President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are running amok at the federal agency that administers Social Security benefits for some 70 million Americans. Earlier this month, Musk and his DOGE squad were granted access to data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) as part of a bogus campaign to root out “fraud” at the agency. Their intrusion into the workings of SSA escalated to an alarming new level when it was reported on Monday that the agency’s acting commissioner resigned, apparently over requests from the DOGE team for even more sensitive data—which may include claimants’ medical records, detailed work histories, and detailed family information. This is a ‘canary in a coal mine’ moment for anyone who cares about the integrity of our nation’s most popular social insurance program.

Trump and Musk are using allegations of “fraud” to justify interfering with Social Security—the program that Americans pay into and depend on for basic financial security upon retirement, disability, or the death of a family breadwinner. Musk and company are perpetrating the ultimate con: hoodwinking people into believing that improper payments and “fraud” are out of control in the programs that conservatives want to shrink, while (so far) ignoring legitimate waste, fraud, and abuse in myriad others.

On February 11, Musk wrote on X that he is “100% certain that the magnitude of fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid… etc.) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by far.” This is a laughable and undocumented claim, a cynical ploy to convince the American public, “See? These programs that are supposed to help people are rife with fraud. You are being ripped off!”

Let’s be clear: there is no massive fraud or abuse at the Social Security Administration (SSA), which pays benefits to seniors, people with disabilities, survivors, spouses, and children. According to the agency’s Office of the Inspector General, improper payments by the SSA are less than 1% of total benefits paid, and most of them are made in error, but not largely fraudulent.

The most troubling possibility, of course, is that Musk and DOGE are attempting to soften public support for the Social Security Administration so that they can dismantle the agency, just as they are doing at USAID.

No doubt, there is waste, fraud and abuse in every large federal program. The bigger the program, the greater the likelihood that a certain amount of money will be misspent. That is why there are myriad safeguards within the system, although Trump recently fired 17 Inspectors General across the federal government whose job it was to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Elon Musk, head of Trump’s inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been given unprecedented access to the Social Security Administration, including the personal data of millions of beneficiaries. Musk may be Trump’s right-hand man and the richest guy in the world, but it’s safe to say he has no experience with administering the nation’s largest social insurance program. As a retired, long-term employee of SSA told me, “Musk and his staff know nothing about how Social Security works.”

As ProPublica reported, Musk’s crew consists largely of engineers, coders and programmers from his own corporate orbit with little to no knowledge about the actual workings of the federal government, and does not include a single professional auditor.

Ignorance of the system has not stopped the unelected billionaire from cherry-picking anecdotal instances of supposed “fraud” from the Social Security Administration’s database. (See Musk’s wholly unsubstantiated claim that 150-year-olds are receiving Social Security benefits.) The Economist magazine called Musk’s assertions “baseless and unfounded.”

Former SSA employees say that the agency already has systems in place to protect taxpayers’ money. “SSA has always worked really hard to root out improper payments, of which fraud is a small fraction. And there is transparency on how they report on it and what they’re doing about it,” says Kathleen Romig, who took a leave of absence from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to work at SSA under former Commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Romig says that Commissioner O’Malley held biweekly staff meetings about improper payments and how to reduce them, including “when those payments were a result of fraud, so they could be investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted.”

“There are ways to take this issue seriously,” Romig says. “Trump and Musk are doing the opposite, making wild accusations and removing the safeguards that we have against fraud.”

In fact, SSA has done a noble job administering the nation’s largest social insurance program amid serious funding shortfalls. The agency has not received adequate funding from Congress since the Tea Party era. Staffing is at a 50-year low at year-low at a time when 10,000 baby boomers are reaching retirement age every day. The SSA, under Commissioner O’Malley, made admirable strides to improve customer service and reduce overpayments. We give the incoming commissioner, Frank Bisignano, the benefit of the doubt that he will continue those efforts in good faith.

The last thing SSA needs is Elon Musk and his DOGE squad interfering with the administration of Social Security benefits. Jacob Leibenluft, a former Treasury Department official, released a paper about the threats posed by DOGE to Social Security and other federal programs, including the potential for illegal withholding of benefits; putting sensitive personal data in the hands of individuals who shouldn’t have access to it; and the risk of “breaking the system” in ways that could inadvertently delay or stop payments from arriving on time.

The most troubling possibility, of course, is that Musk and DOGE are attempting to soften public support for the Social Security Administration so that they can dismantle the agency, just as they are doing at USAID. In December, Musk (the owner of the social media platform X) amplified a post by Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) that referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi Scheme” and called the program “government dependency at its worst.” Other prominent Republicans (including the House GOP Study Committee) have proposed cutting Social Security. Worse yet, DOGE’s interference in the workings of SSA blatantly undermines President’s Trump’s promise to the American public “not to touch” Social Security. His and Musk’s fingerprints are all over it now, and they will own any damage done to America's most popular federal program.

Update: This piece has been updated from its original to account for the resignation of the Social Security Administration's Acting Commissioner.

A combination of pro-Israel advocacy groups and political action committees, including right-wing Christian fundamentalists, neoconservative hawks, and weak-kneed liberals, have not only enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians—they’ve done so much more.

• They’ve silenced congressional debate on decades of Israel’s illegal policies toward Palestinians. Pro-Israel groups and political action committees cry foul whenever their role in this regard is noted. But the tens of millions they’ve spent to punish critics and create a climate of fear—and their own gloating over their successes—are too well-documented to ignore. The result has been that too many members of Congress have either been cowed into silence or motivated to pass excessively bizarre legislation singling out Israel for special treatment in budgetary matters or for political favors.

This same coalition of groups from the right and left of American politics has also pressed successive US administrations not only to turn a blind eye to Israeli actions that violate US laws, but also to take an aggressive posture toward other nations who are critical of Israel. These acts have contributed to dismantling the architecture of international diplomacy, laws, and covenants developed in the aftermath of the two world wars and have done grave damage to the stature of the US in the world community.

US presidents from Ford to Obama have been pressured by pro-Israel group-inspired congressional letters calling on them to back away from positions critical of Israeli policies. Successive administrations have thus been cowed into silence in the face of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied territories and other well-documented Israeli violations of international law and human rights.

This pressure has resulted in US denunciations of UN reports on Israeli violations, the US withdrawal of funds from various UN agencies over actions critical of Israeli behaviors, and repeated US vetoes of Security Council resolutions—even when those resolutions simply affirmed policy positions supposedly reflecting stated US policies. More recently, this same practice could be observed in sanctioning by both Congress and the administration of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court and individuals and countries who participated in decisions that were critical of Israel. These actions contributed to dismantling guardrails put in place to promote world peace, enforce international law, and protect vulnerable populations against abuse—and have left the US increasingly isolated.

• This same collection of groups and the pressures they create to distort US policies have also done incalculable damage to Palestinians and Israelis, and the prospects for Middle East peace. Annually the US Department of State reports on the performance of other countries’ human rights policies. Congressional legislation mandates these reports so that US assistance is not awarded to countries that violate human rights.

The State Department Human Rights report on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is ignored, even when it has been accurate in its reporting. As a result: tens of thousands of Palestinians have been tortured or detained for extended periods without being charged with any crime; and violations of international laws prohibiting seizure of Palestinian lands, evictions from their homes, and mass transfers of Israelis into settlements in illegally seized Palestinian lands have continued unabated.

With no restraints on their actions, Israel’s military and civilian settlers operate with a sense of impunity. While Gaza was destroyed in a 16-month genocidal war, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were being ravaged by the massive demolition of Palestinian neighborhoods and the terrorizing of Palestinian villages and farmlands. The number of Israelis living on Palestinian lands has more than quadrupled in this century, and settlements and Israeli-protected “state lands” and “military zones” and secured infrastructure for settlements now carve the territories into ever smaller areas in which Palestinians can operate. Discussions of a two-state solution have become difficult to entertain. The US has enabled it all by doing nothing to stop it.

One further byproduct of this US acquiescence to Israel’s behavior has been the decline of Israel’s peace movement. Once fairly vibrant, these Israelis used to be able to make the case that settlement expansion or violations of rights would damage Israel’s relationship with the US. After decades of evidence that there would be no such repercussions, this movement has faded into irrelevance. In their absence the hard right has become the dominant force in Israel, leaving the only serious divisions in Israeli politics being whether the next coalition government will be formed with or without the Ultra-Orthodox or Netanyahu in command. Palestinians or matters of peace and justice are not on the agenda.

• Since October 7th, the coalition of pro-Israel forces, led by right-wing Christian Ideologues and pro-Israel groups in the US, have accelerated their efforts on the home front using congressional pressure and Presidential Executive Orders to dismantle constitutionally protected free speech and academic freedom on college campuses. The expanded definition of antisemitism to include legitimate criticism of Israel is now being enforced to threaten federal funds to universities who don’t punish students and faculty for what are now deemed antisemitic activities. The Department of Justice has launched a task force to identify groups and individuals who participated in anti-Israel actions. And right-wing groups have undertaken to identify foreign students and faculty who have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests or against whom Jewish students have issued complaints for anti-Israel remarks. They are reporting them to authorities for deportation, as per another of President Trump’s Executive Orders.

What is deeply disturbing is that equating “anti-Israel” and “pro-Palestinian” with “antisemitism” has created a climate of fear on campuses, impeding free speech and academic freedoms on campuses and public discourse.

And so, while Palestinians are paying with their lives because pressure from pro-Israel groups has silenced criticism of Israeli policies, the damage done by this pressure grows. It has discredited the structures of the international order, humiliated and isolated the US in the eyes of the world, and is now eating away at many of our much-cherished freedoms.

The 32-year-old Norwegian considered himself a deep thinker and a big fan of the rightwing and Russian propaganda which argued western civilization was rotting from within because of multiculturalism, empowered women, racial/religious minorities, and liberalism. Putting pen to paper, he wrote:

“When I first started blogging I was concerned with how we could ‘fix the system.’ I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions.
“If we define the ‘system’ as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of ‘tolerance,’ then this is going to collapse. It’s inevitable.
“The goal of Western survivalists — and that’s what we are — should not be to ‘fix the system,’ but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes.
“We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.”

After writing over 1500 pages describing how it’s the essential duty of every white man in the world to marginalize or even kill as many non-white non-Christians as possible, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo’s Government Quarter, killing eight people.

He then drove to Utøya, an island in Tyrifjorden where the Norwegian Social Democratic party’s youth organization, the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), held their summer camp. There he used a semiautomatic rifle to kill another sixty-nine people, most in their teens or early twenties. He shot and wounded another 41 mostly young people, leaving many with life-changing injuries.

The epigraph to the paragraphs cited above was the polestar of Breivik’s philosophy, one he’d learned from studying the writings and lives of his heroes: Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte. He opened the chapter with it at the top of the page, apart from all the other text:

“He who saves his country, violates no law.”

The phrase was most recently quoted three weeks ago — on January 24, 2024 — by El Salvador’s notoriously violent and lawbreaking President Nayib Bukele, who also tweeted: “He who saves his country violates no law.”

Napoleon overthrew the Directory in 1799, naming himself as First Consul, and then declared himself Emperor in 1804 with those same words: “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi.”

Emperors like Napoleon and dictators like Bukele don’t bother with trivial details like obeying the law. They rule by decree. Write it down, put your signature on it, and boom, it’s now the law of the land.

That was also Breivik’s hope for the Scandinavian countries: throw off the yoke of the “globalist” EU and embrace a racist strongman to lead the continent into an era of whites-only paradise. Replace “the system” of democracy with a white supremacist Christo-fascist oligarchy.

Which is why it’s so troubling that Trump tweeted the same Napoleonic phrase that Breivik made famous. The phrase every white supremacist has memorized, along with the fourteen words and the number 88 as code for “Heil Hitler.”

It would be a mistake at this point to think that when Trump quotes people like Breivik he’s just trolling us: People are now dying all over the world because a half-billion dollars’ worth of USAID food is rotting in storage; millions have lost access to AIDS drugs that were keeping them alive; children in cancer drug trials have been cut off from lifesaving medication; and federal workers who thought Civil Service would protect them are now on the verge of homelessness.

He means it. And for three weeks he’s been acting on his words, largely with impunity.

So long as he’s “saving the country,” he argues, he’s “violating no law.” It’s why he’s defying court orders right now to eject Musk’s teenage hackers from the Treasury Department or restart NIH and USAID funding.

And, truth be told, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have already ratified the White House’s new American dictator doctrine with the Trump v US decision last July, saying that if the president breaks the law while executing “official acts,” he’s immune from criminal prosecution for the crime.

He just gets away with it. As long as he’s saving the country, he violates no law. Don’t even bother going after him, the Republicans on the Supreme Court said; it simply won’t succeed.

It’s probably why Trump is now talking about running for a third term — perhaps even pulling a Putin and running for VP with a figurehead for president — because, like most dictators throughout history, he knows that the minute he’s no longer in power he’ll be facing prison.

This declaration by Trump was no passing joke or meme. He posted it both on Truth Social and on Xitter.

He wants us all to see it.

To hear it.

To know that he means it.

He’s shoving it in our faces. Pounding it out on the keyboard. Declaring it to the world. Quoting Anders Breivik.

And perhaps not just on his own behalf. Kyle Clark, a reporter for 9News Denver, believes it’s a shout-out to the armed insurrectionists Trump recently pardoned:

“As a journalist who covers extremism at the local level, I think it’s a mistake to view Trump’s Napoleonic statement as solely about presidential power.
“Consider if it’s interpreted as a wink and a nod for any extremist to act outside the law to ‘save’ the country as they see fit.”

Time to start killing liberals? Harassing queer people? Burning down the homes of undocumented immigrants?

After all, the rightwing gangs in Russia and Hungary enthusiastically do all these things with the tacit approval of Putin and Orbán.

And now Trump is doubling down; yesterday he retweeted a rightwinger’s message that he could defy the courts if he chose to because he is “saving the country.”

And his fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, is burning through our federal government like a California wildfire.

TS Eliot was wrong: sometimes the world does end with a bang rather than a whimper…

“If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The Secretary of the Interior has made that designation . . . and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every other outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and its very important to this administration that we get that right.” —White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking at her February 12 daily press briefing.

Back in 1997, in the dim pre-history of American Greatness, David King published a book entitled The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. In almost two hundred pages of photos, it demonstrated the ways that Stalin’s Soviet regime literally erased historical events and persons no longer considered to be consistent with the dictat of The Leader.

Such efforts involved extensive censorship and coercion, typically requiring the removal not simply of images and documents but the people to whom they were attached, who often wound up in a Gulag if they were lucky or in a ditch if they were not. At the same time, as the book shows, even more insidious than the coercion was the regime’s wholly cynical attitude towards truth—an attitude so well analyzed by George Orwell’s 1984 that it has come to be described by the colloquialism “Orwellian.” The regime and its Leader regarded themselves as literally authorized to dictate what is and what is not. It was not enough to denounce or disappear an opponent or to censor an image. It was considered necessary, and legitimate, to figuratively and literally erase the opponent and to produce an appropriately revised image or document in which that opponent did not appear, and thus did not exist, and indeed perhaps had never existed.

For Stalin—and, in different ways, for Hitler and Mussolini too—the essential principle of rule was simply stated: “what is, is what I declare it to be.”

On January 20, 2025, within minutes of his inauguration as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump declared, via Executive Order 14172, that heretofore the U.S. government would rename “the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico” as “the Gulf of America.”

Trump’s “Restoring [of] Names That Honor American Greatness” generated enthusiasm among his supporters, criticism among his opponents, and incredulity among most people, including most journalists. For the designation “Gulf of Mexico” has been in use for centuries, since before there was a United States. It has long been the internationally recognized designation for the body of water in question. And, until a few weeks ago, it was the designation employed by every American and especially by every American travel agent and resort owner.

And yet, with a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump declared it was now and forever the “Gulf of America.”

Google and Apple complied with Trump’s order. So too Axios.

But Associated Press chose a more nuanced response: “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”

As a consequence, the White House very publicly blocked AP from Oval Office and Air Force One, making an example of the news agency for its temerity in failing to fall in line.

When questions were raised by journalists about whether such a move was consistent with either the First Amendment or long-standing White House practice, Trump doubled down, and went one step further, issuing a Proclamation declaring February 9 as “Gulf of America Day,” and calling “upon public officials and all the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.” Describing his renaming as a “momentous occasion,” he thus declared that Americans must not only change their language but celebrate him for proclaiming the change.

It was in this context that CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins pressed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who responded as she did on February 12, by not simply defending the denunciation and punishment of AP, but by declaring AP to be lying, and misleading the public, by refusing to acknowledge what is a fact.

Her logic was impeccable. Trump declared it. His hand-picked Interior Secretary “made that designation.” And thus it simply is. And to raise any question about this is to be not simply against what Trump says, but against the simple truth. The rhetorical coup de gras is the gaslighting at the end, the seemingly straightforward claim that “pretty much everyone else” knows this to be true, which renders anyone outside this supposed consensus very peculiar, suspicious, and indeed dangerous.

This is the methodology of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian rule.

It is playing out in the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. And in the widespread scrubbing of federal government websites, an effort recently described by CBS News as a deliberate attempt “to remove content contrary to the president’s thinking.” And in the many directives requiring the repudiation of any and all signs of “wokeness” (citing recent Trump administration guidance, the Maryland National Guard just backed out of its long-standing participation in the state’s official celebration of the birthday of Frederick Douglass. One wonders how long until it is declared that Douglass himself is a much more complicated figure than many have thought, and perhaps never really lived, and the true heroes of the Civil War were Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson).

But the most serious instance of this quasi-totalitarian approach to truth, also declared in a January 20 Executive Order, was Trump’s pardoning of all individuals convicted of or charged with crimes associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Through this edict, Trump explicitly redescribed every insurrectionist as a patriot, and every government official involved in the defense of the Capitol on January 6 or the arrest or prosecution of the insurrectionists as a “deep state” oppressor. As I argued recently, in “It’s Official: Donald Trump Won the 2020 Election,” through these pardons “Trump has commenced the process of erasing the truth not simply about January 6, 2021, but about the last four years.”

How serious is Trump’s Orwellian effort? Can it really succeed in reshaping public discourse? We can hope not. But can we be sure?

I am reminded of Vaclav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Writing in 1978, at a moment that he describes as “post-totalitarian,” Havel asks whether and how it might be possible to break through the repressive Czech regime’s veneer of invulnerability. He tells the story of a greengrocer who, upon instruction from the Party, “places among the onions and carrots, the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite,’” not because he believes the slogan but because it is the easiest way to get by in a very cynical society. As Havel writes:

We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.

The Czechoslovakia of the 1970’s was not a full-blown Stalinist regime—thus Havel’s designation “post-totalitarianism.” But both parts of the designation matter, and while the Communist regime did not practice mass terror, and allowed a sphere of civil freedom in which individuals were free to “go about their business,” the regime very much claimed the authority to decide the limits of such business, and to exercise substantial control over both political and cultural life. When the regime circulated Communist slogans, it was well understood that the slogans were to be honored, and that every “good citizen” was expected to act as if they were not simply followers of the law but sincere and enthusiastic Communists. To do otherwise was to flout the official “truth,” which was the only accepted “truth”—and thus to be a dangerous liar if not certifiably insane.

We do not live in 1970’s Czechoslovakia.

But we do live at a moment when the democratically elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, seems intent on pursuing a very similar approach to public life, dictating what is and what shall be, and expecting those around him, and the citizenry at large, to follow in lockstep, and with at least feigned enthusiasm.

Havel makes clear in his 1978 essay that he understands the very real reasons why so many fellow citizens will make such accommodations with the regime, which are surely rational from the vantage point of the individuals involved. But he also holds out the hope that there are individuals who, following the example of his Charter 77 colleagues, will eventually discover that such accommodations come at too high a price, and thus will begin to raise questions, and to refuse to comply. Whether, when, and how such refusals might grow, he acknowledges, are open questions. What is important, he insists, is that there be some refusal, on the basis of which hope for the future can be sustained.

It took over a decade before Havel’s hope was vindicated (even if briefly, for the Europe of today is not the Europe of Havel’s hope).

Trump has only just begun to do the damage that he will surely do. On what basis can we sustain hope for a future beyond Trump? And how long must we wait for such hope to be vindicated?

Americans these days don’t much like billionaires. Our ultra-rich, Americans overwhelmingly believe, aren’t paying enough in taxes. Polling earlier this month found that nearly three-quarters of the nation’s likeliest voters — 74 percent — feel billionaires are paying “too little’ at tax time.

Just how concerned about billion-dollar fortunes have Americans become? Nearly half of us overall, Harris polling found last summer, would like to see a limit on “wealth accumulation.” Among Gen Z’ers, that support for limits on billionaire fortunes runs all the way up to 65 percent.

“Billionaires,” some 58 percent of Americans agreed in that same Harris poll, “are becoming more like dictators.”

The share of Americans equating billionaires with dictators — given Elon Musk’s current dominant role in the new Trump White House — is most likely running even higher today.

The best way to counter our ongoing billionaire coup? We might want to look east for some answers. In the run-up to Germany’s February 23 parliamentary elections, that nation’s Left Party, Die Linke, has proposed a detailed five-step set of initiatives designed to cut the super rich down to democratic size.

“We believe,” the Die Linke co-chair Jan van Aken notes simply in his intro to his party’s new plan, “that there should not be any billionaires.”

But van Aken and Die Linke understand quite well that no government can suddenly snap its fingers and make billionaires disappear. The party has instead melded ideas from all around the world into a coherent and common-sense package.

The Die Linke plan’s step one: restoring a “wealth tax.” Germany has been without one since the nation’s top court nixed the wealth tax in effect back in 1995. The proposed new version would revolve around an annual levy starting at 1 percent on wealth over 1 million euros — the equivalent of about $1.03 million — and rising up to 12 percent on wealth concentrations above a billion euros.

On top of that would come a special one-time wealth tax, also on a graduated scale, that would only impact Germans sitting on fortunes worth more than 2 million euros. This levy’s top rate would hit 30 percent for awesomely affluent Germans in the proposal’s highest wealth bracket.

Germany’s super rich would also see, under the Die Linke plan, a higher inheritance tax on the wealth they leave behind. On the annual income side, top corporate executives and other high-earners would face a 75-percent tax rate on their take-homes over a million euros.

The fifth and final plank of the Die Linke plan: replacing the current 25-percent flat tax on capital gains — the income from the sale of financial and other assets — with a graduated sliding scale of rates.

The overall goal of the Die Linke tax plan: a halving of the wealth of Germany’s wealthiest over the next decade. Three other German parties on the left side of German politics are also backing tax hikes on the wealthy, but at levels not nearly as significant as Die Linke.

Elon Musk’s favorite German party, meanwhile, sees nothing wrong in boosting the fortunes of Germany’s most fortunate. The ultra-far-right Alternative for Germany party, the Musk-backed Alternative für Deutschland, is pledging higher tax relief for capital gains and an end to Germany’s existing inheritance tax.

Current polling is making the former investment banker Friedrich Merz the favorite to become Germany’s next chancellor. His conservative Christian Democratic Union party favors lowering the corporate tax rate and is now polling support from near 30 percent of Germany’s voters. Polls have the anti-immigrant AfD at a bit over 20 percent.

Die Linke has been rising in the pre-election polling since the party unveiled its tax plan, and the party gained 11,000 new members in January. Analysts now see Die Linke likely to finish with about 6 percent of the overall vote tally, maybe enough to prevent Germany’s right-wingers from forming a new government. But the party’s bold tax plan, either way, has no shot at becoming the law of the land in Germany’s next legislative session.

Still, what seems no more than tax-the-rich pie-in-the-sky in one generation can become actual tax policy in the next. In 1917, for instance, a bold group of American progressives proposed a tax rate of 100 percent on annual income over $100,000, the equivalent of nearly $2.5 million in today’s dollars. A generation later, in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to place that same 100-percent tax rate on America’s most affluent.

Lawmakers didn’t buy FDR’s 100-percent top rate, but they did pass legislation that had America’s richest facing a 94-percent tax on their top-bracket income by 1944. That U.S. top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the United States become the world’s first-ever mass-middle-class nation.

It is well to remind ourselves that today is President’s Day, not Dictator’s Day.

Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary — to check and constrain him.

Fast forward to the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when inequalities of income and wealth had become extreme that the so-called “Robber Barons” of the era (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) controlled the economy, and corruption was rampant. (I say “first” Gilded Age because we are now clearly in the second.)

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, limits on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies to limit their power. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, was established as an independent agency in 1914, to take on corporate monopolies and fraud.

Fast forward again to today. There are by now 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.

But I fear that the Supreme Court is about to end their independence.

On Sunday, White House lawyers asked the justices to allow Trump to fire the head of an independent watchdog agency. It’s the first case to reach the Supreme Court arising from the blizzard of actions taken by Trump in the early weeks of the new administration.

The White House’s emergency application asks the Supreme Court to vacate a federal trial judge’s order temporarily reinstating Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel.

The Office of Special Counsel — a little-known but important independent agency — enforces federal whistleblower laws, which protect whistleblowers from political retribution, and the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity.

In the 1978 law that established the Office of Special Counsel, Congress gave the Counsel a five-year term and provided that he or she could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

But Trump’s one-sentence email to Dellinger on Feb. 7 gave no reasons for firing him, effective immediately.

Dellinger sued. He called his removal illegal and argued that nothing about his performance could possibly meet the standard Congress laid out for dismissing a special counsel:

“Since my arrival at OSC last year, I could not be more proud of all we have accomplished. The agency’s work has earned praise from advocates for whistleblowers, veterans, and others. The effort to remove me has no factual nor legal basis — none — which means it is illegal.”

Since February 7, Dellinger has continued to police the government against Hatch Act and whistle-blower violations — even when they have involved federal workers who allegedly discriminated against Trump. (In a complaint filed last Tuesday, Dellinger alleged that, during a hurricane response in October, an aid supervisor for the Federal Emergency Management Agency illegally instructed FEMA workers not to visit homes with Trump signs.)

Last Monday night, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump from firing Dellinger.

Judge Jackson wrote that the 1978 law “expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change,” adding that the government’s “only response to this inarguable reading of the text is that the statute is unconstitutional.”

On Saturday, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Trump’s emergency motion for a stay of Judge Jackson’s ruling. The unsigned majority opinion said the government’s motion was premature.

“The question here is not whether the president is entitled to prompt review of his important constitutional arguments. Of course he is. The issue before us is whether his mere claim of extraordinary harm justifies this court’s immediate review, which would essentially remove the legal issues from the district court’s ambit before its proceedings have concluded.”

In its Sunday filing before the Supreme Court, the White House said the Supreme Court “should not allow lower courts to seize executive power by dictating to the president how long he must continue employing an agency head against his will.” Translated: Congress can not limit the president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies.

Make no mistake. This is a fundamental challenge to the basic idea — part of the fabric of our government for well over a century — that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.

Trump’s emergency application took direct aim at a precedent from 1935 in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Congress can shield independent agencies from politics.

That case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress used decades later to protect the Special Counsel.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired a commissioner, William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

Fast forward again. The Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.

In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the Bureau — again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor and in Dellinger’s case — said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason. Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued:

“In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”

Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote:

“The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what was then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”

That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision last July that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.

So what now? I’m afraid the Trump White House and the Supreme Court have teed up the Dellinger case to mark the end of Humphries Executor — and therefore the practical end of independent agencies. They may carve out the Federal Reserve on some pretext, but they are bent on centralizing presidential power.

I wish I could be more hopeful, but I honestly don’t see any other decision emerging from this high court.

Celebrate President’s Day today, not Dictator’s Day. And don’t, whatever you do, give up hope. This is all part of democracy’s stress test. I guarantee that eventually democracy will come out stronger for it.

The global commitment to fair climate finance is at a crossroads. COP29 concluded with a disappointing New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance, or NCQG, leaving developing nations at risk of being left behind. With the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris agreement and slashing development aid, prospects for more ambitious fair climate finance are disappearing out of sight. Decisions like these not only threaten global cooperation on climate change but will also fail to meet its core purpose in supporting the most affected communities in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Now, more than ever, fair and equitable climate finance—such as increased grant-based funding and debt relief—is critical.

In Africa, the impacts of climate change are stark and undeniable. Extreme weather events on the continent surged from 85 in the 1970s to over 540 between 2010 and 2019, causing over 730,000 deaths and $38.5 billion in damages. The increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and storms are threatening food security, displacing populations, and putting immense stress on water resources. According to the World Bank, climate change could push up to 118 million extremely poor people in Africa into abject poverty by 2030 as drought, floods, and extreme heat intensify. A stark reality that underscores the urgent need for robust climate finance to implement adaptation and mitigation strategies to safeguard and secure the continent's future.

Without stronger commitments to public grants and additional funding, developing countries risk falling into a cycle of debt that hinders climate action.

At the same time, climate response remains critically underfunded in Africa. From the figures released by the Climate Policy Initiative, the continent will need approximately $2.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030 to implement its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. However, current annual climate finance flows to Africa are only $30 billion, exposing a significant funding gap for climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Climate Finance at COP29

COP29's main objective was to deliver on a finance goal that would see the world off the tipping point. However, after two weeks of nearly failed climate diplomacy, negotiators agreed to a disappointing $300 billion annually by 2035. This amount falls short of the $1.3 trillion per year figure, supported by the Needs Determinant Report, that many developing countries had advocated for.

Nevertheless, the Baku to Belem Roadmap has been developed to address the climate finance gap. This framework, set to be finalized at COP30 in Brazil, offers a crucial opportunity to refine finance mechanisms to effectively and equitably meet the needs of developing countries.

Why the Finance Outcome of COP29 Could Leave Developing Countries Behind

Beyond the insufficient funding, the NCQG lacks a strong commitment to equity, a key principle of the Paris agreement. The principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) emphasizes that developed countries should bear a greater share of the financial burden. However, the NCQG merely states that developed nations would "take the lead" in mobilizing $300 billion, reflecting a lack of firm commitment.

A major concern is the climate debt trap for developing nations. Much of the climate finance provided is in the form of loans rather than grants, worsening existing debt burdens and limiting investments in sustainable development. Without stronger commitments to public grants and additional funding, developing countries risk falling into a cycle of debt that hinders climate action.

Moving Forward: Shaping Conditions for Fair, Equitable, and Enduring Climate Finance

To ensure COP29's finance outcomes do not leave the Global South behind, several actions are needed.

Firstly, debt relief is crucial. Approximately 60% of low-income countries are already in or near debt distress. Between 2016 and 2020, 72% of climate finance to developing nations was in loans, while only 26% was in grants. Reducing debt burdens would allow developing countries to allocate more resources to climate projects, improve fiscal stability, and attract additional investments.

Similarly, given the mounting climate finance debts in low-income developing countries, increased grant-based financing for climate action is needed. In 2022, developed countries provided around $115.9 billion in climate finance to developing countries, but a significant portion was in the form of loans. Heavy reliance on debt-based financing exacerbates financial burdens on these nations. Grant-based finance, on the other hand, aligns with equity principles and ensures that funding effectively supports adaptation and mitigation.

Another potential path is leveraging private sector investment. The private sector plays an essential role in climate finance. However, its involvement often prioritizes profit over genuine climate benefits. Strategies must ensure that private investments align with climate justice principles. To address this, approaches are needed such as those used by Bill and Melinda Gates.

Lastly, implementing robust governance and transparent mechanisms is critical. This includes developing detailed reporting templates, public participation in decision-making, and clear monitoring systems to track climate finance flows and prevent double counting.

While the developed world is rapidly changing its relationship with the rest of the world from aid to trade, the price of not providing equitable, grant-based, public climate finance will be economic losses, health impacts, increased disaster costs, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and infrastructural damage. Quite simply, taking the equity conditions into account is the way forward if we are to ensure that the outcomes of COP29 leave no low-income developing nation in the Global South behind.

A few years ago, I came across an old book at an estate sale. Its title caught my eye: “Our New Possessions.” Its cover featured the Statue of Liberty against stylized stars and stripes. What were those “new possessions”? The cover made it quite clear: Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The subtitle made it even clearer: “A graphic account, descriptive and historical, of the tropic islands of the sea which have fallen under our sway, their cities, peoples, and commerce, natural resources and the opportunities they offer to Americans.” What a mouthful! I’m still impressed with the notion that “tropical” peoples falling “under our sway” offered real Americans amazing opportunities, as did our (whoops — I meant their) lands. Consider that Manifest Destiny at its boldest, imperialism unapologetically being celebrated as a new basis for burgeoning American greatness.

The year that imperial celebration was published — 1898 — won’t surprise students of U.S. history. America had just won its splendid little imperial war with Spain, an old empire very much in the “decline and fall” stage of a rich, long, and rapacious history. And just then red-blooded Americans like “Rough Rider” Teddy Roosevelt were emerging as the inheritors of the conquistador tradition of an often murderously swashbuckling Spanish Empire.

Of course, freedom-loving Americans were supposed to know better than to follow in the tradition of “old world” imperial exploitation. Nevertheless, cheerleaders and mentors like storyteller Rudyard Kipling were then urging Americans to embrace Europe’s civilizing mission, to take up “the white man’s burden,” to spread enlightenment and civilization to the benighted darker-skinned peoples of the tropics. Yet to cite just one example, U.S. troops dispatched to the Philippines on their “civilizing” mission quickly resorted to widespread murder and torture, methods of “pacification” that might even have made Spanish inquisitors blush. That grim reality wasn’t lost on Mark Twain and other critics who spoke out against imperialism, American-style, with its murderous suppression of Filipino “guerrillas” and bottomless hypocrisy about its “civilizing” motives.

After his exposure to “enlightened” all-American empire-building, retired Major General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, would bluntly write in the 1930s of war as a “racket” and insist his long career as a Marine had been spent largely in the service of “gangster” capitalism. Now there was a plain-speaking American hero.

And speaking of plain-speaking, or perhaps plain-boasting, I suggest that we think of Donald Trump as America’s retro president from 1898. Isn’t it time, America, to reach for our destiny once again? Isn’t it time for more tropical (and Arctic) peoples to be put “under our sway”? Greenland! Canada! The Panama Canal! These and other regions of the globe offer Donald Trump’s America so many “opportunities.” And if we can’t occupy an area like the Gulf of Mexico, the least we can do is rebrand it the Gulf of America! A lexigraphic “mission accomplished” moment bought with no casualties, which sure beats the calamitous wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in this century!

Now, here’s what I appreciate about Trump: the transparent nature of his greed. He doesn’t shroud American imperialism in happy talk. He says it just like they did in 1898. It’s about resources and profits. As the dedication page to that old book from 1898 put it: “To all Americans who go a-pioneering in our new possessions and to the people who are there before them.” Oh, and pay no attention to that “before” caveat. We Americans clearly came first then and, at least to Donald Trump, come first now, and — yes! — we come to rule. The world is our possession and our beneficence will certainly serve the peoples who were there before us in Greenland or anywhere else (the “hellhole” of Gaza included), even if we have to torture or kill them in the process of winning their hearts and minds.

It’s 1900 Again in America

My point is this: Donald Trump doesn’t want to return America to the 1950s, when men were men and women were, as the awful joke then went, “barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen.” No, he wants to return this country (and the world) to 1900, when America was unapologetically and nakedly grabbing everything it could. To put it in his brand of “locker room” language, Trump wants to grab Mother Earth by the pussy, because when you’re rich and powerful, when you’re a “star,” you can do anything.

It’s white (male) hunter all over again. Think Teddy Roosevelt and all those animals he manfully slaughtered on safari. Today, we might even add white (female) hunter, considering that Kristi Noem, the new director of homeland security, infamously shot her own dog in a gravel pit because she couldn’t train it to behave. It’s an America where men are men again, women are women, and trans people are simply defined out of existence while simultaneously being forced out of the U.S. military.

To replace the “yellow journalism” of newspaperman William Randolph Hearst in that age, think of the corporate-owned media networks of today, with billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos showing due deference to you know who. For the robber barons of that age, substitute men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (to name only the two most famous billionaires of our moment) along with Bezos and their billionaire tech bros. It’s a new gilded age, a new age of smash and grab, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer, where the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.

Of course, it’s highly doubtful Trump can convince Canada to become the 51st state. Denmark doesn’t seem remotely interested in selling Greenland to America and the Panamanians aren’t eager to return their canal to all-American interlopers and occupiers. Even the “Gulf of America” remains the Gulf of Mexico to the other peoples of the Western Hemisphere. But perhaps Trump and Musk can team up to plant the American flag on Mars!

Yet, while Trump may fail when it comes to any of these specific imperial designs, he’s already succeeding, famously so, where it really matters. With all his imperial blather about Greenland, Gaza, and the like, what he’s really conquering and colonizing is our minds. The man and his ideas are now everywhere. Whatever else you can say about Trump, you can’t get rid of him, especially in the mainstream media which he uses so effectively to trumpet (pun intended) his expansionist agenda.

Yes, Trump is normalizing imperial conquest (again); yes, naked exploitation is unapologetically “destiny” (again). It’s “drill, baby, drill” and party like it’s 1900, since ideas about global warming due to fossil-fuel production and consumption simply didn’t exist in that age. It’s so retro chic to be chauvinistically selfish, to loot openly, even to commit or enable atrocities under the cover of humanitarian concerns. (Think of Gaza and Trump’s recent open call for cleansing the region of Palestinians to make way for their “betters,” the Israelis, to enjoy peace and a “beautiful” seaside location.)

Regression, thy name be Trump. Unabashed greed and unbridled hypocrisy are selling points once again. Protectionist tariffs are “great” again. Immigrants, black- and brown-skinned ones naturally, are depicted as endangering America’s way of life. Time to get rid of as many “illegals” as we can. Deport them! Jail them in Cuba! America is for Americans!

A Global Military Makes It All Possible

President Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan of the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet, the 16 battleships, painted white, that he sent around the world in 1907. He used it to intimidate recalcitrant powers and impress them with America’s growing might and reach. Though the U.S. wasn’t quite a military superpower yet, it was already an economic one, and combining military persuasion with economic prowess was an effective tactic to get other countries to toe Washington’s line.

Today’s U.S. military is quite obviously a global one, an imperial one bent on total dominance of everything: land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, information, narrative. You name it and our military and its partners in what Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (which includes industry, Congress, intelligence, the media, academe, and think tanks) conspire to seize, occupy, control, and otherwise dominate. Small wonder that Trump and his operatives within what might be thought of as the Mondial Imperial State have continued a tradition of seeking ever greater budgets for the Pentagon, more and more weapons sales, and the unending construction of new military bases. Contraction in this highly militarized version of disaster imperialism is never an option (until, of course, it becomes one). Only growth is to be allowed, commensurate with seemingly bottomless appetites.

One example: newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his Project 2025 supporters argue that U.S. military spending should equal 5% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). With this country’s GDP sitting just under $29 trillion in 2024, that would drive an imperial war budget of $1.45 trillion instead of the nearly $900 billion in this year’s Pentagon budget. For Hegseth & Co., the U.S. military is all about warfighting (and wars, if nothing else, are expensive), so it must embrace and hone its warrior mystique. It matters to him and his like not at all that, since 9/11, if not before then, the U.S. military has honed its warfighting identity in disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.

Another example. Just before I retired from the U.S. military in 2005, I learned of efforts to create a new military command with sub-Saharan Africa as its focus. At first, it seemed like a joke. How was Africa directly related to U.S. national security? Whence the threat? Of course, Africa as a threat wasn’t the issue. It was Africa as an arena for U.S. economic exploitation, just as it had been for European countries like Belgium, England, France, and Germany circa 1900, most infamously in the Congo, later exposed as the “heart of darkness” at the center of a European imperialism that would contribute to the tensions leading to the eruption of World War I in 1914. Two years after I retired, the U.S. military did indeed form Africa Command (AFRICOM) as its latest combatant command. Today, every sector of the globe has been accounted for by various commands within the Pentagon assigned to four-star generals and admirals, each in his or her own way as powerful as, once upon a time, the proconsuls of the Roman Empire.

With all of this as background, in his own mind at least, Donald Trump doth bestride the world like a colossus. What backs him up is a Republican vision (shared by most Democrats) of an imperial military (theoretically) unchallengeable in all domains. And whether the United States spends $1.45 trillion or a mere $900 billion annually on it, count on this: in the years to come, that military will be used in, most likely, the stupidest and most violent ways imaginable.

How Long Before the Next World War?

If you buy the conceit that Donald Trump is taking America back to 1900, it suggests a likely starting point for the next world war roughly 10 to 15 years in our future. Ever-increasing military spending; calls for mobilization and a return of the draft; talk of enervating national decline that could allegedly be reversed by an embrace of a new warrior mystique; viewing all competition as zero-sum games that America must win and countries like China must lose: these could act collectively to create conditions similar to 1914 — a tinderbox of tensions just waiting for the right spark to set the world aflame.

The critical difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. Though World War I wasn’t the “war to end all wars,” a World War III fought between the U.S. and its allies and China and/or Russia and their allies promises to be that “last” war. There’s nothing like a few dozen thermonuclear weapons to settle accounts — as in ending most life on Planet Earth.

In an age of weapons of mass destruction and their widespread “modernization,” jaw-jaw, as in compromise and cooperation through conversation, is the only sane choice when war-war looms. Dominance through destruction must give way to détente through dialogue. Can the Trump administration advance progress toward peace instead of letting us regress into war?

Mr. President, here’s the real art of the deal. Rather than turning the calendar back to 1900, your goal should be to turn the atomic clock back to several hours (if not days or weeks) before midnight. That clock currently sits at a perilous 89 seconds to midnight, or global nuclear war. With every fiber of your being, your goal should be to guarantee that it will never strike that ungodly hour.

For surely, even the most deluded strong man shouldn’t wish his manifest destiny to be ruling over an empire of the dead.

Even if you didn’t vote for Donald Trump and you hate his guts, you have to be jealous of how much he’s doing so quickly. Liberal Democrats can’t even imagine one of their presidents leaping into action like this.

The post A Democrat Would Never Do This first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post A Democrat Would Never Do This appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Across the country, trans and nonbinary people and their families are reeling from U.S. President Donald Trump’s cruel anti-trans executive orders, which restrict our access to passports, lifesaving healthcare, military service, athletics, and more.

This builds off an election season that placed us squarely in the crosshairs of political and religious scapegoating.

In 2024 alone, 672 anti-trans bills were introduced at the state and federal level, most of them targeting trans and nonbinary young people. Although more than 600 of those bills failed, President Trump just signed an executive order carrying out many of their worst impulses.

Today, both in the United States and in many parts of the world, trans and nonbinary people—a tiny, frequently poor, and marginalized percentage of the general population—are being used as scapegoats, as symbolic threats to the “right” way of being.

Trump’s order directs multiple agencies to withhold funds from medical providers that provide gender-affirming medical treatments to children. Despite legal challenges to the order, several major hospital systems have indefinitely suspended this care already.

These assaults on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel the strategy that Christian Nationalists used in politicizing abortion access—an issue that had been previously considered apolitical by the majority of Americans, including the majority of American Christians.

Now the eerily similar argument of “defending innocent children” is being deployed against gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical and psychological evidence that this care saves young people’s lives.

Denying this care is about repressively controlling young people, not protecting them.

Throughout history, the unjust and powerful have sought to control people’s bodies as a means to maintain their own social position. This often led to “othering” people who could be isolated, marginalized, and blamed for any variety of injustices, while drawing attention away from those who were actually responsible for widespread misery. It’s a practice that goes all the way back to ancient Rome.

Today, both in the United States and in many parts of the world, trans and nonbinary people—a tiny, frequently poor, and marginalized percentage of the general population—are being used as scapegoats, as symbolic threats to the “right” way of being.

There is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-LGBTQ hate in the United States. As illustrated through the research of Translash Media, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in the funding, development, and workshopping of anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policy, and theology.

Fundamentalist Protestant organizations such as Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have been key in launching the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including drafting the first anti-trans legislation at the Heritage Foundation’s “Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization” conference in 2019.

These constant attacks are aimed at getting struggling people to blame trans folks for their problems. And they’re designed to keep us all politically reactive, overwhelmed, and unfocused on the deep systemic failures of our society.

But trans and nonbinary people know all too well what it’s like to struggle. Indeed, being poor and being trans are frequently inseparable experiences: Trans and nonbinary people are twice as likely to be unemployed, twice as likely to be homeless, and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty than the general population.

So we are allies in the struggle against hardship, not rivals. Similarly, we see our struggles as trans people as linked to the fights for reproductive justice, fair wages, safe working conditions, housing, and immigration justice—and against sexual violence, militarism, and police brutality.

In short, we support every other struggle for people just trying to live safely in their own bodies.

While the real dangers and strain of this moment cannot be underestimated, we must continue to examine and effectively address the root causes of our suffering—and find our common cause with all other hurting and dispossessed people.

The remarkable Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown has been nominated for eight Oscars—best picture, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, director, costume design, sound, and adapted screenplay. The ceremony is scheduled for March 2, but the film, released in December, has already been drawing enormous attention over how true it is to Dylan’s early career, relationships, and music, particularly the controversy over his performance of "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, backed up by an electric blues band. The film’s arc leads us to this crucial final moment, when he steps on stage and sings, “I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."

In the first stanza, Dylan sings, “Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain” and “It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.” Then he complains that Maggie’s brother “hands you a nickel, and he hands you a dime. And he asks you with a grin, if you're havin' a good time.” Dylan’s protagonist clearly hates the backbreaking work, the low pay, and the lack of respect he gets from Maggie’s family.

Where did those ideas and images come from? What does the song tell us about Dylan’s personal and political transformation represented by his performance at Newport? And who was the real "Maggie"?

First some background.

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he admired Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Hank Williams, and especially Little Richard, and taught himself to play guitar. In 1959, he moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota but soon dropped out. He stayed in the area to absorb its budding folk music and bohemian scene, began playing in local coffeehouses, and improving his guitar playing. A friend loaned Dylan his collection of Woody Guthrie records and back copies of Sing Out! magazine, which had the music and lyrics to many folk songs. He read Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, and learned to play many of his songs.

By then young Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently after Welsh poet Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie’s persona. He mumbled when he talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore workman’s clothes (including a corduroy cap), and took on what he believed to be Guthrie’s mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to identify more with Guthrie as a loner and bohemian than with Guthrie the radical and activist. Soon after Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961 at age 19 he visited Guthrie, then suffering from Huntington’s disease, in his New Jersey hospital room.

At the time, New York’s Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk music revival, a growing political consciousness, and (along with San Francisco) the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs. The area was dotted with coffeehouses, some of which charged admission fees and others which allowed performers to pass the hat while customers purchased drinks and sandwiches.

Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs, making a big impression. His singing and guitar-playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm and charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan’s initial repertoire consisted mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional ballads. At the time, he began weaving a myth about his past, including stories about being a circus hand and a carnival boy, having a rock band in Hibbing that performed on television, and running away from home and learning songs from black blues artists. He was, as he continued to do throughout his life, reinventing himself.

Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth.

Between 1962 and 1965, Dylan wrote more than a dozen songs that reflected the turmoil of the period. These included “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about a fourteen-year-old African American who was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. It was Dylan’s first “protest” song. To this he soon added “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (poking fun at the right-wing organization), “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (a critique of the Cold War hysteria that led Americans to build bomb shelters), “Oxford Town” (about the riots by white students after James Meredith became the first Black student admitted to University of Mississippi), “Paths of Victory” (about the civil rights marches), and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (about the fear of nuclear war, which he premiered at a Carnegie Hall concert a month before the Cuban missile crisis made that fear more tangible).

In 1963, Dylan also wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (based on a news story from earlier that year about the death of a black barmaid at the hands of a wealthy white man), “Who Killed Davey Moore” (about a black boxer who died after a brutal match), “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (about the threat of nuclear annihilation), and “Masters of War” (a protest against the arms race).

Dylan borrowed the tune from “No More Auction Block,” an anti-slavery Negro spiritual, for what would become his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, but it was the version released a few weeks later by Peter, Paul, and Mary that turned the song into a nationwide phenomenon. The single sold 300,000 copies in its first week. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two on the Billboard pop chart, with over a million copies sold. Millions of Americans learned the words and sang along while it was played on the radio, performed at rallies and concerts, and sung at summer camps and in churches and synagogues.

Unlike Dylan’s songs that were ripped from the headlines about specific events, “Blowin’ in the Wind” suggested broad themes. Dylan‘s three verses achieve a universal quality that makes them open to various interpretations and allows listeners to read their own concerns into the lyrics. “How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?” and “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” are clearly about war, but not any particular war. One can hear the words “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” and relate them to the civil rights movement and the recent Freedom Rides. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?” could refer to the nation’s unwillingness to face its own racism, or to other forms of ignorance. The song reflects a combination of alienation and outrage. Listeners have long debated what Dylan meant by “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the answer so obvious that it is right in front of us? Or is it elusive and beyond our reach? This ambiguity is one reason for the song’s broad appeal.

“The Times They Are a-Changin’” was also not about a specific event but broadly challenged the political establishment on behalf of Dylan’s youth cohort. The finger-pointing song is addressed to “senators, congressmen,” and “mothers and fathers,” telling them that “there’s a battle outside and it is ragin’” and warning them, “don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” Dylan’s lyric “For the loser now will be later to win” sounds much like the biblical notion that the meek shall inherit the earth, or perhaps that America’s black and poor people will win their struggle for justice. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem, a strident warning, angry yet hopeful. It came to symbolize the generation gap, making Dylan the reluctant “spokesman” for the youth revolt.

Dylan’s third album, also called The Times They Are a-Changin’, was recorded between August and October 1963 and included the song “North Country Blues,” which draws on Dylan’s Minnesota upbringing and describes the suffering caused by the closing of the mines in the state’s Iron Range, turning mining areas into jobless ghost towns—a theme that Bruce Springsteen would reprise years later. Remarkably, Dylan tells the tale from the point of view of a woman.

By 1963, Dylan was a super-star, aided by his manager Albert Grossman (who got him a recording contract) and other performers (including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary) who recorded Dylan’s songs and popularized them to wide audiences. Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Odetta were invited to sing at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

But Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth. In 1963, before singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan explained, “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write protest songs…I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.” Dylan may have been being coy or disingenuous, but it didn’t matter. The song caught the wind of protest in the country and took flight. Her later told Phil Ochs, who continued to write and perform topical songs and to identify with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit, because politics is bullshit. You’re wasting your time.”

In 1965, the Newport Folk Festival invited Dylan to be the closing act on Sunday night, June 25. He agreed, but insisted on singing a few songs backed by an electrified blues band. There is much controversy about what actually happened before, during and after his performance. A Complete Unknown—based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, When Dylan Went Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties—shows Seeger agonizingly trying to persuade Dylan to stick to his acoustic music. When Dylan insists on performing with his rock-and-roll back-up band, Seeger is visibly upset, but it isn’t clear if he actually tries to pull the plug on the amplified sound or is mainly angry that the sound system isn’t adequate to blast such loud music. The person in the film who appears most shaken up by Dylan’s performance is Alan Lomax, the eminent folklorist who played a major role in aiding little-known rural blues singers, mostly in the South, to gain more widespread attention.

Underlying the controversy is a debate about whether “folk” music mainly involves traditional songs by everyday people or newly-written songs about contemporary concerns by professional singers and songwriters. It also involves whether performers who use amplified electronic instruments are performing “folk” music. Even Seeger and Lomax were big fans of Black blues musicians (like Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim) who played with electrified bands. In fact, the black Chambers Brothers and the white Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which backed Dylan, had already done electrically-amplified sets at Newport on Sunday afternoon with no complaints.

On stage, Dylan sang three amped-up songs—“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and a work-in-progress called “Phantom Engineer” (which would eventually turn into “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry,” on his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. His back-up band included three members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Bank (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay), Al Kooper on organ, an Barry Goldberg (who died on January 22) on organ and piano.

Some audience members were not happy with Dylan’s new sound. A few even booed. After performing those songs, Dylan stormed off the stage. But Seeger and others persuaded him to return to the stage, where he performed two songs with an acoustic guitar, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Many of those same audience members who had booed his first set and cheered his second set no doubt would eventually cheer for the upcoming wave of folk-rock music, like the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But it was “all over now” between Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival. He refused to return to that venue for 37 years.

One aspect of the Newport controversy was Dylan’s apparent rejection of politically-oriented music. That was certainly the direction he was heading. With occasional exceptions, he abandoned acoustic and political music for rock and roll, country, blues, and gospel.

But the back story of “Maggie’s Farm”—and its double meaning—is missing from A Complete Unknown and from most tellings of the Newport brouhaha.

On different occasions, Seeger said he liked Dylan’s song. That shouldn’t be surprising. Seeger had recorded a traditional song, "Penny's Farm," on his first solo album (Darling Corey) in 1950. He often sang it at concerts. It is told from the perspective of a sharecropper protesting the working conditions on the farm.

It was originally recorded on Columbia records as "Down on Penny's Farm" by the Bentley Boys, a duo from North Carolina, in October 1929. That was a few days before the Wall Street stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression. But the rural south was already facing a depression, especially among sharecroppers.

Here the opening lyrics to the Bentley Boys’ song:

Come you ladies and you gentlemen and listen to my song
I'll sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong
May make you mad but I mean no harm
It's just about the renters on Penny's farm

[Refrain]
It's hard times in the country
Out on Penny's farm

It continues:

You go in the fields and you work all day
Way into the night but you get no pay
Promise you meat or a little lard
It's hard to be a renter on Penny's farm

[Refrain]

It’s hard times in the country

Out of Penny’s farm

Now here's George Penny come into town
With his wagon-load of peaches, not one of them sound
He's got to have his money or somebody's check
You pay him for a bushel and you don't get a peck

Then George Penny's renters, they come into town
With their hands in their pockets and their heads hanging down
Go in the store and the merchant will say
Your mortgage is due and I'm looking for my pay

It is likely that Dylan heard the Bentley Boys' version, which was reasonably well-known because Harry Smith had included it in his three-record Anthology of American Folk Music, issued in 1952, which helped spark the folk music revival during that decade. Dylan was familiar with the songs on the Anthology and recorded several of them on his first album.

The first stanza and chorus of Dylan’s "Hard Times in New York Town," as well as the tune, are borrowed directly from the Bentley Boys' "Down on Penny's Farm."

Here's the opening words and the tune for Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town”:

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song.
Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong.
Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell
'Bout an east coast city that you all know well.

[Refrain] It's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town.

So, whether he learned the song from Smith's Anthology or from Seeger's album, it is clear that Dylan drew on "Down on Penny's Farm" when he wrote “Maggie’s Farm.”

“Down on Penny's Farm" was based on previous songs. That’s the folk tradition—borrowing and revising older songs. Woody Guthrie was a master of the craft. Others who recorded the song, after Seeger, include Jim Kweskin and Geoff Maldaur, Natalie Merchant, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.

There’s another twist to Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” On July 6, 1963, Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi—in the heart of the Delta—to perform at a voter registration rally sponsored by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was joined by Seeger, Theo Bikel, and the Freedom Singers. SNCC leader, and later Congressman, John Lewis was there, too. You can see a clip of Dylan’s performance in the 1965 documentary about Dylan, Don't Look Back.

Dylan performed a new song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers by a segregationist thug, which occurred only a few weeks earlier, on June 12. The song expresses Dylan’s outrage at the assassination of the civil rights leader, but it also attacks the white Southern politicians and landed aristocracy, who used Jim Crow to pit black and white workers against each other to weaken both groups. In the song, Dylan revealed a sophisticated analysis of the white ruling class’ divide-and-conquer strategy, something that Martin Luther King discussed in some detail in his March 1965 speech at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights.

One stanza of the song captures Dylan’s perspective:

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game

The voting rights rally at which Dylan performed took place on a cotton farm owned by the McGhee (sometimes misspelled Magee) family who were deeply involved with SNCC’s local organizing work. The family included six sons, one of whom, Silas, who had organized to desegregate a movie theater, was shot in the face the following summer by someone whom many believed was a Ku Klux Klan member.

It is hardly a stretch to see that Dylan turned McGhee’s farm into Maggie’s farm.

But what did he mean that he wasn’t going to “work on Maggie’s farm no more”? He certainly wasn’t referring to the McGhee family, whose courage Dylan surely admired. The words refer to his involvement in civil rights movement and politics more broadly.

At the end of the song, Dylan says,

Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them

This is Dylan's way of telling his fans, and the broader public, that, having written many protest songs about civil rights and war in his still-early career, he was no longer going to be a protest singer and didn't like being pigeonholed that way. That was the message he was sending at Newport when he went electric and performed “Maggie’s Farm.”

In fact, Dylan wrote few politically oriented songs after that. By his fourth album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he had decided to look both inward for his inspiration and outward at other kinds of music. He began to explore more personal and abstract themes in his music and in his poetry. He also became more involved with drugs, alcohol, and religion. His songs began to focus on his love life, his alienation, and his growing sense of the absurd. In subsequent decades, Dylan would reinvent himself several more times.

Even after 1965, however, Dylan occasionally revealed that he hadn’t lost his touch for composing political songs. His “Subterranean Homesick Blues” references the violence inflicted on civil rights protestors by cops (“Better stay away from those/That carry around a fire hose”) but also reflected his growing cynicism (“Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters”). The extremist wing of Students for a Democratic Society took their name—Weatherman—from another line in that song (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Other songs, such as “I Shall Be Released” (1967), the Guthrie-esque “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” (1967), “ George Jackson” (1971), “Hurricane” (1975), “License to Kill” (1983), and “Clean Cut Kid” (1984) indicate that Dylan still had the capacity for political outrage.

A Complete Unknown captures the mood and the music of the first few years of Dylan’s ascendency. Timothee Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Seeger embody their characters, including their voices, playing, looks, and performance styles. If the film gets people to be more curious about Seeger, to listen to his songs and learn about his life and legacy—that alone would be enough.

The movie accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition.

Though based on Wald’s extraordinary book, the film takes some artistic liberties that bend or distort the truth. It underplays the importance of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a committed leftist, in educating Dylan about both literature and the civil rights movement. It downplays the fact that Joan Baez was already famous when she met Dylan and helped jumpstart his career by introducing him at music festivals. Contrary to the film, Dylan never appeared on Seeger's homespun educational TV show, "Rainbow Quest." Dylan did visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital when he first arrived in New York, but Seeger wasn't there. And Dylan's second visit with Woody, as depicted at the end of the film, is entirely fictional.

But perhaps most disappointing is what the film left out—Dylan playing on McGhee’s farm in Mississippi and at the March on Washington, both in 1963. Had those incidents been included, we could see that Dylan’s commitment to civil rights and activism , however brief in the context of his long career, was more than rhetorical, and contributed to his image as a protest singer.

Unions are a critical working-class institution. They are one of the most effective organizations in the struggle against poverty, inequality, and economic insecurity.

They’re also deeply popular with the American public — a poll conducted by Gallup last year saw labor unions receive an approval rating of 70 percent.

But despite that broad public support, union membership has fallen steadily over the past four decades. Union density collapsed from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 9.9 percent in 2024, a record low. That’s a total loss of more than 3.4 million union members, from 17.72 million to 14.25 million union members out of a workforce of 88.29 million and 144.52 million, respectively.

The majority of the American public correctly sees this downward trend as harmful to both the country and the working-class. The slide also highlights the need for labor to dedicate more of its resources to organizing non-unionized workplaces rather than lobbying and political campaigns.

Our political system’s dependence on money is a serious structural barrier towards moving the country in a pro-labor direction. We see this in the massive deployment of economic resources at the federal level by lobbyists. And the disparity is jarring when you compare the federal spending by business lobbyists to labor.

From the beginning of 2020 to this past year, labor lobbyists spent more than $258 million, but this is dwarfed by the $17.1 billion doled out by the business sector. This is a ratio of 66 to 1 in favor of business. Corporate influence operations account for 86.7 percent of all federal lobbying spending, and they have zero interest in seeing the expansion of workers’ rights and power.

In other words, political spending is a losing game for organized labor. They cannot match the economic power of oligarchs and the corporations they control, leaving it with little political leverage and influence over our elected public officials.

Despite these structural disadvantages, the labor movement has scored some political victories. Unions endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and donated $27 million directly to his electoral campaign. This paid some dividends. The Biden administration bolstered the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in a pro-labor direction, increasing the agency’s funding and appointing dedicated workers’ rights advocates.

However, as noted by journalist Hamilton Nolan, the opportunity to expand worker power was squandered — a record low of union density was reached after four years of a favorable administration.

Now the organized labor movement is forced to operate in a hostile, anti-worker environment for the next four years, and the brazen attacks have already begun.

In his first two weeks as president, Donald Trump fired General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and Board member Gwynne Wilcox. The latter dismissal generated a legal challenge, but until the courts settle the matter or a new Board member is appointed, the NLRB will remain a hamstrung federal agency.

The lack of quorum strips the Board’s ability to issue a number of important labor-related decisions that come across its desk and it leaves organizing workers vulnerable to both retaliatory attacks and illegal anti-union activities by corporations.

Research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates that there are more than 60 million workers who want and are ready to join a union. Union resources need to be allocated towards organizing those workers, not politics. It would more than quadruple union density and increase the pool of resources available to the labor movement.

Organizing those 60 million workers strengthens our collective power, expands our dues base, develops more leaders, and increases our political influence. We can use our moral and material resources to combat the oncoming increases in the cost of living — thanks to Trump’s tariff regime — and the most unfavorable environment for labor organizing in recent memory.

Given everything that the Trump administration is doing right now, this country needs massive rallies opposing his actions and his authoritarianism.

Ezra Klein recently wrote in The New York Times that Donald Trump was actually rather weak. He is overreaching, doing decrees because he can’t make them law, and that we must simply “not believe” that he is the omnipotent power he now proclaims himself to be. Believing this, as so many clearly do, is disempowering, as the natural response then is to hide instead of act.

I sympathize with the argument. The all-out attack on our system may represent overreach. Not everything that Trump has ordered will come to pass. But it’s vitally important that people not calm down too much out of faith that the democratic system will somehow defend itself.

I am familiar with right-wing authoritarian power grabs in Eastern Europe. I wrote a book anticipating the triumph of the radical right in Poland soon before it actually happened. What Jarosław Kaczyński did in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary took longer to do than what Trump (and Musk and others) are trying to do right now.

In 2017 I attended a panel at the national political science conference where a group of constitutional scholars all agreed that a U.S. president can basically do whatever he wants—far more quickly than a European prime minister can do—and that judicial checks on such behavior, if they come at all, come far later, sometimes too late even to matter. Add to this the fact that Trump, via Vice President J.D. Vance, has all but said he won’t abide by court decisions he doesn’t like. (We should expect the response to any judicial pushback will be classic Trump: he’ll first say the decision is ridiculous and radical and he won’t abide by it, then to get the pro-Trump moderates to calm down he’ll promise to follow the law, and finally, in practice, he’ll ignore the courts.)

The only way to stop this – at least the only way to begin to stop this – is mass protest.

I was in Poland in the months after the Law and Justice party, led by Kaczyński, came to power in 2015 and started on the same new authoritarian path that Orban in Hungary and now Trump is following in the United States. Within weeks citizens organized massive demonstrations in Warsaw and elsewhere. A group called The Committee to Defend Democracy organized them, and sympathetic press publicized them.

I was at these demos. The Poles who attended were being beside themselves when they discovered just how many people had also shown up! No, it did not change any policy, at the moment. But it served the vital purpose of keeping up resistance, which has begun to pay off. The anti-Kaczyński opposition won parliamentary elections a year ago.

It’s now February. The Democrats are doing what they’re doing in Congress and some statehouses. Some protests have taken place outside the Labor Department and in support of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But there haven’t been mass protests. These need to start happening by April or May. At that point even elected Democrats will come (they must not be the organizers!). Such demos will matter—as much if not more than anything matters at this moment. It will be one thing ordinary people can do. The problem right now is that ordinary people are incredibly angry and frustrated, and are being led to believe they can’t do anything, except perhaps to follow the depressing news.

The importance of fighting against helplessness is one of the great lessons from the Polish democratic opposition of the early 1970s. This was a particularly depressing time for the Left in Poland. The official Communist Party authorities had just led the country through their own right-wing national-populist phase. They’d just conducted a massive campaign against Left student radicals as well as Party-affiliated liberals and progressives. And they’d delivered this package with a dose of anti-Semitism, since Jews historically had been the villains for Poland’s radical right (like people of color have been the villains for America’s radical right). They knew that this anti-Semitic campaign would win them strong support from “regular people” always ready to accept some easy answer for their problems and also drive out the liberals still influential in the Party, which would make their populist Right even stronger.

The result was that in the early 1970s, leftists and liberals alike thought the situation was hopeless. And the first thing smart new oppositionists said? When there’s nothing to do, you do something anyway. When the situation seems hopeless, you have to maintain some kind of hope through some kind of action. That’s how the great Solidarity movement, based on the sudden emergence of the new Solidarity trade union, came about in 1980.

Later, when leftists and liberals felt authoritarianism rising after 2015, they marshaled that sentiment once again, and did something. They organized the mass demonstrations that gave people hope by proving to them that millions thought the same way as they did, even if their elected leaders were not yet with them.

Let’s do the same now. We need, and can have, a giant rally—or several giant rallies, it’s a big country!—where speakers loudly and passionately make the case about the Trump administration attacking U.S. democracy and selling out regular working people to the whims of the rich. People will come! And they will learn that there are millions who are as angry as them, and ready to do something about it.

When should these happen? Personally, I think it best to wait a few weeks, since otherwise too many people might accept the Trumpers’ favorite refrain that opposition comes only from those who simply hate him and always want to oppose him. But we can’t wait long. We need giant mass rallies in defense of democracy by spring at the latest.

Who will organize this? Who has access to skilled and well-connected organizers? I don’t. But you’re out there. Let’s get this going!

In the last few days, Taiwan, India and Japan made clear they will be buying exported American LNG in the months and years ahead. Why? Entirely in an effort to hold off tariffs from the Trump administration. As the Japanese prime minister put it,

“We will cooperate to strengthen energy security between the two countries including increasing exports of United States liquefied natural gas to Japan in a mutually beneficial manner.”

Here’s how Bloomberg described the Indian decision-making:

Indian importers are under pressure from the government to reach deals that could smooth relations with Trump, the people said, but they will be looking for the best possible terms before signing any agreements.

Meanwhile, as Sing Yee Ong reports from Taipei

Taiwan is preparing to buy more liquefied natural gas from the US to reduce its trade surplus and potentially avoid higher tariffs.

Oh, and more to come

South Korea, Vietnam and the European Union are among energy buyers trying to appease President Donald Trump — and reduce the threat of tariffs — by looking to increase purchases from the biggest exporter of the super-chilled fuel and largest producer of crude.

I want to highlight these shakedowns, which have mostly been lost amidst the thousand other terrible things the Trump administration has loosed upon the world, because I know that before long Big Oil will be holding them up as evidence that the world needs and wants more fossil fuel. In fact, the world wants to move in entirely the opposite direction: 85% of new electric generation in 2023 came from renewables, and the numbers for 2024 will almost certainly be higher. That, of course, terrifies the fossil fuel industry—which is why they spent record amounts on November’s election. As fracking baron Harold Hamm explained, “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime.”

And now they’re getting the payoff: Trump threatens tariffs, and offers to make them go away if they buy some LNG. It’s akin to a protection racket. Pay up, or your windows get broken. It’s not criminal—it’s all entirely legal. It’s just wrong.

This particular protection racket makes no sense for America at large. Forget, for a moment, that LNG is a huge driver of the climate change driving fire and flood (by the time you’ve shipped it overseas it’s far worse even than coal); exporting it in huge quantities also obviously drives up the price for Americans still reliant on fracked gas for heating and cooking. The Energy Information Administration just predicted that natural gas prices will rise 21 percent in the year ahead. Politico did the math

Paul Cicio, president of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.
Every “dollar increase in natural gas costs consumers $34 billion plus about $20 billion in higher electricity cost,” Cicio said in a statement Tuesday. It's “only going to get worse from here as LNG exports increase.”t of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.

As the Sierra Club points out, Trump’s strategy “makes no sense.” And they’re right—as long as we’re talking about the future of the planet or the cost to American consumers. But that’s not who Trump is thinking about. He’s got one constituency and one only: the Big Oil execs who bankrolled his campaign. For them, this is sweet payback, a 100-1 return on their investment.

And it’s a stark reminder that we have to fight back on the only turf we have: the fact that the sun and wind can deliver the same product as LNG, only more cheaply and much more cleanly. We can’t threaten tariffs to get our way; we can only make the case in such persuasive terms that we start to change the zeitgeist. That’s the point of SunDay project I described last week and that you are going to hear a lot more about. Many thanks to those who went to sunday.earth to help us draw some suns as we prepare for the official launch of this big effort. So many of you took part already. Here’s a beautiful example from the effervescent Ayana Johnson (whose book What If We Get It Right is a document for this tough moment):

And here’s one from Billy Parish, whose Solar Mosaic has financed something like ten percent of the rooftop solar in America

It may seem like a mug’s game to take on Trump’s thuggish power with economics, physics, music, art, and justice. But perhaps they still hold some force in this world—we shall see.

Madmen Trump and Musk are moving with warp speed to illegally and dictatorially wreck America and enrich themselves in the process.

Forget the use of the terms "autocracy" and "constitutional crisis." This is a savage dictatorship, getting worse by the day. Trump is attacking the courts, ignoring Congress run by a cowardly GOP, pushing to cut off critical assistance for tens of millions of Americans, devastating health, safety, food (Meals on Wheels), education (Head Start), and Medicaid insurance protections.

The rabid, ravaging, unstable Musk and his Chief Musketeer Trump are shutting down whole agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Agency for International Development (only Congress can do this). The CFPB is the federal cop enforcing laws against corporate crooks stealing your money in myriad ways, and returning many billions of dollars back to you.

As for shuttering illegally the U.S. Agency for International Development, consider what is happening in these direly poor countries, as reported in the New York Times: "Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medication for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children, and women battered by violence." ("Chaos and Confusion Reign as U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Millions Globally" by Apoorva Mandavilli, February 12, 2025). Trump is also cutting monitoring for the emergence of deadly epidemics such as Ebola, drug-resistant Tuberculosis, Malaria, and other lethal viruses and bacteria, which could come to the U.S. like Covid-19 did.

The cost of all these vital protections is less than one percent of the federal budget. These safeguards have been supported by both Republican and Democratic Presidents—until Trump's brutal reign of terror.

Children, women (maternal health assistance), and men are dying now in places like Africa. Americans are just starting to suffer with the unlawful cutoff of funds (only Congress can do this) and the firing of thousands of dedicated civil servants ministering to their fellow Americans in need.

USAID is the humanitarian face of America, and Republicans like Marco Rubio once called it necessary for our country’s national security.

American businesses are starting to feel Musk's poisonous tusks. Just with closing USAID, this South African racist ordered the sign on its headquarters taken down. 100,000 positions have been cut overseas, and an estimated 52,000 Americans in 42 states have lost their jobs. Agricultural food supplies ready for export are starting to rot in warehouses and ports, according to the Times.

"Street demonstrations are spreading from Washington to California, from Oregon to Florida. Government employees and their unions are filing lawsuits in federal courts. Half of the country's state attorneys general are filing numerous court challenges."

The Trump/Musk machetes are swinging wildly striking beyond bullying the poor, defenseless, and powerless, and also upending the business community. Much of our government is contracted out to millions of businesses—small and large. Their contracts are being ripped up by this lying, corrupt President who many business leaders helped elect last November.

However, voters electing Trump didn't mean that they elected a fascist dictator betraying his campaign boasts and "Day One" promises with the first flurry of executive orders or dictates violating our Constitution, statutes, and international laws.

There is a systemic cunning behind the wild rioting that Trump and Musk are causing. First, their actions are not about efficiency. Here is their broad scheme. First fire the cops, the law enforcers against corporate violators of worker, consumer, environmental, and small investor protections. Many federal agencies have current investigations into Musk’s companies (SEC, NHTSA, EPA, FAA, etc.).

Second, establish a kleptocracy to enrich both Musk and Trump personally. (See the February 13, 2025, New York Times article by Eric Lipton titled "Under Trump Shake-Up, Benefits for Musk Empire").

Third, smash programs assisting people, while protecting huge waste, fraud, and abuse from corporate crime harming taxpayers (e.g., fraud on Medicare/Medicaid) and vast outlays of corporate welfare – giveaways, subsidies, bailouts, and endless tax escapes by big business. After all, Trump and Musk are both corporatists.

The military/industrial complex’s unauditable Pentagon budget is untouchable. Far from squeezing the enormous waste, redundancy, and corporate fraud, Trump gives every sign of supporting an additional $150 billion, which should go for domestic necessities, to this year's Defense Department's swollen taxpayer appropriations. After all, Trump and Musk are militarists.

What of the resistance, presently mounting, but still outrun and over-run by the Trumpster gangsters? Americans don't like to be told to shut up; they don't like to have things rightfully theirs taken from their families; they don't like to be fired en masse without cause; they don't like government contracts for vital services being arbitrarily broken. They also don't like their government being overthrown by fascistic gangsters.

Street demonstrations are spreading from Washington to California, from Oregon to Florida. Government employees and their unions are filing lawsuits in federal courts. Half of the country's state attorneys general are filing numerous court challenges. The mainstream media, under direct attack by Trump, and being frivolously sued by Trump, is still reporting and investigating.

The campuses will start rumbling as Trump/Musk cuts to medical research and other aids to education corrode these institutions. Retired military personnel are voicing their objections to the devastation of the kind of America and the freedom they fought to defend. (See veteransforpeace.org.) Veteran benefits are on draft-dodger Trump's cutting table.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has finally spoken out. On February 11, 2025, the ABA assailed the disregard of the judiciary and threats to judges by Trump/Musk/Vance, which "threaten the very foundation of our constitutional system." The ABA calls for "every lawyer and legal organization to speak with one voice and to condemn the efforts of any administration that suggests its actions are beyond the reach of judicial review."

Soon the business community, unable to tolerate the chaos, inflation, instability, and recklessness of Trump's regime's contracting violations, will speak out as economic indices fall, including stock markets.

It will take a few weeks or months, with heightened inflation, for this disruptive pipeline to reach critical mass as it will everywhere, including the red states where Trump supporters are concentrated. As one example, one of Biden's enacted laws "is projected to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into low-carbon energy technologies." Most of these benefits are in Republican-voting communities in red states "where they are creating a once-in-a-generation manufacturing boom." (The New York Times).

Recall, Trump's "drill, baby, drill" mantra of climate violence was linked with downgrading efficient solar energy and shutting down wind power projects under construction, along with the EPA’s work.

Once Trump's voters and his business base start turning against him, with wide media coverage and dropping polls, the stage will be set for surging demands for his resignation and impeachment that starts with "impossible," then "possible," then "probable," then conviction. If the GOP sees either its political skin at risk in 2026 versus Trump's destructive, daily delusions and dangerous daily damage, politicians will put their political fortunes first.

That is what Congressional Republicans did when they told Nixon to resign in 1974 over the Watergate scandal – a peapod by comparison with Trump’s wholesale subversions of our government to one man rule who has said “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.”

Call the White House switchboard 202-456-1414 and tell Trump to stop the destruction of America and go back to Mar-a-Lago.

In bad times—and these are bad times—I call up the spirit of Willie.

Willie has seen me through cancer, divorce, and deaths in the family. His memory has given me the courage and strength to push on when I wanted to give up and hide. Willie reminds me that, even at 87, I can take it, get back up, survive, sometimes even win.

Willie was my bully. When I was 12, he beat me up or at least threatened to do so almost every day.

U.S. President Donald Trump is my bully now. Even though I share the misery he spreads with millions of others, it somehow seems personal because he makes me feel so vulnerable, so hopeless, so at the end of my version of the American dream. And, of course, everything he does evokes Willie.

We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees.

I recognized each of them as bullies the first time we met. I was a journalist in my early 40s, in the late 1970s, when I initially interviewed Donald Trump for CBS Sunday Morning. I took him for an amusing buffoon. He was around 35 then. Obviously lying to me, it was clear that he had a certain oily allure. People considered him harmless, a loser supported by his dad. He didn’t scare me. After Willie, few ever did. But even then the swagger was unmistakable, the flat-voiced, dead-eyed affect, the lack of humane connection. From that first moment, I knew he was a predator.

Enter Willie

At 12, I was terrified by Willie, who spotted me early in seventh grade as an after-school target. There I was, fat, meek, and lugging a heavy leather bookbag. In my junior high school’s permissive climate, some roughhousing was tolerated to let the bullies drain off energy and ease the teachers’ day. I was in a class for the “gifted,” identified by those bags full of books we carried from class to class (that were all too easily kicked out of our hands).

Maybe the principal, a growly old-school bully himself, thought we needed to be toughened up, since he allowed the harassment—as long as his own authority wasn’t challenged.

Willie never seriously hurt me. Once a week or so, there would be a little blood, a few bruises, maybe a pocket torn off my shirt. But the humiliation in front of my classmates especially the girls, proved crushing. I still remember it viscerally.

Of course, I was hardly the only victim in that school, but I seemed to be the only one with a designated bully on a regular schedule. I never complained or reported it because that seemed to me a form of giving in, surrender, letting Willie and the other bullies know that the torment had gotten to me. I always told myself: You can take it.

And then, one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I have no idea why. It seemed like any other bully afternoon outside the school’s front doors. At 3:00 pm, Willie swaggered up and gave me a preliminary shove. I stood my ground and talked back, trying not to sound whiney. Some of my classmates, relieved they weren’t involved, gathered to watch.

The Battle

Willie kicked my bookbag out of my hand. That hurt. He grabbed for my pocket. I tried to push his hand away and then, for the first time, I suddenly launched myself at him, a rotund rocket of repressed rage. We both went down on the gray sidewalk. Incredibly, I was on top.

I began beating his head. Writing this even now, some 75 years later, I smile, sit up, and feel stronger.

I jammed my pudgy knees into his chest until he gasped, grabbed handfuls of his greasy hair, and yanked until he started to scream. I screamed back, “I’m gonna kill you!” Then I began trying to bash his brains out.

My classmates cheered discreetly, the bullies clapped, and my teacher shouted, “Robert! You’ll hurt him!” What a thrill that was! It didn’t last long. A burly shop teacher peeled me off and laughed as he put a steel-tipped toe in my rear. The principal himself came over to get a better look. I could tell he was trying not to smile.

I didn’t become a school hero, the girls didn’t flock to me, and the bullies didn’t try to recruit me. Still, Willie avoided me after that, and no one ever bullied me again. There were moments in the years to come in school, on the street, even in newsrooms, when I sensed someone was about to symbolically kick me, but I like to think that my response—even if only a sharp word or my body language—left that fight in the world of my fantasies. I was always ready for Willie redux, and I think it showed.

Another Kind of Bully

So here we are so many years later, surrounded by bullies (think, Elon Musk) so consumed by their psychoses, greed, cowardice, and outright madness for domination that they seem capable of becoming the ultimate bullies and destroying our world. No wonder so many of us feel vulnerable, hopeless, marooned at the butt end of this experiment in what once was but no longer is a liberal democracy.

The tale of Willie and me wasn’t simply a metaphor, of course; it was once my reality. Still, I cherish its metaphoric lessons in this moment. They keep me going. After all, the Trump era has felt all too much like a fever dream, a slow-motion train wreck leading us into a future that once seemed inconceivable. But we let it happen, didn’t we?

Who could have foreseen the rise of the new oligarchs, including Elon Musk and all those other billionaires? Well, don’t you remember the first time around—the robber barons of the 19th century?

The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy.

The question is: How did everyday Americans become so ready for such a nightmarish change? How could they be seduced by a clown like Trump? Of course, American history offers its warnings. Remember how many were ready to follow Father Coughlin in the 1930s or Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Still, neither of them ever became president.

Back in Willie’s day, the conventional wisdom was that bullies were basically cowards who would back down if you stood up to them. Even then, that wasn’t necessarily true, but as an explanation it served a purpose. In standing up to the bully and taking your lumps, you would learn that survival itself was a small victory that could lead to bigger ones. Perhaps even a full-scale victory someday.

A few years later, when bullies started packing guns, knives, and computers, the conventional wisdom became dangerous as well as wrong. By then, bullied kids returned with an automatic weapon and wiped out the cafeteria. A cycle of violence had been created.

And now we have this ur-bully in the White House again, who showed up and began suing people, firing them, arresting them. Some of the same pundits who never really believed in his staying power are now suggesting that we simply roll ourselves up and wait it out. You know, just keep your head down. It’s only four years, after all.

Well, consider that the worst advice possible. Donald Trump has loosed too many demons, already out of his control—from unhinged individuals just waiting for a voice to send them out into the night to vigilante militias awaiting a cause to give them purpose. They now think Trump has their backs (although he’s capable of turning on anyone). In his all-(un-)American world, there are no safe havens and no certainties. Those who think the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is Trump’s Mein Kampf had better be guarding against his version of the Reichstag fire that gave Adolph Hitler his critical boost. If you think chaos is assured, the next step may be to build a bunker or hop on a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk interstellar rocket to Mars.

A New Mindset

My own feeling, though, is that the next step is to develop a new mindset.

Something like this: We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees. We’re the Viet Cong who planted poisoned bamboo spikes. Sound ugly? Perhaps you’d rather echo Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” which certainly didn’t lead to victory in the 2016 presidential election. Get real. Going lower is merely a tactical decision. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up your principles, no less joining the other side.

Resistance begins with “embracing the suck” (old military slang for acknowledging the morass we’re in). Part of such an approach is understanding that, in opposing Trumpworld, you could get a torn pocket here, a lost job there, maybe even risky confrontations in the street. But without resistance, count on one thing: It will only get worse.

Old Bullies Beget New Ones

The bullies who clapped when I beat Willie are the progenitors of the unruly mob of blue-collar losers and white-collar wonks, proud thugs and Heritage Foundation nerds who, 60 years later, showed up at Trump rallies. By the time Donald sprung from jail those of them convicted of trashing the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it was clear that they had always been the enemy. In Willie’s time, while we were afraid of them, we also considered ourselves superior to them and that smug, elitist view only grew.

Now, we find ourselves the asymmetrical warriors, the underdogs.

What about those classmates who watched Willie and me? They never tried to rescue me. I never found out what went through their minds when the worm finally turned. Did it make them ashamed or make them fight back against their own bullies?

The equivalent of those classmates, the bystanders of our moment, are the lost souls in this battle. They grew up to be the Democrats who fought among themselves for ideological bragging rights, or the Republicans who gave in, followed the money and power, voted the bastards in, and now hide behind them. They have functionally become bullies, too.

And Willie? The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy. To hell with him and Donald Trump, too. We’ve certainly read enough about his troubled childhood, nasty dad, cold family. The question now is: What do we do before he does us all in?

Three Things to Do

First, shut up and listen.

In retrospect, it’s easy enough to see how the shrewd, disciplined plotters, before and during the Trump years, stocked the judiciary and the state legislatures, the school boards and town councils with radical right-wingers. And it’s no less easy to point out that the rising prices that disrupted the lives of the working and middle classes made Trump seem like an all too viable option for so many of us. All that should have been as clear as after-school bullying. But it didn’t seem to alarm enough of the media and so many of the political bystanders who looked down on the bullies and the bullied and thought they were safe.

If you want to keep ahead of the nightmare to come, you better pay attention now. Better follow Truth Social and not just MSNBC. Better listen to Steve Bannon and not just Rachel Maddow. Bannon’s term “muzzle velocity” explains why we’re having a hard time keeping up with the firehose of grim ideas, lies, deceptions, and mad directives the Trumpists are heaving out right now to overwhelm and confuse us all.

The bullies have a public list of whom they’re coming after and if you’re not on it yet, you’re likely to be in some fashion sooner or later—unless you become one of them.

If we knock off the whining and chattering among ourselves and listen carefully to our enemies, we might be able to figure out just what they’re doing and prioritize just how we need to respond.

Second, never shut up.

Don’t mistake that as a cancellation of the first point. It means that this is the time to report the bullies and complain—to do, in other words, exactly what I didn’t do back in junior high school. We need to keep calling and writing our legislators, showing up at the local town council and school board meetings, while making our opinions clear in voicemails, e-mails, and letters to the editor. We need to keep up the pressure. Most people serving Trump just want to hold onto their gigs. Let them know that they could lose them when the resistance steps up if they don’t start responding to us now.

Don’t ever pass up voting again. How many of the bullied in the Trumpian era were among the misguided whose unused ballots provided him with his heartbreakingly narrow victory?

Support local media outlets and create new ones. The weakening of major newspaper and broadcasting sites has been a shocking development of these years and an indicator of how oligarchic media entities have been co-opted. When the Times pushed columnist Paul Krugman out the door, they lost some trust. Jim Acosta’s parting words as he walked the plank at CNN (“Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope.”) sounded brave but sadly desperate.

Never shut up on environmental issues. It’s a priority to rally around the Earth in the “drill, baby, drill” era of Donald Trump. Many issues are local and coverage is accessible.

Third, above all else support the bullied.

I sometimes still fantasize about my classmates rushing forward, knocking Willie down with their book bags, and saving me. I wonder if that’s our only hope now.

The bullies have a public list of whom they’re coming after and if you’re not on it yet, you’re likely to be in some fashion sooner or later—unless you become one of them. Even then, don’t count on that lasting forever.

Some “sanctuary cities” have already stepped up and declared that they won’t allow their police forces to support ICE in the deportation of undocumented workers. There are major corporations that have refused to disband their Diversity-Equity-Inclusion units and the rights of their gay, trans, ethnic, and racial minority workers. Universities are cranking up to defend against a renewed assault on academic freedom. Obviously, we need to support them and new movements of every sort.

We also need the kind of awakening that right-wing pundit Peggy Noonan seemed to doubt could happen in a recent Wall Street Journal column when she wrote, “With luck this battle will last no more than four years, but we can’t count on the return of shame and decency, the resurrection of the Democratic party, and the emergence of the kind of leadership we need.”

Not on its own we can’t. The return of shame and decency to people who seem historically to have them in short supply sounds improbable. It’s a nice notion. Better we concentrate on growing the grit and smarts to fight back from the hedgerows to the dark net. We can beat Willie and Donald, but only if we do it together.

In a recent article published by NPR titled, “New to the Senate, Gallego Challenges Democrats’ Views on 'Working-Class Latinos’,” the newly elected Senator from Arizona, Ruben Gallego, defends his co-sponsoring of the Laken Riley Act.

Responding to his critics, Gallego stated, “They’re welcome to give me advice and everything else like that… but don’t come and try to lie to me and say that that’s where the Latino voter is… because that’s not the case.”

Gallego’s statement is very telling. It gives us critical insight into the way Democrats think, why they keep shifting to the right, and why they are doomed to keep losing in the face of a Republican Party that is becoming increasingly authoritarian and detached from reality.

When Democrats Follow the Narrative Instead of Driving the Narrative, They Are Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Defeat

In the quote above, Gallego is saying that Latino voters, like other voters, are also “concerned” about new immigrant arrivals at the border. He therefore reasons he has to speak to that concern by supporting militarized right-wing immigration policies, many of which are actually causing the crisis at the border. The Laken Riley Act is not only a due-process nightmare, allowing for detention of noncitizens who have merely been accused of minor crimes like shoplifting, but it will also allow red state attorneys general to sue future Democratic administrations for their immigration policies, effectively kneecapping any immigration policy change they may want to enact and thwarting the exclusive federal authority over immigration law. Gallego’s logic is that it’s OK to sponsor unconstitutional laws because the voters he has spoken to want “tougher” immigration laws.

This thinking perfectly encapsulates what is wrong with the Democratic Party. It is a failed political calculus that has led to decades of bad immigration policy outcomes and repeated electoral defeat. Democratic politicians look to where the polls are, look to the narratives in the public discourse (often planted there by bad faith right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News), and then try to move their policy prescriptions toward what they perceive to be public sentiment. They should do the exact opposite, i.e. they should hold a core of strong policy beliefs and use those to drive a narrative on issues that addresses people’s concerns. Democratic, consultant-filtered thinking is completely backward because it fails to take into consideration that public sentiment is fluid and can be shifted with a compelling narrative. Instead, Democrats take the narratives blasted out by the right-wing propaganda machine and try to adjust their policies to fit them.

The “immigrants are dangerous” narrative is not only demonstrably false (immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than citizens do), but when Democrats concede this narrative, they are setting the stage for their own defeat. Instead of implicitly endorsing the “dangerous immigrant” framework, Democrats should counter it with a narrative about how immigration is good for the country, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than citizens are, and that right-wing policy is the cause of illegal immigration. If the public buys into the “dangerous immigrant” narrative, they are always going to be more receptive to the Republican Party because the Republicans are always going to push further and further to the right. If you think immigrants are dangerous criminals, you are going to support the guy who is talking about walls and tough policies, instead of the party that is constantly giving mixed messages about how immigrants are good but also that they are the ones who are really “tough” on the border.

Instead of giving the Republicans the strength and uphill advantage of conceding their narratives, the Democrats need to flip the script by embracing immigration so that they are the ones attacking from an uphill position of strength.

The effectiveness of the Republican narrative on immigration, even though it is completely false, is reflected in several data points, such as the fact that immigration is a bigger priority to more Americans now than it was a year ago, as well as the reports showing that many Latinos have bought into the right-wing narrative and voted for Trump under the impression that he would only deport the “bad” undocumented immigrants. Of course, this has turned out to be completely false, as Donald Trump’s press secretary recently confirmed that they view all undocumented immigrants as criminals, even if they don’t have a criminal record.

In the NPR article cited at the beginning of my piece, Gallego says, “It’s usually white liberals that are talking to liberal Latinos, and they are essentially saying that’s what working-class Latinos feel and think about immigration… when in reality, they don’t.” I think Gallego is pointing to something that is true, but he’s got the wrong takeaway. For too long, the Democratic Party has assumed that barbaric right-wing immigration policy will inherently drive Latinos to vote for the Democrats. Gallego is essentially saying, “Working class Latinos are concerned about illegal immigration, so Democrats should move to the right on this issue.” I think the more accurate takeaway is that Latinos, just like anyone else, can be susceptible to the right-wing “dangerous immigrant” narrative. Even though right-wing immigration policy will disproportionately impact the Latino community, if the Democrats allow the “dangerous immigrant” narrative to take hold, more and more Latinos will vote Republican. I think the takeaway that Gallego is missing is that, instead of endorsing the right-wing immigration narrative, it is essential for the Democrats to offer a framing of the immigration issue that counters the one pushed by the Republicans.

When Republicans fearmonger about immigrant crime, Democrats need to push back with a factual narrative like this: “Immigration is good for the country and good for the economy. Study after study shows that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens. Republicans love to complain about illegal immigration, but their policies are actually the main cause of illegal immigration. The best way to reduce illegal immigration is to give people more legal pathways to come to the U.S. and stop the conservative policies that cause them to flee their home countries. Instead, Republicans want to cut off pathways for legal immigration, and pursue disruptive policies that make conditions worse in Latin America and the Caribbean.” If Democrats can convince the public that immigration is good, immigrants are not dangerous, and that Republicans are the cause of illegal immigration, it will lead the public to move away from the Republican party.

As long as Democrats keep putting their finger to the wind and trying to follow the right-wing narrative instead of reshaping the narrative to one that is better for the country, better for immigrants, and better for their political prospects, they are going to keep losing and the nation is going to experience increasingly worse immigration policy outcomes. In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu wrote, “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak,” as well as, “It is a military axiom not to advance uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill.” Instead of giving the Republicans the strength and uphill advantage of conceding their narratives, the Democrats need to flip the script by embracing immigration so that they are the ones attacking from an uphill position of strength. This is not limited to immigration. Indeed, it is applicable to all issues. The Democrats need to steer the carriage of public discourse and opinion in the direction they want it to go, instead of being tied to the back of it and getting dragged along.

Days after November’s Trump-MAGA election victory, a senior Russian diplomat asked his American interlocutors how great a historical transformation it signaled. Was it the equivalent of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the South deserting the Democratic Party in response to the 1965 Civil Rights Act?

Within days of his inauguration it was clear, Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times, that U.S. President Donald Trump and his cronies were “waging war on the American system of government.” Billionaire plutocrats captured Washington to increase their immense fortunes, to eviscerate our limited social safety net, to eliminate corporate regulations, and to turn the clock back on 70 years of civil and human rights gains. A month on we find ourselves in the midst of what is politely described as a “constitutional crisis,” as Trump and his co-conspirators signal they will refuse to respect court orders that overrule their illegal and unconstitutional actions.

The chaos and calamity the Trump regime is wreaking within the United States extends beyond our borders, near and far. Counter-productively Trump and company are swinging their recking ball at the foundations of the United States’ liberal and sometimes democratic empire which has subsidized the U.S. economy for more than a century. The murder of as many as 3 million Vietnamese; NATO’s generation-long Afghanistan War; and continuing supply of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons, as well as diplomatic support, for Israel’s genocidal second Palestinian Nakba, give lie to a benign U.S. led “international rules-based order.” Reinforcing the image of the Ugly American, the Trump-Musk assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development is killing innocent aid recipients around the world by denying them food and medicines. Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, targeted primarily against China, provide an unexpected opening to the Middle Kingdom. They violate the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement and a trade agreement with Australia, signaling to the world that, like Hitler before him, Trump operates as if treaties are not worth the paper they are written on, and that the U.S.’ word is not to be trusted. This spells international chaos and economic pain for many U.S. Americans.

Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation.

That era of liberal imperialism is over. It has been coming since the end of the Cold War, as China’s rise and that of the most influential nations of the Global South have created the still uncertain and fluid multipolar disorder. Trump and company’s “peace through strength” is a response to the United States’ relative decline and is being pursued in a nationally self-defeating sovereigntist imperial tradition.

A New York Times article explained that the early sovereigntist movement sought “not only America’s formal sovereignty… but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed… they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well that of their nations.” Sovereigntists played leading roles in the 1930s’ fascist “America First” movement and opposed creation of the United Nations, the International Court, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. Sovereigntists supported racist Rhodesia as a “brave little country” and defended apartheid South Africa against U.N. sanctions. The Trumpist Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proclaimed that “international organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed. They should be abandoned.”

The conservative Trump critic Bret Stephens describes the sovereigntist ideology serving as a means for “a country doing what it wants to do… an indifference to the behavior of other states, however cruel or dangerous, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us.” It means that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In Trump’s case, we know that he despised the “rules-based order.” His former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien reported that he ”adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” That is to say his personal narcissistic sovereignty.

Thus, we have threats to seize Greenland and to annex Canada for minerals in order to outpace China in the technological and economic races for dominance. Panama is threatened in order to restore U.S. control over the strategically vital canal. And while the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP, nearly a trillion dollars, Trump has raised his demand that NATO nations increase their military spending to a staggering 5% of their GDP so that the Pentagon can concentrate its military and economic power on containing and dominating China. A fool’s errand.

Some governments, for example Poland, Japan, and Colombia, are kowtowing to Trump’s crude demands. Others—including Denmark, France, and even Germany, at least in the face of Trump’s Greenland demands—are insisting on respect for their national sovereignty. We can expect linkages as Trump goes beyond his threat to encourage Russia to invade nations that don’t meet his exorbitant military spending demands with tariff threats and other demands for those who fail to kowtow to the new lord’s orders.

Trump has yet to fully reveal his military and diplomatic approaches to Europe and Russia. In his return to power, Trump seems less smitten by Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian autocrat is “destroying Russia.” Trump has threatened further and useless sanctions against Moscow and increases in military support for Kyiv if Moscow refuses to come to the negotiating table on Trump’s terms. He has also offered continued military support for Ukraine in exchange for significant quantities of rare earth minerals needed for the industrial and the technological arms race with China. The Ukraine War, of course, is not only for control of that long-tormented borderland. On all sides, it is being fought to shape and define the Post-Post-Cold War’s European order and strategic architecture.

At the same time, Trump, who believe it or not is driven in part by his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, as well as his transactional way of being, could attempt to negotiate a comprehensive grand bargain with Putin over the heads Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukraine, and European leaders. It could include everything from the future of Ukraine to conventional and nuclear weapons in Europe, and to whatever follows the expiration of the New START nuclear treaty in February 2026.

On the other hand, if Putin is not willing to accommodate Trump’s demands we could see renewed commitments to the Biden administration’s goal of dealing Moscow a “strategic defeat,” and to the new Cold War.

On the international economic front, Trump’s tariff threats are more than temper tantrums. Rejection of the 70-year-old liberal imperial disorder includes the ambition of replacing the Bretton Woods-WTO systems with what Trump’s former Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer terms a “new American trade system.”

Lighthizer, who ignited the economic warfare with China during Trump’s first term, recently wrote that “countries with democratic governments [as of this now applies to the U.S. -jg!] and mostly free economies should come together to create a new trade regime. This system could enforce balance by having two tiers of tariffs.” Punitive tariffs would target “nondemocratic countries as well as those that insist on beggar-thy-neighbor aggressive industrial policies to run large surpluses.” Those within his new regime “would pay lower tariffs and they could be adjusted over time to ensure balance.”

The imperial naivety and ambition of this strategy brings to mind the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Abrams belief that with “shock and awe” that they could simultaneously export democracy to Iraq and seize control of the “sea of oil” on which that nation floats.

By definition, the narcissism of admiring one’s reflection in the mirror and insisting on personal or national sovereignty at the expense of others means ignoring the needs and agency of others. Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation. Just as no man is an island, neither is a nation. As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s decline, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.

We saw that with the end of the Cold War, based on common security and win-win diplomacy, there are alternatives that will enhance our personal and national security. In the words of the Jewish sage Hillel, “If not now, when? If not me [us] who?” We and the world’s nations are not powerless. U.S. and international strategies that target Trump’s stock market Achilles heel or ultimately a general strike could discipline this most undisciplined and dangerous despot.

Dedication: to the Declaration of Independence; it is worth re-reading.

What do we have to show for more than 20 years of war and trillions of dollars spent, since that prophetic day, February 15, 2003, when the world said no to the impending war on Iraq?

It may be useful to reflect on the past decades of never-ending wars and peer at the near future to assess where we might be headed.

The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government.

The Middle East is destabilized and war-ravaged and with 4.7 million people killed. This number includes indirect deaths from food insecurity, demolished infrastructure, environmental damage, and the chaos that ensues when people are bombed, in addition to those killed outright in military strikes. Women and children continue to suffer the deepest and most brutal consequences of the wars. More than 7.6 million children in post 9/11 war zones are suffering from acute malnutrition.

Over 38 million people have been displaced across Asia. A global refugee crisis due to violence and climate change continues unabated as internecine armed conflicts rage and weapons flow across every continent.

In the Afghan and Iraq wars, 53,533 U.S. service members were wounded, over 7,000 killed, and over 30,000 committed suicide. At this point, 22 veterans a day commit suicide; this number has been doubled in the past.

Over $21 trillion were blown on wars. Think what alternative uses for those trillions might have been, and weep for the hungry, unhoused, those lacking healthcare or going bankrupt during a health crisis that insurance refuses to cover, our always under-funded schools, the lack of public transit systems, and the intentional failure to transition from fossil fuels to mitigate the climate crisis that now has us firmly in its grip. Weep for what did not happen that could have benefited everyone and might have transformed our society in positive ways. Instead, trillions went to a few military contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrup Grumman.

Political accountability for the lies told prior to the shock and awe attack on Iraq and all the subsequent war crimes has been zero. The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—with each branch imposing a reactionary political will on all of us, with impunity, respecting no protocols, laws, or even the battered Constitution they swear to uphold. The wars always come home.

The horror visited on Gaza cannot be overlooked. The U.S. supplies lethal arms to Israel’s vengeful, genocidal rampage that has destroyed Gaza and unmercifully persecutes the West Bank. U.S. military support to Israel stands at over $22 billion since October 7, 2023 with additional billions of military aid in the pipeline. Gaza is a ruin of rubble, homes destroyed, no hospitals, no schools, tens (likely hundreds) of thousands killed, at least a hundred thousand wounded (thousands of children with arms and legs blown off), more than 95% of the population is starving. Governments and institutions failed to call for an end to the massacre, yet punished those speaking out for a cease-fire and arms embargo. What can and will be done to mitigate the ordeal the people of Gaza and the West Bank endure, living under murderous occupation?

The devastation from the wildfires in Los Angeles and Israel’s military destruction in Gaza bear an eerie resemblance to each other, one landscape caused by blowback from nature for our failure to care for our planet, the other by intentional military destruction. How painfully similar these landscapes are, as stunning symbols of the harm human beings do to their environment and to each other.

During these decades, the Pentagon budget has risen to astronomical heights despite the fact that the Pentagon has never passed an audit (those wishing to focus on waste in government might start there). The Department of Defense is the single largest fossil fuel consumer in the world and the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, yet environmental organizations and putative leaders carefully avoid implicating wars and militarism as part of the environmental crisis we face.

U.S. popular culture is driven by a saccharine romance with militarism in which the devastating realities of war are obscured, minimized, sanitized. “Enemies” are manufactured to resemble peoples who have governments the U.S. does not like, so that current politics and policies justify wars waged by the Pentagon. The enemy is familiar to all, no questions asked. The wars are so “vast and … absentee” (apologies to Thomas Pynchon) that the wretched, inflicted suffering endured by human beings goes on for years without notice by mainstream society.

The U.S. has only one political party: the War Party. Everyone in the established status quo agrees on policies to develop and build any and all weapons, to foment and continue to wage wars, abrogating international law and treaties that stand in the way. Those of us who rightly object to such destructive folly (defined by Barbara Tuchman as policies pursued that are counter to the true interest of a society) are treated with withering scorn at best and dismissed out of hand by a venal, corrupt establishment that literally coins money for itself by investing in merchants of death.

Environmental consequences loom, military destruction around the world is a significant contributor that includes elevated carbon dioxide released by bombing and the highly polluting jet fuel used for bombing missions. Scarce resources should be used to lessen suffering in our society and across the world, not employed for destructive purposes. Like it or not, we live on an interdependent, ecologically fragile planet. Humans, as Russell Means used to say, are “cursed with rationality,” which enables the crude justification of policies that are detrimental to life on Earth. The stark, evident fact is that Planet Earth itself, and all living things, cannot take any more war.

Do we face an imminent endgame in which nuclear weapons are used? All nuclear nations are busily upgrading their arsenals, flouting the international ban treaty. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight, although moving it to midnight and saying there will be no more changes unless humanity finds a way to save itself might be more apropos for the historical moment we are living in.

Is it at all possible for people to rise up in large enough numbers, out of love for Planet Earth and all living things, across the globe to prevent such a catastrophe, as it is clear that there is no governmental or institutional entity willing or able to call a halt to military madness?

In three days, Amsterdam organized the only general strike in Europe to protest the first roundup of Jews. People poured into the streets on February 25, 1941—an estimated 300,000 of the 800,000 total who lived in the city.

The first to march were the tram and dock workers. The civil servants followed and word spread through the whole city, even to the small sewing workshop where a woman named Mientje Meijer worked. She and her husband had talked about it, and he came to the window to let her know it was really happening. She stopped her treadle, rose to her feet, and said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in.”

The ladies poured out, even the boss, and joined the multitudes: teachers, metal workers, factory employees, shop clerks, people from across the political spectrum. Some were furious that their fellow citizens’ rights had been violated, some wanted to protest the Nazi occupation, and some just hated the Germans. Whatever their motives, they stopped the city in its tracks.

How did they organize so fast? A road builder and a street sweeper who belonged to the banned but well-organized Communist Party decided to call a meeting and take action. They had heard that hundreds of Jewish men had been rounded up on the square between the immense Portuguese Synagogue and the four smaller Ashkenazi ones. The communists gathered with trade union representatives and others at the Noorderkerk in the workers’ part of the city. They enlisted political and moral allies. Soon, a mimeographed leaflet urged everyone to “Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day!” And they did. The Strike even reached a few other cities before the German occupiers reacted with force.

Only limited public protest was heard the year before, at the time when Jews were fired from the civil service, including professors from the universities. Therefore, the Germans were dumbfounded in February 1941 when the Dutch, their Aryan brothers and sisters, took to the streets en masse. But the Nazis recovered fast and ordered the use of rifles and hand grenades to stop the strike.

By the time it was over a few days later, about 200 people had been arrested, nine had been killed, and 50 injured. For the rest of the war, the February Strike remained the only general strike in Europe to protest the roundups. Tragically, it was futile: about 75% of the Dutch Jewish population was mass murdered. Yet the strike remains in our memories as one of the few times ordinary people stood together against the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It meant something to many Dutch survivors as long as they lived.

I learned about the Strike at the time of its 60th commemoration in 2001. Every year, people gather to remember, right where the first roundups took place. They stand around the statue of the Dockworker who is the symbolic figure of the Strike. Sculpted by a resistance worker who survived, the hefty figure wears a worker’s cap, looking not at us but beyond us, his hands at his sides, open but ready to form fists.

In 2001, the square was crammed with people, some old enough to have been alive at the time, others young families, others men of all ages with yarmulkes, and individuals formally dressed in black who proved to be diplomats. Everyone was quiet, even little children. The commemoration began with a few short speeches and a poem, but the main event was this: people were invited, a few at a time, to approach the Dockworker, stand for a moment, and lay flowers.

The elders approached first, those who might have been present at the Strike. Next the Jewish organizations placed their big wreaths, often laid by children. Similar offerings came from the European Trade Union Federation, from the people of Sweden and the United States, and others. But the vast majority of the flowers were small bouquets tied with ribbons, like a dozen red tulips bound by aluminum foil with a bit of wet paper inside. Some were accompanied by a personal note written in ink in a scrawly hand.

It took an hour and a half on that frigid afternoon to lay all the flowers, and they stayed there unmolested for days. The flowers remained until they were all dead and had to be carried away.