In light of Trump II’s predictably cruel and bonkers beginning, many people are asking: “What can I do now?” Here are 10 recommendations.

1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented.

This is an urgent moral call to action. As U.S. President Donald Trump’s ICE begins roundups and deportations, many good people are endangered and understandably frightened.

One of Trump’s new executive orders allows ICE to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, healthcare sites, shelters, and relief centers—thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need.

So-called “sanctuary” cities and states have laws prohibiting their schools, public hospitals, and police from turning over undocumented individuals to the federal government or providing information about them. These are sensible policies. Otherwise undocumented people who are ill, including those with communicable diseases, won’t go to public hospitals for treatment. Parents will be reluctant to send their children to school. Crime victims who are undocumented will hesitate before reporting crimes for fear that they could then face being deported.

If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep ICE away from hospitals, schools, and shelters.

Organize and mobilize your community to support it as a sanctuary city, and to support your state as a sanctuary state. Trump’s Justice Department is already launching investigations of cities and states that go against federal immigration orders, laying the groundwork for legal challenges to local laws and forcing compliance with the executive branch. Your voice and organizing could be helpful in fighting back.

I recommend you order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resources Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.

2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community. Trump may make life far more difficult for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other people through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws, or changes in how such laws are enforced.

His election and his rhetoric might also unleash hatefulness by bigoted people in your community.

I urge you to work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.

3. Help protect officials in your community or state whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance. Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they do not have the means to legally defend themselves, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone who seeks to harm them, immediately alert local law-enforcement officials.

4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.

5. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump. Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Common Cause.

6. Spread the truth. Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources.

Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.

7. Urge friends, relatives, and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X, and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram. They are filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.

8. Push for progressive measures in your community and state. Local and state governments retain significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize, and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders.

9. Encourage worker action. Most labor unions are on the right side—seeking to build worker power and resist repression. You can support them by joining picket lines and boycotts and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.

10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America. Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only 1.5 points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won.

America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it—or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. We cannot allow them to.

We will never give up.

Beyond these, please be sure to find room in your life for joy, fun, and laughter. Do not let Trump and his darkness take you over. Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of yourself. If you obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry, and anxiety, you won’t be able to keep fighting.

EXECUTIVE ACTION

January 23, 2025

ESTABLISHING BEST PRACTICES FOR MAINTAINING SANITY AND A SENSE OF INTEGRITY OVER THE COMING YEARS OF THE REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION AND BEYOND

WHEREAS, in light of the vindictive tone; short-sighted, self-serving orders; and dangerous, ill-advised decisions expressed by the incoming President, it is essential that there be maintained, to the degree to which I can control, in my own being, household, community, and society, a level of mindfulness, well-being, consideration, kindness, and integrity, enabling behavior and actions in alignment with the highest standards of civil discourse with respect for ourselves, our democracy, human rights, and equitable treatment and opportunity for all those in our country and abroad:

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me as a Thinking Human Being and U.S. Citizen by Birthright, and by the Constitution and the statutes of the United States,

I DECLARE THE FOLLOWING:

1. ANY AND ALL NECESSARY STEPS WILL BE TAKEN with the goal of bending the arc of history toward justice, no matter how slow and painful the process, to address and reproach, immediately and clearly, all who mistreat, emotionally, verbally, or physically, others on the basis of age, racial or gender identity, or sexual preference; and protect those who may be victimized, whether as individuals or on an institutional level, by such behaviors; to speak truth to power by communicating regularly with legislators and executive branch staff and to vote in all elections for candidates who uphold my values; to avoid and discredit unverified news sources; to limit exposure to social media, with immediate and complete withdrawal from negative and innaccurate feeds and posts, while employing it to be a voice for peace, human rights, and environmental sustainability; to consciously reduce energy consumption by employing all available means including bicycling for transportation and by limiting my use of fossil fuels; to actively contribute to the betterment of the local community by volunteering and spreading kindness; and, to avoid partaking in the unnecessary consumer consumption that fuels the country’s wealth gap while directing resources toward just and appropriate uses.

2. OPPORTUNITIES SHALL BE CREATED AND PRIORITIZED for self-care, reflection, and creativity that will allow for physical and emotional health and sustainability over the course of time. These opportunities may include, but are not limited to: processing and releasing feelings appropriately rather than acting on them; taking long walks; enjoying talking with, visiting, and supporting friends and family; eating (limited amounts of) chocolate; making art; caring for and playing with children and animals; actively appreciating and nurturing the earth; and traveling.

This policy dictates that all proposed thoughts and actions be based in nonviolence and respect for all beings, with no requirement for or expectation to respect ideas and policies that are hurtful to others. These actions shall go into effect immediately, with due regard for the urgent nature of the matter, and the necessary time and energy required to maintain a sense of humor and maintain morale.

ADDENDUM: In the future, I shall refer to my high school alma mater (McKinley High School) as Denali High School and the wetland next to my trailer park as The Gulf of Justice.

As we enter U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, a chilling convergence of digital theater and eugenic ideology is unfolding before our eyes. Two days before the inauguration, millions watched their TikTok accounts flash warnings across their screens—only to see them restored hours later with Trump positioned as their digital savior.

This orchestrated crisis wasn't just political theater; it was a test run for what was to come. Millions of Americans, including young people whose identities have been shaped by endless scrolling, saw their dopamine withdrawal weaponized into a demonstration of power, foreshadowing a presidency that would soon explicitly embrace the pseudo-scientific theories that once fueled the darkest chapters of American history.

The choreography continued at Trump's pre-inauguration rally on Sunday, January 19, where the aesthetic was deliberately carnage-red: red banners, red caps, red lights casting a deep red glow over the crowd speckled with cowboy hats. Against this blood-tinged backdrop, Trump spliced scenes from Full Metal Jacket with TikTok clips of drag queens, weaponizing confusing and false contrasts to signal his vision of "restored masculinity." Ever the entertainer, Trump showed scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket to represent a past that never existed, feeding his audience a hollow nostalgia for an America that never was. Kubrick had made that film for the exact opposite reason that Trump chose to flash the scenes across the screens. Full Metal Jacket makes graphically visible the brainwashing of young men by hyper-masculine expectations of war.

The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible.

But it was his moment with Elon Musk and Musk's young son that revealed something more chilling. When Trump praised the child's inherited intelligence, invoking "racehorse theory," he wasn't just expressing admiration for the person who is arguably the greatest influence on the sequel of his presidency—he was broadcasting a eugenic worldview that has haunted American history since the 1920s. This was not the first time that Trump has evoked this pseudo-scientific theory at the root of the Holocaust. For a nation built by immigrants and by enslaved persons, his rhetoric about "cleansing" the country of what he terms "criminal illegals" from countries like Congo and Venezuela represents an existential threat to the very diversity that has always been America's greatest strength.

We've seen this before in American history. When eugenic ideologies took hold in the early 20th century, they found fertile ground in institutions across the country, from elite universities to state legislatures. Today, as Trump explicitly returns to this language, we're watching history's shadow lengthen across our democracy. The same pseudo-scientific racism that once justified sterilization programs and immigration quotas now powers algorithms and influences policy. With Elon Musk standing next to him, Trump promoted eugenics hours before he would become president again. Then, during the inauguration on January 20, while Trump was at a distinguished luncheon surrounded by tech oligarchs, Elon Musk stood before Trump's most fervent fans and raised his hand in a salute that cannot be compared to anything but a Nazi salute.

It is harrowing to stand on the precipice of this slide toward authoritarianism and white supremacist dehumanization. Yet throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference, to build connections in spite of–and sometimes because of—the forces trying to divide them. As social media platforms owned by oligarchs become instruments of division, our resistance must be rooted in physical spaces of community. When we look at our neighbors—in urban centers, rural towns, and suburban streets—and say, "I see you, I hear you, I stand with you," we're preserving the human connections that authoritarianism fears most.

The path forward lies not in Trump's dystopian vision of genetic superiority, but in the mutual aid networks sprouting up across the country. These grassroots communities of care and solidarity represent the most radical spaces of resistance available to us as we face the challenges ahead. They embody not some mythical American spirit, but the real and difficult work of building connection across difference—work that has always happened in the shadows of our nation's darker impulses.

In this moment of crisis, while Trump orchestrates the terrifying sequel of his reality-TV presidency—manufacturing crises, staging spectacles, and exhausting our capacity for outrage—we must remember that democracy has never been a destination but is a messy, imperfect journey. Behind each choreographed distraction, real policies of dehumanization take shape. Yet even as the entertainer-in-chief commands center stage, communities continue their quiet work of resistance and mutual support. The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible. Our task now is to continue this long journey toward justice, not by following every performance, but by strengthening the bonds between us. We must build these connections before they can be severed by the politics of division and spectacle. Let's find each other. Let's hold on to each other, let's hold on for our lives, and each other's lives.

Over three score years ago, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had a warning for America.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

“We must never let the weight of this combination,” Ike continued, “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.

Sadly, Eisenhower’s warning went largely unheeded. In the years since, the “military-industrial complex” has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.

In his own farewell address, former President Joe Biden gave that concentration a grim label. An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

We now face a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people,” a reality that Biden warned is eroding our “unity and common purpose” and fomenting “distrust and division.”

The end result? We stand today unable to adequately confront the challenges that face us.

America’s oligarchs, Biden explained, are wielding “their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis.” By resisting safeguards over artificial intelligence—“the most consequential technology of our time”—they’re also opening the door to “new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation.”

Perhaps most ominously of all, these oligarchs are burying Americans “under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”

”Participating in our democracy,” the departing president lamented, has become “exhausting and even disillusioning” for average Americans. They no longer “feel like they have a fair shot.”

But Biden also stressed that by working together, average Americans can shear our new oligarchy—and its “tech-industrial complex” core—down to democratic size. We can get the “dark money” of billionaires out of our politics. We can ban members of Congress from making stock trades while they’re legislating. We can tax the richest among us and make sure they’re paying their fair tax share.

In the days right after Biden’s farewell address, progressives added more specifics to Biden’s list of antidotes to oligarchy. We could and should, as former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich pointed out, either bust up giant, billionaire-owned tech media platforms like X and Facebook or start treating these platforms as public utilities.

We could even ban our wealthiest from owning critical media properties.

But realizing any of these reforms won’t be easy. Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.

Nothing symbolized the reality of this oligarchic power like President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The inaugural ceremony featured America’s three richest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—seated prominently in attendance, alongside other billionaires, as Trump addressed the nation.

“Everybody,” a satisfied president-elect Trump mused last month at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, “wants to be my friend.” Well, no, not everybody. Just everybody with a grand fortune that our new president—and his Republican controlled Congress—can zealously safeguard and grow.

So what can the rest of us do? With Trumpism locked in federally, we can challenge our oligarchs at the state and local level.

Maryland’s governor, for instance, has proposed a series of tax changes that would raise the combined state and local income tax rate on most Marylanders making over $1 million a year to 10.7%. But Maryland, one of the nation’s richest states, could do better. Rich Californians are already paying taxes at a 12% rate.

But that won’t happen more broadly unless average Americans organize—and confront our oligarchs at every opportunity.

If I have to pick only one from the list of nepotistic freaks, ghouls, B-list celebs, lost souls, Hitlerian zealots, and bunglers that will comprise U.S. President Donald Trump's inner circle of appointees, satellite charlatans, and court jesters, I am going to go with the one with the highest body count. There are plenty of zombies in Trump's starting lineup that would give you goosebumps—people who would cause you to choke on a sip of coffee and double check the pistol under your suit jacket if you met them in a diner to talk about internment camps and environmental deregulation. Picking the most terrible of these dregs is no easy task.

We have a serial pet murderer, a dumpy bald version of Reinhard Heydrich, and a bevy of cheerleaders for ecocide. Among Trump's cabinet picks there is a guy with a fetish for bear meat and whale carcasses and a viable plan to bring back smallpox and polio, but it takes more than a nostalgic and wistful longing for diseases of long ago to excite me. There is a certain irony to choose the most upright, clean-cut, impressively credentialed, and soft spoken of this hall of Hell hounds to be my best of the worst. Few things inspire cold sweat beads of fear like a murderer masquerading as a nice guy. Think of Ted Bundy as a Trump appointee.

I have to select Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's nominee to take over Francis Collins' former niche as director of The National Institutes of Health) as my absolute favorite monster from among the whole entourage of moral mutants and groveling sycophants. Bhattacharya would not raise your suspicions if he knocked on your door to deliver pamphlets—I would happily take a copy of The Watchtower and Awake from this reassuring man. He would bring a glow of satisfaction to most parents if their daughter brought him home. Hell, he even has ardent fans on the so-called left—the Tucker Carlson fan club comprised of Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and Matt Taibbi. You can toss Russell Brand in there too. In a game of free association, we casually link Bhattacharya with the issue of free speech—recall that Twitter once censored this honest doctor. Jacobin, in 2020, did a softball interview with one of Bhattacharya's ideological partners, Martin Kulldorff. On the left we sometimes worry more about a killer's rights to free speech than we do about his raised dagger.

Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit.

Free speech has been a distracting shibboleth for many sincere people, even though free speech has little meaning in a media system dominated by cash. The narrative promoted by both fascists and assorted enablers holds that Bhattacharya challenged the powerful forces of the “deep state” and was censored for his courage.

You might recall that the Stanford Professor of medicine coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) along with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. The rightwing Covid-19 gambit enjoyed unlimited oil industry funding and a mandate to assemble tenured prostitutes from academia to bamboozle the public. Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research—a Koch Network outpost in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a plump endowment from stock trading—must have had great confidence in the public tendency to skip the fine print. Leading up to, and following the pandemic, Bhattacharya has held fellowships and professional associations with The Hoover Institute, The Epoch Times, Hillsdale College, and The Brownstone Institute. The Brownstone is an Astroturfed organization with a Brooklyn visual motif and an Austin, Texas mailing address.

This Great Barrington Declaration spinoff—yet another brain child of the restlessly promiscuous, Koch affiliated, Jeffrey Tucker—specializes in Covid-19 minimizing, and anti-vax propaganda while dabbling in climate change denial. Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch revealed that the Brownstone is largely funded by dark money. To appreciate Bhattacharya’s mastery of absurdity, consider his statement in this 2022 interview posted at The Hoover Institute's Website:

It's a disaster that it's become a partisan thing. Public health, when it is partisan, is a failed public health.

If there is one essential talent that a fascist henchman needs, it is an utter immunity to self scrutiny, irony, and hypocrisy. I recall that Rudolf Hoss—the infamous commandant at Auschwitz—remarked in his dutifully composed autobiography (requisitioned by his British Jailers, postwar, prior to hanging), that his administration succeeded (I am paraphrasing) due to the cooperation of staff and prisoners alike. He could not wrap his head around the concept of victims and perpetrators having different agendas. They all worked together in a common purpose in Hoss' broken brain. Likewise, Bhattacharya has a Hoss-like inability to imagine that his narrative might be transparently nonsensical—how can a man affiliated with nearly every institution in the Koch Network not be self conscious when complaining of partisan medical narratives?

Bhattacharya's GBD is little more than libertarian rhetoric shaped to the contours of public health. Libertarian public health is a flagrant oxymoron—the task that Bhattacharya will be handed in a fascist oligarchy will be one that he has already done quite brilliantly—get the fuck out of the way and pretend that the mountain of bodies is an offering to the god of freedom.

Libertarian metaphor is wonderfully adaptable, like an elastic pair of stretch pants—one size fits all. Inaction is always in the service of human well-being. The climate regulates itself—"drill baby, drill." Guns need no regulations either, the "good guy with a gun" provides a natural balance. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff figured out the libertarian essence of the Covid-19 story—the pandemic would fizzle out via the designs of nature (herd immunity!). The mandate for the government public health agencies was to use magic and disappear. And that is what Bhattacharya will do, make healthcare as ephemeral as a slight-of-hand handkerchief. His role is one of absence, abdication, retreat—but ultimately one of corporate fidelity, privatization, and the empowering of insurance companies and other profit-seeking medical companies to feed upon a sickly public.

Herd immunity was the whole tale in the GBD—the entire document can be read by a second grader in 20 seconds, but I can condense it into a three second sentence: Let everyone walk into the pandemic like it was a fourth of July stroll in the park, and, bingo—herd immunity!

There was a tiny bit about "focused protection" for the old and the sick. There was even a suggestion that old folks ought to have their groceries delivered, but not a whisper about who would pay for it. Of course we all know that some 40% of U.S. residents are afflicted with obesity, an enormous risk factor for Covid-19 mortality. We might add in all the smokers, lead- and mercury-poisoned masses, and the generally compromised health of a nation long on high fructose corn syrup and short on medical coverage. What you won't find in the GBD is a word about contact tracing, isolation, support for workers, mask wearing, and equipment for afflicted individuals—you know, the stuff that South Korea did to reduce Covid-19 harms by a factor of five compared to the U.S. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya belatedly renounced “herd immunity” in a Salon interview. WTF? It was all about focused protection he explained.

The deep state censored Bhattacharya, the truth teller, and now he will lead the very agency that suppressed him. The truth is a little more nuanced. Bhattacharya and his fellow medically credentialed whores had a bigger platform than former Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci ever had. With Trump's appointment of Scott Atlas to his Covid-19 Task Force, the GBD nearly became the de facto inspiration for U.S. policy.

According to The Lancet, some 40% of US Covid-19 deaths were preventable—about a half a million deaths could be loosely traced to public recalcitrance regarding pandemic protocol. How many of these victims can be directly traced to the influence of Bhattacharya and the GBD? I can't venture an exact figure, but if you line up all the wicked, unqualified, strange, and misshapen beings who will guide Trump's administration into the stormy seas of fascism, not a single one—not Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Kari Lake, Jared Kushner, Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone else can be linked to the incalculable measures of suffering that Jay Bhattacharya shepherded into history.

This is how Benjamin Mateus, writing for the World Socialist Web Site described the GBD:

The AIER, a libertarian think-tank, which posits as their aim “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is engaged in a highly reactionary, anti-working-class, and anti-socialist enterprise. The declaration has been partly funded by the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists, and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.

Derrick Z. Jackson described the GBD as a plan for "herding people to slaughter." If any of you take issue with my favoring Jay Bhattacharya as Trump's most evil selection, when did Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tulsi Gabbard ever herd people to slaughter?

I am not denying that there are other abominable sociopaths who will be vying for crumbs at the master's table. Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary of the Interior respectively, might someday cause more deaths than the piddling few hundred thousand that I have speculatively traced to Bhattacharya. In fact, the wholesale, escalating assassination of the natural world will act in tandem with our disassembled, privatized medical system. You will get to live downstream from an industrial pig slaughterhouse, with no medical insurance, and no funding for public health.

Zeldin, Burgum, and Bhattacharya might be thought of as crossing guards for the grim reaper, or maybe you might prefer to picture them as scare crows, mannequins, or plastic fuck dolls—things that have no inner lives and serve as extensions of our fantasies.

Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit. Bhattacharya whined about school closings but never acknowledged the 6 million U.S. children now potentially ruined by long Covid.

As you read about the fires turning LA into an ash heap, and Trump's plans to drill and frack until the entire globe achieves end-Permian parity, be aware that the styrofoam inhabitants of Trump's administration will do no more to alleviate your misery than so many cardboard boxes sitting in the storage rooms of Amazon. If we want relief we'll have to plan unprecedented acts of resistance.

One last thought—look at the Rorschach blot below and ask yourself...

Is this an image that summons worries about free speech denied, or does this picture remind you that the oil industry owns our future?

U.S. President Donald Trump cares little about democracy, except in the most utilitarian sense. For Trump, democracy is a ladder that he can use to ascend to power. He is not interested in promoting democracy abroad or strengthening democracy at home. He cares only about power: corporate, presidential, national.

Before Trump, presidents frequently promoted U.S. democracy overseas, despite its obvious design flaws: elections won by candidates who lost the popular vote, wealthy people buying seats in Congress, redistricting to favor a particular party, a system dominated by two parties.

There won’t be any democracy promotion under Donald Trump. In his second inaugural, Trump promised to promote American power, not American principles. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he trumpeted. He promised to push American cars and promote the U.S. military, not least of which to retake the Panama Canal.

U.S. democracy has long been deformed by the influence of the wealthy. But now the playing field, under Trump, will tilt so dramatically that all but the richest will simply tumble off the edge.

It’s no great loss perhaps that the United States will be suspending its official democracy promotion. Other countries are better positioned to that kind of work. The South Korean people, for instance, impeached their leader Yoon Suk Yeol when he declared martial law, something the U.S. Congress failed to do twice with Donald Trump when he overstepped the law. A number of European countries have achieved a much higher level of civic participation and a lower amount of economic inequality than you’ll find in the United States.

The problem for the foreseeable future lies not with the exported version of U.S. democracy. It’s what Trump will do to American democracy at home.

Trump is a convicted felon who attempted to remain in power even after he lost the 2020 election. The case against him for breaking the law to stay in the White House was likely strong enough to result in a conviction. Avoiding prison was perhaps the chief motivation for Trump to win the 2024 elections. His victory led to the dismissal of the case.

To avoid a prison sentence, Trump resorted to lies, distortions, and threats to win the 2024 election. He also relied on the deep pockets of billionaire Elon Musk to sponsor deceptive ads and buy votes in swing states.

If he had lost the 2024 election, Trump was fully prepared to tear the country apart in an effort to prove that the election had been “stolen.” He did win, of course, though with only 49.9% of the vote, the smallest margin of victory in nearly 60 years.

Day One Dictator

Trump promised to be a dictator for his first day in office. It’s no surprise, then, that he issued the most executive orders of any president on inauguration day. Executive action is nothing new. Both Democrats and Republicans have collaborated in expanding the powers of the presidency. But Trump has gone beyond what other presidents have done, or instance to challenge the U.S. Constitution itself by declaring an end to birthright citizenship. He also pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists, which sends a disturbing message to the citizenry about the lack of consequences for those who attack the federal government.

Trump will also take a chainsaw to government—cutting the regulatory agencies that implement policy and keep Americans safe. Democracy, in the modern world, requires state power. By cutting back on federal authority, Trump will empower instead conservative states, corporations, and religious institutions.

The MAGA revolution is all about destroying public institutions, like government-mandated health insurance. Eliminating the Department of Education will only further undermine what religious institutions and hardline conservatives have been pushing for years: the expansion of private schools at the expense of public education.

Although Trump pitched himself as the hero of the “working man,” he has on the contrary created a Kremlin-like oligarchy around himself. Elon Musk is only the richest and most prominent of the dozen billionaires that Trump has selected for his cabinet. Other oligarchs, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have scrambled to curry favor with the returning president, turning such sycophancy into an astute investment decision.

America’s richest people expect to grow their wealth exponentially under Trump. After all, Musk himself made $170 billion just since Election Day, a few short months ago.

U.S. democracy has long been deformed by the influence of the wealthy. But now the playing field, under Trump, will tilt so dramatically that all but the richest will simply tumble off the edge.

Democracy in America has been around for over 200 years. Surely one man, no matter how many super-wealthy people he gathers in his circle, cannot unravel such an august institution. Democracy survived Trump’s first term. Surely, it will survive the abuses of his second.

Or will it?

Coup vs Civil War

The challenge that Trump poses lies not just in the policies he promotes, the public institutions he defunds and delegitimizes, or the wealth he redistributes upward. The new president threatens the very fabric of the country.

The handover of power went smoothly after the last election because the losing party respects the rule of law.

But the erosion of democratic norms under Trump suggests that the next presidential election in 2028 will not go as smoothly. An even more elderly Trump might defy the U.S. Constitution—and its two-term limit for presidents—and stay in office under some contrived state of emergency. Or he might usher his hand-picked successor into the White House in a similarly autocratic fashion.

Paradoxically, it’s the presence of a dozen billionaires in Trump’s inner circle that may save democracy—by fueling the wrath of the disenfranchised and prompting them to support an alternative to MAGA.

The best-case scenario, of course, would be a democratic election in 2028. But let’s say Trump’s successor loses. Trump has effectively said that any election that doesn’t go his way is illegitimate. Should a Trump-inspired uprising take place in 2028 to challenge a “stolen election,” it will be much better planned and executed than the one on January 6, 2021, just as Trump’s second term is much more organized than the first. Such a nation-wide insurrection following any disputed election outcome could unravel an already divided United States.

So, the worst-case scenario for the United States is a coup and the best-case scenario is a civil war? That does not bode well for American democracy.

What to Do?

The only way to avoid these scenarios of coup or civil war is to strengthen democratic institutions even as Trump tries to destroy them. This is no easy feat.

The obvious strategy is to bolster democracy at a state or local level, particularly in areas that did not vote for Trump. This makes a lot of sense, but it will, inevitably, deepen the divide between red and blue states and encourage the very civil-war dynamic it’s urgent to forestall.

Building up the capacity of California or Chicago to fend off authoritarian power grabs from a federal bureaucracy commandeered by Trump will necessarily absorb a lot of the time and energy of the mainstream resistance. It will also put anti-MAGA forces on the defensive as they scramble to file lawsuits to stop Trump’s actions.

But the only sustainable way to strengthen U.S. democracy is to build a movement that includes a lot of the voters who supported Trump. They voted for the current president because they wanted change. They didn’t vote for rule by the rich.

It’s often said that American democracy is being undermined by the wealthy and their capacity to buy elections. Now, paradoxically, it’s the presence of a dozen billionaires in Trump’s inner circle that may save democracy—by fueling the wrath of the disenfranchised and prompting them to support an alternative to MAGA.

Anger over a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich will make it more likely that any future lies about a “strong leader” and a “stolen election” will fall on deaf ears. It’s just a question of what political entity will mobilize that anger and turn it into an electoral force.

In early January, as one of his last acts in office, former U.S. President Joe Biden banned future offshore oil and gas drilling on more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters including the entire East Coast, West Coast, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico as well as the northern Bering Sea.

He did this using presidential powers granted under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which in 2019 a federal judge in Alaska ruled cannot be rescinded by a future president. This means, despite his day one executive order reversing Biden’s order, President Donald Trump will likely have to get Congress to pass legislation negating this drilling ban. Three Republican congressmen from Louisiana and Texas have already introduced legislation to do that, but may have a hard time getting fellow Republicans from states like South Carolina and Florida—where anti-drilling sentiment is strong—to go along.

It’s pretty clear why Biden did what he did, first to thwart Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” energy plan and to burnish his own environmental legacy. What is less clear to most people is why he included 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea off of Alaska in the drilling ban.

“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything.”

As a Biden White House fact-sheet explained it: “The Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area was established in 2016 and includes one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world—beluga and bowhead whales, walruses, and seals… the health of these waters is critically important to food security and to the culture of more than 70 coastal Tribes, including the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq people who have relied on these resources for millennia.”

So, what’s the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area? Established by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, it was an attempt to meet the concerns of both Alaska Natives and environmental scientists studying the rapidly changing conditions they were witnessing. Alaska and its waters are today warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world due to a climate phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” linked to vanishing sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean ice cover that reflects solar radiation back into space has retreated, the dark ocean waters exposed absorb ever greater amounts of heat leading to 2024 being listed as the hottest year on record going back to 1850. 2023 was the previous hottest year. The 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last decade.

This has led to dramatic changes for the fish and wildlife and for the subsistence-based communities of the Arctic who depend on these creatures for their survival. For example, a study published last month found that 4 million common murres, a seabird that frequents the area, recently died as the result of a marine heatwave. This was about half the state of Alaska’s population, and may be the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild bird.

The Bering Sea’s Alaska Native communities—some 70 federally recognized tribes—first requested action under Obama and got both a ban on destructive bottom trawl fishing in the 113,000-square-mile resilience area and a ban on oil drilling in about half the area (rescinded by Trump during his first term and now fully protected by Biden under the Lands Act), also a commitment for the Coast Guard to restrict shipping channels in areas where native communities are involved in fishing, hunting, and whaling (still not finalized by the Coast Guard) and a pledge to consult with these same communities moving forward. Three leading Alaska Native organizations—Kawerak, Inc., the Association of Village Council Presidents, and the Bering Sea Elders Group—released a joint statement on the day Biden acted expressing their “deepest appreciation and gratitude” to him for protecting waters that President Trump hopes to reopen to oil drilling.

I recently interviewed two women from St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles off the Alaskan mainland in the Bering Sea. Destiny Bristol Kushin is a 20-year-old college student working toward an associate degree in environmental sciences, and her grandmother Zinaida Melovidov is an elder who has lived on the island, with a population of just under 400 people, most of her life. They both talked about the decline of the murres that were hunted for meat and whose eggs were collected on a nearby island where they’ve all but disappeared since the die-off.

“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything,” Melovidov worries.

“Even in the last 20 years since I was born, you can see the differences in the environment, especially with the seasons. Our summers will be later and foggy where they used to be sunny,” Kushin notes. “Our winters aren’t as snowy. It’s mostly wet now, like rain and snow all during the winter time.”

I’ve heard similar concerns about climate impacts on lives and livelihoods from Alaska Natives in the Aleutians and Southwest Alaska whose villages are also at risk from erosion, flooding, and thawing permafrost.

Even if Biden’s drilling ban in the Bering Sea stands the test of Trump, other threats will remain including oil spills from Russian tankers passing through the 55-mile-wide Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia delivering oil to China via Russia’s Northern Sea Route of retreating Arctic ice. Russia’s oil trade with China has increased since Western sanctions were imposed following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Reflecting these tensions around oil, in 2023 the Russians refused to participate with the U.S. Coast Guard in a joint oil spill response exercise.

Even with drilling protections for coastal America, the U.S. will remain the world’s leading oil and gas producer, including the 14% of national production that comes from the western Gulf of Mexico where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster took place.

And, with President Trump’s commitment to produce ever more fossil fuels that drive climate disruption and contribute to extreme weather events from heatwaves in the Arctic to the Los Angeles’ firestorms, our problems with oil and gas remain far from over.

Last week, aerial photos from Los Angeles with blocks of homes reduced to ash hit social media timelines, leading people to understandably draw comparisons to Gaza. Destruction of entire neighborhoods is always heartbreaking. Home, where most of us spend a great deal of our time, shapes who we are. The memories and love a home can hold are much larger than whatever the square footage may be. Behind all the devastation are all the people in power that make all of this tragedy and grief possible in the first place.

Joe Biden’s term as president ended on Monday, and the world doesn’t have to guess what his legacy will be. The crimes he is responsible for are written into history with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, each one coming from a neighborhood his administration helped turn to ash. The drone images from Gaza and Los Angeles share the same hues of grey and heartache, and originate from the same flavors of greed and contempt for human dignity. And now, all of a sudden, we have a cease-fire, with no thanks to Biden. When I think of Joe Biden, I will think of every child I’ve seen dismembered and every home I’ve seen destroyed while I scrolled through social media for the last 15 months. And I will remember that none of it needed to happen; he greenlighted and funded the genocide of the Palestinian people. He, and powerful people like him, let insurance companies back out of insuring homes and fueled the climate crisis for decades to come.

Another clear demonstration of his inaction occurred last week, when he suddenly removed Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, a demand we’ve been making to his administration for four years. The designation, along with the U.S. embargo, has caused levels of deprivation the country hasn’t seen since the Soviet collapse. People in Cuba were starving because of Joe Biden’s decision to keep them on the SSOT list, and he only removed them on his way out the door.

I hope our impact eventually defines the legacies of the warmongers like Biden and Trump, so that the world cannot forget who they are or what they did.

A small part of accountability for Biden and his partners in genocide like former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, former State Department spokesperson Matt Miller, and others will be remembering the people that were killed in Gaza with their weapons shipments or because of their lies. Like George W. Bush, the man responsible for the death of a million Iraqis and the country’s destruction, who took up painting in his old age to make people forget what he had done in their name—Biden has time to change what people may think of him. We owe it to the Palestinian people to not develop amnesia while bombs could still rain over their heads. Biden could have ended the genocide at any moment, and he chose not to. And because of that, tens of thousands of children are dead, the only reason being that they were born in the largest open air prison in the world.

It’s hard to speak of legacies when the dust from the bombs dropped on Iraq hasn’t even settled. Babies are still being born in Fallujah with life-threatening deformities and diseases. For over a year, Israel continued to drop U.S.-made bombs and, on multiple occasions, chemical weapons on the people of Gaza. From the environmental impact of the nonstop bombardment to the public health outcomes of living without proper shelter for so long, the extent of Biden’s crimes in Gaza won’t be understood entirely for decades.

It’s also hard to speak of legacies as a new president who has promised to stay the course of genocide takes office. In reality, the genocide of Palestinians will be several U.S. presidents’ legacies—even before Biden.

Evaluating Biden’s legacy on the domestic and international stages shouldn’t be done separately. In fact, the struggles faced by regular people all over the world and across the country make a whole lot more sense when you realize our issues are inseparable. As homelessness reached an all-time high in the United States, Biden and Congress sent billions of dollars in “aid” to Israel and Ukraine. As homeless encampments were swept in Los Angeles as the city burned, Biden notified Congress of another $8 billion in weapons to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military. People are anxious every day about whether or not they will be able to pay rent, afford groceries, or their children’s medicine. While the people suffer, there only seems to be one thing that the people in power (no matter who it is) care about—maintaining global hegemony no matter the human cost. Every year of his presidency, just like every other president, Biden signed a Pentagon budget that allocated more money to war than ever before and failed to improve the lives of the masses. Biden’s legacy as a whole is a disdain for Palestinian life, and to some lesser degree, American life.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what people like myself, in the belly of the beast, ought to do to take responsibility for all the suffering our government, regardless of the president, has caused. I think of Che Guevara, who once said, “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all—you live in the belly of the beast.” As President Donald Trump returns to office to build his own legacy, and as Biden leaves behind four years and decades of consequences, I try very hard to remember that to be in this struggle is a privilege of mine. If I abhor the suffering forced on the Palestinians in Gaza, then I realize I live in the perfect place to do something about it. Trump and his new agenda are obstacles, but we’ve confronted plenty of obstacles under this system, which mobilizes all of its resources against the movement for peace.

When we finally win, I hope people remember our movement as one that took responsibility for our situation and found power when we thought we couldn’t. I hope our impact eventually defines the legacies of the warmongers like Biden and Trump, so that the world cannot forget who they are or what they did. Remember: It’s the people who can really define a president’s legacy. Let that propel you to take action and organize. Let that give you a glimmer of hope.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light, warming the planet. It actually absorbs infrared light, and the article has been edited to reflect this.

My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible—even if I still can’t say so publicly.

I’d like to move away from the coast, maybe even go north. But real estate in the interior is too pricey, especially at higher elevations away from the flood plains. Looking on the bright side, though, my bunker has held up alright so far, even during the usual Cat 7 hurricanes, and I’ve stocked plenty of canned soup. I do worry, though, about being submerged by a storm surge. No one wants to end up like those poor people in Galveston.

In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.

I only hope that the state police won’t find my solar panels, which charge my contraband batteries to keep the AC going down here. We’re all haunted by that Black August in Palm Beach. It turns out that they had 100% humidity then. Combine that with temperatures reaching 120ºF and it dead-on kills you. Your sweat just can’t cool you down anymore, and you end up with terminal heat stroke. Of course, most of them could have been saved by air conditioning if it hadn’t been for the blackout at that new nuclear plant. Bad timing. It turns out such plants use water for cooling and, that day, the local water was so hot they had to shut the plant down.

Tipping Point

There was an unforeseen climate tipping point we blundered into. Looking back, I now realize that the U.S. put out 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the year before—yes, before!—the Second Advent of Our Trump. Horrific as that may have been, it was only about 11% of total global emissions, which hit 41.6 billion metric tons that year before the Second Advent (up from 40.6 billion tons in 2023). In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.

Even a few years ago, such facts and figures would have seemed unbearably wonky to me. I didn’t realize my wife would divorce me over them and I’d end up alone here in my bunker, doomscrolling the dark web looking for the catastrophes they don’t let the mainstream media report anymore. Don’t worry, I use a virtual private network and I don’t think the NSA can trace me. The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.

Some people think we should flee the Big One. For me, it’s too late. The highways are a parking lot, and the price of gasoline is too steep because of the fracked fields going dry. Maybe Our Trump shouldn’t have banned EVs. And I can’t fly out of here anymore (even if I could afford to). It’s too hot for the airplanes to take off. I hadn’t known it, but flying depends on the air having a certain thickness, and hot air has less volume because the molecules speed up and spread around. That’s what Alfred, my PAIC (Personal AI Chatbot), told me when I asked him. Not sure I understand, but it doesn’t matter. The planes are grounded, and so am I.

The Resurrection and the Triumph of Coal

When Our Trump and Secretary of Energy Joe Manchin put billions into reviving Big Coal, that shot U.S. emissions up to 6 billion metric tons of CO2 in just a couple of years, then 7 billion, and so on, launching an international trend as Trumpist-style parties took over ever more governments globally.

As you might expect, once Elon Musk bankrolled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and helped put it in charge, its Fourth Reich held huge rallies in soccer stadiums where they piled up banned solar panels and wind turbine blades and burned them. Then they rounded up immigrants to use as slave labor in Germany’s revived coal mines. When the European Court of Justice ruled against them, the fascist government in Berlin promptly annexed Belgium. And that essentially marked the end of the European Union.

The Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?

Russia also doubled down on coal. Even in the early 2020s, its Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia was one of the world’s largest coal producers. When Our Trump gave Eastern Europe back to Moscow, the Russian Federation prohibited electric cars and heat pumps so it could sell its oil and gas. Poland predictably returned to being all coal all the time and the Le Pen cartel in France, taking its marching orders from Russia, soon legislated the same prohibitions on green tech. Europe’s carbon dioxide production soon skyrocketed.

But the worst problems lay in Asia, an area about which I’ve only recently started to get up to speed. The leaders of China and India insisted that they were damned if they would make sacrifices and risk labor unrest shutting down their coal industries, when the U.S. and Europe were planning to go all out promoting theirs. Imagine the Chinese communists being afraid of their own workers and, worse yet—something I hadn’t faintly realized then—but at the time half the coal mined in the world came from China and even before Our Great Leader came to power a second time, the Communist Party already had plans to mine a billion more tons of it per year.

With America’s implicit permission, Beijing promptly ramped up production. I found out that they were already putting out 70% of the world’s methane emissions from coal mines in the early ’20s. Even then, there were 1.5 million Chinese coal miners while more than 6% of that country still depended on coal plants for electricity. All those numbers only went up when the Communist Party, citing Our Trump, ramped up coal production, sending billions of tons more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Alfred says methane is up to 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even if for a shorter period of time.

In the early part of this century, India was already increasing its coal-fired power plants. When the Hindu nationalists fell in love with Our Trump, however, they became yet more bullish on coal. Their CO2 emissions went through the proverbial roof. They say that, given the smog in New Delhi, the capital, nowadays you can’t see two feet in front of you on a typical day, and 10% of Indians have chronic bronchitis.

The Indians had rejected criticisms of all those carbon-dioxide emissions from low-lying Bangladesh as “anti-Hindu propaganda.” Our Trump used to say that we’d just get more top-notch beachfront property out of sea-level rise, but now I realize that was a sick joke. If you keep heating up this planet, it melts the surface ice, which goes into the ocean and does indeed cause its level to rise. Warmer water also takes up more space, contributing to sea-level rise. So, the Bay of Bengal did indeed rise to claim the capital, Dhaka, along with 20% of the rest of the country. Famine left tens of millions of its people gaunt or skeletal. When millions of Bangladeshi climate refugees then tried to get into India, its army committed what’s now known as the Great Bangla Genocide. Historians say killings on that scale had never been carried out before.

Goodbye to Trump Tower

At an old, banned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site on the dark web I found a document that said, “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever—accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence.” That was from 2024, and whoever wrote it may now be in one of those reeducation camps for Beijing Ministry of State Security spies accused of promoting what the Trump Environmental Protection Agency branded “the climate hoax.” I might find myself there, too, if anyone discovers just how I feel these days.

I now realize that scientists have known for over a century that carbon dioxide absorbs the infrared light reflected off the Earth’s surface, keeping more of the sun’s heat in our atmosphere. I guess those UV rays used to hit this planet and then radiate back into outer space at a significantly greater rate, leaving us so much cooler than we are now. I never paid attention to any of this back in the twenties of this century. Since then, however, I’ve had time to get up to speed. After all, what else is there to do in this bunker?

Believe me, it was kind of embarrassing in 2034, even to me, when The Tower of Our Trump collapsed in Manhattan. Of course, as he said then, it was absolutely not his fault. Instead, he blamed the immigrant construction workers who built it, but they weren’t to blame, either. These days, at least 3 or 4% of the buildings in New York City are at risk from groundwater table rise. And it isn’t just that. Every time another big storm hits, flooding damages tens of thousands of buildings and turns the subway into a swimming pool.

Worse yet, more than a third of the buildings in New York are at risk from storm surges in year 24 of Our Trump. I read somewhere that the southern tip of Manhattan, the East Village, the Upper East Side, and the Tribeca and Canal Street areas now flood for some months of the year. Likewise, the Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?

And to jump across what’s left of this country for a moment, today I caught someone on the dark web reporting from Phoenix, Arizona. It seems like the population there is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Half of the year now it’s dangerously hot and there isn’t enough water. And the electricity blackouts that take out your AC are evidently a nightmare and a half. Same problem, hot river water can’t cool the plant equipment.

That fellow reporting from Phoenix said those local diehards who refuse to leave call themselves Fremen like in the remake of the Dune film and say they need stillsuits. When the Proud Boys won the election for city council there, Our Trump told them to deep-six the local climate action plan, which he swore was for “pussies.” Painting everything white, he insisted, made the city look like a tomb and he wanted the urban tree cover to be cut down for firewood.

Trump’s will be done, as they say.

At least Phoenix is still there. Los Angeles wasn’t so lucky. As it got drier and drier every fall, the Santa Ana winds regularly whipped up wildfires, and one neighborhood after another was turned into cinders. When Beverly Hills went up in flames the way Pacific Palisades had 20 years earlier, that was the nail in the coffin.

The Big One?

Now, I spend my days thinking about the Big One, about how it could all go down. When Chinese forces fired on that American destroyer off Taiwan, the Trump dynasty went ballistic. They said they would bring pain to Beijing like the world had never seen before. They didn’t want to send in ships or troops though, claiming their Dad had been against wasting money on foreign wars.

That was when someone on Fox & Friends (the only “news” show still allowed) suggested a symbolic response, an attack on that big new Chinese military base on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The Trump family immediately ordered a nuclear strike there. I hear Tiffany was the only one who didn’t think it was a good idea. But it melted a lot of the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and the rest of it slid into the ocean. They say it will raise sea level by two feet globally and pretty darn quickly, too, because of that nuke melting so much surface ice. Count on one thing: it will truly be a Trumpocalypse.

That would put my bunker under, of course. I only hope it’s watertight.

Following every Israeli war on Gaza, numerous narratives emerge. Some claim victory for one side and defeat for the other, while others—knowingly or unknowingly—attempt to exploit the aftermath for their own purposes.

The latter is not always nefarious, as the humanitarian calamities resulting from Israel's actions are undeniable—especially as Israel and its allies often use aid to Palestinians as bargaining chips for political concessions or to exert pressure on the strip and its leadership.

This dynamic often results in the exploitation of Palestinian suffering to raise funds, sometimes by organizations with high overhead costs, leaving independent researchers puzzled over the discrepancies between the funds collected and the funds allocated.

The new narrative must position Gaza as the heart of the Palestinian struggle, as a model for humanity, and as the central path for the liberation of Palestine—which, thanks to Gaza, now seems closer than ever.

Additionally, Gaza lacks an independent commission to track all received funds and their usage, which leads to controversies and public accusations at times.

Exploiting Gaza

However, this is a topic for another discussion. The issue at hand here is the portrayal of Gaza's victims—particularly children—without dignity or respect for their privacy, all in the name of helping Palestinian victims.

Throughout the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, the desperation of many Palestinian families, faced with famine and extermination, led them to seek help from international donors, often turning to online donation platforms.

Many of these personal fundraisers were, of course, legitimate, as Gaza was entirely pushed past the point of starvation. Yet, suspicious accounts also appeared, raising money for individuals—real or imagined—who had not sought assistance.

Perhaps future researchers will uncover how Gaza has been exploited by online profiteers and determine how to regulate such practices.

We hesitated to raise this issue during the war, fearing that a single misstep could have dire consequences for an individual or a family. Now that a cease-fire has been signed, it is crucial to open the conversation to scrutiny.

Reclaiming the Narrative

The latest Israeli war on Gaza was not ordinary, but then, no previous wars have been anything but destructive and lethal. For Israel, it was a genocide—a war aimed at exterminating Gaza's population through mass killings and driving the survivors into Egypt.

Thanks to the legendary steadfastness of Gaza's resistance and the unbending spirit of its people, Israel failed. As Israeli writer David K. Rees said, "For the first time, Israel just lost a war"

This is the Gaza that most Palestinians want us to know and remember—a symbol of collective strength and resistance. Their hope is that this message can reverberate around the world, not only to elevate the centrality of Gaza and Palestine in all political discourse but also to inspire oppressed groups globally to fight for their rights unapologetically.

Sadly, though sometimes understandably, that message is not one many are eager to champion.

Many will continue to see Palestinians only as victims. While this narrative may hold Israel accountable for its genocide, it fails to recognize the agency Palestinians have earned and deserve.

However, at times, this viewpoint can be understandable, especially in charitable causes, where the immediate need for aid must be addressed. Yet, it is possible to strike a balance—between meeting the urgent needs of victims and honoring their dignity, resilience, and collective power.

Not Hapless Victims

The exploitation of Palestinians, especially their children, as tools for fundraising must end. Gaza's children, many of whom are amputees, should not be paraded in the most degrading manner to appeal to wealthy donors. The world already knows what Israel has done to the Palestinian people—especially the children of Gaza, who suffer the highest rate of child amputations globally.

This is not to deny the suffering. We are proud and humbled by every Palestinian child—whether martyred, injured, amputated, or emotionally scarred. However, instead of portraying them as helpless victims, we must celebrate them as poets, artists, reporters, and representatives of their people.

The time has come for a new narrative, one fundamentally different from those that have emerged in the wake of previous wars. The new narrative must position Gaza as the heart of the Palestinian struggle, as a model for humanity, and as the central path for the liberation of Palestine—which, thanks to Gaza, now seems closer than ever.

Don't Help Israel

To betray this fact is to betray Gaza and all its sacrifices. A victim-only narrative that ignores the larger political context risks undoing the gains made by Palestinian popular resistance in Gaza and inadvertently helping Israel reintroduce a fear-driven discourse. After 15 months of relentless genocide, Israel has failed to instill fear in Gaza's population—and it must not succeed in rebuilding it.

Yes, we must spare no effort to help Gaza rebuild and resume its historical role as the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement. But we must do so with sensitivity, compassion, and above all, respect for Gaza and its unparalleled sacrifices.

It’s hard to say who is the worst attorney general in American history. The candidates are many and comprise a veritable rogue’s gallery of sadists, reactionaries, and incompetents. They range from A. Mitchell Palmer, mastermind of the original Red Scare that decimated the left in the wake of the First World War, to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and William Pelham Barr, who sacrificed the rule of law in service to Donald Trump.

Merrick Garland may not share the malignancies of his fellow train wrecks, but he deserves to be in the discussion. Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant and fair-minded federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was torpedoed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans, but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.

After his appointment to helm the DOJ, Garland had one overarching mission: to swiftly convene a grand jury to investigate Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. This was a task a third-year law student could easily have accomplished. Garland failed, abjectly.

Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump.

Probable cause for an early indictment was abundant and obvious. On January 6, millions of Americans watched Trump stand on the Ellipse at the south end of the White House and urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Millions watched the actual assault that followed, blow by medieval blow. Even the corrupt McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in February 2021, declared on the Senate floor, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day [January 6].”

Instead of targeting Trump and his chief lieutenants immediately, Garland set out to arrest and try the foot soldiers of the uprising. And while he did a commendable job in that respect (eventually charging more than 1,500 with federal crimes), he dithered on Trump until November 2022, when he appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to probe Trump for the insurrection and absconding from the White House with a trove of highly classified documents.

By then, it was too late.

Although Smith secured an indictment of Trump in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy, obstruction, and election subversion on August 1, 2023, the indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court (Trump v. United States) the following July in a decision that granted Trump sweeping and unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution.

Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong conservative activist with an undeserved reputation as a judicial institutionalist, the ruling is arguably the worst edict handed down by the high court since the Dred Scott case of 1857. “Trump v. United States is distinct as a deliberate attack on the core institutions and principles of the republic, preparing the way for a MAGA authoritarian regime much as Dred Scott tried to do for the slavocracy,” wrote Sean Wilenz in a scathing article for The New York Review of Books.

Smith also indicted Trump in Florida in the documents case, but that prosecution was subsequently scuttled by District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, an inexperienced MAGA sycophant whom Trump installed on the federal bench in the runup to the 2020 election.

In addition to Garland, the Supreme Court, and Cannon, former President Joe Biden also shares responsibility for letting Trump off the hook. From Day 1, Biden should have used the bully pulpit to attack, isolate, and destroy Trump and his MAGA base. Instead, he pursued a politics of accommodation, preaching a return to the false neoliberal normalcy of bipartisanship. Most critically of all, Biden decided to seek a second term, when it was apparent to everyone with two eyes and ears that he was no longer fit, either physically or mentally, for another stint behind the Resolute Desk. With Biden’s approval rating plunging to 40%, former Vice President Kamala Harris had little to no chance of defeating Trump at the polls.

But standing atop the heap, Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump before the forces of reaction had time to regroup and reorganize. They are now in control.

As Palestinians in Gaza celebrate the announcement of the cease-fire, the relief is palpable but mixed with grief over the atrocities that continue to unfold. For many, the cease-fire serves as a moment of hope, yet the U.S.-Israeli war continues to take lives. This was heartbreakingly illustrated in a scene shared on X, where a man, overwhelmed by grief, calls out to his deceased sister, "Hala, get up, the war is over. Get up, Hala, we will leave Gaza and travel abroad. Get up!"

Such grief underscores a painful reality: Even in the moments leading up to a cease-fire, Israel has often escalated its assaults, leaving devastation in its wake. History shows that Israel is not to be trusted to uphold cease-fire agreements, as it is frequently the first to break them.

While the conflict's history predates August 2005, this analysis begins there to focus on the fighting and subsequent cease-fire agreements.This list is far from exhaustive and does not cover all the assaults and skirmishes between Israel, Hamas, and other militant factions in the Gaza Strip.

2005-2008

Despite Israel's August 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the agreements made under the "Agreement on Movement and Access," Israel maintained its illegal and brutal siege on Gaza, occupying its airspace and territorial waters, and severely restricting the flow of goods and people. The destruction of Gaza's airport and seaport in 2001 by Israel, combined with frequent border closures, left residents with no reliable way to obtain essential supplies.

In response, Palestinians relied on underground tunnels to smuggle essential supplies like food, medicine, and construction materials blocked by Israel. These tunnels became an economic lifeline, sustaining Gaza's residents amid the harsh restrictions of the blockade, which had been suffocating them since the signing of the Oslo Accords. A tunnel trader in Gaza described the tunnels as "the lungs through which Gaza breathes" to journalist Nicolas Pelham, for the Institute for Palestine Studies. It is true that weapons, and materials for homemade weapons, also come through these tunnels; however, Palestinians, like all people, have the right to self-defense.

The devastation of Operation Cast Lead, compounded by Israel's failure to adhere to the easing of the blockade as outlined in the cease-fire agreement, set the stage for further hostilities and repeated cycles of violence and cease-fires in the years that followed.

On June 10, 2006, journalist Steven Erlanger, writing for The New York Times, published an article titled "Hamas Fires Rockets at Israel After Calling Off Truce." However, a closer reading of the article reveals that it was Israel that broke the cease-fire by killing a civilian family who were enjoying a picnic on the beach. In retaliation, Hamas launched rocket attacks, much of which, according to the Israeli military, fell within Gaza itself.

On June 25, 2006, Hamas captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In response, Israel continued its military assaults on Gaza, while Hamas retaliated with rocket attacks. Finally, in June 2008, Egypt brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Under the terms of the agreement, Hamas would halt its rocket attacks, while Israel would lift its economic siege on Gaza and cease its military assaults and assassinations. Although Hamas adhered to its commitments, Israel maintained its military blockade, thus breaking the terms of the cease-fire.

An analysis by the Carter Center concluded that the 2008 cease-fire temporarily reduced violence, but Israel failed to address Gaza's humanitarian crisis due to its siege. Before this cease-fire, Israeli assaults caused an average of 49 Palestinian deaths per month in Gaza, compared to one Israeli fatality during the same period caused by a rocket attack by Hamas. Although violence decreased during the truce, restrictions on the movement of goods and people persisted, with imports at just 27% of pre-blockade levels and crossings at Rafah (with Egypt) and Erez (with Israel) severely limited. The ongoing restrictions undermined the cease-fire, fueling frustrations in Gaza.

Hostilities resumed in November 2008 after an Israeli attack killed six Hamas militants. This escalation eventually led to Israel launching a devastating assault on the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008, dubbed "Operation Cast Lead." For 22 days, Israel relentlessly bombarded Gaza while barring international media and aid agencies from entering the strip. The assault resulted in the deaths of over 1,400 Palestinians and left countless others injured. In contrast, Israelis sustained 13 deaths, three of whom were civilians.

Israel's conduct was so egregious that the United Nations Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) independent fact-finding mission, led by Richard Goldstone—"a Jew and Zionist," as described by British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in The Guardian—concluded in its report, The Goldstone Report, that Israel's assault on Gaza was, in part, directed at the civilians of Gaza. It was not just Hamas that was in Israel's line of fire.

Egypt once again brokered a cease-fire deal, with Hamas stipulating the easing of the blockade. However, Israel failed to follow through on its commitments, maintaining its siege on Gaza.

2012–2019

The devastation of Operation Cast Lead, compounded by Israel's failure to adhere to the easing of the blockade as outlined in the cease-fire agreement, set the stage for further hostilities and repeated cycles of violence and cease-fires in the years that followed.

Frustrations reached a boiling point when, on November 14, 2012, Israel launched yet another major assault on Gaza, lasting eight days, dubbed "Operation Pillar of Defense." During this war, Israel killed 167 Palestinians, including 33 children. Hamas' rocket attacks killed four Israeli civilians and two soldiers.

Predictably, another cease-fire agreement was reached after Israel carried out its latest instance of "mowing the lawn." Like previous cease-fires, this agreement called for easing restrictions on Gaza. However, Israel failed to honor its commitments, keeping the siege intact and severely limiting the movement of goods and people.

In April 2014, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority set aside their differences and formed a unity government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government were stunned, leading them to halt peace talks with the PA. This was despite the fact that the reconciliation government recognized Israel as a state, essentially accepting the two-state solution and adherence to seeking a political solution rather than through armed resistance. Despite this, Israel sought a pretext to launch another war on Gaza, aiming to undermine the reconciliation within the Palestinian political factions. The abduction of three Israeli settler teenagers in the West Bank provided that pretext. Israel accused Hamas of their murders without providing any proof, while Hamas denied the allegations. In response, Israel imposed collective punishment on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, killing nine civilians, including a 15-year-old.

As was becoming routine, Israel launched a full-scale military assault dubbed "Operation Protective Edge." The United Nations estimated over 2,100 Palestinians were killed, including 495 children and 253 women, highlighting the devastating human toll. Meanwhile, 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians were reportedly killed by Hamas rocket fire during this operation. UNRAW described the war as "catastrophic, unprecedented, and unparalleled in Gaza, since at least the start of the Israeli occupation in 1967 and further eroded whatever resilience the people in Gaza still have left."

After 50 days of assault on Gaza, Israel and Hamas once again agreed to a cease-fire brokered by Egypt. The terms of the agreement included the cessation of hostilities and the lifting of the siege. Despite the cease-fire agreement, Israel continued to enforce its siege, undermining the deal.

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem documented the aftermath, reporting: "To add insult to injury, some voices in Israel have glorified the damage and even demanded a harsher approach. Meanwhile, thousands of Gazans continue to pay the price." Similarly, Defense for Children International (DCI), a children's rights group, referred to the conflict as "a war waged on Gaza's children." The report detailed, "Children were killed in their homes by Israeli missiles, while sheltering in schools by high-explosive Israeli artillery shells, and in the streets by Israeli drone-fired missiles and artillery shells as they attempted to escape the onslaught with their families."

As a result, the situation returned to the status quo that favored Israel. The West Bank and Gaza remained not only physically but also politically severed.

The next significant event occurred on March 30, 2018, when Palestinians began"The Great March of Return"—nonviolent protests along the fence separating Gaza from Israel. Every Friday, Palestinians marched and protested, demanding an end to the siege and the right to return to their ancestral homes, which were illegally seized by Israel in 1948 and 1967.

Israel responded to these nonviolent protests with lethal force, killing 266 people and injuring 30,000 civilians. The demonstrations lasted nearly two years. By the end, thousands of Palestinians suffered permanent and debilitating injuries.

Meanwhile, Israel continued its siege on Gaza with the assistance of Egypt, which kept the Rafah border crossing closed to Palestinians.

2021

In May 2021, the Jerusalem District Court ordered dozens of Palestinians, who had lived for generations in their family homes in Sheikh Jarrah in Occupied East Jerusalem, to vacate their residences to make way for Jewish settlers. This action has been described by many as ethnic cleansing, carried out through judicial rulings, the use of lethal force, and acts of settler violence.

Protests erupted in solidarity with the families of Sheikh Jarrah across the Occupied West Bank and among Palestinians inside Israel, including those holding Israeli citizenship.

On May 9, Israeli police stormed the occupied Masjid Al-Aqsa, Islam's third holiest site, during Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan, injuring 250 Palestinians. Simultaneously, Israeli mobs rampaged through Jerusalem, committing acts of terror. In response, Hamas warned Israel to cease its actions in Sheikh Jarrah and at Al-Aqsa, eventually firing rockets into Israeli territory, when Israel ignored their warnings.

From May 10 to May 21, 2021, Israel launched an intense bombing campaign on Gaza. During this campaign, the al-Jalaa building, which housed major news agencies, was bombed under the pretext of alleged terrorist activity. However, after an investigation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) dismissed these claims and declared the bombing of al-Jalaa and other buildings as war crimes. Following these events, Egypt brokered a cease-fire deal, ending the escalation.

DCI declared 2021 the deadliest year for Palestinian children since Operation Cast Lead, reporting casualties in both Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Current Cease-Fire

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing hundreds and capturing 250 Israeli hostages. In response, Israel initiated a relentless carpet bombing campaign on Gaza that has continued for 15 months, causing widespread destruction and leveling large swaths of the Gaza Strip, rendering them uninhabitable.

According to The Lancet, the world's leading respected medical journal, a study published on January 9, 2025, estimates that the death toll in Gaza is underreported by 41%. On December 30, 2024, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon, stated on Democracy Now that the actual death toll might be closer to 300,000 people, highlighting the immense scale of human suffering and the challenges in accurately quantifying the casualties.

The U.S.-Israel war on Gaza also became a central issue in the 2024 Presidential elections, influencing the transition from the Biden-Harris administration to President Donald Trump. As the Biden-Harris administration ended amid a significant political defeat for former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats, Trump seized the opportunity to outshine and further humiliate former President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Staying true to his pledge to the Muslim and Arab community, Trump acted decisively to negotiate a cease-fire.

For true peace to take root, these cease-fire agreements must go beyond temporary pauses in violence.

Whether Trump will continue on this path of peace as president remains to be seen. During his previous tenure, Trump oversaw the creation of the Abraham Accords, brokered by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The accords facilitated normalization between Israel and several Arab and Muslim states, but many view them as an attempt to undermine the Palestinian cause by sidestepping a political solution to their struggle.

Additionally, Trump's presidency left a controversial legacy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, marked by pro-Israel policies that deepened Palestinian hardships. Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, endorsing sovereignty over the Golan Heights, closing the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Washington office, and cutting $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority destabilized Palestinian governance and undermined their pursuit of justice and self-determination.

Conclusion

Cease-fires are frequently established following Israeli military operations and wars, but repeated violations by Israel often lead to their collapse. The ongoing siege and blockades imposed after these agreements prevent Gaza's recovery and exacerbate already dire humanitarian conditions.

Israel's long-standing pattern of violating cease-fires is well-documented, yet the United States and the international community often look the other way. For example, the most recent cease-fire agreement between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel serves as a stark reminder of Israel's record of non-compliance.

Imad K. Harb, director of Research and Analysis for the Arab Center of Washington, D.C., noted: "The Israeli Army violated the cease-fire from the beginning and continues to do so more than a week after it went into effect, with some 129 violations by December 4. Israel also violated the cease-fire on December 6 and 7, killing at least seven civilians. This means that all bets are off that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government could be trusted to see peace through in southern Lebanon."

This record of violations raises serious doubts about Israel's willingness to uphold peace agreements elsewhere, including Gaza.

For true peace to take root, these cease-fire agreements must go beyond temporary pauses in violence. They must address the root causes of the conflict: Israel's illegal siege of Gaza, the blockades, the systemic oppression of Palestinians, and the ongoing Occupation of Palestine since 1948. Without meaningful action to uphold commitments and ensure accountability, Gaza's suffering will persist, and the fragile hope offered by cease-fires will remain an illusion.

Beyond cease-fire violations, Israel's siege has profound implications for the fundamental rights of Palestinians. Freedom of movement is essential for the realization of other basic rights, including the right to life, access to medical care, education, livelihood, and family unity. Yet Israel's ongoing blockade prevents Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from exercising these rights. The isolation of Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison, leaves its people cut off from the rest of the world and trapped in worsening humanitarian conditions, unable to rebuild their lives or secure their future.

This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers.

Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: The troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years—more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way.

An Uncertain Future

Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies, and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.

Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about 4 to 5 million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.

As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort.

It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border—a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.

Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.

A Merging of Powers

In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the U.S. to consolidate its military, intelligence, and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.

CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state, and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.

Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.

Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: The flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general. There, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed state National Guard members to prevent CBP from actually processing arriving migrants, complaining that “the only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border.” Abbott’s planned standoff marked the first time a governor had deployed a state national guard against federal orders since 1957, when Gov. Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep Black children from attending an elementary school under federal orders.

The Strange Bedfellows Who Would Implement Trump’s Desires

Military troops who would no doubt have to step in to implement migrant deportation plans as massive as Trump’s would occupy a similarly complicated position, both as outsiders on the local scene and as those charged (nominally at least) with protecting innocent lives. Stranger yet, a small but significant slice of any set of troops asked to take part in such deportations would themselves be immigrants. Five percent, or 1 in 20 servicemembers in our military, were not born here. And there’s nothing new about that. Since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of noncitizens have served in America’s wars. During times of hostility, which (officially speaking) include all the years since the War on Terror began in 2001, the federal government expedited the legal path of those immigrant troops to citizenship. It remains unclear how a military that has long been diverse will respond to orders to brutalize people, some of whom may come from their very own communities.

As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort. Culturally, our troops understand both migration and multiculturalism because they have to adapt again and again to new towns or cities where residents don’t see them as real members of their communities, where it’s hard to find doctors and childcare within the military’s anemic infrastructure, and still harder to find these services in communities about which they lack knowledge and connections. In the most challenging of such cases, servicemembers and their families end up in countries where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, and where they may encounter justifiable hostility towards their presence.

Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.

The experiences of the myriad groups I see in my practice and know in my broad military community overlap in often profound ways that bring images of immigrants to my mind. Many in such populations understand in their bones what it’s like to be the object of local attention, curiosity, even hostility when they venture out each day. They know what it means to constantly translate from your own language and world into that of a local one (or navigate life without knowledge of the native language at all). They also know what it’s like to have all too few resources to handle a medical emergency or an event like the illness or even the death of a loved one that neither the military nor local resources can help with.

I know one military family whose members struggled for two years in a foreign post because one of their children had a physical disability that neither the military nor the local educational system could accommodate, forcing the military spouse to homeschool. When that spouse came down with a severe case of Covid-19 during the pandemic, they searched long and hard for an appropriate doctor to provide outpatient care so that she didn’t have to leave her young children.

Their experiences mirror those of many I see within migrant communities of color here in the U.S., who come up short when they seek educational and health services for children with special needs, and who suffered more gravely during the Covid-19 pandemic due to overcrowded hospitals as well as social isolation and lack of enough connections to care for young family members when one got ill. It’s no wonder that two groups among us with some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality are military families and immigrants from poor countries.

Violence Touches Us All

Broadly speaking, what those two distinctive groups have in common is that, in this century, they felt the most pressure when it came to dealing with this country’s global imperial desires, either by fighting our remarkably disastrous post-9/11 wars or by finding themselves forced to pick up and start over amid the never-ending destruction of those very wars. To end that cycle of migration-as-combat and combat-as-migration, a better world would not dream of kicking out the migrants in this country. Instead, it would be working to bring back the troops from all the places where they are currently still engaged, rather than preparing for conflicts that will only help to create more migrants.

The United States should stop organizing military “exercises” in places like Saudi Arabia and Somalia; stop training troops in countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan; and cease drone and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, among other examples of our military involvement abroad. We should just get out. And we should start funneling some of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve channeled annually into weapons production into our education system, healthcare, and green infrastructure here at home, so that there’s room for everyone, immigrants included, to be safe and cared for in the communities where they live.

Otherwise, if President Trump manages to realize even a modest part of the immigrant deportation goals he and his political allies have outlined, the bulk of the work of ejection will be done by those for whom it may be the most morally devastating. Many more of our troops than he could ever imagine will, I suspect, be unnerved by what they have in common with the people they’re charged with deporting from their adoptive homeland.

Yes, this may very well be wishful thinking on my part, but I do believe that, Donald Trump or not, our common humanity is likely to win out in the end. After years of studying America’s post-9/11 wars from a range of viewpoints (and listening to those deeply disturbed by their War on Terror experiences), the largest commonality I find among our troops is not a desire to take up arms or fight terrorists in distant lands, or even the experience of being personally victimized—hunted, shot, tortured, or maimed. Rather, it’s the trauma of hurting another human being. It’s wrought from looking a Taliban soldier in the eye at a checkpoint in Kabul and realizing he’s human just like you, or separating a suspected opposition fighter from his spouse and kids during an arrest. It’s the scream of a child whose parent you shot during a raid to prevent an attack on you.

In no small part, the stress of those experiences also came from having to leave your own children for months at a time, knowing that the youngest might not even remember you when you return, or telling your teenager that she has to abandon everything she knows—boyfriend, school, sports teams—to go to a new military town where no one will even know her name. Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.

Thanks to Donald Trump, at least some of those troops will undoubtedly face the choice of having to do it all again, this time on our own soil. Unless they pause at the memory of what that may be like, Americans could find themselves in an unrecognizable land. It will be a nightmare if, his second time in the White House, Donald Trump launches a war on terror domestically against migrants, because that would be a war on America itself.

Last week, mediators announced an agreement between Israel and Hamas to a cease-fire in the devastating Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025, which went into effect on Sunday, January 19—the day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th President of the United States. This agreement will stop warfare for six weeks, lead to the release of dozens of Israeli hostages in Gaza and hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel, allow Gazans to return to the remnants of their homes, and let humanitarian aid into Gaza. Importantly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently warned that the cease-fire is temporary and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would remain in parts of the occupied Gaza Strip. Moreover, after the cease-fire announcement on Wednesday, January 15, the IDF intensified its airstrikes against Gaza, killing at least 120 Palestinians.

Assuming it is adhered to by all parties, a temporary cease-fire will bring some relief to a Gaza Strip devastated by unprecedented levels of Israeli military bombardment, as well as Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners. For the last 15 months since Hamas’ attack of Israel on October 7, 2023 that killed over 1,000 Israelis and took hundreds hostage, Netanyahu’s IDF dropped the equivalent of several Hiroshima-level nuclear bombs on the densely populated Gaza Strip. Around 68% of the IDF’s weaponry came from the U.S. during this time under the Biden-Harris administration, who spent an unprecedented $22.76 billion in arms transfers to Israel during the first year of the war and blocked multiple cease-fire efforts in the United Nations, prolonging what leading human rights organizations have described as a genocidal attack on Gaza.

The American-armed IDF wiped out entire multigenerational lineages of families, orphaned children, bombed hospitals and universities, destroyed ancient mosques and churches, and permanently ended almost 50,000 lives. As an occupying military, the IDF cut off food, water, and electricity to Gaza during this time—creating conditions to bring about population elimination through mass starvation, one of the United Nations’ criteria of genocide.

In the face of the potential dangers associated with Trump’s second presidency, how can concerned Americans advocate for a permanent cease-fire, accountability, and repair in Israel-Palestine?

Therefore, while President Joe Biden ended the very last breaths of his presidency with the beginnings of a temporary cease-fire in Israel-Palestine, his principal legacy in Gaza is one of arming an unchecked genocide for almost a year and a half that wrought mass destruction, death, and irreversible damage upon a vulnerable refugee population mass incarcerated within a 140-square mile strip of land. In the face of Biden’s ineffectiveness in achieving a lasting cease-fire earlier, some are attributing this cease-fire to President Trump’s team, who recently placed pressure on Netanyahu to come to a deal with Hamas. Author and social activist Naomi Klein, however, warns that Netanyahu, who leads a far-right coalition in Israel with religious fundamentalist elements, agreed to a cease-fire as “a kind of welcome gift” for Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s track record and the apocalyptic ideology of his white Christian nationalist base show that we should remain vigilant about the prospects of a second Trump presidency aggravating prospects for permanent peace, justice, and equality in Israel-Palestine.

Indeed, 80% of white American Evangelicals voted for Trump, forming a significant part of his overall coalition. According to religion scholar Bradley Onishi in his 2023 book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next, 80% of white American Evangelicals can be classified as white Christian nationalists, or those who believe in a Christian identity of a United States chosen to play an exceptional role in world affairs and that white people deserve to remain at the top of economic, political, and social hierarchies. Owing to their apocalyptic view of the future, white Christian nationalists have been leading voices in the U.S. since World War II in favor of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians—including during the Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025.

An October 2024 poll found that 57% of white Evangelicals had confidence in Netanyahu to handle world affairs—even in light of his genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. The recent sermons of John Hagee—Texas-based white Evangelical pastor, Trump supporter, and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the leading Christian pro-Israel organization in the U.S. with 10 million members—reveal that Christian fundamentalists perceive the Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025 as part of a totalizing Battle of Armageddon. According to this worldview, following attacks on Israel during the end of times, a vengeful Judeo-Christian God would wage unrestricted warfare on Israel’s enemies to eliminate them through brute force, secure “the Jewish right to the promised land—all of it,” and permanently foreclose possibilities for a two-state solution. In Hagee’s words, “Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, leads his army the church triumphant to annihilate those who have desired to attack Israel.” This warfare would eventually engulf the world, leading to mass violence and suffering—but prior, Christians would be transported to Heaven.

Given his white Christian nationalist base, it should come as no surprise that Trump during his first presidency actively damaged prospects for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Now that we are about a year and a half into a genocide of the Gaza Strip with a pause for six weeks, concerned Americans must remain vigorously attentive to Trump potentially deteriorating a fragile peace. Animated by his white Christian nationalist base’s call for enabling Netanyahu to finish his ethnic cleansing campaign of the Gaza Strip, Trump might further entrench a Jewish supremacist status quo in Israel-Palestine.

In the face of the potential dangers associated with Trump’s second presidency, how can concerned Americans advocate for a permanent cease-fire, accountability, and repair in Israel-Palestine? We can start by following the lead of Palestinians themselves. Founded in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, the global, nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement calls on institutions and individuals around the world to boycott and withdraw investments from companies that profit from the violation of Palestinian human rights. The BDS Movement aims to pressure Israel into adhering to its obligations to Palestinians under international law: ending its military occupation of Palestinian lands, enshrining equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel into Israeli law, and allowing Palestinians in exile in the diaspora the right to return to their ancestral communities. It is modeled after the global anti-Apartheid movement that, through economic pressure, helped lead South Africa into multiracial democracy.

Healing in Israel-Palestine is realistically going to take a lot of work in the face of Netanyahu’s Biden-enabled genocidal assault on Gaza and a second Trump presidency energized by white Christian nationalism. Even still, we must not allow ourselves to become paralyzed with fear of the daunting tasks ahead. We must play our roles to organize for permanent peace, justice, and equality. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested regarding the Vietnam War, “Even when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,” we must not be “mesmerized by uncertainty”; “we must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision.

Citizens United, while purporting to address the specific issue of corporate speech, effectively invalidated almost all limits on so-called independent political spending (i.e., money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party, although it is often spent in close cooperation with them). The decision ushered in an era in which super PACs—outside groups that can fundraise and spend without limit as long as they maintain some notional separation from campaigns—now deploy massive amounts of money to influence American elections. Most of it comes from a minuscule group of the wealthiest donors and special interest groups, whose political influence has greatly expanded, as has the potential for political corruption.

The court’s decision and others that followed shaped the 2024 election to a greater degree than any that came before it. Most notably, President Donald Trump substantially trailed former Vice President Kamala Harris in traditional campaign donations, which are subject to legal limits and must be disclosed. Yet he was able to compensate for this disadvantage by outsourcing much of his campaign to super PACs and other outside groups funded by a handful of wealthy donors. While such groups had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in previous cycles, this was the first time they successfully took on many of the other core functions of a general election presidential campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their activities unquestionably would have been illegal before Citizens United.

Roughly 44% ($481 million) of all the money raised to support Trump came from just 10 individual donors.

The donors who funded the president’s campaign and leveraged other resources to help him—most strikingly Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and owner of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter)—have played an unprecedented role in his transition, including shaping policy and meeting with world leaders. Musk in particular was instrumental in derailing a bipartisan budget deal in Congress in December, weeks before the president took office. And he and other major donors are now poised to be pivotal players in Trump’s administration.

The Trump campaign is just part of the story, however. Candidates’ reliance on big money and donor secrecy that accelerated in the wake of Citizens United continued to grow. Outside spending on congressional campaigns, also mostly coming from a select few major donors, broke records. Funds from groups that do not have to disclose their donors at all, known as dark money, kept proliferating and became even harder to track. And candidates and parties continued to bend even traditional fundraising rules to raise more big money.

To be clear, the Supreme Court is not solely responsible for the legal changes that made these activities possible; a dysfunctional federal regulator—the evenly divided Federal Election Commission (FEC)—and Congress have also played important roles. But none of it would have been possible without Citizens United and related decisions, which have played an enduring role in putting the very wealthiest donors at the center of U.S. campaigns and governance.

Citizens United and Related Cases Explained

In the Citizens United case, a conservative nonprofit group challenged campaign finance rules that ostensibly prohibited it from promoting a film that criticized then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton shortly before the 2008 Democratic primaries. The Supreme Court could have issued a narrow opinion ruling on that specific group’s activities, but instead a 5-4 majority took the opportunity to rule that virtually all limits on “independent” political spending from corporations and other outside groups violated the First Amendment.

This conclusion doubled down on the reasoning of a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo. Buckley held that campaign expenditures, money spent to influence voters, were akin to political speech and could not be subject to legal limits (although campaign donations—money given to fund the expenditures of another, such as a candidate—could be limited). The only permissible justification for any limits would be the prevention of quid pro quo corruption (i.e., bribery).

After Buckley, the court upheld some campaign safeguards, most notably in McConnell v. FEC (2003), in which it approved new restrictions on corporate and union campaign spending as well as the stricter contribution limits for political parties in the bipartisan McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, passed in 2002. Only a few years later, however, after a change in the court’s ideological composition, Citizens United reverses these decisions in key respects. The court’s ruling then set the stage for lower courts to hold that any group purporting to be independent of candidates cannot be subject to contribution limits.

While the chances for meaningful reform in the next Congress appear slim, state and local governments can and should lead the charge to make funding elections fairer and more inclusive.

The court did not stop there. In 2014’s McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 majority struck down overall contribution limits on individuals’ donations to candidates, parties, and PACs, known as aggregate limits. Because such groups often fundraise jointly, McCutcheon allowed them to directly raise contributions that far exceed the maximum that any individual can give to a single candidate per election (a little more than $3,000 in 2024).

Through each decision, the court purported to preserve certain safeguards—most notably, transparency rules and independence requirements for outside groups like super PACs. But these protections are increasingly illusory because of weak rules and lax enforcement. The result has been torrents of political spending from a small group of the very wealthiest megadonors via super PACs, as well as steadily increasing amounts of untraceable dark money. Indeed, while Citizens United, like Buckley before it, claimed that independent spending carries no substantial threat of corruption so long as it is truly independent and disclosed, the 2024 election dispensed with that illusion forever.

As noted, the Supreme Court is not the sole cause for this changed landscape. Congress or the FEC could theoretically fill or at least mitigate many gaps in transparency rules and other laws. But the evenly divided FEC, which oversees campaign finance in federal elections, has usually done the opposite and instead created more loopholes. It almost never enforces laws prohibiting coordination that are supposed to keep candidates independent from allied super PACs and similar groups. Nor has it acted on numerous complaints related to untraceable money.

Congress, too, has repeatedly failed to implement safeguards. In the past 15 years, lawmakers have tried to pass meaningful reforms several times but have not succeeded. These efforts included bills that would ensure voters receive information about the large donors who spend money on campaign advertisements, improve FEC enforcement, shore up requirements to ensure that super PACs and other outside groups are truly independent of candidates and political parties, and create a viable public financing system for all federal elections.

In short, the other branches of government could do much more to update U.S. laws in light of the court’s decisions. Those decisions themselves, however, were the catalyst for the most critical changes that shaped the 2024 race.

The Ramifications of Citizens United in 2024

Here are some of the key ways Citizens United and other decisions shaped the 2024 campaign.

A handful of megadonors helped Trump narrow the fundraising gap with Harris, and one of them essentially helped run his campaign. The most striking consequence of Citizens United continues to be the expanded influence of the very wealthiest donors. Last year, donors who gave at least $5 million to super PACs in the presidential race spent more than twice as much as they did in 2020. Roughly 44% ($481 million) of all the money raised to support Trump came from just 10 individual donors. The top 10 donors supporting Harris accounted for nearly 8% ($126 million) of her campaign. For both candidates, most of this money came from outside groups like super PACs.

Of course, super PACs closely aligned with major candidates aren’t new. What made 2024 different was that campaigns were able to rely on these megadonor-backed, purportedly independent groups for core campaign activities. That was possible in part because of Citizens United and in part because the FEC—which already permitted significant cooperation between campaigns and super PACs—effectively eliminated most restrictions on the campaigns’ ability to outsource core voter outreach to these groups.

These changes set the stage for Musk in particular to play a central role in the election. He gave at least $277 million to two super PACs that supported Trump and other Republicans and effectively became part of the Trump campaign, frequently appearing center stage at rallies. One super PAC, to which he donated roughly $240 million, funded direct mailings, canvassing, and “spokesperson consultants” in swing states for Trump. The second, pointedly named RBG PAC after Justice Ginsburg, ran ads in swing states apparently intended to blunt criticisms regarding Trump’s record on abortion (and did not disclose who had funded its spending until after the election).

Musk was far from Trump’s only billionaire backer. Others included venture capitalist David Sacks, who hosted a fundraiser in Silicon Valley where the cheapest ticket was $50,000 ($300,000 bought a more intimate dinner with Trump); casino owner Miriam Adelson, who put more than $100 million into her own pro-Trump super PAC; packaging supplies magnate (and major donor to the election denial movement) Richard Uihlein, who sent $49 million in last year’s third quarter alone to his pro-Trump super PAC; and many other Big Tech billionaires. Collectively, these funders helped Trump make up much of his fundraising disparity with Harris.

Strikingly, while Trump relied heavily on super PACs, his actual campaign operated with a skeleton staff of only a few hundred people (compared with Harris’s more than 2,500 employees across battleground states alone) and little other infrastructure.

Of course, Harris had her own billionaire backers, most of whom also donated through super PACs and dark money groups, including tech moguls Dustin Moskovitz, Reed Hastings, and Ben Horowitz and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. In general, they do not appear to have taken on the same sort of central operational role in her campaign, however.

Megadonors also spent heavily in other federal races. Overwhelmingly, they had no ties to the states where their money landed, significantly exacerbating a trend in which more and more out-of-state money is flowing into congressional races. In marquee races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, for instance, national super PACs fueled by wealthy donors outspent several candidates’ campaigns and heavily influenced close primaries and general election races. Ohio’s Republican Senate primary attracted more than $20 million from nationally funded independent groups (with the two biggest donors hailing from Pennsylvania and Illinois), and Arizona’s Democratic primary for the Third Congressional District lured in $5.3 million from outside groups—twice as much as the campaigns themselves did.

Massive spending was not the only way that billionaires were able to shape the 2024 race. Most notably, Musk leveraged his ownership of the social media platform X to support his preferred candidates. X amplified Musk’s activity, including his pro-Trump posts, so that they appeared in the feed of every subscriber, and took other actions that likely benefited Trump and other candidates, such as hosting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s announcement of his own presidential campaign. Prior to Citizens United, the direct use of corporate resources to advocate for a candidate was typically limited to traditional press activities, which are exempt from most campaign finance rules. Now, however, a corporation like X—which, had it existed prior to Citizens United, would likely not have been categorized as engaging in press activity—has much broader leeway to harness its resources in support of its owner’s preferred candidates.

Dark money continued to dominate federal contests. While final numbers are not yet available, in 2024 anonymous sources directed more than $1 billion, at a minimum, to independent political committees supporting candidates on both sides of the aisle. The largest outside group supporting the Harris campaign was a super PAC funded by dark money groups. The Trump campaign also benefited from such secret spending, including by one group that reportedly raised $100 million over four years.

Dark money also played a pivotal role in many Senate and House races. The four dark money groups associated with House and Senate Democratic and Republican campaigns gave $182 million to their sister super PACs through the end of last September. These purportedly independent groups were, in practice, effectively part of each party’s campaign apparatus. This strategy is certainly not novel—for a decade, both parties have had shadow party super PACs through which they have been able to raise unlimited contributions. Still, while the numbers are not yet final, the flood of dark money likely broke records in 2024.

Thanks to legal loopholes and lax enforcement of current rules, tracking this surge of secret cash is becoming ever more difficult. Dark money groups are required to report spending for only certain activities, including independent expenditures and electioneering communications, which they increasingly do not run themselves. They are not required to disclose donations to other groups (although the recipients may have to disclose these donations) nor many types of campaign advertising, including most online ads, which surged last year.

Candidates and parties turned to joint fundraising committees to foot their big bills in new ways. Joint fundraising committees are PACs formed by multiple candidates, parties, and PACs to raise money together. These groups took on a much more significant role for campaigns last year. Because McCutcheon invalidated aggregate contribution limits, joint fundraising committees can raise enormous amounts in direct donations. In theory, participants are supposed to allocate donations pursuant to a prearranged formula.

In 2024, however, an FEC deadlock created a new loophole, allowing these fundraising entities to themselves run campaign ads without allocating their costs, effectively allowing some participants to subsidize others. Both parties availed themselves of this loophole, but Republicans in particular exploited it. The National Republican Senatorial Committee spent millions of dollars through joint fundraising committees, mostly in battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Democrats, who originally urged the FEC to crack down on this practice, responded by saying they would use the same tactics for ads going forward.

Opportunities for Reform

Fifteen years after Citizens United, federal campaign finance rules are more porous than at any time since Watergate. And with just a sliver of donors spending tens (even hundreds) of millions of dollars apiece, the opportunities for corruption are overwhelming. The Supreme Court has played a central role in eroding safeguards, but the other branches of government have done nothing to shore up rules in response.

While the chances for meaningful reform in the next Congress appear slim, state and local governments can and should lead the charge to make funding elections fairer and more inclusive. At the most basic level, states and large localities should require transparency for all political spending and specify that super PACs and other outside groups must be truly independent from candidates. They should eliminate loopholes that allow joint fundraising committees and similar entities to circumvent contribution limits. More states and localities should also join the many jurisdictions that already offer some form of public financing for elections, the most powerful solution to the problem of big money in politics. And state lawmakers can pass laws calling into question the legitimacy of Citizens United and the Court’s approach to campaign finance more broadly—as many antiabortion legislatures did with Roe v. Wade.

The expanded influence of wealthy donors and untraceable money draws opposition from the vast majority of Americans across virtually all political and ideological divides. With the Supreme Court unlikely to change course anytime soon, it will fall to other branches of government, including state and local policymakers, to enact commonsense reforms to help ensure that every American has a meaningful voice in the decisions that govern all of us.

Augustus liquidated the Roman Republic a generation before Christ by appealing to religion, presenting himself as Apollo’s favorite, placing the senate under his authority, and becoming the first Roman emperor. He promoted upper-class birthrates, traditionalist moralism, and patriotic literature, such as Virgil’s commissioned Aeneid, a classic of political propaganda based on nonexistent facts about Rome’s past greatness.

Augustus capitalized on the social instability of the moment with a charismatic, demagogic, and strategic speech about making Rome great again under the symbol of the Golden Eagle. Half a millennium later, Augustulus was the last emperor of the Western Empire, defeated by the Germanic barbarians.

The American Empire, the most powerful in human history, is probably also the shortest. It has held that title for one-tenth as long as the Roman Empire in Europe and one-hundredth as long as the Eastern Empire.

The problem is not democracy but its substitute: the hijacking of an entire country and the world by the Anglo-Saxon techno-financial oligarchy.

For its part, China will end that rare historical exception called the “Century of Humiliation” and again be the greatest economic power, as it has been for millennia. We hope that what China has learned in those hundred years will not turn it into a Franco-Anglo-Saxon-type empire and that it will continue its oldest tradition of not subjugating peoples on the other side of the planet.

U.S. President Donald Trump is likely to be Augustus and Augustulus at the same time. We might wish that the replacement of hegemonies did not comply with the violent Thucydides Trap, as the replacement of Great Britain by the United States did not, but in that case, there was a strategic continuity of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Hegemony passed from one ally to the other.

Now, the differences are substantial, and above all, the Anglo-Saxon obsession with not allowing any global competition promises us a greater conflict. The Northwest finds itself facing not only a new example of success, that of communist China, but also its own national poverty and its international collapse. It no longer just exports violence, as it has historically done, but consumes it in its internal market. As a solution, it appeals to the same religious-style narrative as always, denying any evidence to the contrary.

One of its most recent sermons has been to justify the success of Chinese socialism with American state capitalism, even though Chinese corporations are below the communist government, while in the West, they are above it and despite the fact that the Chinese economy is planned by the government, not by corporations. China has a market economy (something that capitalism did not invent but rather limited), but it is not a capitalist country. It is a communist country in a still capitalist world.

Beyond its material power, Nonoccident is concerned about what has moved it for generations: the need to abort examples of success that are not “the only possible model”: corporate capitalism. Anglo-Saxon success was not based on capitalism but on overseas imperialism. The capitalist countries that served as colonial suppliers at a pittance were more capitalist than the United States.

Now, the example of Anglo-capitalist success is beginning to deteriorate due to the loss of global power and its profound internal contradictions, which are inherent to capitalism and are crudely coming to the surface: Almost 1 million people living on the streets of the United States; epidemics of addiction and deaths from overdoses; periodic massacres; ethnic hatred to disguise a ruthless class struggle; students indebted to the point of becoming indenture slaves; increasing social differences; crime that cannot be reduced; fascism on the rise; and recognition, until a few years ago unthinkable, that liberal democracy (the political circus of plutocracy) no longer works; recognition (now from the poor right and the wealthy capitalists) that democracy does not work and never worked; that the oligarchs have taken Washington, now without masks, to finish hijacking what was called democracy and multiply their coffers by investing in the wars of the end of the world…

Now, if, on the one hand, the politics of the successful example (the right, to put it in a simplified way) and the narratives about democracy and freedom have entered into a state of panic and catharsis of confession, on the other (the left), some taboos and totems have been broken forever. For example, suddenly, millions of Americans begin to consider apparent things, such as:

1. Patriotism is another way of silencing the truth and maintaining justice with blindfolds.
2. The problem is not democracy but its substitute: the hijacking of an entire country and the world by the Anglo-Saxon techno-financial oligarchy.
3. The failure of the neoliberal dogma that private corporations do it better and cheaper.
4. The uncontrolled criminality and corruption of parallel governments like the NSA, the CIA, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
5. The consensus breakdown on the Empire’s benevolent role. Before the confirmation of Marco Rubio as secretary of state, while he was handcuffed in the Capitol, an activist shouted what millions think: “Rubio is bloodthirsty… he only wants to keep us in a state of perpetual war; free Cuba from the sanctions that kill people. Freedom for Palestine.” Other ex-combatants were arrested for shouting to former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “We need money here, not to bomb children in Gaza.”
6. The purchase of politicians, senators, and representatives by the biggest lobbies in Washington. In January 2025, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), referring to Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby AIPAC, said: “Most Americans don’t want us to support a government that kills children, but if you say that, you’re going to face AIPAC and other millionaires and you’re going to lose the election… Many senators tell me, ‘God, what Netanyahu is doing is monstrous, but I can’t vote against him because they’re going to destroy my political career.’ They know that if the corporations are not pleased, they will lose the election…”

None of these criticisms and ideas are new. Many of us have been writing about this since the 1990s. Not before, because we weren’t born. What is new is that, at the same time that the fascist politics of the super-rich takes power in the White House, supported by a majority of the population that consumes their products, a new and growing minority has come out of the closet with a greater awareness of the de facto class struggle.

On Monday the 20, Donald Trump retook office. His grim face alone says much. His followers are not even hopeful. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, they are not united by love but by fear. As the Italian Oriana Fallaci wrote in 2001, which we criticized as the beginning of a dangerous era (“The Slow Suicide of the West” 2002), they are united by “rage and pride.”

Now, we must not lose sight of the fact that the more the nationalist, fascist, and feudal capitalist right progresses, the more evident a break becomes that will turn to the left, as always―and, as never before for a century, in a radical way.

On New Years’ Eve, two men reportedly committed public acts of violence: a mass murder in New Orleans and an explosion in Las Vegas. Both alleged perpetrators served in the military. Both had troubled personal lives. Both issued makeshift “manifestos”; one through video recordings, the other through emails and social media. And both fit the federal government’s definition of a “terrorist.” But one was white and seemingly Christian by background; the other was Black and Muslim. Therein hangs a tale.

The discourse regarding these two men can be read as a “third manifesto”—a subtle but fiercely ideological statement from a cabal of overlapping interests seeking to manipulate public opinion.

The Acts

Shamsud-Din Jabbar reportedly stated that the Bourbon Street attack, which left a horrifying toll of dead and injured, was motivated by extremism. “I joined ISIS,” Jabbar reportedly said. For that reason, Jabbar’s alleged crimes match the FBI’s definition of “international terrorism”:

Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations...

Matthew Livelsberger allegedly exploded a Tesla truck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, injuring seven people. His weapon was a “moving vehicle improvised explosive device” (MVIED). Thankfully, no one was killed, but they certainly could have been.

Since Livelsberger provided a political motive for his action, it matches the FBI’s definition of what it calls “domestic terrorism”:

Violent, criminal acts… to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.

And yet, only one of these two men was called a terrorist in the media.

Two Terrorists

Here are two New York Times “human interest” headlines about Jabbar:

• ‘I Joined ISIS’: The New Orleans Attacker’s Secret Radicalization
• ‘No Terrorist to Me’: Relatives and Friends Saw Few Signs Before Attack

Both articles take it as a given that Jabbar is a terrorist.

Here are two Times headlines about Livelsberger:

• Soldier in Tesla Blast Had PTSD and Feared U.S. ‘Collapse,’ Officials Say
• Soldier’s Struggles Began Long Before Las Vegas Blast, Nurse Says

The contrast couldn’t be plainer. The human-interest angle on Jabbar is, “What made him a terrorist?” For Livelsberger it’s, “What suffering caused him to do such a thing?”

“Secret Radicalization”

The subheader for the Times’ “secret radicalization” article cites “Jabbar’s growing discontent with American society and increasing isolation even within his local Muslim community.” (Italics mine.) One relative told the Times that Jabbar and his brothers lived largely secular lives. “I don’t think I ever heard the word Allah said,” the relative said.

The word “even” is doing a lot of work here, suggesting that Jabbar’s pathology is linked to his Muslim-ness. But the article describes Jabbar as an “outcast” among “fellow believers.”

Nobody the Times interviewed had ever seen him praying in congregation, even after he reportedly became radical. That raises a question: How Muslim was Jabbar, exactly? Congregational prayer is obligatory for practicing Muslims. Its absence should have raised a question: Was he really motived by his religious beliefs, as they suggest? Or, was he driven by something else, like stress, mental illness, or other factors—the forces that the media used to explain Livelsberger’s actions?

Financial crimes kill. But that kind of terror doesn’t get much headline coverage,

“Increasing isolation, even in the Muslim community,” they wrote. It’s not clear, however, how much he even belonged to that community.

Coverage of Jabbar hints at other motives, if you look hard enough. CNN reports that Jabbar’s videos expressed rage over his recent divorce. He had financial woes, declaring in court that he couldn’t keep up his mortgage payments. He reportedly said he’d planned to kill his family before deciding to stage an attack in ISIS’ name instead. That sounds less like ideology and more like pathology.

It also seems like a relatively recent development. A friend of Jabbar’s told The Associated Press:

I did anti-terrorism in the military. And if any red flags would have popped off, I would have caught them and I would have contacted the proper authorities.

It is confirmed that Jabbar belonged to at least one criminal organization. He was a former employee of Deloitte, the international finance and consulting conglomerate. Deloitte has paid more than a quarter-billion dollars ($283,797,673) for government-contracting, financial fraud, and employment-related offenses since the year 2000.

Financial stress causes physical harm to millions of Americans every year. People with money problems are up to 20 times likelier to attempt suicide.

Financial crimes kill. But that kind of terror doesn’t get much headline coverage.

The Hero

Livelsberger got the benefit of doubt that was denied to Jabbar. Law enforcement set the tone, as when the local sheriff told reporters:

Am I comfortable calling it a suicide mission? I’m comfortable calling it a suicide, with a bombing that occurred immediately thereafter.

The next day, FBI Special Agent In Charge Spencer Evans explicitly denied that Livelsberger’s act was political. Rather, Evans said, the explosion “ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues.”

That’s nothing short of bizarre. The FBI already had communications from Livelsberger calling for an armed uprising against the United States government. They included explicit instructions for a violent right-wing revolt:

• “Military and vets move on D.C. starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.”
• “Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.”
• “Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.”
• “Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”

But law enforcement chose the message: Livelsberger was a suffering hero, not a terrorist. Contrast that with its treatment of Jabbar, who a senior FBI official said was “100% inspired” by ISIS. “This was an act of terrorism,” he said. “It was premeditated and an evil act.”

The FBI now apparently decides, not only what is or isn’t “terrorism,” but what is or isn’t evil. Why? Because its power and autonomy grow when the public is fearful of “the Other”—a definition that, in today’s society, matches Jabbar’s profile but not Livelsberger’s.

The media follow its lead, but why? To appease government sources, especially under a new administration? Because they don’t dare describe right-wing violence as “terrorism”? Because the “hero” angle makes better copy? Because America idolizes its highly-trained killers? Because Livelsberger was white and not Muslim?

Perhaps it was all of the above.

The Third Manifesto

“I have joined ISIS,” Jabbar reportedly said. “Purge,” ”fight,” “ “by any means necessary,” Livelsberger reportedly said. If Jabbar was “secretly radicalized,” so was Livelsberger.

Matthew Livelsberger served in Afghanistan under traumatizing circumstances. He deserved the best care his nation could provide. Know who else served in Afghanistan? Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Don’t feel badly if you didn’t know; it hasn’t gotten much coverage.

Were these men terrorists, damaged souls, or both?

The fact that both alleged perpetrators were ex-military is important. Service in the United States military is the single greatest predictor of extremist, mass-casualty violence.

Not mental illness. Not “Islamism.” Not previous criminal history. U.S. military service is the greatest predictor—and it’s getting worse.

That’s something we’re really not supposed to think about. But we should—not to judge or condemn those who serve, but to understand them, to provide better care, and to minimize the chance of more violence in the future.

“Terrorism” is an ideologically freighted word. If we must use it, we must be consistent. Its selective application here serves as an invisible “manifesto,” one that’s scrawled across our public discourse in invisible ink. It declares that Muslims are the enemy while White right-wing extremists are safe, comfortable, “us.”

Were these men terrorists, damaged souls, or both? I’m not wise enough to judge. But I do know that a just society would judge them fairly, and that a free society needs an honest media—one that provides its citizens with more information and less manipulation.

Has the American public taken a hard right turn? Does the election of U.S. President Donald Trump mean most Americans now oppose abortion rights, want their neighbors deported, and think climate change is a hoax? The answers are no, no, no, and no.

Yes, in 2024 Trump squeaked into the presidency by 1.5% of those who voted but he’s no more popular now than he was in 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden. Trump only won this time because 19 million Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024.

As Michael Podhorzer explained recently in his Weekend Reading Substack, the 2024 election was not a strong endorsement of Trump or MAGA; instead, it was a vote of no confidence in Democrats. Podhorzer is a well-known American political-data analyst and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the largest labor coalition in the U.S.

It seems obvious that, if Democrats actually improve the lives and livelihoods of the people who do all the work, they can once again become the majority party for decades into the future.

“The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA,” Podhorzer writes.

He continues, “A collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that most Americans, especially those in Blue America, are suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy.” It’s that “Americans are fed up. This election wasn’t just a vote of no confidence in Democrats; it was yet another vote of no confidence in our entire political system,” Podhorzer writes.

Why Are Americans Fed up With Their Political System?

The political system is not delivering what Americans want most, which is economic stability: being able to afford a home, groceries, gas, car payments, healthcare, give the kids a decent start (daycare, education), save something for a rainy day, and maybe even take a short vacation every year or so. Instead, what they’re getting is mediocre wages and sky-high prices. Nearly three-quarters of workers feel their paycheck is too small for the quality or amount of work they do.

Measured against wages paid in past decades, today’s paychecks are pitifully small. During the three decades after World War II (1945-1975), as national wealth-per-person increased each year (measured as gross domestic product, or GDP, divided by total population), wages rose in lockstep. However, after 1978, wages grew more slowly than national wealth-per-person because big corporations and super-wealthy individuals started keeping a bigger share of the nation’s wealth for themselves, stiffing their workers. Economic inequality began to rise.

In 2020, a study by the Rand Corporation calculated all this in detail. In their study, Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards showed that, during the last 40 years (1978 to 2018), if workers’ wages had risen in lockstep with wealth-per-person (as they did during 1945-1975), each worker in the bottom 90% of wages would have earned an extra $1,144 per month, month after month, year after year, for a total of $13,728 additional wages each year for 40 years, or $549,120 total additional wages for each worker over the 40 years. For each worker. In all, over the past 40 years, the richest 1% of Americans have stolen $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90%.

On top of that, for decades Democrats have championed education and job skills as their main solution for economic inequality instead of labor rights, union strength, minimum-wage laws, affordable housing, universal healthcare, taxing the super-rich, and, when all else fails, price controls.

Now half of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and 37% say they can’t pay their bills, which means they’re relying on credit, or they’re skipping meals, or they’re homeless. Meanwhile the people who dominate the Democratic Party—affluent, well-educated professionals and their wealthy backers—insist that the economy is doing great. They boast about job creation without mentioning the quality of the jobs. Republicans, on the other hand, say the economy is a disaster, which resonates with millions of people because prices are sky high and so are interest rates on credit cards, home loans, and car loans.

Rising prices hit low-income people hardest. Renters struggle with rising rents and scarce housing while many homeowners continue to enjoy a low interest rate that they locked in years ago. If you own a house and inflation drives up the price of houses, your net worth increases. In short, inflation worsens existing inequalities because those with the fewest resources get hit hardest.

If you usually buy artisan bread, you can downgrade to supermarket bread. But if you’re already buying supermarket bread, you have no choice but to pay more. Then, as more people buy the cheaper brands, those prices tend to rise.

If you’re in the professional class and you’re saving 15 or 20% of your income, you have a big hedge against inflation—a high-yield savings account or perhaps shares of an index fund that grows in lockstep with a basket of high-yield stocks. But if you’re a worker whose paycheck doesn’t keep pace with inflation, you’re probably going into debt to stay afloat.

Americans have a mountain of credit card debt—$1.2 trillion—and that total debt has risen 51% during the Biden presidency. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively deregulated credit cards in 1978, and interest rates have surged upward since then. The average annual interest rate on credit cards today is 21.5%. For new credit card offers, the average is 24.3%, which is what many young people are facing.

In sum, people with moderate or low incomes—especially young people—who rely on credit card debt are paying 20 to 25% more to meet basic needs, compared to wealthier people.

Republicans Benefit From Economic Stagnation and Decline

As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall recently observed, “Electorally speaking,… Republicans profit from economic stagnation and decline.” Therefore, in a perverse way, it makes sense for Donald Trump and his billionaire supporters to oppose everything that actually improves people’s lives: collective bargaining rights; union strength; unemployment insurance; Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”); food stamps; cost-free public education (pre-k through trade school and college); access to broadband internet; decent, safe affordable housing; reproductive rights; anti-discrimination laws; limits on interest-rates for debt; affirmative action for the disadvantaged; environmental initiatives to restore the climate and protect the natural world; community policing and a fair justice system; strong civil rights protections; affordable medicines; anti-price-gouging laws; rent controls; a rock-solid right to vote; and more.

It seems obvious that, if Democrats actually improve the lives and livelihoods of the people who do all the work, they can once again become the majority party for decades into the future.

If history is any guide, by 2026 the public will become disillusioned with the MAGA billionaires and their followers, handing Democrats a huge opportunity.

For Democrats to win again, a good place to start might be an economic bill of rights—a modern version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 proposal: Everyone has a right to a job; an income adequate for food, shelter, and recreation; freedom from unfair competition and monopolies; decent housing; adequate medical care; social security; and education.

Solid Democrat control in Washington in 2028 could set the stage for expanding the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster in the Senate, eliminating the Electoral College, and getting “dark money” out of elections, to establish permanent majority rule for law and policy. This, then, could set the stage for the Mission for America, a massively ambitious program to end the climate emergency and, at the same time, create huge new wealth for the general public.

Because we face two major crises (the climate emergency and an economy that has failed so many people, which is empowering authoritarians) and because Republicans generally rely on economic decline to win elections, the path is open for Democrats to stand up for real economic reforms and win big in 2026 and 2028, and then to mold a decent future for the U.S. and the world. Of course, it will require new, young leaders to make it happen—and they are getting ready now.

Inauguration day is here, a day that many of us have dreaded.

Our opposition to President Donald Trump is based not only on our profound disagreement with him on most of the important issues facing our country but, even more importantly, the lies, fear mongering, bigotry, and xenophobia which underlay those policies. Democracy flourishes where differences of opinion are respected and debated. Democracy is severely undermined under the barrage of bigotry, hate, and disinformation that Trump and many of his acolytes propagate.

Further, as Trump returns to the presidency, there is deep frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to provide a clear alternative to Trumpism. It appears that most Democrats have learned little or nothing from the recent disastrous elections. It's just not good enough to critique Trump and right-wing Republicans. That's been done for the last 10 years. You have to stand FOR something. You have to provide an alternative to a status quo economy and political system which is just not working for the average American.

We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy, and for the very well-being of our planet—because that is precisely what is at stake.

This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and major advances in technology can make us even wealthier. There is no rational reason why 60% of Americans should live paycheck to paycheck or why we have massive and growing income and wealth inequality. There is no rational reason why we are the only major country not to guarantee healthcare for all, and why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. There is no rational reason as to why 800,000 Americans are homeless and millions of others spend more than half of their limited income to put a roof over their heads. There is no rational reason why 25% of seniors in America are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less, why we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any wealthy nation, why young people leave college deeply in debt, or why childcare is unaffordable for millions of families.

We can do better. We must do better. But, in order to effectively move forward, we need to explain to the American people the role that Oligarchy and corporate greed have played in destroying working class lives in this country. We need a progressive agenda that addresses the many crises that working families face and points us forward to a better life for all.

Short-term, as Trump comes into office, we must call his bluff. In the recent campaign he ran as an anti-establishment populist prepared to take on the political class and act on behalf of working families. Well, let us hold him to his words and demand that he do just that. If not, we must expose him for the fraud that he is.

During his campaigns Trump has said that the pharmaceutical companies are "getting away with murder" and that he wanted to lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country. If that is true, we should be willing to work with him to make that happen. We have made some good progress under former President Joe Biden in this area, but much more needs to be done. If Trump is unwilling to stand up to the power of the pharmaceutical industry, we must make that clear.

At a time when many financially strapped Americans are paying 20 or 30% interest rates on their credit cards, President Trump stated that he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. I agree and will soon be introducing legislation to do just that. Let's see if he supports that bill.

Trump has rightfully pointed out that disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR with China have cost us millions of good-paying American jobs as corporations shut down manufacturing in this country and moved abroad to find cheap labor. As someone who strongly opposed those agreements I look forward to working with him on new trade policies that will protect American workers and create good paying jobs in our country. Is he serious about this issue? Let's find out.

Some of Trump's nominees have also made important points. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that food corporations are "poisoning" our young people with highly processed foods that are causing obesity, heart disease, and other serious health problems. Is Trump willing to take on the greed of major food corporations that are making record breaking profits? I doubt it, but let's give him the opportunity.

Trump's Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been supportive of the PRO Act, which would protect a worker's right to join a union and bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions. She is right. Workers must have the right to join a union without illegal interference by their bosses. Will the Trump administration stand up to corporate interests and work with us to pass the PRO Act into law? Stay tuned.

No one denies that we must end waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. Elon Musk, for example, is correct when he points out that the Pentagon has failed seven audits and cannot fully account for its budget of over $800 billion. We must make the Defense Department far more efficient. If we do that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and cut defense spending.

While we should be prepared to work with the Trump administration in areas where we can find agreement, we must also be prepared to vigorously oppose them in the many areas where they are not only wrong, but are bringing forth extremely dangerous policy.

We must vigorously oppose Trump, his multi-billionaire cabinet, and Republicans in Congress when they try to pass massive tax breaks for the rich while cutting Medicaid and other public health benefits desperately needed by working families.

We will oppose them when they try to privatize or cut Social Security, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, public education, the postal service, and other important public agencies.

We will oppose them when they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away healthcare from millions of Americans.

We will oppose them when they represent the needs of the fossil fuel industry and try to rollback climate protections that put at risk the very habitability of our planet for future generations.

We will oppose them when they try to further take away the rights of women to make healthcare decisions about their own bodies.

If there were ever a time when progressives need to make their voices heard, this is that time.

We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy, and for the very well-being of our planet—because that is precisely what is at stake.

Let us not forget that Republican margins in the House and Senate are very slim. If we mobilize effectively we CAN stop some of their worst proposals. It was not that long ago, for example, that people making their voices heard all across the country saved the Affordable Care Act from Trump and a Republican majority.

It is also critically important that we never stop fighting for our vision for the future—one in which we have a government that works for all of its people, and not just a wealthy few.

Can we, one day, create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.

Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.

Can we make healthcare a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life-expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.

Can we, in the wealthiest country on Earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from childcare to graduate school? Yes, we can.

Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.

Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.

And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is imperative that vision be maintained and that we continue to fight for it.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is one of the most pivotal and difficult moments in the history of our country. What happens in the next few years will impact this country and the world for decades. Despair is not an option. We must aggressively educate and organize and go forward together.

Thank you for standing with me in that fight.

This is a jarring time for our country: A far-right autocrat is taking office on a holiday many misrepresent and trivialize as vacation day, obscuring the revolutionary actions of one of the historical greats of the civil rights movement, while whole communities of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles are burning to the ground. Instead of talking about the lives lost and how to support those who will have the most trouble rebuilding, and instead of connecting the dots of these fires to climate change, the incoming administration is intent on spreading disinformation. They are threatening to undo decades of hard-fought progress with lies and deregulation.

Yet, it is often when things seem most bleak, amid grief and heartache, that we reevaluate on the scale the moment demands. That is where the climate movement is right now: The status quo is not working. We are rapidly surpassing many of the planetary thresholds, including the threshold of 1.5°C. As our climate changes, we continue to see an increasing number of catastrophic weather events, as witnessed over the last week in Los Angeles. And despite these climate disasters and massive advances in renewable energy, fossil fuel use also continues to increase; this was true even under former President Joe Biden’s more progressive presidency. Data centers for artificial intelligence and logistics have only added to this increased demand.

We urgently need to change our orientation to how we affect change and what is required. Survivors on the Titanic talked about why they didn’t move: Electricity was still functioning; it didn’t feel like the ship was going down. Being in power can feel like that. But losing power feels different—and we have to be clear-eyed that we will not succeed by lobbying President Donald Trump or his administration, or finding the right words to plead with them. So we must evaluate the levels of power that are available to us, and how we can collectively accept and redistribute the heightened risk that comes in resisting the far-right and their fossil-fueled agenda on the scale we need to.

Rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.

There’s hopeful news: Not only do we know that there is opportunity in how we meet this moment, but there are sparks suggesting that we may actually be on our way.

First, we will see, and are already seeing, an increase in exciting local organizing efforts. Groups in the 350 network have been doubling down on organizing against the power of utility companies. Many of our utilities are hurting the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels, while simultaneously gouging customers in the realm of profits. Many groups are holding utilities accountable by banning them from using ratepayers money for lobbying, intervening in hearings, and running bold corporate campaigns to get them to change their practices.

We are also seeing organizers in more and more states pass Make Polluters Pay legislation, which forces the corporations responsible for the climate crisis to pay for its cleanup.

Second, once we’ve accepted that we cannot change the initial moves Trump will make to gut climate progress, we can move into action to create the kind of reaction that might prevent further moves and bolster the local governments and courts’ ability to have an impact. We have seen this work: When Trump issued his infamous “Muslim Ban” order, tens of thousands of people disrupted business as usual at the airports, creating the popular dissent to allow the courts to throw the order out. I suspect we will see similar moves around potentially leaving the Paris accords, mass drilling on public lands, or the overturning of regulations.

The sad reality is that, no matter what Trump does, we know we will see more climate impacts that bring the climate crisis to more and more of our front doors. Amid the grief at all we have lost in the process, we have also seen people rise to the occasion in ways they’d previously been unwilling. In response to the Los Angeles fires, we have seen rapid, creative, and far-reaching mutual aid organizing spreading rapidly: a little ad hoc window into the social protections we are calling for. Data shows that most people now know that fossil fuel companies are responsible for climate change, so alongside strengthening our mutual aid infrastructure, we suspect that we will see an uptick in calls for accountability for those responsible.

Finally, the key to a broad-based movement is, quite simply, a broad base of people. As people think about the climate conditions in LA that caused fires and displacement, we can help them connect the dots to similar conditions that people faced in their home countries, causing them to migrate. We will see support for the immigrant struggle from the climate movement, support for labor rights and government workers for all sectors. In short, rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.

None of this will be easy. As befits the true Martin Luther King Jr. who, along with many of his co-organizers, spent countless weeks in jail and braved white supremacist violence which killed so many during the civil rights movement. But we collectively know that this level of organizing and intensification of our struggle is necessary. Conditions change, and we change, and so, we are optimistic that out of what is hard right now, we will finally build something beautiful.