory away from economic populism.

If the resistance amounts to restoring moderate corporate Democrats in power, while that is undeniably better than Trumpian fascism, it will only bring more neoliberalism with its lesser-evil abandonment of poor and working people and its erosion of social safety nets, economic equity, and populism.

All of this is fraught with tensions. Many moderates and liberals who are outraged by Trump would likely support a “Blue No Matter Who” return to the safe, familiar harbors of Democratic centrism—even though that corporate-abiding agenda failed disastrously under the electoral banner of former Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s worth remembering that while Biden-Harris did some good domestic things on infrastructure and climate-repairing jobs, and preserved the Constitution, government services, and DEI, they also, hideously, enabled Israel’s genocidal annihilation of Gaza. Although Trump is incalculably more injurious and destructive, our resistance to his fascism and bigotry must not hold space for the Democrats’ support of genocide.

As we rage about Trump’s gutting of federal agencies and workers, the answer isn’t the centrist Clintonian “reinventing government” model that was, in some ways, a precursor to Musk’s grotesquely worse “DOGE.” If we are sickened by Trump’s racist dog-whistling attacks on brown immigrants from south of the border, the response shouldn’t be more Democratic enabling of the false notion that immigration is a problem or a “crisis.” If we are protesting MAGA Republican attacks on LGBTQ people and “DEI”—diversity, equity, and inclusion—then we must support these communities and principles while building a broadly unifying movement.

We are in a critical if confusing and uncertain moment. The resistance movements are just being born, the Democrats are in the wilderness, and we are years and many miles away from a clear political turnaround. We are in a fragile triage moment where democracy itself, and the future of the nation as we know it, is very much in question. There is no quick fix or easy answer.

We must do everything in our power to defy and resist the Trump-Musk-MAGA plunge into fascism. We must block terrible things wherever and however we can, in the name of saving lives and diminishing harm. We will win some battles and lose others. Even as we mobilize in the streets and in halls of power, and fight like hell to stamp out fascist fires, we must begin to build toward something. What emerges will find its own path and won’t be one linear thing. But if we want to save, protect, and support the people and places and ideas being thrashed and eviscerated by Trump, we must come together, coalesce, and strategize how to build a future that is more humane and democratic, and we must start doing that now.

When the Social Security Administration recently reclassified more than 6,000 living and breathing immigrants as dead in order to deny them the Social Security numbers and benefits they legally held, I empathized with those migrants.

I’m not an immigrant, and I don’t receive Social Security benefits. Yet my family, like millions of other Americans, has felt the pain and helplessness of losing access to services and benefits through no fault of our own.

The technique of declaring thousands of people “dead” with one stroke of the pen is particularly cruel and epitomizes the long-standing dehumanization of immigrants in this country.

At first glance, it might seem they target someone else, somewhere else. Upon further reflection, it is evident that the actions and tactics they deploy affect everyone.

But it would be short-sighted to view this as an immigration issue. In fact, this move reveals both our common vulnerability to the whims of high-up decision-makers, and our shared humanity.

As the Trump administration inflicts one cruel injustice after another, rapid fire, on immigrants and other vulnerable groups, these updates flash across screens as discrete, targeted acts. But it is more important than ever to focus on what we have in common and reframe these headlines as coordinated actions within systems that threaten everyone’s well-being.

A few years ago, my husband wrote the annual check for his life insurance policy, sealed it in the company’s return envelope, and dropped it into the official blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox near his bank. To his surprise, the life insurance company contacted him shortly after, notifying him that his policy was canceled due to nonpayment.

Turns out, he was one of thousands of victims of mail theft and check fraud in our town and throughout the country. Just this year, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service warned about mail theft and announced that check fraud has recently doubled.

My husband reported the crime to the police, and his bank covered the amount of the lost check. However, the life insurance company refused to reinstate his policy because during all those years he had been paying the annual fee, he also developed a chronic disease. As a small business owner with three children, my husband watched as an essential financial tool, put in place for our family, disappeared overnight—despite the fact that he had done everything right. Just like those 6,000 immigrants.

The health insurance industry has long employed the strategy of “deny, defend, and depose” to avoid covering the costs of important treatments for the sick and suffering who continue to pay climbing premiums. A 2025 article in the American Journal of Managed Care states that “insurance claim denials have risen 16% from 2018 to 2024, affecting access to essential medications like insulin and albuterol.” At the same time, health insurance companies’ net profitability increases.

Those immigrants followed strict rules and were granted Social Security numbers; they did nothing wrong. But just as their identities were wiped away, the high rate of health insurance claim denials financially wipes out millions of Americans. Almost half a million Americans declared personal bankruptcies in 2024, with medical debt the top cause.

Disability benefits are notoriously difficult to receive, and even when accessed, they are tenuous. According to the non-partisan USA Facts, “38% of applicants who meet technical requirements are accepted initially, but 53% of applicants who appeal that decision are ultimately approved.” However, the appeals process can be burdensome and last years. Paying into a private disability insurance plan holds no guarantees either.

Given that last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that “more than 1 in 4—over 70 million—adults in the United States reported having a disability,” everyone in this country knows someone who contends with their disability and simultaneously battles for benefits that are rightfully theirs. It shouldn’t be difficult, then, to empathize with immigrants’ dual plight: they must ward against diffuse and dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and at the same time fight for basic benefits promised to them.

Even recipients of disability insurance cannot rest easy. They are often stalked and photographed by investigators who use highly selective photos to “prove” the person is able to work. Now, surveillance is digital, too. Algorithms and new surveillance technologies can be laced with bias, trespass privacy laws, and lead to unjust claim denials for the people who can least defend themselves.

These new technologies also surveil migrants, with the same built-in biases. A scholarly article published this year describes the system as “a vast digital dragnet.” Once sacred boundaries that protected the privacy of income-tax payers have now been violated to help the Department of Homeland Security locate tax-paying immigrants. Once breached, that once-clear line of privacy is now erased for anyone.

The policies and actions coming from the Trump administration can feel like a barrage—because they are. At first glance, it might seem they target someone else, somewhere else. Upon further reflection, it is evident that the actions and tactics they deploy affect everyone. No one deserves to capriciously have the rug pulled out from under them through no fault of their own—yet we’re barreling toward a future where that’s commonplace, and possibly the norm.

I’ve worked on Democratic campaigns at every level—from city council to Congress—knocking doors in the rain, training volunteers in living rooms, and flipping districts no one thought we could win. But today, I’m not writing from the field. I’m writing from a place of deep urgency. As someone who has helped build Democratic power from the ground up, I can’t stay quiet about what I see at the top: too much caution, too much delay, and not nearly enough fight.

During a bout of insomnia, I found myself thinking not just about what’s wrong—but about what we can do. The tools Democratic leadership still has, even in the minority. Like many others awake at 5:00 am, somewhere between dread and determination, I sat down to write a letter to my representatives—two of whom also happen to be party leaders.

In it, I shared the frustration that so many Democrats are feeling: that our elected officials are not rising to meet the urgency of this moment. But I didn’t stop at critique. I laid out real, tangible strategies—actions I believe we can take, and must, before it’s too late.

Here Are Just a Few of the Strategies Democratic Leadership Could and Should Be Using Right NowUse Every Procedural Tool to Obstruct Authoritarian Legislation

Even in the minority, Democrats still have tools—filibusters, discharge petitions, amendments, withholding unanimous consent. These tactics should be used not sparingly, but relentlessly, to stall extremist overreach and force accountability.

With Republicans holding only a slim majority in both chambers, many votes require every GOP member to be present. That means well-timed delay tactics—whether procedural roadblocks or quorum pressure—can significantly disrupt daily proceedings and deny legitimacy to the Trump administration’s agenda.

Amplify Activist Voices and Resistance Movements

Read Project 2025 and Trump’s authoritarian policies into the Congressional Record. Bring activists and experts to testify. Turn committee hearings into moments of truth and visibility—not just for legislation, but for resistance.

Public hearings and press conferences should feature not just elected officials, but activists, whistleblowers, and legal experts. Let them speak on the record about what’s at stake. Turn the machinery of Congress into a spotlight—not just for legislation, but for truth-telling, narrative building, and grassroots solidarity.

Encourage Legal action at the State Level Against Corrupt Actors

While federal oversight may stall under a hostile administration, state attorneys general can still investigate, subpoena, and prosecute. Democratic leaders should coordinate and publicly support legal action at the state level—especially in cases of insider trading, abuse of power, and the politicization of federal agencies during the Trump years.

Importantly, state-level prosecutions cannot be pardoned by the president. That independence makes them one of the most effective tools we have for securing real consequences. These legal efforts can also serve as a deterrent, a signal that public service does not grant impunity—and that even in a divided government, justice is not off the table.

Support Civil Servants Who Were Endangered or Silenced

President Donald Trump’s prior administration targeted career civil servants with ideological purges, abrupt terminations, and politically motivated firings. USAID employees, diplomats, scientists, and inspectors general were removed or undermined—often without cause or recourse.

Democratic leaders should stand with these workers by supporting their lawsuits, amplifying their stories, and publicly defending civil service protections. The dismantling of a nonpartisan public workforce is a hallmark of authoritarianism. Defending that workforce is a line we cannot allow to be crossed again.

Challenge ICE and Private Detention Centers Through Local Governance

State and local governments don’t have to wait for federal reform to challenge ICE and the private prison industry. Democratic governors, mayors, and legislatures can cancel contracts, deny facility permits, and even pursue legal tools like eminent domain to reclaim control of detention sites.

These actions send a powerful signal: Cities and states will not be complicit in dehumanization. But there’s also a tactical layer—legal pushback forces major law firms to spend their pledged pro bono hours fighting complex eminent domain cases, rather than quietly defending Trump administration allies in high-profile federal court battles. Local resistance doesn’t just disrupt ICE—it redistributes institutional resources and applies pressure to power from multiple angles.

These are just a few of the actions we can take. I put them—along with a call to act—into a letter to my representatives. What follows is that letter, shared publicly in the hope that it inspires others to raise their voices, too.

Dear Senator Schumer and Congressman Jeffries,

My name is Laura Hughes. I’ve worked as a Democratic campaign organizer for over eight years, and I’m currently pursuing a Master’s in Public Administration at Columbia University. I share this because I want to be clear: I’m writing not just to voice frustration, but to urge action—with both urgency and strategy.

Let me begin by acknowledging what I know to be true: You, like so many of us, are overwhelmed. But with respect, that is not an excuse. You are a leader in the Democratic Party, and leadership in this moment demands more.

We are watching institutions unravel: People are being disappeared, federal departments are dismantled, the economy is unstable, rule of law is violated, and corruption is normalized. This is not a time for business as usual. We cannot afford to stand on ceremony when the floor is collapsing beneath us.

People are in the streets. They are looking to you—not just for speeches, but for strategy.

In both chambers of Congress, Democrats should be leveraging every procedural and political tool available. If Mitch McConnell taught us anything, it’s that a slim majority is no excuse for inaction. Senator Cory Booker had the right idea: We should filibuster more. We should obstruct more. We should use amendments, discharge petitions, and parliamentary procedure to grind every harmful effort to a halt. Invite activists to testify and disrupt proceedings. Read Project 2025 and every authoritarian overreach into the Congressional Record.

Make it harder for them—every single day.

Here are additional actions I urge you and your colleagues to consider:

1. Support legal accountability by encouraging state attorneys general to investigate and, where appropriate, indict former Trump administration officials for clear acts of corruption—such as insider trading or abuse of power.
2. Back civil service lawsuits—stand with civil servants whose careers and safety were jeopardized by abrupt terminations and dangerous policy shifts, such as those at USAID.
3. Empower local governments to resist ICE by encouraging Democratic governors, mayors, and state legislatures to end contracts with private detention centers, shutter ICE offices, and pursue creative legal mechanisms—like eminent domain—to challenge federal overreach and private prison profiteering.

I share these not as an outsider, but as someone who has dedicated her career to building Democratic power from the ground up. I believe in what we’re capable of—but I also believe we are failing to meet this moment.

I hope this letter reaches you not just as a call to act, but as a reminder: History will remember who resisted and who stood back.

With urgency and resolve,

Laura Anne Hughes
Constituent
Organizer
Policy Student

I wrote this letter out of urgency, but I’m sharing it out of hope. Because we still have time to turn the tide—if we’re willing to use every tool at our disposal. I’m asking our leaders to rise to the moment. And I’m asking all of us continue to demand that they do.

We stand at the threshold of 100 days into U.S. President Donald Trump's second term—a milestone that marks not just time passed, but fundamental shifts in what we once thought immovable. Journalists, scholars, and citizens have produced countless analyses dissecting each executive order, each appointment, each tweet—all attempting to calculate what these moves mean for democracy's future. The unthinkable materializes daily, becoming our new normal with terrifying speed.

Yet writers like M. Gessen and Timothy Snyder and many others remind us that this descent into authoritarianism follows recognizable patterns. America has traveled similar roads before—during the paranoia of the Red Scare, through the systematic dismantling of Black liberation during post-Reconstruction, and in the targeting of immigrants throughout our history. Beyond our borders, Hungary, Russia, and other nations reveal the familiar playbook of democratic erosion becoming increasingly visible here.

Still, there is something uniquely harrowing about witnessing our neighbors, friends, and family members rounded up without due process and transported to concentration camps in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian regime. The images sear themselves into our consciousness: Columbia students abducted during citizenship interviews, their futures evaporated in an instant; decades-long careers "trimmed like fat" by an unelected, unappointed Elon Musk, leaving entire families adrift; small businesses built through generational sacrifice now treated as disposable pawns in a tariff power game.

Community isn't just comfort—it's tactical necessity. Art isn't luxury—it's preservation of truth. Memory isn't nostalgia—it's navigational equipment. Solidarity isn't idealism—it's survival infrastructure.

When Trump won in November, I immediately sat down to write warnings for fellow educators. I wrote from the memories inscribed in my body—memories of growing up ethnic Hungarian in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, where terror wasn't theoretical but woven into our daily existence. Under his rule, we were systematically starved, our language and culture criminalized, our neighbors and family members disappeared. My body recognized the warning signs before my mind could fully articulate them. Yet when I submitted this piece, editors dismissed my concerns as overreaction, as hyperbole.

I now understand that my body carries an archive of survival—strategies and wisdom passed down from my mother who preserved our culture through her activism, from my father who defaced propaganda at great personal risk, from grandparents who found a way to feed us when the state wanted us to starve. There is a knowledge that lives in the muscles and bones of those who have navigated authoritarian regimes before. This embodied wisdom isn't just my story—it belongs to many who have survived state violence across different contexts and generations.

This is what I offer now: survival strategies forged in Romania's darkness that may light our path through America's authoritarian turn. Not as abstract theory, but as lived practice—the very tactics that kept my family's humanity intact when everything around us was designed to crush it.

Community as Resistance: When Trust Becomes Radical

The first weapon of every authoritarian regime is isolation. Ceaușescu mastered this in Romania, as Trump now attempts in America. They understand that lone individuals are easily controlled, while connected communities possess dangerous power.

In my Hungarian village, Ceaușescu implemented a calculated strategy of division. He systematically starved our community while simultaneously rewarding informants with extra rations—creating a poisonous ecosystem where survival came at the cost of betrayal. Neighbors who had shared meals for generations suddenly regarded each other with suspicion. Who received extra bread this week? Whose children weren't as thin? The regime turned ordinary human connection into something dangerous, weaponizing our need for sustenance against our equally vital need for community.

This precise strategy unfolds now across America. Websites solicit anonymous reports on professors teaching "divisive concepts." Students are encouraged to secretly record teachers who acknowledge LGBTQ+ identities or discuss racism beyond sanitized narratives. The Department of Education has established hotlines for parents to report teachers who mention forbidden histories. What appears as "educational reform" is actually the ancient authoritarian tactic of severing trust at its roots—making us suspicious of the very neighbors and colleagues we need most.

The antidote feels deceptively simple but requires revolutionary commitment: know your neighbors. Not as casual acquaintances, but as essential extensions of your survival network.

For six years, my Brooklyn neighborhood has gathered during weekends on summer months to collect trash from our streets. This might seem trivial—plastic bags and pizza boxes hardly constitute political resistance. Yet in these mundane moments, something profound emerges. As we fill garbage bags and share slices of celebratory pizza afterward, we establish an invisible but unbreakable fabric of mutual recognition. My neighborhood is no longer filled with anonymous strangers but with Mike whose mom bakes the best brownies; with Danelle who makes sure the community is informed about any policies that may impact us; with Tom in the music industry who now on his own, whether we are out or not, picks up trash because he just can’t stop. I feel held. I feel known. I would place my safety in their hands without hesitation—and they in mine.

This is precisely what happened in upstate New York, when Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar," discovered that power cannot sever communities that refuse to be divided. When ICE abducted a mother and her three children, their neighbors didn't retreat into private fear. They marched directly to Homan's door—not as activists performing resistance, but as a community that simply refused to accept the theft of their own. They stood firm in the insistence that every resident of their town matters, regardless of documentation.

Know your neighbors by name. Share meals. Exchange phone numbers not just as social pleasantry but as survival infrastructure. Create signal groups. Build networks that transcend the algorithm's desire to sort us into isolated political identities.

When they come for one, they come for all. The regime knows this—it's why they work so hard to keep us separated, suspicious, and alone. Our most powerful resistance begins with the radical act of trusting one another.

The Underground Preservation of Truth Through Art

Under Ceaușescu's regime, official history was weaponized—our past rewritten, our cultural heroes erased, our language criminalized. My mother, a rural schoolteacher with no political power, responded with quiet insurgency. She led her students through village cemeteries where our poets and thinkers lay buried, turning gravestones into forbidden textbooks. We cleaned moss from inscriptions, left wildflowers on forgotten graves, and through this ritual, preserved what the state tried to erase.

At night, she transformed our village's cultural center into what we called "Bear Cub Club"—a humble resistance workshop where children learned traditional dances and crafts. She smuggled us to underground theater performances where dissent lived in metaphor and symbolism, slipping homemade chocolate into our pockets to pass secretly during intermission. Even now, decades later in the U.S. theaters, I cannot watch a play without craving something sweet.

The wisdom for surviving what comes exists in communities that never enjoyed the luxury of taking democracy for granted.

Today in America, we witness similar erasures accelerating. NASA's female pioneers vanish from government websites overnight. Harriet Tubman's history requires public outcry to maintain its place in our national story. Curriculum laws in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere criminalize teachers who acknowledge the full tapestry of American experience. The official narrative narrows daily to a procession of white male achievement while alternative stories are systematically dismantled.

While the Kennedy Center plans to host performances celebrating the "dear leader" and January 6 participants form official choirs, we must recognize art's dual purpose: not just as documentation of truth, but as preservation of our humanity when systems work to dehumanize us. Create art. Support underground theaters. Join community dance groups. Form reading circles for banned books. Attend exhibitions featuring artists from targeted communities.

Seek out art like your survival depends on it—because when authoritarian regimes tighten their grip, it does.

Learning from Those Who've Navigated the Unimaginable

Books saved us under Ceaușescu. Our cramped apartment atop a brutalist tenement block housed little luxury except for my mother's library. While the state manufactured artificial scarcity of food, she created abundance of knowledge, teaching me to read long before I entered school. Together we read banned accounts of slavery in America, Indigenous resistance to colonization, and Jewish survival through pogroms. Through these stories, she offered a revolutionary perspective: "What we face is not new, and others have survived worse. We can too."

This wisdom guides me now as America's democratic guardrails buckle. We need not invent survival strategies from scratch—they exist all around us in communities that have long navigated hostile systems. The disability justice movement pioneered "care pods" decades before pandemic isolation, creating mutual aid networks when medical establishments dismissed their experiences. Their mantra—"no one is disposable"—offers a direct counternarrative to authoritarian logic.

Black educators in the Jim Crow South built Freedom Schools that taught not just literacy but liberation, helping young people imagine futures beyond the segregated present. These schools operated in church basements and living rooms, often using donated books and volunteer teachers—creating parallel educational systems when official institutions became tools of oppression.

Perhaps our most vital teachers today are those navigating the modern American gulag—the incarcerated organizers who, despite every attempt to dehumanize them, maintain dignity through solidarity. Our incarcerated brothers and sisters hold crucial knowledge about maintaining humanity when systems are designed to strip it away.

Study these movements not as history but as tactical manuals. Their strategies—mutual aid networks, underground education, community defense, collective care—provide templates adaptable to our current moment. The wisdom for surviving what comes exists in communities that never enjoyed the luxury of taking democracy for granted.

The Messy, Essential Work of Standing Together

Authoritarian regimes perfect the art of division. They thrive when populations fracture into irreconcilable camps—when your suffering becomes disconnected from mine, when my liberation seems to threaten yours. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement through outrage, become unwitting accomplices in this fragmentation, serving us increasingly extreme versions of "us versus them" narratives with each scroll.

The antidote lies not in perfect unity, but in messy, imperfect solidarity. When Ceaușescu targeted Hungarians in Romania, he exploited centuries-old ethnic tensions, encouraging Romanians to see us as the source of their suffering rather than his extractive policies. The regime's collapse began only when both groups recognized our common exploitation. Despite language barriers and historical grievances, Romanian and Hungarian workers stood together in Timișoara's square in December 1989—not because we suddenly loved each other, but because we finally understood a profound truth: Our liberation was bound together.

Start where you are. Show up as you are. The work ahead requires all of us—imperfect, scared, determined.

Today, as Musk and Trump consolidate unprecedented wealth and power, they depend on the same strategy—convincing Nebraska farmers that Brooklyn activists threaten their way of life, persuading urban workers that rural Americans oppose their interests. Meanwhile, both communities struggle under identical systems of extraction. This Tax Day, the wealthiest 1% paid effective tax rates lower than teachers and nurses, while corporate profits reached record highs alongside unprecedented poverty.

True solidarity doesn't require sameness or even agreement on every issue. It requires only the recognition that oligarchic power maintains itself by convincing us to fear each other more than we fear them. Solidarity means Appalachian coal miners supporting urban climate activists despite apparent contradictions, recognizing that both deserve sustainable futures. It means suburban middle-class families standing alongside immigrant communities despite xenophobic propaganda, understanding that borders primarily serve capital, not people.

Liberation won't arrive through algorithmic echo chambers or perfectly aligned political purity. It emerges through the uncomfortable, challenging work of holding space for difference while recognizing our interdependence. Imperfect solidarity defeated Ceaușescu. It remains our most powerful weapon now.

The Long Road Ahead: Finding Your Revolutionary Role

My father was a revolutionary—a raucous, rebellious figure. He defaced communist propaganda and statues and was tortured for his resistance. My mother was a revolutionary too. She taught criminalized histories and ensured our ethnic community grew up knowing our strength, power, potential, and could envision a future.

There is no single face of resistance. The charismatic protest leader shouting through megaphones and the quiet grandmother knitting hats for those without homes are equally vital. The lawyer challenging unconstitutional policies and the cook ensuring no community member goes hungry during ICE raids are both essential. Some will document through journalism and art what others accomplish through direct action. Some will teach when others heal. Some will challenge publicly while others build underground networks.

The coming years demand we abandon the fantasy of the perfect revolutionary—that cinematic figure with the perfect slogan and unwavering certainty. Instead, assess your skills, your position, your capacity. Are you connected to resources that could shelter the vulnerable? Can your professional credentials be leveraged to bear witness when rights are violated? Does your kitchen have capacity to feed extra mouths when communities are targeted?

Start where you are. Show up as you are. The work ahead requires all of us—imperfect, scared, determined. It's going to be a long three years and nine months. Find your revolutionary role and inhabit it fully, not just for dramatic moments of crisis, but for the quiet Tuesday afternoons when the slow work of resistance continues without applause or audience.

The Velvet and Gold Illusion: Seeing Through Dictators' Theater

As a child, I accompanied my grandmother on nights she cleaned the Communist Party headquarters in our village. Every settlement, no matter how tiny, housed these ornate shrines to power where uniformed men monitored our movements by day. By night, my grandmother—whose ancestral fields had been seized to grow export crops while we subsisted on cornmeal—scrubbed their floors and emptied their ashtrays.

I remember the jarring contrast between these offices and our daily reality. While our fingers were encrusted with the soil we worked for the government, party headquarters gleamed with gold fixtures and blood-red velvet draperies. Crystal decanters of cognac sat on desks while we boiled potatoes and onions for soup. The vulgar opulence wasn't accidental—it was calculated theater, designed to awe and intimidate.

Nature offers us wisdom these hollow men will never grasp: that true strength lies in nurturing life, not destroying it for profit or spectacle.

When I saw the recent White House photos of Trump and Bukele smirking beneath gaudy golden decorations, my body recognized this performance instantly. The same garish decorations, the same wall of self-satisfied white men, the same pompous spectacle—as they casually discussed trading $6 million dollars for 238 human lives. I watched them laugh about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father disappeared despite a Supreme Court order for his return. Without due process. Abducted. Their golden backdrop making mockery of justice.

This ostentatious display is not true power but its desperate imitation. My grandmother, who could coax eggs from chickens during bitter winters and knew which wild herbs would heal a fever, embodied genuine strength. She taught me power resides not in gilded rooms but in the hands that feed communities, in bodies that resist breaking, in knowledge that sustains life when systems fail.

When bombarded with these theatrical performances by weak men who trade human lives like commodities, remember where authentic power dwells—not in marble halls but in soil and seed, not in executive orders but in neighbor protecting neighbor. Nature offers us wisdom these hollow men will never grasp: that true strength lies in nurturing life, not destroying it for profit or spectacle.

The Higher Law of Conscience During Authoritarian Rule

Hunger was my earliest teacher about the difference between law and justice. In Ceaușescu's Romania, food scarcity wasn't accidental but weaponized—a deliberate policy to keep us weak and compliant. My sister, just nine years old, would rise before dawn to stand in bread lines, her small body pushed aside by desperate adults as she fought to bring something—anything—home for us to eat. The state declared private food production illegal while systematically starving us.

I remember one moonless night when desperation overcame fear. My mother grabbed my hand, as we crouched at the edge of a state-controlled cornfield. "Hurry," she whispered, as we ran into two rows to snap just one ear of corn—officially the property of a government exporting food while its citizens withered. Breaking this law wasn't criminal, obeying it would have been. That was one of the first times I learned that sometimes survival itself becomes an act of resistance.

When they insist on a world of walls and borders, we must insist on one of bridges and belonging.

In the coming years, America will see laws proliferate that criminalize basic human decency: laws making it illegal to shelter migrants fleeing violence, laws criminalizing teachers who acknowledge our full history, laws forbidding healthcare workers from providing life-saving care to transgender youth. Remember this: No government decree can override the higher law of conscience. The same legal system that once upheld slavery, criminalized interracial marriage, and imprisoned Japanese Americans in concentration camps now enables new mechanisms of cruelty.

We each must decide where our moral boundaries lie—what actions we cannot take regardless of their legal status. Live not by what is legally permissible but by what allows you to meet your own eyes in the mirror each morning. As we face this authoritarian turn, our moral compass—not their proclamations—must guide us through the darkness ahead.

Carrying Memory Forward: Our Collective Resistance

As we near the end of the first 100 days, we have already seen the playbook of authoritarianism unfold with terrifying precision. But we have also seen what resistance looks like—in packed rallies where Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speak truth in red states, in communities gathering to protect neighbors from ICE raids, in artists creating powerful works when official narratives fail us, in the knowledge preserved and passed down by those who have navigated state violence before.

The memory of my mother teaching forbidden histories in cemeteries, my father defacing propaganda despite the consequences, my grandmother finding ways to feed us when the state wanted us to starve—these are not just stories from a distant country. They are blueprints for survival that echo across time and borders. The tools of resilience that carried my family through Romania's darkness are the same ones that will carry us through America's authoritarian turn.

The regime calculates its success on our isolation. Every authoritarian system depends on convincing its targets that resistance is futile, that neighbors cannot be trusted, that alternative futures are impossible. Our most revolutionary act becomes refusing this imposed solitude—finding one another despite their barriers, remembering our histories despite their erasures, maintaining joy despite their manufactured crises.

As we face the long journey through these next years, carry these strategies not as distant historical curiosities but as practical inheritance. Community isn't just comfort—it's tactical necessity. Art isn't luxury—it's preservation of truth. Memory isn't nostalgia—it's navigational equipment. Solidarity isn't idealism—it's survival infrastructure.

They want us fragmented, fearful, and forgetful. Our response must be connection, courage, and radical remembering. When they insist on a world of walls and borders, we must insist on one of bridges and belonging. This is how we not only endure their calculated cruelty but transcend it—by remembering that on the other side of survival lies the world we are already building together.

Are Americans victims of political bait and switch? Immediate pain isn't what Republicans promised voters.

President Donald Trump promised immediate benefits, much of it on "day one"—cheaper eggs, lower inflation, peace in Ukraine. The war rages on. Egg prices have increased. Inflation, fueled by tariffs, is on the way up. But stocks, including Americans' 401-K retirement accounts, are way down.

Mr. Trump is now saying that Americans will suffer pain, but that it will pave the way for long term gains: "Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."

When people invest, they personally bear the costs of their better future—a lower short-run standard of living. The current national "investment" is being made at other people's expense, not at the personal expense of our wealthy leaders.

The immediate pain is real, but the gains will come slowly if at all. "Reshoring" cannot be done overnight. It takes years to develop skilled workers, create supply chains, and build new factories.

New factories require investments, but with constantly changing rules investors cannot know whether new factories will be profitable.

Accepting less now in order to get a better future is a classical definition of investment. An individual could work but chooses further education, living on very little in order to earn a better future living. Instead of spending all our income, we buy stock or bonds, increasing our future purchasing power.

But when people invest, they personally bear the costs of their better future—a lower short-run standard of living. The current national "investment" is being made at other people's expense, not at the personal expense of our wealthy leaders.

Indeed there is speculation that some leaders, or friends with whom they shared inside information, became even more wealthy buying stock options minutes before the announcement of the 90-day tariff "postponement" set off a one-day surge in the markets.

There is now pain all around the country. Thousands of federal workers are losing their jobs. Projects around the country and world are being discontinued, causing additional unemployment. When people lose jobs, they also usually lose medical insurance.

There are threats to eliminate medical care for millions of other Americans. Research into disease treatments and avoidance of future epidemics is being reduced.

Reindustrialization—encouraged by tax reductions for the rich and tariffs—will supposedly produce benefits that will trickle down to the men and women in the street. But trickle down benefits have been doubtful in the past, and could well be pure "vaporware."

A more certain way to improve the economy would be to distribute dependable government benefits—jobs, research, health insurance, even cash—right now, and allow consumer expenditures to bubble up to benefit industries that cater to people's actual wishes.

Cutting taxes for the rich, or giving the rich more ability to cheat on their taxes by whacking the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget, is trickle-down economics run wild.

These tax decreases for the wealthy will be partially paid for with income from higher tariffs. These tariffs will not be paid by foreigners, but by average Americans who purchase the imported goods. Tariffs are an indirect sales tax.

When private corporations employ bait and switch advertising, Americans are rightfully indignant and government regulators may try to outlaw it. Why should we accept similarly dishonest marketing by political entrepreneurs attempting to win elections?

Donald Trump clearly loves tariffs and would like to be considered a second President William McKinley—McKinley II. But the recent stock and bond market behavior, reflecting investors' cold-blooded analysis of Trump's policies, suggests that he could instead become Hoover II. (Republican President Herbert Hoover led the country into the Great Depression after signing a major increase in tariffs.)

Congressional Republicans should remember that, after Hoover, their party did not capture the White House again for 20 years. It was nearly that long before they again controlled Congress.

This is too bad. American political parties are both rife with bad ideas at the moment. Like Republicans, Democratic politicians have some bad ideas that need to be opposed by a responsible opposition party that can sometimes win elections.

In February, the economist Gabriel Zucman posted an absolutely stunning graphic online that depicts the wealth of America richest 0.00001% as a share of our nation’s total household wealth.

The share of American wealth held by the 19 lucky souls in this top 0.00001% now stands at 2%, a 10-fold increase from the share these deep pockets held over four decades ago in 1982. Collectively, as of this past December, these rich held $3.1 trillion of the country’s $146 trillion total household wealth.

If 2% doesn’t seem to you like all that much, consider that this $3.1 trillion amounts to one-50th of our country’s wealth. We have, of course, exactly 50 states. The 19 Americans in this top 0.00001% hold personal net worths ranging from $50 billion to $360 billion. They together control the same amount of wealth as an average American state—think Massachusetts or Indiana—with a population of about 7 million people.

And the growth of our top 0.00001%’s wealth share over the years has been geometric, not linear. If policy choices over the next 42 years allow the trend of the past 42 years to continue, our top 0.00001 percenters won’t merely increase their wealth share from 2 to 4%. They will be increasing their wealth share 10-fold, to about 20%.

Will what’s left of American democracy survive for much longer if this wealth-concentrating trend continues?

Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes.

Nearly a century ago, former Supreme Court jurist Louis Brandeis famously warned us: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

We’re now seeing the nightmare scenario Brandeis feared—an oligarchic subversion of American democracy—play out in real time. We can argue politely about whether any single billionaire represents a policy failure. But having our nation’s three richest billionaires—Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg—sitting front and center at the inauguration of a billionaire president sure looks like we have a president answerable to oligarchs, not America’s voters.

An extreme concentration of oligarchic-level wealth, Brandeis feared, can easily translate into an extreme concentration of political power. To believe that this concentration has not occurred here in the United States rates as totally delusional. Musk spent over $250 million on U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, less than one one-thousandth of his personal fortune, yet enough to overwhelm the campaign finance system.

Musk, maybe more significantly, used his control over a powerful social media platform, X, to promote Trump’s campaign. Bezos and another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiung, demanded that the editorial boards of the newspapers they own, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, not run editorials endorsing Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Let’s remember that each of the country’s four wealthiest Americans—Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ellison—controls at least one major media outlet or social media platform.

Let’s also remember that Musk, nearly immediately upon Trump taking office, began making unilateral decisions that are leading to the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers, the termination of life-saving foreign aid, and, if lawsuits don’t prevent it, the dismantling of entire federal agencies.

Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes. For nearly half a century, everything from wage and labor policies to antitrust enforcement and intellectual property and trade standards have been moving us in the direction of more concentrated wealth.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the federal minimum wage today stands at half its 1968 level. Over the past 50 years, union density has plummeted. The market power in virtually every major industry now sits massively concentrated in just a handful of giant corporations.

Against all these trends, tax policy remains our last line of defense, our firewall against the power of our wealthiest.

Think about things this way: Our policy choices in areas outside taxes—labor, wages, antitrust—all impact our national concentration of income. These policy choices drive the sharing of our country’s income between labor and capital and between consumers and businesses. And these policies have been driving an ever larger share of our nation’s income to those at the top.

Tax policy, by contrast, governs the conversion of income into wealth. Without taxation, necessary living expenses would cause income and wealth inequality to deepen over time—because those with smaller incomes must devote a larger portion of their income to basic living expenses. The passive income generated by the resulting unequal distribution of wealth—dividends and interest income, for instance—then proceeds to drive income inequality still higher in future years, causing the sharing of income remaining after living expenses to become even more skewed in favor of our richest.

With these dynamics in play, progressive income and wealth taxation becomes a necessary counterbalance to income inequality. Absent progressive taxation, income and wealth inequality will continuously worsen. The greater the level of income inequality, the more progressive the system of taxation necessary to counteract that concentration.

From this perspective, America’s tax policy choices have been an abject failure for nearly 50 years. Our top 1%’s share of our country’s income has more than doubled since 1980. Our tax system has become hugely less progressive. Regressive taxes like federal payroll taxes and state-level sales and property taxes have increased, while the gains from federal income tax cuts have flowed disproportionately to those at the top.

Between 1980 and today, the top federal income tax rate on paycheck income—the only substantial income that flows to most American households—has fallen by about one-fourth, from 50% to 37%. But the decline in the top income tax rate on dividends—income that flows primarily to major corporate shareholders—has fallen from 70 to 20%.

And these numbers just describe the surface of our current tax-cut scene. The investment gains of the ultra-rich compound tax-free until the underlying investments get sold. At sale, these gains face a one-time tax rate of 23.8%. That 23.8% translates into an equivalent annual tax rate that can run under 5%. And if a rich investor dies with billions of untaxed capital gains, all those gains totally escape any income-tax levy.

A tax system, to effectively contain the concentration of a society’s wealth, must contain a mechanism to tax either wealth itself, the income from that wealth, or the intergenerational transfer of wealth—or some combination of the three. America’s current tax system falls short on all these counts.

The income subject to federal income tax often represents only a fraction of the actual economic income that’s filling American billionaire pockets. Investment gains go untaxed unless and until investment assets get sold. The federal estate and gift tax system—originally intended to tax the intergenerational transfer of wealth—stands eviscerated by a combination of cuts and the refusal of Congress to shut down avoidance strategies that tax lawyers have fine-tuned and court decisions have blessed.

Today, even billionaires can avoid federal estate and gift tax entirely.

Here’s how undertaxed our billionaires have become: In a study commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, four economists at the University of California-Berkeley analyzed the tax payments of the richest 0.001% of American tax units, about 380 taxpayers in all, a total that roughly matches the annual Forbes 400.

In 2019, this study found, those 380 deep pockets ended up paying in taxes federal, state, and foreign just 2% of their wealth. The average tax burden between 2018 and 2020 for those in the top 0.00005%—some 90 tax units—amounted to just 1% of their wealth.

Meanwhile, between 2014 and 2024, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 grew from $2.3 trillion to $5.4 trillion, an average annual growth rate, net of taxes and consumption spending, of 8.9%. The wealth of just the top 19 on the Forbes list over these years grew at an annual rate of over 12%.

So do the math: Oligarchic wealth in America is growing at a rate that dwarfs the actual tax rate upon that wealth. The oligarchic cancer destroying American democracy is continuing—and will continue—to metastasize.

Unless we rise up.

The Trump administration has made a shocking claim: that it can declare living people dead to cut off their access to government benefits and the broader U.S. financial system.

According to reporting from The New York Times, the Social Security Administration (SSA), at the direction of DOGE, has begun knowingly adding living people to SSA’s death records—the Death Master File (DMF)—by assigning them false “dates of death” to “terminat[e]” their “financial lives.”

Being wrongfully identified as dead in Social Security records “can lead to benefit termination… and severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals.” Because the DMF is leveraged by many federal and state agencies to determine eligibility—and by the Treasury Department’s government-wide “Do Not Pay” system to prevent improper payments—false inclusion of a death date can lead to an individual losing their health coverage through Medicare, having their tax return delayed, or having their Social Security or other eligible benefit payments cancelled, among other harms.

There is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.

The DMF is also used by some private-sector companies with a legitimate business or anti-fraud need for the data—including financial institutions, credit agencies, insurance companies, and pension administrators. As a result, being inappropriately listed as dead can result in severe financial consequences like disruption in bank account access, credit cards being cancelled, pension benefits being paused, insurance coverage being cancelled or claims being denied, rejected employment applications, or denial of credit.

The first group of people to be wrongfully and knowingly declared dead by the Trump administration are reportedly being targeted in an immigration enforcement effort focused, at least in part, on people who were lawfully present and eligible to work until the Trump administration abruptly terminated their lawful status. These individuals would have been correctly issued Social Security numbers (SSNs) upon obtaining their lawful immigration statuses, and any change in those statuses should not limit their access to their own financial resources in U.S. banks.

The Trump administration made an unsupported claim that everyone in the initial group had either links to terrorist activity or criminal records. But an internal review by SSA staff that focused on some of the youngest targets—including children as young as 13 years old—“found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions.” The administration’s unproven claim follows its other wildly inaccurate and widely debunked claims about Social Security—including false claims that people who are 150 years old receive Social Security payments and that 40% of calls to Social Security come from fraudsters, when evidence suggests the percentage is “minuscule.”

It is deeply concerning that the administration is knowingly falsifying records. While SSA has the legal authority to collect information about people’s deaths to administer Social Security, there is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.

Moreover, it’s unclear how an individual could have themselves removed from the list if being dead is no longer the sole criterion for being included on the DMF. Recognizing that wrongful inclusion in the DMF can be “devastating” to individuals and their families, SSA has taken steps under previous administrations both to reduce the chances of such mistakes and to resolve them as quickly as possible. Previously, when a person was included in error in the DMF, they had only to make the straightforward case that they were alive, something that could be achieved with identification documents and an in-person visit to a Social Security field office. In this case, without transparent guidance on what circumstances other than death would result in inclusion on the DMF, and without a clear process for appeal, there is no longer a clear pathway to proving that the inclusion was in error.

This claim of unbounded power is made all the more concerning by the lack of effective oversight at SSA. The Trump administration has already dismissed the acting Social Security inspector general without cause and pushed out many nonpartisan career officials, reducing oversight and guardrails. And there are reports that staff objections to the legality of falsifying death information in SSA data have already directly led to the removal of at least one agency senior executive.

As SSA and DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) prioritize carrying out this reckless and seemingly illegal action, it serves as just one more example of the Trump administration’s failure to protect Social Security, including undermining core systems that are critical to running the program. At a time when the administration should be doing everything it can to reassure seniors, people with disabilities, and others who receive Social Security benefits, it is instead making deep cuts to SSA staffing, leading to overworked and understaffed field offices and degrading customer service and the reliability of SSA systems; proposing and then partially walking back the unnecessary elimination of phone services, leading to confusion and unnecessary burdens on seniors; and now falsely labeling people as dead in SSA databases.

As darkness falls in one of the most densely populated strips of land in the world, residents of Gaza wish the night had never come. The deafening sound of fighter jets comes first. Then the bombs that detonate, igniting fires which often propel debris at high speeds onto tents or people sheltering in rubble and the few structures that remain.

"Save our children from this hell," writes Salma, a mother of two, as her daughter screams in terror, when another Israeli fighter jet flies overhead. "Do you know how painful it is to see your daughter cry in terror and have no way of protecting her?" she asks rhetorically.

Like every parent in Gaza I've come to know through GoFundMe efforts, Salma wants one thing and one thing only: for the war on her children to stop. For the constant bombing, fear, death, starvation, and displacement to end. Since Israel broke the cease-fire on March 18 and resumed its quixotic quest to root out Hamas, an estimated 1,630 more people have been killed and 4,302 wounded. The United Nations says 100 children have been killed or injured every day. On the day the cease-fire broke, 183 children were killed, according to Al Jazeera.

Mix constant displacement, the lack of permanent housing, schooling, and healthcare, and children in Gaza are being deprived of their childhood.

Salma, a widow, and her two children live in northern Gaza, but it's the same everywhere—for those living in tents in the al Mawasi refugee camp in southern Gaza and those living on the streets in Gaza City. On the same night Salma's daughter screamed in terror, Israel ordered people to evacuate neighborhoods in Khan Younis in the south. Mohammed Samir Elnabris, whose story I shared in December on these pages, writes:

I wish night had never come. A difficult night, just like the nights that preceded it, but this night the tension, anxiety, and anticipation are heightened due to the evacuation notices issued to the area surrounding us. Reconnaissance aircraft of all types are constantly in the sky, accompanied by warplanes at very low altitudes. It's pitch black, and terror and fear grip our hearts, along with the sounds of children crying, terrified by the sounds of bombs. People fleeing their homes, fearing bombardment, are crowding in after being forced to evacuate in cold, stormy weather in pitch darkness.

Another message comes in from someone I don't yet know:

The situation is very dangerous, beyond description, beyond all thought. People are living in a state of shock, {with} death, bombing, loss, hunger, crying, suffering, and misery. My daughters are still very scared from every bombing. Get the message across and talk about us to help us survive. Please don't leave {us} alone in this conflict that seems like it will only end with us all being killed and exterminated.

The U.N. human rights office warned late last week that "Israel's actions in Gaza are increasingly endangering the existence of Palestinians as a group."

"In light of the cumulative impact of Israeli forces conduct in Gaza," Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, told reporters, "we are seriously concerned that Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group."

In short, genocide, as U.N. experts and others began to accuse Israel of as early as November 2023. "Time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe," the experts warned then. Except for a short cease-fire in late November of 2023 and another from approximately January 20 to March 18 of this year, the genocide continues while the U.N. takes note and the U.S. and most of the E.U. offer unconditional support.

But it's not just relentless bombing that parents face in trying to protect their children, it's also staving off infections when immune systems have been weakened by the lack of nutritious food. Israel resumed blocking all humanitarian aid on March 2. A week later they cut off electricity to the last operational desalination plant for drinking water.

The same night Salma and Mohamed and millions of other families were subject to another night of relentless bombing, Rasha, the mother of another family I've come to know through GoFundMe, sends out a "distress call" to all her contacts. Her one-year-old son, also named Mohammed, is running a fever. Doctors told her he had severe infections in his ear and throat and needed antibiotics. "But the cost is very high," she said, "because of the lack of medicine and closure of crossings."

"He needs healthy food," she added, "and all of this is very expensive. Please, my friends, my heart aches for him. Do not leave my child in this condition, he needs you."

Rasha and her family are again living in a tent in the densely packed al-Mawasi camp on the coast. They'd hoped to rebuild their home in Rafah, but Israel recently cut off the city from the rest of Gaza vowing to vigorously expand control of the territory. They don't know if they'll ever be allowed to return.

Mix constant displacement, the lack of permanent housing, schooling, and healthcare, and children in Gaza are being deprived of their childhood. Marz, a father of three, ages eight, five, and three, who once owned a clothing store in Gaza City, sends a devastating message on the same night of the bombing that impacted so many families. He says the family is now living on the street after their tent was destroyed. "Is there anyone who hears my family's voice? I am speaking to your human hearts to stand by us. We are now living a harsh journey of displacement without a permanent and real home. My children, Issam, Mohammed, and Jude, are living an indescribable catastrophe. Please help us. We are in urgent need of your kindness and humanity."

Over 200 people have donated to his family since the start of the genocide, but their collective good will is no match for a world unwilling to let Gaza's children have a childhood.

The United States is witnessing a collapse in travel and tourism from Europe, often based on a fear of what could happen when the U.S. border is reached. Many Europeans are refusing to purchase U.S. products and services in protest against the Trump administration. Solidarity is also being expressed for U.S. university professors and students in the wake of crackdowns on academic freedom and free expression on campuses across the country.

As an American in Europe, and as someone who has consistently and publicly pointed to Trump’s obvious anti-democratic ideology, I completely understand these reactions. There is justified outrage over what is happening right now in the U.S.

This justification, however, cannot hide an uncomfortable truth. Namely, that Europeans (and many of my fellow Americans) have for decades been more than happy to ignore state violence and the abuse of human rights committed by the United States so long as the victims were poorer people in “other” parts of the world, or poorer people in marginalized sections of U.S. society.

The U.S. has the death penalty, the application of which had been proven to be overtly discriminatory and racist. The U.S. has a long history of supporting regimes engaged in human rights abuses, including the suppression of academic freedom. The U.S. has for decades interfered with democratic elections across the globe, often subverting the will of the people. The U.S. destroyed Iraq in the interests of oil. The Obama government convicted more whistleblowers than all other U.S. administrations combined, and he also engaged in the wide-scale use of “extra judicial” drone warfare that led to the deaths of large numbers of civilians, including children. During his first administration, Trump passed a “Muslim Ban.”

Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.

These things, it seems, were tolerable to many European democrats. But when U.S. actions impacted Europeans coming to the U.S., caused damage to the European stock market or led to Europeans being denied jobs or research grants? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.

And therein lies an even more uncomfortable truth. That Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.

I was a PhD student in Texas on September 11, 2001. I witnessed how my country (and the UK) engaged in the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis as U.S. media (and many U.S. citizens) cheered the grotesque killing. As would become apparent, these were citizens who not only had nothing to do with September 11, but their country wasn’t even involved.

The Western reaction? A collective shoulder shrug.

Did European travel to the U.S. collapse? Did European universities call for an academic boycott of U.S. higher education and academic journals? Was there a call to end research collaboration? Did academics stop attending conferences in the U.S.? Did citizens boycott U.S. products? No. Europeans were happy to travel to the U.S. as soldiers slaughtered civilians in Iraq and the government passed the Patriot Act (allowed for mass surveillance).

Why? Because the people being killed, surveilled, stopped and searched at the airport were Muslims or other minorities, not Christian families from London, Stockholm, or Frankfurt on their way to New York or Disneyland. The Iraqi stock market crashed, not Spain’s. The slaughter in Gaza is a stain on global humanity, only made possible by U.S. weapons and financing. I have yet to hear a call for cutting cultural or political ties with the U.S. over this ongoing atrocity. If we are being completely honest with ourselves, we should at least admit that, because of its massive global reach, boycotting the U.S. would have a major impact on our daily life in ways that boycotts of other nations simply do not. So we do not do it.

My argument is simple. If we want to understand the political and material conditions that make anti-democratic movements like Trumpism possible, then we must openly and honestly confront how our own apathy about the violation of the rights of the weakest in society can be exploited and expanded to later violate the rights of groups usually seen as “safe” from such exploitation.

There is plenty of blame for Trumpism to go around. That sometimes means a painful look inward.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern, Streaming Later:

On TMI, hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan tackle President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, centered on his vow to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants. Immigration attorney Allen Orr joins to dissect the practicality of this audacious plan, navigating the legal quagmires and logistical nightmares. Recent reports estimate ICE’s capacity at just 300,000 detentions annually—can Trump’s team scale up to meet his target amidst strained resources?

The conversation shifts to a high-profile case rocking headlines: a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, despite a Supreme Court order demanding his return. News outlets note the administration’s defiance, raising the stakes—can Trump ignore the nation’s highest court without consequence?

The hosts also confront the plight of alleged gang members, like those swept up in ICE’s recent “Operation Safe Streets,” deported without due process. Stories reveal thousands branded as gang affiliates based on flimsy evidence, leaving lives in limbo. Is there any path to justice for those denied fair hearings? Most alarmingly, Trump’s provocative claim—made in a widely circulated Mar-a-Lago speech—about deporting U.S. citizens he dislikes to El Salvador ignites a firestorm.

Legal scholars cited in recent articles call it a constitutional nonstarter, but could executive overreach make it reality? With families shattered, court orders challenged, and the very notion of citizenship under siege, this episode lays bare the raw human and legal toll of Trump’s deportation juggernaut. Will it reshape America’s future, or collapse under its own weight? Join Rall, Chan, and Orr for a gripping, no-holds-barred analysis of a policy driving national division. Don’t miss this urgent exposé that pulls no punches, revealing the chaos and consequences of a nation at a crossroads. Tune in to uncover what’s really at stake!

The post TMI Show Ep 118: “Decorations Ramping Up” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

• U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have expressed an interest in selling off the U.S. Postal Service to for-profit corporations. Even piecemeal privatization of this public agency would have wide-ranging effects on postal customers, employees, businesses, and our broader economy. One nearly certain result: a dramatic increase in package delivery prices.

Unlike the for-profit carriers, the Postal Service has a universal service obligation to provide affordable deliveries to all Americans, regardless of where they live or work. Currently, USPS parcel rates are about 25% to 60% below FedEx and UPS prices.

Would we want for-profit corporations handling our ballots?

Without competition from this public service, for-profit firms would jack up delivery fees on as many customers as possible. Who would be hit hardest? Most likely those who live or work in ZIP codes where private carriers already impose surcharges because deliveries to these addresses are less profitable.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that UPS and FedEx area surcharges now apply to retail customers sending parcels using their own packaging to addresses in ZIP codes where 102 million Americans live. Not surprisingly, these include addresses in Hawaii, Alaska, and rural and remote areas. But they also cover many small towns and neighborhoods just outside major cities.

UPS and FedEx charge around $43 extra for shipments to Alaska and about $15 extra for deliveries to Hawaii and remote areas where nearly 4 million Americans live. The private carriers slap “extended area surcharges” of $8.30 on home deliveries in rural ZIP codes with a combined population of 35 million. Residential delivery surcharges run a little over $6 in suburban and small-town ZIP codes where 19 million people live.

Unlike the public Postal Service, the private carriers also impose extra charges for Saturday delivery, for fuel (based on distance), for package pickup, and for residential delivery. These charges reflect the higher costs for companies that, unlike USPS, aren’t already visiting every address six days a week.

Today’s higher FedEx and UPS delivery rates are just a taste of what would come if the Trump administration succeeds in privatizing USPS. In fact, Wells Fargo recently published a postal privatization plan that recommends hiking USPS parcel delivery rates by 30% to 140%. Their aim: to fatten up the hog before selling off this lucrative part of the postal business. Private carriers could also flat out refuse to deliver to far-flung addresses.

On top of higher delivery costs, rural communities would suffer the most from other impacts of a for-profit model. For instance, they would likely face the shuttering of many post offices and the related loss of postal jobs that pay decent wages with benefits.

Rural residents also rely heavily on USPS to deliver prescriptions, since many small-town pharmacies have shut down. The Postal Service also handles mail order prescriptions for military veterans, more than a quarter of whom live in rural areas.

During the 2024 general election, the Postal Service delivered more than 99 million ballots to or from voters. Rural voters rely particularly heavily on the mail-in option because physical polling sites are often long distances from their homes. Nationwide, half of rural county polling sites serve an area greater than 62 square miles, compared to just 2 square miles for urban sites. Would we want for-profit corporations handling our ballots?

Over its 250-year history, our public Postal Service has continually reinvented itself in response to changes in technology and the evolving needs of our society. Rather than selling this public treasure off to the highest bidder, we should explore opportunities for strengthening the Postal Service to deliver even better services in the 21st century.

In addition to the growing package delivery market, there are many opportunities for generating new revenue. For example, USPS could provide additional financial services, such as low-fee ATMs and check cashing. It could work with state and local governments to gather data on public safety and environmental risks through monitors on delivery vehicles. It could follow the models of some foreign postal services by providing check-in services for elderly and disabled residents.

With its extensive and valuable human resources and infrastructure, USPS has a strong foundation on which to continue providing a vital public service for all Americans for generations to come.

I was at an event last week where a prominent GOP pollster who often appears on CNN was discussing the details of U.S. President Donald Trump’s political profile as we approach the 100-day mark of his administration. The back and forth was interesting to me and my fellow political nerds. However, during the presentation, my inner voice sounded like Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “This is not normal.”

Unfortunately, far too many political insiders are acting as if Trump is a normal if a little eccentric president. They think that they can negotiate with him on issues and influence his staff to move him in their direction. No matter what Trump does, they see it as just a negotiating tactic.

April 14, 2025 should go down in American history as the day when Trump’s steps in the direction of authoritarianism made it clear to all that this is not a normal presidency. After Monday’s events, there can be no more debate about what Trump is and where he is taking America.

Let’s break down what happened. In a meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, President Trump openly defied a 9-0 Supreme Court decision that said that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, must be returned to the United States. As The New York Times put it:

The meeting in the Oval Office on Monday was a blunt example of Mr. Trump’s defiance of the courts. The president and his top White House officials said the decision over Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, would have to be made by [El Salvador President] Mr. Bukele.

If this was not enough, President Trump went on to outline plans for sending American citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador. More from The New York Times:

President Trump just said he was open to sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to President Bukele’s prison in El Salvador. Trump had a similar response when Bukele first offered to jail convicted American criminals in February.

“I’m all for it,” Trump said, adding that his attorney general was studying whether the idea was legally feasible. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem, no,” he said, adding: “I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people.”

Another sign that we are in a constitutional crisis happened just outside the Oval Office on Monday. President Trump had barred The Associated Press from covering certain White House events because they had refused to use his preferred nomenclature for what the White House refers to as the “Gulf of America.” Last week, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore AP access to White House events. The federal judge who ruled in this case was Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee. In his decision, McFadden wrote that:

No, the Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints... The Constitution requires no less.

On Monday, the White House blocked the AP reporter from attending the Oval Office press conference with President Trump and Bukele. Again, Trump failed to obey a court order.

Now, barring a reporter from the Oval Office may not seem to be a big deal. However, it is the government telling the media what it can report on. Plus, the courts ruled directly in the AP’s favor. The lines are clearly drawn here.

President Trump in the Oval Office on Monday openly defied decisions of the judicial branch. One was a 9-0 ruling of the Supreme Court and the other ruling was by a federal judge he appointed. As a nation, we are clearly in a constitutional crisis. This is not something theoretical or something that might happen sometime in the future. The crisis is at hand. The fabric of the American republic is being torn in two.

What we need is bold opposition from Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. If the current leadership is unwillingly to respond, they need to step aside. The first action that each of us can take to protect the American experiment is to stop pretending that Trump is a normal president.

This week was the week that our 2024 taxes were due in order to fund the fiscal year 2025 federal budget and thus our nation’s priorities. This year’s budget represents the final Biden budget. It comes at a time when our country is in a deliberate state of chaos instituted by the current administration. Under the non-elected efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency and current cabinet, we find punitive and seemingly random disjointed cutting of essential services and vital programs in addition to international aid that cuts to the core of who America is.

U.S. Congress has just passed a budget resolution requiring $1.5 trillion in savings to be realized over the next 10 years. Ultimately, budgets are moral documents. How do the current cuts, in addition to planned cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, address our needs and follow a moral compass? How does funding nuclear weapons factor in when addressing our needs and priorities?

This year’s federal tax expenditure for all nuclear weapons programs will be $110,344,000,000. This figure was released on Tax Day in this year’s U.S. Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project. That amounts to $3,499 per second. This year will see an increase of roughly $15.8 billion over FY 2024. Congress prides itself in being fiscally responsible. Yet when cities like Detroit are spending over $114 million on nuclear weapons programs, Atlanta over $245 million, Chicago over $961 million, and the impoverished Navajo nation of roughly 113,000 people are spending over $18 million, where is the rationale, fiscal responsibility, and sanity?

Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated.

The continuation of this out-of-control escalation is fueled by the myth of deterrence with dramatic increases in weapons delivery systems and missile defeat and defense expenditures. The latter is the present day version of former President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or “Star Wars.” Today’s version continues the elusive and easily outfoxed goal of hitting a bullet with a bullet to defend us coupled with a complex early detection system. With roughly 12,331 nuclear weapons in today’s global arsenals, the world remains closer to nuclear war than at any point in the past 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts our current risk at 89 seconds to midnight and nuclear Armageddon. That risk assessment comes from the current geopolitical turmoil; climate change; and evolving disruptive technologies that increase the risk of nuclear war either by intent, miscalculation, or accident presenting a very real and present danger. Everything and everyone we care about is threatened with the distinct possibility of ending the human race.

Ultimately, the only way to prevent a nuclear war is to abolish these weapons. Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated. What is needed is the political will. The people need to speak, and when the people lead, the leaders will follow.

Fortunately, there is a U.S. grassroots movement, Back From the Brink, bringing diverse communities together to eliminate nuclear weapons. This movement calls on the United States to take a leadership role in bringing together the world’s nuclear powers to negotiate a time-bound, verifiable, and complete elimination of all nuclear weapons. It includes four precautionary measures to safeguard against nuclear war until that goal is achieved. These include renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack; taking U.S. weapons off of hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Anyone can endorse this campaign. Presently 495 organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 430 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress have endorsed this campaign.

Last week Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) introduced U.S. House Res. 317, which lays out how we can fundamentally reform U.S. nuclear weapons policy and achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. In addition to supporting the policy points of Back From the Brink, this resolution supports: the maintenance of a de facto global moratorium on nuclear testing, protecting communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons by fully remediating their deadly legacy of environmental contamination past and current, and actively pursuing a just economic transition for the civilian and military workforce involved in this entire nuclear cycle.

We have the answer to realize significant cost savings, while simultaneously promoting sound fiscal policies that benefit us all. With life itself hanging in the balance we all must demand a meeting with our legislative leaders, urging them to endorse this legislation. If they refuse, we must ask why they are willing to put everything at risk?

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that taxpayers would pay $3,498,985.29 per second for nuclear weapons this year. The actual figure is $3,499 per second. The piece has been updated to reflect this.

Is the Trump Administration secretly waging war on senior citizens? A suspicious new trend suggests they’re passive-aggressively piling on extra hurdles to snag Social Security benefits—bureaucratic hoops and red tape that’d make even the sprightliest grandma groan. Why the sudden change? Maybe it’s a cunning ploy by the president, a self-proclaimed beacon of physical fitness, now teamed up with health nut RFK Jr. Could this be their bizarre masterplan to Make Elderly Codgers Limber Again (MECLA)? Forget bingo and rocking chairs—Trump might want seniors doing jumping jacks to prove they’re worthy of their checks!

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