“I was in the Oval Office when I got a call with the results of the September 15th House Impeachment vote. Unbelievable. Of course, my Repubs all voted against this persecution, but 47 of the Dems, including their leaders—Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and Richard Neal from Democratic Massachusetts—voted PRESENT! That is really a vote against Impeachment and makes them ON MY SIDE! My aide read their lame excuse, saying that ‘serious work’ had to be done, including ‘comprehensive investigations, reviews of thousands of documents … Congressional hearings, sustained public organizing … to build a broad national consensus.’ That’s why they voted PRESENT!”

“But they were really AWOL. The polls show well over a majority of people want me FIRED. The Dems are really cowards. All they had to do was to use my scores of Executive Orders, which they claim were illegal and unconstitutional. Plus, repeat my widely reported statements that I can do whatever I want as President and what they have condemned as my outlaw actions here and abroad. I’m the only evidence they need.”

“Look at crazy Nancy. She impeached me twice, once on the Hunter Biden fabrication and once on the January 6 peaceful demonstration. Now she refuses to vote for Impeachment for the far wilder and more destructive things she has accused me of doing daily. Go figure.”

“Am I just lucky, or are they afraid of my going after them by name? Fear is a coward’s fuel, someone once told me.”

“Thankfully captive to their corporate consultants—look all I’ve done for their corporate clients—cut taxes, cut regulation, subsidized them—the Dems are helpless. They’ve let me normalize me in every way. They look at how I MAGA every day, call them traitors and lunatics and fanatics, demand the execution of six senators, and they say, ‘There he goes again.’ Then they do nothing. That’s normalizing me before the American people. How wonderful.”

“They are sooo out of it. They have no slogans, unless you are stupid enough to think ‘Build Back Better’ does anything other than bring us more of Sleepy Joe. They have no nicknames to counter my torrent of nicknames, even though my name lends itself to many.”

“Examples: I said, ‘Drain the Swamp.’ They could have said, unfairly, ‘Close the Trump Dump.’ I expected them to call me ‘Dictator Donald,’ ‘Trump the Chump,’ ‘Tyrant Trump,’ ‘The Trump Pump’ (because of gas prices), ‘The Trump Sump’ (their nutty charges of de-regulated air pollution) or ‘Dangerous Donald.’ Or, taking off from my naming things after me, have you heard words like Hurricane Trump, Tornado Trump, or Trump’s Dark Ages? We’ve laid off firefighters. But no giant wildfire has yet been given my name.”

“What really stuns me is how they have normalized what they call my greed. I had to disclose my finances for 2025 when I made $2.2 billion working out of my Trump House position. Again, a few words of rage, but no Dems broke it down to $1.1 million an hour, over a 40-hour week, as I proudly keep the federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour for our business friends. ‘Billions’ go in one ear and out the other. But $1.1 million an hour hits home! They blew it again.”

“To my praise of our brave, lethal soldiers, the Dems could have regularly called me a serial draft dodger during the Vietnam War. Silence. They do once in a while call me a ‘convicted felon,’ but it’s a throwaway line. Then they vote in Congress for an even bigger unaudited Pentagon budget.”

“In an anger fit, I threaten to bomb like hell our ally Oman; they call me ‘frustrated’ over the war with Iran. How kind of them.”

“I pardoned over 600 violent convicted criminals over January 6. Over a hundred of them have already committed serious crimes since their release from jail. The Dems just say I’m abusing my pardon powers. Don’t they remember what damage the first Bush’s campaign did to Dukakis in 1988, blaming him for the crime Willie Horton committed after his early release from jail?”

“Am I just lucky, or are they afraid of my going after them by name? Fear is a coward’s fuel, someone once told me.”

“I campaigned on making the US dollar stronger than ever. Now it is weaker than in many years against other currencies. From the Democrats—silence.”

“I call them socialists and communists. They don’t call me fascist—just authoritarian. How feeble can you get? Such people are often called ‘useful idiots’”

“I call global warming and possible AI extinction ‘hoaxes,’ along with labeling wind power and solar energy ‘scams.’ ‘There he goes again,’ is the shoulder-shrugging reaction. Love it.”

“Were I a churchgoer, I would thank Almighty GOD for blessing me. With such enemies, who needs friends?”

Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate look better than ever, but even if November brings a blue wave, they will still not have control of the legislative and executive branches simultaneously until at least 2029.

The question facing Democratic lawmakers now is how they should conduct themselves during these wilderness years if they want to regain a trifecta in the next presidential election.

Voting down any idea the White House or GOP leadership propose without suggesting any alternative is a bad idea. More than three-quarters of Americans say they want more bipartisanship in Washington, and voters often punish opposition parties they view as do-nothing obstructionists.

Fetterman, take notes: When you vote with Republicans, do it to help working-class families buy homes, not to make sure gas prices keep going up.

But when we say Democrats should be more bipartisan, it’s important to specify what we mean. This moment has provided exemplars of two very different kinds of aisle crossing, which I’ll refer to as John Fetterman Bipartisanship and Elizabeth Warren Bipartisanship.

Sen. Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) bipartisanship is largely performative. He’s constantly appearing on Fox News to scold his fellow Democrats for calling President Donald Trump a fascist, denounce democratic socialism, defend Israel’s devastation of Gaza, or praise the giant monument to Trump’s ego that is the White House ballroom.

And when it’s not performative, it’s actively harmful. Fetterman voted to confirm disastrous Trump appointees like former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—both of whom turned out to be too incompetent even for this administration. He voted against war powers resolutions that could have hastened the end of the costly and unnecessary conflict with Iran. He voted to end last year’s government shutdown, throwing away leverage Democrats could have used to keep healthcare affordable for millions of families. And he voted to keep funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement after agents murdered two Americans in the streets.

It’s a voting record defined by cruelty, contrarianism, and pettiness. In his home state of Pennsylvania, Republicans have rewarded him with a near 80% approval rating, and Trump is actively courting him to switch parties.

Whether he does or not, Fetterman has already betrayed the people who elected him and undermined the party whose donors and campaign arm spent over $100 million on his Senate race.

Thankfully, Fetterman Bipartisanship is not the only alternative to blind obstructionism. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has spent the last two years (and more) showing Democrats that it’s possible to reach across the aisle without losing your soul.

Last month, Warren signed a letter to the CEOs of Midwest Real Estate Data—a multiple listing service (MLS) that serves as a database for property listings in the Chicago area—and Compass, the country’s largest brokerage firm. The two had signed an agreement that hides certain listings from members of the public and makes them available only to brokers who pay a subscription fee. This practice, Warren warned, will create a “two-tiered housing market” that benefits insiders while driving up prices for regular people who have to compete for a smaller pool of homes.

Warren wasn’t the first to raise the alarm about this corrupt bargain. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) beat her to it by about two weeks. But instead of treating the MRED-Compass deal as a toxic GOP issue, Warren threw her weight behind the probe to stop corporate greed from making homeownership even more prohibitively expensive.

And speaking of affordable housing, she also co-sponsored the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—the most consequential federal housing legislation in 30 years. This bill cuts red tape to make home construction cheaper and easier, rewards jurisdictions that build more housing, and bans private equity from buying up homes that should go to families. And as an added bonus, Trump was too focused on disenfranchising minorities to be bothered to sign the thing. It became law without his signature, but his total lack of interest makes it easy for Democrats to claim the legislation as their win.

Fetterman, take notes: When you vote with Republicans, do it to help working-class families buy homes, not to make sure gas prices keep going up.

Warren also joined Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to co-sponsor the Break Up Big Medicine Act and co-authored an op-ed with Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) calling for a tax increase on the wealthy to save Social Security.

Even if these proposals never become law, they provide Democrats with a powerful argument for 2028: “We’ve been proposing solutions all along. We even tried to work with reasonable Republicans. It’s not our fault they failed, and if you vote for us, they won’t fail again.”

Calling Trump a Nazi or a threat to democracy is a great way to fire up the base, but independents are tired of hearing it. They want to know what Democrats will do to make their groceries, health insurance premiums, day care bills, mortgages, and gas station trips more affordable. We won’t win them over by parroting stale Fox News talking points, but if we can show that we care more about affordability than about partisan bickering, we might just pull it off.

After a century of providing healthcare to this rural, southeast Michigan community, Sturgis Hospital closed in June with only 70 hours warning.

The hospital was not on the at-risk-of-closing list that had been published by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) a year earlier.

Over 300 Sturgis Hospital employees are scrambling to find work. Registered nurse Beth Kelley, who had worked at Sturgis for 32 years, described the meeting room as filled with “shock” and “devastation” when management announced that the hospital was closing.

Nationwide more than 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, over half at immediate risk within the next two to three years. The 700 hospitals represent about one-third of all rural hospitals.

The termination of care at Sturgis Hospital overloads the city’s emergency medical services. Director of public safety Ryan Banaszak said, “What was once approximately a 2-mile transport for patients has now become closer to 25 miles, which takes ambulance personnel and equipment out of service for a much longer period of time.”

The impact is great on Michigan Medicaid patients, who cannot use the closest hospital because it is across the state line in Indiana.

“Rural hospital closures lead to significant increases in mortality, and birthing outcomes and obstetric care suffer following closures,” said Michael Shepherd, University of Michigan health policy researcher. The risk increases with every additional mile for emergencies like strokes and heart attacks.

A few weeks later the rural River District Hospital in St. Clair County northeast of Detroit announced the closing of its inpatient and emergency services. Four more rural Michigan hospitals—in Mt. Pleasant, Carson City, Ontonagon, and Dowagiac—are in danger of closing with the upcoming Medicaid cuts.

Rural Americans live sicker and die younger than those in urban areas. Life expectancy is about three years shorter in rural communities. When a rural hospital closes, the mortality rate rises by 5.9%. Rural hospital closures increase mortality for emergencies such as heart attacks and strokes by about 10%.

“There are two kinds of Americans: those who live 12 minutes from an emergency department and those who live 72,” writes Ayla Ellison who grew up in Carmi in southern Illinois. “Whether you survive a heart attack, deliver a healthy baby, or die from something entirely treatable increasingly depends not on the severity of your illness, but on the distance to the nearest hospital,” she continues. She explores the consequences of rural hospitals folding in a country where no one is responsible for assuring help is close enough for a chance at life. The hospital in Carmi closed 20 years ago. Nine more Illinois hospitals are at risk of closure, most of them in southern Illinois.

Other states are worse off. In Mississippi, 51% of the rural hospitals are at risk of closing; in Alabama, 52%; in Arkansas, 68%.

Dr. Kenneth Williams battled for decades to sustain the hospital (Alliance Healthcare System) in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Rapid expansion of Medicare Advantage plans reduced reimbursement and increased denials of payment to the hospital. In 2023, facing financial desperation, the hospital converted to Rural Emergency Hospital status, a federal program designed to stabilize struggling rural hospitals. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) later removed that designation, leaving the hospital again fighting to stay open.

Nationwide more than 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, over half at immediate risk within the next two to three years. The 700 hospitals represent about one-third of all rural hospitals. That report was prior to the passage of HR 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that slashes $1 trillion from Medicaid. The crisis escalates from grim to disastrous with the looming Medicaid cuts.

Federal efforts to save our rural hospitals have been pitifully inadequate in the face of the towering problem.

Critical Access Hospitals, created by Congress in 1997, allow small rural hospitals to receive cost-based Medicare reimbursement. The plan was designed to stem the tide of closures.

Between 2010 and 2025, 152 rural hospitals closed. Of these, 52 were Critical Access Hospitals.

In 2021 Congress created Rural Emergency Hospitals. This designation provides for enhanced Medicare payments allowing rural hospitals to continue with outpatient and emergency services only, instead of closing.

In 2023, Sturgis hospital was “saved” by conversion to a Rural Emergency Hospital, delaying its shutdown by three years.

Neither these nor any other federal plans are big enough or thorough enough to work.

CMS Director Mehmet Oz recently visited Kentucky, home of 35 rural at-risk hospitals. He touted the $50 billion in Rural Health Transformation Funds as the solution. The assertion is absurd.

At best, Kentucky will get $1 billion from the rural transformation funds as it loses $21 billion in Medicaid funds. Not even a wizard can turn that into a winner.

As Boston University professor Alan Sager notes, no US entity is responsible for sustaining or building or financing hospitals based on community need.

“The whole Appalachian area has been abandoned, but its hospitals should be funded and improved, as a necessity of life—like the post office,” says Dare Cima, who is from southeastern Kentucky.

With passage of H R 3069, Improved Medicare for All, finally, the nation will take responsibility for assuring that rural areas have adequate facilities. Hospitals will be paid quarterly, in advance, with a global budget that provides operating expenses.

The allocation to hospitals ensures proper staffing with safe nurse-to-patient ratios and optimal staffing for physicians and other healthcare workers. Physician salaries can be included in the global budget. Adjustments to the operating budget will be made “to decrease healthcare disparities in rural or medically underserved areas.”

Special projects funds will be used to end discrimination based on race or other underserved categories including geography. Funds will be allocated for construction of new facilities where needed. At long last, the nation’s healthcare plan will guarantee that not only is everyone covered for care, free at the point of service, but that there is a place within reasonable distance to find that care.

The late Dr. Ewell Scott, Medical Staff president of St. Clair Regional Medical Center in Morehead in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, predicted that if current policy continued, it was just a matter of time until all of Kentucky’s hospitals east of I-75 would be closed.

Sadly, that prediction is breathtakingly close as 16 of east Kentucky’s hospitals in the 5th Congressional District, including Dr. Scott’s beloved St. Clair hospital, are on the list of those endangered with closing by the passage of HR 1.

But Dr. Scott was fighting for a different future. He persuaded the City of Morehead to pass a resolution supporting Improved Medicare for All, a national single-payer plan that would cover us all and fund the hospitals.

Dr. Scott urged all who would listen to tell their congresspersons: “We know the solution. You’ve got to have the guts to stand up and do it.”

What does it mean to be an American? Does your family trace its roots to the American Revolution? Did your ancestors come here seeking opportunity, arrive by force and endure enslavement, or live on this land since time immemorial?

As we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, the question of what it means to be American is a tactile one; it is inseparable from the places we inhabit and the histories embedded within them. Places tell us who we are and how we came to be here—as individuals and as a nation.

Yet the Trump administration is working to dismantle legal protections for the historic places that narrate and preserve our nation’s heritage. A federal advisory council, made up of Trump appointees, is working to roll back the National Historic Preservation Act, and in particular Section 106, which requires federal agencies to consider how the projects they carry out and fund may affect historic properties.

If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

This process, as its currently designed, gives consulting parties and the public a voice in helping to identify ways to avoid or minimize adverse effects to our important historical places, whether they be a recently discovered archaeological site, or a famous building. The proposed changes shift that balance by concentrating decision-making authority solely with federal agencies, reducing meaningful consultation with Tribal Nations, state and local governments, preservation experts, and the public.

Making public participation optional and drastically shortening review timelines will give communities, preservation advocates, and the people who live in and care for these places fewer opportunities to raise concerns before important cultural and historic places are altered or lost.

This is a form of cultural and historical erasure and a further erosion of the public trust. While the consequences may not be immediately visible, one potential outcome is the unchallenged destruction of the material evidence of who we are as a nation: evidence of our diversity, the difficult truths of our founding and colonial history, and the struggles and progress that shaped American life.

Once these places are destroyed, the histories embedded within them become more difficult to recover, understand, and tell. Cultural resources are a nonrenewable resource deserving of rigorous protections.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans believe that historically and culturally significant places should be preserved for future generations, according to a June 2026 YouGov poll. And yet, some losses are unfolding in plain sight. The East Wing of the White House was demolished as part of a ballroom project that federal courts later ruled could not proceed without congressional authorization. At the same time, the proposed Trump Arch threatens to alter historically and emotionally significant views between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

And erasure is not always so conspicuous. It can occur when places largely invisible at the national scale are neglected, altered, or removed despite their immense importance to local communities. Booker T. Washington Cemetery in Centreville, Illinois, for example, became overgrown and invisible yet still powerfully meaningful to Black communities in the area, including those with connections to the 1917 East St. Louis violence. In Arizona, construction of the U.S-Mexico border wall recently bulldozed through Las Playas Intaglio, a more than 1,000-year-old Indigenous geoglyph culturally significant to the Tohono-O’odham.

Places like these may be largely unknown to the broader American public, and once they are removed or altered there is no longer that physical interruption in the contemporary landscape. Nothing to catch the eye of someone passing by prompting the question: What happened here?

Our understanding of what it means to be an American is shaped, in part, by the physical evidence of the people who came before us. When historic places disappear, something more than buildings, archaeological sites, or landscapes is lost. Historic places anchor us in space and time. They confront us with histories we might otherwise forget, preserve evidence of both injustice and achievement, and allow us to see change written into the landscape itself.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, protecting these places is not simply an exercise in preserving the past. It is an investment in our ability to understand ourselves and the future. If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

If the proposed changes to the Section 106 process are finalized, losses like these could become more difficult for communities to identify, challenge, or prevent. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s next meeting is November 10, and the proposed revisions are currently moving through the federal rulemaking process. Once the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register, the public will have an opportunity to submit formal comments. You can also contact your members of Congress to make them aware of the proposed changes and your concerns about their potential effects on historic preservation. The bottom line is simple: If you care for our historic places, be their voice.

As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.

On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.

The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.

Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before.

That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.

Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above.

The Jubilee movement had brought millions of people onto the streets and into churches to demand the cancellation of crushing debts owed by the world’s poorest countries.

By 2001 a hundred thousand people were meeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil under the banner “another world is possible,” and that same year a young man named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead protesting the G8 in Genoa, Italy.

The powerful learned early that this movement would not simply ask politely. It would demand systemic change.

Then came the crash. In 2008, the same financial system that had been sold to us as untouchable collapsed, and ordinary people were handed the bill while the bankers who broke it kept their bonuses. Out of that betrayal came the next great wave of action.

2011 brought Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignados, the Greek fight against austerity, the Chilean students, and, in September, a small camp in the shadow of Wall Street.

The Occupy Wall Street movement gave the whole movement its slogan—“We are the 99%.” A single phrase that did what a thousand policy papers could not. The protesters drew the line. There is them, and there is the rest of us, and the rest of us are almost everyone.

Occupy’s camp was eventually cleared. Critics declared the moment over, the movement a failure, the slogan a fad. Look closer and you see something different.

The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth.

The idea did not die. It moved into the bloodstream of public life. The language of the 1% vs the 99% is now spoken in parliaments and kitchens alike. Ideas once dismissed as fringe—taxing extreme wealth, cancelling illegitimate debt, treating billionaires as a policy problem rather than a national mascot—are now argued seriously by economists and demanded openly in the streets.

That is what a movement can do over time. Shift what people believe is normal, and then shift what they believe is possible.

We need that long memory now, because the case against the system has never been clearer. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth hit a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, growing three times faster than in the previous five years, while the number of billionaires surpassed 3,000 for the first time in history. The richest 1% now own almost 44% of all the world’s wealth, while the poorest half of humanity holds barely half of 1% of all the world’s wealth.

Just 12 men hold more wealth than 4 billion people combined. Elon Musk recently became the first person in history to be worth a trillion dollars, in a world where 1 in 4 people goes hungry. This is not the weather. It is a result of a system, engineered by people with names and addresses who have rigged the rules in their own favor.

The other side of that ledger is the bill the rest of us pay. The same years that added a trillion to the top produced rents nobody can pay and food prices that climb faster than wages.

The 1%’s record wealth and the 99%’s rising cost of living are not two distinct stories. They are one transaction, and we are on the paying end of it. In the United States, rents across major cities have risen by more than a third since 2020, the cost of living now tops the list of voters’ concerns, and in 2025 Zohran Mamdani became mayor on an affordability platform in the very city where Occupy began.

And the wealthy know they are exposed, which is why they are buying protection. The super rich are now 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the rest of us, and they have spent freely to capture the media, the courts, and the politics that might otherwise hold them to account. When wealth concentrates like this, democracy thins out. The fight against inequality and the fight for democracy are the same fight.

Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded new anti-government protests in more than 70 countries in 2025.

The young people filling the streets today are not starting from zero. They stand on the shoulders of Seattle, Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, every square that was ever cleared, every campaign that was ever written off. And they are not marching over an abstraction. They are marching because the cost of a decent life has been priced out of reach while a few thousand people got richer than anyone in history.

So this one goes out to Gen Z, in every city and every country where the numbers no longer add up. Your time is now. You did not break this economy. You inherited the bill for it. Enough is enough.

The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth. The only question that has ever mattered is whether we organize. Every generation before answered yes. Now it is yours to answer, and the world is waiting to hear it.

For the past two decades, the Democratic Party has struggled to articulate a coherent foreign policy doctrine. From the Iraq War to the rise of China to the Russia-Ukraine war, Democrats have had little exciting to offer. Too often, they have converged with Republicans on militarism, occasionally tinging it with a dose of liberal internationalism in an effort—often fruitlessly—to demonstrate that they are different.

But that uninspiring foreign policy may finally be facing a serious reform movement in the wake of the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the Democratic establishment once again turns to militarism to defend the US-Israel alliance, insurgent progressives—once on the fringes of the Democratic Party—are gaining momentum to reverse that tradition. For all intents and purposes, what begins as opposition to the conventional Democratic approach to Israel could evolve into a broader challenge to the party’s establishment—and ultimately rescue Democrats from their disappointing foreign policy record.

Make no mistake: Democrats once knew how to do foreign policy. Those who succeeded in building a robust foreign-policy identity shared one important trait: They all connected their foreign-policy principles to their domestic agenda. In doing so, they created a coherent foreign-policy philosophy that could resonate with mainstream Democratic voters, who generally care more about domestic affairs than foreign policy.

Connecting Foreign Policy to the Domestic Agenda

The idealist Woodrow Wilson framed American entry into World War I and the creation of the League of Nations in terms of protecting American security and prosperity. Likewise, the pragmatist Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his recognition of the Soviet Union as part of a broader effort to advance American economic interests during the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter framed nuclear arms control with the Soviets as a means of reducing the economic burdens of the arms race and preserving resources for domestic priorities. A business-friendly Bill Clinton presented China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as an opportunity to expand American exports, create jobs, and strengthen the US economy.

That foreign-domestic policy nexus largely disappeared after 2004. When Democrats rallied behind John Kerry, they hoped that his military service in Vietnam and his vote authorizing the Iraq War would give him the credentials to challenge George W. Bush as an accredited commander in chief. But they overlooked a fundamental flaw: Kerry had an internally contradictory foreign-policy record. He supported several US military interventions while remaining committed to multilateralism. The result was that Kerry, the liberal hawk, alienated anti-war Democratic voters without giving hawkish voters a compelling reason to prefer him over Bush. More importantly, in their effort to portray Kerry as a strong grand strategist, Democrats failed to answer the question that mattered most to their own base: How would a Democratic president with an inclination toward Republican-style military intervention actually make Americans better off?

The Kerry puzzle seems to have haunted the Democratic foreign-policy agenda ever since, with occasional exceptions. Yes, Barack Obama had some notable foreign policy achievements, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of US-Cuba relations. And those achievements, pitched domestically either as a means of enhancing US national security or of expanding economic opportunities for Americans, suggested that he had the potential to reform, if not transform, the rigid Democratic foreign policy orthodoxy. But the unexpected rise of Donald Trump abruptly brought that process to a halt, shifting Democrats’ focus from opposing Republican foreign policy in general to opposing Trump, the person.

US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.

Democrats’ obsession with Trump left his Democratic challengers—from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Kamala Harris—stuck in the limbo of status-quo foreign policy. They became so eager to deliver an immediate and defining foreign-policy victory, in the hope of reassuring voters of their ability to handle global affairs, that they lost sight of a more fundamental task: developing a set of principles that the party could consistently defend rather than maintaining the status quo through piecemeal policies. Many of the top officials in the Biden administration, for instance, had been involved in negotiating the original Iran nuclear deal, which sought to advance cooperative internationalism, yet his administration showed little appetite for restoring it.

Nor did Biden make good on his promise of a foreign policy for the middle class. His administration proposed redirecting part of the defense budget toward technological workforce development to preserve America’s innovative edge and strengthen long-term readiness. Yet defense spending continued to grow throughout his presidency. Likewise, he promised to move away from promoting democracy through costly military interventions, but his administration repeatedly relied on military force abroad, including strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen without congressional authorization and US involvement in conflicts across multiple regions.

Biden epitomizes the conundrum confronting the Democratic foreign-policy establishment: It has one foot in the present to search for reform while the other remains firmly planted in the past. That dilemma helps explain why liberal hawks so often prefer ad hoc decisions to a systematic strategy for the long game. And the poignant yet unavoidable consequence is that Democrats still lack a robust foreign-policy identity, leaving their pursuit of national security credentials always several steps behind their Republican opponents.

Kamala Harris may have recognized this dilemma and attempted to break with it by making the bold move of picking progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But putting aside Walz’s progressive domestic agenda, his realist approach to foreign policy rendered the Harris-Walz ticket, at most, slightly-left-of-center and unlikely to bring genuine change to the party’s foreign-policy outlook. Their broad alignment with Biden’s policy toward the Gaza conflict only reinforced the impression that they would remain tethered to a Democratic foreign-policy establishment operating within a bipartisan “Blob” whose worldviews have been monolithic.

That said, the only way for Democrats to escape this quagmire is to stop tinkering with—or, worse, simply repeating—some version of the tired conventional Democratic “wisdom.” That approach has proved ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst over the past two decades. What Democrats need is an outside-in reform. And as quixotic as it may sound, this is something only genuine progressives—the outsiders of the Democratic Party—can deliver.

The Outsider Agenda

Progressives, by nature, embody an egalitarian imagination. Their dissatisfaction with the US status quo can easily translate into opposition to the Democratic foreign-policy establishment’s hunger for “normalcy.” Because progressives view conflict as anchored in structural inequality at multiple levels, they seek to reshape the very inequality-based “normalcy” that gives rise to traditional security problems. Therefore, they possess a quality desperately needed for foreign-policy reform that is difficult to find within the Democratic establishment: a willingness to reconsider America’s changing place in the world increasingly defined by inequality.

The greatest challenge is the Democratic Party’s fixation on US military dominance, which progressives increasingly view as an important contributor to global inequality. In defending that dominance, the Democratic establishment reveals the gap between its ideological commitments and its actions. It champions cooperative internationalism as a means of reducing inequality yet repeatedly returns to militarism in ways that can perpetuate it. Given Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria, Obama’s airstrikes against Libya, and Biden’s use of military force in Yemen, it doesn’t take a policy wonk to figure out how the next Democratic president would respond if a skirmish broke out in the South China Sea.

In stark contrast, progressives are dedicated to dismantling US military dominance and reconstructing American exceptionalism from within. Free from the establishment’s unbreakable ties to militarism, progressives avoid conflating “effective US foreign policy” with “military intervention”—as Democratic elites often do—thereby bringing domestic clarity to foreign policymaking.

Progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters.

This domestic clarity enables progressives to offer a clearer foreign policy vision than the establishment. By working toward social transformation at home, strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the American state, and reinforcing the moral legitimacy of its economy, the United States can increase its capability to marshal diplomatic pressure on behalf of allies around the world. By doing so, Democrats can reclaim the domestic-foreign nexus that Democratic grand strategists once wielded so effectively and present their voters with a foreign policy that speaks directly to their interests.

The most direct benefit of restoring that nexus is exactly what Democratic foreign policy needs: giving voters the ability to hold policymakers accountable for poor foreign policymaking. Due to the notoriously self-forgiving nature of the foreign-policy establishment, Democratic elites can often walk away scot-free despite the consequences of their policy advice. Biden’s behind-the-scenes hawkish advisers Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and Brett McGurk were responsible, for instance, for the administration’s near-unqualified support for Israel. Yet they were never meaningfully held accountable for their advice. A foreign-policy agenda grounded in progressive accountability would give voters a more effective means of judging the consequences of such decisions.

And the result of this shift toward accountability would be a clearer answer to what Democrats should pursue in an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry: not ex post facto militarism, but ex ante diplomacy. This progressive vision was on display in the remarks of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Taiwan at the Munich Security Conference this year. Despite her stumbles, Ocasio-Cortez captured an ethos fundamentally different from a militarism-based approach to US foreign policy: Rather than emphasizing how the United States would defend Taiwan and democracy through strength, as many centrist Democrats might, she emphasized the need to work toward ensuring that the United States and China “never get to that point.”

The Democratic establishment ridiculed that progressive vision and tried to keep it under control by stopping democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. Little did it know that the progressive spark Sanders ignited a decade ago would grow into a political cyclone in 2026, sweeping through one state after another in a string of electoral victories. From Melat Kiros and Abdul El-Sayed to Peggy Flanagan, progressive candidates have repeatedly defeated AIPAC-backed establishment figures and, in an ironic twist, have benefited politically from the warnings of Democratic elites. In a broader sense, this progressive wave is also reshaping the party’s stance on the litmus test of Israel. In July, over half of House Democrats voted to support cutting $3.3 billion in US aid to Israel, a shift that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.

Accountability Matters

Perhaps that is what a real progressive revolution is supposed to look like: not top-down reform, but a bottom-up revolt. The grassroots movement that has catapulted the left forward now gives progressives an opportunity to capitalize on their momentum and forcefully expose the uncomfortable elephant in the room that the Democratic foreign-policy establishment has long avoided: US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.

Under pressure from the left, Democrats will have to rediscover that their foreign policy must ultimately remain answerable and vulnerable to the demands of mass politics. They will have to take seriously voters’ growing frustration with the longstanding shibboleths of American exceptionalism and US global leadership when those grand ambitions do little to make healthcare more accessible or everyday life more affordable. And they will also have to recognize that the rise of a progressive pro-Palestinian foreign policy is not simply a manifestation of youthful political naïveté but reflects a grassroots revolt against a US-led global order that many young Americans increasingly see as inseparable from the economic inequalities they experience at home.

The establishment might be strong, but its outdated militarist doctrine will not endure forever. And progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters. Such a foreign policy would put people before US primacy, diplomacy before militarism, human rights before geopolitical calculations, and the needs of ordinary Americans before bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

On Friday night, DC-based advocacy organization Hands Off the Arts and its allies are going to form a human chain around the Kennedy Center, called Hands Around the Kennedy Center, putting their bodies on the line to protect the institution. While the group has been planning this action for several weeks, before the removal and literal disembodiment of Joel Shapiro’s 24-foot-tall sculpture "Blue," the board’s vote to close to the Kennedy Center, and pictures captured Wednesday night showing President Donald Trump looking at a plan to demolish the Kennedy Center aboard Air Force One, the action has taken on intense meaning.

At its core, his final strategy for the Kennedy Center, after judges have repeatedly told him he cannot put his name on another president’s memorial, is scorched earth.

I have been on the ground in Washington, DC from the beginning—reporting and raising awareness about Hands Off the Arts’ weekly protests since Trump’s second inauguration. Many of the Hands Off the Arts organizers—including co-founder Mallory Miller—were my colleagues, at the arts institution where I worked as an audio describer for three years. As a public historian witnessing Trump transform the Kennedy Center into his hill to die on, I cannot help but see the similarities to Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree where he ordered the destruction of German lands and infrastructure to prevent its future use by any Allied forces.

“The demolition watch piece of this cannot be understated. It is truly a crazy timeline that we’re living in where the president of the United States can just say that he might demolish the Kennedy Center.”

Hitler’s strategy was named after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, which, according to tradition, was blamed on Rome’s Christian communities and used by Emperor Nero to justify their persecution. Although there is no historical evidence that Nero set the fire, nor that he played the fiddle or lyre while watching the city burn, Nero was blamed all the same, especially since land cleared by the fire was used to build his new palace, the Domus Aurea. Hitler issued his decree once he recognized that Germany faced imminent defeat but was unwilling to accept the terms of unconditional surrender. He ordered that this land be destroyed on the grounds that the German people had failed his great mission.

As Hitler wrote in the March 1945 decree, “All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments, and supply deports, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.”

Even before Hitler issued the Nero decree, he was already burning thousands of works of art publicly. The Nazi government confiscated art from state-owned German museums and then put them on public display in 1937 as part of a propaganda art exhibition meant to classify art created in the styles of Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction as “Degenerate Art.” What could be sold to enrich the regime was and what couldn’t was publicly burned. The similarity to Trump’s criticism of Jose de Rivera’s "Infinity" in front of the National Museum of American History and destruction of Joel Shapiro’s "Blue" is palpable.

All of the other art that he favored, namely Classical and Renaissance works, were hidden in caches and planned to be displayed at a massive art complex called the Führermuseum in his hometown of Linz, Austria. The museum was never finished because the Nazi regime fell before Hitler’s goal was realized. In the chaos of the Nazi regime’s collapse, many priceless works of art burned in two devastating fires in May 1945 that destroyed the Friedrichshain flak tower. Whether the fires were caused by an accident, combat damage, or intentionally set, we will never know, but Hitler never intentionally ordered the destruction of the art held in these caches.

While the Hitler’s Nero decree ordered the destruction of German lands and infrastructure, not the art he had stolen, the connection to Trump’s fight for the Kennedy Center is glaringly obvious. Chris Raleigh, one of the co-founders of Hands Off the Arts, pointed out the historical similarities in an interview with me this week. Raleigh compared the Hands Off the Arts group to the Monuments Men fighting to preserve the art that Hitler and the Nazi regime stole and was holding hostage.

“Hitler wanted to build a museum where he lived… I think he wanted to make basically his mausoleum. It was his antithesis to all the degenerate art of the world at the time,” Raleigh explained. “I worry about the Nero decree. It was, "If I can’t have it, no one can. Destroy all of it.’ I don’t know if we’re in Nero decree territory, but we’re going pretty close.”

In truth, comparisons between Trump and Hitler are tenuous at best. There are striking social, economic, and even religious differences between the two dictators, but historical similarities are key to helping us understand how history can help us anticipate and fight back against violent escalation. At its core, Trump’s fight for the Kennedy Center as well as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is about his legacy, about how he will be remembered. It’s just like Hitler’s own fight to create a cultural district synonymous with his name, not so different from Trump’s own attempts to cast DC as culturally derelict and remake the capital in his own image, with the installation of new sculptures of controversial founding fathers and gilding “The Arts of War” and “The Arts of Peace” equestrian monuments.

As Mallory Miller, co-founder of Hands Off the Arts, explained to me, the way that the Trump administration was purposefully not caring for the exterior of the building, leading to mold growth, deinstalling "Blue," and widely publicizing the ceiling collapse is another use of this purposeful tactic to convince the public that the Kennedy Center is falling apart and needs to be closed and demolished for safety reasons.

“The demolition watch piece of this cannot be understated. It is truly a crazy timeline that we’re living in where the president of the United States can just say that he might demolish the Kennedy Center,” Miller said. Hands Off the Arts organized a livestream of the front of the building, capturing some of the first photos of his name being removed from the building before the tarp went up. The administration has even started putting up bike racks and other barriers around the perimeter of the Kennedy Center, which Miller acknowledges is likely in anticipation of their protest tonight. But with more than 900 people registered for the protest, Miller is eager to just make their circle bigger to protect the memorial to the slain president.

“We can save this,” Raleigh continued, “We can save world heritage. American heritage, but it’s going to be hard, and they’re not going to go down without a struggle, but that is also one of the things that I think about—we are not the first people [to do this work].”

This fall, California residents will be voting on a measure that would impose a tax of 5% on people with wealth in excess of $1 billion. This is a serious tax on a small group of very wealthy people.

While some focus on the amount of tax that these super-rich people will pay, it’s worth keeping in mind how much they will still have after paying their tax bill. A billionaire with $5 billion in assets will pay $250 million in taxes, but they will still be left with $4,750,000,000. We probably still don’t have to worry about these folks collecting food stamps.

The proponents of the tax calculate that it will raise $100 billion. While it is a one-time tax, it can be paid over five years. This sum will roughly match the cuts in Medicaid funding over this period that the Trump administration has put in place.

It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem.

To me, this sounds like a great plan. The state needs money to provide essential services. Why not take it from the people who have money coming out of their ears?

Okay, but we know the real world is never this simple. The rich love their money and aren’t happy about turning over any portion of it to the state of California, no matter how little it affects their living standards. We have to ask how much money the tax will actually collect after the rich use all the tools available, both legal and illegal, to avoid paying.

The podcast Today Explained had an interesting discussion of this issue last week. It included comments from two economists who have done research on this issue: Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University. Rauh is a conservative, while Young is a liberal. Both have done serious work on taxing the rich.

Not surprisingly, Rauh opposed the wealth tax. He argued that the tax would end up as a net revenue loser. The tax would apply to billionaires who were in the state as of January 1 of this year, which means if they haven’t left the state already, they will still be liable for the tax even if they choose to leave later. But Rauh argues that the combination of lost future income tax revenue from the billionaires who have already left, combined with reduced collections from the billionaires who stay or don’t come to the state, will more than offset whatever revenue the state collects from the tax.

I take seriously the issues Rauh raises. Some billionaires have left the state. They also are very clever in finding ways to avoid taxes. Rauh did a paper a couple of years back that found that the rich managed to escape paying 60% of the anticipated tax revenue from a 3-percentage-point increase in the top tax rate paid by high-income people.

There clearly is some point where higher tax rates can actually result in less revenue, mostly due to increased evasion and avoidance, but there also is some negative incentive effect (definitely the smaller part of the story). Rauh’s work suggested California might not be far from that point. (Its top marginal tax rate is 13%.)

While Rauh’s view of the wealth tax was predictable, I was surprised to hear that Young also opposed it. Young has done considerable work that finds that rich people do not often move to escape higher state tax rates. It might have been expected that Young would think that the state does not have much to fear from billionaires leaving to escape the wealth tax.

However, Young opposed the tax on different grounds. He argued that the one-time infusion of revenue from the tax, collected over five years, would still leave a funding gap five years out, after the revenue stopped coming in.

This is hard for me to understand. Five years in Trump’s America in an eternity. It is reasonable to think that in five years we may again have a more normal government at the national level that is prepared to actually provide people with healthcare. In that case, the shortfall will not be an issue. Alternatively, if Trump and his followers still hold power, we are likely looking at a disaster story for which there is no real way to prepare.

There are a number of billionaires who very publicly left California before the start of the year and may thereby avoid the tax. This will reduce the revenue collected from the tax and will mean a loss of income tax revenue for the state in future years, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

We can all envision better ways to tax the rich in an ideal world. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the state wealth tax because he says we should have a federal wealth tax. Perhaps we should, but a state wealth tax is what’s on the table, and proponents of taxing the rich would be foolish not to wholeheartedly support it.

If the wealth tax goes down, California is not about to institute Young or anyone else’s ideal tax on the rich. If it goes down, it’s a pretty sure bet that it will be some time before another tax on the super rich in California comes this close to becoming law.

I will add that I have long argued that we need to structure the economy differently so that we don’t give the rich all the money. Having shorter and weaker government-granted patent and copyright monopolies would be a good start. Also, changing bankruptcy laws so that private equity partners can’t walk away from companies they bankrupted with their pockets full. And applying a modest sales tax on financial transactions would downsize the sector and eliminate many of the great fortunes on Wall Street.

This is the topic of my book, Rigged (it’s free). It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem. Taxing some of it back is a great thing to do, but it would be even better not to give them the money in the first place. That’s not a reason to oppose the tax, but it would be good if progressives paid some attention to fundamental issues of how we structure the market.

Editor’s Note: The following is the fifth and final excerpt from Nancy J. Altman’s new book, The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge, 2026), now available for purchase wherever quality books are sold. Read the previous excerpts published by Common Dreams here, here, here, and here. As the United States continues to spend substantially more on health care than other wealthy nations but with poorer health outcomes, Altman’s book analyzes the dysfunction of the current system and sets forth the solution. “Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight,” she argues, “but it is a fight we can win.”

Reaching our destination won’t be easy. Americans have been fighting for universal, government-sponsored national health insurance for over 100 years. Progress was made in 1965 and 1972, when Medicare was enacted and expanded. Since, then, though, not only was Medicare not expanded; frustratingly, its opposition has succeeded in partially privatizing it.

The moment in which the nation finds itself does not appear particularly hopeful even for the country to remain the United States. Not since the Civil War has the nation been so divided.

Past Threats to Democracy

Almost 100 years ago, the Great Depression brought economic collapse and with it, a serious threat to democracy. Like today, there was hostility to those perceived to be elites. The economic turmoil opened the door to widespread radical movements and demagogues.

Like today, “others” were scapegoated, along with the “elites.” Jews were a particular target. One extremely powerful, influential anti-Semite was radio preacher Father Charles E. Coughlin. At the height of his popularity, his Sunday radio show, Golden Hour of the Little Flower, which was broadcast over dozens of radio stations around the country, was heard by nearly one in four Americans and had a larger share of the listening audience than the more recent broadcasters Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, and Larry King put together. Before the 1936 Presidential election, he asserted. “This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads. I take the road to fascism.”

Another leader of the time seeking radical change was Louisiana Governor and then Senator Huey Long, who targeted the extreme income and wealth inequality which exploded during the so-called Roaring Twenties. His Share Our Wealth plan proposed confiscatory income, wealth, and inheritance taxes on the wealthiest and generous federal benefits for working and middle-income families. Just one year after announcing the plan, there were 27,000 Share Our Wealth local clubs, mainly in the South, with over 7.5 million members.

Long planned to run for president as a third-party candidate, even setting out his plans and strategy in his 1935 novel, My First Days in the White House. His plans came to an abrupt end, though, in September, 1935, when he was assassinated by the son-in-law of a political opponent whom Long had targeted and slandered.

Another radical leader of the time was socialist author and journalist, Upton Sinclair, who sought to expose corruption in business and government, while shining a spotlight on the horrendous working conditions at the time. In 1934, he ran for Governor of California on his “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) plan, which, like Long, he set out in a novel, the 1933 I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. His plan called for the state to seize idle factories, farms, movie studios, and other businesses and convert them to worker-run co-ops, financed with progressive revenue. Two dozen candidates who ran on the EPIC plan won seats in the state legislature, including lawyer and journalist Culbert Colson, who successfully ran for Governor four years later, becoming the first Democrat in 40 years to win the office.

The Perfect Person for the Moment

At base, people were suffering and open to radical solutions to address their misery. Franklin Roosevelt was undoubtedly the right person to meet that moment. He was extremely politically savvy, pragmatic, and smart. His speeches were inspiring and visionary. His famed fireside chats, named to convey a sense of cozy familiarity, established a strong personal connection between the president and the American people. He radiated optimism. Perhaps most importantly, he exuded compassion and empathy.

Though he enjoyed extraordinary wealth and privilege, his paralysis, resulting from contracting polio at age 39, was apparently transformative. His close colleague Frances Perkins, who became the first woman to serve as a Cabinet secretary to a president, described his transformation in her book, The Roosevelt I Knew. She witnessed Roosevelt undergo, she wrote:

“a spiritual transformation during the years of his illness….The man emerged completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit and with a deeper philosophy. Having been in the depths of trouble, he understood the problems of people in trouble.”

The brilliant achievements of the charismatic Roosevelt can continue to be felt today. His Social Security program was carefully crafted to embody basic American values, containing both progressive and conservative elements that continue to appeal to Americans across the ideological divide. Roosevelt’s legacy provides good news in today’s troubling time. As polarized and hostile as Americans are in general, we are overwhelmingly united in our support for Social Security and Medicare, which grows out of Roosevelt’s legacy. A 2025 Bipartisan Policy Center poll, for example, found that 91 percent of Americans believe that Medicare is valuable. That same poll found that 93 percent believe Social Security is valuable. Numerous other polls, taken over many years by groups across the ideological spectrum, have found similar results of unanimity of support.

Despite how divided and combative the American people are generally, these numbers provide a ray of hope. Supporters of Improved Medicare for All must build on this support systematically. The cause and its success may have the byproduct of helping to bring the country back to more normal, less fractured, and hostile times.

Today’s Missing Leader

Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, none of the Democratic presidential nominees in the last few election cycles nor the mainstream leaders of today’s Democratic Party appear to match Roosevelt’s political insights or capabilities. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) showed that he can garner enthusiastic support, as has New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but the Democratic leadership has not embraced them or similar charismatic progressive leaders. Consequently, the Democratic Party has not spoken with one single clear voice and capitalized effectively on the broad support for Medicare and Social Security.

Unfortunately, unlike Roosevelt, the current politicians who appear most likely to win the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination do not appear to have the vision or charisma to capitalize on the popularity of Medicare and Social Security. There is no candidate with Franklin Roosevelt’s many gifts who is in a position to fully embrace Improved Medicare for All and ride it to victory, together with an expanded Social Security program. At this moment, the Democratic Party does not seem united in a path forward, certainly not one that would embrace as bold a vision as Improved Medicare for All.

Nevertheless, the political movements of the 1930s provide evidence that those policy goals can be achieved without a political leader. While the Share the Wealth and End Poverty in California grassroots movements had high-profile personalities leading the efforts, another astoundingly successful grassroots movement did not.

A Grassroots Movement to Emulate

While policymakers in Washington were primarily focused on unemployment in the early years of the Great Depression, they apparently did not fully appreciate that hidden in the shadows of the unemployment numbers were impoverished, aged parents reluctantly dependent on their adult children for support. When Social Security became law in 1935, every state but New Mexico had poorhouses (sometimes called almshouses or poor farms). The vast majority of the residents were elderly. Most of the “inmates,” as they were often labeled, entered the poorhouse late in life, having been independent wage earners until they were no longer able to work.

Although official Washington was not focused on the plight of the elderly, ordinary people were. In September 1933, a Long Beach, California doctor, Francis E. Townsend, found himself at age 66 unemployed with no savings. He was gazing out his window when he spotted two elderly women, dressed in rags, rummaging through his garbage, searching for anything edible. It so upset Dr. Townsend that he sent a letter to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, his local newspaper.

His letter, published on September 30, proposed a plan. He proposed that the federal government provide every person aged 60 or older a pension of $200 per month, a princely sum in the 1930s. The only requirement, in addition to being retired and not a criminal, was that the recipient had to spend every penny within 30 days of receipt. He claimed that his plan would not only eradicate old-age poverty; it would so stimulate the economy that it would create jobs and end the Depression.

The idea spread around the country at a rate astonishing to believe in that pre-Internet, pre-social media world. A year after Townsend wrote his letter to the newspaper, Time magazine reported in its October 15, 1934, issue:

By last week the flow of money…was enough to pay the wages of 50 people….There were Townsend Clubs in every State except Delaware…. Between 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 people had put their names to petitions begging their Congressmen to vote the Plan into effect at once.

Even in the short time between the publication of Townsend’s letter and the establishment of Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security (CES), his interagency task force to develop the Social Security Act, supporters of the Townsend proposal were exerting considerable pressure on the Administration and Congress. At the height of CES’s work, mail from Townsendites averaged about 1,500 letters a day. In some congressional districts, a candidate’s position on the Townsend plan determined the outcome of the election.

By mid-October 1934, Townsend had acquired two million signatures on petitions urging congressional action on his plan. Just three months later, he was claiming to have 25 million signatures. The number of Townsend clubs had climbed to 25,000 across the country. The plan’s popularity was not hard to fathom. As political columnist, Mark Sullivan with The New York Herald Tribune explained: “The zeal of those promoting the plan is evangelical, almost fanatic.”

A Time magazine piece explained the political climate surrounding the plan:

The good doctor’s Old Age Revolving Pensions scheme, better known as the Townsend Plan, had by last week become one of the biggest political facts in the US. The early California groundswell of sentiment in its favor had grown to a tidal wave, battering at nearly every door in House and Senate Office Buildings.

In the end, the Townsend plan, which policy experts understood to be unworkable—benefits would have cost half the income of the United States, for example—was instrumental in enacting Social Security, because it provided the widespread pressure to address old age insecurity. That is the kind of pressure that today could get Improved Medicare for All enacted, as well.

A New Movement: Improved Medicare for All Clubs All across the Nation

To build such a movement is both easier and harder than it was almost 100 years ago. While American news consumption is much more siloed, social media, email chains, and the internet generally allow people to connect much more easily and effectively. Of course, people are drawn to a variety of important issues, including climate change, gun violence, and immigration. Nevertheless, similar to the 1930s with respect to old age insecurity, Americans appear to be reaching the end of their rope with respect to the nation’s health insurance companies, as was demonstrated by the strong, instantaneous outpouring of frustration with commercial health insurance in response to the murder of the UnitedHealthcare executive.

The movement for Improved Medicare for All already has powerful, effective, knowledgeable and resourceful leaders. They are members of a far-reaching, forceful coalition, the National Coalition for Medicare for All. The coalition meets regularly to strategize and advance the issue. They are doing a spectacular job in championing and pushing forward Improved Medicare for All. To help them succeed in its enactment, the rest of us should provide them with an overwhelming army of passionate, dedicated grassroots supporters.

The goal, as impossible as it might seem, is to build a broad-based, energized, and determined Townsend-like grassroots movement. Everyone who wants Improved Medicare for All to become law should reach out to friends, family, and neighbors and urge them to get involved. In addition to joining already-existing groups, such as MoveOn, Public Citizen, and Indivisible, supporters should create Improved Medicare for All clubs.

Those clubs should play a number of roles. First, the clubs could educate members and others about why Improved Medicare for All is so important. They could discuss at club meetings how health care is a right, not a privilege and how Improved Medicare for All is the only realistic way to get us there. Just as the Townsend clubs hounded their elected representatives, supporters should flood offices with phone calls, keep track of when their Senators and representatives are home from Washington, DD, and attend their town halls if they host them. If they don’t, the clubs can seek meetings with their members and staff. If their members won’t commit to cosponsoring Improved Medicare for All legislation, they should put pressure on them, including picketing their offices.

Other Steps Individuals Can and Should Take

With or without membership in an Improved Medicare for All club, those wanting to help the effort have many other steps they can take. On this and many other issues, there are a multitude of effective civic and social organizations active on political issues, such as Indivisible, MoveOn, Public Citizen, and many more. If you have access to a union, they remain extremely important and effective actors with which to engage. With or without engagement with these organizations, it is perhaps most important to educate family, friends, and neighbors. Writing letters to the editor and posting on social media are helpful actions. If possible, there may be an opportunity to hold an event at a school, perhaps through the PTA, as well as at assisted care facilities, libraries, and other spaces. If you want to organize an event but want experts to be the speakers and/or panelists, that is relatively easy these days, particularly, if the speakers can appear virtually.

Moreover, because healthcare costs affect everyone, the issue of Improved Medicare for All can be tailored to a variety of organizations and groups. School groups may be concerned about the impact of healthcare costs on their budget. Women’s groups may be concerned about reproductive rights. Again, the point is to make the movement for Improved Medicare for All as large a mass movement as possible.

This moment in history may make enactment of Improved Medicare for All appear as far away as it possibly could be. However, the mythological phoenix should be the symbol of the effort. The phoenix, an immortal bird that continually arose from the ashes of its predecessor, symbolizes renewal after a period of hardship.

The Friday before Labor Day saw news break that OpenAI was beefing up its political influence staff, notably nabbing Jessica Schumer from Amazon to lead the firm’s “policy and partnerships” operations in the Northeast.

Schumer is the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and has been a longtime corporate politicker for Big Tech. Naturally, OpenAI was conscious of the potential ethical issues and clarified in a statement to the New York Post that “Jessica will focus on state and local public policy efforts and not federal policy or engagement with Congress. She will not be involved in any advocacy before the Minority Leader or his office related to OpenAI business.”

While superficially reassuring, OpenAI’s supposed commitment to ethics does little to actually address the underlying issue that Democratic leadership, and Chuck Schumer specifically, have been extremely tepid and lethargic, despite the rapid pace of AI industrial buildout and grassroots politics surrounding data centers. Jessica Schumer’s new gig puts an uncomfortable reality front and center: Democrats’ floundering is happening simultaneously to the party’s own political elites reaping financial and professional rewards from the continued strength of AI firms.

The senator played a major role in blocking oversight of the industry behind both his children’s paychecks.

At a time when the lane for an anti-corruption politics is wide open, with more than 90% of Americans believing corruption is a major issue in every branch of our government, Schumer’s hiring is a reminder that powerful people and families of both parties are deeply intertwined with the corporate behemoths that people are organizing against.

People simply do not trust the crop of AI executives to develop the technology responsibly in a way that serves the public interest.

They similarly have little faith in the children of powerful politicians abstaining from leveraging their parents’ status for personal gain. In a 2023 YouGov poll, 85% of respondents believed that children of presidents “always or sometimes profit off of their parents' positions in government;” it seems inconceivable that those numbers would have decreased in the intervening years. It’s hard not to see Jessica Schumer’s case that way; she has built a career around helping advance Big Tech’s legislative agenda in New York, a state her father has held elected office in for literally half a century. As a famously local-focused politician, the idea that the Schumer name would not carry weight in New York politics would be astonishingly naive. The younger Schumer was raised rubbing shoulders with a veritable who’s who of the state political class, creating in-built relationships to local politicos. And those people would have every incentive to try and build relationships with her to keep from risking running afoul of one of the most dominant (perhaps the most, given the righteous electoral defenestration of Andrew Cuomo) political figures in New York politics, and the newly ascendant company that employs her.

All of this would be one thing if it were an aside in an otherwise laudable track record on Sen. Schumer’s part of holding Big Tech to account. But we are quite clearly living on the other hand, where the senator played a major role in blocking oversight of the industry behind both his children’s paychecks (his other daughter, Alison, works for Facebook parent company Meta). He killed the oversight legislation "feared most" by Big Tech while his daughters were employed in marketing at Meta and as a lobbyist for Amazon. Even if Schumer reached that decision without personal bias, reasonable observers cannot help but question the integrity of the policymaking process.

The strongest winds in politics right now are outrage at Trumpian corruption, largely driven by the AI and crypto industries, and aversion to data centers and their impacts on local communities. Opting not to tack into them looks foolish on its own. Paired with leaders’ kids cashing checks from the very firms seeking to influence the government, it looks like dropping anchor in troubled waters.

September 11, 2026, was the 25th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center by hijackers who were part of al Qaeda and followers of Saudi religious fundamentalist Osama bin Laden who had sworn revenge against the United States because of its actions in the Middle East.

Twenty-five years ago, less than a week after the attack, in the midst of national mourning, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, where he explained: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that... The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war... America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms, and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.”

Sadly, leading members of the Republican Party have especially short memories as their party has morphed into what has become an Un-American party. President Donald Trump has repeatedly demonized Muslims in the United States and around the world. As recently as July the president shared a social media post mocking Muslim children in Minnesota for wearing hijabs to their kindergarten graduation ceremony.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Gov. George Pataki, both Republicans, joined two Republican members of the New York City Council demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not participate in the 25th-anniversary September 11 memorial ceremony. Giuliani said that participation by Mamdani, who is Muslim, “Offends him.” Zohran Mamdani ignored their demands and attended with dignity.

Other leading Republicans, including Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Party candidate for governor of New York, have joined the attacks on Mamdani because of his religious identification. During Ramadan in March, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Republican from Alabama, recirculated an image of Mayor Mamdani paired with an image of the attack on the Twin Towers with the caption, “The enemy is inside the gates.” Blakeman called Mamdani “un-American” because “He shares the philosophy of the people that murdered my nephew and all those other people.” But as George W. Bush would have explained to Blakeman, he is the one who is being un-American.

Today’s Republican Party betrays the vision of the United States held by the nation’s founders. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. In the letter, the president explained:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Washington told the Newport Congregation, “If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.” These are sentiments that need to be reborn in this country.

At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil.

Bessent agreed with Trump, saying the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars.

So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?”

Bessent’s answer was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…

Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.

Here’s what we do know:

Three days after Trump kidnapped President Maduro and his wife, he went on his Nazi-infested social media site and wrote that Venezuela’s oil revenues would be controlled by him personally “as President of the United States.”

Three days after that, he signed an executive order declaring a “national emergency” involving that oil so no court or creditor could touch the money, screwing the bondholders and oil companies to which Venezuela owed roughly $150 billion.

Then Trump started selling the oil we’d seized from Venezuela. The first load, according to Reuters and Semafor, went to commodity trading companies Vitol and Trafigura for about $500 million, groups that the Washington Post said both carry histories of bribery schemes tied to oil sales.

And that money didn’t go to the Treasury account that was described in Trump’s own executive order. Instead, it went to a bank account in Qatar, right after that country’s leaders gave him a $400 million jet. A senior official explained to Semafor that Qatar was chosen as a “neutral location” where money “can flow freely” without risk of seizure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was outraged, and told the world what most of us were thinking at the time:

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate that $300 million had been sent to Venezuela to cover government payroll needs and another $200 million was “still sitting” in Doha. He referred to the entire operation as “novel” and “a short-term mechanism.”

But a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC that the account had been closed and no more money would be flowing to or through Qatar…and nobody has identified where it went, or where it is, since then.

Where’s the money?

House Foreign Affairs committee ranking member Gregory Meeks called it “an offshore slush fund.” Bessent, questioned by Casten back in February refused to say which accounts the Treasury Department was even using, even though Trump’s executive order had named him/Treasury as the custodian for the funds. Casten and Senator Chris Van Hollen again demanded to know where the money was in March, and were again stonewalled. And then again this week.

Meanwhile, the pile of money is growing, particularly given the oil crisis provoked by Trump’s idiotic war against Iran. Using Bloomberg tanker-tracking data, the Council on Foreign Relations published an April estimate that:

“In the first four months of the United States exerting control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”

A State Department official testified to Congress back in April that around $3 billion had gone back to Venezuela, but Trump boasted in July that the US had sold more than $13 billion in stolen Venezuelan oil and suggested he could divert those funds to the American military or anywhere else he wanted.

Back in June, Marco Rubio tried to assuage Congress’ concerns by saying that accounting firm KPMG “audits every disbursement.” But when the libertarian Reason Magazine dug into it in August they found that neither the agreements nor the audits have been published.

And the so-called “Transparent Sovereignty” website the Venezuelan government set up to show the world its oil transactions only lists one single sale. Apparently, Trump is not even telling them what he’s done with their oil, or where their money went.

And it’s not just oil. In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flew a planeload of American mining executives to Caracas and came home bragging about having made off with over $100 million in gold. He set up a deal to sell it to reportedly bribe-friendly Trafigura with the proceeds going into, well, nobody knows where.

This is an old script that Trump appears to be following here, one many corrupt petrostates pioneered long ago.

For example, in 2014 Nigeria’s central bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, accidentally revealed to his Senate that roughly $20 billion in oil revenue had never made it into the national treasury. President Goodluck Jonathan’s response was to fire him and call the money a “phantom.” When PriceWaterhouseCoopers finally audited the books, it found at least $1.48 billion was simply gone.

I’ve done international relief work in some of the most corrupt nations in the world, been offered bribes and threatened for not taking them, and the pattern I’m seeing here is eerily familiar. They never announce the looting; they just stop letting you know where anything went or who ended up with it. Most people figure that it must be okay since it’s not being reported or discussed, and the conversation dies away.

So, here we are. Trump:

— announced that he’d taken the oil,
— then that he’d taken the money from the sale of the oil and put it in a bank with the country that had given him a free 747 jet,
— hired traders with bribery records,
— refused to publish the contracts,
— put his own hand-picked cabinet members in charge of both the disbursements and oversight, and
— then sent Bessent to Congress to say, “No” when asked if we could please, please know where it’s all gone.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress seem to have developed a sudden case of lockjaw.

Congressmen Casten and Joaquin Castro have introduced into the House the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act to force the GAO to audit the Qatar account and whatever’s followed it. Republicans refuse to let it out of committee, and Mike Johnson won’t give it a chance on the floor.

I have spent my life watching men in suits sign away things that were never theirs to sell. The North American Free Trade Agreement. Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution. The land beneath the feet of the people who work it. Trade deals get written in rooms none of us are allowed into, then handed to us as done—take it, live with it, and don't ask who profited. That was the old playbook: theft dressed up as a benevolent "all boats rising" policy.

What's happening in 2026 is not quiet. Donald Trump is doing it all out loud, in broad daylight, on camera, daring anyone to stop him. And he's doing it right here in the USA.

Washington has long muted its professions of democratic faith whenever a compliant government was needed in Mexico or elsewhere around the world. Now, that corrosive indifference to core values is at work at home in the United States, with a terrifying array of targeted attacks on immigrant communities; judges stripped of the power to enforce basic civil procedure and defend what little protection people still have under this economic order; and the Orwellian vaporization of extensive scientific databases tracking climate change and other inconvenient truths.

The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become.

And that's before we even consider this administration's aggressive support for unchecked AI dominance with no regard for what it costs humanity, or the foolishly criminal forever war he started with Iran last February.

In the USA, the machinery of electoral democracy is itself under direct assault: career officials who once safeguarded elections purged and replaced with loyalists who deny elections happen fairly at all; Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned into something even The Washington Post now calls a paramilitary force; and a Pentagon chain of command purged of those considered most likely to obey their oath to the US Constitution at a time of shameless presidential power grab.

The shamelessness makes clear what used to be hidden. In Mexico, NAFTA was imposed with a rewritten constitutional article here, a side agreement there, with no teeth—so boring that no one ever looked into it too closely. Today’s openly hostile power grab made it impossible to keep pretending the arrangement could ever be fair..

What kind of future can we build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?

It is precisely this vital conversation about our future—between people from Canada, USA, and Mexico—that the US administration is trying to shatter. We intend to have it anyway.

To create peace among our people we must work on removing the causes of conflict. We see the contradictions: inequality versus greed, misery versus excess, haves versus have nots. These are the contradictions democracy is supposed to be able to overcome by dictating that majorities rule policy and that there are constitutional protections for all. These principles have never worked as well as promised, but they have endured. Now they are under unprecedented attack.

For too long history has underlined the difference between our countries, and politicians have benefited from promoting rivalry and inequality. But today, it is clear that we are a cross-border majority suffering the consequences of a handful of billionaires.

Peace power requires a refreshed regional majority with new voices and decision-makers. A big tent where Black communities, Indigenous peoples, gun violence survivors, workers, and migrants from the three countries are treated as the pillars of democracy they already are. All represent communities who've never had the luxury of walking away from struggle, which is exactly why their vision and strength are vital to uniting our majority in the pursuit of peace and freedom.

The power of the people is still the most important power, and the billionaires know it. That's why they invested so much in turning news and information into a circus of conflict for a doomscrolling public. They need our attention even more than they need our votes. Let's give them neither. Every hour they capture is an hour we don't spend building the unity that can defeat them. Our power relies on our strength of community and thrives in places where people can put the phone down and just make common cause with their fellow humans.

That's why people across Minnesota, California, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York are organizing from the neighborhood to the state: to resist authoritarianism and reclaim power back to the people. And that’s why, this September, we're throwing up a big tent in two cities that share two countries and one river. El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become: one where the future isn't handed down from a boardroom or negotiated in a room we're not allowed into, but built, plainly and stubbornly, by the people who actually have to live it. One where democratic dialogue and a radical democracy is protected as a sacred value.

The future is in our hands.

In May 2024, a New York City jury convicted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of 34 felonies of falsifying business records with an intent to defraud, including an intent to “commit, aid, or conceal another crime.” Days earlier, Justice Juan Merchan had convened counsel for a pre-charge conference to discuss their recommendations for jury instructions. There, Trump’s defense team, led by Todd Blanche, failed to propose a key legal requirement for what the prosecution called the “most obvious” other crime—conspiracy to promote an election through the “unlawful means” of violating Federal Election Campaign Act contribution limits. Under reigning federal precedents, there could be no criminal violation of FECA unless the conduct was “willful,” defined as knowing it was unlawful. Yet the defense put forth the term “willfully” without saying what it meant!

Had the defense presented the correct language, it is possible that Trump would have escaped conviction. With his recent elevation to attorney general, Blanche’s defective lawyering raises the question of whether he may make further mistakes that threaten his patron’s interests.

To understand the importance of this and other defense errors, a brief recap of the trial is necessary. Testimony by David Pecker, chairman of American Media Inc. (AMI), publisher of the National Inquirer and other tabloids, and Trump attorney Michael Cohen, described a 15-month Trump-AMI conspiracy to suppress media stories, especially from women, that could damage Trump’s campaign. They aimed to spot prospective pieces and purchase them to prevent publication. Michael Cohen, known as Trump’s “fixer,” was AMI’s contact point with Trump.

The liberal-progressive media rap on Todd Blanche has been that, under his leadership, the Justice Department... has been too subservient to Trump’s undemocratic, illegal, and unconstitutional tendencies. That’s true.

In early August 2016, AMI paid Karen McDougal $150,000 for her story of a past affair with Trump, which it did not plan to publish, and collateral services. There was an understanding that Trump would reimburse the company. In late October, AMI declined a similar deal with adult film star Stormy Daniels, passing the transaction to Cohen. He paid Daniels $130,000, expecting to be reimbursed by “The Boss.” These transactions violated FECA. They were expenditures coordinated with a political campaign, which are considered “in kind” contributions, and they either exceeded the contribution limit of $2,700 or were illegal corporate donations.

In cross-examinations, Blanche’s team sought to shake jurors’ confidence in the witnesses’ credibility. They suggested that Pecker’s damning account, reflecting a previous non-prosecution agreement with a US attorney, might have been motivated by his eagerness to complete his company’s sale of two tabloids. They brought out Cohen’s long history of lying and fraud, which resulted in his prosecution for multiple offenses under Trump’s administration.

But prosecutors offered compelling documentary evidence to corroborate their witnesses’ accounts. Pecker’s testimony was supported by his non-prosecution agreement. A Cohen-recorded September 6, 2016 phone call between Pecker and Trump revealed them discussing Trump’s projected reimbursement of AMI for McDougal’s story. “What do we have to pay? $150 [thousand]?” Trump inquired. (AMI later dropped its insistence that Trump repay it}. On October 26 Cohen wired funds transferred from his private bank account through his shell company, separate from the Trump Organization, to Daniels’ representative, Keith Davidson. In a recorded December 9 phone call, he complained to Davidson that Trump “was not even paying me the $130,000 back” (Pecker recalled Cohen speaking similarly to him in the November-December time frame). In a later call, Cohen told Davidson, “I can’t even tell you how many times [Trump] said to me I hate the fact that we did it [paid Daniels].”

Other documents were smoking guns for the base falsification of business records charges. They showed that Trump’s payments reimbursing Cohen for his 2016 payoff were purposely mischaracterized by the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and controller as “retainers” for 2017 legal services. Trump himself signed nine checks with stubs reading “retainer.” And In a note to his 2018 financial disclosure report to the Office of Government Ethics, President Trump acknowledged that he reimbursed Cohen between $100,00 and $250,000 during 2017.

Facing strong headwinds, Blanche’s team headed to the charging conference. The first item on the agenda was the defense’s proposed jury instruction that Trump could be found guilty only if the violations of FECA in question were “willful.” “This is a big one for us,” Blanche co-counsel Emil Bove pleaded to the judge. Justice Merchan upheld his request.

But the defense had asked for too little. It had failed to put forth the legal definition of willfulness in FECA—acting with knowledge the conduct was unlawful—to guide the jury. According to virtually unreported defense documents posted on two legal websites, it initially requested such a definition in a written submission to the judge. But it inexplicably dropped it in a subsequent joint written submission with the prosecution. This was a serious, possibly fatal, error. Blanche was fully aware of the importance of properly defined willfulness in campaign finance law. Three years earlier, in defending Igor Fruman, a Trump supporter who was charged with soliciting foreign campaign contributions, he had negotiated a plea agreement under which the defendant admitted he “generally understood” foreign nationals were not allowed to make political donations.

Why did the defense drop the crucial definition? Was it overconfidence in its case, or a misplaced expectation that the judge would supply the missing language in his charge? Bove, co-counsel Susan Necheles, and Maxwell Gottschall, who is handling Trump’s appeal, all declined to respond to my inquiries about the proposed instructions.

As the Supreme Court has pointed out, “The word ‘willfully’ is sometimes said to be a word of many meanings, whose construction is often dependent on the context in which it appears.” According to legal scholars, in some statutory contexts it may merely “denote an act which is intentional, knowing or voluntary, as distinguished from accidental.” But in highly technical federal statutes where there is a “danger of ensnaring individuals in apparently innocent conduct,” courts have recognized that “proof that the defendant knew of the specific law prohibiting the conduct” is required. Such has been the case with campaign finance law according to the Justice Department, Federal Election Commission, and federal courts.

In a famous case bearing many similarities to Trump’s, former Senator and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee John Edwards was charged with violating FECA by accepting excessive contributions through intermediaries to meet his secret pregnant mistress’ expenses during his 2008 presidential primary campaign. The judge instructed jurors that “willfulness” meant “Mr. Edwards acted with knowledge that his course of conduct was unlawful and with the intent to do something the law forbids.” Indeed, his lawyer led off his summation by suggesting that while Edwards might be presumed to know the figure for the FECA contribution limit, that was not true for “knowing that a third party paying for a mistress could be a campaign contribution.” The trial ended with a hung jury.

If Justice Merchan’s willfulness instruction was wanting, there was still a way for the defense to get the jury to consider Trump did not know he was breaking the law. In his summation, Blanche could have emphasized that the prosecution had failed to offer any specific evidence that Trump knew paying off alleged sexual partners for their silence was illegal (It had tried unsuccessfully to introduce an old 1999 media interview in which Trump commented that he was very experienced with campaign finance laws). Yet, rather than attempting to subtly influence jurors’ understanding of “willfully,” Blanche offered only the naked assertion, “There was no evidence of a willful violation of FECA.” He also clung to the thoroughly debunked retainer cover story, which may have damaged the credibility of his entire final argument.

None of this is to say that with a proper judicial definition of willfulness or better defense summation, Trump would have necessarily fared as well as Edwards. Even without specific evidence of Trump’s knowledge, jurors might possibly have inferred that his efforts to conceal his actions reflected not only his desire to protect his political reputation but also his consciousness of breaking the law. We’ll never know.

The liberal-progressive media rap on Todd Blanche has been that, under his leadership, the Justice Department (he has been deputy and acting attorney-general) has been too subservient to Trump’s undemocratic, illegal, and unconstitutional tendencies. That’s true. But the record of the hush money trial suggests Blanche exercised some agency in serving Trump, and sometimes behaved incompetently, jeopardizing Trump’s interests. And as a top Justice official, he continued to do so as in his error-ridden release of the Epstein files and public disrespect for the concerns of Epstein survivors, which generated bipartisan blowback against the Trump administration. Caveat emptor, Mr. President.

After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming DC monuments, President Donald Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000-pound bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families, and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

This latest US weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement.

In June of 2026, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 170,000 households in Gaza, equivalent to nearly 1 million people, were living in tents. “Another 5,000 households sleep outdoors,” they reported, “while 52,000 households live in overcrowded shelters.” As Gazans enter the rainy and cold months of winter, they still lack emergency shelter items. They need plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. Genocidal war and siege drive the crisis they face as the Israelis continue destroying Gazan homes and shelters and imposing restrictions which block desperately needed relief.

President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using US manufactured bombs.

Over the past two years, members of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine coalition have held weekly online meetings with Palestinians living in the West Bank. They update our coordinating committee about their experiences amid ongoing US provisioned Israeli genocide against Palestinians. They speak with anguish about people in the West Bank and Gaza enduring persecution, travel restrictions, hunger, inadequate medical care, land theft, contamination, and an alarming rise in pogrom-style attacks by illegal settlers who are often assisted by Israeli military and police forces.

Our Palestinian coalition members living in the West Bank long to extend a helping hand to people trapped in Gaza. They recently raised the dilemma of Gazan children who have already lost years of education. Many live in wretched tent encampments, lack adequate food and medicine, and struggle with psychosocial traumas because of having lost their loved ones.

A Palestinian NGO, PYALARA, (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights) suggested that our coalition could help with practical measures to assist Gazan children who are eager to learn but who lack basic school supplies. The children are bereft of paper, pencils, pens, books, desks, and book bags.

Recently, for UN News, an interviewer spoke with Julia Dicon, the director of education for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Association for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East). Dicon described what education means for Palestine refugee children and why sustained support is critical. She expressed deep respect for the many ways that Palestinians maintain capacities to educate their children, even in these dire times.

The interviewer asked her to tell a story about Palestinian young people who represent courage in the face of unspeakable adversity as they continue efforts to learn and teach.

Dicon talked about two Gazan sisters, 17-year-old Tala Mousa and her 15-year-old sister, Farah Mousa, who were recently named winners of the 2026 Middle East Earth Prize. The young women regularly looked at rubble surrounding their home, which Israel had bombed. Unlike President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using US manufactured bombs. Fala and Farah puzzled over how they and their neighbors could begin creating the indispensable equipment to reconstruct housing: bricks. Together, using their scientific knowledge, they developed a practical way to transform rubble into reusable blocks for garden beds, pavement, and partitions.

Tala and Farah represent the potential of Gazan youth to make a significant difference in their community’s lives and futures. Their energetic, practical, and impassioned approach deserves our respect and support, while at the same time we must find creative ways to resist the merchants of death who benefit from the Trump administration’s purchase of their death-dealing weapons. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grummon are among the US companies whose profits will continue to soar while the US markets their weapons, “showcasing” them in war zones around the world.

We live in harsh, dark times.

The latest US weapon sale to Israel further confirms US complicity with Israel’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We must heed an urgent call issued by those most impacted by the war crimes: “Don’t look away.”

Voters had a big win at the Supreme Court this week. What does it all mean?

On Monday, the court refused to allow the Postal Service to implement a new rule that would have curbed mail voting. But the one-paragraph ruling seemed to say more than “not yet.” The Trump administration, the justices ruled, was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”

This was great news for the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting, the method now used by 1 in 3 voters. It was utterly bonkers that the White House tried to exert control over the election system. That’s illegal, a fact now confirmed over and over. The Brennan Center was proud to be part of the legal team representing voters before the Supreme Court.

We must never, ever get used to the idea that the president of the United States routinely denigrates our democracy. We should not have to wait with bated breath to see whether the Supreme Court will do the right thing.

President Donald Trump’s drive to undermine the election is failing. Time and again, his moves have been parried or blocked.

Voters, the coast is clear. You can vote with confidence. It’s five weeks until Election Day. Make a plan. Vote early in person. Vote as early as possible via the US Postal Service (USPS). Vote via a drop box. Vote on Election Day. Make your voice heard.

Yes, let’s exhale. But also let’s not lose sight of some bigger lessons.

Trump has not given up on trying to mess up and undermine the election. Repeatedly, courts have had to step in to protect the rule of law, blocking the executive order that mandated the USPS rule, the order before that, and very possibly whatever comes next. Whistleblowers keep popping up to reveal new depredations, such as the violations of state law by the Department of Homeland Security that were uncovered this week.

Just know that voting rights groups, state and local governments, election officials, and judges around the country have your back.

Then there’s the Supreme Court. It did the right thing here. But the situation should not have been this hard. This court helped create the chaos and confusion three weeks ago when it allowed Trump’s mail ballot plan to go forward.

And this whole election takes place in a political system transformed by the Roberts Court. A flood of billionaire funding and dark money thanks to Citizens United and other rulings. Frenzied gerrymandering. And, all too often, a green light for voter suppression. It has been two decades since the Supreme Court blocked a state from enacting a restrictive voting law. After the Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April that demolished what was left of the Voting Rights Act, Southern states rapidly redrew congressional maps to eliminate districts where Black voters had a fair chance to elect candidates who represented them. Expect more fights about district maps next year.

As for the states, there is some good news: In the recent mail balloting case, 24 state attorneys general filed litigation. Opposition to USPS’ antics did not fall strictly along party lines, with seven Republican-led states separately telling the court that Trump’s plan to disrupt the existing system was unworkable. That’s all encouraging.

But far too many states are colluding in efforts to take rights from their own citizens. In numerous states, our research shows, voters will go to the polls with restrictions put in place since 2024. Unscrupulous politicians have free rein to concoct new restrictive rules.

All this adds up to an argument for strong new national laws to ensure this doesn’t happen again. I’m done with trench warfare on voting. We can’t let vote deniers trash our elections, in Washington or in state capitols. Squalid moments like this one must be followed by reform and renewal.

On Wednesday the Brennan Center released Eight Solutions to Protect Voting Rights and Improve Representation, the most recent in a series of papers laying out solutions to our most pressing issues. Already we have published proposals on political corruption, Supreme Court reform, and congressional reform. This new raft of proposed actions would respond to the assaults on voting and representation still underway.

Congress can pass a national law, for example, banning partisan gerrymandering and barring mid-decade redistricting. That would significantly bolster competition and representation across the country, applying to red states and blue states alike. And it would eliminate the Supreme Court’s ridiculous rule in Callais that partisanship serves as an excuse for states drawing racially discriminatory maps.

What about the freedom to vote in the wake of the court’s other damaging decisions? Citizens should be able to defend their own voting rights in court when they are impinged upon. Surprisingly, no such law exists assuring access to the courts today. With the Voting Rights Act smashed to bits, an even broader statute would give voters the ability to protect themselves. Voters who have suffered racial discrimination should not face court-imposed barriers to vindicating their rights.

We also need national standards to ensure that citizens everywhere can vote by mail, vote early, be automatically registered, and take advantage of the myriad ways we have improved access. We should expand the size of the House of Representatives, a change conservative scholar Yuval Levin and others have urged, to widen representation. And it’s past time to admit the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states, as their citizens have repeatedly supported. And more.

Believe it or not, Congress has the power to do all these things. Yes, gridlocked, polarized, much-maligned Congress. The branch of government closest to the people should take the lead in restoring power to the people.

We must never, ever get used to the idea that the president of the United States routinely denigrates our democracy. We should not have to wait with bated breath to see whether the Supreme Court will do the right thing.

The law is clear: States run elections. But the Constitution gives Congress a role, too: It can pass national legislation. It should use that explicitly granted power to do what it has at other times, to lift the floor under voters and ensure protections. When it comes to voting rights, presidents should stay out. Congress should jump in.

The Trump family has made a fortune from its crypto business. By granting his business a bank charter, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the Treasury Department has acted to help him, his family, and possibly one Middle Eastern spymaster make more money.

It is widely recognized that the OCC’s decision is laden with conflicts of interest. But there is more to it than self-dealing and self-enrichment. If implemented, the decision also corrupts the US economy by allowing criminals, terrorists and rogue states access to the payments system—the basic plumbing—used by regulated banks. It also creates conditions for crypto firms to maneuver for a federal bailout should their businesses start to fail.

The Trump family has a significant ownership interest in World Liberty Financial, a company that among other things issues the USD1 “stablecoin.” In 2025 Trump alone reported earning $536.4 million from WLF. Even this sum does not include income that may be going to Trumps’ family, or to the family of his emissary Steve Witkoff, which also have interests in WLF. Nor does it include income which may be going to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates spy chief, whose investment company owns a 49 percent equity share of WLF.

Not satisfied with that haul, WLF has obtained a trust bank charter from the OCC, which will be used to house its stablecoin business.

This will give WLF important new advantages.

First, a trust charter eases the way for the WLF stablecoin business to obtain a “master account” at the Federal Reserve, which are used by banks to hold and transfer dollars electronically. If a master account is granted, dollar payments into and out of USD1 can go through that system. This will lower USD1 costs, since it will not need to use a commercial bank to transfer funds.

Second, it will create a halo effect for USD1, enhancing its legitimacy and perceived safety. A “trust bank” sounds like something that comes with the regulations, supervision, and guarantees that make commercial banks a safe place for retail depositors. But that is not true. Trust banks do not take deposits or make loans, are not federally insured, and are not eligible for lending from the Federal Reserve.

The conflicts of interest in granting a bank charter to WLF are apparent. The OCC—which a Trump executive order claims is completely controlled by him—has granted a bank charter to a firm which makes him money and will act as the supposed supervisor of that bank.

Bad as this seems, there are harms beyond the self-dealing and self-enrichment involved in granting this charter. Giving any stablecoin or crypto currency firm access to a master account invites illicit use of the regulated financial system which we all depend on.

The Tether stablecoin, for example, has featured in international criminal cases, and has frequently been used by financial fraudsters laundering money, by countries such as Iran and Russia evading sanctions, and by terrorist networks. A record $158 billion of crypto tokens were sent to criminal wallets in 2025, a 145% increase from the previous years.

This risk has been recognized by the Federal Reserve in the past. According to guidance released by the Board of Governors in 2022, master accounts should not go to entities that create an undue risk to the economy by “facilitating activities such as money laundering, terrorism financing, fraud, cybercrimes, economic or trade sanctions violations, or other illicit activities”. It is not at all clear why any stablecoin or other crypto currency is not, on the face of it, ineligible under these and other parts of the BOG guidance. In fact, Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr has objected to the creation of this class of account because it does not provide sufficiently specific and robust safeguards to protect against their being used for money laundering and terrorist financing by institutions the Fed does not supervise.

There is another alarming outcome that may result from giving bank charters to crypto firms. The halo effect—which may lead stablecoin users to believe they have federal protection—could be used by WLF and other crypto firms to provide political cover for a federal bail-out if their businesses were failing.

There would be no legal basis for such a bailout. But would this administration, and the OCC which it claims to control completely, look for a way to provide a bailout that protected their crypto firm wealth? That may seem unlikely, but so did a $1.8 billion fund to benefit January 6 rioters and other political favorites.

The OCC and the Federal Reserve are failing in their duty to protect the public and the economy from potential harm that can flow from crypto firms like WLF. A responsible Congress would intervene to stop it.

Marc Jarsulic and Gerald Epstein are economists and among dozens of expert contributors to Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America, a project of the Political Economy Research Institute, UMass Amherst. The ideas in this article are developed in their paper “No More Bailouts,” available on the Game Changers website.

President Donald Trump is losing badly, and he knows it. At the MAGA rally billed as the Republican midterm convention on September 9-10, he mounted yet another brazen attack on the democratic process that threatens to hold him accountable. He tried to buy votes, imbue personal loyalty to him over allegiance to democracy, and encourage voter fraud.

Most of the media dismissed the episode as just another bizarre Trump moment.

A Dubious Promise

Eight minutes into his second keynote speech on Day Two of the rally, the president promised a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to every US adult citizen if Republicans retained control of Congress in November. That would add more than $1 trillion to the burgeoning federal deficit and fuel persistent inflation.

“Outside historical norms”? Trump’s actions are so far beyond the pale that it’s inappropriate to describe them in such sanitized terms.

Some observers dismissed it as a campaign promise. But federal law provides:

Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and

Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. (18 U.S.C. Sec. 597—“Expenditures to Influence Voting”)

Of course, the Trump Justice Department that is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for posting a photograph of seashells on a beach will never investigate or prosecute Trump for anything. And Trump’s position will always be that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. United States effectively gave him a permanent “get-out-of-jail-free” card for anything he does as president.

Even so, Trump’s promise of money in exchange for Republican votes was blatantly anti-democratic; the loyalty oath that he then asked his audience to take was worse.

A Dangerous Pledge

Ten minutes after his $5,000 promise, Trump asked attendees to raise their right hands and swear—not to defend democracy, but to undermine it as an act of personal loyalty to him: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe.”

The audience repeated his words. Ignoring the evidence that voter fraud is virtually non-existent, Trump continued:

That I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it anyway. I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m gonna try and cheat like hell like they do. They never, there’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am gonna go out and I'm gonna get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3 or we are going to vote before that.

Ready? To finish the pledge? So we swear [Audience responded: “We swear.”] on November 3, we are going to go out and vote.

Then Trump added: “And you know what? If you want, you can vote Democrat, but I don't think there's one person in this room that's gonna vote [Democrat]. [Audience responded: "No."]

“I don't think so. So I don't have to preface, I don't wanna waste the words vote Republican, just go out. If you vote, you're voting Republican. Okay.”

Then he concluded the pledge: “So help me God.”

[Audience responded: "So help me God"]

“Swear Your Loyalty to Me”

It’s no secret that Trump values personal loyalty to him above all else. Competence has never been a job requirement in his administration. See, for example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Pete Hegseth (Defense), Kristi Noem (Department of Homeland Security), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor), and more.

But Trump’s oath is particularly unsettling. A US president asking any audience to swear personal fealty to him should trouble any citizen. When coupled with a pledge to commit voter fraud aimed at preserving that president’s compliant legislative majority for another two years, it’s stunning. And the historical parallels are frightening.

Pundits responded with their usual euphemisms: “Trump acted outside historical norms;” “Don’t take Trump literally;” “Trump is being Trump.”

Then they moved on.

“Outside historical norms”? Trump’s actions are so far beyond the pale that it’s inappropriate to describe them in such sanitized terms. He has already destroyed many of democracy’s guardrails, and he’s not done.

“Don’t take Trump literally”? Maybe pundits don’t, but even with a dismal approval rating in the mid-30s, millions of people will. After all, he concluded his September 10 pledge with a warning:

You know what happens if you don't vote? You go to hell. You know that. Okay? You go to hell. And I don't want that to happen to you, so please go and vote because together we will defeat the communists. We will defeat the communists. We will reject, and that's what they are. They're not socialists. They're not Democrats. They're communists. We will reject these radical left lunatics. We will demolish the extremists, fanatics, lunatics, and criminals who want to destroy our country.

“Trump is being Trump”? That’s true in the sense that he’s saying the quiet part out loud. But the response should be more than a collective shrug. With the help of a complicit Republican majority in Congress, a cooperative US Supreme Court, and Republican controlled-state governments across the country, Trump has amassed unprecedented presidential power—and abused it in unprecedented ways.

The November election must become the reckoning that Trump does not want.

I was almost six years old when the Korean War began and Korea was a mere 7,000 or so miles from Washington, DC. I’m now 82 years old and my country is at war with Iran, whose capital, Tehran, is—phew!—only about 6,300 miles from Washington, DC. What a relief!

By the time I’m 110, there’s a dim possibility that, should that be a pattern (and don’t forget Vietnam, a mere 9,000 miles from Washington; Afghanistan, a mere 7,000 miles away; or Iraq, a mere 6,000-odd miles offshore of the United States, all of which suggest that distance has indeed been a significant—and significantly unnerving—part of American imperial war making since 1945), the US might be warring with a country merely 5,000-odd miles from our capital. And by the time I’m 126, the war of that moment might, for all I know, be right next door. (Of course, if Donald Trump, who would then be 124 years old, is still president, it might even be in Canada, “our cherished 51st State.”)

I should, in truth, be more used to my country’s distant wars by now. After all, I can still remember my opposition to the Vietnam War, a moment when I actually took to the streets and turned in my draft card in public protest—yes, back then, the military wasn’t an all-volunteer outfit—and also learned how to be a draft counselor to help potential draftees like me, who were against that all too literal war from hell.

There are so many things that are truly needed on this overheating planet of ours, how deeply sad (not to say genuinely pathetic) that the best thing the president of the United States and his advisers could find to do this year was launch a war halfway around the world that would kill all too many people.

Almost 60 years later, I find it strange that my country is once again fighting a distant war for reasons that, at best, make no sense whatsoever to me, and at worst are simply horrific and repetitive beyond belief. It’s a war that, as The New York Times reported, was essentially sold to the president by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “near-certain victory” against a weak Iranian regime that would prove incapable (no question about it!) of blockading the Strait of Hormuz, could do little harm to America’s allies in the Middle East, and “could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.”

Yes, it’s true that my country may indeed have been the most imperial—in the sense of influencing so much of the world—country in history with a truly global reach. Of course, there were also the other two great powers of the last half century. There was the Soviet Union—now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which, to give him credit of an unnerving sort, is at least fighting his nightmarish war against Ukraine right at or near its own border rather than in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. And then there is China, which has so far proven itself a remarkable imperial force by having but a single military base anywhere else on the planet—unlike the 750 American ones scattered around the globe—and not fighting a war anywhere other than not particularly successfully against Vietnam in 1979 and border skirmishes with India in 2020 and 2021 (which, historically speaking on this planet of ours, is almost the imperial equivalent of pacifism).

No such luck for the United States of Donald J. Trump, of course. “Our” latest president has continued a tradition now more than 75 years old of launching distant wars that simply never succeed. Never.

You would think, of course, that there might be some extremely modest learning curve when it came to such conflicts, but if so, you would think wrong. Logical as that might appear, it’s proven to be anything but the reality of our world. And after so many failed wars globally, that’s once again our reality in relation to Iran, despite the fact that “our” president in his first term in office offered this description of himself: “They said: ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

And curiously enough, with the exception of an ongoing conflict in Syria, he stuck to his... oh, sorry, but it is the phrase... guns then. No such luck recently, of course. And Iran is turning into a disaster first class, while the harm to that country is, as with all such wars (remember the millions killed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), or at least should be considered, unbearable. And mind you, while “our” president was turning our world into an ever greater mess at home and abroad, he was still planning to extend his renaming frenzy from the Gulf of Mexico (oh, sorry, the Gulf of America) and Lake Ontario (oh, sorry, again, Lake America) to the Strait of Hormuz, which he was hoping, believe it or not, could be renamed the “Trump Strait.” As he wrote at his Truth Social account: “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Imagine that, will you—not that the Strait of Whatever You Want to Call It was, in fact, faintly under American control.

And for what acts might it be renamed? Well, just as I was writing this piece, for instance, accounts appeared indicating that a missile launched by my country reportedly killed at least four people, including a 4-year-old child, and wounded another 68 at a wedding—yes, a wedding!—in Iran.

Oh, and let me at least add that, right here at home, one American was finally brought to justice for his acts—in this case, US Air Force Major Jason Watson, who had stood on the steps of the US Capitol and called for the impeachment of President Trump. As he told CNN: “Not only is [Trump] a failure as president, he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption, and is killing Americans. And that is unacceptable to me.”

And as it turns out, it’s also unacceptable to the Iranians. Since, despite what Benjamin Netanyahu assured “my” president about, they have indeed been capable both of attacking American allies and a whole string of American military bases in the Middle East with missiles and drones, while indeed largely shutting down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and so driving up oil prices strikingly on a global level.

There are so many things that are truly needed on this overheating planet of ours, how deeply sad (not to say genuinely pathetic) that the best thing the president of the United States and his advisers could find to do this year was launch a war halfway around the world that would kill all too many people, ruin worlds (and weddings), pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and waste enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars thousands of miles from home at a moment when all too many people in this very country still need so much.

Why is it, I wonder, that American presidents of seemingly any stripe simply can’t stop launching distant, disastrous wars with our tax dollars? In some sense, I simply don’t understand. How can there be no learning curve whatsoever when it comes to American wars abroad since 1945? How thickheaded do you truly have to be not to notice an overwhelming pattern of lack of success (not to say outright failure)? It’s so obvious that there should be no way it wouldn’t be a front-and-center phenomenon no one could miss or ignore?

No such luck, of course.

Obviously the story of the moment is the sudden, coordinated bout of cold feet in the AI industry, whose leaders expressed support over the weekend for some kind of effort to slow down the pace of their R&D. This is something that’s never happened in the 40 years of the climate fight, and so it shouldn’t be dismissed; in fact, it could conceivably provide an opening for common sense across the entire apocalypse front. So let’s try to game out how responsible political leaders—which means, I tremble to say, Democrats—might try to talk about it.

First, credit where due. The fact there’s an opening at all is owed to the remarkable citizen resistance to data centers that has sprung up in the last year, and also to the courage of a few kids in the AI industry. At Third Act-GrayPAC we’ve been a part of that resistance in place after place—if you want some insight on its roots and future, join us Wednesday night for a conversation with old friend Justin Pearson, the Tennessee state rep who helped kick it off with the fight against Elon Musk’s super-polluting Memphis facility.

Water wastage, noise, land use—the data center fight has often been routed in deeply local concerns. But it has two other dimensions. The first is about energy, both its costs and its pollution. As I’ve noted, one way to understand a data center is that it’s a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop. The degree to which this is becoming a climate disaster can hardly be overstated. Here’s the latest, from Bloomberg on Monday:

Natural gas consumption for electricity generation at data centers is forecast to increase by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the decade ending in 2035, even when accounting for planned projects that may never be completed. This volume exceeds the current gas consumption of all nations except China, Russia, Iran, and the United States, based on data from the US Energy Information Administration. The projection is more than double BloombergNEF's December forecast of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.

In essence, American data centers are about to become a giant new fossil-fuel burning country, just when we need it least. And if you wonder whether the oil boys have figured this out, don’t. When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—long a big backer of AI—proposed some limits last week, the reaction went like this:

“We were disappointed in the announcement in that it sends the wrong message to these incredible economic opportunities that are presented for Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania’s economy,” said James D. Welty, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition…

Marcellus producers are almost solely dependent on demand growth within their own producing region. Artificial intelligence data centers powered by gas-fired electricity are seen by Marcellus gas producers as a key source of that so-called in-basin demand.

But that data center resistance was driven by something else too, that’s been largely ignored—it was a chance to stand up to the oligarchs and this technology they’ve staked their future on. A few years ago Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest had a mixed reputation, admired by some and distrusted by others; now the loathing is much more universal, especially since they’ve allied themselves with the most unpopular president in recent history. They marketed their AI tech on the promise that it would destroy jobs; it’s also proven useful for making naked pictures of anyone you could imagine. They stole books to train it; now it produces a commodity universally reviled as slop.

Oh, and it might kill us all, which brings us back to those kids. Jacob Coxon is a 27-year-old former silver medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad who worked first at Open AI and then Anthropic, and who resigned last week, kicking off this current storm with his tweeted fear that things were getting out of control. A top scientist at the company backed him up, tweeting: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Which seems like kind of a big deal. Perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was on to something when, many months ago, he called for a moratorium on this kind of work, a call he’s repeated in recent days. But no one takes Bernie seriously (except the American people, for whom he remains the most popular active politician). So it’s a good sign that there seem to be some starting to follow suit. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has been nimblest, and not for the first time—he got a start on the messaging by saying

On day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the engineering of bioweapons. Meanwhile, Don Jr's 1789 Capital bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs... President Trump is compromised.

And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another 2028 possibility:

It’s becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington.

But as Greg Sargent points out in a prescient piece today, the Dems are mostly playing small ball here, nibbling around the edges instead of biting. I think someone has the chance for a kind of career-defining stance here, one that builds on the growing sense of unease with the overheating world (an unease which is already quite broad and is going to deepen as the budding El Niño takes us ever deeper into the climate future). As we start to look forward to 2028, even Barack Obama—a cautious man—has called for Democrats to be more aggressive. Here’s a stab at what that might look like:

Elections usually turn on immediate, pocketbook issues—that makes sense, because we all need to eat, and right now the price of groceries is too high, the price of gas is too high, the rent is too high. We know why—tariffs, stupid wars, corruption. We’ve got lots to work on.

But there are also moments when need to think about larger questions, and this is clearly one. AI is not something any of us asked for—just about no one wants a data center in their neighborhood, and no one put up their hand to sacrifice their job to some computer bot. It’s been forced on us by some of the richest people on Earth, and it was obnoxious even before it started going on the attack—now, as even its creators say, it’s out of control and offers a very real risk to our health and safety, and maybe even our existence as a species.

So we need to rein it in, with serious government regulation that dramatically slows the pace of development until we can can understand and control it. And that includes making the companies that produce this, and the hedge funds who invest in them, liable for the havoc they create.

But we need to go beyond that. We need to step back and say: What are we doing here, people? Why are we running risks like this? Our civilization, especially in rich countries like this one, is capable of producing the things we need: We’ve never lived longer or better. If we didn’t concentrate wealth in a few hands, if we spread it our more widely, we could provide healthcare and housing for everyone. Natural human intelligence has produced plenty; the natural human sense of justice can help us figure out how to share it in ways that work for all. Things could be… okay.

So why would we run enormous risks—the ones that come with artificial super intelligence, and the ones that come with rapidly warming the planet? These are the dangers that could attack and impoverish us; no rational society would treat them as casually as the Trump administration has done. Instead we should be hard at work insuring against those risks—by, say, building out cheap and clean renewable energy. And by upgrading the education and the skills of our kids, instead of handing them screens and turning them over to AI teachers.

In some cases this would mean “slowing down progress”; in every case it would mean attacking concentrated wealth and power. But is it really progress? Is there any real reason we need to rush pell-mell into this chaotic and dystopian future? We’re told that medical advances await—but we’ve been making steady progress on this front for decades, with lifespans expanding and more and more diseases becoming manageable. (Or at least we were making progress till this administration decided to upend our scientific research institutions). We’re told that if we don’t rush ahead China will—but that seems more like an argument for negotiating with China about cooperative controls, just as we once negotiated with Russia about the control of nuclear weapons. It’s never easy, it’s always messy, and so far it’s been successful.

If this willingness to stick with the world as we’ve known it—a world where human intelligence prevails, and where we keep some ice near the poles—sounds “conservative” then so be it. There are moments when humans need to say, "Enough," and this is one. We are fools to endanger all that our ancestors have built in search of some new thing that will enrich a few. I know that the Trump administration wants to rush forward, that he has called AI fears a “hoax,” the exact same word he’s used about the climate crisis. But Trump and his colleagues are greed-seeking missiles, always looking for some way to grift, whether its from AI and crypto or from oil companies and Middle East princelings.

We are told that our destiny is constantly to rush forward—to head for Mars. But actually, one unique human gift is the ability to decide not to do things we’re capable of doing—to say Mars isn’t as important as getting things right on Earth. In fact, we’ve never had a better chance of getting things right. All of a sudden solar panels are the cheapest way to make power, for instance. It wasn’t AI that did that—it was smart people, at work in universities and companies around the world. They’ve given us a real gift, even if it’s going to cost Exxon some profits.

Humans don’t get many chances to make momentous decisions like this. Usually they get made for us. But across the country people have stood up to the data centers, and that’s given us the possibility for real change. Let’s take it.