After meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump repeated his assertion that “the Palestinians have no choice but to leave Gaza.” The utter destruction of buildings and infrastructure is almost incalculable.

Trump’s solution is to depopulate Gaza of Palestinians by sending them to Egypt and Jordan. This would be a continuation of the war crimes in the furtherance of the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, the displacement of so many refugees would result in political instability in both countries and the festering of future conflicts with Israel.

Trump’s insights should be applied to a better, more just and longer lasting solution. If Gazans were to go anywhere during the reconstruction, it should be to the United States. We are the country most responsible for suppling the IDF with the means of blowing up Gaza. We should invite up to 2 million Palestinians giving them Green Cards and a road to citizenship or dual citizenship as is common among Israeli Americans.

We cannot ignore the human costs. We must be deeply committed to supporting the rebuilding of Gaza but also to the rebuilding of human infrastructure by enabling Gazans to live and reconstruct their lives.

Gazans should be welcomed to this country and provided free medical care, and education to make up for the loss of schools, universities and hospitals as a direct result of explosive armaments sent from the United States. They should receive access to employment, and credit to establish businesses given the destruction of Gaza’s commerce. Of course, the people of Gaza would be able to return to their homeland at any time of their choosing.

We must squarely face up to two issues. The first is the obligation by the United States and Israel to pay for the bulk of the cleanup and for the physical reconstruction of Gaza. The U.S. has spent nearly $20 billion on blowing up Gaza at an estimated cost of more than $400,000 for every Gazan killed.

We cannot ignore the human costs. We must be deeply committed to supporting the rebuilding of Gaza but also to the rebuilding of human infrastructure by enabling Gazans to live and reconstruct their lives.

I am certain the American President will lead the country to endorse this plan given his pragmatic insights regarding the scale of destruction and the required relocation of Palestinians. Furthermore, we will have ample human space to welcome Palestinians as the result of Trump’s vigorous program of ethnic cleansing of people currently residing within our borders.

Misattributed quotes and next-level gaslighting aside, we find ourselves yet again at a crossroads in time—a moment demanding serious reflection on the foundational principles that shaped our republic. This is not hyperbole.

For far too many years, most of what we have been willing to believe contradicts the ideals of the figures said to be revered by those we have entrusted with our government.

As to misattributed quotes, we could jump right in with Thomas Jefferson's actual words regarding our shared principles, but let's first reflect on the insights of his revolutionary compatriot turned bitter political rival, John Adams. In a letter dated April 16, 1776—less than three months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Adams shared this wisdom:

Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.

Now, recognizing that those working to recreate our nation—in their own oh-so-very perfect image—may not favor the Federalist Adams, our indispensable second president, let us fast forward some 140 years to Theodore Roosevelt. "Teddy" Roosevelt, a man well-versed in the ideas of our Founding Fathers and our foundational principles, had this to say in a letter dated January 1917:

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

The focus on virtue as the foundation of national character contrasts sharply with the narrative we have been fed by those who, in reality, promote "the things that will destroy America." God only knows why we, the people, have been so accepting of their manipulative tactics instead of insisting upon promoting "the virtues that made America." Regardless, we have once again set ourselves up to watch as policies that overwhelmingly benefit a growing cadre of super-rich are implemented.

Yes, they will fuel their economic fire sufficiently so that some of us will enjoy a few crumbs. But regardless of their justifications, the harsh realities facing the shrinking middle class and the most vulnerable will be disregarded. They'll tell us that our best way forward is to be dragged down some technological path by today's Monied Interests, feeding us an amped-up version of the same greed-driven trickle-down bullshit that we've willfully consumed for nearly half a century. And for good measure, they will, this time, destroy as many ballasts of good governance as they possibly can. Then, their blaze will exhaust itself—leaving behind a stunning path of destruction. Never mind the damage done.

We the People should by now recognize their ways.

Let's now acknowledge that many of our antagonists today would prefer that we conclude this essay with the Anti-Federalist Jefferson's 1801 Inaugural Address, wherein he listed his governing principles and said, "These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment..." However, it seems anything but likely that those currently at the helm of government are willing to acknowledge this in context.

For example, we are far removed from Jefferson's agrarian society, our need for a standing army is without question, and the Monied Interests have evolved beyond anything Jefferson could have imagined. So, we'll conclude, in a moment, with another example of Jeffersonian wisdom. Nonetheless, here's an abbreviated look at Thomas Jefferson's "bright constellation":

• "Equal and exact justice to all…
• Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…
• The support of the state governments in all their rights…
• The preservation of the General government in its whole constitutional vigor…
• Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority…
• A well-disciplined militia…
• The supremacy of the civil over the military authority…
• Economy in the public expence…
• The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith…
• Encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid…
• The diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses…
• Freedom of religion; freedom of the press; and freedom of person…
• and trial by juries impartially selected."

To close, let's turn to the wisdom of an aging Jefferson, as he penned in an 1819 letter:

Of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

We may not yet fully realize it, but we are literally in the process of deliberating (for lack of a better term) our foundational principles, and the chaos to come is going to test our commitment to Jefferson's Rightful Liberty—our foremost foundational principle of liberty and justice for all. We will soon know if we, as a nation, will continue our pursuit of a more perfect union.

The good news is that we, individually and collectively, get to decide which path we will pursue. The choice is ours.

Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed? Are we really to be remembered as the ones who abandoned America's Foundational Principles?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not be confirmed as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. because he is ideologically committed to falsehoods and positions that threaten people’s health and health equity. He is the lethal broken clock who tells the right time for two seconds a day—in his case, about how corporate profiteering can harm health—while poised to wreak havoc and harm the other 23.999999 hours.

As a critical scientist and advocate for health justice, I know that systematically asking who gains from or is harmed by the status quo is one thing, but treating scientific knowledge as a matter of mere opinion and ideology, as if facts and hidden conflicts of interest don’t matter, is another. As aptly stated in a public letter from the new coalition Defend Public Health, signed by over 700 health professionals and scientists, RFK Jr.’s “unfounded, fringe beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world.”

RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy.

Kennedy’s confirmation hearing January 29 didn’t ease those concerns. Confronted with the wilder conspiracy theories he’s embraced—like the claim that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain groups—he mostly soft-peddled or danced around them, rarely giving direct answers. He dodged questions about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal health funding and seemed to have no idea what Federally Qualified Health Centers are (they’re community health centers that provide care to underserved populations, regardless of ability to pay). He made vaguely reassuring statements like, “I am supportive of vaccines,” but waffled when, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confronted him with a child’s onesie sold by Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy founded, that reads, “No Vax, No Problem.”

RFK Jr.’s opposition to profiteering companies is highly selective. In his own words, he’s rooting for “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” His statement, however, ignores the myriad companies and investors aggressively trying to cash in on this list—which includes products repeatedly shown to be either harmful or ineffective, like ivermectin. The key study advocating its use was retracted in December. RFK Jr. also has invited the U.S.’ largest producer of raw milk to be in charge of raw milk policy, despite multiple recalls of this company’s products, most recently because of contamination by bird flu virus. For RFK Jr., opportunistic profiting off of unsafe products is apparently fine, as is having plutocrat supporters keen to slash environmental protections, the social safety net, and of course their own income tax.

RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy. One rare success in reducing unfair differences in rates of disease across social groups—by income, by race or ethnicity, by rural or urban location—has been for vaccine-preventable childhood illness thanks to school vaccination mandates plus such federal programs as Vaccines for Children. Weakening these programs won’t “Make America Healthy Again.”

RFK Jr. falsely pits “infectious” disease against “chronic” diseases without understanding many diseases are both infectious and chronic, including numerous types of cancer (e.g., cervical cancer, liver cancer) and ulcers—and many infectious diseases lead to chronic disease (e.g., HIV/AIDS, long Covid). Yet, Kennedy famously declared that the National Institutes of Health should “take a break” from “infectious diseases,” and pivot to “chronic diseases.” He apparently is unaware that 85% of the current NIH budget already goes to research on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, drug addiction, mental health, aging, child health, and the like.

RFK Jr. should never be given power to implement his fallacious health-harming agendas.

The following is a lightly-edited version of remarks given by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the Senate floor on February 4, 2025.

We find ourselves in a pivotal moment in American history, and millions of Americans, by their actions or lack of action, will determine the future of this country for decades.

In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.

These three multibillionaires are working with Trump because they understand one very important reality. Trump’s policies are designed to make the very richest people in this country even richer.

The Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an authoritarian society where the rule of law, and our Constitution, are being ignored and undermined in order to give more power to the White House and the billionaires who now control our government.

In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very rapidly toward a kleptocracy—where the function of government is not to serve the people of America, but to enrich those who are in power.

I think that today is a good day to recall what one of our great presidents said at Gettysburg in November of 1863. Looking out at a battlefield where thousands of Union soldiers had just sacrificed their lives in the defense of freedom, former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln famously stated:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Under President Donald Trump we are not seeing a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Quite the contrary.

We are seeing a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class. And it’s not being done secretly. It’s right out there for all to see.

Several weeks ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Standing right behind him were the three richest men in the country—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—worth a combined $920 billion. These three men have more wealth than the bottom half of America—170 million people. And I should point out, and this should tell you exactly where we are going as a nation, these three men have become some $232 billion richer since Trump was elected. In just two weeks under Trump their wealth has exploded by $232 billion dollars.

This is how an oligarchic system works. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, and now a key part of the administration, spent over $277 million to get Trump elected. In other words, within a corrupt campaign finance system he helped buy the election for Donald Trump.

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the second and third wealthiest people in our country, both kicked a million each into Trump’s inauguration fund.

And let’s remember that Mr. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, rescinded the endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris of The Washington Post’s editorial board. Mr. Bezos was showing early on that he was willing to bend the knee for Donald Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to settle a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million.

These three multibillionaires are working with Trump because they understand one very important reality. Trump’s policies are designed to make the very richest people in this country even richer.

Since Trump’s election, Mr. Musk has become $154 billion richer, Mr. Bezos has become $35 billion richer, and Mr. Zuckerberg has become $43 billion richer.

I am growing increasingly concerned that in our country, under the leadership of President Trump, we are moving rapidly towards authoritarianism.

And all over this country people are alarmed and shocked by what they are seeing.

Just a few examples.

Last week, Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. As every third grader knows, the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the president.

Let’s be clear. The president can recommend legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding and legislation passed by the U.S. Congress. That is a dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional act.

And I should add that Trump’s blocking of federal funding would have had an horrific impact on millions of Americans who utilize programs like Medicaid, Head Start, community health centers, Meals on Wheels, homeless veterans’ programs, and many, many other initiatives.

Tens of millions of Americans, including some of the most vulnerable people in our country, were impacted by that decision.

But that’s not all.

A few days ago, Trump fired 17 inspectors general—independent government watchdogs that were created by Congress, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, to prevent the abuse of power by the executive branch.

Last week, President Trump fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and in so doing, effectively neutered the only federal agency in America with the authority to hold corporations accountable for illegal union busting and to protect the constitutional right of workers to form a union and to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Not only is this move blatantly illegal, it is exactly what Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, have been fighting for for months. This is a huge gift to the two wealthiest people in our country who are both strongly anti-union.

The president also illegally fired members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the only independent commission in our country that protects workers against discrimination in the workplace.

Further, and this should upset every American regardless of political view, in direct violation of the Constitution and federal law, Trump is intimidating the media with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, and the Des Moines Register. His FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR. Take a deep breath my fellow Americans.

What Trump is essentially saying to every media outlet in America: If you say or do anything that is critical of me, that displeases me, you may be subject to a lawsuit or a federal investigation.

If this is not a direct attack on the First Amendment, the U.S. Constitution, and Freedom of Speech, I don’t know what is.

But that’s not all.

Elon Musk and his unelected minions at DOGE have forced out officials at the Treasury Department and illegally shut down USAID—a program which, among other things, helps feed and provide medical help to starving and desperate children all over the world. Presidents, much less unelected billionaires, do not have the unilateral right to shut down federal agencies established by Congress.

When we talk about the dangerous movement towards authoritarianism let us not forget Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists who injured 174 police officers at the Capitol.

Even worse, Trump is undermining the FBI by investigating the agents there who helped bring these violent criminals to justice.

In other words, what Trump is saying is that violence against police officers, when done in his name is OK, but when law enforcement officers try to hold criminals accountable that is not OK.

Under Trump, we are rapidly moving toward a kleptocracy as well.

Just before Trump was inaugurated, he and his wife Melania launched their own cryptocurrency coins giving them the potential to earn tens of billions of dollars.

If Wall Street CEOs tried to bribe the president with a bag full of money that would be against the law.

But now, they don’t have to do that.

Today, if a multi-billionaire or the head of a foreign country wants to curry favor with the president, all they have to do is buy his cryptocurrency coins and, when they do that, they are directly enriching Donald Trump and the first lady.

That is unacceptable and cannot stand.

So, the question then becomes, where do we go from here?

Instead of moving toward an economy which is designed to benefit the very richest people in our society, we have got to fight hard to create a government that works for all of us, not just Mr. Musk or Mr. Bezos or Mr. Zuckerberg and other multi-billionaires.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, we must not provide more tax breaks to billionaires paid for by huge cuts in Medicaid and other programs that working families and low-income people desperately need.

But let me tell you what we should be doing.

At a time when 85 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured, we have got to do what every major country on Earth does and that is to guarantee healthcare as a human right to every man, woman, and child in this country.

At a time when 1 out of 4 Americans cannot afford the medicine that their doctors prescribe, we have got to end the absurdity of Americans paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

We have got to cut the cost of prescription drugs in half.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. While 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, we must raise that minimum wage to a living wage, at least $17 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos want to make it harder for workers to join unions. Well, we have got to do exactly the opposite. We must pass the PRO Act so that anti-union CEOs cannot act unconstitutionally to deny workers the right to join a union.

At a time when we need the best educated workforce in the world, we need to have the best public schools in the world. And, among other things, that means we need to substantially raise teacher salaries. If we want the best and the brightest to become educators, no teacher in America should earn less than $60,000 a year.

All over this country, we have a major housing crisis. And it’s not just the 800,000 who are homeless. It is millions of working families who are spending 40, 50, or 60% of their limited incomes on housing. Instead of spending almost a trillion dollars a year on a wasteful and bloated Pentagon budget, we have got to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. And when we do that, we put large numbers of people to work at good-paying union jobs.

I hear from Trump supporters that the president won the election and he has been given this huge mandate to do whatever he wants. Well, no president has the right to move us to oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy. But more importantly, let us not forget that while Trump did win this election, he actually received 4 million fewer votes in 2024 than Biden did in 2020 when Biden won the election.

Donald Trump offered a bullying buyout offer to 2.3 million federal workers that strongly implied that they might lose their jobs unless they take it. On the other hand, he also announced that he is expanding the Guantánamo concentration camp to house 30,000 migrants.

The post Not-So-Civil Service first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Not-So-Civil Service appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Federal workers are on the front lines of the Trump-Musk regime’s illegal and destructive orders.

The email sent to federal employees urging them to resign in exchange for uncertain benefits is clearly aimed at purging critical government employees and replacing them with loyalists and ideologues.

The email promises workers up to eight months of pay if they resign by February 6. At first glance, this might sound like a generous offer. But neither Elon Musk nor U.S. President Donald Trump have the legal authority to make such a promise.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, in an email Sunday expressed deep skepticism about the promises.

There is no guarantee workers who accept this offer will get paid through September 30 as promised. Not only is there no funding for that time frame right now, but I personally am deeply skeptical of any offer from a president like Donald Trump who has so consistently shown he will try to stiff workers if it furthers his personal goals and ambitions.

Just ask Elon Musk’s employees at Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter/X, and you’ll find similar disregard for employees.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, points out, federal salaries are funded through the agencies and departments that employees work for—not from the whims of Elon Musk or Donald Trump. Congress must approve any allocation of funds.

Even more troubling: If federal employees take the bait, they may find themselves without pay or legal recourse.

“Musk (and Trump) are violating the law by agreeing to spend money that the administration doesn’t have,” Reich said. “Congress could declare the entire offer illegal—which it is. Then where would you be?”

“May I also add that you shouldn’t trust Trump or Musk.”
Dismantling the Services We Rely on—and Accountability

This isn’t just about bad offers or broken promises—it’s about dismantling the United States government. Federal employees are responsible for maintaining essential services, safeguarding public health, protecting the environment, and upholding the Constitution. The effort to push them out isn’t just about cutting costs; it’s about weakening the integrity of our democratic institutions. That should be clear following the recent firing of inspectors general.

As Reich emphasizes, this is an attempt to install loyalists who are more concerned with personal allegiance than public service. This is a direct threat to the functioning of our democracy. The removal of experienced, skilled civil servants would create dangerous vacancies—places where sycophants and ideologues can do serious harm. If this agenda succeeds, it could pave the way for more aggressive autocratic control.

Solidarity and Resistance Are Key

In response to these threats, know that there is widespread support for federal workers and offers of legal assistance, whistleblower protections, and job-search help for those who feel forced to leave their positions. The importance of this work cannot be overstated. Solidarity in this moment is essential—not only for federal employees but for the future of our democracy.

Here are some of the resources available:

Subreddit for Federal Employees: If you want to see what federal employees are saying when they can express their feelings freely, check out this Subreddit. This is an eye-opening glimpse at the Trump-Musk administration’s profound disruption of our government, and also showcases the deep commitment many federal workers have for upholding democracy and the Constitution.

Civil Service Strong, an organization of pro-democracy groups and unions offering information and resources about how you can protect your rights as an employee of the federal government and protect your safety if attacked. The site includes an FAQ on the Trump administration’s recent “Fork in the Road” mass email encouraging federal employees to quit.

Federal Employee Resource Hub includes whistleblower resources, information on federal employee rights, a guide to filing an appeal, and more.

GAO Whistleblower Resources: How to anonymously report misconduct within government agencies.

The Justice Connection: Formed by employees forced out of their positions at the Justice Dept. to support those still working while facing political pressure or retaliation.

Hatch Amendment: Know your rights to speak out: This publication from the Office of Special Counsel lists activities that are prohibited and permitted for government employees. (Download before it is removed from the web).

If you’re a federal worker, your service is deeply appreciated and essential to our nation’s future. You may feel isolated or uncertain right now, but know that you’re not alone. There are millions of people who value the work you do. Stand strong, and don’t let this offer trick you into giving up your rights or your livelihood.

What You Can Do

Those who don’t work for the federal government can help:

1. Thank a federal worker for their service. Whether that’s your postal carrier, your healthcare provider, or a TSA worker at the airport, let them know that their work is noticed and appreciated, and tell them to stay strong.
2. Share resources like those above with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and others who work in federal government or who knows someone who does. Let them know that support and information is available.
3. Contact your representative and ask them to take a stand against this overreach. Regardless of party, it is their duty to defend the Constitution and the integrity of the federal workforce. If you’re not sure who your representative is, type your zip code in at House of Representatives website. For Senators, call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

This Is the Moment We’ve Been Warned of

The actions being taken by the Trump-Musk regime are not just damaging to federal workers—they are damaging to people throughout our country, our natural environment, and our democratic form of government. This is the fascist takeover we’ve been warned of.

The stakes are historically high. It will take many of us, alone and—even more powerfully—in groups of workers, pro-democracy activists, unions, faith groups, and friends to mount a strong and ethical resistance.

It will be hard work, but if we stand together, we’ll come out stronger and more resilient, clearer about our values, with stronger communities and a more people-centered democracy.

On the night of January 7th, as the Palisades Fire surged to 2,000 acres to the west and the Eaton Fire exploded to 1,000 to the east, I joined thousands fleeing hurricane-force winds that hurled embers for miles. But while I evacuated out of precaution, across Los Angeles, many Angelenos were not as fortunate. Like so many here, I spent those first sleepless nights glued to wall-to-wall news coverage, tracking the fires’ paths. But while flames dominated headlines, a slower crisis burns, one that Los Angeles has yet to confront.

Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat. Entire neighborhoods in Altadena have lost more than homes—they’ve watched their generational wealth turn to rubble. In Pacific Palisades, emergency teams scrambled to stabilize hillsides before landslides erased what remained. With wildfire losses now climbing past $250 billion, one question echoes through the city: Who pays to rebuild? And how can we do it faster, smarter, without sinking deeper into debt?

Los Angeles isn’t the first to face this reckoning. Back in 1997, Grand Forks, North Dakota, suffered a catastrophic flood. Their city was left in ruins, but they had something most cities don’t: the Bank of North Dakota (BND), America’s only state-owned public bank. Within two weeks, the BND funneled around $70 million in credit for emergency operations and rebuilding. While FEMA took months to distribute aid, the BND’s local presence and public mandate allowed it to act with precision. ND mortgage holders got six-month payment pauses. Show me one Wall Street bank that’s offered that kind of breathing room.

Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat.

This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response. Unlike profit-driven institutions, a public bank—owned by a city or state—would reinvest public deposits into local resilience rather than shareholder dividends. Imagine transforming tax dollars into a renewable resource: funding fire-resistant infrastructure, upgrading aging power grids, and keeping families housed during disasters.

Look around Los Angeles today. Insurers flee high-risk areas, leaving families stranded. Meanwhile, we’re sending more than $1.4 billion a year in debt service fees to Wall Street—this staggering sum, outlined in the City’s 2024/25 Adopted Budget (Page R-71), is money that could fortify hillsides or retrofit homes. Governor Newsom’s $2.5 billion wildfire package helps clear debris, but it doesn’t address the bigger question: How do we fund tomorrow’s disasters without predatory loans that bleed the city dry?

A public bank is the answer. Picture the Bank of North Dakota model scaled for a metropolis. Need emergency credit after the next natural disaster? Done. Low-interest loans for small businesses distributing supplies mid-crisis? No delays. By partnering with local lenders, a public bank could bridge the gap for families waiting months or years for insurance payouts.

This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response.

This isn’t fantasy. A national public banking movement is rising. In 2019, California passed the Public Banking Act, clearing the legal path for cities like Los Angeles to establish their own public banks. New York City plans a public bank to fund affordable housing and support minority communities. Florida eyes the model for local control of state resources. From San Francisco to New Jersey, cities and states recognize that megabanks can’t meet the scale of today’s economic and environmental challenges. Public institutions keep dollars local, funding fire-resilient housing, green energy projects, and businesses that anchor communities during crises.

During COVID-19, the Bank of North Dakota proved this again. While Wall Street prioritized corporations, the BND partnered with community banks to quickly deliver relief to small businesses and frontline workers. Los Angeles deserves that same agility. A public bank could centralize disaster funds, slash bureaucratic delays, and ensure every dollar stays local—rebuilding neighborhoods instead of enriching distant shareholders.

Housing offers another critical test. Today, financing affordable projects takes years as developers navigate a maze of private lenders. A public bank could create a housing fast-track fund, offering below-market loans for shovel-ready developments. Interest payments would recycle into future projects, not Wall Street bonuses. Streamlined funding means lower costs, faster construction, and more Angelenos housed before the next disaster strikes.

The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.

Critics argue public banks risk politicization. But the BND’s 105-year track record in a solidly red state disproves this: it's rated A+ by S&P with an 18.2% return on equity in 2023. It’s safer than most big banks and exceptionally stable as a public institution. By law, California’s public banks won’t compete with local community banks, instead, they will partner with them, expanding access to credit in underserved communities.

The money to capitalize a public bank exists. We’ve already raised billions for disaster recovery. The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.

From LA’s wildfires to Asheville’s floods, disasters are intensifying and demand resilience. Public banking offers a blueprint for recovery: leverage public dollars to cut long-term costs, create jobs, and rebuild smarter.

Los Angeles can lead this revolution. By creating the nation’s first major urban public bank, we’ll pioneer a model for cities nationwide. When the next disaster strikes, we won’t be at the mercy of for-profit banks, we’ll have the tools to rebuild ourselves—faster, fairer, and permanently stronger. The alternative is unthinkable: another decade of rubble, debt, and avoidable loss.

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Today we need a nation of Minute Men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of America, cannot succeed with any lesser effort.” — President John F. Kennedy

The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs.

For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”

"As long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late."

And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

— Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious/racial/gender minorities.

— Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of oligarchs funding primary challenges against them that it’s been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. (And now, many say they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families if they fight Trump.)

— And our White House is today occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king.

Trump’s attack on our democracy is an old story, played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation during the past two centuries. It follows an absolutely predictable pattern: You could call it a playbook.

In a democracy, there are four main elements involved in governance: Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and the Press (the Fourth Estate).

While Democrats over the past 50 years or so have focused their efforts on winning elections (Legislative and Executive), the billionaires who own the GOP have directed their attention to using massive amounts of cash to seize control of the unelected branches (Judiciary and Press), a job that can be done with money but doesn’t always require winning elections.

This is a pattern that’s been duplicated in multiple nations that have lost their democracies. Trump and Musk are simply following their instruction manual.

When Viktor Orbán took over Hungary in 2010, he first set out to seize control of the judiciary and the media. He lowered the retirement age for judges, immediately forcing out 57 justices who he replaced with loyalists (an echo of Mitch McConnell’s stealing two Supreme Court seats for Trump).

Then, following the strategy announced last week by Trump and FCC Chair Carr, he sued multiple independent media outlets and attacked the funding of Hungary’s public broadcasting system, shifting control over both into the hands of friendly oligarchs.

With dissenting voices silenced in the media and judges willing to overlook his blatant violations of Hungarian election laws (purging voters, gerrymandering, challenging the votes in opposition-friendly districts), Orbán was able to win every election since.

Vladimir Putin followed a similar script a few years earlier; once he had control of the judiciary and Russia’s media, he was able to stomp all over that country’s new and fragile democratic institutions and intimidate the Russian parliament (the Duma).

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro followed a nearly identical script. As did Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia and Robert Viko in Slovakia.

And now Trump is trying the same, the GOP having seized control of the Supreme Court and much of the nation’s systems of elections.

He’s launched massive lawsuits against most of America’s major legacy media, and his new FCC head has begun investigations of NPR and PBS for accepting “commercials.” Major media outlets are aggressively whitewashing his campaign against American democracy, while NPR and PBS could be brought to heel by Carr’s efforts.

Once these steps are complete and Trump, Musk, and their billionaire and theocratic allies are done gutting our government and cowing our media, it’s likely there will be no turning back.

Which is why Vladimir Putin is so confident that Trump will destroy our traditional alliances and align America with Russia, once he’s fully consolidated his power. He told Russian media over the weekend that it wouldn’t be long before Trump was as powerful as himself:

“And all of them, you will see — it will happen quickly, soon — they will all stand at the feet of the master and will wag their tails a little. Everything will fall into place.”

However, there are two countries of note — and possible examples for America — that tried to go down this path but had it interrupted, throwing them back into democracy: Poland and South Korea.

In Poland, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party failed to destroy the independent media, even though they’d succeeded in seizing the judiciary and rigged election rules to their favor. Because roughly 70% of Poland’s media stayed in independent hands, his party lost power in the 2023 elections and Poland is now returning to democracy.

Similarly, in South Korea their President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to declare a state of emergency and outlaw his opposition Democratic Party. He’d failed, however, to first seize control of South Korea’s independent media, so people showed up in the streets demanding his arrest; he sits in prison today.

This all highlights the importance of independent media, from old-line publications like The New Republic to new but blossoming upstarts like Substack, along with all of us fighting hard to protect the neutrality of NPR and PBS.

The American Revolution was an all-hands-on-deck affair, bringing together conservatives like Alexander Hamilton, liberals like Thomas Paine, military guys like George Washington, and intellectuals like Jefferson and Adams.

The Lincoln Project and other never-Trump movements show the commitment of true conservatives to democracy. Increasingly, liberals, military and law enforcement people, and intellectuals across the spectrum are joining the effort to salvage and then revive our republic. We are this generation’s Minute Men.

We’ve done this before; we can do it again: It’s going to take a hell of a fight, though, given that we’re up against the richest men on the planet. But as long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late.

Pass it on.

President Donald Trump is making good on his promised threat to “dismantle Government bureaucracy” and “cut wasteful expenditures,” issuing orders to choke off the funding pipeline for federal grants and assistance programs.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Because government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits baked into U.S. law and tax policy, forms the very foundation of Trump’s own wealth. The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.

Trump became wealthy the traditional American way: he was born into it. As most thoroughly described in Samuel Stein’s excellent 2019 book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Donald’s father Fred’s real estate empire began with Brooklyn and Queens housing developments financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For some of those Trump developments, the path was literally cleared by government demolition of existing homes and buildings. Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.

That was not the only investigation targeting Fred Trump’s government-funded properties. His Maryland buildings were so decrepit and his ignoring of the residents’ pleas for help and city orders to repair so blatant that the elder Trump was actually arrested in 1976 for operating a “slum property.” A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C”—for Colored—so they could be rejected out of hand.

Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.

That federal housing discrimination lawsuit, filed in 1973, did not just name Fred Trump. It also included the company’s president, his 27-year-old son Donald.

Donald Trump soon followed in his father’s footsteps by exploiting government programs to develop his buildings. The benefits included an unprecedented 40-year tax abatement, funding that was designed to support low-income neighborhoods, sweetheart deals to privatize public land, and government bonds used to finance his developments. “Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” a New York deputy mayor told the New York Times in 2016.

For example, the famous Trump Tower benefited from over $163 million in tax abatements provided by New York politicians whose campaigns Trump helped fund. That money was part of what the Times estimated was nearly a billion dollars Trump received in government grants and tax breaks for his New York properties alone, not counting the government benefits for his properties in Florida, Nevada, and Atlantic City. "Donald Trump's business wouldn't be possible but for major government subsidies,” Timothy O'Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told NPR.

Trump’s dependence on government funding is more than matched by the taxpayer dollars hoovered up by his designated government waste czar Elon Musk. As CNN has reported, the world’s richest person reached his status thanks to government loans and contracts that propped up Tesla and SpaceX in their vulnerable beginning stages. Musk still rakes in billions of dollars from government contracts and government-mandated payments to Tesla by other automakers.

“The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the U.S. government,” tech analyst Daniel Ives told CNN.

We know that the Trump-Musk attacks on federal government programs are deeply harmful to vulnerable people, devoted civil servants, and communities and organizations trying to make the world a better place. Less well known is that Trump and Musk both owe their fortunes and careers to the very government spending they demonize now. They used government programs to climb to great heights, and now are intent on pulling up the ladder behind them.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once said that a hypocrite politician is one who cuts down a redwood tree, then stands on its stump to deliver a speech about conservation. When the wealthy and powerful Donald Trump mounts his attacks on government programs, he does so while standing on a platform built by government largesse.

Airing LIVE at 10 am Eastern time this morning, then Streaming 24-7 thereafter:

Dispirited and depressed, the Democratic Party doesn’t have a target audience, a message to send it, or a strategy to opposing Trumpism. Highlighting their dismal situation, new ideas were notably missing at a recent election for new DNC chair, where party insiders insisted that Biden and Harris ran great campaigns that failed to get their great message across to the voters and that nothing should fundamentally change. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA Republicans are manic and energized, running roughshod over institutional and constitutional norms, and capturing our national attention.

Can a major political party survive without a core constituency or firm ideological underpinning? Is waiting for Trump to overreach, provoke a backlash or die a feasible strategy? Will Democrats go the way of the Whigs?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss the future of the Democratic Party. Does it have one? If so, what does it look like? Joining is guest Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune.

The post TMI Show Ep 71: Democrats: Is There a Road Back? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 71: Democrats: Is There a Road Back? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The first few days of the Trump administration have made it abundantly clear that lowering costs for the American people is taking a back seat to empowering billionaires and weaponizing the government to wage right-wing culture wars.

As Chair Lina Khan leaves the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), I’d like to highlight what service to the American people looks like by highlighting the FTC’s accomplishments over the past four years under her leadership.

Over the last four years, the FTC has consistently delivered for consumers, lowering costs and creating a fairer, more honest, and more competitive economy. Under Chair Khan’s leadership, the FTC took strong actions to make prescription drugs and other health care more affordable, improve access to housing, protect workers, help small businesses, keep kids and teens safer online, protect childrens’ and all Americans’ data privacy, and tackle threats to consumers created by artificial intelligence.

I praise and applaud the spectacular work of the FTC under Chair Khan’s leadership and thank the dedicated staff of the agency for their exemplary service to the American people.

Under Chair Khan, the FTC banned hotels and sellers of sports and concert tickets from charging American consumers junk fees, saving consumers $11 billion over the next decade. They finalized a rule making it simple to "click to cancel," ensuring that consumers don’t get trapped into paying for subscriptions they can’t escape. The FTC also obtained $1.5 billion in consumer refunds over the past four years, ranging from tax preparation companies to corporate landlords. And they banned noncompete clauses to increase the average American worker’s wages by $524 a year.

Chair Khan and the rest of the FTC fervently protected the personal data of millions of Americans by aggressively policing the illegal collection, use, and sale of consumers’ sensitive data. They banned data brokers from selling consumers’ location data, stopped health apps from sharing consumer health data for advertising purposes, and limited companies’ ability to profit from kids’ personal data.

The FTC stood up to pharma’s attempts to unlawfully inflate the price of lifesaving medications including EpiPens and inhalers. Their work reduced out-of-pocket costs for inhalers from $500 to $35 and held three of the largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) accountable for engaging in anticompetitive practices that inflated the cost of insulin.

I praise and applaud the spectacular work of the FTC under Chair Khan’s leadership and thank the dedicated staff of the agency for their exemplary service to the American people. Their commitment to battling corporate greed and protecting consumers should serve as an inspiring example to the new administration.

Ezra Klein has become a very influential political commentator. He listens well to the experts with whom he regularly speaks, and he thinks for himself. He is right about many things. But his most recent New York Times column, “Don’t Believe Him,” is too clever by at least half, minimizing the danger posed by the Trump administration at a time when the danger has never been greater.

Klein’s argument is simple: Trump’s current onslaught against “the deep state” is less a show of strength than a Steve Bannon-inspired effort to “flood the zone” with executive orders and monopolize public attention in the absence of either a strong governing majority or a clear governing agenda. Klein notes that some of these efforts have already failed, and he insists that many more will prove ineffective. While Trump poses as an all-powerful dictator, Klein insists, he is merely working overtime to keep American citizens “off balance” because his power is limited, and his “overreach” will eventually produce an electoral reckoning.

Klein is not the only commentator to emphasize Trump’s limits. And limits there surely are. At the same time, I am aware of no serious commentator who has attributed to Trump God-like powers to literally dictate the future.

Trump is no God.

But he is the recently installed President of the United States, and thus the occupant of the single most powerful political office in the world, invested by Constitution and statute with enormous authority as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief. Klein insists that Trump’s executive orders are a symptom of his inability to govern via legislation. But his executive orders carry enormous weight, and are already wreaking havoc and engendering confusion and anxiety.

There will be chaos. There will be ineptitude. There will be a surplus of cruelty.

It is only the second week of Trump’s four-year term—with over two hundred weeks to come– and he has already gutted key government agencies responsible for protecting civil rights and public health; issued executive orders that threaten public education and academic freedom; and generated enormous insecurity and fear among the tens of millions of Americans who are in the actual or potential cross hairs of his promise to detain and deport what he calls “illegals.” He has gotten major media outlets to bend the knee. And has used his attention-mongering bully pulpit to defame and bully critics, and to poison public communication with lies about how “DEI” is responsible for California wildfires and DC plane crashes.

Trump is not as powerful as he says he is (what megalomaniacal narcissist is as powerful as he imagines himself to be?).

But who is more powerful?

Does faith that Trump will inevitably overreach generate counter-power? Does credulity about mid-term elections, or encomiums to the Constitution or the civic virtue of ordinary Americans? Can the courts be relied on to countermand the wide range of Trump’s dangerous political appointments and executive orders, which fall pretty squarely within the extraordinary discretionary power that U.S. presidents possess?

It is comforting to imagine that Trump faces the normal legal and political constraints that confront every president.

A recent Times editorial criticizing Trump’s barrage of executive orders states this view well: “American voters gave President Trump and his party the right to push forward the agenda he campaigned on. If the president wants to shrink the federal work force, end programs he disagrees with or revamp oversight, he has the license to pursue those efforts. Yet he must do so legally and by operating inside the system of checks and balances that has guided the country since its founding.”

But what is the force of the “must” here?

Surely Trump must proceed legally if he wishes to respect the law. But, as seems clear, he does not wish to respect the law. Must he? Who or what is going to make him?

Indeed, it is delusional to believe that Trump’s campaign agenda is one thing, and his lawlessness something else. For Trump’s entire campaign centered on retribution and revenge, on destroying an opposition described as vermin, and on completely overthrowing institutions that he described as tyrannical. Trump is doing what he promised to do and what he won the November election by promising to do—and that he made other bogus claims about inflation and prosperity is completely beside the point.

Trump’s blanket pardon to over 1500 J-6 insurrectionists was simply the most outrageous expression of a contempt for liberal democracy that has long defined his political persona. At a televised Univision Town Hall in the weeks before the election, Trump offered this defense of the J-6 insurrectionists: “They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came . . . There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. . . . that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands.”

Read that again. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.” He is talking about the Capitol police. “They” were armed. But “we”—the insurrectionists”—were not. Could it have been said any more clearly? He was telling the whole world where he stood—with the mob who stood with him, and against due process and law enforcement and the constitutional democracy.

Is Trump omnipotent? No.

Will he succeed in doing all that he has promised? It’s not likely—though he might very well succeed in doing much of what he has promised, and he is already off to a strong start.

He has the power to fire two dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on J-6, and to purge thousands of FBI agents and career Justice staff who worked in support of the J-6 prosecutions. And he’s done it.

He has the power to fire 18 independent inspector generals. And he’s done it.

He has the power to deploy U.S. Army personnel and equipment to the southern border, and to issue an executive order “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity.” And he has done it.

He has directed the Department of Education to stamp down on “radical Marxist indoctrination” in public schools.

He has directed the Justice Department to stop enforcement of consent decrees designed to reform police departments with a track record of racism and police brutality, and to limit the enforcement of the FACE Act that protects reproductive health facilities from harassment and obstruction.

His administration only just begun to severely interrupt the normal workings of key federal agencies, from the Center for Disease Control to USAID to the Treasury Department itself.

There will be chaos. There will be ineptitude. There will be a surplus of cruelty.

And there will be threats of harm, and actual harm, to scores of millions of people living in the U.S., whether they be citizens or green card holders or undocumented immigrants.

And there will be a relentless rhetorical assault on the norms, laws, and institutions that provide protection for the civil freedom and political legitimacy of all of those that Trump deems “enemies of the people.”

It is possible that effective political opposition may eventually be mounted by a reinvigorated Democratic Party—though I would not bet on it happening any time soon.

But it is inevitable that Trump will exercise the tremendous executive power in his possession to poison public discourse and destroy the foundations of responsible public policy.

Trump is a liar and an autocrat. There is no reason to trust anything he says or to support anything he does. But there is every reason to believe him when he promises to “annihilate” his opponents and to advance a xenophobic and authoritarian vision of “American Greatness.” Because he has already begun to do exactly this. And he is just getting started.

Understand this: The reason Trump has raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico is not to have more bargaining leverage to get better deals for the United States from Canada or from Mexico.

Hours before the Canadian tariffs went into effect, Trump was asked if there was anything Canada could do to stop them. “We’re not looking for a concession,” Trump said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon. “We’ll just see what happens, we’ll see what happens.”

The real reason Trump has raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico is to show the world that he’s willing to harm (smaller) economies even at the cost of harming America’s (very large) economy.

The point is the show — so the world knows it’s dealing with someone who’s willing to mete out big punishments. Trump increases his power by demonstrating he has the power and is willing to use it.

The same with deporting, say, Colombians or Brazilians in military planes, handcuffed and shackled. If, say, Colombia or Brazil complains about their treatment, so much the better. Trump says, without any basis in fact, that they’re criminals. Then he threaten tariffs. If Colombia backs down, Trump has once again demonstrated his power.

Why did Trump stop foreign aid? Not because it’s wasteful. In fact, it helps stabilize the world and reduces the spread of communicable diseases. The real reason Trump stopped foreign aid is he wants to show he can.

Why is he disregarding (or threatening to tear up) treaties and agreements (the Paris Agreement, NATO, whatever)? Not because such treaties and agreements are bad for America. To the contrary, they’re in America’s best interest.

The real reason Trump is tearing up treaties is they tie Trump’s hands and thereby limit his discretion to mete out punishments and rewards.

Don’t think of these as individual “policies.” Think of them together as shows of Trump’s strength.

If Canada or Mexico retaliates, he’ll retaliate against them with even bigger tariffs.

If some senior Republican members of Congress object that he’s stepping on congressional prerogatives, so what? It’s an opportunity to show them who’s boss.

If a federal court temporarily stops him, so what? He’ll go right on doing it and demonstrate that the courts are powerless to stop him.

Look behind what’s happening and you’ll see that Trump is employing two techniques to gain more power than any U.S. president has ever wielded.

The first is to demonstrate that he can mete out huge punishments and rewards.

It doesn’t matter if the punishment or reward is justified. A 25 percent tariff on Canada? Hello?

It’s a show of strength.

If prices skyrocket in America for oil and lumber from Canada or for fruits and vegetables from Mexico, no problem for Trump. Most Americans don’t understand how tariffs work, anyway. Trump will blame Canada and Mexico. And then threaten them with, say, 50 percent tariffs. Kabam!

Which brings us to the second technique Trump is using to expand his power: unpredictability.

What makes an abusive parent or spouse, or an abusive dictator, or Trump, especially terrifying? They’re unpredictable. They lash out in ways that are hard to anticipate.

So, anyone potentially affected by their actions gives them extra-wide berth — vast amounts of obedience in advance.

Trump keeps everyone guessing.

He demands that Denmark sell Greenland to the United States. He chews out the CEO of the Bank of America at Davos for allegedly discriminating against conservatives. He fires independent inspectors general. He purges the Department of Justice of career civil servants who prosecuted cases against him. He attacks birthright citizenship.

What’s next? Who knows? That’s the whole point.

How else to explain the bizarre deference — cowardice — we’re seeing among CEOs, the media, almost all Republican and even some Democratic lawmakers? Presumably, they’re all saying to themselves: “He could do anything, so let’s be especially careful.”

Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg kiss his derriere. Bill Gates is “frankly impressed” with him. Jamie Dimon, chief of JPMorganChase, decides he’s “not all wrong.”

Nearly 50 House Democrats support a bill targeting undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation. What?

In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that sometimes it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness” (Discourses on Livy, book 3, chapter 2). In his 1962 book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, futurist Herman Kahn argued that to “look a little crazy” might be an effective way to induce an adversary to stand down.

The “rule of law” is all about predictability. We need predictability to be free.

But much of what Trump is doing is either illegal yet will take months or years before the courts decide so, or is in the gray area of “probably illegal but untested by the courts.” Which suits his strategy just fine.

The media calls it “chaos,” which is how various people and institutions experience it.

The practical consequence is that an increasing number of so-called “leaders” — in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, and around the world — are telling their boards, overseers, trustees, or legislatures: “We have to give Trump whatever he wants and even try to anticipate his wants, because who knows how he’ll react if we don’t?”

Together, these two techniques — big demonstrations of discretionary power to reward or punish, and wild uncertainty about when or how he’ll do so — expand Trump’s power beyond the point any president has ever pushed power.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is Trump so obsessed with enlarging his power?

Hint: It’s not about improving the well-being of average Americans and certainly not about making America great again (whatever that means).

Yes, he’s a malignant narcissist and sadist with an insatiable lust for power who gets pleasure out of making others squirm.

But there’s something else.

The bigger his demonstrable power and the more unpredictably he wields it, the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both in the United States and elsewhere.

I’m referring to America’s billionaires, such as Elon Musk and the 13 other billionaires Trump has installed in his regime, as well as the 744 other billionaires in America, and the 9,850 Americans with at least $100 million in net worth.

Together, these individuals have a huge storehouse of wealth. Many are willing to trade some of it to gain even more, and to tie down what they have more securely.

They give Trump (and his family) business deals, information, campaign money, and positive PR (propaganda). In return, he gives them tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and suspensions of antitrust.

I’m also referring to oligarchs in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. He gives them special trade deals, energy deals, intelligence deals, access to global deposits of riches; or he threatens to hold them back. In return, they give him (and his family) business deals, information, support in political campaigns, and more covert propaganda.

This is Trump’s game: Huge demonstrations of power that’s wielded unpredictably. They’re eliciting extraordinary deals for Trump and his family, domestically and worldwide.

Trump says he’s doing this for American workers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He’s doing this for himself and for the world’s oligarchy, which, in turn, is busily siphoning off the wealth of the world.

How to stop this? The first step is to understand it.

“Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!

Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:

Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!

Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:

Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.

But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:

If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.

But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”

So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?

All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!

President Donald Trump’s “shock and awe” assault on virtually every major institution in Washington has been, to a degree, successful. There’s a perverse logic behind his radical cabinet appointments, widespread firings and threats to the federal workforce, and his seemingly scattershot Executive Orders that upset apple-carts up and down the street. Like President George W. Bush’s 2003 “shock and awe” blitz of Baghdad at the start of the Iraq war, Trump’s intent is an overwhelming show of power, hitting on multiple fronts in order to disorient and demoralize his opponents.

While most of Trump’s actions have been focused on the domestic front, and have served their purposes, he upped the ante by throwing in a few foreign policy zingers for good measure. He threatened to take back the Panama Canal, to force Denmark to sell him Greenland, and to annex Canada into the US. As reactions from Panama, Denmark, and Canada have made clear, none of Trump's foreign policy “tests” and challenges have had the same impact or success as his bullying forays into domestic policy.

In yet another quixotic foreign policy venture, Trump threw a bombshell into the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He proposed that before the reconstruction of Gaza could begin it would be necessary to “clean out Gaza.” It’s been reported that in separate conversations with Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Sisi, Trump pressed both to accept the bulk of Palestinians from Gaza, with Albania and Indonesia being tapped as backups to resettle others.

If Trump’s goal was to shake things up and provoke a reaction, it flopped. None of the countries mentioned have agreed to participate in this bizarre scheme. And beyond a simple rejection, Palestinians have pretty much ignored Trump’s bait, largely owing to their preoccupation with the emotional return to “their rubble” in Gaza’s north and with fighting off an increasingly aggressive occupation in the West Bank.

Let’s be clear: If phase one of this ceasefire holds and moves on to phases two and three, when reconstruction is supposed to begin, some serious issues must be confronted. For example, there are two million homeless Palestinians and hundreds of thousands of demolished homes and buildings. It is estimated that it will take at least two or three years to remove or repurpose the rubble, and decades to build sufficient housing to accommodate those whose homes have been destroyed.

If one didn’t know Trump, or his allies in Israel, one might think he was making a compassionate appeal to neighbors to shelter the homeless Palestinians until Gaza was ready to receive them. But that assumption doesn’t pass the smell test for several reasons. Trump hasn’t given any indication that he is moved by the suffering of the Palestinians. What he finds more appealing are the prospects of building a resort on Gaza’s shores. At the same time, Netanyahu’s coalition has made it clear that they want to evict the Palestinians from Gaza.

Given this, Trump’s “suggestion” that Palestinians be moved to Egypt and Jordan seems to be more like providing his blessing for a new Nakba. The first Nakba of 1948 saw the forced eviction of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes followed by Israel’s demolition of over 420 Palestinian villages to ensure that they couldn’t return. This second Nakba would reverse the process, with Israel first demolishing entire residential areas in Gaza and then “transferring” 2,000,000 Palestinians out of their country.

If we’ve learned anything in dealing with Netanyahu, his coalition and their enablers in Washington, it’s best never to assume that they won’t do the worst thing possible. Trump may be attempting to transfer his “shock and awe” to the Middle East or innocently floating an idea of transfer to facilitate reconstruction. But more likely he is floating a “trial balloon” for his friend Netanyahu, to test the region’s acceptance of a genocidal transfer plan to “solve” the Palestinian problem.

As I noted, with so much demanding their attention, neither Palestinians nor their supporters across the Arab World have reacted in full fury to Trump’s “suggestion.” Nor has a plan been proposed to address how to clear the rubble and rebuild with two million Palestinians under foot.

For any such relocation and reconstruction plan to be accepted, at least two conditions must be met. Israel must fully withdraw from Gaza, surrendering control of access and egress from the territory. This precondition is imperative so that Palestinians can feel confident that if they leave Gaza, they are guaranteed the right to return. Another problem to be addressed is that some Palestinians returning from the south to the north are having difficulty identifying where their homes once stood. To avoid confusion or conflict, if municipal records no longer exist, an effort must be made to map Gaza, so that Palestinians can establish the location of their residence or business.

Without ironclad assurances of return and a plan to facilitate return to specific locations, efforts at relocation and reconstruction instead of solving a problem will only create deeper ones.

For over a century, Palestinians have been pawns played by Western powers and the Zionist movement. They have been dismembered, dispossessed, and dispersed among the nations. Through it all, their national identity and attachment to their lands has only become stronger. Because of this, they’ve remained a persistent thorn in the side of those who oppress them. It’s time for the US to recognize this reality and instead of compounding Palestinian suffering, we should develop a humane plan to end Israel’s veto over ending the occupation and implementing long-denied Palestinian rights.

In raids reminiscent of the “January 6” Proud Boys attack on the U.S. Capitol four years ago, unelected, unvetted, and without federal government security clearance, the Trump-anointed head of the yet unapproved Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk and his henchmen are wreaking havoc in government offices with sensitive personal data of all U.S. citizens.

Last week, Musk’s blitzkrieg team gained access to sensitive Treasury data including the Social Security and Medicare customer payment system. Access to the system is closely held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of U.S. citizens who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds, and other payments from the federal government.

The responsibility for ensuring payments are accurate is on individual agencies, not the relatively small staff of civil servants at the Treasury Department’s Office of Fiscal Services, which is responsible for making more than one billion payments per year. The office disbursed more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023.

Career Department of Treasury Senior Official Forced Out of Job of Ensuring Massive Data Security

After receiving the demand from Musk and his DOGE operatives for access to the extremely sensitive data the Department of Treasury’s on Friday acting Deputy Secretary David Lebryk resigned from his position at Treasury after more than 30 years of service.

The previous weekend, Lebryk had been pushed by Tom Krause—the chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group and a member of Musk’s blitzkrieg team—for entry into the federal payments system. Lebryk refused and then was subsequently put on administrative leave and then forced to resign.

In response to Lebryk’s resignation, Musk responded on February 1 to a post on his social media platform X: “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”

In Musk and Trump styles, Musk provided NO evidence for his allegation.

Senator Ron Wyden Pushes Back on Musk’s Politically Motivated Access to Highly Sensitive Financial Programs and Data

Also on Friday, after hearing about the DOGE raid on the Office of Financial Services, Senator Ron Wyden, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outraged that “officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy.”

Sen. Wyden pushed back against DOGE operatives, saying “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Writing on social media on Saturday, Wyden said that “sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE *full* access to this system, Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it."

In a four-page letter dated January 31, 2025, Wyden demanded answers from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent following a report that personnel affiliated with Musk sought access to the highly sensitive Treasury Department payment system. That system, which is maintained by non-political staff, disperses trillions of dollars each year, such as Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax credits for individuals and businesses, grants and payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk-owned companies.

Senator Wyden wrote to Trump’s new Secretary of the Treasury:

“I write regarding disturbing reports that officials associated with Elon Musk and the so called U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) attempted to gain access to systems that control payments to millions of American citizens, including Social Security, Medicare and tax refunds. A confrontation over access apparently resulted in the abrupt resignation of David Lebryk, a career non-partisan Treasury official who recently had been named acting Secretary of the Treasury by President Trump.

These reports are particularly concerning given incidents earlier this week in which Medicaid portals in all 50 states were shut down along with other crucial payment programs, following the Trump Administration illegally issuing an order to freeze all grant and loan payments.

As you are aware, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion in annual payments to households, businesses and other entities nationwide. These payment systems process more than a billion payments annually and are responsible for the distribution of Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, payments to federal employees and contractors, including competitors of Musk-owned companies, and thousands of other functions.

To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy.

I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs.

I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission critical systems.

Whether intentional or unintentional, failure of these payment systems could stop Social Security checks from being sent to retirees who need to pay bills and buy food and drugs. It could stop paychecks from being sent to our troops and their families. As you well know, Americans are in the middle of tax filing season, with many counting on tax refunds that they are legally owed by the government.

Most importantly, the federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.

Accordingly, I am deeply concerned by the possibility that Elon Musk and a cadre of other unknown DOGE personnel are seeking to gain access to and potentially control the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to carry out a political agenda that clearly involves violating the law. It appears that Musk’s behavior is forcing out highly qualified and experienced career public servants in order to get his way and fulfill Trump’s goal of eviscerating the federal budget, including potentially by cutting social security and Medicare benefits for millions of Americans who are already struggling to pay their bills or buy groceries.

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China -- a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Musk now has access to data of all U.S. government employees with no oversight for cybersecurity issues Musk can cause.

DOGE operatives gained access to this Treasury payment system on Friday, the same day that an official at the Office of Personnel Management revealed that Musk operatives had locked career civil servants out of a computer system containing the personal information of federal employees. The action of this group of DOGE operatives, including Musk, is part of the Trump administration's efforts to assert authoritarian control over the federal government.

An Office of Personnel Management (OPM) official told Reuters that "we have no visibility" into what Musk aides "are doing with the computer and data systems," and "that is creating great concern. There is no oversight and it creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."

Earlier this week, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, warned that Trump "is trying every trick he and his Project 2025 cronies can think of to circumvent established civil service protections so they can purge the civil service of experts and replace them with political loyalists."

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Trump made good on his threat to slap tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada over the weekend. All imports from China now face a 10% duty. It’s 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada. Canadian oil, natural gas and electricity, will be taxed 10%. Trump’s order includes a mechanism to escalate the rates charged by the U.S. against retaliation by the other countries, raising the specter of an even more severe economic disruption. Trump demanded that the three nations to stop the manufacture and export of fentanyl and that Canada and Mexico reduce illegal immigration into the U.S.

The tariffs could cause inflation to worsen. They are likely to cause turmoil in supply chains and have an impact on financial markets, though not immediately.

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss Trump’s tariffs and their impacts on your life.

The post TMI Show Ep 70: Tariff Terror! first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 70: Tariff Terror! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Many people are nervously awaiting the fate of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, under the new administration. If the ACA is repealed or restricted, countless women in abusive relationships could be forced to risk losing their spouse's healthcare coverage should they decide to leave.

For millions of Americans, healthcare is tied to jobs or marriages, creating dangerous dependencies. In 2023, over 60% of Americans under age 65 relied on employer-sponsored health insurance. Of these, one-quarter of women under 65 received their health insurance through a spouse’s plan.

I witnessed the devastating consequences of this firsthand during my 10 years working with a governmental agency dedicated to supporting individuals in “high-risk” domestic violence situations—cases where abuse was severe, frequent, and life-threatening. In this role, I provided crisis intervention, safety planning, and emotional support to survivors navigating unimaginable challenges. One woman I worked with called me from the doctor’s office one afternoon in tears. She had just been treated for a fractured eye socket. Her partner had thrown her against a wall the night before. While she hadn’t disclosed the cause of her injury to the medical staff, she had shared the truth with me.

Today, healthcare access is largely determined by employment and marital status, reinforcing economic inequality, gender-based harm, and rigid social roles.

Her distress, however, wasn’t about the medical care she received. It was about the idea of losing access to that very care if she ever left her partner. Ironically, the same healthcare that tended to her physical and emotional wounds was tied to her abuser’s job. Without him, she and her children would lose their health insurance entirely.

This tragic irony is the daily reality for countless individuals across the United States. For people in abusive, coercive, or manipulative relationships, healthcare tied to marriage gives abusers significant leverage. Leaving an abusive partner is never a simple decision, but the threat of losing health insurance—often for their children as well as themselves—makes it even harder. Survivors are forced to weigh their personal safety against access to life-saving care.

Employer-sponsored health insurance wasn’t always the norm. Before World War II, Americans typically paid out of pocket for medical procedures. But in the 1940s, wage controls during wartime prevented employers from raising salaries, so they began offering health insurance as a perk to attract and retain workers. Over time, this temporary solution became a default system, expanding to include dependent and spousal coverage as societal norms emphasized “family-centric” policies.

What began as a short-term fix has since created a web of unintended consequences. Today, healthcare access is largely determined by employment and marital status, reinforcing economic inequality, gender-based harm, and rigid social roles.

For survivors of domestic violence, this system compounds an already harrowing situation. The research shows that approximately 99% of domestic violence survivors experience financial abuse. Healthcare is often one of the financial tools used to exert control. Survivors may be blocked from accessing care, forced to remain in harmful relationships, or deprived of medical resources if they attempt to leave.

But the problem doesn’t end with domestic violence. The employer- and spousal-based healthcare system pressures people to conform to outdated family roles, leaving out millions who live outside traditional employment or family structures. For example, why shouldn’t someone be able to add a sibling, an elderly parent, or a close friend to their health insurance plan? Our narrow definitions of “family” exclude many from the support they need during life’s most challenging moments.

The good news is that change is possible. While we may not yet be at a point where we can fully separate healthcare from jobs and marriages, we are at a critical juncture where we can challenge the status quo and push for meaningful reform.

The Affordable Care Act was a significant step forward, but public options remain prohibitively expensive for many Americans. On average, employer-sponsored plans cost workers around $6,200 annually for family coverage, while public plans, without subsidies, can be more expensive. Closing this gap through expanded subsidies or premium caps must be a priority.

Current laws offer some protections. For example, domestic violence survivors qualify for health insurance enrollment outside standard open enrollment periods under the ACA and many private plans. But these policies are undermined by prohibitive costs and complex administrative processes, creating unnecessary barriers for those already in crisis.

Administrative barriers like these need reform. The ACA’s rollout was marred by technical issues, and today, many Americans still face confusing, inefficient systems that discourage participation. Streamlining the enrollment process and raising public awareness of available options would go a long way toward ensuring equitable access.

Long-term, we must move toward a system where healthcare access is no longer tied to employment or romantic relationships. Universal healthcare, or at least a robust public option, would give Americans the freedom to leave jobs or relationships without fear of losing coverage. No one should have to choose between their health and their safety, or between financial security and their autonomy.

Donald Trump has a habit of blaming everything that goes wrong on “woke” liberal Democratic and diversity equity inclusion policies. This became especially laughable after he blamed DEI for the collision of a military helicopter and a passenger jet, killing 67 people in Washington.

The post All-Purpose Scapegoat first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post All-Purpose Scapegoat appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Despite everything U.S. President Donald Trump has said and done, Democrats are still delusional.

I keep hearing things like, “He can’t run again.” “We no longer need to [find a way to] beat him.” “Eventually there will be a post-Trump.” Yes. When he dies. If he dies. I’m starting to believe as he probably does: that he’s immortal. That’s probably what keeps him going. Pure will and rage. But until then—his death—he will remain our opponent to beat, the biggest threat to America, to democracy, and to the world order.

I laugh at the thought of him making way for Vice President JD Vance, whom he clearly despises—and often humiliates—let alone a Democrat. No, he won’t make way for anyone. “Over my dead body,” as they say, or if at some point in the near future he’s so demented—he’s not far off—he can no longer pretend to be sane, and can be wheeled out of the White House, a senile Hannibal Lecter, scowl gone, blank stare on his face.

Even if some or all of Trump’s maneuvers are deemed—or indeed are—unconstitutional, will that stop him?

It’ll go a little something like this, and yes, feel free to scoff. I’m but a writer, doing as a writer does: stressing, speculating, imagining worlds and situations that might prove nothing more than pure fiction. I hope so, although so often writers—especially fiction writers—get it right. At the very least, I hope to widen my reader’s eyes, force them to think….

So much of what I’ve feared has already come to pass, and at this point I simply beg that the worst be considered and prepared for. Without a sense of urgency—of terror—the status quo of apathy and acceptance will remain. As William Butler Yeats writes, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In three years time or sooner, when the majority of Americans, including many of Trump’s own voters, are fed up with him; the chaos he has sowed at home and abroad; the broken promises, namely the increased prices of everything, his tariffs and tax cuts a disaster for everyone except the very wealthy; the loss of healthcare; the loss of labor or a loved one or a business or a job or an education to deportation or violence or budget cuts, he will wage a war.

Alongside Israel and similarly-immortal, criminal-in-arms Benjamin Netanyahu, he will wage a war against Iran, hoping Vladimir Putin and Russia will be too caught up in Ukraine, still, to care; see Putin’s failure to help Bashar Al-Assad in Syria.

Perhaps a deal by then will have been made: America will no longer support Ukraine. America, perhaps, will withdraw from NATO, as France did in 1966. Trump hates NATO, as we know. He hates all such international agreements and organizations, already withdrawing—for the second time—from The Paris agreement, as well as from the World Health Organization... A new deal with Iran, meanwhile, would be “nice” Trump said.

The votes necessary for this, both the withdrawal and for war, will come through a dictator’s favorite forms of power: force, coercion, and intimidation. It won’t matter if the midterms bring more Democrats into the mix. I worry they won’t, that billionaires and the disinformation they sow, and exhaustion, and yet more intimidation will keep a blue resurgence in check. It might even get worse, Republicans adding to their numbers.

Trump has his militia after all. At the core of it are the Proud Boys and the J6 Prison Choir, all of whom are deeply indebted to him, still standing by, and will have grown as a force by then. It’ll be easy work; with a few exceptions, Democrats have yet to show any sort of real fight in them, a willingness—the courage—to do anything other than give in. Slink away. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland… How pathetic, the lot of them. After all the threats they spoke of…

Besides, if a war with Iraq was possible, justified by faulty intelligence and false allegations in the pre-social media age, an age of generally agreed-upon facts, corruption, racism, and hubris all playing their part, with 110 Democrats voting in favor of it, including, unsurprisingly, the soon to be forgotten, aforementioned lame-duck president and similarly spiritless, failed candidate Hillary Clinton—that alone should’ve have disqualified both of them—war with Iran, under these circumstances, most definitely is.

Trump will make a similar deal with Xi Jinping and China: feel free to take Taiwan. Marco Rubio will happily comply, breaking his back once again to change his hawkish approach on China. Maybe he’ll just undulate; at this point, does he even have a back? Spineless, all of Trump’s appointees, appointed for that very purpose: They will do exactly as he says. Pete Hegseth can’t wait.

Trump will become a wartime president. He and Republican governors will simultaneously declare states of emergencies or martial law where they can, citing attacks on home soil, assassinations or suicide bombings by Iranians and Islamic extremists, possibly false-flag operations, the Proud Boys and J6 Prison Choir again called upon; citing massive protests against him, the war, and said governors, violent clashes between all parties, the National Guard called in and ordered to shoot; perhaps he’ll declare martial law in the vein of Abraham Lincoln, who he weirdly admires, a broad one targeting “all rebels and insurgents, their aiders and abettors,” and he will use these various reasons—“peril to life and extensive damage to infrastructure”—to break from precedent, as he and Republicans have a penchant for doing—who cares if this one is 175-years old?—and suspend or simply delay elections indefinitely.

This isn’t impossible. “While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power… Congress may be able to delegate [it] to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute.”

“Foreign interference could, in and of itself, disrupt future elections; could exacerbate other disruptions (e.g., power failures) by spurring doubt about the legitimacy or accuracy of political or voting processes; or both.”

Perhaps another—more successful—elector scheme will surface.

In any case—or in all of them—Congress will again prove compliant; where the mob fails, investigations by Kash Patel and the weaponized justice department will succeed. And even if some or all of Trump’s maneuvers are deemed—or indeed are—unconstitutional, will that stop him? We’ve seen how fragile democracy is. How corrupt the Supreme Court is. They too—the majority—answer to Trump, who knows he can’t be criminally prosecuted even for blatantly illegal acts. And so he presses on, emboldened…

The Constitution is under constant attack. The funding freeze and executive action ending birthright citizenship are more recent examples. But let’s not forget Trump’s total disdain for the separation of powers, consolidating it more every day; let’s not forget the Muslim Ban and various emolument rackets and pay-to-play schemes…

For now the courts are holding relatively strong. The worst of his agenda is being delayed. Will they continue to? I’m starting to seriously doubt it, as others are, and I can’t help but wonder: How much longer will the Constitution as it stands, amendments already being proposed to grant Trump a third term—will democracy—last?