Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The presidential announcements and outrage come at us so viciously fast that it is difficult to keep up with the latest assault on governance, our intellect, decency, or humanity.

Much of the perceived chaos is planned and judiciously meted out to keep our heads spinning leaving little time or energy to respond to anything before something new intrudes the space. Their goal is to produce as much confusion and chaos as possible so the public will struggle to keep up and lose the ability to pay close and constant attention to the important things of democratic and constitutional order. Our national setting has become a mixture of reality TV with the sensationalism of that genre, where mean-spirited sound bites emanate from those in power who smirkingly stare into the cameras knowingly creating the next news cycle. There is a racist, hate-filled, untruthful, and vindictive blanket covering this government and suffocating the country under its weight. We have never seen anything like this before.

There has been one attack followed by another. The announcement of tariffs has sent financial markets into a tailspin. Those who are reliant upon 401K plans and the likes are feeling anxious wondering how fall the markets will fall, and how deep it will cut into their retirement. Consumers already worried about the costs of everyday living are frightened by the possible consequences of this latest announcement.

Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to reel from the attacks on federal employees, the Department of Education, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, the Courts and law firms, media, colleges and universities, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and The Smithsonian Museums (particularly The National Museum of African American History and Culture). Each have fallen under the axe of DOGE or the accusation of promoting "Woke" ideology.

Immigrants have been a favorite target of this administration. The undocumented have been hounded, hunted, arrested, and transported to prisons in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba which are known for human rights violations. But the long authoritarian arm of government is not only extended to the undocumented, but also against scholars and students legally here. We were shocked when Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped. He was a graduate student at Columbia University and had been a spokesperson during that school's 'stop the genocide' demonstrations.

Rumeysa Oztur was recently picked up by plain-clothed goons and transported to Louisiana while on her way to an Iftar near Tufts University in Massachusetts. She is a doctorate student and, like Khalil, legally in the country. Each is apparently guilty of decrying the genocide in Gaza and indicting the white supremacy of Zionism for those atrocities. These two names have been widely reported, but we should not assume that these are the only names. These arrests however signal a First Amendment crisis where it appears that anyone can be criminalized for supporting Palestinian rights. My fear is that these seem to be a trial runs that start with those with the undocumented, then moves on to those with vulnerable legal status, and finally is used against citizens who express points of views critical of and unsanctioned by the government. Where does the creep towards totalitarianism end?

If you are not already weary from the list of head spinning encroachments on democratic order, there is much more to add to the list of insults. There is the re-installation of Confederate statues, renaming bodies of water and land to fit an imperialistic paradigm, and the removal of photographs and references to Black people and women, and any image or phrase that speaks to diversity, inclusion, or equity. Even the word "Gay" emblazoned on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, the Enola Gay, came under attack. There are no-so-funny teases about the annexation of Canada, Greenland, and taking back the Panama Canal that adds to the dizziness of any day. In Washington, D.C., the city government was ordered to dismantle "Black Lives Matter" plaza that was erected during the George Floyd unrest and after first-term Trump held a bible up in front of a church after the crowds had been tear-gassed and attacked by police and military.

The callous war criminality of this administration in collaboration with other war criminals have quipped about removing the population from Gaza and turning the devastation produced by that illegal war into a coastal resort. And now there is the insinuation that Trump may try to extend his time in office.

Some of the news and reports from this government are real and some are not. It is difficult to tell what is real from what is not. But one thing we understand with these demagogues and anti-democratic criminals in office or serving the government is that we need to take everything as real. We have discovered that there is nothing beyond the pale for these gangsters let loose on the world stage.

Since the strategy is to wear us down and out, keep our heads spinning, and make us feel powerless in the face of these avalanches of rumors, innuendoes, and news means simply that we cannot lose our focus, let ourselves become weary or tired, or stop paying attention. We must pay attention to all the mess, all the rumors, and all the insanity coming from this group of White Supremacists, Zionists, and Christian Nationalists.

The plan of this government is to change the discussion daily, create a new issue, a new controversy, and orchestrate a new debate to fill the media's bandwidth. It is their way of moving things in and out of the public scrutiny so fast that you can't deal with one thing before the next thing comes along.

But no matter what they do or say Palestinians are still struggling and dying every day. Israel is still bombing Gaza, Lebanon, and Israeli settlers are still attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. The U.S. is still bombing Yemen and Syria. Children are still being exploited for their labor in the mineral pits of Africa. Federal workers still have been fired or are in danger of losing their jobs. And we the people are still trying to remain plugged in and aware of what is going on at home and around the world. But we need to do more than being aware.

We need to find ways from the reserves of our strength to do what we can to hold up and onto the light, bring the hope, and maintain a very vocal and very loud demand for justice. We need to remind ourselves that we need to keep our focus and watch over everything and continue to stand, march, demonstrate and confront the wrongs that abound with a strength drawn deep from the reservoirs of our being.

Yes, we are weary, tired, and frightened. Yet in times like these when our lives or the lives of loved ones are endangered people have been known to find a Herculean strength that has lifted cars, fought bears, and turned ordinary strength into incredible power.

We have the surprising ability to reach beyond ourselves to muster the strength and power in moments of fear and great distress. We know the histories of the many movements that produced extraordinary results, brought down mighty systems, freed people, and changed the outcomes of the human story. The movements of labor, civil rights, climate change, LGBTQIA, and every other movement was sparked by a faint flicker in vast darkness when the heaviness of the moment felt unbearable, frightening, and too threatening.

When a new outrage, the proverbial final straw of insults and injury is thrust upon us that is when the small amber of resistance begins to spread into the great fires of change. Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

We are in those moments now and may the sparks that ignite the flames of hopefulness and light drive out the heaviness and darkness and grow into something large and fierce enough to save us from this madness.

I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man named Elon Musk. But he lost out on one thing: He didn’t get a top secret briefing on Pentagon war plans for China. And the news people breathed a sigh of relief.

With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles, a day in the life is getting increasingly tough to take here in the land of the free. I’m meant to be reassured that Musk didn’t get to see America’s top-secret plans for—yes!—going to war with China, even as I’m meant to ignore the constant drumbeat of propaganda, the incessant military marches that form America’s background music, conveying the message that America must have war plans for China, that indeed war in or around China is possible, even probable, in the next decade. Maybe in 2027?

My fellow Americans, we should be far more alarmed by such secret U.S. war plans, along with those “pivots” to Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and the military base-building efforts in the Philippines, than reassured by the “good news” that Comrade Billionaire Musk was denied access to the war room, meaning (for Dr. Strangelove fans) he didn’t get to see “the big board.”

If you judge him by deeds rather than words, he’s just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).

It’s war, war, everywhere in America. We do indeed have a strange love for it. I’ve been writing for TomDispatch for 18 years now—this is my 111th essay (the other 110 are in a new book of mine)—most of them focusing on militarism in this country, as well as our disastrous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; the ruinous weapons systems we continue to fund (including new apocalyptic nuclear weapons); and the war song that seems to remain ever the same.

A few recent examples of what I mean: President Donald Trump has already bombed Yemen more than once. He’s already threatening Iran. He’s sending Israel all the explosives, all the weaponry it needs to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza (so too, of course, did former President Joe Biden). He’s boasting of building new weapons systems like the Air Force’s much-hyped F-47 fighter jet, the “47” designation being an apparent homage by its builder, Boeing, to Trump himself, the 47th president. He and his “defense” secretary, Pete Hegseth, continually boast of “peace through strength,” an Orwellian construction that differs little from “war is peace.” And I could, of course, go on and on and on and on…

Occasionally, Trump sounds a different note. When Tulsi Gabbard became the director of national intelligence, he sang a dissonant note about a “warmongering military-industrial complex.” And however haphazardly, he does seem to be working for some form of peace with respect to the Russia-Ukraine War. He also talks about his fear of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Yet, if you judge him by deeds rather than words, he’s just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).

Consider here the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by that lucky man Elon Musk. Even as it dismantles various government agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, it has—no surprise here!—barely touched the Pentagon and its vast, nearly trillion-dollar budget. In fact, if a Republican-controlled Congress has any say in the matter, the Pentagon budget will likely be boosted significantly for Fiscal Year 2026 and thereafter. As inefficient as the Pentagon may be (and we really don’t know just how inefficient it is, since the bean counters there keep failing audit after audit, seven years running), targeted DOGE Pentagon cuts have been tiny. That means there’s little incentive for the generals to change, streamline their operations, or even rethink in any significant fashion. It’s just spend, spend, spend until the money runs out, which I suppose it will eventually, as the national debt soars toward $37 trillion and climbing.

Even grimmer than that, possibly, is America’s state of mind, our collective zeitgeist, the spirit of this country. That spirit is one in which a constant state of war (and preparations for more of the same) is accepted as normal. War, to put it bluntly, is our default state. It’s been that way since 9/11, if not before then. As a military historian, I’m well aware that the United States is, in a sense, a country made by war. It’s just that today we seem even more accepting of that reality, or resigned to it, than we’ve ever been. What gives?

Remember when, in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”? Fortunately, after much struggle and bloodshed, he was proven wrong. So, can we change the essential American refrain of war now, war tomorrow, and war forever? Can we render that obsolete? Or is that too much to hope for or ask of America’s “exceptional” democracy?

Taking on the MICIMATT(SH)

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern did America a great service when he came up with the acronym MICIMATT, or the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, an extension of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, or MIC (from his farewell speech in 1961). Along with the military and industry (weapons makers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin), the MICIMATT adds Congress (which Eisenhower had in his original draft speech but deleted in the interest of comity), the intelligence “community” (18 different agencies), the media (generally highly supportive of wars and weapons spending), academia (which profits greatly from federal contracts, especially research and development efforts for yet more destructive weaponry), and think tanks (which happily lap up Pentagon dollars to tell us the “smart” position is always to prepare for yet more war).

You’ll note, however, that I’ve added a parenthetical SH to McGovern’s telling acronym. The S is for America’s sporting world, which eternally gushes about how it supports and honors America’s military, and Hollywood, which happily sells war as entertainment (perhaps the best known and most recent film being Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, in which an unnamed country that everyone knows is Iran gets its nuclear ambitions spanked by a plucky team of U.S. Naval pilots). A macho catchphrase from the original Top Gun was “I feel the need—the need for speed!” It may as well have been: I feel the need—the need for pro-war propaganda!

Yes, MICIMATT(SH) is an awkward acronym, yet it has the virtue of capturing some of the still-growing power, reach, and cultural penetration of Ike’s old MIC. It should remind us that it’s not just the military and the weapons-makers who are deeply invested in war and—yes!—militarism. It’s Congress; the CIA; related intel “community” members; the mainstream media (which often relies on retired generals and admirals for “unbiased” pro-war commentary); academia (consider how quickly institutions like Columbia University have bent the knee to Trump); and think tanks—in fact, all those “best and brightest” who advocate for war with China, the never-ending war on terror, war everywhere.

Wage war long and it’s likely you can kiss your democracy, your rights, and just maybe your ass goodbye.

But perhaps the “soft power” of the sporting world and Hollywood is even more effective at selling war than the hard power of bombs and bullets. National Football League coaches patrol the sidelines wearing camouflage, allegedly to salute the troops. Military flyovers at games celebrate America’s latest death-dealing machinery. Hollywood movies are made with U.S. military cooperation and that military often has veto power over scripts. To cite only one example, the war movie 12 Strong (2018) turned the disastrous Afghan War that lasted two horrendous decades into a stunningly quick American victory, all too literally won by U.S. troops riding horses. (If only the famed cowboy actor John Wayne had still been alive to star in it!)

The MICIMATT(SH), employing millions of Americans, consuming trillions of dollars, and churning through tens of thousands of body bags for U.S. troops over the years, while killing millions of people abroad, is an almost irresistible force. And right now, it seems like there’s no unmovable object to blunt it.

Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve written dozens of “Tomgrams” suggesting steps America could take to reverse militarism and warmongering. As I look over those essays, I see what still seem to me sensible ideas, but they die quick deaths in the face of, if not withering fire from the MICIMATT(SH), then being completely ignored by those who matter.

And while this country has a department of war (disguised as a department of defense), it has no department of peace. There’s no budget anywhere for making peace, either. We do have a colossal Pentagon that houses 30,000 workers, feverishly making war plans they won’t let Elon Musk (or any of us) see. It’s for their eyes only, not yours, though they may well ask you or your kids to serve in the military, because the best-laid plans of those war-men do need lots of warm bodies, even if those very plans almost invariably (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) go astray.

So, to repeat myself, how do you take on the MICIMATT(SH)? The short answer: It’s not easy, but I know of a few people who had some inspirational ideas.

On Listening to Ike, JFK, MLK, and, Yes, Madison, Too

Militarism isn’t exactly a new problem in America. Consider Randolph Bourne’s 1918 critique of war as “the health of the state,” or General Smedley Butler’s confession in the 1930s that “war is a racket” run by the “gangsters of capitalism.” In fact, many Americans have, over the years, spoken out eloquently against war and militarism. Many beautiful and moving songs have asked us to smile on your brother and “love one another right now.” War, as Edwin Starr sang so powerfully once upon a time, is good for “absolutely nothin’,” though obviously a lot of people disagree and indeed are making a living by killing and preparing for yet more of it.

And that is indeed the problem. Too many people are making too much money off of war. As Smedley Butler wrote so long ago: “Capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.” Pretty simple, right? Until you realize that those whom we elect are largely obedient to the moneyed class because the highest court in our land has declared that money is speech. Again, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. Nor did Butler.

As a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, I want to end my 111th piece at TomDispatch by focusing on the words of Ike, John F. Kennedy (JFK), Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), and James Madison. And I want to redefine what words like duty, honor, country, and patriotism should mean. Those powerful words and sentiments should be centered on peace, on the preservation and enrichment of life, on tapping “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln wrote so long ago in his First Inaugural Address.

Why do we serve? What does our oath of office really mean? For it’s not just military members who take that oath but also members of Congress and indeed the president himself. We raise our right hands and swear to support and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

There’s nothing in that oath about warriors and warfighters, but there is a compelling call for all of us, as citizens, to be supporters and defenders of representative democracy, while promoting the general welfare (not warfare), and all the noble sentiments contained in that Constitution. If we’re not seeking a better and more peaceful future, one in which freedom may expand and thrive, we’re betraying our oath.

If so, we have met the enemy—and he is us.

Ike told us in 1953 that constant warfare is no way of life at all, that it is (as he put it), humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. In 1961, he told us democracy was threatened by an emerging military-industrial complex and that we, as citizens, had to be both alert and knowledgeable enough to bring it to heel. Two years later, JFK told us that peace—even at the height of the Cold War—was possible, not just peace in our time, but peace for all time. However, it would, he assured us, require sacrifice, wisdom, and commitment.

How, in fact, can I improve on these words that JFK uttered in 1963, just a few months before he was assassinated?

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living…

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age… when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn… surely the acquisition of such idle [nuclear] stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war—and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Are we ready to be urgently rational, America? Are we ready to be blessed as peacemakers? Or are we going to continue to suffer from what MLK described in 1967 as our very own “spiritual death” due to the embrace of militarism, war, empire, and racism?

Of course, MLK wasn’t perfect, nor for that matter was JFK, who was far too enamored of the Green Berets and too wedded to a new strategy of “flexible response” to make a clean break in Vietnam before he was killed. Yet those men bravely and outspokenly promoted peace, something uncommonly rare in their time—and even more so in ours.

More than 200 years ago, James Madison warned us that continual warfare is the single most corrosive force to the integrity of representative democracy. No other practice, no other societal force is more favorable to the rise of authoritarianism and the rule of tyrants than pernicious war. Wage war long and it’s likely you can kiss your democracy, your rights, and just maybe your ass goodbye.

America, from visionaries and prophets like MLK, we have our marching orders. They are not to invest yet more in preparations for war, whether with China or any other country. Rather, they are to gather in the streets and otherwise raise our voices against the scourge of war. If we are ever to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks and make war no more, something must be done.

Let’s put an end to militarism in America. Let’s be urgently rational. To cite John Lennon yet again: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Together, let’s imagine and create a better world.

We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.

Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead.

Originally formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, NATO not only failed to disband with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it increased from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. Despite promises not to expand eastward, it ploughed ahead against the advice of senior, experienced U.S. diplomats who warned that this would inflame tensions with Russia. While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine, in violation of the UN Charter, we cannot deny the disastrous role played by NATO in provoking and then prolonging the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine had brought on the Ukraine war. “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” he said.

NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized.

The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism. Watch a video of the Secretary General of NATO publicly telling the European Union to move money from healthcare and retirement to war. It should be clear which side of the Hands Off agenda NATO is on.

NATO is a destabilizing, law-breaking force for militarization and war provocation. Its existence makes wars, including nuclear wars, more likely. Its hostility toward the few significant militaries in the world that are not among its members fuels arms races and conflicts. The commitment of NATO members to join each others’ wars and NATO’s pursuit of enemies far from the North Atlantic risk global destruction.

We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter. If we are truly committed to human needs and the environment, as well as peace, diplomacy, and the UN Charter, then we should eliminate NATO from the Hands Off agenda.

We should go beyond that. We should recognize that while many government agencies are being unfairly cut and need to be defended, one enormous agency that makes up over half of federal discretionary spending is being drastically increased and needs to be cut. That is the Pentagon. The U.S. government spends more on war and war preparation than on all other discretionary items combined. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more on militarism than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. The U.S. spends more on war per capita than any other nation, except Israel.

This is not normal or acceptable, or compatible with funding human and environmental needs. NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized. Trump has recently switched from demanding 2% of economies for war to 3%, and then almost immediately to 5%. There's no logical limit.

Companies that profit from war, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will always push for more military spending. So will NATO. While NATO allies consider Russia their most immediate and direct threat, their long-term adversary is China. The constant search for enemies leads to a vicious cycle of arms races. But there is a different path: the pursuit of disarmament negotiations, the rule of law and global cooperation. If we pursued that path, we could move massive amounts of money away from weapons to invest in addressing the non-optional dangers of climate, disease, and poverty.

The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.

On April 2, Donald Trump declared a national emergency and announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all imported goods. The headlines were dramatic — tariffs on China, allies like Canada and Mexico, and everything from cars to coffee beans. His administration framed the move as a patriotic stance for “reciprocal trade” and economic sovereignty.

Don’t be fooled. This isn’t the collapse of “free trade.” It’s the continuation of corporate globalization — just with a MAGA bumper sticker slapped on it.

Trump says he’s standing up for American workers. But he’s the same president who signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and called it “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.” The rebranded North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal — despite some improvements forced in by congressional Democrats and civil society organizations — contained much of the same structural rot that has enabled outsourcing, empowered monopolies, and tied the hands of governments trying to protect their people and environment.

Trump is not rejecting the corporate trade model. He’s weaponizing it.

For decades, “free trade” deals like NAFTA locked in rules written by and for multinational corporations: rules that made offshoring easier, gutted environmental protections, and prioritized investor rights over worker rights. Stagnant wages, emptied factory towns, and rising income inequality have caused widespread pain and frustration among working Americans — which Trump has weaponized again and again.

Tariffs can be part of the answer to these problems, but Trump’s ham-handed approach is not it. There’s no industrial strategy. No labor plan. No climate protections. Just a unilateral, top-down stunt that does nothing to dismantle the corporate architecture still rigging the global economy.

Pair this “concept of a plan” with the rest of his agenda: gutting investment in vital sectors such as biomedical research, support for basic science and clean and affordable energy technologies and products; slashing all efforts to combat child labor and other egregious labor rights violations around the world, providing tax cuts for billionaires and corporations; stripping away health care, food support and other vital services for the most vulnerable Americans, undermining Social Security, and decertifying and undermining the power of labor unions.

It’s clear working people will not be the winners here.

Who Wrote the Rules? U.S. Corporations, Not Foreign Adversaries

Trump loves to blame other countries, claiming global trade has “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered” the U.S. economy in his “Liberation Day” speech. He claims that the U.S. has been victimized by other countries and has been “too nice” in response.

Nothing could be further from the truth — the rules of the neoliberal trade system were rigged in favor of large corporate interests in the Global North. While workers in the U.S. and around the world were the losers, Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and other U.S. corporate giants have always been the winners.

For decades, U.S. corporate lobbyists have used their privileged access to closed-door trade negotiations to rig the rules to maximize their profits, not to serve working people, small businesses, or the environment.

They pushed for extreme intellectual property rules to entrench Big Pharma monopolies that keep the price of medicines sky high, with deadly consequences. They demanded open capital markets and deregulated financial flows for Wall Street while securing rules that let agribusiness giants flood foreign markets with subsidized U.S. commodities, displacing millions of farmers and leading to forced migration.

Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.

At the same time, they ensured that governments couldn’t support domestic industries, raise labor standards, or enforce environmental protections without being accused of “trade distortion.” The result was a race to the bottom for workers and communities — here and abroad — with record profits for corporate giants.

It matters a lot that Trump is identifying the wrong perpetrators of the failed global trade system because that sets the table for wrong solutions.

Once we identify multinational corporations as the architects of the current system, we’re directed toward the right solutions – not blanket, high tariffs based on mindless formulas, but a new trade policy and new trade rules that prioritize the interests of workers, consumers, and the environment.

NAFTA to USMCA: Same Corporate Model With Some Improvements (No Thanks to Trump)

Trump spent years railing against NAFTA as the “worst trade deal anybody in history has ever entered into,” tapping into the legitimate grievances of workers and communities harmed by its race to the bottom. He campaigned on a promise to eliminate it and replace it with a better agreement for workers.

However, once elected, he opted to renegotiate and rebrand the deal in the form of the USMCA, which he then insisted was “the best trade deal in history.” Now, in a dizzying reversal, he’s claiming the USMCA has been a disaster that only an aggressive wave of “retaliatory” tariffs on Canada and Mexico will fix.

In reality, while some improvements were forced into the negotiation, the USMCA largely preserved the core logic that made NAFTA so harmful in the first place. It expands corporate rights, limits democratic oversight, and undermines public protections in the name of increased trade.

The new labor provisions — often cited as proof of a “new era” in trade — were not original features of Trump’s deal. They were won through months of intense organizing and negotiation by House Democrats, labor unions, and civil society groups.

Congressional Democrats working in close alliance with the AFL-CIO drew a hard line. Backed by the relentless organizing of groups like Public Citizen, the Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers, and a transnational coalition of Mexican and Canadian labor and civil society partners, they made it clear: they would block passage of any deal unless meaningful labor enforcement were included and damaging Big Pharma giveaways were removed.

Trump’s administration favored language that preserved corporate prerogatives and offered only symbolic nods to labor rights. Still, in the end, it acquiesced to congressional Democrats’ demands. It incorporated essential tools like the facility-specific Rapid Response Mechanism for labor enforcement and eliminated some of the most egregious giveaways to Big Pharma.

However, the structural rot from NAFTA remained.

While experts across the ideological spectrum lauded the drastic reduction of controversial investor privileges that allow corporations to sue governments over public interest laws through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), Trump preserved ISDS for fossil fuel firms operating in Mexico — a carve-out aggressively pushed by Big Oil.

Agribusiness also retained its arsenal. The ongoing U.S. trade challenge to Mexico’s restrictions on genetically modified corn — measures rooted in precautionary health standards and cultural preservation — reveal the deal’s true intent. Rather than respecting national policy space over food safety, trade rules are once again being deployed to dismantle domestic protections at the behest of corporations.

Not only did Trump fail to fix NAFTA, but he made it even worse in at least one crucial way: Big Tech secured its wishlist in the form of a digital trade chapter. These new terms undermine the ability of U.S. states, Congress, and other countries’ governments to hold Big Tech accountable for gender and racial bias in AI, rampant abuse of our privacy, and monopolistic overreach.

Performative “Protectionism” and the Authoritarian Trade Playbook

Far from dismantling the corporate trade regime, Trump’s first term revealed him as a loyal steward of it — so long as he could plaster his name on it. Despite the USMCA rebrand, he left the core NAFTA structure intact and continued to stoke public anger over working people’s struggles — not by confronting the root causes but by scapegoating other nations. And he has been increasingly employing tariff threats as his weapon of choice — not in pursuit of justice but as a blunt instrument of control.

Just weeks ago, Trump threatened new tariffs unless Mexico deployed troops to militarize the border. He pressured Colombia to accept a deportation flight of asylum seekers.

Big Tech companies are awaiting their handouts, as it is widely expected that Trump will lift tariffs on countries that agree to undo tech accountability policies.

And perversely, he is using tariffs as a cudgel to pressure other countries into signing the very liberalizing trade agreements he claims to oppose.

“Liberation Day” was more of the same from this ever-more-authoritarian White House: an emergency decree bypassing Congress, escalating instability, and concentrating power in the executive. Trump hasn’t rejected the anti-democratic nature of the neoliberal trade model — he’s replicating it with a vengeance.

All Madness, No Method

While tariffs can be a useful tool, they must be transparently employed in strategic sectors for a clear purpose following careful analysis and open debate.

Trump’s tariffs, however, are based on misleading data and flawed logic. He uses exaggerated trade deficit calculations and stays silent on how the U.S. dollar’s dominance enables America to import far more than it exports, a luxury most Global South nations — burdened with debt and structural trade deficits — cannot afford.

The methodology behind these tariffs has experts scratching their heads.

Trump claimed that the “reciprocal tariffs” were derived from a detailed assessment of each country’s tariff and non-tariff barriers (more on these in a moment). In fact, the number assigned to each country seems to be based on the difference between the total value of imports the U.S. receives from a country versus the amount we export to it.

Apparently, no regard was given to why there may be a large imbalance. For example, Lesotho, which Trump dismissed as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” was hit with the highest tariff of any country at 50%. Forget the fact that the small, landlocked country’s population of 2 million may not be able to afford Made in America products, leading to a lopsided trade balance.

The crude formula used to determine each country’s “reciprocal” tariff was described by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as something that appeared to be “thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice,” and “reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.”

As some commentators have noted, this tariff breakdown is what you get if you ask ChatGPT to come up with a U.S. trade policy. This could very well be the first global economic policy written “of, by, and for” our robot overlords. What could possibly go wrong?

The Corporate Wishlist

Since the Trump administration clearly did not take on the, admittedly Herculean, task of reviewing the thousands of tariffs and trade barriers imposed by hundreds of countries, it simply used trade imbalances as a crude proxy. It’s a stand-in for the cost of that country’s tariffs and, importantly, its non-tariff barriers.

“Non-tariff barrier” is trade-speak for “any policy that’s not a tariff” but might restrict trade — from climate protections to minimum wage laws to consumer protections in the form of toxic food additives. While many non-tariff barriers serve vital public policies, corporations and trade negotiators often treat them as obstacles to profit.

According to the April 2 executive order, Trump can unilaterally decide to lower the tariffs imposed on a country if it takes “significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters.”

What constitutes a “significant step” isn’t defined, but it certainly looks like an open invitation for governments to slash their tariffs and reverse policies to appease Trump and his billionaire buddies.

For what exactly those policies may be, just look to the report Trump waved around at the beginning of his so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement speech in the Rose Garden.

That document is a 400-page list of the policies that other countries have enacted — or are even considering enacting — that U.S. corporations don’t like. It’s the National Trade Estimates Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, an annual government report that has long been criticized as an inappropriate overreach to name and shame other countries’ legitimate public interest policies. It’s also a glimpse of the policies that Trump may seek to have destroyed in exchange for tariff relief.

The policies targeted in this year’s report include climate protections, including Canada’s Clean Fuel Standard, the European Union’s Deforestation-Free Supply Chain Regulation, and Japan’s renewable energy incentives — all of which are aligned with global climate commitments.

Public health regulations aimed at protecting consumers, preserving biodiversity, and preventing long-term health risks were also attacked. Employed by dozens of countries, these include bans, testing requirements, or even labeling policies on pesticides like Roundup’s glyphosate, genetically engineered food, ractopamine in beef and pork, and heavy metals in cosmetics.

Regulations that promote competition in the digital ecosystem, laws that impose digital services taxes on Big Tech firms, place conditions for cross-border data transfers, promote fairness in the digital economy, and laws that regulate emerging technologies such as AI.

Benefits for Trump’s Buddies

Countries are not the only ones who will be supplicating to avoid the full weight of Trump’s tariffs. Despite Trump’s claims that other countries foot the bill on tariffs, it is U.S. importers who must pay this fee … unless they can convince Trump to grant them a special exemption.

It is well-documented that the opaque and chaotic tariff exclusion process created in Trump’s first term quickly overwhelmed government agencies and enabled a quid pro quo spoils system that rewarded the rich and well-connected. A revolving door of lobbyists, including former and future Trump administration officials, were able to secure lucrative tariff exceptions for their CEO clients through political pressure, informal meetings, and campaign contributions.

Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn.

Through this system, Trump wielded tariffs and tariff exceptions to reward his friends and punish his enemies. CEOs that donated to Republicans had a 1 in 5 chance of having their exemption request granted versus 1 in 10 for CEOs that supported Democrats, according to a January 2025 study.

If Trump’s recent attacks on law firms, universities, and the press are any indication, he’s prepared to double down on using his second term to punish enemies and enrich himself and his friends. And his dismantling of watchdog agencies and boosting of big business ties set the stage for tariff exemptions to be even more corrupt and harmful to workers, consumers, and the U.S. and global economy.

What other displays of political loyalty might companies offer to Trump for a tariff exclusion this time around? Public endorsement of his policies? Promises to monitor employees for DEI ideologies or views critical of the administration?

We Deserve Better

Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.

There’s no industrial plan. No support for unions. No climate-resilience vision. Just a chaotic, performative tariff regime, which in practice will surely be wielded to reward loyalty and punish dissent.

Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn. Trump talks a big game but serves the same corporate interests that gutted labor rights in the first place. Working people deserve a system with them at the center, not one that favors corporations.

This isn’t trade justice. It’s a con.

By Ralph Nader April 4, 2025 Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard…

Feeling liberated yet?

People of a certain age will remember Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny around with a shotgun, blasting holes in walls, ceilings, and windows while completely missing his target. It’s the perfect metaphor for Trump’s tariff policy announced this week.

Trump is acting as if tariffs were a form of warfare, and he’s “fighting back” against the countries that have “taken advantage of us.” This is how he’s behaving like Yosemite Sam with his blunderbuss, shooting everywhere and just making a mess while missing the target altogether.

He’s not only throwing wild tariffs on every country that trades with America (except Russia), but he also put a flat 10% tariff on every product imported into the United States (except from Russia).

Additionally, this sort of rhetoric — and making tariffs country-specific instead of product-specific — is what drives trade wars that also run the risk of increasing the danger of actual wars.

If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.

“Shooting” at countries instead of at products is not only hostile; it’s also generally counterproductive except, literally, during time of war.

Further demonstrating Trump‘s ignorance about the difference between business-based tariffs on products and war-based tariffs on countries, his commerce secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, is warning countries not to engage in reciprocal tariffs or trade restrictions.

The second solid criticism of Trump’s tariff plan is that only Congress has the legal power to impose them, and that’s a good thing.

No manufacturer is going to invest billions of dollars and years of construction to build a factory here in response to a tariff thrown up on the whim of a mercurial president; they want to know that that tariff will be there for decades so they can earn back their investment.

Which is why, outside of wartime, tariffs should be specific to products, not countries.

Our Department of Commerce specifies over 17,000 separate categories of products that tariffs can be attached to, and they’re often startlingly specific. Steel, for example, has 740 sub-categories ranging from rolled steel to ingots to hundreds of items as specific as “Semi-finished iron/nonalloy steel, ≥ 0.25% carbon, rectangular/square cross-section, width ≥ 4x thickness.”

Products that we make in America, or want to make here again, should be the targets of tariffs, not the countries that make them. And while there are thousands of product categories that are amenable to tariffs, there are also things it would be stupid to put tariffs on because we don’t make them here — and don’t plan to.

For example, we don’t grow coffee in the US, but they do in Mexico; that’s why we imported 65.5 million kilograms of unroasted beans from that country in 2022. Slapping a tariff on all Mexican goods will sweep up coffee, which will only succeed in driving up inflation here, as the cost of the tariff is added to every cup in every kitchen and restaurant across America.

Bringing back manufacturing also a really good thing to do, because it’s historically been one of the most important ways that workers can find entrée into the middle class without a college education.

Sadly, though, Trump may be doing more damage than good to the cause of the middle class with his bizarre country-based tariff policy.

Trump is able to do his uninformed tariff song-and-dance because there’s a loophole in our tariff laws that allows the president — during a time of national emergency — to impose emergency tariffs. It makes sense that the president should have that flexibility in the event of another Republican Great Depression or World War III, but that isn’t what’s happening today.

Trump declared a state of emergency at the beginning of his administration specifically so he could put his tariffs into place — which means the next president can simply reverse them. Again, no CEO in her right mind is going to invest billions based on that level of uncertainty.

At least four Republican senators get this; Tuesday night, Trump did one of his signature weird 1 am screeds on his Nazi-infested social media platform, calling out Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski by name because they’re supporting a Democratic effort to end the state of emergency so Congress can reclaim its trade authority. They voted with Democrats last night and the resolution passed; it goes to the House now, where Mike Johnson will probably kill it.

If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.

But, no; understanding anything other than how to cheat on golf and your taxes, screw vendors, stiff workers, and sexually assault women is beyond his limited abilities. And, of course, running companies into bankruptcy and being bailed out by Russians. Repeatedly.

When Congress imposes tariffs there’s a far better chance they’ll stay in place long enough to assure American companies it’s worth building new factories. Instead of imposing his tariffs by fiat, Trump should have put them into the form of a proposed bill that he’d then submit to Congress.

Sadly, he’s not that smart or well-informed about history, and apparently neither are his advisors.

So, here we are with actions taken that may throw the entire world into recession, or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression.

That said, there’s also a huge risk to any Democrats who might want to play Yosemite Sam themselves, blasting away at Trump’s tariffs and missing the nuance — and the multiple truths — that make up today’s trade situation.

The simple reality is that tariffs do work to protect domestic manufacturing; they have since the founding of our republic, and are used today by every country in the world (including the US) for that purpose. (There’s a great explainer of all this, including the American history with tariffs going back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, here.)

And, when Reagan embraced neoliberal cuts in tariffs, negotiating the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 — which led to the WTO and NAFTA (also negotiated by Reagan and Bush respectively) — those two Republican presidents began the long slide of American manufacturing.

As the union guy who spoke at Trump’s event yesterday noted, anybody over 50 can remember when everything in Walmart — and pretty much everywhere else, including the cars on the dealership lots — was made in America.

Hell, Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan “100% Made in the USA” which is also the title of his autobiography; it was only when those tariffs collapsed as a result of Clinton signing off on Reagan’s/Bush’s NAFTA and the WTO that Walton’s stores began to import from cheap-labor countries and stopped stocking American-made products.

Because of this simple reality, Democrats who simply fall back on the old neoliberal talking points that tariffs are sales taxes and that countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other (the original explicit neoliberal rationale for tariff-free trade) are risking political suicide.

It’s hard to make political arguments that use nuance, but in this case, Democrats really don’t have a choice. Having grown up in the Midwest (Michigan) I can tell you that most anybody who hails from a former manufacturing region is cheering Trump on right now.

Regardless of party.

And today’s Democrats haven’t been all that hostile to tariffs: Not only did President Biden keep Trump’s tariffs from his first term in place, he added additional tariffs of his own (although almost nobody knows it).

Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% in 2024; his tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by the end of this year; Democratic tariffs on some electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% last year; Biden’s tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration even put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

(Notice that none of those are tariffs on countries, just on products. The only country-specific tariffs Biden approved were against Russia, in response to their invading Ukraine, as a form of economic warfare.)

Opposing tariffs just because Trump loves them, in other words, isn’t just ineffective politics; it doesn’t even conform to Biden’s new Democratic trade policy.

So, here’s how modern Democrats need to talk about this situation. It’s not only good political messaging; it’s also good trade policy, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

First, Democrats need to answer the question, “Why tariffs, particularly if they act as taxes on imported goods?”

That answer is easy; it’s an accurate explanation of what Trump is totally garbling: Tariffs encourage manufacturers to produce their products here in the USA instead of in cheap labor or high pollution countries.

But the “how to do it” is the critical part.

Democrats, in other words, need to differentiate between “smart tariffs” and “stupid” or “wartime tariffs,” advocating the former while ridiculing the latter.

“Put tariffs on products, not on countries” would be a great start, for example.

Our dim-witted president is being called out on his shoot-from-the-hip tariff policy from both left and right. The country is confused, and needs to understand what is going on and how it will impact their future.

Democrats must therefore take a clear position in favor of smart, targeted tariffs — on individual products rather than countries — like Biden did.

And then they must point out that Trump’s obsession with slapping punitive tariffs on countries (except on Russian products) stupidly risks utterly crashing our economy — and possibly even the world’s economy — while starting a trade war that nobody will win.

And, tragically, it’s all being done not for any good reason, but just because Trump is not that bright.

Streaming 10 AM Eastern & 8 AM Mountain time + Streaming Afterwards:

Ted Rall and Manila Chan welcome auto industry expert Lauren Fix to dissect the impact of President Trump’s new 25% tariffs on foreign cars. The discussion explores how these tariffs, effective immediately, are shaking up the automotive landscape. Ford and GM, with 20-30% of their U.S. sales tied to imports, face pressure, prompting Ford to announce price cuts to offset rising costs. The episode delves into projections of auto prices climbing $5,000-$15,000, as even American-made vehicles rely on foreign components, leaving consumers squeezed amid persistent inflation.

The conversation also covers Tesla’s position, fully U.S.-produced and thus insulated from the tariffs, though its stock has dipped 5% after hours due to unrelated backlash. Broader market effects take center stage, with the tariffs triggering volatility—Ford’s stock rises 2%, GM’s falls 1.5%, and global trade tensions loom. Potential retaliation from Canada and Mexico, key players in the $460 billion auto trade network, adds fuel to the fire, unsettling investors further. Lauren Fix provides data-driven insights, while the hosts keep the pace brisk and engaging, blending economic analysis with real-world implications. The episode captures a pivotal moment as policy shifts ripple through wallets, assembly lines, and Wall Street, delivering the raw, unfiltered breakdown TMI fans expect.

The post TMI Show Ep 111: “Car-azy: Tariffs, Ford Price Cuts and Tesla Attacks” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dear Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman, School of International and Public Affairs Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, Columbia University Trustees, SIPA Administrators, and SIPA Program Heads:

I am writing to you on my own behalf, as an individual alumna of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

It has been 27 days, and SIPA has not meaningfully spoken up for Mahmoud Khalil.

On Saturday, March 29—SIPA Alumni Day 2025—rather than celebrating the school and our association with it, a number of SIPA alumni including myself held a press conference and protest at 1:00 pm outside the Columbia gates at 116th St. and Amsterdam Avenue. We condemned SIPA's collusion with the Trump administration (including ICE and DHS) and the NYPD, and the school's failure to act against the Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people by:

1. Renouncing our degrees and our association with SIPA and Columbia University;
2. Destroying our diplomas;
3. Pledging to end our donations to SIPA and Columbia University; and
4. Pledging to continue to speak publicly on these matters.

As you are no doubt aware, the protest was extensively covered by local, regional, national, and international press outlets, including Democracy Now!, The Guardian, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Post, Daily News, Fox News, AJ+ (Al Jazeera Plus), The Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye, and many more.

Among the many points that were made at the press conference, we alumni made clear that the false conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the false conflation of Judaism and Zionism by Columbia University, are, in fact, cynical antisemitic ploys that put Jews and all people in danger.

Acting President Shipman: In your first message to the Columbia University community, you wrote, "...to our alumni community, I want to emphasize how important you are to the strength of our institution. Your engagement is critical, and I look forward to your partnership."

However, past statements that you, Ms. Shipman, have made as co-chair of the Board of Trustees do not suggest that common ground can be found. Are you interested in taking rapid steps to change course by:

• Divesting Columbia's holdings in all endeavors making possible the Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people;

• Reversing actions taken by your predecessor(s) in acceding to (colluding with) Trump administration demands;

• Protecting free speech and the right to dissent for ALL on campus;

• Condemning the draconian and illegal actions taken against Mahmoud Khalil and other anti-genocide students, faculty, and staff;

• Renouncing Columbia's partnership with the NYPD in repressing Columbia students and militarizing the campus;

• Permanently closing the Tel Aviv Global Center and the Columbia dual degree program with Tel Aviv University; and

• Joining in a "Mutual Defense Compact" to block Trump's campus attacks, as advocated by the Rutgers University Senate, in which schools embody the values of democracy and "commit meaningful funding to a defense fund to provide immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement"?

If so, perhaps the large and rapidly increasing number of alumni who are deeply alienated by the university would believe common ground might be found.

Speaking for myself, I have no optimism on any of these scores. I believe Columbia has become, in the words of Professor Rashid Khalidi in an article for The Guardian on March 25, "Vichy on the Hudson." I believe it has damaged its reputation beyond repair. Far more than capitulating to American fascism, I believe Columbia is collaborating with it, colluding with it, and emboldening it, thereby putting at risk not just countless other institutions of higher learning across the country, but our society, global humanitarian values, and the lives of the Palestinian people as well.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Scarlott, SIPA MIA '86 (renounced degree)

It’s the Donald Double Whammy.

Grocery price are not “coming down fast,” as U.S. President Donald Trump promised. And Trump’s tariffs are about to boost the price of everything we buy that’s imported—from cars to gasoline to clothing to shoes to computers, cellphones, toys and, yes, groceries, too. America imports one-fifth of our food from abroad, and tariffs will make fruits and vegetables more costly.

Two of the false promises Trump made during the election will be haunting us.

Trump did not tell inflation-afflicted voters before November that a vote for Trump was a vote for more pain.

First, he pledged to fix inflation. The economy was issue number one for most voters, and Trump attributed his victory to Americans’ anger over food prices. He promised “inflation will vanish completely,” and vowed “prices will come down... and they’ll come down fast... with everything.”

“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” Right up to election day, Trump assured us, “A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper.”

Trump never revealed his plan for dealing with inflation because he had no plan. And after the election, he admitted prices were not going to come down. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he acknowledged a few weeks later. “Very hard.”

By January, Trump confirmed that inflation was not his No. 1 issue, and by Inauguration Day, he ceased talking about it at all. Prices did not start coming down on Day One, and still haven’t on Day 75. They won’t because of his second false claim.

Trump promised that the tariffs he imposed would be paid by other countries, not by American consumers: “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”

“I am going to put tariffs on other countries’ [goods] coming into our country and that has nothing to do with taxes to us.”

Trump knew this was wrong. As the right-leaning Tax Foundation explained, a tariff is simply “a tax on people who buy things from foreign businesses.” The conservative Cato Institute reports “overwhelming evidence that Americans bore the brunt” of Trump’s first-term tariffs and will do so again.

And now, finally, Trump admits it himself. When confronted with the fact that his 25% tariff on autos and auto parts will cause prices to surge, Trump did not dispute that tariff costs would rest on the backs of American consumers. Instead, he cheered!

“I couldn’t care less,” said Trump. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars.”

Trump understands perfectly well that tariffs are not “a cost to another country.” He no longer says, “It’s not going to be a cost to you.” Now he says Americans will feel “some pain,” but that it’s a good thing.

Trump did not tell inflation-afflicted voters before November that a vote for Trump was a vote for more pain.

Can Trump’s tariffs increase manufacturing in the United States by forcing us to buy American-made cars? Economists are dubious. To begin, there aren’t any 100% “American-made cars.” “Almost 60% of the parts used in vehicles that are assembled in the country” are imported.

Auto manufacturers created a system based on free trade among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada in which parts made in any of the three countries may freely move among the others. Then cars assembled in one country may be sold into another.

Half of the parts in a “made-in-the-USA” Cadillac are manufactured in Mexico. Thirty percent of the parts in an Acura assembled in Mexico come from the U.S. or Canada.

Trump claims the trade agreement underlying this system is “unfair” and that Mexico and Canada “took advantage of the United States.” “Who would ever sign a thing like this?” Trump recently asked.

Donald Trump, actually. The U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) was negotiated and signed by Trump on November 30, 2018. Then, he hailed USMCA as “a colossal victory for our farmers, ranchers, energy workers, factory workers, and American workers in all 50 states.”

“An especially big win for American auto workers,” Trump bragged. “The USMCA is the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.”

Back then it was “incredible,” “the best agreement we’ve ever made.” Now it’s a target for Trump’s irrational tariff mania. What will come of tariffs on everything we buy from abroad? Unemployment, as cars and other goods become more expensive and demand plummets. More unemployment as other countries retaliate with tariffs that bar American exports. And more inflation, with China, Canada, and Mexico tariffs alone costing the typical household $1,600 to $2,000 a year.

Trump has moved on from his false promises. And American families are left to bear the costs.

Of all the slash and burn terminations U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk are inflicting on public agencies, few will have a more far-reaching, devastating impact than the frontal assault on Americans' health, safety, and living standards.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, warned that the shock and awe cuts of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff—a 25% decimation—and programs, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy." It also advances a decades-long dream of the far-right.

For half a century, extremist libertarian, corporate, and Republican ideologues have sought demolition of public safety net programs, regulations, and reforms, and elimination of personnel to carry them out. But it has required the authoritarian collaboration of Project 2025, Trump, Musk, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to begin to implement this program.

"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits."

Public protests and legal challenges were already underway as the first round of layoffs and forced retirements undermined healthcare. The widespread scope of the latest mass firings, especially at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reinforces the urgency of a response.

It included the agencies responsible for medical research, tracking disease, drug approvals, and regulating food safety, said The Associated Press. The Bullwark's Sam Stein termed it "an absolute bloodbath" with a "generation of scientists, healthcare officials being wiped out," Common Dreams noted.

Union officials said CDC layoffs eliminated programs focused on smoking, lead poisoning, gun violence, asthma and air quality, and occupational safety and health, AP added.

Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental protections were gutted, The New York Times reported. Officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told their offices were being eliminated. HIV prevention was a target. Funding cuts for the healthy aging program apparently eradicated the government's Alzheimer's program, noted Rachel Maddow. Layoffs also hit people working on bird flu and measles.

The cruel spirit of the actions was evidenced by ultimatums given to multiple health experts to relocate to remote areas of the continent from Indian Health Services territories to Alaska. Or leave their jobs, in malicious messaging characteristic of Trump's reign, as voiced by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik that only "fraudsters" would complain about Social Security recipients losing their earned monthly checks. Among them were directors at the National Institutes of Health and the directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Nursing Research.

"The FDA as we've known it is finished, since most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed," former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf wrote on LinkedIn. Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, said the HHS cuts, paired with an $11 billion cut in funding to state and local health departments announced this week, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy."

"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits," said National Nurses United.

"From a policy perspective, the changes initiated at HHS by the second-term Trump administration are far-reaching. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to reshape the U.S. public health agenda," wrote Simon Haeder, Texas A&M University public health professor.

In addition to the mass firings, the Trump administration is pursuing plans to weaken the Affordable Care Act and challenge state programs focused on health disparities. And the House is moving forward with its plans to devastate Medicaid with up to $880 billion in cuts to help pay for its $4.5 trillion tax gift for billionaires.

The scheme is particularly manifest in plans to roll back numerous regulations on "everything from clean water to safe vaccines," Haeder emphasizes. "Regulation has emerged as the most prolific source of policymaking over the last five decades, particularly for health policy...Vast cuts to the HHS workforce will likely curtail this capability, resulting in fewer regulatory protections for Americans... With fewer experienced administrators on staff, industry influence over regulatory decisions will likely only grow stronger."

Putting 'Democracy in Chains'

Corporate titans and the libertarian far-right have long pushed deregulation and privatization. In her seminal work Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean profiles right-wing economist James M. Buchanan who for half a century promoted a definition of "liberty" that insulates private property rights from government. Through his "public choice theory," for which he won a Nobel Economics Prize, he condemned majority rule as self-centered voting rights that results in "overinvestment in the public sector" and subjects the minority, meaning corporations and the elite, to "discriminatory" taxation and legislation.

Buchanan established a libertarian think tank at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, enthusiastically funded by oil magnate Charles Koch. Its goals included destroying Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Buchanan showed his disdain for anyone harmed by writing that people who failed to save money for the loss of public protections "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent." Tyler Cowen, Buchanan's successor at Mercatus, MacLean notes, projected "rewriting of the social contract" that included slashing Medicaid. Compensation for a "fiscal shortfall" from the handouts to the elite, "will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers."

Buchanan would see his views come to fruition in Chile, MacLean notes, after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's murderous coup in 1973. It was followed by a rewriting of the country's constitution, advised by Buchanan, so that post-Pinochet the "capitalist class would be permanently entrenched in power" in which, adds Sam Tanenhaus, "labor unions were banned and social security and healthcare were privatized."

With the Project 2025 blueprint, Trump, Musk, and their Republican Party followers embracing similar authoritarian rule, that program is on speed dial. A populist uprising, which ultimately deposed Pinochet and other dictators, is the challenge to all of us. Fortunately, street protests are increasing, as is a voter response, demonstrated by the electoral trouncing of Trump and Musk's handpicked candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, a positive sign in troubled times.

President Donald Trump has caused so much devastation over the last several weeks that it is hard to calculate the loss. It is easy to lose sight of the people who are being hurt. Earlier this week, the Trump administration's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a vast restructuring of the agency. As a result, literally thousands of workers were fired and entire sections of HHS eliminated and countless programs—spanning the gamut from world health to food safety—negatively impacted.

One of the programs devastated was the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) which helps low-income individuals and families pay for heating or cooling homes. According to the New York Times, the entire staff of LIHEAP was fired. LIHEAP helps over six million low-income people and has an annual budget of $4.1 billion.

Over the years, both Republicans and Democrats have supported LIHEAP. The program found supporters in New England who depended on LIHEAP for heating assistance and those in the southwest who used the assistance to help cool their homes. Those days of bipartisan cooperation are long gone.

Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP...

No one should have been surprised by the severe cuts to LIHEAP. The program was targeted by Project 2025 and by the House Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget last year. Interestingly, this position puts the GOP at odds with utilities/energy companies which support LIHEAP.

In terms of bureaucracy, the LIHEAP staff was very small (25 people) when compared with overall staffing at HHS. Given the number of people LIHEAP helps, the program seems very efficient. Furthermore, LIHEAP serves a vital—that is, life-saving—purpose. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey shows that families across the country are having problems affording their energy costs. In October of last year, Louisiana (31%), West Virginia (28.%), and Massachusetts (27%) topped the charts in states with the highest percentage of adults in households that were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last 12 months.

Congress has already approved $4.1 billion for LIHEAP subsidies and implementation costs for the current fiscal year and about 90% of that amount has already been awarded to the states who administer the grants to individuals in need. However, it is unclear how the rest of the funds will be disbursed as there is no staff to administer the program. It is anyone’s guess as to what happens when the money runs out.

One thing is for sure: If LIHEAP is eliminated, people will die and these will be the most vulnerable among us. In case you are interested in proof of this common-sense conclusion, check out the paper “The Mortality Effects Of Winter Heating Prices” in the Economic Journal.

On Thursday, Kennedy told ABC News that some of the HHS cuts had been made in error and would be rescinded. This whole situation will be clarified when Kennedy testifies on April 10 about the HHS reorganization before the Senate Health Committee. Hopefully, LIHEAP will be one of the programs that was cut in error. Given the fact that Project 2025 singled out LIHEAP, this may be a forlorn hope.

Written just over a hundred years ago, T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland proffered that “April is the cruelest month.” Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP to stay warm in their homes and survive in this world.

Courts will not save us. Neither will a charismatic leader.

The Trump administration is unleashing unthinkable threats toward students. Each day a new harrowing accounting becomes publicly available. A Tufts student is abducted by a group of masked, plain-clothed people. Her phone ripped from her hand. She is screaming for help, confused. All we know is that she co-authored an op-ed. Another researcher, this time from Harvard, is detained at the border under the auspices of having scientific materials with her that she should have declared. Here, we learn that she protested the war against Ukraine while in Russia in 2022.

The list is growing everyday. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and academic who mobilized against genocide, is confronted in the middle of the night by ICE agents who confusingly tell him and his pregnant wife that a student visa was revoked. He is whisked away under the shroud of darkness. Another student, who showed up to protests in order to voice her support for those most marginalized in our world and who exercised her free speech, has been threatened with deportation though she is a green-card holder and has been in the U.S. since she was 7. The arbitrariness here is a strategy, much like the infamous flood-the-zone approach. It is to spread fear so that no one acts, not knowing if they will become a target.

Consider what's happening at USAID: By the time lawsuits fully play out, many employees will have already found new jobs.

As I watch the escalating attack on the notion of free speech and higher education in the United States, federally but also on the state level, I am reminded of how fragile our democratic institutions have become. They are crumbling before us. Students exercising their basic human right to protest are being abducted in the middle of the day by masked men, threatened with deportation, surveillance, and academic punishment. States like Ohio have now enacted laws that significantly curtail what topics can be discussed within public universities. On March 28, Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, which bans diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public colleges and universities without clearly defining what they are. The law also prohibits faculty strikes and requires universities to maintain neutrality regarding political and ideological expressions. This vague language opens the door to preventing conversations that unequivocally state that what the Nazis did was reprehensible or that name the evils of slavery.

University administrations around the country are being pressured by the White House to turn over names of students who have exercised their right to free speech to gather in peaceful protests. And based on Columbia's trajectory, it is terrifying to imagine how easily many universities, even those with the economic power to legally question these unconstitutional strategies, may comply with these illegal and unconstitutional requests. In this climate of paralyzing fear, students flee, professors hide, supports disappear, and a chill spreads across academic communities designed to foster critical thinking. The foundation of freedom is our ability to speak truth to power. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the Republican establishment—which now only exists to support this dangerous vision—are attacking the free press and higher education—both spaces that enable free speech to flourish, both spaces that encourage speaking truth to power.

How can those of us who care about freedom and see the threat of this moment respond effectively? Yes, we have seen promising responses from the courts. We've seen rulings reinstating fired federal workers, insisting on due process for those sent thousands of miles to violent prisons in El Salvador, and beginning to protect students targeted for their political speech. But court responses take time. Incredible harm occurs while we wait: disappeared offices, maligned families, traumatized communities, and even death as this death tracker as a result of USAID cuts devastatingly demonstrates.

And there's a more fundamental problem: Courts are at their core designed to maintain the status quo. They can be instruments of the state, and as Angelo Guillen from the Philippines explains, the legal system can be "weaponized to target perceived enemies of the state." The law's fundamental purpose in many systems is to preserve existing power structures, not transform them. Even when legal victories occur, they may not lead to fundamental changes.

National security and counterterrorism laws—intentionally vague and overly broad—allow the state to target activists and progressive organizations. Increasingly these vague laws are used to target anyone who has expressed views in opposition to those held by the White House. Domestic legal systems often lack the necessary avenues to adequately protect violated rights. Courts are not neutral entities but are influenced by political considerations. Why else would Elon Musk suddenly become so invested in Wisconsin Supreme Court judges? He poured more money into a state supreme court race than ever before.

Most critically for those of us who want to see our beloved communities experience less violence, courts are inherently reactive institutions. They do not preemptively tell the government how to operate. Before a federal court can do anything, it must wait for the government to do something illegal, wait for a plaintiff to come along who is injured, and then, if conditions are right, the court can intervene. Here we are, all of us watching in horror, as the government illegally whisks up students from universities who are not fighting to protect them. We cannot watch as this assault on free speech, a bedrock of democracy, is dismantled before our horrified eyes.

By the time the courts may successfully declare these acts as unconstitutional, permanent damage may already be done. Consider what's happening at USAID: By the time lawsuits fully play out, many employees will have already found new jobs. If the Supreme Court ultimately rules the agency must continue to function, that decision could take months or years. By then, the agency may have experienced such severe brain drain that it will be a shadow of its former self and importantly thousands of lives will be lost because of the services that were suddenly ended.

Even if the court responds resoundingly, as it did in the case of migrants who have been deported to El Salvador without due process, Trump may just simply ignore it, as he seems to be doing so now. We see this also in the case of Brown University professor Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist who was expelled in apparent defiance of a court order.

If we cannot expect the courts to save us, especially during this era when the three branches of government have been usurped by Trump who believes himself to be king, what do we do?

We need to mobilize. As we have been, in fact! According to research by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth and colleagues, "Resistance is alive and well in the United States." Their data shows that protests against the Trump administration may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but they are "far more numerous and frequent—while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance." In February alone, they counted over 2,085 protests compared with the 937 protests in 2017.

Keep showing up. Visible dissent matters. Trump and Musk are consuming the airwaves, are monopolizing our attention with orchestrated chaos, and we can take back our power and take back a narrative that is being spun about who we are. We can show them who we are.

This is what authoritarians like Trump fear most: not just our protest, but our solidarity, our unwavering commitment to truth and to one another.

These mass gatherings also help to put pressure on the courts. It really matters. We can show our legislators the priorities we have for protecting all of our human rights. We can make sure they hear our insistence that we won't let anyone in our community become a target for simply exercising the constitutionally protected right of free speech. We can show that we refuse to be complicit in this harm and we demand them to do the same. When we speak up in unison, we become unstoppable. We know that, because we have seen that repeatedly throughout history.

History doesn't only instruct us about the way democracies can slide toward authoritarianism—which has become essential to track as we watch that same pattern unfold here—but history also tells us how we can push back against it. How we can defeat oppressive regimes. History shows us that authoritarianism wasn't beaten by lawyers or by opposition parties. It was beaten by people rising up against systems of oppression. Consider the solidarity between factory workers and intellectuals during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Despite their different social positions, they joined forces in demanding political reforms, establishing democratic workers' councils, and resisting Soviet repression. Today's Hungary, with the authoritarian vision of Viktor Orbán, is once again creating these false divisions to disempower the collective and break down solidarities. Trump makes no secret of his admiration of Orbán's approach. But, as the 1956 revolution instructs us, we can refuse to be divided.

We see the war on academia and higher education as a way of further fracturing communities. But we are actually on the same side. We want one another to thrive. When we are placed into separate groups, it only serves to dehumanize us. By mobilizing together, we learn that we have shared struggles.

It has been frustrating to watch the Democratic Party flounder in terms of an organized response as they remain risk-averse, operating under the guise of a world where good faith still exists. Others simply say nothing can be done. James Carville suggests the party "roll over and play dead" and let Trump overreach. "No one is going to care how hard you fight in March of 2025," Carville said. "It's how you win" in 2026.

With all due respect, this is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. The quiet, the playing dead, the submission—this is allowance that enables the oppressor. Columbia is playing dead and thereby killing free speech and democracy. They didn't react by rightly taking the government to court and demonstrating how unconstitutional this interaction was. But we can. We have to react. We have to respond. We have to maintain connection. We need to do this together.

Ironically, with so much upheaval being justified as cost-cutting measures by the joke that is Musk's oligarchic takeover of the government in the form of DOGE, all the court cases fighting unconstitutional executive orders are costing taxpayers significant money. We are paying for the government to defend these unconstitutional actions. It is our taxpayers' funds that are used by Trump and Musk, billionaires, to defend their unconstitutional behavior. As of April 2, there are 162 cases challenging the administration's actions.

We need each of these court cases; according to The New York Times, as of March 25, at least 53 rulings have temporarily paused some of the administration's initiatives. But they cannot save us.

What is necessary for our survival and the survival of our democracy are opportunities to gather. Talk to your neighbors. Organize community cleanups. Engage in acts of mutual aid that refuse to dehumanize each other. Get to know each other. Show up for protests that demand the protection and respect for human rights of our most vulnerable communities.

In my classrooms, I often tell my students that when we examine social change, we must look beyond individual personalities to focus on systemic processes and policies. This broader perspective reveals historical patterns and trajectories that help us identify opportunities for solidarity across different communities. When we understand that our struggles are connected through these systems, we can build movements based not on opposition to individuals, but on a shared vision of collective liberation.

Let's apply this same approach as a community now. The policies and processes being implemented are violent and stand against our fundamental values of dignity, freedom, and justice. By focusing on these systems rather than getting caught in the cult of personality that surrounds Trump or Musk, we open pathways to solidarity with others who might seem different but who share our vulnerability to these harmful policies. This is about more than Trump and Musk, it is about building a world that allows all of us to thrive. This is not about individual actors—it's about dismantling the policies that divide and harm our communities and replacing them with systems of care and mutual support.

Since the legislative branch, like the judicial branch, has been swallowed up by Trump and Musk's authoritarian takeover, we have to return to the very first words of the Constitution: WE THE PEOPLE. We the people have to mobilize. We the people have to gather. We the people have to talk. Not to escape the harm, but to begin to mobilize against it more effectively.

Universities should be doing the same. They cannot continue to operate as though their individual responses will make the threat go away. Instead, there needs to be an orchestrated collective response. As a recent open letter in The Guardian stated: "We urge Columbia's administrators to rethink their strategy in dealing with Trump's authoritarian administration. We urge university administrators around the country to respond collectively rather than allowing themselves to be picked off one by one."

This era is one of the greatest crises facing academia in U.S. history, and also one of the greatest assaults on free speech.

Solidarity, not isolation, is our path forward.

We can't wait for the courts to save us. We can't wait for the right democratic leader to come along with the right rhetorical presence. We have to speak up ourselves. Call your lawmakers every single day. Tell them you believe free speech is essential to maintaining our democracy. If you are at less risk because you are a citizen, attend know-your-rights trainings and ensure you can protect the most vulnerable. Refuse to be complicit with your silence. Safely join gatherings, make sure judges know the side of history we stand on, and pressure them to do the same.

This is what authoritarians like Trump fear most: not just our protest, but our solidarity, our unwavering commitment to truth and to one another.

The architects of alternative facts fear one thing above all: truth told boldly and repeatedly by communities standing together. The more chaotic and overwhelming these attacks on truth become, the more essential it is that we refuse to normalize them. Speak up. It matters. It makes a difference.

History is clear on this point: When leaders wage war on truth itself, silence equals surrender. We cannot afford to surrender now. Read the books they want to ban. Refuse to obey in advance unjust, unconstitutional, and illegal executive actions. Gather with your neighbors and friends and speak the truth. The courts won't save us. Neither will charismatic leaders. We—all of us, together—are the heroes we need.

In Texas, midwife Maria Margarita Rojas and assistant Jose Ley face felony charges for allegedly providing abortions, the first arrests under the state’s near-total ban since Roe was overturned in 2022 . Attorney General Ken Paxton boasts of jailing healthcare workers—Rojas held on a $500,000 bond—while ignoring the absurdity: punishing those trained to heal, not harm. Over 50,000 abortions occurred safely in Texas in 2020; now, caregivers risk decades in prison. It’s not justice—it’s dystopian control.

The post Texas Abortion Arrests appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism? Before Hamas attacked Israel, American voters had not arrived at a consensus. They hadn’t thought much about it. Asked whether the two terms were synonymous, 62% of respondents to a Brookings Institution poll taken seven months earlier said they didn’t know. 15% replied yes and 21% said no.

For the time being, that argument is over.

Supporters of Israel won. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” A task force created to deal with anti-Gaza War protests at Columbia University, a hotbed of campus activism a year ago, has defined anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. The policy change was announced in an Israeli newspaper. NYU and Harvard followed suit.

If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you redefine criticism of the State of Israel and/or Zionism as anti-Semitism, it turns college campuses into hotbeds of anti-Semitic bigotry.

“Since the terrorist attack…anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish students on college campuses have reached alarmingly high rates, increasing by 700% from 2022 to 2023,” Hillel International claimed. The Anti-Defamation League said they went up 628%.

ADL reports about campus anti-Semitism are unquestioningly reported by news media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Colleges and universities have freaked out in response—firing presidents and professors, banning protest groups, locking down campuses, expelling students and revoking diplomas, turning a blind eye as ICE arrests and imprisons their students. These actions are to be expected. Establishmentarian and conservative, university trustees and administrators don’t want to be seen as tolerating anti-Semitism, especially those whose schools dependent upon influential Jewish donors who cite this supposed spike in campus anti-Semitism.

Given those numbers, finding specific incidents of anti-Semitism should be easy. Yet factual, fully-sourced reporting is almost impossible to come by.

Where are the Jewish students, or witnesses of any background, willing and able to go on the record about seeing or hearing acts of anti-Semitism? Where are the verifiable details? I’ve pored over hundreds stories under sensational headlines describing an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred at institutions of higher education. To my frustration, almost everything I read turns out to be hearsay, hysteria or based on unreliable conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

It’s amazing that these pieces passed editorial muster. The stories are vague—there’s no who, what, why, when or how. Secondhand accounts abound. Specifics are absent. There is generalized anxiety; Jews on campus, we are told, “feel uncomfortable,” are “scared” or “worried” without explaining exactly why. Some supporters of Israel even say they’re triggered when they see a classmate wearing a keffiyeh.

The reports of anti-Semitism we’ve been hearing about, it appears, have been overstated.

“The problem is that the ADL changed its methodology after October 7,” NPR reported on April 25, 2024. “After [the Israel-Hamas War] began, the ADL started to include specific speech expressions in its audit of antisemitism, including certain anti-Zionist phrases and phrases that express support for Hamas. And for extremism researchers, you know, this is not traditional.”

So when the ADL receives a report that a protester carried a sign or shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a rally, the organization counts it as an “anti-Semitic incident.” Even in a New Republic op-ed sympathetic to the protests, the author stretches to find possible anti-Semitism in a sign posted outside George Washington University’s encampment that read “Students will go back home when Israelis go back to Europe.” There is an argument to be made, and backers of Israel do, that statements like these evidence anti-Semitism. But people who protest against Israel, a movement that includes many Jews, disagree. No matter what the House says, there is no widely accepted opinion.

If you oppose Israel, the ADL considers you to be an anti-Semite—even if you’re Jewish. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explains away antiwar Jews, who are inconvenient to framing that all Jews support Israel. Greenblatt bizarrely calls anti-Gaza War groups like If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace “radical far-left groups” that “represent the ugly core of anti-Zionism.” These organizations want the fighting to stop. Their members see a clear distinction between Israel, a nation-state with the most right-wing government in its history, and the Jewish people, most of whom do not live in Israel.

Greenblatt’s claim that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is highly debatable—even inside the ADL. A disgruntled staffer told The Guardian: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.”

Several ADL staffers have quit over Greenblatt’s extremist stance. One former ADLer said: “Those were Jewish people who we [as the ADL] were defaming, so that felt extremely, extremely confusing, and frustrating to me. And it makes it harder to talk about that when any criticism of Israel, or anyone who criticizes Israel, just becomes a terrorist.”

At face value, conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism in order to discredit and suppress legitimate protests against a violent conflict that has cost at least 50,000 lives is dishonest and censorious. Stifling criticism of the biggest recipient of U.S. aid deprives society of the robust political debate necessary to develop intelligent analysis and policies toward the Middle East.

Less noticed and no less toxic is the effect the hysterical crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech has on Jewish people, especially those who feel affinity toward Israel.

The ADL’s decision to add anti-Zionist speech to its tally of anti-Semitic incidents without indicating separate subtotals of each means that there is no way to know if anti-Semitism as we knew it before October 7th has increased, decreased or remained at prewar levels. Are synagogues being vandalized more frequently? Are Jewish cemeteries getting desecrated more? We don’t know. It’s not apples to apples; it’s apples plus oranges.

Has anti-Semitism really increased? There’s no way to know. The FBI tracks hate crimes, not incidents that qualify as anti-Semitism but are legal, like First Amendment-protected speech expressing hatred of Jews. It may seem reasonable to assume that it would, given the powerful emotions surrounding the Gaza conflict. Feelings should never substitute for data. It’s insane to suddenly start stripping kids of their diplomas, banning activist groups and deporting peaceful protesters in response to a poorly-defined threat.

The ADL is doing no favors to Jews—a group that has disproportionately suffered horrific violence at the hands of the hateful for centuries—by insisting that people who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people are anti-Semites. Nor are the media outlets that accept their misleading statistics. When a Jewish person sees 100 people wearing keffiyehs and chanting “intifada,” they may reflexively track the event as personal hatred directed at them when, in fact, they oppose the Netanyahu government’s war in Gaza—and the marchers may themselves be Jewish.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is complex. Opinions are highly diverse, a point illustrated by a September 2024 Israel Democracy Institute poll that 28% of Israeli Jews believe Palestinians have the right to their own state. Attempts to radically simplify this complicated situation by equating anti-Israelism to anti-Semitism may quash the pro-Palestine movement in the short run but, in the long run, they will only muddy the truth and scare Jewish students—and everyone else.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)

The post Surprise Casualties in the War of Words Over anti-Semitism appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Suppose your doctor suddenly insisted that you needed to follow a strict diet and exercise regimen. He said he realized you had a serious problem when he divided your height by your birthday, and it came out way too high. You would probably decide that you need a new doctor.

This is basically the story of Donald Trump’s new round of import taxes (tariffs) on our trading partners. Trump somehow decided that trade was bankrupting the country, even though we were creating jobs rapidly, the economy was growing at a strong pace, and inflation was slowing to normal rates when he took office.

Trump’s response is to give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis, which comes to $7,000 per household. And this tax hike will primarily hit moderate and middle-income families. Trump’s taxes go easy on the rich, who spend a smaller share of their income on imported goods.

Trump’s team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country’s tariff on goods imported from the U.S.

There was much that Trump said in his Rose Garden address that made little sense. He repeated his bizarre claim that the United States had its greatest period of prosperity in the 1890s. This was a time when workers put in seven days a week, unions were largely illegal, and life expectancy was less than 50.

He then attributed the Great Depression to the income tax, and had it continuing after World War II and President Roosevelt’s death. In Trump’s telling of history, the post-war Golden Age from 1945 to 1973 did not exist. This was a period when the economy was growing rapidly, the gains from growth were broadly shared, and the top income tax rate was between 70 percent and 90 percent.

Trump’s account of the present was no more based in reality than his history of the United States. He told us that our trading partners and closest allies were all ripping us off.

Canada is one of the prime villains in Trump’s story. This is based on their trade surplus with the United States, which Trump insists is $200 billion a year. In reality, Canada’s trade surplus is roughly $60 billion, and this all due to the oil we import from them. Without our oil imports, we would have a trade surplus with Canada.

Ironically, Trump encouraged us to import more oil from Canada in his first term in office. Apparently, he has now decided that they are ripping us off by selling us the oil he wanted us to buy.

The fact that Trump’s aides have been unable to get him to correct his imaginary Canada trade surplus number is a clear warning that Trump’s big tariffs are not grounded in reality. There are certainly issues that can be raised about trade, and our policies have often not benefited the country’s workers.

The rapid expansion of trade with China and other developing countries in the first decade of this century cost us millions of manufacturing jobs. It also devastated manufacturing unions. As a result, the unionization rate in manufacturing is now barely higher than in the rest of the private sector. The historical wage premium paid in manufacturing has largely disappeared.

But it is a huge and absurd jump from this fact to Trump’s claim that all of our trading partners are ripping us off. In fact, in the course of his rambling address Trump gave a great example of how trade was benefitting the country.

Trump’s method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president.

An outbreak of Avian flu sent egg prices soaring when Trump first took office. In response to the record high prices, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary negotiated huge purchases of eggs from South Korea and Turkey, making our trade deficits with both countries larger. Nonetheless, Trump boasted about how his administration had brought egg prices down.

It was this sort of warped thinking that is the basis for the massive tax that Trump is imposing on the goods we import from our trading partners. Incredibly, it turns out that the tax rates Trump put in place, from 10 percent on goods from the UK to 49 percent on Cambodia, which were ostensibly “reciprocal” tariffs, bear no relationship whatsoever to the tariffs or trade barriers these countries place on our exports.

Instead, Trump’s team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country’s tariff on goods imported from the U.S.

Trump’s method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president. And apparently none of his economic advisors has the courage and integrity to set him straight or to resign.

"We've seen encampments cleared, phones tapped, and permits held up—but this? This feels like they're preparing for war," said Marisol Jennings, a D.C.-based organizer who has coordinated protests since 2017.

Just days before thousands of Americans are expected to gather in Washington, D.C. to protest the Trump administration's policies, a sweeping new executive order threatens to transform the nation's capital into a showcase for authoritarian policing.

Signed on March 27, the order—Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful—appears less concerned with beautification than with containment. Its provisions call for surging federal law enforcement, accelerating immigration crackdowns, and strictly enforcing vague "quality-of-life" directives for the city. And its timing, just a week before what organizers are calling the most consequential day of protest since President Donald Trump's return to office, is raising alarm from civil rights lawyers, city officials, and veteran demonstrators.

April 5 could become a barometer for how far Americans are willing to go to resist encroaching authoritarianism—and how far their government is willing to go to stop them.

This aggressive reordering of public space arrives at a politically volatile moment. On April 5, demonstrators from across the country will convene under the banner "Hands Off!"—a coordinated protest against Project 2025, growing executive overreach, and the erosion of democratic norms. But these protests will unfold on ground that has just been legally redefined. The executive order establishes a federal task force with sweeping discretion to enforce federal statutes, remove homeless encampments, and sanitize public areas—rhetoric that critics fear is coded language for suppressing civil dissent. One of the EO's most striking directives calls for expanding the presence of federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and increasing enforcement of so-called "quality-of-life" regulations in public spaces, including parks and federal landmarks.

Civil liberties advocates point to the EO's targeting of "unpermitted" demonstrations and disruptive gatherings as a thinly veiled attempt to preempt large-scale mobilization. In a city where the right to protest has long been protected even under strain, the threat of being forcibly removed or detained for a sign, a chant, or an unauthorized step into the street carries profound implications. "You don't need to ban protests if you can criminalize every protester," one ACLU attorney told me. "Public noise ordinances, anti-loitering laws, unauthorized signage—those become the new tools of political suppression."

The fear is not hypothetical. Activists organizing the April 5 protests have already reported increased surveillance and delays in permitting. Groups representing immigrants and unhoused communities are reconsidering participation altogether. The EO directs federal agencies to maximize "enforcement of Federal immigration law" and redirect available "law enforcement resources to apprehend and deport illegal aliens in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area," a mandate that has already created a chilling effect among undocumented residents, some of whom now fear that attending a peaceful march could result in deportation. In response, the National Homelessness Law Center warned that the order "will worsen homelessness in D.C., violate rights, and waste resources," especially with the federal push to "promptly remove and clean up all homeless encampments."

Then there is the question of firearms. Nestled within the order is a provision directing local entities to expedite and reduce the cost of concealed carry licenses in the District of Columbia. In a city with some of the country's strictest gun laws, this shift could radically alter the atmosphere of a mass protest. Armed counterprotesters, legally carrying under the new directive, may now appear in greater numbers—creating conditions ripe for intimidation or escalation. Police, too, may respond with heightened aggression, assuming the risk of firearms in the crowd. As one security analyst from Georgetown University put it, "You're introducing legal ambiguity and lethal potential into an already volatile situation."

But the risk of physical violence is just one dimension of the broader threat.

For many organizers, the stakes are not just physical—they're existential. "This is a test run," said Rami Kareem, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Brennan Center for Justice. "What they're doing in D.C. could easily be replicated in Atlanta, Phoenix, or Milwaukee if it succeeds. If people stop showing up out of fear, the right to protest dies quietly, without a single law being passed."

Legal analysts point out that the EO contains intentionally broad language, such as directing agencies to deploy a "more robust Federal law enforcement presence" to ensure "that all applicable quality of life, nuisance, and public-safety laws are strictly enforced." Additionally, the EO mandates "prompt removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments and graffiti on Federal land." These directives could grant law enforcement considerable discretion to interpret and potentially suppress protest gatherings, signage, and activities under the guise of enforcing public safety and beautification measures.

Even before the order, Project 2025 had stirred significant public anxiety about the centralization of federal authority and the erosion of institutional norms. But this EO provides an immediate, tangible mechanism to contain dissent—not just in D.C., but in any city with significant federal presence. As national attention turns toward the capital on April 5, many movement leaders see it as a galvanizing moment: either a line is held in defense of civil resistance, or a line is crossed in the normalization of political suppression. "If people stay home out of fear, it tells them this worked. If we show up in mass, it tells them we still have power," Jennings said. "That choice is still ours."

What's at stake goes far beyond the fate of one demonstration. April 5 could become a barometer for how far Americans are willing to go to resist encroaching authoritarianism—and how far their government is willing to go to stop them. If the demonstrators are met with violence, surveillance, or mass arrests, it may radicalize a new generation of resistance. If they succeed in holding ground peacefully, it may mark the resurgence of a national movement grounded in visibility and defiance.

Either way, this is not just a march—it is a test. Of power, of will, and of what kind of country this is becoming. Washington, D.C. is not only a geographic location; it is the symbolic heart of American democracy. If peaceful protests in the capital can be stifled under a vague mandate of "beautification," it sets a precedent that ripples outward. Critics argue this beauty is being defined in opposition to presence, protest, and poverty. The message is clear: Public dissent may now be treated as public disorder. That message is not lost on organizers, some of whom now fear their demonstration may be remembered not for its power—but for its suppression.

City leaders are in a bind. Mayor Muriel Bowser has offered cautious criticism of the order, noting that her administration already addresses crime and homelessness through existing programs. But the new federal task force was created without local input, and its presence sharply curtails D.C.'s home rule. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton warned that the order strips power from D.C. residents under the guise of national pride. In her statement, she added the order was "thoroughly anti-home rule" and "insulting to the 700,000 D.C. residents who live in close proximity to a federal government, which continues to deny them the same rights afforded to other Americans." Yet legally, city officials may have little recourse. On federal land, the task force's authority is unchecked.

As April 5 approaches, the atmosphere in Washington is one of deep unease. The executive order's timing, scope, and ambiguity suggest that the federal government is not preparing for peaceful civic engagement, but rather girding itself for defiance. If protesters are met not with the protections of the Constitution but with barricades, surveillance, and selective enforcement, then this spring may be remembered not as the moment democracy was defended in the streets—but the moment it was quietly roped off, one barricade at a time.