I remember the phrase from my boyhood, listening to baseball games on the old wooden radio by my bed. A major hitter would be up and—bang!—he’d connect with the ball in a big-time fashion. The announcer in a rising voice would then say dramatically: “It’s going, going, gone!” It was a phrase connected to success of the first order. It was Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle hitting a homer. It was a winner all the way around the bases.

Today, though no one may say it anymore, somewhere deep inside my mind I can still hear it. But now, at least for me, it’s connected to another kind of hitter entirely and another kind of reality as well. I’m thinking, of course, about the president of these (increasingly dis-)United States of America, Donald J. Trump, and how, these days, his version of a going-going-gone homer is simply the going-going-gone part of it.

But no one reading this piece should be surprised by that. After all, in my own fashion, for the last 24 years here at TomDispatch, I’ve been recording the going-going-gone version of both this country and, as time has gone on, this planet.

This isn’t simply a moment of imperial decline, something all too common in the long story of humanity, but of a marked planetary decline as well.

And of course, I’ve lived through it all as well. I mean, imagine: I was born on July 20, 1944, less than 13 months before World War II ended in all-American success with the ominous use of two atomic bombs to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Going, going, gone!) And I grew up in the 1950s, years when the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had previously been nothing less than the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in World War II and a five-star Army general. And it would be under his presidency that this country would end its military action in Korea with an armistice that left that land split in two. And that unsatisfying conclusion would prove to be but the first of what, over the decades to come, would be an almost endless series of unwinnable wars in countries ranging from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the era of the Global War on Terror, an unnerving percentage of the rest of this planet. (Going, going gone!)

We’re talking about the military that, in those same years, would establish an unparalleled 750 or more military bases across significant parts of planet Earth and would, while it was at it, create what was functionally a global navy and air force.

In those same decades, as literally millions of people died in all-American wars, we would, in response, pour ever more money into the institution that was all too inaptly—or do I mean ineptly?—called the Department of Defense. Of course, the question of whether it should actually have been called the Department of Offense simply never came up. And yet, despite three-quarters of a century of remarkable lack of success in its conflicts, in the years to come, the Pentagon, under Donald J. Trump, is likely to break quite a different kind of record when it comes to success. No, not in fighting wars, but in being funded by the American taxpayer in what, if any sort of perspective were available, would be seen as a staggeringly unbelievable fashion. After all, President Trump is now aiming for a 2026 “defense” budget that, with a rise of 13%, would break the trillion-dollar mark. And mind you, that sum wouldn’t even include the $175 billion he hopes to invest in “securing” our border with Mexico, or the funding for the rest of the national security bureaucracy.

And to set the stage for all of this, he even all too (in)appropriately launched a new American conflict, an air war on Yemen, a country that, I would bet, most Americans didn’t even know existed and certainly couldn’t locate on a global map. And given the American record on such matters since 1945, it was perhaps strangely on target of him recently to suddenly halt that bombing campaign, since you can count on one thing without even having access to the future: There was no way it would have proven successful and victory there would never have been at hand.

And consider it strange as well that, even in the decades of this country’s imperial success, when it helped form and support the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe, when it developed a vast network of military bases and military allies across the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia and beyond, when it faced off against the Soviet Union on this planet (and did indeed, in the end, leave that imperial power in the dust of history), it was still, in war-fighting terms, a military disaster zone. In short, since its victory in World War II soon after my birth, this country has never again come close to winning a war.

And yet, here’s the strange thing, historically speaking: Those years of disastrous wars were also the years of American imperial greatness. Who, today, can even truly remember the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its empire dissolving, while it fell into utter disarray, leaving this country, in imperial terms, standing distinctly alone on planet Earth, not an enemy or even a true opponent in sight? (Communist China was then still a modest power, though on the rise.)

Going Down the Trumpian Toilet

Thirty-four years later, how things have changed! (Yes, given those years, it seems to me that an exclamation point is anything but inappropriate!) And if you want to take in the true nature of that change, you have to look no further than one Donald J. Trump. How extraordinary that he has become the Dwight D. Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy of this strange moment of ours.

I think that someday, looking back, hard as that act may be even to imagine right now, Donald Trump will be seen as a—or perhaps the—symbol of the decline and fall of just about everything. Or looked at another way, what’s left of imperial America appears to be going down Trump’s toilet, while this country itself threatens to come apart at the seams. Meanwhile, America’s first billionaire president, who has surrounded himself with a bevy of other billionaires, continues to have the urge to profit personally from this increasingly strange world of ours. Of course, that should hardly be shocking on a planet where, in 2024, even before his second term in office, the cumulative wealth of billionaires was estimated to have grown by $2 trillion, or $5.7 billion a day, with the creation of an average of four new billionaires a week. And according to Oxfam, “In the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion—or $3.9 billion per day—in 2024, and 74 more people became billionaires.”

And mind you, all of that was true even before (yes, that word should indeed be italicized!) billionaire Donald Trump reentered the Oval Office, while his sons continued to wildly circle the globe trying to make yet more money for themselves and him. And who wouldn’t agree that, in these last months, the second time around, he’s been a distinctly tarrific president? (Don’t you dare disagree or I’ll put a 10%,—“the new zero”—if not a 145% tariff on you personally!)

Oh, and the man who rode into office on a promise to save the American middle class has promisingly staffed his administration with at least 12 other billionaires. And oh (again!), I haven’t even mentioned the richest man on planet Earth yet, have I? Yes, Elon Musk has lent a distinctive hand—and what a hand!—to dismantling significant aspects of the U.S. government (but not, of course, the Pentagon!), throwing tens of thousands of people out of work, while ensuring that parts of the government that actually helped Americans and others on this planet of ours would no longer be functional. No less impressively, he did so at a genuine cost to himself. The fall in value of the stock of his increasingly unpopular car company, Tesla, has been little short of stunning, leaving him with a mere $300 billion or so (no, that is not a misprint!), which represents a loss of about $131 billion so far in 2025 alone.

The President from Hell

But what makes Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s moment and movement so different from any other moment or movement in our history is another reality (and it is a reality) entirely: This isn’t simply a moment of imperial decline, something all too common in the long story of humanity, but of a marked planetary decline as well.

Yes, the Earth itself is, it seems, going down that same imperial toilet. And unlike the decline of great powers, the decline of Planet Earth is likely to be devastating indeed for the rest of humanity. It’s hard even to believe, in fact, that Americans elected (twice, no less!) a man who has insisted that climate change is a “giant hoax” and, once in office, has seemed intently focused on increasing the levels of drilling for and the burning of oil and natural gas, even though it’s hardly news anymore that such acts will, over the years to come, help devastate this already overheating planet of ours—the last 10 years having already been the hottest on record—and everyone on it.

Storms, floods, and fires of a historic—or do I mean post-historic?—sort clearly lie in our future in a fashion that we humans have never experienced before. And it’s perfectly obvious that 78-year-old Donald Trump simply couldn’t give less of a damn. After all, he certainly won’t be here to experience the worst of it. He is, in short, not just a tariffic president but, in some futuristic sense, all too literally the president from hell.

And all of this should have been obvious enough from his first round in the Oval Office, so consider all too many of us Americans, if not us humans, to have some version of a Trumpian-style death wish, even if not for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren. In so many ways, in retrospect, the reelection of Donald Trump seems to represent—explain it as you will—the enactment of a human death wish on a scale almost beyond imagining.

And with that in mind, let me return to the threesome I began this piece with. Those three words may no longer be a baseball line at all—I wouldn’t know since I haven’t listened to a baseball game in years—but they still have a certain grim futuristic significance on our planet. So let me repeat them again as a kind of warning about where, if we’re not far more careful in our political choices, all too much of humanity is heading—thank you, Donald J. Trump!

Going, going, gone!

(Let’s truly hope not!)

As House Republican leaders work to advance a reconciliation bill to the floor, their agenda couldn’t be clearer: stripping health care and food assistance away from millions of people and raising families’ costs, breaking their promises to help people on the margins of the economy — while showering ever larger tax breaks on the wealthiest households.

House Republicans’ extreme SNAP cuts would take some or all food assistance away from millions of low-income people and families who struggle to afford groceries. This will drive up hunger, deepen poverty, and leave more people unable to afford basic needs.

House Republicans are trying to hide much of the impact of the SNAP cuts by slashing federal funding and then passing the buck to states. When a state can’t come up with the money to backfill for the large federal cuts totaling billions nationally, it will have to choose how to cut the number of people getting help or whether to opt out of having a SNAP program entirely. With this scheme, the plan walks away from the 50-year, bipartisan commitment to ensure that poor children get the help they need, whether they live in Alabama, Missouri, or California.

Proponents want to shift blame for the cuts to states, but the blame game won’t matter to children, families, seniors, people with disabilities, veterans, small business owners, and others when they are hungry and can’t afford food. (Republican portrayals of who gets helped by SNAP and Medicaid are selective at best — about 1 in 4 veterans and 1 in 4 small business owners live in a household getting help from SNAP, Medicaid, or CHIP at some point in the year, Census data show.)

This plan is replete with proposals that will add red tape, making things more cumbersome, more bureaucratic, and less user-friendly — and ultimately designed to fail families in ways that will leave people sicker, poorer, and hungrier.

At the same time, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage and become uninsured under the House Republicans’ Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace agenda that deeply cuts Medicaid, erects new barriers to coverage, and allows the enhanced premium tax credits (PTCs) that help low- and middle-income families and small business owners afford health coverage to expire, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. Some Republicans argue they shouldn’t be blamed for the 4 million people projected to lose coverage due to the PTCs’ expiration. That’s frankly absurd: they wrote a bill that extends all of the expiring 2017 tax cuts — and even expands provisions that benefit the wealthiest people in the country — yet chose not to extend the enhanced PTCs for people who need help affording coverage. That’s their agenda and they need to own it.

Like their approach to SNAP, House Republicans seek to obscure the impact of their health care cuts through complicated proposals, like limiting the ways states can fund Medicaid and adding lots of red tape and paperwork that makes it harder for people to get and keep health coverage. But here, too, there’s no hiding the outcome: millions of people, including children, will lose coverage and access to care for life-threatening and chronic illnesses as well as preventive care.

The House Republican plan targets some of its harshest attacks on people who are immigrants and their families. It would take away Medicare and marketplace coverage from certain immigrants, including people granted refugee and asylee status after proving they face persecution in their home countries, victims of trafficking and domestic violence, and people with Temporary Protected Status. The plan also takes away the Child Tax Credit from U.S. citizen children if both parents don’t have a Social Security number (even if one parent is a citizen), and strips access to SNAP benefits from people granted asylum and refugee status and other vulnerable groups who are living and working lawfully in the U.S.

Proponents of these cuts often falsely claim that they are restricting access for people who lack documentation, when the reality is that people without a documented immigration status already do not qualify for these benefits, and the cuts will largely impact lawfully present immigrants and U.S. citizen children in immigrant families.

Despite House Republicans’ rhetoric about supporting the “working class,” the plan targets working people and their families, making it much harder for them to get help weathering life’s ups and downs.

Despite House Republicans’ rhetoric about supporting the “working class,” the plan targets working people and their families, making it much harder for them to get help weathering life’s ups and downs. Workers may need help because their employer lays them off or cuts their hours, or because they get sick or have to miss work to care for a sick loved one, and the House Republican plan takes help away from people in exactly these situations.

And for all of the rhetoric coming out of DOGE about making government work more efficiently, that commitment doesn’t seem to apply to working families who need help. This plan is replete with proposals that will add red tape, making things more cumbersome, more bureaucratic, and less user-friendly — and ultimately designed to fail families in ways that will leave people sicker, poorer, and hungrier.

Moreover, the House Republican plan would deny as many as 20 million children in working families from receiving the full $2,500 Child Tax Credit because their parents — who work important but low-paid jobs — don’t earn enough. The 17 million children who currently don’t get the full $2,000 Child Tax Credit would get nothing from the credit’s $500-per-child increase, even as families earning up to $400,000 would get the full increase. Last year 169 House Republicans voted to help most of the families they are now leaving out.

In contrast to its disdain for people whose budgets are stretched thin every month, the plan showers more tax cuts on the wealthy, extending the highly skewed provisions of the 2017 law and adding permanent expansions for wealthy households. In 2027 it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an annual tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts — the same households who will then bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

This agenda won’t create a future of shared prosperity and economic opportunity, which is what’s required to build a country that’s truly great.

The plan’s tax cuts would cost nearly $4 trillion through 2034 — and over $5 trillion if one sees through its timing gimmicks like turning off tax cuts for middle-class families after four years while making some of its most top-tilted tax cuts — like the cut in the estate tax and the deduction for pass-through income — permanent. Moreover, the House Republicans cut more than $500 billion in clean energy tax credits — which would worsen health outcomes for communities facing high rates of pollution, and the plan’s health cuts would make it harder for them to access health care.

It’s been clear for some time that House Republicans were headed down this harmful path, but to see the contours of this bill emerge is somehow still shocking: that they would hurt so many people who struggle to afford basic needs and whom they have promised to help. And they continue to pursue this agenda at a time when the President’s tariffs, chaotically crafted and applied, have caused increased uncertainty and raised the risk of a recession, higher unemployment, and surging prices.

Whatever Republican policymakers may think, these policies aren’t popular with the public because they aren’t consistent with core American values, which include helping people when they fall on tough times and expecting wealthy people to pay their fair share.

This agenda won’t create a future of shared prosperity and economic opportunity, which is what’s required to build a country that’s truly great. There’s a better path forward, but it requires tearing up this legislation and replacing it with a plan that lowers costs and invests in people and families, while raising the revenues from the wealthy to make those investments and reduce economic risks associated with high debt.

The numbers are clear. Nursing home residents depend on Medicaid. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, fully 63% of nursing home care in the United States is funded by Medicaid. Some states are even more dependent on Medicaid than the national average. For example, in West Virginia fully 77% of nursing home care is funded by Medicaid.

Politico reported on the morning of May 15 that after a marathon markup session lasting 26 hours, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced legislation that “would slash Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.” These cuts would directly impact nursing home residents and their families. The Washington Post reports that:

“Their [nursing home residents] coverage will be at risk,” said Katie Sloan Smith, president and chief executive of LeadingAge, a Washington lobbying association for operators of nonprofit senior-care facilities. “Either the home itself will have to make up for that loss in some way or they will simply have to say, ‘We can no longer support people on Medicaid’ and close those beds.”

While the Medicaid cuts would hurt nursing home patients, they would also severely impact those who receive care at home (often referred to as home and community-based care). According to National Public Radio, Medicaid pays for care at home for roughly 4.5 million Americans.

The Medicaid cuts that passed the Energy and Commerce Committee would devastate America’s family caregivers as Medicaid also funds caregiver respite programs and caregiver training. The cuts would hurt our most vulnerable and their families.

Where are our citizens on the question of Medicaid cuts? The evidence clearly shows that the American people oppose Medicaid cuts. In fact, there is support for more spending on Medicaid. Polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in March of this year found that 42% want to see an increase in Medicaid spending. Just under 3 in 4 (73%) of respondents say that Medicaid is important to their local communities. Democrats (83%), Independents (74%), and Republicans (61%) all see Medicaid as very important to their local community.

Late Thursday May 15, the fate of the measure that passed the Energy and Commerce Committee was in doubt as the legislation moves to a vote in the House of Representatives. There will no doubt be more twists and turns before the measure heads to the Senate. Every moment that activists can delay the passage of these Medicaid cuts is more time to mount an opposition. Republicans might not want to admit it, but support for Medicaid is strong and deep.

This is the greatest threat to Medicaid since its creation in 1965. The GOP legislation is a dagger pointed directly at our most vulnerable. Many of those who would be impacted by Medicaid cuts are not able to raise their voices. Therefore, it up to those of us who can, to raise our voices and tell our elected representatives to reject these cruel proposals that would devastate our families, friends, and neighbors. The stakes in the debate over Medicaid are far too high for any of us to stay silent.

Former presidential adviser-cum-rightwing podcaster Steve Bannon often mentions that discerning the truth of President Donald Trump's policy goals entails focusing on the signal and not the noise.

But doing so has been next to impossible when trying to figure out the rationale behind the administration's moves in agriculture, which since January have generated widespread confusion and uncertainty.

Specifically, while Trump publicly proclaims that he stands with farmers, his tariff war with China stands to rob producers of their markets. Since Trump's last term, China has already been looking to countries like Brazil for soybeans as the U.S. has proven an unreliable partner. Adding insult to injury, unexpectedly cancelling government contracts with thousands around the country early in his term placed undue stress on farmers who already have to contend with what extreme weather events throw their way.

Taken together, the bailouts along with the freshly inked U.K.-U.S. trade deal and easing of tariffs on China illustrate how the Trump administration prioritizes export agriculture as the driving force of our country's farm system.

Now, with the details of the U.K.-U.S. trade deal becoming known, the signal—that is, the truth—of the Trump administration's vision for agriculture is coming into view. To the point, not unlike how U.S. agriculture has been directed for the past few decades, it is becoming clear that this administration will prioritize exports. The problem with this vision is that, even if it generates short-term profits, it endangers our long-term national food security by dangerously further internationalizing our agricultural system.

Consider the praise that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins heaped on the U.K.-U.S. deal that was made on May 8, singling out its supposed gains for farmers.

Following the announcement, the secretary announced a tour that she will take through the United Kingdom to tout the agreement. While details are still being hashed out, we are told of a promised $5 billion in market access for beef and ethanol.

Contrast that clear messaging—the signal—with how government contracts with farmers were frozen and made subject to administrative review, and the funding for local food programs was slashed.

The contracts were connected with the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included resources for initiatives like those dealing with soil and water conservation, and supporting local food processing. Additionally, programs that connected local producers with schools and food banks, for example, the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, had their funding cut in the amount of about $1 billion.

Since February, some of the contracts have been unfrozen if they aligned with the administration's political objectives (i.e. not promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI). Despite court orders ruling that all contracts must be honored, if and when the funds will be distributed, remains to be seen.

Overall, the noise surrounding the unfolding contract drama signals to farmers who want to diversify their operations and serve local markets that they should second guess looking to the government for help.

At the same time, Trump has not abandoned all producers.

In fact, amid the commotion about freezing some contracts, Secretary Rollins ok'd billions in direct payments, or bailouts, for growers of commodity crops such as corn. Thanks to such payments and not any improvements to markets, it is expected that farmers will see their incomes increase when comparing this year with the last.

Taken together, the bailouts along with the freshly inked U.K.-U.S. trade deal and easing of tariffs on China illustrate how the Trump administration prioritizes export agriculture as the driving force of our country's farm system.

Such dynamics smack of contradiction, as Trump appears eager to send our food abroad while he's willing to do whatever to bring manufacturing back to America's shores in the name of strengthening the national economy.

Still, the deeper problem is with how export promotion makes our food system insecure, subjecting farmers to international political upheavals and economic disruption.

Remember the 1970s, when a grain production crisis prompted sudden demand in the Soviet Union. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to "plant fence row to fence row" and "get big or get out" to profit from the newfound export opportunity.

The promise of international markets came—and went. President Jimmy Carter's embargo of grain exports to the Soviet Union in 1980 for that country's invasion of Afghanistan came as a body blow to the farmers who made commodity exports central to their financial plans. Farmers then struggled to pay off the debt for the land and machinery that they acquired just a few years before, which, with rising gas prices, contributed to the 1980s farm crisis. Parallels abound now, including the initial effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine increasing fertilizer and gasoline costs, and most recently, the ongoing dynamics of Trump's trade war with China.

Concerning the U.K.-U.S. deal, U.K. imports of ethanol may seem a boon for corn growers. But without future terms of the deal becoming clear, it is unclear if this is simply a continuation of what the British already import. Similarly, the significance of the slated $250 million in purchases of beef products is of questionable importance, as last year the U.S. exported $1.6 billion to China. Regardless of the recent 90 day truce in the China-U.S. trade dispute, the remaining 30% tariff would still hurt American farmers. The Trump administration's export push will find farmers without markets and in need of more bailouts.

Besides subjecting U.S. farmers' livelihoods to international uncertainty, the other concern is the lack of concern for the next generation of food producers. Year after year, the country's farmers are getting older, with no one stepping up to replace them. According to the 2022 Agricultural Census, the average farmer is over 58 years old, up over half a year from when the last census was conducted in 2017. During that same time, we lost nearly 150,000 operations. Since 2012, over 200,000 farmers have left the industry, representing a 10% decline. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, upwards of 70% of farmland is expected to change hands over the next 20 years.

Export promotion serves a temporary fix, but places farmers at the whims of international politics. Moreover, it threatens our country's already economically pressed farmers, making our country even more dependent on a dwindling number of people for our food, as well as imports. In fact, since 2004, while exports have nearly doubled from $50 billion to $200, our food imports have increased slightly more so.

Trump's efforts to undo the previous administration's policies set up our food system for disruption and crisis, subjecting farmers to the uncertainties of international markets and developments elsewhere. If there is a signal with the noise that Trump is making with our food system, then this is it—farmers better get ready for a volatile next few years and more bailouts, as operations will continue to go under. Overall, Trump's nationalist rhetoric amounts to little, as our food system becomes more global, increasingly made vulnerable to dynamics outside our control.

I have taught AP U.S. history for years, as well as Government and World History courses. I have written an original curriculum for Honors Economics. I coached successful Public Forum and Policy debate teams for five years. In addition to my professional experience, I am a close reader of both historical scholarship and current events. The conclusions that follow are drawn from a systematic comparison of this year’s immigration and due process developments with established patterns in the historical record.

The federal government is executing a coordinated legal and administrative campaign aimed at the identification, arrest, and removal of millions of undocumented immigrants. These efforts rely on expanded authority for military and federal agencies, the criminalization of municipal noncooperation, and the systematic dismantling of legal protections previously afforded to vulnerable populations. Though presented as standard immigration enforcement, the structure and language of these measures reflect a state-directed attempt to displace a racially and ethnically defined group. The legal apparatus includes provisions for indefinite detention, the arrest of elected officials, and the use of private contractors to operate beyond traditional channels of accountability.

These policies are not theoretical. They are codified in executive orders, agency directives, and prosecutorial actions. The stated goal exceeds the undocumented population, and enforcement does not rely on individualized findings of legal status. It is categorical. The administration describes its targets as “invaders” and “vermin” and frames sanctuary jurisdictions as criminal conspiracies. These terms do not function as rhetoric. They define policy. Laws criminalizing refusal to comply with deportation efforts are designed to eliminate legal and institutional resistance.

The most effective deterrent to escalation remains noncompliance at every level of implementation.

What follows is a chronology of recent actions taken or proposed during the second Trump administration, aligned with legal precedents from early Nazi Germany. These are not metaphors. Each section pairs language from contemporary United States policy with that of the 1930s German state, using identical structure and phrasing where historically appropriate. The purpose is to allow for clear legal comparison of governance models used to execute racialized mass removal.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14159 titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The order suspended habeas corpus protections for undocumented immigrants, expanded federal authority over sanctuary jurisdictions, and authorized indefinite detention and mass deputization of local police under 287(g) agreements.

On February 28, 1933, Adolf Hitler enacted the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. The decree suspended habeas corpus, granted the central government power over state authorities, and permitted indefinite detention and mass deputization of local police to suppress declared enemies of the state.

In April 2025, the Trump administration began removing civil servants based on prior involvement in diversity or civil rights programs. A directive issued April 2 targeted officials for dismissal or reassignment solely for ideological nonconformity.

On April 7, 1933, Hitler’s regime enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. This measure removed Jews and political opponents from public office based on ancestry or beliefs and mandated reassignment or termination for ideological deviation.

In May 2025, the Department of Justice ordered the identification of state and local officials who refused to assist with federal immigration enforcement. These officials were targeted for prosecution under statutes related to obstruction and harboring.

In March 1933, the Nazi regime began detaining opposition party members and regional officials who resisted centralized directives. Local leaders were prosecuted or removed for obstructing enforcement of national laws.

In February 2025, the Trump administration revoked federal support for PBS and NPR and initiated reviews of media funding for ideological violations. The stated aim was to eliminate sources of disinformation and enforce loyalty to national priorities.

In March 1933, the Nazi government enacted the Editors Law, revoked press credentials from noncompliant outlets, and placed all broadcast content under state control. The purpose was to remove disloyal voices and ensure total ideological conformity.

In May 2025, a Wisconsin judge was arrested for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant. Federal officials warned that similar acts of judicial noncooperation could be prosecuted as subversion.

In July 1933, the Nazi regime dismissed judges deemed politically unreliable and established special courts. Judges who issued rulings contrary to regime policy were disciplined or removed.

In April 2025, Trump officials proposed turning military bases into detention centers for families without legal review. These facilities would be operated by private contractors under emergency protocols.

In June 1933, Nazi authorities converted military and industrial sites into concentration camps. The camps detained prisoners without court oversight and were run by SS forces under emergency powers.

In May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was considering the arrest of Democratic members of Congress who protested at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. They were accused of obstructing federal officers and interfering with detention protocols.

In March 1933, the Nazi regime arrested parliamentary members and accused them of obstructing national authority. Resistance to regime policy was criminalized as a threat to public order.

Trump has constantly proposed legislation to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented parents. His proposals aim to redefine legal membership in the national community.

In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the Reich Citizenship Law. The law stripped Jews of citizenship and redefined the legal criteria for national belonging.

The current phase of the Trump administration’s immigration policy reflects an early stage rather than a peak of repression. The legal and operational structure for targeted mass removal is being assembled through executive orders, bureaucratic purges, and prosecutorial test cases that redefine the limits of federal authority.

The scale of proposed removals exceeds historical precedent but has not yet reached full execution. Institutional resistance is inconsistent but has not been eliminated. Local and state officials retain procedural leverage if they choose to apply it. The most effective deterrent to escalation remains noncompliance at every level of implementation.

The policy direction is explicit. Continued repression is not a possibility but a stated intention. The presence of Latino Americans in federal agencies and military institutions has not prevented policy targeting based on national origin or perceived foreignness. Participation does not provide exemption from removal. The structural conditions that have historically preceded ethnic cleansing are now observable. The determining factor will be whether enough people act before enforcement becomes normalized.

Earlier this year, the University of York released a sobering report: 90% of secondary school teachers in the U.K. said their male students are being heavily influenced by online misogynistic figures—often quoting or defending toxic masculine personalities in classes. Girls, meanwhile, are withdrawing from discussions, leaving classrooms quietly divided along gender lines.

This is not just a school issue; it's a society-wide crisis forming in real time, and it's happening worldwide. Boys are learning that dominance is power and empathy is weakness, lessons they carry with them far beyond the walls of a classroom. Online misogyny thrives not only because of those who perpetrate it but also due to the silence of many men who choose not to confront it. This passive complicity allows harmful narratives to flourish, shaping a digital culture where toxic masculinity is normalized and women's voices are marginalized.

There is a better way forward. As a human rights advocate with extensive experience in promoting positive masculinity at RWAMREC, Rwanda Men's Resource Center, I have witnessed firsthand how transformative male engagement approaches can challenge gender-based violence and reshape harmful cultural narratives, both online and in the real world. But, despite their demonstrated successes, these programs are vastly underutilized. Many campaigns focus exclusively on empowering women to protect themselves, rather than mobilizing men to take collective responsibility for change. To truly create lasting change and address online misogyny, we must invest in programs that equip men with the tools and confidence to act as allies.

Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.

Content creators promoting hypermasculine personas characterized by control, dominance, and anti-woman rhetoric have amassed audiences in the tens of millions across platforms like X, TikTok, and YouTube. Such creators often blend self-improvement themes with misogynistic and conspiratorial messaging, making their content more appealing and harder to critique. A U.K.-based survey of secondary school teachers revealed that 90% observed male students mimicking or defending online personalities who espouse these hypermasculine ideologies, demonstrating their real-world influence in shaping gender attitudes among youth. Too many boys view this kind of hateful content with complacency, fostering environments where such attitudes are normalized. But a recent study presented compelling evidence supporting the effectiveness of male bystander intervention in reducing sexist behavior. The research found that when male bystanders actively confronted instances of gender prejudice, female victims experienced increased feelings of empowerment and a greater willingness to confront the perpetrator themselves.

By encouraging men to reflect on their behaviors and understand the impact of their words, the toxic patterns that often go unchecked in digital spaces can be dismantled. Educational campaigns that include men in honest conversations about gender equality have led to more respectful engagement on social media, gaming platforms, and online forums. Participants are more likely to recognize misogynistic content, challenge harmful narratives, and avoid contributing to hostile online environments. These efforts not only reduce the prevalence of online abuse but also shift cultural norms around masculinity, making empathy and accountability part of the standard.

Of course not all boys and men endorse or participate in misogynistic behavior online, and many already stand as strong allies in promoting gender equality. However, the pervasive nature of online misogyny calls for a collective response. While male engagement is essential, it is not enough on its own. Tech companies also play a critical role, as their platforms often become spaces where misogynistic content thrives. These companies must take responsibility by implementing robust policies, monitoring harmful behavior, and holding users accountable. Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.

The fight against misogyny requires active engagement from all corners of society, including those who have the privilege and responsibility to challenge these harmful ideologies. By standing up and speaking out, men can help disrupt the cycle and create a safer, more inclusive online environment for everyone. We need increased funding for initiatives that engage men in preventing online misogyny. We also need media literacy education in schools that arm young people with tools to recognize and challenge harmful online behaviors. Men's active involvement in challenging misogyny is more than supportive, it's revolutionary. When boys and men confront sexist remarks, push back against harmful gender stereotypes, or simply opt out of disrespectful conversations, they break the cycle that normalizes misogyny in everyday life.

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted out of committee early Wednesday morning legislation that would strip as many as 14 million Americans of their Medicaid-based healthcare, including millions of seniors in nursing homes and children living in poverty.

Ironically, red states will be hit harder by this than blue states, as they’re generally less capable of making up the loss of federal funds (Medicaid is administered at the state level with block grants from the feds).

Which provokes some serious head-scratching among the pundit class: Why would Republicans kneecap their own people? Do they really think they can get away with it, just to fund tax breaks for Elon, Mark, Jeff, and Donald? And, for that matter, why is it that red states are so vulnerable to this GOP perfidy?

Republicans are more than willing to tolerate massive, desperate levels of human suffering to make sure there’s a steady supply of cheap labor. In fact, they intentionally run their states that way to produce those results.

One of the enduring mysteries of America is why the citizens of red states are generally poorer, less educated, and sicker than the citizens of blue states. To that question, I step up as your hierophant with an answer to this deep mystery that you may not have previously considered.

First, that generalization is broadly true:

• Blue states account for about 71% of America’s GDP, whereas red states only produce 29% of our income and wealth.
• The median family income in blue states is $74,243. In red states it’s $63,553. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.
• Counties that voted for former President Joe Biden in 2020 are more diverse, being 35% nonwhite compared to 16% nonwhite populations in counties that voted for President Donald Trump.
• Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are better educated, with 36% of their population having some college education compared to Trump’s counties at 25%.
• Residents of blue states live 2.2 years longer, on average, than residents of red states.

And, second, it’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

• Spousal abuse
• Obesity
• Smoking
• Teen pregnancy
• Sexually transmitted diseases
• Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
• Bankruptcies and poverty
• Homicide and suicide
• Infant mortality
• Maternal mortality
• Forcible rape
• Robbery and aggravated assault
• Dropouts from high school
• Divorce
• Contaminated air and water
• Opiate addiction and deaths
• Unskilled workers
• Parasitic infections
• Income and wealth inequality
• Covid-19 deaths and unvaccinated people
• Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
• People on welfare
• Child poverty
• Homelessness
• Spousal murder
• Unemployment
• Deaths from auto accidents
• People living on disability
• Gun deaths

But are all these things happening because Republicans simply hate their citizens and explicitly want high levels of poverty, ignorance, death, and disease?

Turns out there’s a much simpler answer.

The problem for red states is that Republicans worship cheap labor, because it drives up profits for the fat cats who own American businesses—and having a steady and reliable supply of cheap labor to maintain high profits requires widespread poverty, ignorance, death, and disease.

That poverty, of course, brings along with it the long list of social ills above, but Republicans are more than willing to tolerate massive, desperate levels of human suffering to make sure there’s a steady supply of cheap labor. In fact, they intentionally run their states that way to produce those results.

If you have any doubts about this, if that sounds like hyperbole, simply look at the policies the GOP has promoted for the past century:

• Republicans hate unions, because unions raise wages and benefits for workers, shifting them from poverty into the middle class. Once thus empowered, those uppity middle-class people then start to demand “unreasonable” things like overtime pay (Project 2025 would functionally end it), healthcare, paid vacations, paid sick leave, and paid family leave.
• Republicans hate Social Security and have worked to gut, privatize, or outright end it ever since FDR signed it into law in 1935. They do this because elderly workers in poverty are a great source of compliant, cheap labor. Former President Ronald Reagan’s changes in Social Security benefits have led to millions of Boomers having to take gigs as greeters, waiters, etc., for low wages; prior to Reagan’s changes in the Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) and his raising the retirement age to 67, you could safely retire on Social Security in most parts of America at 65. Now, Republicans want to raise that age to 69 or 70.
• Republicans hate universal or inexpensive healthcare (and real Medicare for the elderly) because having massive medical debt provides a large pool of desperate workers willing to work crappy jobs for pathetic wages to pay it off. It’s why the 10 states that refuse to expand Medicaid for low-income workers are all Republican-controlled. Medical debt is a non-issue in every other developed country in the world, but here in America 79 million people are struggling to pay off doctors’ or hospital bills (7 million of those debtors are elderly, many the victims of the Medicare Advantage scam).
• Republicans hate the minimum wage because it cuts into profits. That’s why the minimum wage in blue states can be more than twice that of red states (Washington State is $17 per hour versus Texas’ $7.25 per hour). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.
• Republicans hate empowered women because forced pregnancies create more potential workers and unwanted children exacerbate poverty. Thus their 50+ years of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and their embrace of abortion bans.
• Republicans promote hatred of racial, religious, and gender minorities because when Americans are at each other’s throats they’re not organizing to throw off the GOP-corporate yoke. It’s hard to remember that the billionaires have stolen fully $50 trillion from the middle class over the past 44 years of the Reagan Revolution when you’re constantly distracted with hysteria about Black Haitians, Brown Mexicans, and trans students who just want to use the damn bathroom.
• Republicans hate education because it’s the main tool for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thus demand higher wages and better benefits. Before the Reagan Revolution, every American who wanted to and could pass the entrance exams could go to college; many universities (like the entire University of California system) were free, and you could pay your tuition at most other colleges like I did in the 1960s working weekends as a dishwasher at Bob’s Big Boy in East Lansing, Michigan and pumping gas at the Esso station across the street. This is also why so many red states are gutting their public education systems with private school vouchers. Less education, more poverty; more poverty, more cheap labor.
• Republicans hate atheism and embrace a neofascist form of Protestant Christianity and a bizarre, right-wing version of Catholicism that goes by a Latin name because both are hierarchical and male-dominated, just like corporate culture. It’s why the Confederacy was explicitly Christian. “Don’t worry about how much you’re paid, boy, or bother organizing into a union; just keep picking that cotton and you’ll get your reward in heaven when you die.” After all, according to the Bible your fate was preordained “before the foundation of the world,” as was that of your boss, who must have been selected for particular grace by God or he wouldn’t be so rich.
• Republicans hate food stamps, housing supports, aid to women and dependent children, and every other form of what they call “welfare” because these programs slightly reduce the desperation of people who might otherwise be easily forced to work for a pittance.
• Republicans hate environmental protections because they cut into profits; who cares if the lack of them creates things like the “Cancer Alley”—which hits children particularly hard—that runs through Texas and Louisiana?
• Republicans hate unemployment insurance because it reduces the privation people can experience when they lose a job. It’s why all the blue states offer at least 26 weeks of benefits, but red states often radically reduce that (Florida, North Carolina, Kentucky; 12 weeks; Alabama: 14 weeks; Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri: 16 weeks).

So, the next time somebody asks why Republican policies so often hurt their own people, just tell them, “It’s all because of the cheap-labor Republicans and their loyalty to their greedy billionaire owners.”

In a recently conducted YouGov survey, designed by the Center for Working Class Politics and the Labor Institute, 63% of 2024 voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin said they supported “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of a felony.”

Supporters surprisingly included 36% of those who voted for U.S. President Donald Trump last year.

That wording was taken directly from the American National Election Studies survey (ANES) of 28,311 respondents between 1996 and 2020. In my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I used the ANES survey to zero in on white working-class voters’ opinions across the country. The results were startling:

In 2016, only 32% supported granting legal status to undocumented (“illegal”) residents. By 2020, support had jumped to 62%.

We expected that voters of all shades and persuasions may have turned against immigrants after Trump highlighted the issue in his three campaigns, focusing attention (with the often-relentless help of Fox News) on a number of horrific but rare violent crimes apparently committed by the undocumented. He threatened the mass deportation of undocumented residents in 2016 and 2020 and then began a campaign of highly visible deportations after winning the presidency in 2024. But as the chart below shows voters in key swing states, all of which voted for Trump, still supported legalization, as of April 2025. (3,000 voters were surveyed.)

Here are the results broken down by the 2024 presidential vote in the same four states.

By party identification:

By ideology:

By class:

And by ethnicity:

The survey also shows that support for legalization is highest among younger voters: 76% of those 30 years of age and younger support legalization.

But isn’t immigration the big right-wing issue?

There is a big difference between controlling immigration at the border and criminalizing hard-working undocumented residents. You can be for secure borders and restrained immigration while also supporting legalization of the 11 million undocumented workers now living in the shadows.

Our analysis shows that a majority of voters are compassionate toward immigrants and understand that having 11 million people living and working without legal protections is not good for them or for working people in general.

Undocumented workers find it very difficult to exercise their rights. They can be forced to work for lower wages in poor conditions and have no easy recourse to complain about it without fear of being reported by their employers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Those we surveyed clearly understand that this places downward pressure on wages in many occupational categories, hurting American workers as well as immigrants.

Arguing that undocumented workers do jobs that U.S. citizens no longer want to do completely misunderstands the labor market. If wages are pushed up, instead of down, good-paying jobs would be filled both by U.S. citizens as well as legalized immigrants.

So why aren’t the Democrats on it?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. But I suspect that the Democrats have drifted so far away from the working class that they don’t understand that legalization of undocumented workers is a working-class issue. I don’t know who does their polling, but I would bet they are not asking the kind of questions we are asking. They have long ago stopped trying to understand the needs and interests of working people.

For whatever reasons, the Democrats are letting Trump stomp all over undocumented workers. Yes, there is concern about specific immigrants who have been illegally detained and deported. Yes, there is mumbling about providing citizenship for Dreamers—those born here with undocumented parents. But there is radio silence about hard-working undocumented workers receiving legal status. This is a fight the Dems are choosing to avoid.

Trump’s weaponization of the immigration issue might have Democratic politicians on the defensive, but there might be another reason they’re choosing not to engage. The group that most wants immigrants to stay in the shadows are those who profit from low-wage labor.

There is a vast ecosystem of sub-contractors and temp agencies that supply undocumented workers for warehouse operations like Amazon’s and food-processing plants, like those of JBS and Tyson. Tens of billions of dollars in extra profits are made off the backs of these workers, few of whom have any way to exercise normal employee rights, much less fight to unionize. They can and are being exploited.

The employers who have their hooks into these undocumented workers also have their hooks into both political parties. They are not keen on uplifting their lowest-paid employees or having those who receive their political donations fighting for their rights.

The travesty of the two political parties not fighting the rights of these working people, even with strong polling supporting such a fight, is just one more reason why we need a new political entity, one that focuses on the needs and interests of all working people.

The billionaires have two parties: We need one of our own!

In these first 100-plus days of the nation’s 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes—poof!—offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration.

To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Dismantling the Institutions

By the middle of March, the new administration had already eliminated dozens of departments and offices, as well as thousands of staff positions, with the supposed goal of “government efficiency.” Buyouts, layoffs, reassignments, and a flurry of resignations by those who preferred not to continue working under the new conditions all meant the elimination of tens of thousands of government workers—more than 121,000, in fact, across 30 agencies. The affected agencies included the Department of Energy, Veterans Affairs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as multiple offices within Health and Human Services, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Education lost nearly half its staff. And then there was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). By the end of March, the administration had closed its offices and reduced its staff from approximately 10,000 personnel to 15.

The gutting of such offices and their employees is—I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn—expected to cripple significant government services. At the Department of Education, for example, billions of dollars of institutional aid as well as student loans will be affected. Cuts at the Office of Veterans Affairs, which faced one of the largest staff reductions, are predicted to deprive veterans and their families of healthcare services. USAID’s end will cut programs that addressed poverty, food insecurity, drug trafficking, and human trafficking globally. At the Department of Health and Human Services, the availability of vaccines, the tracking of infectious diseases, and all too much more are threatened and could, according to the executive director of the American Public Health Association, “totally destroy the infrastructure of the nation’s public health system.”

But, as novelist Kundera reminds us, the toll won’t just be to government officials and the positions they’re leaving in the dust of history. The cuts also include a full-scale attack on the past.

Records Gone Missing

As part and parcel of this bureaucratic house-clearing, an unprecedented attack on the records of government agencies has been taking place. Basic facts and figures, until recently found on government websites, are now gone. As I wandered the Internet researching this article, such websites repeatedly sent back this bland but grim message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”

Many of the deletions of facts and figures have been carried out in the name of the aggressive anti-DEI stance of this administration. As you’ll undoubtedly recall, in the first days of his second term in office, Donald Trump declared DEI programs to be “illegal” and ordered the elimination of all DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) “policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” A Pentagon spokesperson then tried to explain such acts this way: “History is not DEI.”

The assault on the facts and figures of the past includes an adamant refusal to keep records for the future.

And indeed, at the Pentagon’s website, at least 26,000 portraits, ranging from a World War II Medal of Honor recipient to the first women to graduate from Marine infantry training, were scheduled for removal in the name of the administration’s anti-DEI agenda. In addition, articles were deleted from the site, including a story on baseball great Jackie Robinson, who had served in World War II, as well as mentions of women and minorities. On the website of Arlington National Cemetery, information about Blacks, Hispanics, and women went missing as well. At the Smithsonian Institution, where Vice President JD Vance was put in charge of the world’s largest museum enterprise, consisting of 21 separate museums and the National Zoo, the mandate similarly became to “remove improper ideology” from those museums, as well as from the education and research centers that its portfolio includes.

Following a storm of protest, some efforts at restoration have occurred, including the material on Jackie Robinson, The Washington Post reports that “the categories ‘African American History,’ ‘Hispanic American History,’ and ‘Women’s History’ no longer appear prominently.” Yet some information and artifacts, officials predict, have been lost forever.

The attack on history is perhaps most strikingly apparent in the disruption of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the institution whose mission is precisely to preserve government records. As The Associated Press summed it up, “As the nation’s recordkeeper, the Archives tells the story of America—its founding, breakdowns, mistakes, and triumphs.” The attack on NARA has come in the form of staff reductions, including the firing of the Archivist of the United States and the departure, owing to firings, buyouts, or resignations, of half of that office’s staff. (Remember, NARA was central to the federal criminal case brought against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, a case which was eventually dismissed.) Notably, the Department of Justice reportedly removed a database which held the details surrounding the charges and convictions that stemmed from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

At USAID, an agency founded more than 60 years ago and now utterly eviscerated, the destruction of past records has been a top-line item. As ProPublica first reported, and other news sources later detailed, employees at USAID were ordered to destroy classified and personnel records. “Shred as many documents first,” the order read, “and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” Meanwhile, massive layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are expected to drastically curtail the access of Americans to public records. At the CDC, cuts have included gutting the public records staff (though HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has claimed that he plans to reverse that).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the assault on the facts and figures of the past includes an adamant refusal to keep records for the future, a tendency that also marked the first Trump administration and has already proved striking in the first 100 days of his second term.

The Signalgate scandal is a case in point. In the group chat held by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz on the Signal app, instead of a designated classified communications channel, discussing an imminent attack on Yemen, national security officials communicated classified information outside of approved channels. In addition to violating norms and laws governing communications involving classified information, the fact that the app was set to auto-delete ignored the law that mandates the preservation of official records.

Nor was Signalgate a one-off. Trump administration officials have reportedly taken to using Gmail, while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been relying on Google Docs for the drafting of government documents, in each case attempting to bypass laws regulating the archiving of public records by potentially “failing to preserve all iterations of its drafts as well as comments left on shared documents.”

Of course, the president’s aversion to creating records in the first place long predates the present moment. During his first term, for example, he had a tendency to rip up documents as he saw fit. “He didn’t want a record of anything,” a senior official told The Washington Post. Notably, he refused to have notes taken at several meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, after one encounter with the Russian president at a Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, he confiscated the interpreter’s notes.

Evading the Law

In such an ongoing obliteration of the records of government activities, the violations that have already taken place have essentially rendered the law invisible. The Federal Records Act, as Lawfare reminds us, requires any federal agency to ”make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency.” And when it comes to presidential records, the Presidential Records Act categorizes them as the property of the United States and requires the president to take “all such steps as may be necessary” to preserve those records.

There is, however, a giant carve-out to that requirement. During his tenure in office, the president can seek to withhold certain records on the grounds that the documents have ceased to have “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.” In order to make such a decision, however, the president must first consult with the national archivist, a position that at present belongs to the now four-hatted Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is currently the acting head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and USAID, as well as the National Archives. It’s worth noting that there is no enforcement mechanism in place to address a decision to dispose of documents, or to challenge the legality—or even the wisdom—of such a decision. The law, as one scholar argues, remains essentially “toothless.”

Why History Matters

Historians like me are particularly sensitive to the destruction of government records. Archival materials are our bread and butter. Who knows what new information we might find and what new insights we might gain from a fresh look at the letters of John Adams on the eve of the outbreak of the American Revolution or the records of the dissenters in George W. Bush’s administration in the run-up to the War in Iraq? With the new insights that documents and records provide can come new understandings of who we are as a country, what ills our leaders have (or haven’t) addressed, what tragedies might (or might not) have been avoided, what successes might (or might not) have been more likely to come about. In sum, the records of the past hold innumerable lessons that could guide us into a more sustainable and just future.

That documentary record helps—or at least until this fragile moment, helped—us understand the pathways that have brought us here in both moments of glory and times of trouble. The record feeds us, inspires us, and allows us to feed and inspire others. It’s through the telling of history that we have come to understand our collective selves as a nation, our individual selves as actors, and our leaders’ decisions about the future.

Expunging history was an early tactic of the Nazis, who sought to turn the clock back to a time before the French Revolution and its values altered the course of history.

All that is, of course, now changing and the spell cast by the administration’s ongoing destruction of those records, the emptying or altering of the nation’s cache of documents, has been enhanced by another spell—that of suspicion over the contents of what documents remain, based on accusations that the record itself is partisan and tainted, and so deserving of eradication.

For historians and the public we serve, when record-keeping is marred or even annihilated by a political agenda, as is happening today, such acts can carry special interest for scholars of the past. After all, purposeful deletions from and false additions to the historical record offer a truly grim possibility: the creation of what could pass for a new history of this country. As of now, the Trump administration is functionally acting to rewrite the prevailing narratives of our past—a past of progress toward equal rights, fact-based education, and lessons learned from mistakes and achievements. In sum, to alter or erase the historical record amounts to erasing our knowledge of ourselves.

David Corn, in his newsletter Our Land, recently posted a piece entitled “Trump’s War on History.” In it, he quotes George Orwell from his classic dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As Corn points out all too ominously, expunging history was an early tactic of the Nazis, who sought to turn the clock back to a time before the French Revolution and its values altered the course of history. As Corn puts it, for the Nazis, “the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed.”

For Orwell, as for Kundera, owning history with a firm grip is a power of immense consequence, never to be lightly dismissed. Memory and the records that sustain knowledge of the past are essential to humankind’s struggle against the worst sort of naked power grabs, never more so than now.

The top tax rate wealthy Americans pay on their investment gains today runs barely half the top rate the rest of us pay on our wages. But that only begins to tell the story of how lightly taxed our richest have become compared to the rest of us.

On the surface, the nominal tax rate on long-term capital gains from investments seems somewhat progressive, even given the reality that this rate sits lower than the tax rate on ordinary income. Single taxpayers with $48,350 or less in taxable income face a zero capital gains tax rate. Taxpayers with over $533,400 in taxable income, meanwhile, face a 23.8% tax on their capital gains, a rate that includes a 3.8% net investment income tax..

But these numbers shroud the real picture. In reality, we tax the ultra-rich on their investment gains less, not more. The rates we see on paper only apply to gains taxpayers register in the year they sell their investments. But we get a totally different story when we calculate the effective annual tax rate for long-held investments, especially for America’s wealthiest who sit in that nominal 23.8% bracket.

Buffett and Bezos may be poster children for reforming our absurdly regressive capital gains tax policy. But the problem remains wider than a handful of billionaires who founded wildly successful businesses.

For members of America’s top echelon—the wealthiest 2% or so of American households—the effective annual tax rate on capital gains income, the rate that really matters in measuring the impact a tax has on wealth accumulation, actually rates as sharply regressive.

That sound complicated? Let’s just do the simple math.

The federal tax on capital gains doesn’t apply until the investment giving rise to those gains gets sold, be that sale comes two years after purchase or 20. During the time a wealthy American holds an asset, the untaxed gains compound, free of tax. In other words, as the growth in the investment’s value increases, the effective annual rate of taxation when the investment finally gets sold decreases.

The graphic below shows how the effective annual tax rate on investment gains—all taxed nominally at 23.8%—varies dramatically with the rate of the gain and how long the taxpayer hangs on to the asset.

If an investor sells an asset that has averaged an annual growth of 5% after five years, the one-time tax of 23.8% on the total gain translates to an effective annual tax rate of 22.1%. In effect, paying tax at a 22.1% rate each year on investment gains that accrue at a 5% rate would leave the investor with about the same sum after five years as only paying a tax—of 23.8%—upon the investment’s sale.

In that sale situation, the tax-free compounding of gains over the five years causes a modest reduction in the effective annual tax rate, less than two percentage points. The 22.1% effective rate reduces the 5% pre-tax growth rate of the asset to a 3.9% rate after tax.

Let’s now compare that situation to an investment that grows at an average annual rate of 25% before its sale 40 years later. In this scenario, the tax-free compounding significantly reduces the effective annual tax rate to a meager 3.39%. That translates to a barely noticeable reduction in that 25% annual pre-tax rate of growth to 24.15% after tax.

Put simply, in our current tax system, the more profitable an investment proves to be, the lower the effective tax on the gains that investment generates. You could not design a more regressive tax system.

Who benefits from our regressive tax system for capital gains? We hear a lot from our politicians about some of those folks, the ones they want us to focus on.

Think of someone who starts a small business—with a modest investment of, say $100,000—that over three decades grows into a not-so-small business worth $25 million. Our culture celebrates small-business success stories like that, and political leaders in both parties seek to protect the owners of these businesses at tax time. Why punish, these lawmakers ask, small business people who started from humble beginnings and sacrificed weekends and vacations to build up their enterprises?

But do we get sound policy when we base our tax rates on high incomes on the assumption that certain high-earners have sacrificed nobly for their earnings? Think of a highly specialized surgeon who made huge personal sacrifices to develop the skills she now uses to save the lives of her patients. Should the annual income tax rate she pays on her wages be 10 times the effective annual income tax rate on the gain that the founder of a telephone solicitation call center realizes when he sells the business after 30 years?

We hear similar policy justifications for the ultra-light taxation of the gain realized upon the sale of a family’s farmland. But those who push these justifications rarely point out that the gain has little to do with the family’s decades of farming and far more to do with the land either sitting atop a recently discovered mineral deposit or sitting in the path of a major new suburban development.

Just as magicians get their audiences to focus on the left hand and pay no attention to the right, defenders of the lax tax treatment of investment gains heartily hail the hard work of farmers and small business owners, a neat move that diverts our attention from what simply can be windfall investment gains.

America’s taxation of capital gains runs regressive where it most needs to be progressive—to halt the concentration of our country’s wealth.

Those lucky farmers and business owners, you see, provide political cover for America’s billionaires, by far the biggest beneficiaries of the regressive taxation of capital gains. Consider Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. His original investment in Amazon over 30 years ago, in the neighborhood of $250,000, has now grown close to $200 billion. And that’s after he’s sold off billions of dollars worth of shares. Or how about Warren Buffett, whose original investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the source of virtually all his wealth, dates back to 1962?

Bezos and Buffett, when they sell shares of their stock, face effective annual rates of tax similar to those in that far-right bar of the graphic above, under 4%.

Buffett and Bezos may be poster children for reforming our absurdly regressive capital gains tax policy. But the problem remains wider than a handful of billionaires who founded wildly successful businesses.

In 2022, for example, the top one-tenth of the top 1% of American taxpayers reported nearly one-half the total long-term capital gains of all American taxpayers. Average taxpayers in that ultra-exclusive group of just 154,000 tax-return filers had over $4.7 million of capital gains qualifying for preferential tax treatment, a sum that rates some 943 times the capital gains reported, on average, by taxpayers in the bottom 99.9% of America’s population. And this bottom 99.9%, remember, includes the bottom nine-tenths of the top 1%, who themselves boast some pretty healthy incomes,

The regressive taxation of capital gains drives the tax avoidance strategy I call Buy–Hold for Decades–Sell. The essence of this simple strategy: buy investments that will have sustained periods of growth, hold them for several decades, then sell.

The strategy works fantastically well if you happen to hit a home run with an investment and achieve sustained annual growth of 20% a year, like those who purchased shares in Microsoft in 1986 did. But you only need to do modestly well to benefit enormously from Buy–Hold for Decades–Sell. If, for instance, you only manage 10% a year growth, barely more than the average return on the S&P 500, your effective annual tax rate if you sell at the end of 30 years would be just 9.28%, leaving you with an after-tax pile of cash over 13 times the amount of your original investment.

If we dig into the data produced by economists Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow, we can see clearly that once we get to the upper levels of America’s economic pyramid, the tax avoidance benefit of Buy–Hold for Decades–Sell increases mightily as we progress to the pinnacle.

Fox and Liscow estimate, for the period between 1989 and 2022, the average annual growth in unrealized taxpayer gains at various levels in our economic pyramid [see their research paper’s second appendix table]. The clear pattern: The higher your ranking in our economic pyramid, the greater your average annual growth in unrealized gains.

And when the growth in unrealized gains is running at its highest rate, the annual effective rate of tax on those gains—when finally realized—is running at its lowest. Why? The same factors that drive the growth rate of unrealized gains higher—longer asset holding periods and higher rates of appreciation in value—also drive the annual effective tax rate lower, as the graphic above vividly shows

In short, thanks to Buy–Hold for Decades–Sell, America’s taxation of capital gains runs regressive where it most needs to be progressive—to halt the concentration of our country’s wealth. The higher we go on our wealth ladder, from the highly affluent to the rich to the ultra-rich, the lower the rate of tax. The upshot: The richer you happen to be, the smaller the portion of your investment gains you pay in tax and the greater the portion of those investment gains converted to permanent wealth. That’s how wealth concentrates.

Unless we reform the taxation of capital gains to shut down Buy–Hold for Decades–Sell, the concentration of our country’s wealth at the top—and the associated threat to our democracy—will worsen.

It’s just math.

The Big Law firms that capitulated to President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional demands thought they were buying peace with his administration, preserving their client relationships, and protecting their bottom lines.

Recent developments illustrate the growing magnitude of their mistake.

Fighters Are Winning

On May 2, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell became the first court to issue a final ruling that Trump’s executive orders targeting Big Law firms violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. In a 102-page opinion, the court shredded Trump’s edict with a straightforward analysis that other courts are likely to follow:

“In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’ [Trump’s Executive Order] takes the approach of “Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,” sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.

“Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, however, is contrary to the Constitution,…. Simply put, government officials ‘cannot . . . use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’

“That, however, is exactly what is happening here.”

For those keeping score, Trump’s Justice Department has now lost every courtroom fight on the subject. Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey obtained immediate temporary relief from his executive orders, as did Perkins Coie, which has now won a permanent injunction from Judge Howell.

Meanwhile, how are the firms that caved to Trump doing?

The Other Shoe Drops: #1

After providing Trump with a war chest totaling almost $1 billion in free legal services, the settling firms are now learning how he plans to use it. Previously, Trump had mused about using Big Law attorneys on coal leasing and tariff deals, but on April 28 things got real.

Trump issued an executive order titled, “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS.”

The order emphasized the need to “protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials.” It directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to provide the legal resources necessary to defend those officers, including “private-sector pro bono assistance.” [emphasis supplied]

Stated simply, police officers accused of brutality and other misconduct will get Big Law attorneys to defend them – free of charge.

Meanwhile, traditional pro bono causes, including defending immigrants’ rights, are suffering from the deterrent effect of Trump’s attack. Fearing his wrath, they are declining work that challenges his policies.

Settling firms were already getting blowback from their partners and associates as many have left their firms. Trump’s newly-added page to their pro bono catalog won’t help recruiting or retention. And as with all things Trump, there’s no limiting principle. Appeasement never produces finality.

The Other Shoe Drops: #2

The firms’ stated reason for capitulating to Trump was concern that clients would leave any firm that was not in Trump’s good graces. That premise is not aging well either.

On April 11, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett agreed to provide $125 million in pro bono work “and other free legal services” to Trump-designated causes.

On April 22, the firm informed the Delaware Chancery Court that it would no longer be representing Microsoft in a case related to its 2023 acquisition of Activision. The same day, Jenner & Block replaced Simpson Thacher as Microsoft’s counsel.

Losing a client to another firm is not uncommon, and none of the players has commented on Microsoft’s switch. But capitulation to Trump has not been a panacea for preserving client relationships. A firm that challenges an unconstitutional order threatening its existence is a firm that many clients want fighting for them.

The Other Shoe Drops: #3

On April 24, 16 House members sent letters to nine firms that settled with Trump. Asking about their motivations and urging them to disavow the deals, lawmakers suggested that the agreements may violate federal and state criminal and civil laws while creating “potentially irresolvable violations of applicable Rules of Professional Conduct.” Previously, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent requests for information from several firms and White House counsel on April 6 and April 18.

The Other Show Drops: #4

Firms assumed that capitulation would occupy a single news cycle and then disappear. But their public relations nightmares aren’t going away. Apart from the widespread and ongoing condemnation of the legal community, the story continues to have legs as a fateful moment for the rule of law in the United States.

The May 4 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a damning segment on Big Law firms that settled with Trump. None was willing to appear and defend itself or its deal. The legal term for such continuing cowardice is res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself. In this case, the firms didn’t speak at all.

On May 9, an article that later appeared in the New York Times Sunday print edition ran with this headline and subhead:

Can Elite Lawyers Be Persuaded to ‘Wake Up and Stand Up’?
When the law firm Paul Weiss cut a deal with the Trump administration, a new kind of activist emerged.

Some of the settling firms, including Kirkland & Ellis and at least one other, have an escape hatch: Their “handshake deals” with Trump are not in writing. They can do what Trump does when he no longer likes his own prior agreement: Walk away.

In fact, even firms with a written agreement can walk away too. Whatever their form, the deals are probably not enforceable. But that was never Trump’s main objective. It was always about intimidation and deterrence. When firms bent the knee to him, he won and scored an invaluable public relations victory.

And his accompanying billion-dollar windfall didn’t hurt.

We are nearly four months into the Trump administration, but sometimes it feels like the orange man has been president forever. This is because Donald Trump’s second term is a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse.

First, you have the chaos that Trump has unleashed around the world with his uninformed and simplistic views on international trade and trade policy and threats to Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico; then his all-out assault on civil society and the very fundamental principles of U.S. democracy; and then the daily and exhausting bullshit that comes out of his ignorant mouth, which he uses as a diversion to distract citizens and the media alike from his actions.

But it is the horrible combination of lawlessness and incompetence, fear and cruelty of Trump 2.0 that creates the feeling that time has stopped. Time flies when things are good and we are having fun. But if we are in distress and pain, time slows down.

Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.

Trump’s politics are repellant. They are straight out of the fascist playbook. They are dressed in fear and hate, cruelty and vengeance, with lies and corruption being both cause and effect of his leadership style.

Trump is using fear as a political tool with citizens, Congress, courts, business, universities, and the news industry. He uses denigrating and dehumanizing language to promote hate in order to create a divided United States.

Trump's anti-immigrant policies are rooted in racism and, sure enough, want to make eugenics great again. Offering special immigration status to white Afrikaners, on a refugee program that has essentially been suspended for all other groups, speaks volumes of who the orange man is and what he stands for.

But Trump’s signature is cruelty. Indeed, in Gaza, Trump did not see immense human suffering, let alone a genocide in the making, but “underdeveloped real estate,” as Robert Kutner so astutely observed. Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.

Umberto Eco claimed that “there was only one Nazism.” But the great Italian scholar and best-selling author went on to add that “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”

To be sure, a fascist monster who demonizes migrants, exacts revenge on his perceived foes, actively destroys the rule of law, and whose real agenda is not “America First” but rather “Trump First” is in charge of today’s United States.

I have no idea how the Trumpian nightmare is going to end. But it will surely get worse as time goes by if Americans do not rise up against the orange man’s fascist regime.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency's current goal is to cut $150 billion a year in spending from the federal government. One fundamental problem with Musk's approach is that sometimes spending a little more money saves a lot of money, or makes a lot of money. Repairing a hole in a roof in Florida before hurricane season saves money. Regularly changing the oil in your car saves money. For every dollar that the Internal Revenue Service spends auditing the top 10% of earners, it recovers $12 in taxes. A recent Stanford study found that auditing partnerships nets $20 in taxes recovered for every dollar spent by the IRS.

The largest chunk of fraud in America's federal government is the tax gap. The tax gap is the difference between how much is owed in taxes and how much is paid in taxes. For 2022, the IRS estimated that the tax gap was $606 billion. That $606 billion in fraud that tax cheats get away with is equivalent to the total federal income taxes paid by the bottom 90% of earners in America.

For most Americans, like myself, every dollar in wages we earn is reported by our employers to the IRS, our taxes are withheld from our paychecks, and that money is paid to the Treasury as estimated taxes four times a year. So for most Americans, cheating is close to impossible, and our rate of compliance is 99%. But for rich individuals and corporations, our byzantine tax code gives them lots of nooks and crannies to hide their income and avoid paying the taxes they owe, so their rate of cheating can be as high as 55%.

I propose that we not only hire back all those fired workers at the IRS, but double down and spend an additional $5 billion auditing the top 10% of earners and $5 billion auditing partnerships at the IRS to reduce the tax gap by $160 billion.

If we collected 25% more of the tax gap, that would be roughly $150 billion a year, which happens to match the DOGE yearly goal. But DOGE isn't even looking at bringing in more revenue. How can DOGE, whose mission is government efficiency, ignore the biggest chunk of fraud in the federal government? DOGE has actually done the opposite. DOGE has aggressively cut workers from the IRS, targeting those employees recently hired and being trained to go after the worst of the worst of the tax cheats. The Inflation Reduction Act, which former President Joe Biden pushed through Congress, bolstered tax enforcement and modernization at the IRS, and experts being trained to audit the most complex returns were hired less than two years ago, so they were cut as part of Musk's purge of probationary federal employees. Even worse, it has been reported that Musk and President Donald Trump are working on plans to cut staffing at the IRS by half.

The Budget Lab at Yale has estimated that if 22,000 employees are cut from the IRS, the tax gap will increase by $160 billion in 2026. If DOGE cuts half of IRS employees, or 50,000, the Budget Lab at Yale estimated that the tax gap will increase by $203 billion in 2026. So just accounting for DOGE's cuts to the IRS, DOGE will likely increase the deficit, even if they hit their target of cutting $150 billion in spending.

I propose that we not only hire back all those fired workers at the IRS, but double down and spend an additional $5 billion auditing the top 10% of earners and $5 billion auditing partnerships at the IRS to reduce the tax gap by $160 billion. So the score is an estimated increase of $203 billion in fraud for DOGE, $150 billion in deficit reduction for me.

When I joined the Air Force, I took the oath every serviceperson takes: to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. Every member of Congress takes this same oath.

At his inauguration, President Donald Trump swore a much shorter oath: to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has since actively rejected his responsibility to the Constitution, ignoring Supreme Court rulings, violating the emoluments clause, stripping people of due process, and engaging in nakedly corrupt self-enrichment. We are in a constitutional crisis, in every sense of the word.

None of Trump’s unconstitutional actions are disputed. My responsibility as a citizen is the same as the responsibility of our duly elected officials in the Senate and the House: to remove this blatantly unfit president from office. If Trump isn’t sure he needs to uphold the Constitution, he should not be leading our democracy. Simple.

Trump is a blatantly corrupt tyrant laying waste to the Constitution. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. The American people know it. The remedy is clear: impeachment.

Democrats have made it clear that they believe Trump has committed impeachable offenses. They tell us endlessly, in all forms of social media, public speeches, and fundraising texts, about the bribery and the violation of rights and the usurpation of the power of the purse. They all pledge to do something about it.

That something must be impeachment.

Impeachment is the legal remedy for the unconstitutional actions of this president, enshrined in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. They understood the danger a tyrant would pose to our republic, and provided impeachment as the clear, constitutional method to remove “a president who mistakes himself for a monarch.” Impeachment and removal of a tyrant is the fundamental responsibility of duly elected members of the House of Representatives.

I am taking my oath seriously. In April I started the grassroots Citizens’ Impeachment with former Senate staffer Gabe Garbowit. We started out as Operation Anti-King, and recruited citizens from every congressional district and sent more than 600 emails to ask their representatives if they would support impeachment. Fifteen representatives said yes.

One of those Representatives is also taking their oath seriously: Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has gone on to introduce articles of impeachment under Rule IX, requiring the House to vote on impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for his undisputed high crimes and misdemeanors. That vote happens this week.

It’s a simple question: Is this impeachable conduct or not? Any representative who answers “yes” to that question and intends to uphold their oath of office should stand firmly behind impeachment. This includes voting to move forward the articles of impeachment introduced by Rep. Thanedar.

Reportedly, some Democrats aren’t thrilled at the opportunity for an up-and-down vote on impeachment, but they should be. A majority of likely voters support impeachment, including a majority of Independents (55%). Democratic likely voters are particularly enthusiastic, with 64% strongly supporting impeachment and another 16% supporting impeachment somewhat. Impeachment is a slam-dunk signal to a Democratic representative’s constituents that they are upholding their oath to the Constitution and the American people.

Trump is not invincible. His coalition is starting to crack over the obvious incompetence and corruption, and he has the lowest approval rating of any president in the past 80 years at this point in their term. If Congress refuses to uphold their own oath to support and defend the Constitution by removing him from office, there isn’t anything left to hold back this rogue president from a full power grab.

Voters also have a huge part to play here. We need to insist that every duly elected representative—Democrat and Republican alike—uphold their oath of office and move forward articles of impeachment this week. The more our elected officials hear from their constituents, the harder it is to ignore us and the constitutional crisis. Citizens’ Impeachment has instructions and scripts to help you tell your representative to support impeachment and move forward H. Res 353, Impeaching Donald John Trump.

The Citizens’ Impeachment movement came together very quickly—from two passionate and determined people to thousands of active volunteers in less than two months—because we recognize two things. The first is that impeachment is the only way to remove a tyrant as laid out in the Constitution. And the second is that the power of people coming together, to tell our elected representatives what we want to see them do, to pressure them into committing to this path publicly, is how we can get them to act.

Trump is a blatantly corrupt tyrant laying waste to the Constitution. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. The American people know it. The remedy is clear: impeachment. This week, representatives have the opportunity to align themselves with the American people, uphold their oath, and support and defend the Constitution. We will see how many of them take it.

As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten any institutions that could check his administration’s ongoing drive toward authoritarianism, there’s been a stark contrast in responses to his mob boss-style attacks. Some targets—like Harvard, which vowed to fight Trump’s assault on universities, or the law firm Perkins Coie, which recently scored a judicial win holding Trump’s actions against the firm unconstitutional—have seen their stature in their respective fields skyrocket,. Others—like Columbia University or the law firm Paul Weiss, which both immediately folded at the first sign of aggression from Trump—have been publicly, and perhaps permanently, tarred as feckless cowards.

This contrast between courage and gutlessness appeared once again earlier this month in response to Trump’s latest dictatorial salvo: an all-out assault on behalf of the fossil fuel industry against state and local efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate change.

Right now, 1 in 4 Americans live in a jurisdiction that is fighting to put Big Oil companies on trial for their climate lies and make them pay for the catastrophic damage they knew decades ago that their products would cause. The fossil fuel industry concedes that it faces “massive monetary liability” in these cases, and has been growing more and more desperate to stop plaintiff communities from having their day in court. In the last few years Big Oil has asked the Supreme Court to block these cases on five separate occasions. Recently, industry front groups tied to Leonard Leo ran a pressure campaign pushing the court to take up the issue.

Making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.

But the court has denied Big Oil every time, and so fossil fuel companies have had to shift to Plan B: asking the man they spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing to fulfill his end of the quid pro quo. The Wall Street Journal reported that oil executives asked Trump during a White House meeting for legal help against the cases, and their lobbyists are pushing congressional Republicans to include legal protections for the fossil fuel industry “in a coming Trump-endorsed bill.”

In his typical oligarchical style, Trump has gone all in to protect his corporate backers. On April 8 Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “take all appropriate action” to stop states that have “sued energy companies for supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” And this month the Department of Justice filed a series of lawsuits attempting to prevent Hawaii and Michigan from pursuing climate litigation.

We’ve become so inured to the extreme misconduct of this administration that it’s often hard for any new scandal to stand out. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the staggering corruption of this new broadside on the rule of law.

Trump is taking unprecedented action on behalf of an industry that understood decades ago that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “great irreversible harm,” “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Instead of warning consumers about this existential threat, they waged a massive disinformation campaign to prevent the public from understanding the dangers of climate change. They made trillions of dollars from this deception, leaving regular Americans to pay the price.

And regular Americans certainly have been paying that price. They’ve been paying in higher insurance costs driven by the “violent weather” that Big Oil companies knew their products would cause. They’ve been paying in homes, businesses, and livelihoods lost in climate-driven “deluges.” And in far too many cases they’ve been paying with their own “suffering and death.” That is why many of the communities hit hardest by these disasters have sued—under the same long-established state laws used to hold Big Tobacco and opioid profiteers accountable—to force the companies responsible for global warming to contribute at least something to the often devastating climate costs that right now are falling entirely on the shoulders of regular Americans.

Trump, of course, doesn’t care about regular Americans experiencing, in his words, “supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” His concern is limited entirely to his Big Oil donors, who are terrified of having to defend their climate lies to a jury composed of the people they screwed over.

Unfortunately for Big Oil, we live in a federalist system of government that does not allow a president to unilaterally block a state from pursuing valid state-law claims in state courts. Indeed, legal experts seem to agree the suits filed by the administration against Hawaii and Michigan are “shockingly flimsy.”

That doesn’t mean Trump’s legal maneuvering isn’t a potent weapon, however. As we’ve seen with Trump’s assault on universities and law firms, the goal of these attacks is not winning in the courtroom. It’s all about intimidation—which means that what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.

Some leaders are demonstrating that they have that backbone. On May 1, Hawaii ignored the DOJ’s specious lawsuit and became the 10th state to sue Big Oil. As Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said, “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had a similar response: “Donald Trump has made clear he will answer any and every beck and call from his Big Oil campaign donors… I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his Big Oil donors so fear.”

Sadly, not all local leaders have demonstrated such courage. Shortly after the DOJ announced its suits against Hawaii and Michigan, Puerto Rico voluntarily dropped its 2024 case that sought to make fossil fuel companies pay to help protect the commonwealth’s infrastructure against stronger storms, sea-level rise, and other damages fueled by climate change. The Leonard Leo-linked Alliance for Consumers, which days earlier called on Puerto Rico’s governor to help kill the case, crowed that the dismissal would allow consumers to “take comfort in knowing the things you buy for your family will still be there, at the store, when you need them”—an Orwellian message for the millions of Puerto Ricans who were unable to access basic goods for months following the climate-driven catastrophe of Hurricane Maria.

A spokesperson said the commonwealth dropped its case, which was brought under a previous administration, because Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón wanted to “be aligned with the policies of President Trump,” which is “to support the burning of fossil fuels [and] the protection of oil companies.” As a result, her constituents will be condemned to a future of escalating climate disasters that they—and not the polluters most responsible—will have to pay for.

But maybe the contrast between Puerto Rico’s humiliating supplication and Hawaii and Michigan’s courageous stands can help inspire other local and state jurisdictions to refuse to bend to Trump’s future threats. After all, making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.

When the history books are written about this lawless moment, the collaborators—the Columbias, the Paul Weisses, the González-Colóns—will not like how posterity remembers their cowardice. But leaders who rise to the occasion, who refuse to surrender to Trump’s protection racket, and who continue fighting to make polluters pay will be able to take pride in their place on the right side of history.

For all the autocratic abuses that characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s second tenure, nothing more parallels the historic pattern of dictatorships than the kidnapping of disfavored individuals by armed agents of the state. Then concealing them in detention facilities, including as a prelude for some to be renditioned to horrific prisons in foreign countries. All while trampling on constitutional protections of legal due process, often ignoring court orders to stop it.

"The one power you cannot give the executive is the power to arbitrarily imprison people who oppose the regime,” says Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “Today it may be an El Salvadorian immigrant or a foreign student, but tomorrow it is you or me. The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.”

“In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence,” writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “The State of Law vanished, along with the principles of due process” for “guaranteed equitable treatment by the courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.”

For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole.

Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these autocratic practices, the Trump administration continues to escalate the assault on the rule of law. Recent incidents illustrate the rising danger.

Federal agents have begun targeting judges and elected officials. In late April, the FBI arrested sitting state court Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration agents for allowing an undocumented immigrant who had properly appeared for a hearing to evade the federal officers who were waiting outside her courtroom.

Judge Dugan was handcuffed behind her back, her ankles later shackled, and publicly paraded outside. FBI director Kash Patel celebrated the arrest by posting a photo on X in a display obviously intended to intimidate other judges, as over 150 former state and federal judges emphasized in a letter. Attorney General Pam Bondi doubled down proclaiming, “nobody is above the law,” apparently omitting her boss, Donald Trump.

— (@)

Then, on May 9, federal agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka for alleged “trespassing” when he, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) and LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), arrived to inspect a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility that Baraka says has operated in violation of city and state certification of occupancy, inspections, and permits laws. A Department of Homeland Security official menaced that arrests are “definitely on the table" for the Congress members, despite their oversight rights at federal facilities, claiming they were “body-slamming” an ICE agent.

Persecution of judges and elected officials and warnings by Trump prosecutors to other critics are designed to silence resistance, as experienced in other dictatorial regimes. In Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat quotes Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflecting on Franco’s murderous regime. “The threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.

These steps coincide with the seizure of undocumented persons, foreign students, and even U.S. citizens by ICE and other federal agents. They are then hastily transferred to detention facilities in preparation for deportation or rendition abroad, typically without evidence, barring rights of due process, depriving them of contact with family or legal counsel, in open defiance of court orders.

Due process is mandated by the Constitution’s Fifth and 14th Amendments stating no “person,” not just citizens, can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property” without legal protection under law. Separately, the Constitution declares a right of habeas corpus, the ability to go to court to ensure a person is not improperly charged or unjustly imprisoned, as former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained on MSNBC.

In its crusade for mass deportations and renditions, the administration is “actively looking” at formal suspension of habeas corpus, says Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff and its most fanatical architect of immigration policy. Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck notes that "Miller doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the president are per se unconstitutional.”

Habeas corpus has been postponed just four times in U.S. history—during the Civil War, in response to the post-Reconstruction KKK terror campaign in the South, amid an insurrection against the U.S. 1905 occupation of the Philippines, and after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii.

For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole. By early May, Trump had already deported 152,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

More than 200 were dispatched to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, in flagrant disregard of court rulings. One of them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Trump has doggedly rejected a unanimous Supreme Court order he “facilitate” his return despite the administration’s admission he was deported by mistake.

Further, Trump has expelled hundreds of others to countries not their own, including to Costa Rica, Panama, and the Guantánamo Bay prison in occupied Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made it clear he is scouring for more rendition locations. “We are working with other countries to say… will you do this as a favor to us?... And the further away from America, the better.”

One plan near fruition this month, until blocked by a court order, involved expelling Filipino, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Mexican migrants to detention centers in Libya, which Amnesty International has depicted as a “hellscape.” Most, said Human Rights Watch, are “controlled by abusive, unaccountable armed groups. Such violations include severe overcrowding, beatings, torture, lack of food and water, forced labor, sexual assault and rape, and exploitation of children.”

Global Precedents of Fascist Practices

Beatings, torture, and starvation in CECOT and Libyan camps are chilling reminders of the most brutal end game of death camps by fascist dictatorships from Hitler’s Nazi Germany to Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and others. “The global history of (concentration) camps shows that most internees die from disease, overwork, or starvation rather than from execution,” notes Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Within days of being appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler established models other authoritarian regimes would follow. Hermann Göring, second only to Hitler, was granted “extraordinary police powers” to brutally assault and round up political adversaries “with increasing ruthlessness,” writes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

Soon, after a fire ravaged the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, the Nazis enacted emergency legislation to fully unleash dictatorial powers, to ratchet up arrests, press censorship, and repression. Similarly, Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and is scheming to use the 1792 Insurrection Act and other emergency laws to legitimize autocratic moves, despite not meeting the constitutional requirements for either.

Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political opposition, not for lack of trying.

By late March 1933, the Nazis had opened their first of many concentration camps, Dachau, near Munich, initially to incarcerate communists, socialists, then social democrats, gay men, gypsies, others labeled “asocials,” and eventually Jews. Notes Fritzsche, the Nazis, aided by friendly press coverage, successfully painted opponents as the “enemies from within” and racist and antisemitic dehumanization of their enemies as “subhuman”—a practice Trump has also employed.

“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison,” states the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political opposition, not for lack of trying.

Victories have been won. One notable example is the court ordered freedom for Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk released from a Louisiana detention center after she was frighteningly seized by masked federal agents on the street for the “crime” of writing an op-ed protesting the Israeli-U.S. war in Gaza. The job for all of us is to build on that, and to never stop the pressure.

The Trump coalition includes four groups of people:

1. The MAGA (“make America great again”) base, mostly rural white men and women;
2. A group of Silicon Valley billionaires known as the Paypal Mafia;
3. A separate political movement called “religious nationalists”; and
4. The Trump crime family itself.

All four groups share one basic aim: to degrade our one-person-one-vote election system so a few billionaires and certain religious zealots can consolidate their political power to eliminate free and fair elections to become even more controlling and richer than they already are.

Here are brief descriptions of the four groups.

1: The MAGA Base: Who Are They?

The hardcore, mostly-rural MAGA base can be understood as an echo of the Confederacy. Philosophically, many of them are the same people who tried to destroy the United States to preserve slavery via the Civil War (1861-1865). In their view, the basic ideas that inspired the founding of the U.S. (1776-1788) are wrong: All humans are not created equal and should not have equal rights under law. In 2022, MAGA believers included about 15% of the U.S. adult population, or about 39 million out of 258 million adults.

The MAGA Base: What Do They Want?

For many MAGA believers, President Donald Trump has been sent by God to make American great again, restoring white power. To many of them, white men naturally should dominate all people of color and all women. To varying degrees, many of them scorn foreigners, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, LGBTQIA people, and anyone they think looks down upon them (the mainstream media, Hollywood, and college types, among others).

White MAGA confederates share a seething resentment that they are losing the power and privilege that they have always taken for granted. Trump is their retribution, and many of them find community by rejoicing in his sadistic cruelty.

Of course, they want to restrict the vote. To achieve that goal, they are working to limit or eliminate the right to “due process” guaranteed in the Constitution, which is a step toward their goal of curbing the authority of the judicial branch of government. They seek freedom—freedom to do whatever they want to whomever they please, and they have made real progress.

2: The Paypal Mafia: Who Are They?

The Paypal Mafia is a loosely-affiliated group of billionaires in California’s Silicon Valley with roots in apartheid South Africa. Nazi-saluting Elon Musk is the most famous of them, though Peter Thiel is likely more influential. Many have become devotees of a man named Curtis Yarvin, a racist and avowed monarchist who believes democracy is unworkable and has failed. Yarvin is friends with Vice President JD Vance, whose political career was launched and funded by Peter Thiel.

The Paypal Mafia: What Do They Want?

The Paypal Mafia wants the U.S. to be run by a king, whom they would call a “CEO” (but which Curtis Yarvin has bluntly called “a dictator”). Seriously. They want the nation run like a corporation because corporations are “efficient” (meaning tightly controlled). Another term for what they want is “techno-fascism.”

This “tech broligarchy” (which reveres unlimited male power) wants to “get government off its back” as it continues to create and sustain gigantic monopolies of dubious legality like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Paypal, Palantir, and so forth—while they freely explore the profit potential of crypto currencies and artificial intelligence, among other dangerous wild-west technologies. Obviously, they oppose one-person one-vote democracy, which might eventually break up their monopolies and curb their dangerous tech gambles.

3: Religious Nationalists: Who Are They?

Religious nationalism includes a large group of people who share an overwhelming desire for political power to eliminate democracy and who are exploiting religion to achieve that goal.

As Katherine Stewart has shown in two well-researched books, The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, this is not a religious movement. It is a radical anti-democracy political movement dressed up in religious disguise.

About one-third of U.S. adults (roughly 78 million people) either strongly support (26 million) or partially or moderately support (52 million) religious nationalism. Although they are often called Christian nationalists, their actions and goals have little to do with the teachings of Jesus—feed the hungry, house the homeless, welcome the stranger. None of that.

Christian nationalists are Donald Trump’s largest group of devoted supporters. Two out of three completely or mostly agree that God ordained Trump to win the 2024 election. Without religious nationalist support, Trump would never have become president. So, their wish is his command.

Religious Nationalists: What Do They Want?

As Katherine Stewart has shown, religious nationalists want political power so they can eliminate democracy from the United States. They want to end the separation of church and state; eliminate public education and, in its place, substitute particular religious teachings; ban abortion nationwide and restrict access to birth control; deprive gay people of the right to marry and rescind laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation; eliminate no-fault divorce and restore “traditional” family roles in which men dominate; pack the federal judiciary with religious nationalists; allow corporations to discriminate openly against female employees (denying them access to birth control); declare “war” on progressive social policies and on “critical race theory;” end all restrictions on corporate monopolies; cut funding for science; get rid of governmental social safety nets (for example, social security, Medicaid, and food programs) so people will become dependent on churches for their survival; promote a Christian Nation identity in which conservative Christians have a right and a duty to enforce their values, sometimes by force; and of course make it hard or impossible for most people to vote.

Their core mission is to take over America and end democracy. Some of them are well on their way.

4. The Trump Crime Family: Who Are They?

Over the years, many people have compared Donald Trump’s family to a “crime family” and Trump himself to a Mafia godfather, demanding unquestioned loyalty from underbosses, enforcers, and associates.

Trump is always looking for ways to keep his soldiers and associates (in the three groups described above) loyal by giving them some of what they want. Meanwhile his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, are roaming across the planet making lucrative deals with people who seek privileged access to the President of the United States. Cryptocurrency has made such access simple and secret.

The Trump Crime Family: What Do They Want?

So long as Donald Trump can use his office to acquire gobs of money, push people around, receive endless praise and adoration from his subordinates, and inflict cruel revenge on those who stand in his way, he seems happy. His sons seem satisfied to score a few billion dollars here and there, based on their family ties to the president. At bottom, the family wants to retain power so they and their soldiers and associates can make boatloads more money. This requires modifying election systems so Republicans can win despite the odds against them.

Conclusion

So that, in a nutshell, is the Trump coalition. They all share one goal: to end one-person one-vote democracy. To do that, they first want to disempower the federal judiciary and eliminate the expectation of “due process.” Then, by making it difficult or impossible for large numbers of Americans to vote, they intend to remain in power forever.

It is up to the rest of us to make sure they don’t.

May 14 is celebrated in Israel as “Independence Day,” since it marks the end of British colonial rule over what had been the British Mandate of Palestine, and the proclamation of the new state of Israel. One day later, May 15, Palestinians commemorate the violent expulsion of around 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland, that started with the attack on Tiberias City on December 22, 1947. By January 3, 1949, 437 cities and villages had been destroyed and depopulated: 295 of them were obliterated through assaults or expulsion orders by Zionist troops,106 were depopulated in the midst of psychological warfare caused by the fall of neighboring villages or towns, and 36 fell victim to outright massacres committed by Zionist fighters. Many of the refugees fled to Gaza.

Palestinians refer to these 13 months as the beginning of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.” Every year since 1998, it has been commemorated on May 15 with the “Palestinian March of Return.” This year, however, the Association for the Defense of the Rights for the Internally Displaced Persons in Israel was forced to cancel the March. Organizers were informed that a crowd larger than 700 people or the presence of Palestinian flags would lead to “immediate police intervention.” Already since 2011, the “Nakba Law” made the commemoration ever harder, prohibiting the allocation of funds to all institutions that engaged in academic, cultural, artistic, or political activities that observe the Palestinian Nakba Day as a day of mourning. But things have become much worse.

After October 7, 2023, in May 2024, Sabreen Msarwi, a middle school teacher in Tayibe, was fired for participating in the March, and last April, in Tel Aviv, Meir Baruchin, a 62-year-old high school teacher who had been teaching history and civics for 35 years, was arrested for his Facebook posts that pleaded against the dehumanization of Palestinians: “For most Israelis, if you say Palestinian, they automatically think terrorists. They have no name, no face, no family, no hope, no plans—nothing.” For no other reason than refusing to engage in this multi-leveled erasure, for no other reason than defending Palestinian human and political rights, Baruchin was locked up for four days as a “high-risk detainee” in solitary confinement, while his apartment was ransacked by Israeli authorities.

As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning?

It is particularly calamitous that the State of Israel, whose government claims to speak for all Jews worldwide, criminalizes remembrance, when, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his pathbreaking book Zakhor (Hebrew for “Remember!”) teaches us, remembrance is a religious commandment in the Torah, especially the remembrance of Exodus, the liberation from captivity and enslavement. Moreover, as the historian Enzo Traverso has argued, the “civil religion” of Holocaust memory has for decades “served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes against humanity.” Traverso warns that if this “sacred and institutionalized memory serves only to support Israel and attack the defenders of the Palestinian cause on the pretext of antisemitism, our moral, political, and epistemological bearings will become unmoored, with devastating consequences.”

Yet, this is exactly what is happening. In a recent article, the renowned Israeli-American scholar of Holocaust studies Omer Bartov charges that the “memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.” How is it possible, he asks, “well into the 21st century, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this ‘crime of crimes’?”

It is then not only the denial of “the right to remember, to speak and to mourn” that marks this year’s 77th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel and the onset of the Nakba. This year’s May 14 and May 15 will be remembered by a particularly horrendous proof that international law has been shattered: A state unconditionally supported by the most powerful Western country, the United States, and by other Western countries, is intentionally starving an entire population. As of this writing, at least 57 Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza as a direct consequence of Israel’s 10 weeks long brutal blockade of food, water, and any other critical aid to the Palestinian population. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, estimates that 66,000 children in Gaza are now suffering from “severe malnutrition” due to the total siege which Sean Carroll, the president and chief executive of the nonprofit group American Near East Refugee Aid, has condemned as an “engineered system of deprivation.” This is, Carroll writes, “the moment of moral reckoning […]. When we talk about peace, we must ask: What kind of future are we envisioning if an entire people is left to suffer starvation?”

As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning? It is high time to pressure our government to vigorously work toward a solution in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal political rights and security, and to support a vision offered by Israeli-Palestinian civic groups like Zochrot, Salt of the Earth, Standing Together, and A Land for All.

Republicans are preparing to give trillions in tax handouts to millionaires and billionaires. How do they plan to pay for these tax handouts? By stealing health care from 13.7 million Americans, including destroying Medicaid as a functioning system for millions of seniors, children, and people with disabilities.

Older Americans and their families are often shocked to learn that, under most circumstances, Medicare doesn’t cover long term care. Medicaid does. In fact, Medicaid pays for over 60 percent of nursing home care. It also covers other types of long-term care, such as in-home care. And, Medicaid covers premiums and out-of-pocket costs for millions of low-income people with Medicare.

To qualify for Medicaid long term care, many seniors have to “spend down” their assets and savings. This is morally wrong. We will never stop fighting for a Medicare for All system, where everyone in America gets high quality health care that is free at point of service. But as flawed as the current system is, it’s far better than the Republican alternative — ripping away Medicaid, so that seniors who need long term care (and other care not covered by Medicare) can’t get it at all.

The bottom line: People will die because they can’t get the care they need.

Make no mistake: Republican Medicaid cuts will devastate seniors, ripping away critical care. Republicans are planning to make $880 billion in spending cuts to pay for the tax handout to the wealthy, and the majority of those cuts will come from Medicaid. It is impossible to cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid without hurting massive numbers of seniors.

Several of the Medicaid cuts they are considering amount to different ways of giving states far fewer federal dollars to spend on Medicaid. That means states will have to scale back their Medicaid programs, which will inevitably hurt seniors.

These cuts will hit all hospitals, but will almost immediately devastate rural hospitals, which rely on federal Medicaid dollars to stay afloat. America’s Essential Hospitals, the group representing these hospitals, says that the Republican plan “would cause children, pregnant patients, and disabled people to lose access to their coverage. Older populations living in nursing homes would also risk losing their health care coverage.”

If Republicans pass their Medicaid cuts into law, hospitals around the country — disproportionately in red states, which are more rural — will close. That’s on top of 200 rural hospitals that have already closed in the last decade. These closures won’t just impact people on Medicaid. It will devastate entire communities that rely on these hospitals.

Seniors with medical emergencies are in no position to drive hundreds of miles to a different hospital. This will also increase the burden on family caregivers, who will now have to travel further to get their spouse or aging parents to the hospital. The bottom line: People will die because they can’t get the care they need.

Congressional Republicans want to ruin the lives of millions more seniors, by taking away their Medicaid.

At the same time Republicans are planning these enormous Medicaid cuts, the Trump-Musk regime is breaking Social Security. They’ve pushed out 7,000 of the public servants who help Americans claim their earned benefits, with more layoffs to come. Field offices around the country have lost half their staff, leading to much longer wait times — if you can get an appointment at all.

Like the planned Medicaid cuts, these Social Security cuts are disproportionately hurting people living in rural areas and people with disabilities. If they can’t navigate the increasingly glitchy website, they may have to travel hundreds of miles to a Social Security office for an appointment.

The Musk henchmen running Social Security are also wrongly declaring people dead, cutting them off from their earned benefits as well as their credit cards and bank accounts — financial murder. People are flooding overwhelmed field offices, desperate to fix the error. In one keystroke, the Trump-Musk regime is ruining their lives. And Congressional Republicans want to ruin the lives of millions more seniors, by taking away their Medicaid.

All of this suffering is completely preventable. America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Republicans want to rip health care away from tens of millions of people to give tax cuts to billionaires. Instead, let’s make those billionaires pay their fair share — and use the money to give everyone in America the health care they need.

Let’s suppose someone decides it would be a good idea to drive 80 miles per hour through a school zone while the amber lights are flashing. If something bad happens, as it would be likely to, and he kills one or more children, how would the law treat it?

He could tell the court that he sincerely didn’t “mean” to kill anyone, but that wouldn’t exonerate him. The court would consider the case at minimum as vehicular homicide, and more likely, given the aggravating circumstance of lethal speed in a school zone, it might well result in conviction for aggravated murder.

Absent a miraculous development of telepathic powers, we can’t read people’s minds and determine their “real” mental state; we can only infer intent from their behavior. If someone commits a reckless act whose adverse consequences are clearly foreseeable, then for all practical purposes, that person willed the consequences. This principle—who wills the means wills the ends—is applicable in law, but should also be valid in everyday life. It should particularly apply to the behavior of public officials who wield power over the rest of us.

With that in mind, let’s look at President Donald Trump’s first-term record. His handling of the COVID-19 pandemic plainly indicated an unconcern for the consequences of his ignoring the outbreak in its early stages during the winter and spring of 2020. As he told Bob Woodward, he wanted to downplay the disease so as not to spook the stock market, evidence of his preference for Wall Street over human life. His refusal to recommend masking and social distancing, and encouragement of crackpot Covid deniers, took a heavy toll.

Trump’s behavior during the pandemic alone should have disqualified him from ever holding elective office again.

According to Scientific American, “In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died from COVID-19, and life expectancy fell by 1.13 years, the biggest decrease since World War II. Many of the deaths were avoidable; COVID-19 mortality in the U.S. was 40 percent higher than the average of the other wealthy nations in the Group of Seven (G7).” That equates to 140,000 excess deaths from his contempt for human life in a crisis whose outcome was predictable.

Trump’s behavior during the pandemic alone should have disqualified him from ever holding elective office again. Alas, the American people’s memory, knowledge, and judgment being what they are, we are now being forced, like hostages at gunpoint, to endure another four years of criminal behavior, carried out with our tax money.

We have already seen enough to expect the Trump regime’s second term to be like the first on steroids. Thus, gutting the Department of Health and Human Services’ infectious disease research and forcing out the FDA’s chief vaccine expert is exactly what it looks like: an effort to see that more Americans die prematurely. This same result will certainly come as well from cutting $12 billion from state health service grants.

The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wants to implement placebo testing of vaccines, even though this methodology had been eliminated long ago because of ethical concerns: subjects administered a placebo could be placed at considerable health risk when the overall efficacy of vaccines has been demonstrated worldwide for the many decades. So why is Kennedy doing this?

The most benign explanation is that he is a paranoid crackpot who believes in his quack medical theories (in which case, why did the Republican Senate confirm him in the face of abundant evidence of his lack of qualification and risk to public well-being?). A harsher explanation might be that Kennedy, in line with his various crank theories, sees too many human beings as pestilential, and wouldn’t mind if there were fewer of them. In either case, every senator who voted to confirm him will be just as responsible for any excess deaths occurring as he would.

The same applies to veterans’ health programs. The VA under Trump has slashed personnel, cut programs, and halted clinical trials. In recent testimony, the department’s secretary, Doug Collins, succeeded in matching his own bumbling incompetence with arrogance and nastiness. Yet the Republican senators who pretended to be critical of him in the hearing for the benefit of their veteran constituents had voted to confirm him, so if any veterans die from lack of health care, it will be their responsibility as well as that of Collins.

Why did the Trump cabal eliminate the terrorist data base at the Department of Homeland Security? Given that most domestic terrorism cases have a right-wing motivation, they must want to see more terrorism: it is useful in cowing the rest of the population. As for terrorist incidents in general, they can serve as an excuse for martial law. We can similarly conclude that wiped-out towns and lives ruined by natural disasters is the intended result of slashing FEMA.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that approximately 420 Americans die from Salmonella each year. The CDC also estimates that about 1.35 million people get sick from salmonellosis, and 26,500 are hospitalized. So why did Trump’s Agriculture Department withdraw a proposed rule that would have limited salmonella content in raw poultry and required producers to test their products before sale?

You might say it was lobbying by the poultry interests. In that case, it reflects the same attitude of willful contempt for human life on the part of Trump and his minions: that the profits of corporate contributors are more important than the safety of the American people.

Where does this contempt for human life come from? Any rational person who observed Trump over the past decade would conclude that he is a pathological narcissist who is indifferent to others. But that only leads to another question: why do so many Americans not only support him, but treat him as a near-deity?

At the core of Trump’s base are tens of millions of religious fundamentalists who believe in the Apocalypse. If the end is at hand, if in fact it could come at any moment, why worry too scrupulously over a life or two, or, for that matter, over the functioning of society at a level above that of the bronze age? The behavior of Trump’s supporters, particularly their “Covid parties” and “measles parties,” suggests an actual courting of disease and death. Their relation to Trump is like that of the ancient Carthaginians, sacrificing their children to the destroyer-god Baal.

Where does this contempt for human life come from? Any rational person who observed Trump over the past decade would conclude that he is a pathological narcissist who is indifferent to others.

There is another, more secular, source of this willingness to let people die: survivalists whose rabid fear of economic collapse, social breakdown, and anarchic violence ironically leads them to hope for the very chaos they supposedly abhor, because it would prove them to have been right all along.

Right-wing media have long egged on the paranoid with ads prophesying imminent economic or social collapse. Since the 1970s oil shock, an abiding feature on the American scene has been the right-wing survivalist, hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands.

Religious lunatics and bunkered-in survivalists have been a feature of society for decades, but what gives their vision the potential for fulfilment is a newer, third element: the neo-reactionary tech bros. What the apocalyptics and survivalists supply in numbers, the Silicon Valley billionaires provide in money: they are already a mainstay of funding for Trump’s political operations.

According to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, tech bros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen believe they have the money and means to carry out what the two authors call End Times Fascism. Musk’s effort through DOGE to destroy the government’s health and safety infrastructure is precisely what will bring a societal collapse nearer—and that’s a good thing in the eyes of these neo-reactionaries, because it makes survivalist prepping all the more critical while culling the unwanted.

Their goal is like something foretold in Neal Stephenson’s novel "Snow Crash" over three decades ago: the destruction of the traditional nation-state and the creation of city-states ruled by tech moguls and serviced by AI robots and whatever number of the lower orders of humanity are deemed necessary.

This nightmarish vision is now the de facto program of the Republican Party, regardless of what its official platform contains. The deaths that will occur from the cutting or elimination of the programs I have mentioned are not an accident or unforeseen consequence.

No, on the contrary: Republicans want you to die.