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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup.

I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators.

I’m referring to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The Guardian.

By not calling it a coup, the mainstream media is failing to communicate the gravity of what is occurring.

Yesterday’s opinion by The New York Times’ editorial board offers a pathetic example. It concedes that Trump and his top associates “are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War” but then asks: “Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?” and answers that what Trump is doing “should be taken as a flashing warning sign.”

Warning sign?

Elon Musk’s meddling into the machinery of government is a part of the coup. Musk and his muskrats have no legal right to break into the federal payments system or any of the other sensitive data systems they’re invading, for which they continue to gather computer code.

This data is the lifeblood of our government. It is used to pay Social Security and Medicare. It measures inflation and jobs. Americans have entrusted our private information to professional civil servants who are bound by law to use it only for the purposes to which it is intended. In the wrong hands, without legal authority, it could be used to control or mislead Americans.

By not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are at odds with what a president wants.

By failing to use the term “coup,” the media have also underplayed the Trump-Vance-Musk regime’s freeze on practically all federal funding — suggesting this is a normal part of the pull-and-tug of politics. It is not. Congress has the sole authority to appropriate money. The freeze is illegal and unconstitutional.

By not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are at odds with what a president wants.

There is nothing about the regime’s refusal to be bound by the courts that places it within the boundaries of acceptable politics. Our system of government gives the federal judiciary final say about whether actions of the executive are legal and constitutional. Refusal to be bound by federal court rulings shows how rogue this regime truly is.

Earlier this week, a federal judge excoriated the regime for failing to comply with “the plain text” of an edict the judge issued last month to release billions of dollars in federal grants. Vice President JD Vance, presumably in response, declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Vance graduated from the same law school I did. He knows he’s speaking out of his derriere.

In sum, the regime’s disregard for laws and constitutional provisions surrounding access to private data, impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress, and refusal to be bound by judicial orders amount to a takeover of our democracy by a handful of men who have no legal authority to do so.

If this is not a coup d’etat, I don’t know what is.

The mainstream media must call this what it is. In doing so, they would not be “taking sides” in a political dispute. They would be accurately describing the dire emergency America now faces.

Unless Americans see it and understand the whole of it for what it is rather than piecemeal stories that “flood the zone,” Americans cannot possibly respond to the whole of it. The regime is undertaking so many outrageous initiatives that the big picture cannot be seen without it being described clearly and simply.

Unless Americans understand that this is indeed a coup that’s wildly illegal and fundamentally unconstitutional — not just because that happens to be the opinion of constitutional scholars or professors of law, or the views of Trump’s political opponents, but because it is objectively and in reality a coup — Americans cannot rise up as the clear majority we are, and demand that democracy be restored.

As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war. This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.

Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On February 12th, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began. They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called President Zelenskyy and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelenskyy called a “lasting and reliable peace.”

At the same time, the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.”

There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO.

Assigning Europe the role of security guarantor is a transparent move to shield the U.S. from ongoing responsibility for a war that it played a major role in provoking and prolonging by scuttling previous negotiations. If the Europeans will not accept their assigned role in Trump’s plan, or President Zelenskyy or Putin reject it, the United States may yet have to play a larger role in security guarantees for Ukraine than Trump or many Americans would like. Zelenskyy told the Guardian on February 11th that, for Ukraine, “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.

After blocking peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, the Biden administration rejected peace negotiations over Ukraine for nearly three years. Biden insisted that Ukraine must recover all of its internationally recognized territory, including the Crimea and Donbas regions that separated from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014.

Hegseth opened the door to peace by clearly and honestly telling America’s European allies, “…we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Spelling out the U.S. plan in more detail, Hegseth went on by saying that a "durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”

NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians. Trump and Hegseth’s forthrightness in finally pulling the plug, after the U.S. has dangled NATO membership in front of successive Ukrainian governments since 2008, marks a critical recognition that neutrality offers the best chance for Ukraine to coexist with Russia and the West without being a battleground between them.

Trump and Hegseth expect Europe to assume prime responsibility for Ukraine, while the Pentagon will instead focus on Trump’s two main priorities: on the domestic front, deporting immigrants, and on the international front, confronting China. Hegseth justified this as “a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively.”

Elaborating on the role the U.S. plan demands of its European allies, Hegseth explained,

If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine… Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

To say that U.S. forces will never fight alongside European forces in Ukraine, and that Article 5, the mutual defense commitment in the NATO Charter, will not apply to European forces in Ukraine, is to go a step farther than simply denying NATO membership to Ukraine, by carving out Ukraine as an exclusion zone where the NATO Charter no longer applies, even to NATO members.

While Trump plans to negotiate directly with Russia and Ukraine, the vulnerable position in which his plan would place European NATO members means that they, too, will want a significant say in the peace negotiations and probably demand a U.S. role in Ukraine’s security guarantees. So Trump’s effort to insulate the U.S. from the consequences of its actions in Ukraine may be a dead letter before he even sits down to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine.

Hegseth’s reference to the Minsk Accords highlights the similarities between Trump’s plans and those agreements in 2014 and 2015, which largely kept the peace in Eastern Ukraine from then until 2022. Western leaders have since admitted that they always intended to use the relative peace created by the Minsk Accords to build up Ukraine militarily, so that it could eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force, instead of granting them the autonomous status agreed to in the Accords.

Why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza?

Russia will surely insist on provisions that prevent the West from using a new peace accord in the same way, and would be highly unlikely to agree to substantial Western military forces or bases in Ukraine as part of Ukraine’s security guarantees. President Putin has always insisted that a neutral Ukraine is essential to lasting peace.

There is, predictably, an element of “having their cake and eating it too” in Trump and Hegseth’s proposals. Even if the Europeans take over most of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine's future security, and the U.S. has no Article 5 obligation to support them, the United States would retain its substantial command and control position over Europe’s armed forces through NATO. Trump is still demanding that its European members increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, far more than the U.S. spends on its bloated, wasteful, and defeated war machine.

Biden was ready to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” as retired U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman said in March 2022, and to enrich U.S. weapons companies with rivers of Ukrainian blood. Is Trump now preparing to fight Russia to the last British, French, German or Polish soldier too if his peace plan fails?

Trump’s call with Putin and Hegseth’s concessions on NATO and Ukraine’s territorial integrity left many European leaders reeling. They complained that the U.S. was making concessions behind their backs, that these issues should have been left to the negotiating table, and that Ukraine should not be forced to give up on NATO membership.

European NATO members have legitimate concerns to work out with the new U.S. administration, but Trump and Hegseth are right to finally and honestly tell Ukraine that it will not become a NATO member, to dispel this tragic mirage and let it move on into a neutral and more peaceful future.

There has also been a backlash from Republican war hawks, while the Democrats, who have been united as the party of war when it comes to Ukraine, will likely try to sabotage Trump’s efforts. On the other hand, maybe a few brave Democrats will recognize this as a chance to reclaim their party’s lost heritage as the more dovish of America’s two legacy parties, and to provide desperately needed new progressive foreign policy leadership in Congress.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s peace initiative is a gamechanger and a new chance for peace that the United States and its allies should embrace, even as they work out their respective responsibilities to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. It is also a time for Europe to realize that it can’t just mimic U.S. foreign policy and expect U.S. protection in return. Europe’s difficult relationship with Trump’s America may lead to a new modus operandi and a re-evaluation (or maybe even the end?) of NATO.

Meanwhile, those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.

Given that most of the casualties in Ukraine are soldiers, while most of the maimed and killed in Palestine are civilians, including thousands of children, the compassionate, humanitarian case for peace is even stronger in Palestine than in Ukraine. So why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza? Is it because Trump is so wedded to Israel that he refuses to rein in its slaughter? Or is it just that Ukrainians and Russians are white and European, while Palestinians are not?

If Trump can reject the political arguments that have fueled three years of war in Ukraine and apply compassion and common sense to end that war, then he can surely do the same in the Middle East.

Gitmo, of course!! It’s the freest place “we” have—by which I mean the American government, aka President Donald Trump. No rules apply there, be they international humanitarian law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s a dumping ground, a black hole.

It’s the most secure place for America to hold, as Trump put it a few weeks ago, “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.”

His plan is to expand the infamous Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, part of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which George W, Bush began using as he waged his horrific “war on terror” in the Middle East. He began imprisoning alleged terrorists, often arbitrarily arrested, in a hellhole where they had zero rights. Some are still there, several decades later. Trump’s plan is to expand the detention center to hold 30,000 people, which would be, oh, more than double the size of two unforgettable Nazi concentration camps combined: Dachau and Treblinka.

What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo.

And these migrants would be stuck there entirely under the control of an American government that has declared them to be the country’s biggest enemy of the moment: the biggest threat to our national safety. No rights for them!

If you want to be a great national leader, this is step one: Create an enemy. Stir fear and hatred, then demonstrate that only you can protect us, by doing what’s necessary: dehumanize, dehumanize, dehumanize. That is to say, keep things simple: us vs. them. This is what the masses understand, apparently.

Oh God, I don’t believe this at all, but the reality of it seems unshakable—with Trump in the White House, more so than ever. There was a time when I believed we were moving beyond the militaristic simplism of Superpower America, with political hope bubbling all the way up to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Yeah, the Bush era’s dead! But then... wars continued, not much changed. Obama had promised to close the Gitmo prison in his first year. That didn’t happen—and that’s when I started to realize that the progressive movement in this country had no real political traction.

What we have instead is ongoing outrage, fueled by truth and introspection. Trump wants to “make America great again” and keeps ironically raging about the migrant invasion. The days of American greatness for which he’s reaching go well past the civil rights (the “political correctness”) era, past the women’s rights era, past the Great Depression. America’s greatness began with the European invasion of what came to be called the Americas—several hundred years of obliterating native cultures and dehumanizing them as “savages.” Our “greatness” preceded the American Revolution and continued well after it.

Trump’s intention to expand the Gitmo prison is symbolic as well as practical: It revitalizes the Bush-era war on terror; it brings the war home. Today’s terrorist equivalents are the migrant invaders. If you’re interested in reclaiming the actual history of that period, I recommend the book Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, written by two Algerian men randomly arrested in Bosnia in 2001: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir. They were falsely accused of being terrorists and spent seven years imprisoned for no reason at Gitmo—pulled away from their wives, their children... witnessing, and enduring, horrendous treatment, trapped in the American black hole with zero rights. The book contains fragments of our national history: what we can do in the wake of creating and dehumanizing an enemy.

Some years ago, I wrote about the book, about the hell they endured: “stuffed into cages, interrogated endlessly and pointlessly, humiliated, force-fed (in Lakhdar’s case)... and finally, finally, ordered by a U.S. judge to be freed, when their case was at long last heard in a real court and the lack of evidence against them became appallingly clear.” This happened thanks to the unending aid they received from a U.S. law firm that spent more than 35,000 pro bono hours litigating the case.

“The book is the story of the courage it takes to survive.”

As well as alleged terrorists, Gitmo has also long been used to detain immigrants intercepted at sea. At Gitmo, they lacked “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water,” according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. And they had no option to seek asylum in the U.S.

What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo. Those arrested here actually had certain rights and protections—which could essentially disappear at Gitmo. Somehow that seems like the point of it all: Americans first. Americans only!

Progressive sanity will re-emerge politically, or so I believe, but how this will happen is anything but clear. The Republican right has certain serious political advantages, even if their basic agenda has only minority support. The prime advantage is billionaire dollars backing their cause. And, of course, creating an “us vs. them” governing mentality has a lot more immediate impact than addressing the world—even one’s enemies—with empathy, understanding, and a sense of connection.

Another difficulty the progressive movement faces is the Democrats, who have drifted ever more centrist-right since the Reagan era, refusing to challenge the Republican agenda head-on and gently cradling the nation’s expanding militarism.

It almost seems like we need to start over: Rosa Parks must refuse to give up her seat on the bus again. What might this mean? If nothing else, the truth about American history must continue to flow and efforts to ban it from libraries and classrooms, to burn it in book fires, must be endlessly challenged. And truth still speaks to us from the mountaintop:

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Stevie Wonder was one of more than two dozen superstars who performed at FireAid, a six-hour benefit concert held late last month to raise money for Los Angeles wildfire victims and, according to event organizers, support “long-term initiatives to prevent future fire disasters throughout Southern California.” Viewed by more than 50 million people around the world, the benefit raised more than $100 million.

Before launching into “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” “Superstition,” and “Higher Ground,” Wonder called for unity in the face of the disaster. “In this world today, we have no time for blaming. We have no time for shaming,” he said. “We need to have prayer and come together as a united people of the world.”

Wonder was likely alluding to the thoroughly debunked lies uttered by then-President-elect Donald Trump, who falsely accused then-President Joe Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of mismanaging resources.

If someone on the FireAid stage had remarked how ironic it was that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs sponsored the event, 50 million people would have heard about the destructive role they are playing, probably for the first time.

Neither Biden, Newsom, nor Bass were at fault, but with all due respect to Mr. Wonder, it is long past time to blame and shame those who are truly responsible for fueling the climate crisis.

One could of course start with Trump, whose first administration rolled back or dismantled nearly 100 environmental safeguards and who—on day one of his new term—ordered federal agencies to begin gutting protections for the air, water, public lands, and the climate. Republican members of Congress, who have amassed 82% of oil and gas companies’ campaign contributions over the last two decades, are also to blame. And then there’s the fossil fuel industry itself, which was aware of the threat its products pose as early as 1954 but publicly denied the science for decades and funded disinformation campaigns to obstruct and delay government climate action.

Other responsible parties, notably banks and insurance companies, are less obvious. Paradoxically, a handful of them were among FireAid’s corporate sponsors, all of which presumably underwrote the concert to demonstrate their bona fides as caring, public-spirited companies. Joining American Express, Kaiser Permanente, and 20 other corporations were four banks—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and U.S. Bancorp—and a financial services company—Capital Group—whose investments undermine the concert’s goal of preventing future fire disasters. In fact, the tens of billions of dollars they collectively invest in fossil fuel-related companies annually will make fire disasters in Southern California—and everywhere else—more likely to happen.

Climate Change the ‘Main Driver’ of Wildfires

The science is clear, regardless of what Donald Trump may claim. Primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, climate change is the “main driver” of an alarming increase in wildfires in the Western United States over the last four decades, according to the findings of a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“During 1984 to 2000, 1.69 million acres burned over 11 states,” NOAA’s PNAS study press release pointed out. “It doubled in size to [approximately] 3.35 million acres during 2001 to 2018. In 2020, the total annual burned area jumped to 8.8 million acres, more than five times of that in 1984 to 2000.”

“Even though wetter and cooler conditions could offer brief respites,” the press release added, “more intense and frequent wildfires and aridification in the Western states will continue with rising temperatures.”

A study published last November in Science Advances found that temperatures out West have indeed continued to rise since NOAA’s 2021 study, causing drought even when the region experienced normal precipitation due to moisture loss from “evaporative demand,” or atmospheric thirst. Once again, researchers predicted more severe, longer-lasting droughts covering wider areas as temperatures increase.

Just two months after the Science Advances study came out, Los Angeles County was engulfed in flames, prompting a multinational team of scientists at World Weather Attribution to produce a quick analysis. They found that, without a doubt, climate change “increased the likelihood of wildfire disaster in highly exposed Los Angeles area.”

The cost of that disaster was astronomical. A preliminary estimate of damages from the LA wildfires by AccuWeather ranged from $250 billion to $275 billion—more than the losses from the entire 2020 U.S. wildfire season. Other analysts estimate that the wildfires will cost insurers anywhere from $10 billion to $40 billion.

Burning Through Billions

The four banks that sponsored FireAid were among the world’s largest fossil fuel industry financiers from 2016—when the Paris climate accord went into effect—through 2023, according to the most recent “Banking on Climate Chaos” annual report, published by a handful of environmental groups in May 2024.

JPMorgan Chase: Although JPMorgan’s investment of $40.8 billion in fossil fuel, utility, and pipeline companies in 2023 was roughly half (in inflation-adjusted dollars) of what it invested in 2016, it is still the largest underwriter of fossil fuel deals. From 2016 through 2023, the bank—the largest in the United States—invested $430.9 billion (in unadjusted dollars), more than any other bank worldwide. Its top client was ExxonMobil, which received $15 billion, more than twice the $6.48 billion the bank poured into TransCanada Pipelines, its second largest investee.

Besides its relatively paltry donation for LA fire victims, JPMorgan is retreating from international efforts addressing the climate crisis.

Goldman Sachs: Goldman Sachs, which invested $184.9 billion from 2016 through 2023, was the 14th largest investor over that eight-year span. Its two biggest clients were the Saudi Arabian Oil Company ($4.38 billion) and Royal Dutch Shell ($3.2 billion). In 2023, Goldman Sachs invested $8.8 billion and was the fourth largest financier of fracking companies.

UBS: The Swiss-based UBS’s investments in fossil fuel-related companies dropped precipitously in 2023 to $8.8 billion, likely due to the bank’s dramatic profit swings, but between 2016 and 2023, it was the world’s 10th largest funder. Over those eight years, it invested $210.7 billion and was the biggest financier of metallurgic coal companies. UBS’s leading investee was Calpine Corporation, the largest U.S. natural gas and geothermal electricity provider, which received nearly $4 billion. Other top clients included Duke Energy ($3.25 billion); Parsley Energy, a natural gas developer ($3.4 billion); and Buckeye Partners, an oil pipeline company ($3 billion).

U.S. Bancorp: U.S. Bancorp—the fifth-largest U.S. bank—was the 28th largest financier, investing $97.27 billion over the eight years covered by the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report. Among its top investees were Occidental Petroleum ($2.2 billion) and Devon Energy ($1.9 billion). In 2023, U.S. Bancorp invested $12.77 billion and was the ninth biggest financier of fracking companies. (Besides sponsoring FireAid for an undisclosed sum, the company—which has about 200 branches and 4,000 employees in the Los Angeles area—donated a meager $100,000 to the United Way of Greater Los Angeles to help fire victims.)

Capital Group: The fifth financial institution that sponsored FireAid, Capital Group, is one of the world’s largest asset managers. As of May 2024, it held more than $173 billion in shares and bonds in 162 fossil fuel-related companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Conoco Phillips, according to the 2024 report “Investing in Climate Chaos,” which did not document investments on an annual basis.

The Energy Transition Could Take ‘Generations’

JPMorgan, by far the worst of the five financial titans sponsoring FireAid, posed as a good corporate citizen by offering LA fire victims mortgage payment relief and donating $2 million to the American Red Cross, California Community Foundation, and United Way of Greater Los Angeles. But that’s chump change for a bank that posted a record $56.8 billion profit last year, a 19% increase from 2023.

Besides its relatively paltry donation for LA fire victims, JPMorgan is retreating from international efforts addressing the climate crisis. Just days before the bank announced its donation, it announced it was leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-sponsored organization of more than 140 banks from 44 countries that have pledged to align their investments and loans with the goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. A year before, in February 2024, JPMorgan quit Climate Action 100+, a $68-trillion investor organization that advocates for reining in world’s largest corporate carbon emitters to reduce financial risk.

JPMorgan says it left CA 100+ because it hired its own climate risk analysts, but it walked away shortly after the investor group began requiring members to broaden their corporate disclosure and implement climate transition plans, according to ESG Dive, a trade journal. The bank did not cite a reason for leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, but news outlets reported that Republican politicians had been pressuring banks to quit even before Trump, a notorious climate science denier, won the election last November.

A JPMorgan spokesperson promised that the bank would “continue to support the banking and investment needs of our clients who are engaged in energy transition and in decarbonizing different sectors of the economy.” And, to its credit, JPMorgan had already pledged to “finance and facilitate more than $2.5 trillion”—including $1 trillion for renewable energy and other “green initiatives”—by 2030 to “help advance long-term climate solutions and contribute to sustainable development.” In 2023 alone, the company invested $300 billion.

But the company remains the top fossil fuel industry financier and will continue to invest, regardless of the consequences. At a September 2022 congressional hearing, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who made $34.5 million that year, was unequivocal. When asked if his company has a policy against funding oil and gas projects, he responded: “Absolutely not. That would be the road to hell for America.” More recently, in April 2024, the company issued a report warning that it will take “decades, or generations, not years” to phase out fossil fuels and hit net-zero targets.

Fossil Energy Companies Are ‘Hugely Important’

Goldman Sachs, the sixth largest U.S. bank, announced in December 2019 that it would no longer invest in oil development in the Arctic or in thermal coal mines worldwide, a first for a U.S. bank. It also said it would invest $750 billion in sustainability financing, which includes green energy, by 2030.

Environmental groups cheered, but stressed that the bank had a long way to go to align its investments to meet net-zero goals. It still does.

Like his counterpart at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon rejects calls to sever his bank’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. “Traditional energy companies are hugely important to the global economy they are hugely important to Goldman Sachs,” he said in 2023, when he made $31 million, a 24% jump from the previous year. “We are all going to continue to finance traditional companies for a long time.”

Likewise, Goldman Sachs quit CA100+ (last August) and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (last December). “We have made significant progress in recent years on the firm’s net-zero goals and we look forward to making further progress, including by expanding to additional sectors in the coming months,” the bank said when it departed the alliance. “Our priorities remain to help our clients achieve their sustainability goals and to measure and report on our progress.”

Name, Blame, and Shame

Last year was the hottest on record, beating out the next warmest year—2023. Meanwhile, the 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred over the last 10 years. In 2024, global temperatures exceeded the pre-industrial (1850 to 1900) average by 2.63°F (1.46°C), only slightly less than the Paris climate agreement’s ambitious goal of limiting the worldwide temperature increase to less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

The hotter it gets, the more likely such devastating events as the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene will be decidedly worse. More neighborhoods will be wiped out. More people will lose their homes. More will die.

Regardless, the world’s largest banks have failed to keep their pledge to support the central aim of the Paris accord, according to a new report by research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance. BNEF analysts calculated that the ratio of financing green energy and infrastructure relative to financing fossil fuel-related ventures must reach 4 to 1 by 2030 to keep any temperature rise below 1.5°C. Since 2016, BNEF found, banks have invested nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuels but only $3.8 trillion in green energy. That’s a trifling 0.63 to 1 ratio. For every dollar invested in fossil fuels, only 63 cents went to clean energy.

The banking ratio is only slightly better now. In 2023, it was 0.89 to 1, according to BNEF, a minor improvement over 2022, when it was 0.74 to 1. And for all that JPMorgan crows it invests in “green initiatives,” its energy-supply banking ratio in 2023 was a measly 0.80 to 1, and it is doubtful that the bank will start investing four times more in green enterprises than in fossil fuel companies anytime soon.

Regardless, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and the other financial firms that sponsored FireAid and donated to local nonprofits aiding fire victims want to be seen as good guys. They correctly assume that the general public has no idea that their investments are ruining the planet. After all, the mainstream news media rarely, if ever, report on this topic, and the trade press that does is mainly read by industry insiders.

So no matter how heartfelt, Stevie Wonder—a celebrated humanitarian in his own right—was wrong. We should call out the people and corporations responsible for the climate crisis. If someone on the FireAid stage had remarked how ironic it was that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs sponsored the event, 50 million people would have heard about the destructive role they are playing, probably for the first time. A column like this one, unfortunately, does not have that kind of reach.

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

New financial reports indicate five of America’s biggest corporations—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla—could win $75 billion in tax breaks if U.S. Congress and the president satisfy demands from corporate lobbyists to reinstate a provision repealed under the 2017 Trump tax law.

The CEOs of these companies may have hoped to gain any number of benefits from attending the second inauguration of President Donald Trump in January, and this tax break is just one possible example.

The tax break allowed companies to immediately deduct the expenses characterized as research and development in the year they are incurred rather than deducting those expenses over several years like other investments. Repeal of this tax break was one of the few revenue-raising provisions in the Trump tax law, and it was supposed to slightly offset the costs of the law’s corporate tax cuts.

Restoring the R&D provision would reduce the collective effective tax rate paid by these five companies for this three-year period by almost two-thirds, from 20% to 7%.

The Trump tax law repealed the R&D expensing break starting in 2022, replacing it with a less generous rule requiring R&D expenses to be deducted over five years. In the previous Congress, the House of Representatives passed a bill reinstating the break retroactive to 2022. That bill did not advance in the Senate, but now that Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, there is every reason to believe the proposal will be considered again.

Proponents of the tax break make a very questionable argument that it encourages companies to engage in research that benefits society. But reinstating this tax break retroactively obviously cannot accomplish this because it would merely reward companies for research and development investments they already made. The $75 billion saved by these companies would be a pure windfall that does not require them to do anything going forward.

The 2024 House-passed bill that would have reinstated this tax break was controversial, but that legislation at least offset the costs by shutting down a different tax break that was being fraudulently claimed by unscrupulous accountants on behalf of businesses that were not actually eligible for it. That legislation also included a badly needed expansion in the Child Tax Credit. Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill because they hoped they could later enact tax legislation that would be even more generous to corporations—as they are now trying to do.

The five tech companies profiled here have disclosed that in the three years the R&D tax increase has been in place, their federal income tax bills increased by at least $75 billion as a result of this provision.

These companies have reaped huge windfalls from Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, which included a reduction in the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%. They also benefit from special breaks and loopholes allowing them to pay effective tax rates that are even lower than the statutory rate of 21%. And they will pay even lower effective tax rates if President Trump and Congress reinstate the R&D tax break.

For example, the federal corporate income taxes that Apple reports it paid over the past three years come to 18% of its reported income during that period. That is another way of saying Apple paid an effective tax rate of 18% during the previous three years. If Congress retroactively repeals the R&D tax change, the company’s three-year tax rate would be cut in half, to 9%.

Meta’s three-year tax rate on $133 billion of U.S. income would drop from 15% to just 4%. And the three-year tax rate of Elon Musk’s Tesla would drop from the 0% the company currently reports to negative 22%.

Restoring the R&D provision would reduce the collective effective tax rate paid by these five companies for this three-year period by almost two-thirds, from 20% to 7%.

The research and development provision at stake in this year’s tax debate was one of the few revenue-raisers embedded in the 2017 law and served to make the plan overall appear somewhat less costly. Repealing this tax change is a stealthy way to make the corporate tax cuts even bigger than they were when enacted in 2017, and it would allow the five companies profiled here to shelter two-thirds of their U.S. income from federal income tax.

“They are coming to replace us.”

It sounds like the tagline of a horror movie. And indeed, what the far right whispers into ears, chants at hate-filled rallies, and translates into odious legislation in white-majority countries is very much a horror movie in that it is both scary and untrue.

In country after country, the far right has been promoting its horror movie premise that a horde of faceless immigrants is flooding across the border, aided by liberals, and displacing the native-born population. This campaign built around the Great Replacement conspiracy has mobilized White people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to amplify their pride, their power, and their privilege in the face of a vast, inchoate fear.

Fear wins elections, unfortunately. But let’s be clear, the Great Replacement is one of the greatest hoaxes of recent memory, right up there with the notion that COVID vaccines kill people rather than save them. Immigrants, after all, are saving countries throughout the Global North, which otherwise would be not-so-slowly erasing themselves. The EU’s fertility rate, at 1.46 in 2022, is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. rate, which dropped to 1.62 in 2023, is not substantially different.

The Great Replacement, once whispered in the corners of bars and Internet chatrooms, is now being shouted in public places, as the far-right campaign has gone mainstream. Donald Trump is probably more responsible for this dismal state of affairs than anyone else.

The Great Replacement, once whispered in the corners of bars and Internet chatrooms, is now being shouted in public places, as the far-right campaign has gone mainstream.

The once-and-again president hasn’t just translated the Great Replacement theory into domestic policy by closing the border with Mexico and deporting as many people as possible. He has weaponized the theory as part of U.S. foreign policy. It’s no longer a matter of stopping people from leaving “shithole” countries to come to the United States.

To the people of Gaza, Trump has essentially proclaimed, “We are coming to replace you.”

Out of the Blue?

Trump has long flirted with the Great Replacement theory. During the 2024 election, he asserted that Democrats were encouraging an inflow of the undocumented so that they could vote against Trump (they couldn’t, by law, so they didn’t). Before the 2016 election, Trump claimed that it would be the last U.S. election that Republicans had a chance of winning (for the same erroneous reason).

Being wrong has never stopped Trump. He doubles down, which means he’s even wronger the next time around.

Trump’s hostility toward Palestine and Palestinians is also nothing new. During his first term, charging “chronic bias against Israel,” Trump withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council. He closed the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. and deleted funding for UNRWA, the agency that supports Palestinian refugees. In a boon to the Israeli right, Trump broke a global convention by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

All that time, he was trying to negotiate a megadeal to facilitate the diplomatic recognition of Israel by all major regional actors. As I wrote in 2020,

Where does this leave Palestinians? Up a creek without a state. The Trump administration has used its much-vaunted “deal of the century” to make any future deal well-nigh impossible. In collaboration with Netanyahu, Trump has strangled the two-state solution in favor of a single Israeli state with a permanent Palestinian underclass.

But what Trump is proposing now with respect to Gaza is hubris beyond anything he has ever publicly considered. The president has proposed to expel all 2 million citizens of Gaza to nearby countries, none of which has even the slightest interest in accepting them. The Gazans would have no right of refusal and no right of return. Trump has threatened both Jordan and Egypt with economic penalties if they don’t welcome the expelled. Given domestic considerations, neither country is likely to bow to that kind of pressure.

Imperialism Repackaged

The United States was late to the nineteenth-century game of colonialism. Even though there wasn’t as much land to grab by the 1890s, the United States jumped right in: Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Panama Canal.

Donald Trump must feel as if the United States is late to the game this time around, too. Russia has grabbed a chunk of Ukraine. Israel is reasserting control over Gaza. Turkey sliced off a piece of Syria. China effectively absorbed Hong Kong.

Nothing betokens a healthy empire like a steady diet of territory. Thus, Trump has talked of reasserting control over the Panama Canal. He is eyeing the vastness of Greenland like Secretary of State William Seward once coveted Alaska. Even good neighbor Canada isn’t excluded from Trump’s greedy gaze.

Like most fabulizing colonialists, Trump has promised the Gazans that “We’ll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people. We’ll build beautiful communities, safe communities — could be five, six, could be two, but we’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.”

The Gazans know that this is nonsense. Overcrowded refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon have existed for over 70 years, and no one has managed to turn those into “beautiful” or “safe” communities. Like a slumlord eager to get rid of tenants so that he can raze the property and build a new skyscraper, Trump doesn’t care about the current inhabitants. The focus instead is on building an oligarchs’ retreat that’s a short flight from Israeli, Gulf, and Egyptian elites.

The Great Replacement is a clear case of psychological projection, like an inveterate liar who is always calling his opponents liars or a serial rapist who constantly complains about rapists coming from over the border. “They” are not the problem; we the wealthy countries are the problem. Waves of immigrants are escaping wars that rich countries supported or economic conditions that rich nations helped to create through neoliberal reforms or climate conditions that rich industrialized powers have largely produced and subsequently ignored.

All these conditions have converged to push Gazans off the land. Yet, despite this adversity, they want to stay on their land and achieve some measure of political sovereignty. Finally, there’s a people who want to stay, and now Trump wants them to go.

The irony would be laughable—if it weren’t a war crime.

In less than three weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump secured a cease-fire in Gaza, spoke directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, and kickstarted diplomacy to end the Ukraine war. At the same time, he has also put forward some idiotic ideas, such as pushing Palestinians out of Gaza and making Canada the 51st state.

But it raises important questions: Why didn't the Biden administration choose to push for an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine? Why didn't the majority of the Democrats demand it? Instead, they went down the path of putting Liz Cheney on a pedestal and having former Vice President Kamala Harris brag about having the most lethal military in the world while Trump positioned himself as a peace candidate—justifiably or not.

A profound reckoning is needed within the Democratic Party to save it from slipping into becoming neocon by default.

Undoubtedly, Trump's plans in Gaza may make matters worse and his diplomacy with Putin may fail. But that isn't the point.

The point is: Why did Trump choose to pursue diplomacy and seek an end to the wars, and why did the Democrats under former President Joe Biden choose to transform the party into one that embraced war and glorified warmongers like Cheney, while protecting and enabling a genocide?

What happened that caused the party to vilify its own voices for peace—such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—while embracing some of the architects of the Iraq war?

And all of this, of course, in complete defiance of where the party base was (throughout the Gaza war, the base supported a cease-fire with 70% majority, for instance).

A profound reckoning is needed within the Democratic Party to save it from slipping into becoming neocon by default.

And with the pace at which Trump is moving, that reckoning needs to come fast. It will, for instance, be a severe mistake if the party positions itself to the right of Trump and reflexively opposes him on every foreign policy issue instead of basing the party's positions on solid principles, such as centering diplomacy, military restraint, and peace. Trump currently speaks more about peace than the Democrats do.

A senior Democratic lawmaker asked me rhetorically last week if I knew anyone who was happy with the foreign policy of Biden and voted for Harris on that basis.

I was happy to hear that the question was being asked. That's a good first step.

The House Republican budget released Wednesday by Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington is an extreme giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of families who already have a hard time making ends meet. It would raise families’ healthcare, food, and college costs; increase the nation’s economic risks; and worsen poverty and hardship for tens of millions of people, while doubling down on huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses. This budget plan reflects a stark betrayal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to protect families who struggle financially.

The proposed budget’s reconciliation instructions—the directives to the tax-writing and other committees that set up a special fast-track process for passing budget and tax legislation—make the Republican agenda clear: costly tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses, paired with deeply harmful cuts in programs and services for families and communities. This is an upside-down plan that prioritizes the wealthy and well-connected over families for whom the cost of healthcare, college, and food is a serious concern. A reconciliation bill that meets the reconciliation directives to each committee would add trillions to the debt over the decade.

For weeks, House Republicans have been circulating proposals that would take health coverage and food assistance away from millions of people and raise the cost of student loans to offset part of the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts. Based on various proposals, 36 million people or more could be at risk of losing their health coverage through Medicaid, and more than 40 million people could receive less help from SNAP to buy groceries, millions of them potentially losing their food assistance altogether. About 5 million undergraduate students a year use federal student loans to pay for college, and many are at risk of higher costs to go to college given the cuts assigned to the Education and Workforce Committee. Millions of borrowers no longer in school could also be at risk for higher loan costs.

Extending the tax cuts for the top 1% costs $1.1 trillion through 2034, roughly the same amount they are proposing in cuts for millions who rely on Medicaid for health coverage and who use SNAP to buy groceries.

These aren’t just numbers. The loss of Medicaid means, for example, a parent can’t get cancer treatment, and a young adult can’t get insulin to control their diabetes. Cuts to food assistance mean a parent skips meals so their children can eat or an older person who lost their job has no way to buy groceries. These cuts will affect people in every state and of all races and ethnicities, but the impacts will often be especially severe in poorer states and among Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and people in rural communities, who have higher poverty rates and thus are more likely to qualify for food assistance and health coverage. Rather than expanding opportunity, the budget would make it harder for people to afford the healthcare and food they need to survive and succeed.

In addition to taking food assistance and health coverage away from people who need it, the budget plan could result in enormous cost shifts to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, which are already facing tougher fiscal conditions than in recent years. And when they can’t meet those higher costs, the impacts on people and families will be severe.

All of this for what? To give tax cuts to high-income people for whom the cost of eggs or prescription drugs is at most an afterthought. The spending cuts required by the reconciliation instructions total $1.5 trillion, which is about the cost of extending the expiring tax cuts through 2034 just for those with incomes above roughly $400,000. Extending those tax cuts would give households with incomes in the top 1%, who make roughly $743,000 a year or more, a tax cut averaging $62,000 a year—significantly more than the total income of most households at risk of losing Medicaid or SNAP.

Even as Republicans promise to extend tax cuts skewed to the top, they are noticeably silent about extending one tax cut that is well targeted to people who need it: the improved premium tax credits that since 2021 have made Affordable Care Act marketplace health coverage far more affordable. Failure to extend this tax cut would raise premiums for more than 20 million people, including at least 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers, and render an estimated 4 million people uninsured.

Outside of the reconciliation instructions, the budget blueprint calls for significant additional, unspecified cuts, including cuts to the part of the budget that funds K-12 education, Pell Grants for college students, medical research, transportation and flight safety, clean air and water projects, and customer service at the Social Security Administration and the IRS.

The Numbers

The budget resolution directs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reduce the deficit by $880 billion over 10 years, a target Republicans have indicated they will hit primarily by cutting Medicaid. Similarly, it directs the House Agriculture Committee to reduce the deficit by $230 billion over 10 years, which the committee would achieve primarily by cutting SNAP benefits, restricting eligibility, or both. And it directs the Education and Workforce Committee to reduce the deficit by $330 billion, the bulk of which is likely to come from making student loans more expensive.

These cut numbers are a “floor”; committees could cut even more as the legislative process advances. The budget resolution even includes a non-binding policy statement indicating a desire to make deeper cuts. (The directive to the House Ways and Means Committee may also assume cuts to energy tax credits, which would increase utility bills, imperil energy reliability, and threaten jobs and investment nationwide.)

This budget also cuts myriad investments in the budget area that covers everything from schools to roads, medical research, assistance with rents, and administering Social Security, known as non-defense discretionary (NDD) spending. In 2024, total NDD funding outside of veterans’ medical care was 14% below the 2010 level, after taking into account inflation and population growth, and it will likely fall further in 2025, when appropriations are finalized. The House Republican budget would continue this disinvestment in the future.

The House Republican budget’s path of less opportunity, higher poverty, and more inequality is the wrong direction for our nation.

As noted above, the budget plan could result in enormous cost shifts to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments. Some of the proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP would force them to pick up a much larger share of the programs’ costs or leave people without needed help. Cuts in funding for education, childcare, transportation, and other services would also leave states and localities to fill in the holes or see serious degradation in basic public services. If some states are better able than others to fill in those holes, the already large differences among states in areas such as education funding and quality will grow.

The budget would cut Medicaid, SNAP, and a broad set of public services and make college more costly, but not to reduce deficits or respond to a national emergency; instead to offset a portion of Republicans’ profligate tax agenda. The reconciliation instructions allow for the Ways and Means Committee to increase the deficit by $4.5 trillion through 2034. This is $900 billion more than is needed to extend the expiring 2017 tax provisions over that time period, signaling that more tax cuts will be added on top of the already expensive 2017 tax cuts and could include additional regressive corporate tax cuts. (Note that the reconciliation directives only go through 2034, so include nine years of new tax policy because the 2017 tax cuts are already in effect through 2025.)

Underscoring the House Republicans’ upside-down priorities: extending the tax cuts for the top 1% costs $1.1 trillion through 2034, roughly the same amount they are proposing in cuts for millions who rely on Medicaid for health coverage and who use SNAP to buy groceries. This is the same old trickle-down nonsense that has dramatically worsened inequality in income and wealth.

As large as the tax cuts are, the Budget Committee claims that the budget plan, if followed, would achieve deficit reduction by using unreasonable estimates of economic growth and its resulting impact on government revenues and spending. Their claimed macroeconomic “bonus” of $2.6 trillion over 10 years is far larger than independent estimates of macroeconomic effects of extending the tax cuts done by diverse entities like the Tax Foundation, Tax Policy Center, Yale Budget Lab, Joint Committee on Taxation, Congressional Budget Office, and Penn-Wharton Budget Model. While these were not estimates of this precise budget plan, it’s extremely unlikely that they would show a bonus anywhere near this size. And it should be noted that the Trump administration’s planned mass deportations (supported by the increased spending in the budget plan) as well as restrictions on new immigration and tariffs are all projected to reduce economic growth.

When you strip away the budget’s “bonus,” the budget would increase the debt by $1.6 trillion over the next decade—driven by expensive tax cuts—while increasing poverty, increasing the cost of a college education, raising families’ costs for food and healthcare, and leaving more people without health coverage. Coupled with the potential for tariffs to raise consumers’ prices for many goods, this agenda is a stark betrayal from the -resident’s promises during the campaign to look out for people who face financial struggles.

The House Republican budget’s path of less opportunity, higher poverty, and more inequality is the wrong direction for our nation. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans appear poised to head in a similar direction, only through two reconciliation bills rather than one. Congress should return to the drawing board and craft a budget that broadens opportunity, lowers costs, and invests in people and families, while responsibly raising the revenues needed to make those investments and reduce economic risks associated with high debt.

The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war and the threat of more war, a rampaging climate crisis, and an accelerating nuclear arms race (and that’s just for starters)—all occurring in a climate of massive mis- and disinformation that makes it ever harder to build a consensus toward solutions to the multiple problems we face.

Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.

This should be a time for action and activism on behalf of our species and our planet. While there’s certainly a fair amount of that already, the combined weight of the risks we face makes all too many of us turn inward toward family and friends, or outward to find scapegoats for our problems. And yes, there are still moments of joy, optimism, and constructive action. Unfortunately, they are increasingly hard to sustain amid relentless daily attacks on people’s lives, livelihoods, and basic dignity.

One of the best ways to find a place of balance and light amid all the chaos is by creating and appreciating art, which can get to the heart of the matter by tapping not just the intellect but the emotions, putting us in touch with a deeper sense of meaning too often ignored in our rush to deal with the crises of the moment.

Sending Out an SOS

It’s in this context that I read and viewed Promemoria—Reminder (Sending Out an SOS) by EMA (Enrico Muratore Aprosio), a Geneva-based human rights advocate, humanitarian, and artist. The words in the book, which addresses Covid-19, the climate, and the prospects of nuclear war through poetry, prose, and storytelling, are compelling. But the artworks that punctuate the text are truly stunning, using bright colors and complex designs that incorporate pictures of both historical and imaginary figures—its images ranging from Karl Marx to Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan to the Mona Lisa (wearing a Covid-19 protective mask).

The book honors the spirit of altruism and courage, most notably in a section dedicated to Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese peacekeeper who saved up to 1,000 lives amid the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only to be killed in a mortar attack 12 days before he was set to return home.

Melissa Parke, director general of the Nobel Prize-winning International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, captures the sense of the book well, suggesting that Aprosio’s “use of beautiful animals, striking colors, and magical happenings communicates both the urgency of the situation we face and reminds us of what we stand to lose if we don’t change course.”

Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity.

Appreciating what we still stand to lose couldn’t be more crucial in the world we now face. Savoring everything from the signal achievements of humanity (writ large) to the pleasures and accomplishments of our everyday lives matters deeply, both as a motivation to continue working for change in an ever-messier world and as fuel for sustaining us in a struggle of unknown duration.

Yes, EMA’s book is grimly grounded in reality, even as it (literally) paints a picture of a world that could be so much better. One of my favorite panels in the book is entitled “Every Day More Bullshit,” just because, well, it seems all too sadly appropriate to the moment we’re in.

There’s also a chapter called “Radioactive Beasts,” inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm. The animals Aprosio writes about are worried by the state of the world and concerned that humans aren’t taking the risks posed by current conflicts seriously enough.

In April 2023, some of Aprosio’s fictional beasts were projected onto buildings in New York City’s Times Square with support from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Other portions of the book could be displayed across this embattled planet of ours in a similar fashion to good effect.

There’s more to EMA’s book than can be taken in at a sitting, or even many sittings, or certainly summarized in an essay like this. Still, get your hands on it if you can. It can serve as an inspirational reference work you can dip into at any time to reenergize yourself or contemplate what a different world might indeed look like. In that way, it reminds me of the effects of Afrofuturist art and literature, not because the forms necessarily resemble each other, but because both approaches underscore the desperate need for a bold vision of what a new world might look like—a vision of what anyone trying to change things might dream of.

Artists for Peace

Promemoria is anything but the only current art project that takes on nuclear weapons and related dangers. One of the most interesting current networks is Artists Against the Bomb, a global organization of creators who have produced an amazing array of antinuclear posters, among other works.

Another vital project in a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating and the U.S. is planning to invest up to $2 trillion dollars in the (yes, this is indeed the term!) “modernization” of its nuclear force in the coming decades is Bombshelltoe. It’s a policy and arts collective that defines itself as “a creative organization pushing for an active exploration of arts, culture, and history to promote nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament for the next generation.” One of its prominent efforts is the Atomic Terrain Project, which highlights how nuclear weapons have “seeped into our waters and tapped into our soil” and “continue to harm all life, human and non-human alike.”

I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition that the project mounted at the 2024 New York Art Book Fair entitled “How to Make a Bomb”—a book with the same title was also released then—organized and presented by Gabriella Hirst, Warren Harper, Tammy Nguyen, and Lovely Umayam (the founder of Bombshelltoe). The exhibit was built around a flower, the Rosa Floribunda, or—yes!—“Atom Bomb,” which Hirst describes as “a garden rose that was cultivated and named in 1953 during the Cold War arms race to commemorate Britain’s newfound status as a nuclear power.” Hirst has taken the lead in cultivating (and you might say pacifying) that rose, while getting it planted in gardens throughout the United Kingdom and beyond as an antinuclear gesture of beauty.

At the book fair, attendees could learn how to plant and maintain just such a rose while engaging in conversations about the history and devastating impact of nuclear weapons or checking out basic documents and books about the nuclear age. Such an indirect (even flowery!) route into truly grim subject matter drew interest from people who might not normally pick up a book on, or read an article about, the dangers of nuclear weapons but were fascinated by the physical process of grafting a rose and then willing to stay for open-ended conversations about the growing nuclear dangers in our world.

When asked why the project chose to use a rose as an entry point into discussions of such ominous and grim subject matter, Lovely Umayam noted that “nuclear issues alone can feel abstract and alarmist” and eerily unapproachable. As Gabriella Hirst put it, the project “is about taking the sublime into your own hands and working through that in small ways… to reduce fear among non-experts.”

At the same book fair where I encountered the Rose Project, I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Rejali, an organizer of the art and political website Khabar Keslan. Recent essays there include an interview with Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Jarrar, but I was first drawn to the project’s printed works, including reproductions of stamps from Iran and South Asia going back to the 1950s. There were, of course, numerous stamps portraying the once-dreaded Shah of Iran. There was also one of the CIA’s logo with blood running down it, a reference to the agency’s role in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah as Iran’s autocratic ruler. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful product of Khabar Keslan, however, may have been a collection of poems entitled “Salute to Olives” by the late Omar al-Bargouthi, many of which were written while he was being held in Israeli prisons.

On a planet where nuclear dangers are only growing, both Promemoria and the Atomic Terrain project underscore the importance of finding new ways to communicate about this increasingly fragile and endangered planet of ours that inspire creativity and action rather than fear, paralysis, and denial. At a time when challenges to fundamental rights are hurtling toward us at warp speed, taking the time to experience artworks of any kind can seem like a distinct luxury, but don’t believe that for a second. Such art is a key to reclaiming our humanity and getting in touch with the creative, collaborative impulses that could help save our planet. A pause, artistic in nature, to reflect and recharge our psychic batteries can go a long way toward helping us to cope with this all too strange present moment and build for the future. Promemoria provides us with that precious opportunity.

A Brief History of Culture and Resistance

Music, theater, painting, and other forms of artistic expression have, in fact, been part of every major movement for change in recent memory. The Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, funded as part of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the era of the Great Depression, hired unemployed performers and writers who produced more than 800 plays and dance events. In the process, they highlighted work by under-represented groups, including African Americans via the Negro Theatre Project and the African-American Dance Unit. It also funded foreign language plays in Spanish, Yiddish, and German until Congressman Martin Dies, Jr., head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, led a successful charge to defund the program because of its advocacy of racial equality and other progressive themes.

Theater, however, continued to play a central role in progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from Teatro Campesino, born during the United Farm Workers Union’s organizing drives in California; to the Bread and Puppet Theater, a staple of anti-war efforts; and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose plays captured a whole range of progressive themes, often in hilarious fashion. And don’t forget the freedom songs that were at the core of the civil rights movement, sung by demonstrators at mass rallies and activists detained in local jails in the South.

The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s was also sustained and amplified by works of art. Its best-known cultural product was undoubtedly the TV movie The Day After, a fictionalized treatment of the impacts of a nuclear war viewed by more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in November 1983. But there was also a steady drumbeat of anti-nuclear cartoons, some of which were assembled in a widely distributed collection entitled Warheads. Joel Andreas’s 77-page graphic comic book, Addicted to War: Why America Can’t Kick Militarism, proved to be a primer on the roots of the American war system from the 19th-century vision of “manifest destiny” to (in an updated edition) the Global War on Terror, taking on war profiteers and the role of the media along the way.

More recently, groups like the Yes Men and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir have lampooned corporations and their executives through street theater and by posing as participants in corporate gatherings (and so underscoring the absurdity of their activities and world views). The Yes Men describe their work as using “humor and trickery to highlight the corporate takeover of society, the neoliberal delusion that allows it, [and] the corporate Democrats’ responsibility for our current situation.” Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ridicule materialism in all its forms from Starbucks displacing local coffee shops to the excesses of the Disney Store in New York’s Times Square.

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has similarly engaged in a wide range of politically focused art projects, ranging from a Peace Symphony performed in Hiroshima to The Book of Ice, which addresses climate change, to a wide array of films, articles, and concerts. Robin Bell Visuals has produced films and art installations, including projecting the words “Pay Bribes Here” on the side of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. And there have been scores of anti-war anthems produced in virtually every genre of modern music from folk to jazz to rock to hip hop to heavy metal.

My colleague Khody Akhavi makes short compelling videos on topics ranging from the dangerous rise of AI-driven weaponry to the impact of the funding of think tanks by weapons contractors, the Pentagon, and foreign governments. And the Center for Artistic Activism partners with advocacy groups on specific projects, schools them in artistic techniques, and helps them build art into their campaigns and public education efforts. Their slogan: “we make social and environmental change more effective—and more creative.”

Better yet, the artists and projects cited above are just a sampling of the many forms of political art that have attracted audiences and encouraged activism at the local, national, and global levels. Promemoria is a worthy addition to this tradition. Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity. Given the world we’re now in, it can’t happen soon enough.

On February 4, in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip,” “level the site,” have all Palestinians removed, and enable people “from all over the world [to] be there” to enjoy what he appears to envision as an international resort area.

While many observers are dismissing Trump’s statement as a bizarre and spontaneous scheme on which he will likely not follow through, the announcement appeared to be the result of at least some degree of planning, as he read from prepared notes from a proposal assembled well ahead of Netanyahu’s visit.

While this may be among the most extreme anti-Palestinian initiatives to have ever come out of Washington, it is the logical extension of decades of bipartisan U.S. policy in support of Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank, as well as recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, a recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s exclusive capital, and support for Israel’s decades-long siege of and successive devastating wars on the Gaza Strip. In denying Palestinians equal rights, either through a viable two-state solution or a binational state with guaranteed rights for all, the United States has contributed to the emergence of violent extremists on both sides, and has given the far more powerful Israelis license to escalate their imposition of a kind of apartheid system.

The one cause for hope is that the U.S. government’s now open, on-record support for such a flagrant settler-colonial project—as opposed to its prior platitudes about a two-state solution it never had any intention of forcing Israel to accept—might enable the emergence of a stronger movement in support of human rights and international law in Israel and Palestine.

Trump has rationalized expelling Palestinians in order to rebuild Gaza on the terms of the United States and Israel by noting that much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and can no longer sustain the population. While he referred to the Palestinians’ plight as a result of “bad luck,” it is in fact the result of deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure by U.S.-backed Israeli forces. A growing international legal consensus hasdescribed this ongoing siege as genocide, made possible through bipartisan support for unconditional military aid, five U.S. vetoes of otherwise-unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire, and attacks on human rights groups and international legal institutions that have sought accountability for the actions of the Israeli government.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared earlier this week on X that the United States would “Make Gaza Beautiful Again.” While members of Congress from both parties expressed skepticism, others were supportive. U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said the proposal was a “good idea,” and asked a reporter, “Do you want to be part of it?” U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) also appeared to be open to the idea, calling it “provocative” but saying that it is “part of the conversation.”

Arab states, including such Trump-backed autocratic regimes as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, roundly rejected Trump’s plan, which would require them to absorb a new round of Palestinian refugees. Germany, Russia, China, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, and other nations, as well as various United Nations agencies, condemned the proposal as illegal. The proposal was reportedly influenced by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who said publicly last year that “Gaza’s waterfront property... could be very valuable” and that “from Israel’s perspective, [he] would do [his] best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

The Israeli Intelligence Ministry had already prepared a plan in October 2023 to physically remove all Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai desert, as ministers in Netanyahu’s government have repeatedly called for the expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza and colonization of the region. That same fall, the Biden administration proposed to the Egyptians that they accept an exodus of Palestinians into the territory. Although the State Department later claimed the administration’s proposal was only meant as a short-term measure, the Egyptians doubted that Israel would allow the refugees back, in light of Israel’s historic refusal to honor the right of return of previous waves of Palestinian refugees.

Now such plans are coming to fruition. Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli army to prepare plans to organize the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Although Jordan and Egypt, whom Trump suggested could take the bulk of refugees, have made it clear that they will not accept Palestinians forced out of Palestine, they cannot stop Israel, with the backing of the United States, from expelling them.

Compounding the horror of Trump’s proposal is that, while many Palestinian families have lived in Gaza for centuries, the majority of current residents are themselves refugees or descendants of refugees forced out of other parts of Palestine between 1947 and 1950. When asked about what would happen if the Palestinians wanted to return to Gaza, Trump—after describing how he planned to turn the territory into a new Riviera—dismissed the question by saying, “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”

That no one in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress or elsewhere has called for Netanyahu’s arrest in keeping with the International Criminal Court, or even objected to his being invited, has likely emboldened Trump and Netanyahu to announce their support for this ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. With the majority of congressional Democrats continuing their support for unconditional military aid to Israel despite its slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the threatened expulsion of 2 million more, these two right-wing leaders appear to believe there is little stopping them.

The one cause for hope is that the U.S. government’s now open, on-record support for such a flagrant settler-colonial project—as opposed to its prior platitudes about a two-state solution it never had any intention of forcing Israel to accept—might enable the emergence of a stronger movement in support of human rights and international law in Israel and Palestine. Supporting unconditional military aid to a government committed to ethnic cleansing may prove even more difficult for members of Congress to justify than providing such assistance to a government in its terror bombing of crowded urban areas and then restricting relief supplies.

What is at stake here is not just a new threat to the rights of the Palestinians, but a threat to the entire international legal order. With Trump’s plans to colonize Gaza, congressional Democrats may finally be forced to choose which side they are on.

Trump and Musk are stirring up a resistance movement among liberals and the left. The protests are a righteous struggle against the authoritarian usurpation of lawful power, the reckless, illegal attacks on government agencies, the stripping of DEI programs and language, and the trampling over the rights of immigrants and transgender people.

But what are the goals of this resistance? And do voters outside the liberal bubble support them?

It's time to face up to the harsh reality: Trump’s flurry of activity, at least so far, has made him more popular, not less so, with the American public. Here’s the latest CBS poll:

• How would you describe Trump? 69 percent said “tough,” 63 percent said “energetic,” 60 percent said “focused,” and 58 percent said “effective.”
• Is Trump living up to his campaign promises? 70 percent said “yes.”
• Trump’s overall job rating is 53 percent. At this point in his first term it was only 40 percent.
• A hefty 59 percent approve of his program to “deport immigrants illegally in the U.S,” while 64 percent approve of sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. A smaller majority, 52 percent, oppose setting up large detention centers.
• How about Gaza? 54 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, though only 13 percent think it would be a good idea to for the U.S. to take over Gaza.
• Trump’s major vulnerability seems to be inflation. Two-thirds believe he is not focusing enough on lowering prices.

Progressives emphatically believe that Trump is destroying democracy, but doesn’t democracy have something to do with the will of the people? And what does it mean for democracy if Trump’s actions are broadening his base even beyond those who voted for him? It likely means that a majority of the public does not view Trump as the destroyer of democracy.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels.

Trump is broadening his base by doing what he said he would do and thinks he was elected to do. His support is growing because there is a hunger for action that is, at least symbolically, in the people’s interest. Will Trump’s approach improve the outcomes for the working class? That’s doubtful, but there is a desire for defiant action, and they are getting it.

Breaking Out of the Bubble

There’s a lesson there. Broadening the base is precisely what progressives must do.

That starts with a recognition that protests alone don’t signal action on behalf of working people. And such displays may be helping Trump increase, not undermine, his support. He may even want to provoke them, because he understands what liberals don’t—that most of the protests will be seen as resistance to change, as support for established elite institutions, and as obstacles to creating a better life for voters.

Think for a second about USAID. Most Americans are not strong supporters of spending billions to aid other countries while needs at home go unmet. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief advisor, put it:

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: ‘Cut foreign aid.’”

What then are the tests to evaluate resistance tactics?

• Do protests and resistance expand the progressive base?
• Do they engage with working people who have drifted away from the Democratic Party over the last generation?
• Do they win over those who support Trump’s efforts to dramatically change the federal government?

So far, probably not. That’s because progressive protests mostly, if not entirely, involve mobilizing and appealing to those who already agree with liberal positions. There are plenty of people who support these efforts, but not enough.

It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

This is not to say that protests to protect the vulnerable are not important. Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Mobilizing for 2026?

If progressives want to halt Trump’s authoritarian actions, they will want the Democrats recapture at least one of the Congressional chambers. To do that the progressive base must expand in swing districts.

How should those battles be waged?

We know from the polling done by the Center for Working Class Politics that a strong populist economic message is far more effective than attacking Trump on democracy issues. We also know from the CBS poll that Trump is vulnerable on the high cost of living.

Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels. As I recently wrote, the Democrats also could put Trump on the defensive by demanding he implement an executive order that prevents government contractors (like Musk) from laying off workers involuntarily.

Progressive activists have the creativity to mobilize protests around price hikes and needless layoffs. But the move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In a fragmented society, this is a heavy lift. More affluent progressives and Trump working-class supporters do not often live in the same areas or share the same spaces. Inflation and job insecurity may not feel as pressing to them as they do to working people. It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

The move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In our own small way, the Labor Institute has figured out how to build educational bridges between MAGA workers and others in our Reversing Runaway Inequality training for union members. The participants bring with them a wide range of political preferences, but after an 8-hour workshop they come together to design a common vision for what a society without runaway inequality should look like. It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

Then what? That openness won’t translate into Democratic votes unless candidates are willing to put forth a powerful populist economic message that supports workers’ jobs and wages.

It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

And there’s the rub: those candidates not only have to mouth the words, but also, they need to believe in the message. To build a bigger base, they must be willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class instead of trying to raise money from them.

The alternative? More marches, more chanting, and... more defeats.

In his book, The Present Age, the late sociologist Robert Nisbet applied a pithy descriptor to a phenomenon we have seen all too often in public life: the “no-fault” theory of political action, particularly in foreign affairs. “Presidents, secretaries, and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations,” he wrote. “This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon, and now the Persian Gulf.”

Nisbet did not live to see a spectacular example of his theory. George W. Bush, having failed to prevent the 9/11 disaster his own intelligence agencies foresaw, proceeded to initiate a years-long disaster in Iraq, a catastrophe of his own making. Yet what were the consequences? The American people rewarded him with a second term in the face of abundant evidence of his incompetence and bad faith.

It would appear that Nisbet’s thesis needs revision. What he said was blatantly obvious: of course politicians rarely blame themselves for their own egregious policy failures, for it characterizes the typical behavior of ambitious, self-confident, and often corner-cutting people.

We frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like... How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

What is more significant, and troubling, is the reaction of the people who elect them: why do they more often than not reward leaders who inveigle them into national calamity? Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection.

Wait, say the pundits, weren’t great swathes of the American people in 2016 victimized by the system, suffering from “economic anxiety?” But exit polling data from 2016 showed that Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year and by nine points among those making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump, on the other hand, won every demographic making $50,000 or more

In 2024, the U.S. economy was the best in almost 60 years, with October unemployment at 4.1 percent. This is not to argue that everything was ideal, but the economy was better than recent U.S. experience, and unemployment and GDP growth were far better than most developed countries.

Accordingly, pundits dropped the economic anxiety excuse. Instead, we have been inundated with think pieces about how Democrats in some unexplained way “lost the working class,” a demographic conveniently left undefined. This claim contradicts continued polling evidence that Trump consistently did better among more affluent voters. The notion that Trump has magnetic appeal among Americans living a precarious economic existence is largely myth.

Otherwise, the media has treated Trump’s election like an asteroid falling from the sky, a natural disaster seemingly without input from the electorate. Why? It may be that the press still refuses to violate the last moral taboo in American public life: the essential innocence and virtue of this country’s citizens.

Denouncing the rascality of politicians is a revered American tradition, from Artemus Ward to Mark Twain, to Will Rogers, right down to the late-night TV hosts of today. Even the ultra-refined Henry Adams, scion of the Adams's of presidential fame, approvingly quoted the line, “A congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and beat him on the snout!”

Perhaps the only well-known American literary figure to take a dim view of the people who actually elect the politicians was H.L. Mencken. He denounced vigilantism during World War I, Prohibition, the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the revival of religious fundamentalism that same decade, not as some plague that befell the country from nowhere, but as an expression of Americans’ mob mentality, anti-intellectualism, and search for easy solutions.

Otherwise, American literary tradition gives us Walt Whitman singing the praises of his fellow citizens, Carl Sandberg (“the people, yes . . .”), Thorton Wilder and his sentimental tale of small-town folks, and Frank Capra’s maudlin cinematic paeans to the fundamental goodness of the common clay. Thousands of lesser lights have engaged in similar rhetorical puffery to the present day. The tragic, grown-up sense of social life in Victor Hugo or the great Russian novelists is absent from the American tradition.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions...?

Editorial departments still hew to this convention. A journalist friend recently submitted a piece to a well-known center-left magazine arguing that some responsibility must attach to the voters for the 2024 election. The response: “We can’t say the American people are stupid,” even though the editor agreed with the author.

Political theorists from the center to the far left are also prone to this delusion. They have built an edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of illegitimate corporate or governmental control, it is miraculously unconnected with the character of the people the system administers. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is typical of the species, a late-20th century adaptation of Karl Marx’s theory of mystification: that the common people do not recognize their genuine interest because they have been mystified by the powers-that-be.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions when accurate information is easily accessible, and never more so than today? (This is quite apart from the fact that Trump told voters very explicitly about the horrors he would inflict, meaning that something other than gullibility is also at work).

It wasn’t always thus: farmers in the 1890s, the core support for the old People’s Party, knew very well who was screwing them: the railroads, the banks, the grain traders. So did 1930s production-line workers in steel, autos, and rubber, struggling for union recognition: they knew it was their own employers, not foreign competition or some culture-wars chimera that was responsible for their miserable conditions.

But now, farmers vote overwhelmingly for Trump, despite their suffering under foreign retaliatory tariffs resulting from his ill-considered economic policy during his first term and likely further damage in his second. And unionization is at record post-World War II lows, despite the material benefits of union membership.

What changed? Historian Rick Perlstein, writing in The Invisible Bridge, said that in the 1970s, as the crises of Vietnam, racial unrest, and Watergate abated, the American people had a chance to learn from these events: in other words, to grow up and be responsible citizens.

They didn’t. Ronald Reagan’s soothing fairy tale of innocent virtue, of a country sinned against but never sinning, became America’s secular religion. I would extend Perlstein’s thesis by suggesting that this bogus innocence has become embedded in the American psyche and individualized into a personalized martyr complex. Every vicissitude of life is now the fault of some detested minority, or the elites, or the system generally.

The vanguard of this personality type, the people who actually generate the atrocious ideas the Trump regime is now implementing, is what substacker John Ganz calls the “creep-loser.” You know the type from high school: awkward, asocial, and full of resentment against the world for failing to recognize his genius.

Many of them become brooding, failed intellectuals, the sort that were the idea engine of authoritarian movements throughout the 20th century, and who now infest places like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation. They are to MAGA what the Old Bolsheviks were to the Communist movement. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist. Their goal is simply destruction as revenge.

It is true that all of these resentful fantasists together would barely fill a stadium: hardly a key national voting bloc. But their nihilistic attitude is surprisingly prevalent among “real Americans” who never read Ayn Rand or attended Hillsdale College. Beginning in 2015, pollsters have been rather surprised at the frequency that respondents claim they just want to “burn it all down,” not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious?

Add to them the rapturist Christians, the hard core of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc (the largest single constituency of the Republican Party). The belief that a millennial holocaust wiping out earth is something to look forward to is in its basic psychology no different from Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker or suicide cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Even the wider fundamentalist belief system is prone to rigidly separate human beings into the blessed and the damned, a mindset hardly consistent with pluralist democracy.

A final demographic is the most diffuse and least attached to any ideology: the tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type. No doubt they think even now that plundering Greenland or sending combat troops to Gaza is comedy gold. Others will apply a sort of degenerate folk wisdom that they think is clever, saying they “always vote those in office out, and those out of office in,” or some similar nonsense.

Other unserious people feign a righteous anger over the price of eggs on the assumption that the White House controls the cost of consumer goods regardless of circumstances like bird flu. The price of eggs or broiler chickens is much more important to them than living under the rule of law or handing down a decent and humane society to their children.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious? No doubt indifference, because it won’t affect them, just as arrests of Jews or Social Democrats didn’t affect “good Germans” in the 1930s. As for the true believers, whether religious fundamentalist or secular neoreactionary tech-nerd, they’ll be cheering it on: they never believed in any nonsense about democracy or human rights in any case.

How can America’s purported thought-leaders seriously maintain that a working majority of Americans (those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care) didn’t consciously will what is now unfolding? As Steve Bannon’s role model Lenin was reputed to have remarked, “who says A must say B:” people are intellectually and morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. To argue otherwise is the equivalent of saying that tens of millions of Americans are legally incapable of signing contracts, marrying, driving cars, or exercising the franchise.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it. It’s a Wonderful Life is conventionally viewed as a heart-warming Christmas movie, with a depressing second act making the finale all the more sentimentally fulfilling, like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Yet, but for the contingency of George Bailey’s having been born and lived, Bedford Falls inevitably would have defaulted to Potterville, hardly an affirmation of the goodness and civic-mindedness of the majority, who might have been expected to resist the designs of the grasping Mr. Potter.

Contingencies work that way in real life, too. But for the pandemic and the resulting inflation, we might be living in a different world. Alas, given the recent price of eggs, most Americans preferred to ditch safe, staid old Bedford Falls for the vulgar excitement of Potterville. The town’s owner, whether Mr. Potter or Donald Trump, will cheerfully ensure that while he might fleece you for every cent and jail you if you defy him, you’ll never be bored.

As President Donald Trump tests the limits of manufactured crisis and chaos, he claims a mandate from the American people. But his razor-thin electoral victory tells a different story. Voters didn’t ask for an illegal takeover of government offices, a freezing of funds for needed services, sending our immigrant neighbors to camps at Guantanamo, or aggression against our allies. Yes, we wanted change. But as multiple polls show, a clear majority were seeking relief from unaffordable prices, real economic hardship, and inequality, not an authoritarian takeover.

The Trump administration’s initial barrage of orders will make life worse for the most vulnerable — especially immigrants and transgender people — but soon enough for everyone else in the non-billionaire community. The rapid roll out of these policies is right out of the fascist playbook, designed to overwhelm and demobilize the public.

How can we regain our footing and our strength? We need to not only stop the roll out of policies that threaten to make life worse for ordinary people, but we need to keep focusing on the changes we the people are actually looking for. We need to demand the changes we voted for. If we do that, we can stay grounded during the turmoil, resist the chaos, and build the power to create an authentically populist future.

Does Trump have a mandate?

First, did the American people actually vote for the Trump/Musk actions? Clearly the answer is no. Trump won the vote of less than 1 in 3 eligible voters. 31 percent voted for Kamala Harris. This margin of victory was significantly lower than President Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020.

It was “none-of-the-above” that won a landslide in the 2024 election; 38 percent of eligible voters either cast a vote for a third-party candidate or they didn’t vote for president.

What Americans really want

Economic wellbeing, not chaos and threats, were the top of the list for Americans, including those who voted for Trump. Ninety percent of voters told Gallup the economy was a top influence in their 2024 vote. The rising cost of housing and everyday expenses was cited as the most critical issue by both Trump voters (79 percent) and the broader electorate (56 percent). Trump won four out of five voters who said they were worse off financially than four years ago.

The hardships are real. According to Federal Reserve data, more than one-third of American adults lack the resources to handle a $400 emergency. Families face crushing costs—median childcare runs $1,100 monthly, matching typical rent payments. Twenty-five percent of households with children carry medical debt. Nearly one in five adults has been financially impacted by natural disasters.

Democrats often tout improvements in inflation and unemployment under the Biden Administration. Yet the ALICE metric (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) reveals a hidden crisis: 42 percent of American households — often working multiple jobs — struggle to cover basic needs, a 23 percent increase since 2010.

Meanwhile, America's billionaire class has accumulated unprecedented wealth—$6.72 trillion among 813 individuals, growing by $1 trillion in just that last nine months of 2024, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Seventy-two percent are dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations (and that number has grown by 14 points since the beginning of Trump’s first term).

It’s no surprise, then, that the economy remains the concern most noted by Americans in a Jan. 24-26, 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll (21 percent), just behind is “political extremism or threats to democracy (20 percent). Immigration is third at 14 percent. Another poll shows 80 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the nation’s efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness, 69 percent dissatisfied with the availability of affordable healthcare, and 69 percent dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed.

Trump focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy and safeguards

President Trump used populist talking points when he was running. Sure corporate CEOs are happy to have fewer environmental and health regulations, and yes, that would boost their profits. But he has done nothing to further the economic wellbeing of ordinary Americans. Tariffs will make prices climb for consumers. And increased drilling will make the climate crisis worse while accomplishing little in a nation already awash with fossil fuels.

Trump is a genius at distraction, especially when his policies are mostly aimed at improving the prospects of himself and other billionaires. He does that by channelling MAGA anger at the least powerful members of our society, beginning by bullying undocumented families and transgender people.

It is true that Americans of both parties are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country. Migration is a global challenge—war, climate-caused displacement, and economic dislocation have sent millions of people on desperate searches for safety and opportunities. Some of them have come to the United States.

But many Americans value the neighbors, family members, business owners, and workers who are part of our communities. Few want to see forced family separations, the deportations of hard-working neighbors, and federal agents stalking our communities. And those with a long view recognize that they, too, could be displaced by natural disasters and climate change, and might wish to be treated well in their new homes.

Mobilizing for real populism

Early signs are that Americans are not on board with many of the Trump administration’s barrage of executive orders. According to an early February Reuters/ Ipsos poll, 62 percent opposed the temporary freezing of domestic spending.

Other executive orders supported by MAGA are also unpopular. Abolishing DEI programs in the military was supported by 46 percent of respondents, but opposed by 49 percent. And 55 percent opposed Trump’s order barring transgender people from the military.

How can ordinary people build sufficient power to protect democratic principles and the wellbeing of our families?

We should reject bogus claims of a mandate and recognize that Trump’s policies are unpopular and his approval ratings are low, already underwater with 46 percent disapproval compared to 45 percent approval.

That should embolden us to speak out!

But public opinion won’t save us. We have to act. And Americans are mobilizing, shaking off the shock and overwhelm of the initial onslaught of Trump orders:

Elected officials in Washington, D.C., report thousands of phone calls and emails coming in from constituents, and Democrats are beginning to push back. Even Republicans might find the backbone to stand up for ordinary people if their constituents let them know.

State and local officials are taking steps to protect residents from the worst damage from Trump administration action.
Thousands of people came together in hastily organized protests at state capitols around the country under the hashtag 'Build the Resistance.' Plans are underway for more mobilization and grassroots organizing.

Public officials and civil society groups are mounting successful lawsuits to rein in the worst abuses—the legal challenges are already demonstrating that the co-equal judicial branch of government is still functioning, and that many independent judges are prepared to stand up to administration bullying.

The next few years will be difficult for all who value freedom and equity. And, like the hardships the Trump administration is inflicting on Americans, citizens of other countries will feel the pain.

Our best hope is to organize, mobilize, and create common ground around the demands for economic relief, not authoritarianism. Instead of being distracted, divided, and overwhelmed, we can set our own agenda for positive change and insist that our elected leaders act on our behalf, not for the billionaires.

We will need many, many leaders—no one will save us. But if we step up and work together on the issues that affect ordinary people, we may come through this difficult time with renewed clarity about America’s strengths and values, and with the collective power to create a better future and a more durable democracy.

On January 20, the fate of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border was abruptly changed as U.S. President Donald Trump announced new executive orders further dismantling the right to asylum.

That morning, the patients I saw in our pop-up clinic at a migrant shelter were full of apprehension about the threatened Trump policies, but a sense of hope remained. One young man told me he was so excited he could barely sleep because his CBP One appointment, which would allow him and his family to request parole to enter the U.S. while they applied for asylum, was scheduled for the following day.

By noon, the tone had changed. People tried desperately to log in to the CBP One app but were given error messages. Cancelation notices arrived in the email inboxes of those who had already been granted appointments. One patient who had left his country fleeing political violence and had been waiting for eight months at the border for the appointment, frantically held his phone up to show me the email. “Now what are we supposed to do?” he lamented, “We have nowhere safe to go.”

There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders.

Indeed, the end of the CBP One appointment program has effectively closed the door on asylum seekers at the U.S.’ southern border. With the ongoing restrictions of the asylum ban and border closure rules put in place during the Biden administration, there are now no viable legal pathways to entry for the hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking safety at the border.

The effect on our patients waiting in Mexico has been devastating, and it’s only going to get worse. Patients came into the clinic reporting depression, panic attacks, and despair. Some had just narrowly survived being kidnapped, beaten, or raped, and were petrified about being targeted again by the organized crime groups that prey on migrants in Mexican border cities.

Over the years in our clinics, we have seen that increased restrictions in border policies—such as Trump’s Remain in Mexico—increase danger, injuries, mental health problems, childhood developmental problems, and untimely death for asylum seekers trying to make it to the U.S. Most recently, these issues had still been occurring given the long waiting periods of the CBP One system, but now they will undoubtedly worsen.

Being stranded leads people to make impossible choices. Some families will risk (and some lose) their lives trying to cross the swift currents of the Rio Grande or the harsh landscape of the desert. Some families choose to send their children over the border unaccompanied, taking on the trauma of family separation because they see no other way for their child to escape from danger and have a better life.

President Trump says we shouldn’t care about the plight of immigrants and should instead focus on American citizens’ needs—of which, undoubtedly, there are many. But such perspectives miss the bigger picture, and are, in fact, woefully inaccurate. Not only are we able to support immigrants, we desperately need to, for the sake of all of us. Without immigrants, we’d be facing a home care crisis, an agricultural crisis, and our economy would suffer. What’s more, the plight of migrants in transit impacts our communities in the U.S. I have patients at my primary care clinic in Massachusetts who have fallen into a deep depression or whose blood pressure has skyrocketed when a loved one of theirs is lost along the migrant route or is assaulted on the journey. Let alone our international and domestic legal obligations that require us to recognize and honor the right to seek asylum.

As our patients at the migrant shelter reeled from the news of the cancelation of CBP One, one man was still smiling. “I believe the new president will have compassion for us,” he said, standing outside his tent and nodding toward his wife and small children inside. “He has a family too. I pray that he will be able to understand that we need safety for our kids.”

It would be nice. But in the absence of that change of heart, our communities need to take action. Elected officials, civil society, and our communities must band together to resist the current assaults on asylum, and push for humane and welcoming border policies. There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders—it’s our obligation, and it’s a matter of life and death.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which reverses the push for paper straws in favor of plastic ones—based on the claim that paper straws don’t work (which, by the way, isn’t true)—is about way more than just straws. It is designed to undercut the Biden administration’s 2022 initiative to phase out single-use plastics, including straws, containers, and bottles, from federal buildings by 2032.

While the administration’s EO focus might seem to be shining a light on a seemingly trivial issue, it is a symptom of a much larger, and much more alarming problem: plastic pollution and its impact on all of us. Plastic is a human health crisis in the making and this decision is more than absurd—it’s actually dangerous.

Firstly, while banning plastic straws specifically is not all about saving turtles and trashing the ocean—we are in fact by using them helping to trash the oceans.

This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil.

Plastics have become a pervasive pollutant with 8 million tonnes of plastic dumped in our oceans every single year, killing marine life, including whales and seabirds at an alarming rate. One million sea turtles alone die every year from ingesting plastic trash. That represents 10% of the entire global population.

Researchers estimate there are around 199 million tonnes of plastic contaminating our marine environment already, and every year we do not take action and instead back plastic, that number rises.

Much of this largely single-use plastic, like straws, eventually breaks down into microplastics, smaller than a grain of rice. So, when we eat fish, we are consuming all the plastic junk and chemicals they have been ingesting too.

Which might help to explain why scientists have found plastic particles in human brains, lungs, hearts, and even placentas. We are poisoning our own babies with plastics, even before they are born.

These microplastics are harmful in their own right but, they also leach out toxic plastic chemicals, like Bisphenol A and phthalates, both known endocrine disruptors. Exposure to these chemicals in early development can have lifelong effects on a child's health, from developmental delays to ADHD, autism, and increased risks of certain cancers. These chemicals are even linked to miscarriages and infertility.

We already know that babies and infants appear to be ingesting high levels of microplastics because a study by scientists from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland discovered they had over 10 times higher rates of microplastics in their feces samples than adults.

From the moment we wake up to the time we go to sleep, we are being exposed to microplastics—whether through the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe.

The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life. So, the president’s focus on supporting plastic straws is worryingly indicative of a disregard for the growing scientific consensus on the dangers of microplastics and the chemicals used to make plastics in general.

This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil. Why? Because plastics are made from petrochemicals, this order therefore supports the fossil fuel industry. An industry already wreaking havoc on our planet by fueling climate change.

If we are serious about safeguarding human health, we must shift away from our throwaway plastic culture that has dominated our society for decades. The impacts of plastic pollution on our health, and our babies’ too, are far-reaching and catastrophic. It's time for our leaders to prioritize the health of people, not the interests of the plastic industry.

As the debate over plastic straws continues, which it will, we need to refocus the conversation on the real, life-threatening dangers posed by plastic pollution. It is time to recognize that this is not a fight over a straw—it is a fight for children’s health.

Which is why EARTHDAY.ORG is running an End Plastic Initiatives—so we can continue to drive public support around making a stand against plastic pollution and in the process protect our planet—and more importantly our health—for generations to come. The fight continues. Plastic is Toxic. DON’T GO BACK TO PLASTICS!

On February 10, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, filed suit for damages against the Trump-Musk-DOGE cartel. The lawsuit, which EPIC filed before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, calls for damages on behalf of tens of millions of government workers and Americans resulting from the administration’s illegal breach of personal privacy and its threat to national security.

“These basic security failures have resulted in the unlawful disclosure of personal data—including social security numbers and tax information,” reads the complaint.

EPIC is claiming the data incursion—among many other violations—is illegal under the Privacy Act of 1974. “Plaintiffs have a constitutional right to the privacy of their information… Defendants have violated and continue to violate that right by unlawfully disclosing extremely personal information about plaintiffs and millions of others to unchecked actors in violation of law,” the complaint states.

The courts (and hopefully Congress) are catching up to public opinion, which has taken a drastic turn since Musk began violating the privacy rights of millions of people.

EPIC urges the court to compel defendants to “delete all unlawfully obtained, disclosed, or accessed personally identifiable information from systems or devices on which they were not present on January 19, 2025.” It calls on the court to award plaintiffs statutory and punitive damages “in the amount of $1,000 per each act of unauthorized inspection and disclosure.” That’s a sum that could add up to trillions of dollars in damages given the scope of DOGE’s breach.

The law is catching up to Elon Musk. The EPIC suit is just one of many that have been filed since U.S. President Donald Trump was sworn in and Musk and his DOGE crew infiltrated several key federal agencies and their extensive public records.

On February 7, a federal judge issued an emergency temporary restraining order (TRO) against DOGE after 19 state attorneys general filed a complaint also alleging that DOGE had violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and other laws. The TRO blocks Musk et al. from accessing Treasury systems and requires they destroy any material downloaded.

On filing their case for the TRO, New York State Attorney General Letitia James said: “President Trump does not have the power to give away Americans’ private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress. Musk and DOGE have no authority to access Americans’ private information and some of our country’s most sensitive data.”

The largest data breach in U.S. history

During a Free Press webinar held prior to EPIC’s filing, the organization’s chief litigator, John Davisson, called the DOGE incursion into federal agencies like the Department of Treasury “the largest and most consequential breach of personal information in U.S. history.” To make matters worse, Davisson noted, “it’s being led by malign, unaccountable forces from both without and within the government.”

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert led the very first suit against Trump’s second administration. Since then, the organization has filed several other suits against the Trump White House and its operatives, with most focused on pushing back against the DOGE power grab. “What really stands out is the corruption implicit in Musk being at the helm,” Gilbert said during the Free Press webinar. A Public Citizen report from October found that three of Musk’s businesses—SpaceX, Tesla, and X—face at least 11 criminal and civil investigations at the federal level.

“The biggest risk of all is the risk to democratic governance,” said Davisson. “The folks involved here—these bandits, these hijackers—have correctly assessed that the systems in federal agencies are critical levers for how they carry out the functions Congress has assigned.” Davisson added that the massive DOGE data breach empowers Musk’s unaccountable team “to exert all sorts of pressure on federal employees and people at large on people they disagree with politically and that is something we should be very, very worried about.”

The groundbreaking reporting of WIRED’s Vittoria Elliott has exposed the relatively inexperienced team of techies that has accompanied Musk into these federal agencies to access massive troves of personal data. “One of the biggest issues is the lack of transparency,” she said during the webinar. “We don’t know what systems they’re accessing. We’re not given transparency about their roles… The consequences of [Musk’s team] getting it wrong are so dire for so many people.”

Sowing the Seeds of DOGE’s Downfall

One of the things that stands out to Davisson is just how many mistakes DOGE has made since it began its work. Musk and his team have left themselves vulnerable to the sorts of lawsuits being filed by EPIC, Public Citizen, and state attorneys general, he said. “They’ve aggravated a lot of stakeholders; they’re in the process of aggravating the courts. They’ve embarrassed themselves in many ways; they’ve drawn the eye of the public. I think in many ways they have already sown the seeds of their downfall.”

Congress has reportedly been inundated with calls from people who are deeply unhappy about Musk’s raid on government agencies. “It is a deluge on DOGE,” Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) told The Washington Post. “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years… People are really angry.”

People must share their concerns with their lawmakers and call on Congress to act against the incursions. But that’s just a start.

“There is broad public dislike for Musk,” Davisson said during Monday’s webinar. “And we should continue to find ways to leverage that... This is going to require many small—sometimes unsatisfying—actions by a lot of different people in a lot of different places. This assault on democracy is vulnerable to that.”

Turning Anger About Musk Into Action

There are productive places to channel outrage, said Gilbert. “There have been some really effective engagements and protests and people are ginning up for the next phase of resistance... There are some places where we can win things,” she added, pointing to the upcoming budget fight in Congress.

“There’s a battle to be had, where everyone's senators and members matter,” she said. “Knowing that and knowing that there are places where constituents can weigh in hopefully changes the calculus a little bit when folks are feeling like there’s nothing they can do.”

And indeed Musk may be popular among the extremist MAGA crowd, but voters in general aren’t on board with the DOGE team’s privacy violations. A new Hart Research survey indicates that his popularity is in rapid decline as people learn more about his efforts to compromise our data.

The Economist/YouGov conducted a poll finding that the billionaire is falling out of favor with voters, including Republicans, who say in increasing numbers that they want him to have little-to-no influence over the way the government conducts its business.

The wins against DOGE are just the beginning, Davisson said. The legal strategy is “going to be important for staying grounded through what is going to be a very long and difficult fight. So I encourage everyone to celebrate the wins when they come.”

The courts (and hopefully Congress) are catching up to public opinion, which has taken a drastic turn since Musk began violating the privacy rights of millions of people. With continued public pressure and legal challenges, it’s possible DOGE’s days may be numbered.