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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and a full ceasefire in a rare open letter. The Kremlin said Putin had not yet seen the letter but welcomed a potential meeting in Moscow.

• More than a dozen GOP lawmakers defy their own leadership — and Trump — by voting with Democrats to approve a major bill to deliver billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine while imposing steep sanctions on Russia. Speaker Mike Johnson had urged his members to oppose the measure, arguing that they should give Trump space to negotiate with Russia.

• Democrats are at each other’s throats about Graham Platner after his latest scandal, after the New York Times released a report with disturbing accounts from several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends, just days before he is set to win the Democratic nomination to face GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, a critical Senate battleground. One woman described Platner grabbing her in ways that left marks and once locking her in a room. She also claimed he knew that his tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol when he got it.

• Italy calls for the creation of a new European defense alliance amid a rising reluctance by the United States to guarantee Europe’s security. The proposal, made by Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, calls on the EU’s 27 members to form an alliance with 13 other like-minded European nations that are not part of the bloc, including Britain, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine.

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One of the biggest threats to the planet is humans’ tendency to think of warm (hot) sunny days as “good” weather. As the planet warms, it is dying—and we will die with it, feeling great the whole time.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• The US House of Representatives votes under the War Powers Act to stop halt Trump’s war on Iran as the conflict drags into a fourth month. The vote was a striking commentary on just how much Republicans are losing patience with Trump and his war. It was a sign that a small but significant number of them are less willing to give him more time to try and figure a way out.

• Israel and Lebanon agreed to a full ceasefire, contingent on Hezbollah halting attacks and withdrawing its operatives from the area south of the Litani River in Lebanon, according to a joint statement from the U.S., Israel and Lebanon.

• Protests have grown against plans by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to develop luxury properties on an ecologically sensitive portion of the Albanian coast. The protests, in the capital and in coastal towns, have become a lightning rod for widespread discontent in Albania, long one of Europe’s poorest countries. For years, the plans — a $1.4 billion luxury hotel complex on an island off the coast and another development on a peninsula that is home to sensitive wetlands — have generated concerns about conservation and transparency.

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The post Congress to Trump: Stop the War! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President Trump is facing backlash, even within his own party, for his plan to establish a $1.8 billion slush fund funded by U.S. taxpayers to compensate his political allies, including January 6 Capitol rioters. Government largesse and welfare are OK when you’re the beneficiary!

The post Sin It To Win It appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Not least because I was 12 years old, the Bicentennial festivities felt very different from this year’s 250th birthday celebrations for the United States. This being America, commercialization was inevitable—everything was red, white and blue and was official whatever of the shindig. Overall, though, 1976 was a non-partisan affair despite being an election year following a major scandal.

No one seemed to think it should be otherwise.

Aside from the flood of Bicentennial quarters that began turning up in our change, my main interaction with the event was a junior high school field trip to Cincinnati to visit the Freedom Train, which carried notable historical artifacts but not the blockbusters I was hoping for. The Louisiana Purchase is no Declaration of Independence!

Decline was baked into the event. The train barely made it to my hometown of Dayton, whose passenger rail lines were shutting down and beginning to rust away alongside the factories that used to employ my neighbors.

America was not in awesome condition. The Vietnam War had ended a year earlier with the humiliating fiasco of the withdrawal from Saigon. Gas rationing and the OPEC crisis were fresh memories, and inflation stubborn enough to call for “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons. The president, Gerald Ford, hasn’t even been elected; the Michigan congressman had emerged, like Peter Sellers in “Being There,” from the wreckage of Watergate. In short succession we had witnessed the ouster of the vice president, then the president, and then Ford’s pardon of his disgraced predecessor, which confirmed dark suspicions that the fix is always in and the big fish never get caught. He was presiding over an impressive run of getting nothing through the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

And crazy women kept trying to kill him.

But it wasn’t all sour. The war was over. Criticism of the president cast him as a well-meaning, bumbling goof who couldn’t chew gum without tumbling down a flight of stairs. Though unfair, it was good-natured by today’s standards.

Most importantly, the constitutional system had worked, albeit belatedly. Republican leaders had finally abandoned Nixon, putting country above party. Nixon himself had respected political tradition enough to resign rather than subject us to protracted impeachment proceedings. Jimmy Carter, the affable, grinning Georgian who was crafting a new moderate Southern governor strategy for the post-liberal Democrats, was nailing down the nomination and exuding an irresistible optimism.

The main event was the arrival of tall ships from around the world—talk about inclusive!—with one even from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in New York Harbor, followed, naturally, by a nationally televised fireworks display for the ages.

The tonal contrast with the Semiquincentennial celebration centered around July 4, 2026, couldn’t be more stark.

It isn’t just a sense that the American empire is beyond mere decline but actually circling the drain, a broad-based lack of expectation that this country will ever again strive to build great things. Our exceedingly partisan president, who makes clear every day in his online and verbal communications that he does not consider half of the population of the United States to be loyal Americans, is determined to impose his personal mark on the event in a way that would never have crossed the minds of Ford or even the imperious Nixon: a triumphal arch in Washington, a $250 bill and commemorative coin both bearing his face, Trump passports, and a political rally to open his “Freedom 250” fair dedicated to the ideology of his branch of the Republican Party.

As in 1976, there will be fun—for a certain kind of American, the downscale kind Trump considers to be his supporters: a UFC cage match on the White House lawn in conjunction with Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14th, plus a NASCAR-style race through the nation’s capital and around its monuments. It’s fun for the whole family, if your family is white, male, old, and lives in a red county in a red state.

Fifty years ago, the emphasis was unity. “Each of us, of every color, of every creed, are part of our country and must be willing to build not only a new and better nation but new and greater understanding and unity among our people,” President Ford urged.

This year’s theme is exclusion, beginning with the Washington Mall national prayer rally led by Trump on May 17th—taxpayer-funded—emphasizing to everyone who is not an evangelical or at least a Protestant Christian that separation of church and state is dead and that we are “One Nation under God”—Trump’s version of God, who approves of emoluments, wars of choice, and not attending church.

For a showman who obsessed over the attendance at his first inauguration in comparison with that of his predecessor, it’s curious that Trump has chosen to throw a party to which at least half the country isn’t invited.

65% of Republicans plan to celebrate. Only 37% of Democrats do.

Though it’s impossible to quantify buzz or excitement, I doubt even the most avid MAGA supporter will argue that we as a people—even if you only include Republicans—are excited about what ought to be a momentous occasion, marking a quarter of a millennium as a new and different kind of nation-state. Far more people are talking about the FIFA World Cup, even if it’s to complain about how ridiculously expensive, and poorly planned it will be.

If anyone compares, Ford will beat Trump on the headcount.

This will be a tacky affair, one that reflects and further divides an already bitterly polarized electorate. Strip mall meets used car lot at the corner of “Idiocracy,” except that the movie’s wrestler-porn star prez cared about actual problems affecting people.

For both the president and for us, however, it will be difficult to match the low bar set by the first Centennial in 1876.

The main event for the 100th was an exhibition centered in Philadelphia that showcased American industry and innovation, like the first telephone and the importation of bananas, to which no one could object. It pointed the way to the future with a speech by Susan B. Anthony in favor of women’s suffrage. In a country of 46 million people, there were 10 million visitors, making it a huge success.

Sadly, that triumph was quickly forgotten in the catastrophic 1876 presidential election that found Democrat Samuel Tilden defeating Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Northerners refused to accept the results, tainted as they were by extreme fraud in several states, because the Democratic Party had been seen as the party of the South during the recently concluded Civil War. So Congress passed the Compromise of 1877, which reassigned electoral college votes to Hayes, making him president. Tilden stepped aside in exchange for ending Reconstruction in two remaining states, leading to the brutalization of Southern Blacks after the withdrawal of Union occupation troops.

If Trump gets his way, the midterm elections will similarly be such a disgrace that the hot mess he is making of the Semiquincentennial will soon be forgotten as well.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you.

Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Graham Platner, whose contest in Maine is a key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the US Senate, sought to discredit reports that he had exchanged sexual messages with women outside his marriage. Can his candidacy survive?

•  Four detainees at the largest ICE detention gulag in the U.S. filed a federal lawsuit alleging human rights abuses, “horrific” conditions and “severe medical neglect” at the facility. “Detained people are regularly subjected to severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; no meaningful programming or recreation; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors or nail clippers, outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight,” according to the complaint.

• Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark NJ, has imposed a curfew on the area surrounding Delaney Hall, the ICE detention gulag that has become a flashpoint in the debate over Trump’s mass deportation drive. The announcement comes amid a flare-up in tensions outside the centre, which is run by the private contractor GEO Group.

• In a surprisingly strong performance, right-wing outsider candidate Abelardo de la Espriella will face leftist candidate senator Iván Cepeda in a June runoff election to decide Colombia’s presidency, setting the stage for a battle over the country’s political future. De la Espriella won the most ballots with 43.74% of the vote, with Cepeda getting 40.90%, both falling short of the absolute majority required to win outright.

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President Trump repeatedly says he feels no pressure to make a deal with Iran, even though his war led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the entire global economy hangs in the balance. Given how much he has personally enriched himself from the presidency, it’s not hard to see why he feels that way.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Trump officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring Trump’s portrait, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years.

•  A former senior CIA official is accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40 million and stashing them in his home. From November to March, David Rush requested and received a “significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” according to the FBI.

• A Kenyan court has suspended US plans to open an Ebola quarantine facility for American citizens. The 50-bed isolation centre is to be staffed by US medics and was due to begin operations today. In its court petition, rights group the Katiba Institute warned that the arrangement posed “grave and imminent risks” to public health. Now Trump wants to send Ebola patients to Europe.

• Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu says he has given orders to the IDF to seize control of 70%, imperiling the deal.

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Given how Congress remains obsessed with redistricting (gerrymandering) rather than the problems of the American people, it seems the only promise they are making is to make it impossible to unseat them if we ever decide to hold them accountable.

The post One Single Promise appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Like the weather, everyone complains about the Democrats, but no one does anything about them. Well, we do point out what the perennial hapless loyal opposition is doing wrong. But we rarely offer useful suggestions for what they ought to do instead.

Democrats are favored to take back the House in this year’s midterm elections, and possibly the Senate too. When you are opposing someone as reckless as Donald Trump, however, you have an ethical obligation not to leave any votes on the table or miss any opportunities. Winning, in other words, is not the only thing. Winning big is the only thing.

The first step should be to look at examples of big midterm victories. With the exception of years like the 1974 Democratic landslide, when all you had to do to win big was not be associated with the Watergate scandal, 1994 stands out. Even though the economy was recovering nicely from the Reagan-Bush recession of 1987–1992, House Speaker Newt Gingrich led the GOP to a sweeping “Republican Revolution” victory by nationalizing the election with his “Contract with America.” The fact that nobody remembers what was in that document doesn’t matter. Nationalization was key. Going into this fall, Democrats ought to come up with a list of promises that all of their candidates agree to sign and run ads accordingly in every market.

As to the contents of a 2026 Democratic Contract with America, polling clearly suggests that the top three promises need to involve lowering prices, increasing wages, and getting the United States out of the Middle East once and for all.

Politics have changed a lot since Gingrich, and one of the ways American voters have become more sophisticated is that they are now far more aware of the parliamentary obstacles that can prevent the fulfillment of a campaign promise in the form of legislation. It’s no longer enough to be vague when you say that you are going to tackle affordability. You have to explain the exact legal or regulatory mechanism you’ll use to make it happen. And you have to explain how you are going to enact it given such legislative realities as a right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, the lack of a veto-proof supermajority in the House of Representatives, and obstructionist tactics such as blocking bills by threatening to shut down the government.

Not only do your promises have to be credible in the sense that voters believe you are serious about fulfilling them after you win, but the approach you promised to take to enact those promises also has to have a credible chance of success given political realities.

Thanks to President Trump and his blizzard of executive orders, Democrats have a path forward should they choose to take it: move fast, push things through with or without constitutional or legal legitimacy, and rely on the delay machine that is the court system to delay the blowback. If and when you are forced to back down, it will only be after you’ve had the chance to demonstrate to people that you were serious about addressing their concerns all along.

Hoping and praying for lower gas prices is not a plan. Promising to close all U.S. military bases in the Middle East, normalize relations with Iran, and cut off military and financial assistance to Israel — all moves that would be popular with voters — would of course have a significant downward effect on energy prices over the long term. Meanwhile, in the short term, Democrats could promise to invoke the same wartime emergency measures they used during the COVID-19 pandemic to nationalize energy infrastructure and reserves in order to reduce prices to a fixed rate set by the federal government. Don’t laugh: Richard Nixon did much the same thing when he confronted inflation with wage and price controls.

Increasing the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009, may be politically unrealistic with the Congress we have, even after the midterm elections. Still, there’s a lot that a Democratic majority in Congress could do to put upward pressure on American wages, like refuse to do business with any government contractor in the private sector that doesn’t pay at least $25 an hour to its lowest-paid workers.

Presumably Trump will still be president next year under a Democratic majority. But Democrats can do exactly what Republicans do: hold the purse hostage to guarantee that we distance ourselves from Israel and withdraw from the Middle East. Simply refuse to sign off on the next defense spending package.

The message should be simple: we hear your complaints, loud and clear. We’re all on board—no DINOs invited. We have some great ideas that can fix those problems, and we have a plan for accomplishing them no matter what Republicans do. That’s the kind of party people might just want to vote for.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post More Good Advice Democrats Won’t Take appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• The Trump administration threatens to stop immigration processing for incoming international flights at major US cities with so-called sanctuary laws, which ban or limit local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, to punish protests against ICE. It’s the start of summer tourist season.

• The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Trump of sexual assault. The investigation centers on whether she committed perjury when she won a $5 million civil judgment that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her, and a $83.3 million civil judgment against him in another defamation case.,

• Middle East War: Trump warns that Oman, a US ally, “will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.” Resignation is setting in across Lebanon that a meaningful end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah is not coming anytime soon. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has targeted an American air base in the region, after fresh US strikes on southern Iran, and oil prices are up.

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Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• The Trump administration plans to exile American citizens exposed to Ebola to Kenya rather than bring them home to the US for observation and treatment. In previous outbreaks, health care workers and other US citizens were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units.

• As we predicted yesterday, Texas Republican primary voters elected Attorney General Ken Paxton over 5-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn by a 64%-36% landslide. The GOP could find itself diverting millions of dollars to defend Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.

• But it’s not all good news for Trump. Defying pressure from Trump and national conservatives to wade into the country’s redistricting wars, the South Carolina Senate adjourned without taking up a new congressional map that aimed to eliminate the state’s lone majority Black district and cement an entirely Republican delegation.

• The Ultimate Fighting Championship has released its rendering of the very classy, highly dignified octagonal cage at the White House for a fight scheduled on Trump’s 80th birthday and also America’s, which is 170 years older than Trump. It depicts a star-spangled arch over the cage on the White House South Lawn. Trump is also planning a highly dignified, very classy IndyCar street circuit racing past landmarks including the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol in August.

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Trump created a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for himself and his MAGA cronies to compensate themselves for alleged prosecutorial overreach during the Biden years. Never have taxpayers been subjected to such brazen self-dealing at the hands of a president who purports to represent them and wants to drain the swamp.

The post It’s on Me, Er, You appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Donald Trump skipped his son’s wedding to spend a wild weekend in Washington, where he announced that permanent peace was at hand as well as the release of $24 billion belonging to Iran, then a temporary memo of understanding meant to last 30 days, then a concept that needed to be ironed out, and finally wound up bombing Iranian boats and missile launchers in “self-defense.” Complicating peace talks, Trump encouraged Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords with Israel.

• After security minister Ben Gvir released a video of him abusing them, Gaza flotilla activists kidnapped by Israel in international waters said that IDF soldiers tortured them with tasers and rubber bullets and broken their bones. Activists also accused Israel of systemic sexual violence, including “multiple accounts of rape,” and “forcible penetration by a handgun.”

• A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego García, an immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador. Meanwhile, Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil appeals to SCOTUS.

• Skanky Attorney General Ken Paxton, endorsed by Trump, is heavily favored to defeat 5-term Senator John Cornyn in Texas.

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After a society gets called out for an atrocity, one of the cries we hear from “good” citizens is that the act does not reflect them as a whole. However, these incidents never occur anonymously. They always reflect a long-term trend and internal moral rot. The latest example is Israel, of course, but it is hardly unique to them.

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Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Kamala Harris “wrote off rural America” during the 2024 presidential campaign and failed to attack Trump with sufficient “negative firepower,” according to a post-election autopsy finally released by the Democratic National Committee. Chairman Ken Martin’s handling of the document and the direction of the party’s political machine has angered Democrats. Gaza doesn’t rate a mention. Will there be major reforms at the DNC?

• Iran and Oman are in talks over a Strait of Hormuz Ship Payment System. The discussions suggest that the US and the Iran may not be close to reaching a deal to end a war that has badly damaged the global economy.

• House Republicans abruptly canceled a vote on a War Powers resolution directing Trump to withdraw US forces from Iran or win approval to continue the war, after it became clear they lacked the votes to defeat the measure. It’s a striking setback that exposes fractures within the GOP over the conflict at a moment when the party has begun pushing back forcefully on Trump and his agenda.

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Asked if he considers the economic pain caused by his war against Iran, Trump said, “Not even a little bit.” Will this “let them eat cake” moment hurt him as much as “basket of deplorables” hurt Hillary?

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Should I stay, the Clash asked, or should I go?

When I was a kid, during and following Watergate, the tortured politico’s answer to that existential question was the latter. Occasionally. During the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to obey Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor and resigned. Gerald Ford lost his Press Secretary Jerald terHorst the following year, because Ford pardoned Nixon but not Vietnam draft dodgers. In 1980, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance quit after Jimmy Carter ignored his advice to pursue diplomacy and sent the military on a hostage rescue mission to Iran, which turned into a fiasco.

Vance was the high-water mark of quitting over a policy disagreement. Indicating either the triumph of cynical careerism over personal integrity, or an extraordinary run of ideological alignment between presidents and their hirelings, or both, the high-profile political Resignation on Principle vanished into deep hibernation for more than four decades.

A dozen mid-to-senior level diplomats and staff stepped away from the State Department to protest Biden’s support of Israel’s 2023-2025 genocide in Gaza, but it took Trump’s second term to reanimate the beast.

So far this year, Joe Kent left his job running the National Counterterrorism Center over Trump and Netanyahu’s war against Iran, RFK Jr.’s spokesman Rich Danker quit over the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to re-legalize child-friendly fruit-flavored vapes, and top Treasury lawyer Brian Morrissey split because the Trump Administration created a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for right-wing MAGA allies of the White House.

At some point in your life, you will have a choice to make. Do you overlook ethical and/or legal wrongdoing, and remain at your job/in your organization, thus making you complicit? Or do you resign/depart, minimizing your guilt while removing yourself from the authority/standing that might allow you to stop or mitigate that evil? Purist outsider who blows everything up, like Daniel Ellsberg? Or tainted saint, quietly working for change from the inside like Oskar Schindler?

Should I cool it, the Clash sang, or should I blow?

Sometimes (and these are some of those times) the breadth of evil is so enormous, and the failure of established checks and balances so pronounced, and the prospect for reform within the establishment so hopeless, Resignations on Principle by government officials—even en masse—are insufficient. As Americans witnessed during Nixon’s final year as president, a change of personnel does not create a change of policy, especially when a regime is in crisis and its leader is so cornered that all he can consider is short-term survival.

While it is the Trump Administration that is out of control—in the last few months, it has kidnapped a foreign president and his first lady, gone to war at the behest of an outlaw ally, lost that war and tanked the global economy, called for a 50% increase in war spending that ought to have been slashed 90%, unleashed ICE goons on U.S. city streets, announced that the president does not care about the economic pain caused by his pointless wars, and announced the slush fund—the failure of government institutions constitutionally created to rein in such excesses is enabling it. A supine Supreme Court, a gutted news media, and an impotent Congress are unwilling and unable to exercise oversight.

That includes Democratic politicians.

Calling Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund “most depraved,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it was “corruption happening in broad daylight.” In what passed for a response, 100 Democratic politicians filed a federal court motion/amicus brief asking for Trump’s lawsuit against the Justice Department to be dismissed—the same day as Trump had already moved to withdraw it. The Democratic motion, symbolic at best, stands no chance of abolishing the slush fund.

Given Republican control of the White House, narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, and the fund’s structure as a transfer from the permanent, indefinite Judgment Fund appropriation, there is little Democrats can do to stop it until next year, when they will likely regain control of Congress, and when the debt ceiling will need to be lifted again. Even then, Democrats will not have the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto. Bottom line: Democratic Representatives and Senators can sit and watch Trump’s mayhem on the slush fund, the war and a million other outrages—but they can’t do anything to stop them.

If I go, there will be trouble, the Clash noted. And if I stay, it will be double.

It is time for Congressional and Senatorial Democrats to consider quitting. All 257 of them.

Just leave.

As I once told a boss who ordered me to do something I considered highly unethical and probably illegal, “you can do whatever you want, but you will do it without me or my help.” Years later and more eloquently, an assistant attorney general refused to carry out Trump’s order to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me,” he wrote Trump.

Mass exits have worked before. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s Nationalist Party (BNP) rigged the 1994 elections in Bangladesh. In response, nearly all opposition members of parliament—147 out of 154 from the main opposition alliance (primarily the Awami League, and the Jatiya Party)—resigned en masse from the 330-seat Bangladeshi parliament. The opposition demanded that Zia’s government resign immediately, followed by free and fair elections. It led general strikes, street protests, and blockades to paralyze the country.  A prolonged political crisis ensued, and the opposition held firm, also boycotting the 1996 elections (which the BNP won with tiny turnout and no international legitimacy).

Two years later, the BNP caved. They passed a constitutional amendment institutionalizing a non-partisan caretaker government system for future elections. New elections were held under this framework in June 1996, and the Awami League won.

Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Thailand and other nations where, as in the United States, popular trust in institutions is low, have seen similar extra-parliamentary protests.

Warmongering, genocidal Republicans who don’t care about the American people want to do whatever they want without negotiating with Democrats. Why should Democrats legitimize fascists?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• President Donald Trump’s settlement with the IRS was updated to include a provision that stops the government from prosecuting him and his family and end audits, a way to get around restrictions on him pardoning himself. Meanwhile, Trump’s U.S. prosecutors charges former Cuban President Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy.

• Israel’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, waved an Israeli flag and taunted rows of detained international activists — participants in an aid flotilla meant to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza — were brutalized by IDF thugs on an Israeli-government video posted to social media. The peaceful protesters were arrayed face down, hands zip-tied, as the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah, played loudly. The violent incident, filmed at Israel’s Port of Ashdod, drew international condemnation.

• House Democrats are one step closer to finally getting a successful Iran War Powers Act vote as their last holdout plans to flip and at least one Republican says they may follow suit.

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