The dramatic clash between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dominated headlines, turning what was supposed to be a diplomatic engagement into a public spectacle. Viewers watched in real time as shouting, accusations, and later reports of the abrupt departure by the Ukrainian delegation fueled outrage and speculation. Critics accused Trump of abandoning Ukraine, undermining the U.S. commitment to global democracy, and treating foreign policy negotiations as if he were a mafia boss issuing ultimatums. Yet while Trump’s behavior was undeniably confrontational, the real issue runs deeper than his personal style of diplomacy.

Trump’s approach may lack the diplomatic polish of previous administrations, but the difference is stylistic rather than substantive.

Beneath the theatrics, Trump is not fundamentally breaking from U.S. foreign policy traditions; he is reshaping them. His rhetoric of ending “forever wars” masks a calculated strategy—one that replaces direct military intervention with economic control, resource extraction, and corporate influence. What Trump offers is not an alternative to U.S. imperialism but a rebranded version: a “profitable imperial peace” where stability itself becomes a commodity for American oligarchs. Meanwhile, centrist politicians—his supposed opposition—continue to promote a perpetual war that serves the interests of the military-industrial complex, ensuring that conflict remains a permanent feature of global geopolitics.

The Outrage Over Trump Misses the Bigger Picture

Following the disastrous meeting, widespread condemnation of Trump emerged from political analysts and mainstream media. Critics accused him of selling out Ukraine, bowing to Russian interests, and violating the norms of diplomatic engagement. These critiques, while valid in their own right, fail to address the fundamental reality: U.S. foreign policy has always been about maintaining imperial power, whether through military occupation, economic coercion, or geopolitical alliances that serve corporate interests.

Trump’s approach may lack the diplomatic polish of previous administrations, but the difference is stylistic rather than substantive. His overt transactionalism merely exposes what has always been true: The U.S. does not support Ukraine out of a commitment to democracy but because it serves American geopolitical and economic interests. Beneath the veneer of respectability, the Biden administration, along with centrist politicians in the U.S. and Europe, has funneled billions into a war effort that increasingly appears to be less about securing Ukrainian sovereignty and more about sustaining a profitable cycle of militarization and strengthening U.S. global power.

The left must support Ukraine’s fight for self-determination, but its critique of Trump cannot be reduced to liberal outrage over his rhetoric or authoritarian posturing. What is needed is a materialist analysis of the capitalist forces shaping U.S. foreign policy—one that moves beyond the spectacle of Trump’s behavior to examine the deeper economic interests at play. Trump is not simply an outlier; he is both a continuation of and a divergence from the military-industrial complex mindset embraced by the Democratic establishment and centrist foreign policy elites. While figures like former President Joe Biden and European leaders justify endless military aid as part of a moral defense of democracy, they are simultaneously ensuring that the war remains a lucrative investment for arms manufacturers and defense contractors.

Trump, by contrast, has framed his approach as one of “peace,” but this too is a project driven by oligarchic interests, not diplomacy or anti-imperialism. His vision of peace is not about Ukrainian sovereignty but about restructuring U.S. hegemony in a way that shifts power from defense corporations to the energy sector, real estate developers, and financial elites. The far-right’s “imperialist peace” seeks to replace direct military engagement with economic subjugation, where stability becomes a tool for privatization, resource extraction, and the expansion of corporate control over Ukraine’s post-war future. This is not an abandonment of empire but a strategic reconfiguration of its mechanisms. A critical left analysis must dissect why Trump and his allies are so committed to peace—not as a humanitarian cause, but as a means to consolidate power for a different faction of oligarchs, all while leaving Ukraine trapped between Russian colonization and Western economic domination.

Imperialist Peace: A New Model of Capitalist Control

The real divide in U.S. foreign policy is not between interventionism and isolationism but between two competing models of imperialism: perpetual war and profitable peace. Centrist politicians and military contractors benefit from an unending war economy, where conflicts like Ukraine serve as permanent revenue streams for arms manufacturers and defense lobbyists. The longer the war drags on, the more profitable it becomes, allowing the U.S. and Europe to solidify and grow their military industries.

Trump’s vision for Ukraine presents itself as a departure from military interventionism, yet it reshapes imperial influence into a model of economic control. This “imperialist peace” positions stability as a resource for capitalist elites, ensuring corporate access to energy, land, and financial markets. Instead of a commitment to democracy or self-determination, this approach prioritizes wealth extraction through industries aligned with Trump’s strongest backers—fossil fuel conglomerates and real estate developers.

As long as U.S. foreign policy remains structured around corporate interests, the world will continue to be trapped in a cycle where war is either endlessly prolonged or peace is crafted to serve the needs of capital.

While Democrats and Republicans both maintain deep ties to the weapons industry, Trump’s policies reflect a strong alignment with fossil fuel executives and luxury property developers. Energy firms invested an estimated $219 million to shape the current U.S. government, signaling their expectation of policies favoring resource extraction and deregulation. Real estate investors, long intertwined with Trump’s personal business empire, have also fueled his political rise through massive financial contributions.

The purpose of Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington underscored this economic agenda. While media attention focused on the fiery exchange between leaders, the trip’s primary objective involved securing a deal granting U.S. companies control over Ukraine’s mineral wealth. This agreement cements Trump’s vision where capitalist elites extract profits from conflict not only through weapons sales but also through post-war reconstruction, energy production, and privatized infrastructure.

Luxury real estate speculators view regions impacted by war as investment opportunities. Waterfront redevelopment in areas previously devastated by conflict has emerged as a lucrative ventures. Stability functions as an asset for those seeking to transform destroyed neighborhoods into high-end residential and commercial spaces, ensuring an influx of capital through privatization. Trump’s strategy for Ukraine mirrors this approach, positioning peace as a mechanism for capital accumulation rather than a humanitarian goal.

Expanding the Imperialist Peace Model: Gaza and the Digital Economy

Trump’s “imperial peace” extends beyond Ukraine. His proposals for Gaza suggest similar priorities—displacing residents while repurposing land for high-end redevelopment. Recent reports detail his team’s discussions on transforming Gaza into an exclusive investment hub, removing existing communities under the pretext of regional stabilization. This mirrors his broader approach to foreign policy, where war-torn regions become assets for financial elites seeking prime real estate acquisitions.

This version of peace appeals to billionaire investors shaping the digital economy. High-profile figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg support Trump not only due to ideological alignment but also because their industries depend on access to land and minerals critical for data infrastructure. Lithium and rare earth elements, essential for artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and cloud computing, remain central to their business models. Securing these materials through agreements structured under Trump’s version of stability allows these tech leaders to expand digital empires without disruption.

Developers pursuing large-scale urban expansion depend on geopolitical conditions that guarantee unrestricted access to construction zones, lucrative tax incentives, and flexible labor markets. This extractivist economic model strengthens corporate dominance by securing control over resources, expanding real estate ventures, and integrating digital infrastructure into newly developed regions. Trump’s approach reconfigures imperial influence into an economic framework where energy executives, land developers, and tech giants dictate the terms of global stability. War fuels one sector of capital, and peace opens new pathways for financial expansion, ensuring that every phase of instability generates wealth for those positioned to exploit it.

Perpetual War vs. Profitable Peace–A Capitalist Trap

Framing the future in terms of perpetual war or imperialist peace obscures how both serve capitalist consolidation. Centrist politicians sustain conflict through arms production and military spending, maintaining profits for defense contractors. Trump offers an alternative where corporate executives expand power through resource extraction, real estate ventures, and digital infrastructure. Both systems reinforce a global structure that keeps economic elites in control, ensuring that whether through war or peace, capital remains the primary beneficiary.

The shock over Trump’s behavior during his meeting with Zelenskyy reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. foreign policy. While his tactics may be more blatant, his actions expose what has always been true—war and peace are both industries, and U.S. engagement in global conflicts is driven not by moral concerns but by economic interests. Whether through perpetual war or a profitable imperial peace, the capitalist class benefits, while the people on the ground—whether in Ukraine, Palestine, or elsewhere—suffer the consequences.

Trump’s brash, domineering style serves as a distraction from the deeper capitalist dynamics at play. He performs the role of the “strong” business leader, evoking the image of a mafia boss who negotiates through intimidation and self-interest, much as Biden projected the aura of a “respectable” diplomat who upholds international order. Each persona functions as a veneer, concealing the same fundamental commitment to capitalist imperialism. While one brandishes threats and transactional deals, the other couches economic coercion in diplomatic formalities. Both preserve a system where economic elites dictate global affairs, ensuring that policy decisions—whether framed as aggressive or pragmatic—ultimately protect the interests of corporate power.

As long as U.S. foreign policy remains structured around corporate interests, the world will continue to be trapped in a cycle where war is either endlessly prolonged or peace is crafted to serve the needs of capital. The real challenge is not choosing between these two models of imperialism but dismantling the system that allows war and peace alike to be dictated by profit.

During his first term as president, Donald Trump criticized NATO, demanding that European allies increase their defense spending. This friction created uncertainty about NATO's reliability, a key aspect of its role in global security. Concern exists into his second term as countries like Ukraine brace for changing foreign policy.

This was heightened after a White House meeting in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was reportedly asked to leave, contacting French President Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte afterward. Since their meeting, events have escalated, including the European Commission's proposal to borrow 150 billion euros for E.U. governments to invest in rearmament amid growing doubts about U.S. protection.

These concerns have also led some European leaders to explore alternative security arrangements beyond NATO. If Trump moves forward with reducing U.S. involvement in NATO, European countries may be forced to explore alternative security frameworks.

NATO's perceived instability could create opportunities for non-state actors and radical movements to challenge traditional security models.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there was no immediate answer as to what should become of NATO or future security structures. Mikhail Gorbachev's concept of a "Common European Home," proposed in the late 1980s, aimed to establish a unified and cooperative security framework that would encompass both Eastern and Western Europe. This vision sought to move beyond the division of military blocs like NATO and the Warsaw Pact, instead fostering a collective security system based on dialogue and cooperation. Institutions such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which later evolved into the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), were envisioned as key platforms for conflict resolution and diplomatic engagement.

A central element of Gorbachev's proposal was demilitarization and arms reduction, which he linked to broader Soviet arms control efforts, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty of 1990. Gorbachev also signaled an end to the Brezhnev Doctrine, Glasnost, and Perestroika, which sought to reform the Soviet system while reducing tensions with the West.

The United States put forward a contrasting vision. In his speech "A Whole Europe, A Free Europe," President George H.W. Bush emphasized the spread of free markets and the expansion of NATO's mission to support Eastern European democratization and strengthen transatlantic ties. He positioned NATO as the central stabilizing force in post-Cold War Europe.

While there are reasons why NATO's expansion filled the post-Cold War security vacuum, it remains highly controversial. Gorbachev's remarks and declassified documents provide a nuanced view of the debate, particularly regarding the infamous "not an inch" exchange between Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev. Baker's assurance that "not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction" has remained a point of ongoing contention, frequently cited in debates over NATO expansion and the commitments made during post-Cold War negotiations.

Baker's assurances were nonbinding and focused solely on NATO's presence in Germany, rather than a broader commitment against expansion. While these discussions did not explicitly address countries like Ukraine, any movement beyond Germany could be interpreted as conflicting with the spirit of those assurances. However, Gorbachev later emphasized that neither he nor Soviet authorities were "naïve people who were wrapped around the West's finger," asserting, "If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object."

Robert Zoellick, who participated in the negotiations as a U.S. State Department official, recalled that President George H.W. Bush explicitly asked Gorbachev whether he agreed that sovereign nations had the right to choose their alliances. Gorbachev affirmed this principle, effectively acknowledging that former Warsaw Pact countries could independently determine their security alignments. However, Gorbachev later expressed regret over NATO's expansion, stating, "I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990."

The debate over NATO's expansion did not end with Gorbachev. Russian President Boris Yeltsin also expressed mixed feelings, notably in a letter to President Bill Clinton. While he opposed NATO's rapid enlargement, citing what Russia believed were assurances made during German reunification negotiations, his position was inconsistent. During a visit to Poland, he reluctantly acknowledged Poland's right to join NATO, characterizing this statement as merely an "understanding."

Despite tensions, NATO and Russia initially pursued cooperation through the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, in which NATO pledged not to station permanent forces in new member states. However, Yeltsin later described this agreement as a "forced step," reflecting Russia's growing unease with NATO's expansion.

Other efforts to define NATO-Russia relations took shape through the 2002 NATO-Russia Council, which sought to establish equal dialogue. However, relations steadily deteriorated, first with Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, then with the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and finally collapsing entirely in 2021 when Russia ended its NATO diplomatic mission.

George Robertson, former U.K. Labour defense secretary and NATO chief, claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin once expressed interest in Russia joining NATO, a notion Putin himself had also suggested. Putin transitioned away from these efforts, culminating in the 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, where he condemned the U.S. for seeking a "unipolar world," a vision he saw as destabilizing and unacceptable. He portrayed NATO's eastward expansion as a direct threat to Russian security and strongly criticized U.S. military interventions conducted without United Nations approval.

While there is far more history behind this issue, these fundamentals are key to understanding the barriers and complexities in discussing alternatives to NATO. The debate highlights core issues, including the West's interest in maintaining power, Russia's attempts to either integrate into or counter that structure, and the often-overlooked agency of smaller nations. These discussions tend to center on justifiable criticism of Western dominance, partly fueled by financial interests tied to weapons production, and Russian security concerns, while overlooking the actual security needs and self-determination of the nations most directly affected.

Although Russia perceived NATO enlargement as a threat, the newly independent states of Eastern and Central Europe had their own security priorities, shaped by decades of Soviet dominance. Many actively sought NATO membership, not to provoke Russia, but to secure their sovereignty in a post-Soviet landscape where Moscow's future actions remained uncertain. Dismissing or misrepresenting these concerns overlooks the agency of these nations. This was most recently evident in Sweden and Finland's decision to join NATO, which was driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine rather than Western pressure.

Discussions about the influence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the E.U. are important, but they must also acknowledge the genuine security concerns of these countries, which extend beyond external pressures or manipulation. For example, after gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine quickly recognized that securing its sovereignty depended on international alliances. In 1994, Ukraine joined NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP). This decision was made independently of later political narratives and took place years before the Orange Revolution.

Ukraine also entered into the Budapest Memorandum (1994), an agreement in which it relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the U.S., and the U.K., but this ultimately failed to prevent later invasion. It exemplifies how nonbinding agreements, lacking the enforcement mechanisms of military alliances, can create vulnerabilities and uncertainty in international security commitments. It also highlights the tensions Eastern European countries face when entering such agreements with Russia, particularly when they lack assured, legally binding military defense.

During and after this time, NATO's interventions led to allegations of war crimes, civilian casualties, and legal violations. These allegations span interventions from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Libya. The International Criminal Court attempted to investigate war crimes, including allegations of rape and torture by the U.S. military and CIA, but U.S. pressure shut down the inquiry. In 2019, the U.S. revoked the visa of ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and later imposed sanctions on her and other ICC officials involved in the investigation. Facing these challenges, the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor, under new leadership in 2021, decided to "deprioritize" investigations into U.S. and NATO personnel, focusing instead on alleged crimes by the Taliban and ISIS. This further undermined NATO's portrayal of itself as a purely defensive alliance.

Over the years, various alternatives to NATO have been proposed, shaped by different geopolitical, ideological, and strategic considerations. These proposals generally fall into three broad categories: European-led defense initiatives, U.N.-based security strategies, and non-state or decentralized models.

Some European leaders advocate for reducing reliance on NATO, particularly on U.S. military commitments, by strengthening the European Union's Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). This vision promotes an E.U.-led military force capable of acting autonomously when European interests diverge from those of the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron has been a strong proponent of this approach, arguing that Europe's dependence on the U.S. leaves it vulnerable to shifts in American foreign policy, such as those seen during Trump's presidency. His vision includes a joint European military force that could operate alongside NATO when necessary but remain independent when transatlantic priorities differ.

Another approach emphasizes strengthening the U.N.'s role in global security as an alternative to NATO. One example is the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative, which aims to enhance U.N. peacekeeping operations by prioritizing multilateral cooperation over military alliances. However, the Security Council's structure remains a significant barrier to any U.N.-led initiatives, as the veto power held by the U.S., Russia, and China frequently obstructs meaningful reforms and hinders the organization's ability to respond effectively to global security challenges. While calls for Security Council restructuring have gained momentum, particularly in response to conflicts like the Gaza crisis, the likelihood of the U.N. fully replacing NATO remains low without substantial institutional changes.

Nonaligned or regional security frameworks have also been proposed. This includes a return to Cold War-era nonalignment, where countries avoid military blocs, and the formation of regional security pacts. Organizations like the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could potentially assume roles similar to NATO within their respective regions.

Beyond state-centered models, some anarchist and labor movements propose radical alternatives that challenge the idea that security must be provided by nation-states or military alliances. These models emphasize mutual aid, worker solidarity, and decentralized defense structures rather than state-controlled militaries. The Zapatistas in Mexico, for example, have established autonomous self-defense forces to protect Indigenous communities, while Kurdish-led autonomous administrations in Syria organize security through federated agreements rather than centralized military command. In Ukraine, networks such as Solidarity Collectives play an important role in providing mutual aid and logistical support in conflict zones, working alongside unions to coordinate efforts.

Although these decentralized approaches offer an alternative vision, they face significant challenges, particularly the lack of strong military deterrence. In regions dominated by state-backed militaries, their ability to resist aggression remains limited. However, as NATO's legitimacy continues to be questioned, these models could gain traction, expanding the debate on security beyond traditional military alliances.

Trump is unlikely to formally withdraw the U.S. from NATO, but his past confrontations with the alliance and his current treatment of Zelenskyy signal to European leaders that NATO's reliability is no longer guaranteed. This uncertainty has already sparked discussions on alternative security frameworks, ranging from a stronger European defense initiative to broader multilateral arrangements. If European nations increasingly view NATO as unstable or subject to U.S. political shifts, they may seek greater autonomy, altering the global security landscape.

At the same time, NATO's perceived instability could create opportunities for non-state actors and radical movements to challenge traditional security models. As states reassess their dependence on military alliances, decentralized defense structures whether rooted in anarchist mutual aid networks, worker-based militias, or regional federations may gain traction. While such alternatives face considerable obstacles, NATO's crisis of legitimacy could open space for non-state approaches to security, expanding the debate beyond state power and military blocs.

Tuesday night, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history—the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.”

We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off—with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people)—soon to be on the chopping block.

Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme.

It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare. Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.

In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world.

But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons.

The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society: That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers.

Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil.

Former President Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the cause of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times.

Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s.

Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100.

The entire solvency and health of Social Security could be cured permanently, in other words, if we simply did away with the “billionaire loophole” in the Social Security tax.

But the idea of having to pay a tax on all their income so that middle class and low income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea.

How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets!

Which is why Elon Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security Administration and its employees with such gusto.

By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system.

(This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.)

The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare that former President George W. Bush created in 2003. That scam makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for giant insurance companies, who then kick some of that profit back to Republican politicians as campaign donations and luxury trips to international resorts.

Advantage programs are notorious for screwing people when they get sick, and for ripping off our government to the tune of billions every year. But every effort at reforming Medicare or stopping the Medicare Advantage providers from denying us care and stealing from our government has been successfully blocked by bought-off Republicans in Congress.

Once Republicans have damaged the staffing of the Social Security Administration so badly that people are screaming about the difficult time they’re having signing up, solving problems or errors, or even getting their checks, right-wing media will begin to promote—with help from GOP politicians and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News”—people opting out of Social Security and going with a private option that resembles private 401(k)s.

Rumor has it they’ll call it “Social Security Advantage” and, like Medicare Advantage, which is administered for massive profits by the insurance giants, it will be run by giant, trillion-dollar banks out of New York.

While big insurance companies have probably made something close to a trillion dollars in profits out of our tax dollars from Medicare Advantage since George W. Bush rolled out the program, Social Security Advantage could make that profit level look like chump change for the big banks.

And, as an added bonus, billionaires and right-wing media will get to point out how hard it is to deal with the now-crippled Social Security administration and argue that it’s time to relieve them, too, of the regulatory burdens of “big government”: Gut or even kill off the regulatory agencies and make their yachts and private jets even more tax deductible than they already are.

This is why Donald Trump repeated Elon Musk’s lies about 200 year-old people getting Social Security checks and the system being riddled with fraud and waste. In fact, Social Security is one of the most secure and fraud-free programs in American history.

But Tuesday night was just the opening salvo. It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare.

Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.

And he may well get away with it, unless we can wake up enough people to this coming scam and put enough political pressure—particularly on Republicans—to prevent it from happening.

Tag, you’re it.

In her towering 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics,” Jewish philosopher and refugee immigrant to the United States Hannah Arendt wrote, “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.” Nearly 60 years later, President Donald Trump is ensuring this observation becomes a reality — and in the process is putting our immigrant children and economic future at risk.

Our current political crisis is, at base, rooted in an informational crisis, where the facts of any particular matter — public health, climate change, gun violence, et al — only pertain insofar as they are politically useful for the Trump administration.

Above all, we are being forced to live with falsehoods about immigrant families living in the United States. This administration has blamed immigrants for harming the economy, spiking the housing market, and “poisoning” the country.

Say it plain: Not one of these claims is true — not vaguely, not a little, not in part, not kind of, not at all. But, as we are in a moment where political convenience constantly pressures the truth, the Trump administration published an executive order on Saturday, “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States.” This new policy is bad for kids, bad for the U.S.’s immigrant integration system, and bad for our economic present and future.

As its title notes, the order sets English as the country’s official language. But that is largely symbolic, completing a conservative culture war crusade — backed for years by radical groups like ProEnglish and U.S. English and California Republican gubernatorial and senatorial candidate Ron Unz. The U.S. government already conducts essentially all of its business in English.

More consequentially, it rescinds a quarter-century of federal guidance instructing public agencies to take steps to make their programs and services accessible to linguistically diverse communities. Until last weekend, that guidance instructed leaders of public systems to translate written materials and online information — and to interpret audio information and public meetings for non-native English speakers.

This longstanding policy was grounded in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination based on people’s national origins, and was a lynchpin of the country’s approach to integrating immigrant families into U.S. society, culture, communities and the economy. The success of the rescinded guidance wasn’t simply about doing the right thing — ensuring that multilingual communities can fairly access public services — it was also about supporting these communities because their success benefits everyone who lives in this country. Indeed, studies of immigrant families indicate that their children bring valuable languages and cultures to their schools — and benefit when educators engage them (across language differences) as partners.

This is immensely important now, as the country’s immigrants and their children make up the bulk of the growth in the U.S labor force in recent years. Their success in schools today and in the workforce tomorrow is essential to sustaining the country’s economic growth.

Look at what the Trump administration’s new guidance is throwing away. While far from perfect, the United States’ immigrant integration systems perform relatively well compared to similar systems in other countries.

Here’s how that looks in schools: Linguistically diverse children of immigrants are often designated as English learners (ELs), and receive targeted language instruction to help them learn the language while also advancing their academic development. Critically, research shows that the best way to do this is to provide them with bilingual learning opportunities so they are exposed to English while continuing to develop in their home languages.

Over time, as these students learn English, their academic outcomes significantly improve — these “former ELs” reliably become one of the highest-performing student groups in U.S. schools. What’s more, recent research has linked schools’ increased immigrant student enrollment with better academic outcomes for U.S.-born students.

Yet now, the Trump administration has chosen to dismantle public protections ensuring that these students’ families get translated enrollment forms and information about their available school choices. It has chosen to reduce their opportunities to learn about housing, health care, nutrition, and enrichment programs available to their children.

Or maybe it hasn’t? At the end of the order, the White House insists that it requires no “change in the services provided by any agency.” In a political moment where the facts are decreasingly important, perhaps it’s no surprise that the text of this executive order is confusingly at odds with itself.

But, given conservatives’ consistent support for reforms to make children of immigrants’ lives less stable and safe — see, for instance, the administration’s enthusiasm for conducting armed immigration enforcement raids on K–12 campuses — it’s hard to imagine a future where these language access supports persist. In this moment, the maximally cruel outcomes feel like the safest bet.

There should be little doubt about how a lasting peace can be established in Ukraine. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of signing a peace agreement in Istanbul, with the Turkish Government acting as mediator. The U.S. and U.K. talked Ukraine out of signing the agreement, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since died or been seriously injured. Yet the framework of the Istanbul Process still provides the basis of peace today.

The draft peace agreement (dated April 15, 2022) and the Istanbul Communique (dated March 29, 2022) on which it was based, offered a sensible and straightforward way to end the conflict. It’s true that three years after Ukraine broke off the negotiations, during which time Ukraine has incurred major losses, Ukraine will eventually cede more territory than it would have in April 2022 — yet it will gain the essentials: sovereignty, international security arrangements, and peace.

In the 2022 negotiations, the agreed issues were Ukraine’s permanent neutrality and international security guarantees for Ukraine. The final disposition of the contested territories was to be decided over time, based on negotiations between the parties, during which both sides committed to refrain from using force to change boundaries. Given the current realities, Ukraine will cede Crimea and parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, reflecting the battlefield outcomes of the past three years.

Such an agreement can be signed almost immediately and in fact is likely to be signed in the coming months. As the U.S. is no longer going to underwrite the war, in which Ukraine would suffer yet more casualties, destruction, and loss of territory, Zelensky is recognizing that it’s time to negotiate. In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump quoted Zelensky as saying “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.”

The pending issues in April 2022 involved the specifics of security guarantees for Ukraine and the revised boundaries of Ukraine and Russia. The main issue regarding the guarantees involved the role of Russia as a co-guarantor of the agreement. Ukraine insisted that the Western co-guarantors should be able to act with or without Russia’s assent, so as not to give Russia a veto over the Ukraine’s security. Russia sought to avoid a situation where Ukraine and its Western co-guarantors would manipulate the agreement to justify renewed force against Russia. Both sides have a point.

The best resolution, in my view, is to put the security guarantees under the authority of the UN Security Council. This means that the U.S., China, Russia, U.K., and France would all be co-guarantors, together with the rest of the UN Security Council. This would subject the security guarantees to global scrutiny. Yes, Russia could veto a subsequent UN Security Council resolution regarding Ukraine, but it would then face China’s opprobrium and the world’s if Russia were to act arbitrarily in defiance of the will of the rest of the UN.

Regarding the final disposition of borders, some background is very important. Before the violent overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Russia did not make any territorial demands vis-à-vis Ukraine. Yanukovych favored neutrality for Ukraine, opposed NATO membership, and peacefully negotiated with Russia a 20-year lease for Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since 1783. After Yanukovych was toppled and replaced by a U.S.-backed, pro-NATO government, Russia moved quickly to retake Crimea, to prevent the naval base from falling into NATO hands. During 2014 to 2021, Russia did not push for annexing any other Ukrainian territory. Russia called for the political autonomy of the ethnic Russian regions of eastern Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that broke away from Kyiv immediately after Yanukovych was toppled.

The Minsk II agreement was to implement autonomy. The Minsk framework was inspired in part by the autonomy of the ethnic Germany region of South Tyrol in Italy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel knew the South Tyrol experience and viewed it as a precedent for similar autonomy in the Donbas. Unfortunately, Ukraine strongly resisted autonomy for the Donbas, and the U.S. backed Ukraine in rejecting autonomy. Germany and France, which ostensibly were guarantors of Minsk II, stood by silently as the agreement was thrown aside by Ukraine and the United States.

Following six years in which Minsk II was not implemented, during which the U.S.-armed Ukrainian military continued to shell the Donbas in an attempt to subdue and recover the breakaway provinces, Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states on February 21, 2022. The status of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Istanbul process was still to be finalized. Perhaps a return to Minsk II and its actual implementation by Ukraine (recognizing the autonomy of the two regions in the Ukrainian constitution) could have been ultimately agreed. When Ukraine walked away from the negotiating table, alas, the issue was moot. A few months later, on September 30, 2022, Russia annexed the two oblasts as well as two others, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

The sad lesson is this. Ukraine’s loss of territory would have been averted entirely but for the violent coup that toppled Yanukovych and brought in a U.S.-backed regime intent on NATO membership. The loss of territory in eastern Ukraine could have been averted had the U.S. pushed Ukraine to implement the UN Security Council-backed Minsk II agreement. The loss of territory in eastern Ukraine could probably have been averted as late as April 2022 in the Istanbul Process, but the U.S. blocked the peace agreement. Now, after 11 years of war since the overthrow of Yanukovych, and as a result of Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, Ukraine will cede Crimea and other territories of eastern and southern Ukraine in the coming negotiations.

Europe has other interests that it should be negotiating with Russia, notably security for the Baltic States and for European-Russian security arrangements more generally. The Baltic States feel very vulnerable to Russia, understandably so given their history, but they are also gravely and unnecessarily adding to their vulnerability by a stream of repressive measures taken against their ethnic Russian citizenry, including measures to repress the use of the Russian language and measures to cut their citizens’ ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. Baltic state leaders are also provocatively engaging in remarkable Russophobic rhetoric. Ethnic Russians are about 25% of the population of both Estonia and Latvia, and around 5% in Lithuania. Security for the Baltic States should be achieved through security-enhancing measures taken on both sides, including the respect for minority rights of the ethnic Russian populations, and by refraining from vitriolic rhetoric.

The time has arrived for diplomacy that brings collective security to Europe, Ukraine, and Russia. Europe should open direct talks with Russia and should urge Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace agreement based on the March 29 Istanbul Communique and the April 15, 2022 draft peace agreement. Peace in Ukraine should by followed by the creation of a new system of collective security for all of Europe, stretching from Britain to the Urals, and indeed beyond.

Even before the extraordinary activism for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the liberation of the Palestinian people at Columbia University last spring, the students of Smith Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, set a high bar for the coming wave of campus unrest across the U.S. with their 11-day occupation of College Hall, Smith’s administration building.

For us as residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, it was awe-inspiring to watch Smith students’ activism as those first days passing sleeping bags through the windows of College Hall turned into weeks and months of creative actions demanding the school’s administration end its complicity in genocide.

Outdoor student and faculty teach-ins in the snow and mud of early spring set the stage for ongoing pro-Palestine cultural and political education events as the lush grounds of the college responded to the lengthening days and warming temperatures. Local media covered the occupation of College Hall, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted the intense dedication of Smith SJP’s occupation.

You claim to be a school that encourages activism, and yet, when it comes to opposing genocide, not only do you not celebrate your courageous students, you seek to silence, question, and condemn them.

During a memorial service for Gaza martyrs in front of College Hall, in somber silence amid flowers and flickering votive candles, we gazed up at the uppermost tower of the hall, to see that the flag of Smith College had been replaced by students with a flag bearing the Palestinian colors that read, “Smith Divest Now.” The tall, ornate, iron gates in front of College Hall were decorated with small Palestinian flags; flowers; and red, black, green, and white streamers. Despite increasing animosity from Smith’s administration, campus activism to end the genocide in Gaza continued through graduation, only fading as students dispersed for the summer months.

As on so many campuses across the U.S., students returning to Smith last fall were met with a new set of policies hammered out by the administration over the summer in an effort to prevent further activism for Palestine. Only after the new policy was leaked to the college community did Smith College President Sarah Willie-LeBreton concede that there was a new set of rules governing, in minute detail, the “time, place, and manner of expressive activity” on campus.

In a College-wide message, Willie-LeBreton claimed that her new policy was simply a response to urging by the U.S. Department of Education and national organizations (and unlikely bedfellows) such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Zionist organization at the forefront of efforts to suppress anti-genocide activism and speech by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism; the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); and Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), that campus protest policies be revisited. (For those familiar with the Palestine Exception, it was crystal clear that the new policy was designed to quell continued pro-Palestine activism.)

On October 24, Smith students walked out of classes to protest the new policy, which states, “Speech is not protected when it is libelous, slanderous, threatens violence, incites riot, intends to cause personal injury, infringes upon the rights of others, or is otherwise unlawful.” The policy included a time frame within which students are allowed to make noise while protesting, banned face coverings to conceal identity, forbade protestors from “interrupting academic life,” and more.

As fall deepened into winter, community advocates for an end to the genocide concluded that Smith’s administration needed to hear from us in support of Smith SJP. Shortly after a discussion with a community organization called “Northampton Neighbors” in which President Willie-LeBreton emphasized the importance of ties and communication between “town and gown,” organizers with Demilitarize Western Massachusetts and 16 other local and state-wide groups called for a rally and press conference—Western Mass Stands with Smith SJP—for February 27, on a public sidewalk on Route 9 in the heart of the campus.

As the rally began, in cold showers between snow banks, we made the two statements provided below in describing the three demands of the rally—that Smith College must:

1. Divest from Israel’s genocide,
2. Issue a public statement condemning genocide and scholasticide in Gaza and throughout Palestine, and
3. Rescind the draconian “expressive activity” policy clearly targeting pro-Palestine student, faculty, and staff activism.

After our description of the community demands, a slew of speakers from community organizations supportive of Smith SJP, including Smith Alumnae for Justice in Palestine (AJP), spoke to the press and assembled community members and students.

A college spokesperson responded to a reporter with the Daily Hampshire Gazette with the following statement: “Smith is a strong supporter of free speech and the right to assemble. However, it is important to note that this gathering was held on Northampton city property and was not a Smith-sponsored event.” The reporter noted, “Officials did not address the demands made at the protest.”

In addition to faculty and student groups from UMass-Amherst and Hampshire College and many community anti-genocide organizations, we were gratified to secure public endorsement of the rally by the Peace & Justice Committee of First Churches of Northampton, by Interlink Publishing (the only Palestinian-owned publishing company in the U.S., located in Northampton), and two state-wide organizations—Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) and Pax Christi MA.

We hope that communities and non-academic organizations across the country find ways to stand with all college and university students on the vanguard of the movement for a free Palestine and an end to the ongoing genocide—until Liberation and Return. We echo Smith SJP’s chant: “Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest.”

Community Demand No. 1: Divest from Genocide

We residents of Northampton, western Massachusetts and beyond are here today to demonstrate our support for the courageous Smith College Students for Justice in Palestine who are demanding that their school join the global struggle to stop the hideous, unchecked genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people.

What can Smith do?

Smith SJP has been pleading with Smith President Sarah Wille-LeBreton and the Smith Board of Trustees for more than a year to DIVEST, to sell every single penny of stock that the school owns in so-called defense corporations, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon, General Dynamics, Hexcel, and Northrup Grumman. Also on the list is L3 Technologies, which has a plant in Northampton, less than a mile from here.

The students selected these stocks because all of these corporations are profiting tremendously by providing a wide array of weapons and military services that the Israeli government is using right now, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, year by year to kill, maim, and terrorize Palestinian people and to drive them from their land.

Smith President Willie-LeBreton says Smith will not sell these stocks because Smith has such a small investment in genocide, about $67,000 worth.

If the amount is so small, why not sell the stock?

Is it because if Smith, seen as one of the prestigious “Seven Sisters,”, divests, it will put a stink on these blood-soaked genocide stocks that might hurt their value on Wall Street? Would selling these stocks cast shadows over the careers of members of the Smith Board of Trustees who are in the investment business?

We implore Smith College to lift itself out of the vile quagmire of genocide and honor SJP’s call to DIVEST.

Community Demand No. 2: Condemn Genocide and Scholasticide in Gaza and Throughout Palestine

United Nations experts and many others have expressed urgent concern over Israel’s scholasticide in Palestine. Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian scholar and emeritus fellow in politics at Oxford, coined the term in 2009. Nabulsi has described scholasticide as the systematic destruction of educational institutions and points out that Israel has a long history of attacking education in Palestine dating back to 1948. The transnational organization Scholars Against War has since built on Nabulsi’s definition, listing 18 acts as scholasticide, including killing students, teachers, and other school-related personnel; destroying educational institutions; blocking the construction of new schools; and “preventing scholarly exchange in all of its forms.”

In addition to the injury and deaths of tens of thousands of students, teachers, and university professors and the destruction of all 12 university campuses and the majority of schools in Gaza, Israel has deliberately targeted mosques, churches, libraries, the Central Archives of Gaza, cultural heritage sites, and UNRWA. A U.N. report states: “These attacks present a systemic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society. They have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future. When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams.”

As with all other activities conducted by Israel with impunity, indeed with the full partnership of the United States, scholasticide throughout Palestine is being normalized, in part through the silence of educational systems in the West.

Smith College? Silent on scholasticide. The trustees of Smith and President Willie-LeBreton have such a mutilated and truncated understanding of ethics that they apparently believe their silence on Israeli scholasticide is some sort of elegant neutrality. We call it what it is. Complicity. Partnership in destruction of education, of culture, of history, of a people. A component of full-scale genocide. President Willie-LeBreton and Smith College Trustees, we DEMAND that you issue a public statement categorically condemning Israel’s scholasticide and work actively to support, in consultation with your students and faculty and following the leadership of the Palestinian people, the rebuilding of Palestine’s educational system.

Community Demand No. 3: Protect Free Speech on Campus

The third demand of this community rally in support of Smith SJP is that President Willie-LeBreton immediately rescind her new “Policy Governing Time, Place, and Manner of Expressive Activity.” Did Smith College actually believe that we as a community would see the beautiful, vigorous, anti-genocide advocacy for Palestinian liberation on this campus last year, and not notice the muting of that advocacy this year? We know, in fact, that like so many other U.S. colleges and universities, Smith used the summer months to devise ways to shut down the activism that was so vibrant at Smith last year.

We see you, Smith College. We see you, Palestine Exception. We know it is no coincidence that a new “Expressive Activity” policy has been imposed on students the semester immediately following the brilliant activism the preceding spring. You claim to be a school that encourages activism, and yet, when it comes to opposing genocide, not only do you not celebrate your courageous students, you seek to silence, question, and condemn them. We see you, Smith College. We see that you comfortably fit in with those institutions of higher learning that say, to quote Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in her apt paraphrasing of so many university administrators, “We want ALL students on campus to feel safe. The pro-genocide and the anti-genocide ones.”

President Willie-LeBreton: Rescind your draconian “Expressive Activity” policy. Celebrate your anti-genocide students. Learn from their humanity. Protect them from external attack, arrest, deportation. We community members implore you: Wash clean your blood-soaked Ivory Towers by following your students’ lead in opposing a historic genocide.

In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump.

But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.

“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs,” President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on January 20. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent—he was a natural businessman—and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”

Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump—yes, that’s the word!—any pretense to internationalism.

Moving on from such fractured facts and scrambled history, Trump suggested the foreign policy principles that would guide his new administration, or to quote that poem, the “rough beast” as it “slouches towards” Mount McKinley “to be born.”

Then, to another round of applause, he added ominously: “We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”

In a quick segue, the president then promised to act with a “courage, vigor, and vitality” that would lead the nation “to new heights of victory and success,” presumedly via a McKinleyesque policy of tariffs, territorial conquest, and great-power diplomacy.

Remembering William McKinley

Since President William McKinley’s once-upon-a-time mediocrity was exceeded only by his present-day obscurity, few observers grasped the real significance of Trump’s remarks. To correct such a critical oversight, it’s important to ask two significant questions: Who was William McKinley and how might his legacy influence current American foreign policy? In fact, Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley’s Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.

After an otherwise undistinguished career in Congress crowned by the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 with record-high import duties, he won the presidency in 1896 thanks to the influence of Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist—the 19th-century equivalent of a present-day tech billionaire—who tithed his fellow millionaires to create a war chest that would fund the country’s costliest political campaign up to that time. In doing so, Hanna ushered in the modern era of professional electioneering. That campaign also carried American political satire to new heights as, typically, a withering political cartoon caricatured a monstrously bloated Hanna, reclining on money bags given by millionaires like banker J.P. Morgan, declaring, “I am confident. The Working Men Are with Us.” (Sound familiar?)

As president from 1897 to 1901, McKinley enacted record-high tariffs and used the brief Spanish-American War of 1898 to seize a colonial empire of islands stretching halfway around the world from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Instead of crowning the country with an imperial glory akin to Great Britain’s, those conquests actually plunged it into the bloody Philippine-American War, replete with torture and massacres.

Rather than curtail his ill-fated colonial venture and free the Philippines, McKinley claimed he had gone “down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” As it happened, his God evidently told him to conquer and colonize, something that he arranged in great-power bilateral talks with Spain that determined the fate of millions of Cubans and Filipinos, even though they had been fighting Spanish colonial rule for years to win their freedom.

At the price of several hundred thousand dead Filipinos, those conquests did indeed elevate the United States into the ranks of the great powers whose might made right—a status made manifest (as in destiny) when McKinley’s vice-president and successor Theodore Roosevelt pushed rival European empires out of South America, wrested the Panama Canal Zone from Colombia, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

With surprising speed, however, this country’s leaders came to spurn McKinley’s embrace of a colonial empire with its costly, complicated occupation of overseas territories. Just a year after he seized the Philippine islands, his secretary of state called for an “open door” in China (where the U.S. had no territorial claims) that would, for the next 50 years, allow all powers equal access to that country’s consumer markets.

After 1909, Secretary of State Philander Knox, one of the founders of the United States Steel Corporation, pursued a program of “dollar diplomacy” that promoted American power through overseas investments rather than territorial conquests. According to historian William Appleman Williams, an imperial version of commerce and capital “became the central feature of American foreign policy in the 20th century,” as the country’s economic power “seeped, then trickled, and finally flooded into the more developed nations and their colonies until, by 1939, America’s economic expansion encompassed the globe.”

Emerging from World War II, a conflict against the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—that had seized empires in Europe, Africa, and Asia by military conquest, Washington built a new world order that would be defined in the United Nations Charter of 1945, guaranteeing all nations the right to independence and inviolable sovereignty. As Europe’s colonial empires collapsed amid rebellions and revolutions, Washington ascended to unprecedented global power marked by three key attributes—alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and iron-clad assurance of inviolable sovereignty. This unique form of global power and influence (which involved the seizure of no more territory) would remain the guiding genius of American imperial global hegemony. At least that remained true until this January 20.

The Past as Prologue

Although none of us were quick to grasp the full implications of that inaugural invocation of McKinley’s ghost, Donald Trump was indeed signaling just what he planned to do as president. Leaving aside the painfully obvious parallels (like Elon Musk as a latter-day Mark Hanna), Trump’s foreign policy has already proved a surprising throwback to a McKinleyesque version of great-power politics marked by the urge to take territories, impose tariffs, and conclude diplomatic deals.

Let’s start with the territorial dimension of Trump’s ongoing transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Just as McKinley moved to seize an empire of scattered islands instead of whole countries like the Congo or China, so Donald Trump has cast his realtor’s eye on an unlikely portfolio of foreign properties. Take the Panama Canal. In his first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio swept into Panama City where he warned its president to reduce Chinese influence over the canal or face “potential retaliation from the United States.” In Washington, President Trump backed his emissary’s threats, saying: “China is running the Panama Canal… and we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.” Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, promptly pushed back, stating that Washington’s claim about China was “quite simply [an] intolerable falsehood,” but also quickly tried to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative. The reaction among our Latin American neighbors to this modern edition of gunboat diplomacy was, to say the least, decidedly negative.

Next on Washington’s neocolonial shopping list was Greenland. On his sixth day in office, President Trump told the press aboard Air Force One: “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it. And I think the people want to be with us.” Invoking that thawing island’s mineral wealth, he added: “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world. It’s not for us, it’s for the free world.” In a whirlwind diplomatic offensive around the capitals of Europe to counter Trump’s claims, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen won strong support from the Nordic nations, France, and Germany, whose leader Otto Scholz insisted “borders must not be moved by force.”

That revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power.

After roiling relations with America’s closest allies in Europe and Latin America, Trump topped that off with his spur-of-the-moment neocolonial claim to the Gaza strip during a February 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump announced to Netanyahu’s slack-jawed amazement. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.” After relocating 2 million Palestinian residents to “one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, twelve” sites in places like Jordan or Egypt, the U.S. would, Trump added, “take over that piece and we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.” Warming to his extemporaneous version of imperial diplomacy, Trump praised his own idea for potentially creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, which would become “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

The international backlash to his urge for a latter-day colonial land grab came hard and fast. Apart from near-universal condemnation from Asia and Europe, Washington’s key Middle Eastern allies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan—all expressed, as the Saudi Foreign Ministry put it, a “firm rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” When Jordan’s King Abdullah visited the White House a week later, Trump pressed hard for his Gaza plan but the King refused to take part and, in a formal statement, “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Setting aside Trump’s often jocular calls for Canada to become America’s “51st State,” none of his neocolonial claims, even if successfully accomplished, would make the slightest difference to this country’s security or prosperity. Think about it. America already dominates the Panama Canal’s shipping traffic (with 73% of the total) and a restoration of sovereignty over the Canal Zone would change nothing. Similarly, Washington has long had the only major military base in Greenland and its continued presence there is guaranteed by the NATO alliance, which includes Denmark. As for Gaza, it would be the money sink from hell.

Yet there is some method to the seeming madness of the president’s erratic musings. As part of his reversion to the great-power politics of the Victorian Age, all of his territorial claims are sending a chilling message: America’s role as arbiter and defender of what was once known as a “rules-based international order,” enshrined in the U.N. Charter, is over. Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump—yes, that’s the word!—any pretense to internationalism.

Meet Tariff Man

The second key facet of President Trump’s attack on the liberal international order, tariffs, is already proving so much more complicated and contradictory than he might ever have imagined. After World War II, a key feature of the liberal international order created through the U.N. Charter was a global trade regime designed to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous protective tariffs (and “tariff wars” that went with them) which deepened the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s. While the World Trade Organization (WTO) sets the rules for the enormous volume of international commerce, localized treaties like the European Union (E.U.) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have produced both economic efficiency and prosperity for their respective regions. And while President Trump hasn’t yet withdrawn from the WTO, as he has from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, don’t count on it not happening.

On the campaign trail last year, candidate Trump advocated an “all tariff policy” that would impose duties on imports so high they could even, he claimed, replace the income tax in funding the government. During his first two weeks in office, President Trump promptly imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Since North America has the world’s most integrated industrial economy, he was, in effect, imposing U.S. tariffs on the United States, too. With the thunderclouds of an economic crisis rumbling on the horizon, Trump “paused” those tariffs in a matter of days, only to plunge ahead with a 10% tariff on all Chinese goods and a 25% duty on aluminum and steel imports, including those from Canada and Mexico, and threats of reciprocal tariffs on all comers.

As an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute warned, “Introducing large increases in the prices of imported goods could breathe new life into some of the inflationary embers.” Indeed, a sudden spike in inflation seemed to put an instant crimp on his tariff strategy. Even though the U.S. economy’s integration with regional and global markets is now light years away from the McKinley Tariff of 1890, Trump seems determined to push tariffs of all sorts, no matter the economic damage to American business or the costs for ordinary consumers.

A Return to Great-Power Politics?

Consider an attempted return to the great-power politics of the Victorian age as the final plank in Donald Trump’s remaking of American foreign policy. Setting aside the sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter that seats all nations, large and small, as equals in the General Assembly, he prefers to deal privately with peer autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.

Back in 1898, President McKinley’s deal-making in Paris on behalf of uninvited Cubans and Filipinos was typical of that imperial age. He was only following in the footsteps of Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had, in 1885, led his fellow European imperialists in carving up the entire continent of Africa during closed-door chats at his Berlin residence. That conference, among other things, turned the Congo over to Belgium’s King Leopold II, who soon killed off half its population to extract its latex rubber, the “black gold” of that day.

Trump’s deal-making over the Russo-Ukraine War seems a genuine reversion to such great-power diplomacy. The new administration’s first cabinet member to visit Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv on February 12 with a proposal that might have made King Leopold blush. In a blunt bit of imperial diplomacy, the secretary gave Ukraine’s president exactly one hour to sign over a full 50% of his country’s vast store of rare earth minerals, the value of which President Trump estimated at $500 billion, as nothing more than a back payment for military aid already received from the Biden administration. In exchange, Bessent offered no security guarantees and no commitments to additional arms, prompting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to publicly reject the overture.

On February 12, President Trump also launched peace talks for Ukraine through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and Trump himself added that NATO membership for Kyiv was equally unrealistic—in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow even before the talks started. And in the imperial tradition of great powers deciding the fate of smaller nations, the opening peace talks in Saudi Arabia on February 18 were a bilateral Russo-American affair, without any Ukranians or Europeans present.

In response to his exclusion, President Zelenskyy insisted that “we cannot recognize any… agreements about us without us.” He later added, “The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.” Trump shot back that Zelensky, whom he branded a “dictator,” had “better move fast” to make peace “or he is not going to have a country left.” He then pressured Ukraine to sign over $500 billion in minerals without any U.S. security guarantees, a classic neocolonial resource grab that he reluctantly modified by dropping that extortionate dollar limit just in time for Zelensky to visit the White House. While witnessing this major rupture to the once-close cooperation of the NATO alliance, European leaders convened “an emergency summit” in Paris on February 17, which aimed, said the British prime minister, “to ensure we keep the U.S. and Europe together.”

Well, don’t count on it, not in the new age of Donald Trump.

Clearly, we are at the threshold of epochal change. In the words of that poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… Surely some revelation is at hand.”

Indeed, that revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power, which had, over the past 80 years, become inextricably interwoven with that order’s free trade, close alliances, and rules of inviolable sovereignty. If these tempestuous first weeks of Trump’s second term are any indication, the next four years will bring unnecessary conflicts and avoidable suffering for so much of the world.

The last few weeks have been the most destabilizing for Social Security in its 90-year history.

America’s historic retirement security program has survived world wars, pandemics, and recessions. But without a rapid course correction, it may not survive Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

In mid-February, Musk demanded access to private Social Security data. When the Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) declined, President Donald Trump immediately replaced her. He leapfrogged over 120 more senior employees to install a DOGE sympathizer, Leland Dudek.

Dudek is reportedly planning to lay off at least 15 percent of SSA’s already understaffed, overworked workforce. SSA staff were sent a message on February 27 telling them the organization will soon undergo an “agency-wide organizational restructuring” and incentivizing them to resign rather than get fired.

Nobody voted for this. During the presidential election, Donald Trump blanketed swing states with campaign flyers pledging that he wouldn’t touch Social Security. Make no mistake: Trump has broken that promise.

Trump and Musk have also instructed the government to terminate the leases on SSA’s over 1,200 field offices, which are critical for the agency’s public-facing work. Social Security field offices, like our post offices, are in every community. They’re there to help us when it’s our turn to access our benefits.

They’ve also ordered all workers to return to the office. But where are those workers supposed to go if their offices are closed? That only makes sense if the ultimate plan is not just to fire the currently reported 7,000 workers from SSA, but everyone!

Many of SSA’s most senior employees, including five of eight regional commissioners, have left. This is causing an enormous brain drain. Together, they represent a huge loss of critical institutional knowledge. Collectively, those employees had almost 1,000 years of institutional knowledge and skills.

SSA was already severely underfunded and understaffed before all of this. The DOGE bloodbath could lead to its collapse.

Most at immediate risk are those applying for disability benefits. Already, large numbers of disabled workers find themselves homeless, and a staggering 30,000 Americans die every year while waiting to receive their earned benefits. Now that number is likely to rise significantly.

Retirement benefits are less complicated to administer, but they’re not safe either. People who are accidentally over- or under-paid will have a far harder time correcting the error. And the planned layoffs are so destabilizing that seniors may even see a disruption in their monthly payments.

Furthermore, Americans will have a terrible time reaching SSA if they have questions, need to change their bank accounts, or have other issues. Moreover, grieving families may have trouble getting the survivor benefits their loved ones have earned for them. Relying on a website or worse, an AI chatbot, won’t cut it.

Nobody voted for this. During the presidential election, Donald Trump blanketed swing states with campaign flyers pledging that he wouldn’t touch Social Security. Make no mistake: Trump has broken that promise.

In his March 4 address before Congress, Trump lied about this extremely efficiently run program. Worse, he’s given Elon Musk, who recently slandered Social Security by calling it a criminal “Ponzi scheme,” the power to destroy it.

SSA’s budget comes out of the Social Security trust funds, not general government revenue. That means that when Americans pay into Social Security with every paycheck, they’re also paying for high-quality customer service.

That’s exactly what we would get — if Congress allowed SSA to spend just a few percentage points more of its $2.7 trillion surplus to hire and adequately train staff, open new field offices, and get wait times down. Instead, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are planning to utterly demolish Social Security’s customer service to pay for billionaire tax cuts.

It isn’t too late to stop this disaster. Everyone should call their members of Congress. Tell them that cuts to the Social Security Administration are cuts to Social Security. Tell them that you value your local Social Security field office.

Tell them to represent the people they serve by making Elon Musk and Donald Trump keep their hands off our earned benefits.

On a motorized float designed and built several weeks into the Trump administration for the Rose Monday celebration before Lent in Cologne or Koln, Germany, the likeness of U.S. President Donald Trump vividly illustrates what is becoming more of his view toward the world and toward citizens of the United States.

Trump Giving the Middle Finger to the World

On the float, Trump has the world perched on his middle finger, a derogatory symbol known worldwide.

With Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s mega-bully job on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump’s image of giving the finger to not only Zelensky, but also the leaders of the European community who met with Zelensky one day later on March 1 in London, seems to symbolize Trump’s view of European leaders.

As The Guardian reported:

Zelenskyy came to the White House to sign a deal for U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s mineral industry to pave the way for an end to the three-year war. The president has inspired many by refusing to flee Kyiv when Russia launched its invasion—“I need ammunition, not a ride” – delivering nightly addresses to rally his people, and visiting his troops on the frontlines.

The Guardian ironically characterized Trump as:

a profile in courage who dodged military service in Vietnam because of alleged bone spurs and who hid in the White House during the 6 January 2021 riot. Trump has reportedly described soldiers who die in combat as suckers and losers. He was impeached for trying to strong-arm Zelenskyy in 2019 and last week called him a dictator.Statue of Liberty Knocked Flat on Her Stomach

Also on the float is a replica of the Statue of Liberty, a statue that is known from a poem by Emma Lazarus and placed as a plaque on the statue as a beacon of hope to those fleeing oppression:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost (tossed) to me.

Ironically, the inspiration for the poem came from Emily Lazarus’ “involvement in aiding Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. After seeing the conditions in which many of these people lived, she expressed her empathy and compassion through the lines of the poem.”

On the float, the Statue of Liberty has been knocked down onto her stomach no doubt in reference to Trump’s idea of sending Palestinians away from their lands as a part of the Israeli genocide of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as well as a symbol of Trump’s deportation of migrants, calling them “criminals,” surely meant to inflame his blindly loyal MAGA base.

The Statue of Liberty also is no doubt offended by Trump’s proposal to sell a pathway to U.S. citizenship by offering a $5 million “Gold Card” visa to investors, replacing the 35-year-old EB-5 visa for investors who “spend about $1 million on a company that employs at least 10 people.”

Lady Justice on Her Knees

Lady Justice is depicted as kowtowing on her knees to the hundreds of Trump’s executive directives... except the courts are finally standing up to his pronouncements that are negatively affecting every aspect of our federal government’s ability to help its citizens.

While the anointed—but not confirmed—Trump alter ego, “Special Employee” Elon Musk, is supervising the destruction of many federal agencies and neuters those that do not fall in line with his mega-financial exploits with Telsa and Space X!!!

One Small Float Says It All About Trump and His Policies

It’s amazing that on one small float in Germany as a part of the celebration of the Easter season, the worldwide effects of Trump and his administration are portrayed with stunning accuracy.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow note that the Western notion of freedom derives from the Roman legal tradition, in which freedom was conceived as “the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.”

Because of this, “freedom was always defined—at least potentially—as something exercised to the cost of others.”

You have to understand this notion of freedom—that to be free, you have to make someone else less free—to make sense of the idea that Donald Trump is a champion of “free speech.”

Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter.

This is, unfortunately, not a fringe idea. Last week, The New York Times (2/25/25) ran a long interview Ezra Klein did with Trump-supporting intellectual (and former CIA officer) Martin Gurri, who said his main reason for voting for Trump was that “I felt like he was for free speech.”

“Free speech is a right-wing cause,” Gurri claimed.

Trump is the “free speech” champion who said of a protester at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign (Washington Post, 2/23/16): “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that…? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

Trump sues news outlets when he doesn’t like how they edit interviews, or their polling results (New York Times, 2/7/25). Before the election, future Trump FBI Director Kash Patel (FAIR.org, 11/14/24) promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s FCC chair is considering yanking broadcast licenses from networks for “news distortion,” or for letting former Vice President Kamala Harris have a cameo on Saturday Night Live (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

Nonetheless, Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter—like right-wingers who weren’t allowed to post content that was deemed hate speech, disinformation, or incitement to violence on social media platforms. As the headline of a FAIR.org piece (11/4/22) by Ari Paul put it, “The Right Thinks Publishers Have No Right Not to Publish the Right.” Another key “free speech” issue for the right, and much of the center: people who have been “canceled” by being criticized too harshly on Twitter (FAIR.org, 8/1/20, 10/23/20).

‘Agitators will be imprisoned’

Now Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25) has come out with a diktat threatening sanctions against any educational institution that tolerates forbidden demonstrations:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!

The reference to banning masks is a reminder that, for the right, freedom is a commodity that belongs to some people and not to others. You have an inalienable right to defy mask mandates, not despite but mainly because you could potentially harm someone by spreading a contagious disease—just as you supposedly have a right to carry an AR-15 rifle. Whereas if you want to wear a mask to protect yourself from a deadly illness—or from police surveillance—sorry, there’s no right to do that.

But more critically, what’s an “illegal protest”? The context, of course, is the wave of campus protests against the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, attacks (though Trump’s repressive approach to protests certainly is not limited to pro-Palestinian ones).

No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide.

On January 30, Trump promised to deport all international students who “joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” and to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” He ordered the Justice Department to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

A federal task force convened by Trump (CNN, 3/3/25) is threatening to pull $50 million in government contracts from New York’s Columbia University because of its (imaginary) “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” which has been facilitated, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, by “the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.”

So the expression of ideas—Palestinian solidarity, U.S. criticism, generic “radicalism”—has to be suppressed, because they lead to, if they do not themselves constitute, “harassment of Jewish students” (by which is meant pro-Israel students; Jewish student supporters of Palestinian rights are frequently targets of this suppression). Those ideas constitute “censorship,” and the way to combat this censorship is to ban those ideas.

No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). That’s because—in the longstanding Western tradition that Trump epitomizes—free speech is the possession of some, meant to be used against others.

The destruction of jobs, both public and private, creates billionaires. But most working people don’t know that, and the Democratic Party is afraid to say it.

Why? Because billionaires who have killed jobs of all kinds, dominate both political parties with their ill-gotten gains. Money buys silence.

The power of billionaires is rising as their numbers increase. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in the United States. In 2023 there were 748. And in the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth in 2024 increased by $l.4 trillion, that’s $3.9 billion a day.

How did that happen?

It’s hard to wrap your mind around how much a billion dollars is. If you earned $1,000 per hour, it would take you 68.5 years to reach $1 billion, and at that point you’d have as much money as one thousand millionaires. That’s a lot of money, more than we can imagine, certainly more than any human being needs, ever.

To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.

But they earned it, right? Isn’t earning billions of dollars a just reward for unparalleled entrepreneurial success? And isn’t criticizing that success sour grapes, the same as criticizing what makes our country so prosperous, free, and strong?

Maybe, until you look under the hood.

To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.

The carnage started with the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1970s, widened during the Reagan years, and was then adopted as the mantra of the Clinton administration during the 1990s.

The deregulation of Wall Street allowed companies to buy each other up with few constraints, often using borrowed money and putting the debt on the books of the acquired company. Layoffs are then used to pay off that debt.

Deregulation also led to the legalization of stock buybacks, which allowed companies to repurchase huge amounts of their own shares and drive the share price up. Wall Street investors and CEOs, who were increasingly paid with stock incentives, became fabulously rich as the price of their shares rose, though their company was no more profitable. Layoffs are then used to finance those buybacks.

Before deregulation, corporate leaders were ashamed if they had to lay off workers. They saw that as a sign of their own failure as managers. CEOs then thought themselves to be in the service of their employees, their communities, and their shareholders.

But free-market ideologues in the 1970s waged a successful campaign to favor shareholder supremacy above all—jobs, workers and communities be damned! (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers, for the details)

Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.

That new cutthroat Wall Street mindset has led to approximately 18 million involuntary layoffs per year, year after year, since the 1990s.

But wait, you probably thought most job loss was caused by new technologies, like those that caused the disappearance of elevator operators and horse and buggy drivers?

Nope. Technological change, even AI, changes overall job composition slowly, over many years, even decades. Newness is expensive, so changes are adopted incrementally as costs come down.

But Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.

Public Employees Are Now Sitting Ducks

When labor unions represented more than 30 percent of private sector workers, from WWII to the 1960s, their wages and benefits improved year by year. So did the standard of living of public sector workers.

In New Jersey, for example, 40 years ago there were 60,000 high-paid auto workers with good pension plans. Public sector workers used them as a yardstick to increase their own compensation, as well. But today, those autoworker jobs are gone, which has put downward pressure on the wages and benefits of public sector workers.

Overall, in 1980, more than 50 percent of all private sector workers had pensions. Today, it’s only 11 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of state and local government employees, and nearly all federal workers, continue to have access to such plans. That’s why they are sitting ducks.

Divisive politicians can fire away by saying, “Why should private sector workers like you pay taxes to support public sector worker’s benefits that you don’t even have!”

There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.

That’s one reason why Trump and Musk have been getting away with trashing federal employees, with very little blowback from working people in the private sector, at least so far.

But there’s more.

Musk and his fellow billionaires need to cut federal government jobs so they can continue to stuff themselves at the federal trough. They want job cuts to pay for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that go to the largest US corporations via tax breaks, subsidies, and fat federal contracts. Last year alone, Fortune reports that Musk received $6.3 billion in federal and local taxpayer funding, and during the past four years the total was nearly $25 billion.

Privatization of public sector jobs also is a bonanza for wealthy investors. Just imagine the billions to be made by turning over the postal service to the private sector.

There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.

“Save Our Jobs from Billionaire Greed.”

Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors to finance hefty stock buybacks for its billionaire owners. A show of support for their fellow layoff victims and a unity message aimed at stopping billionaire job destruction would be simple to craft and easy to share. It would be news.

Why aren’t the Democrats doing this?

Because they don’t want to upset their billionaire donors by interfering with Wall Street’s pillage of working people. As Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic Party put it recently, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with the Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money…”

If the Democrats dared to look under the hood, they would find that every one of those “good billionaires” is making money from job cuts that boost the value of her or his portfolio.

I was born and raised as a working-class Democrat, but I know that the slaughter of public and private sector jobs won’t stop until there’s a new party that truly represents the interests of working people.

Only then can we fight back against the billionaires and their two-party poodles so willing to curl up in their laps.

Over the weekend, Politico reported that, in early February, a group of Democratic “consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials, and party leaders” had convened in Virginia to chart a course forward for the party. The so-called “Comeback Retreat” was organized by the corporate centrist think tank Third Way and resulted in a summary document highlighting some of the top takeaways from the convening. In a series of bullet points, the authors of the document summarize the ways that, in their view, Democrats can reconnect with working class voters.

The Democratic Party is still reeling from its loss to President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in November, and party leaders are correct in thinking they should adopt a new tack. However, Third Way, and its brand of tried-and-failed Republican-lite politics, should not have any say in the way the Democratic Party reforms itself as it heads into the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential election.

The Comeback Retreat summary focuses on Democrats’ cultural disconnect with working class voters, as well as Democrats’ lack of “economic trust” with voters. The document first points to issues in each category and then offers solutions for rebuilding across both lines. Some of these issues and prescriptions are of the milquetoast variety typically generated by the consultant class. Democrats should “acknowledge [voters’] struggles and speak to real concerns,” advises one point, while elsewhere the document recommends “[improving] Democratic communication and media strategy.” No political strategist would disagree that these are both good practices for any successful campaign.

If Democrats really want to speak to voters’ concerns, they should start by addressing trends that are making life unlivable for so many Americans.

However, situated alongside these poli-sci bromides are some truly reactionary ideas. In the cultural dimension, the document encourages Democrats to “embrace masculinity” and celebrate “traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).” Apparently, Third Way and its colleagues don’t consider city dwellers to be traditionally American. On the economic side, the document encourages Democrats to stop “demonizing wealth and corporations” and to “avoid an anti-capitalist stance.” The party also, per Third Way, needs to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.”

If the party “moves away” from small-dollar donors, that apparently means “moving toward” millionaire, billionaire, and corporate donors.

Finally, the document devotes a fair amount of time to “reduc[ing] far-left influence and infrastructure.” Recommendations include building a pipeline of moderate Democrats to staff the ranks of the party and run for office, banning “far-left” candidate questionnaires, and “push[ing] back” against far-left staffers and groups who, according to Third Way, exert “disproportionate influence” in the party. (I’m pleased, as a member of the so-called “far-left,” to learn that we wield so much power within the party—and expect that our influence on party policy will become visible any day now.)

Taken together, a very clear image emerges of the Democratic Party envisioned by Third Way: It is pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, and preferential to big donors over small ones. It also celebrates masculinity and a traditional America while rejecting “identity-based” concerns. To put it another way, it sounds a lot like the modern GOP right before the MAGA movement took over.

This list of prescriptions—cooked up at a retreat held in the richest county in the U.S., where I seriously doubt there were working class voters present—is a recipe for disaster for the Democratic Party. In 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris ran a campaign that was heavily focused on Republicans disaffected with Trump and aimed at presenting the Democrats as a kinder, gentler GOP, the kind that we might have today if Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney had become the standard-bearer instead of Donald Trump. This strategy backfired catastrophically. Doubling down on it would be pure political malpractice.

The Democratic Party does need to emphasize “shared values,” as the document says. These values, though, include the notion that healthcare is a human right that should be provided by the government, not a privilege. They embrace the idea that the U.S. needs to develop more clean energy sources, not drill for more oil and gas—with renewable energy creating more jobs than drilling. And Americans agree that corporations and the wealthy should be taxed more, not celebrated for their ingenuity in hoarding wealth.

If Democrats really want to speak to voters’ concerns, they should start by addressing trends that are making life unlivable for so many Americans. The affordability crunch caused by corporate greed, the climate crisis, our ever-more-expensive healthcare system, and our flailing democracy all provide the party with openings to take bold, progressive policy stands. However, these stances are completely incompatible with the regressive, triangulating politics that Third Way envisions.

The Democratic Party is very much at a crossroads: It can embrace progressivism and forge a new, compelling identity that speaks directly to voters’ concerns—especially working-class voters. Or it can take cues from the donor and consultant class and embrace the very policies that precipitated our current political crisis. The former approach requires bravery and risk-taking; the latter only asks that the party backslides into its old habits and, quite possibly, political obsolescence.

Just weeks after the Trump administration began sending immigration detainees to Guantánamo, the detainees report windowless solitary confinement for up to 23-hours-a-day; denial of drinking water as a form of punishment or retaliation; verbal and psychological abuse, including guards "threatening to shoot detainees"; and "never [being] permitted to contact family members."

These allegations are from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on March 1 to prevent new transfers to the offshore prison. The mistreatment is not surprising.

In 1991, U.S. military personnel dressed in riot gear and carrying "rifles with fixed bayonets" attacked Haitian asylum-seekers at Guantánamo—while the Haitians were sleeping.

ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible.

That's according to an official military history of the detention of thousands of Haitians at the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba. Some of the Haitians had protested delays in their cases, as well as their mistreatment in U.S. custody, after fleeing U.S.-sponsored political violence in their country.

"The stunned migrants offered no resistance," writes the Marine Corps historian in his account of this "humanitarian mission."

In 1993, an American soldier at Guantánamo was angered when a Haitian child urinated in the dirt. The soldier "took the little boy's hand and rubbed it in the urine and mud, and then wiped it in his face and in his mouth," according to a fellow service member who later spoke to documentary filmmakers about his refusal to violently suppress nonviolent protests (see Crowing Rooster Arts, Guantánamo Notes, at 21:29).

In 1995, Haitian children unaccompanied by adults reported being "cracked" by U.S. military guards at Guantánamo: "their hands cuffed behind their back, their feet cuffed and then stepped on... The cuffings often occur[ed] in conjunction with other punishments, such as... being forced to kneel for hours on hot cement or beds of ants," according to the newspaper Haïti Progres.

After a 15-year-old Haitian girl threw food on another girl's bed, American soldiers handcuffed her to a cot in solitary confinement for a day-and-a-half, the girl told a visiting attorney. (You can read more about those imprisoned Haitian children in this pamphlet, published as part of "Ghosts of Guantánamo," a 1995 exhibit in Miami Beach organized to bring attention to those children in a time before social media.)

A brigadier general who acknowledged these incidents said they were not "abuse" but merely the result of "poor judgment and improper disciplinary techniques." A press release from the U.S. Atlantic Command said that the "conduct" of the military was being "closely monitored" by the U.S. immigration service.

Today, as the U.S. military collaborates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Guantánamo, "degrading conditions and extreme isolation have led to several suicide attempts," according to the ACLU.

Remember that these "administrative detainees" are being held for alleged civil violations, and their past crimes are either exaggerated or non-existent.

The conflation of "immigrant" and "criminal" by anti-immigrant movements preceded the Trump administration by decades, of course, but the Trump-Vance campaign took mere lies to a new level, claiming outright that even legal immigrants are "illegal." On January 28, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked up the line, saying that all undocumented immigrants are criminals. (That's not true, either.) Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth parroted the slogan that the immigration detainees sent to Guantánamo are the "worst of the worst." The phrase was popularized by former Vice President Dick Cheney in his justification for sending post-September-11 prisoners to the U.S. base in Cuba, and it was misinformation then, too.

So what is the real point of Guantánamo detentions?

In the 2004 Supreme Court arguments in Rasul v. Bush, concerning the post-9/11 detainees, attorney John Gibbons called the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo a "lawless enclave." That lawlessness had already been tested on the immigration prisoners. It's now more widely understood that the point of imprisoning Haitians—and others, including Cubans and Chinese—in offshore camps on foreign territory controlled by the U.S. was to keep them isolated from the U.S. justice system. Attorney Gibbons was referring to this lack of access to courts and due process.

ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible. That's part of what the oft-quoted "taking the shackles off" of ICE really means, and it's why the Trump administration has ordered legal organizations to stop helping detained noncitizens within the U.S. even to understand the laws they're accused of breaking, much less to know their own rights under the law. (That order has been blocked by a federal judge for now.)

It's also worth remembering, with all the propaganda about borders and invasion, that the executive's backwards rationale for its claim to unlimited detention authority in Cuba has been that the U.S. is holding the prisoners outside U.S. borders. But Escalona v. Noem, the ACLU lawsuit, argues that the very transfer of immigration detainees from the U.S. to Cuba is illegal under U.S. immigration law. (The 1990s immigration detainees at Guantánamo had been picked up at sea, not transferred from the mainland U.S.)

At Guantánamo, as in ICE detention centers here, the lawlessness of procedure and the brutality of daily mistreatment are part of the same fabric. Isolating the detained persons—from lawyers, family, and the media—is crucial to that project. Trying to break the prisoners' isolation is therefore paramount.

The economy is like the ocean—both rely on a healthy foundation to thrive. Just as the ocean's ecosystems depend on clean waters and balance at its depths, the economy needs a strong, stable base—workers, industries, and resources that function properly at the ground level. If the ocean floor becomes polluted, it disrupts the entire ecosystem, causing the waters above to suffer. Likewise, when the foundations of the economy are neglected—through inequality, corruption, or unsustainable practices—the effects ripple upward, leading to broader instability, high unemployment, and deepening inequality, making it increasingly difficult for ordinary people to stay afloat.

A clear example of this is when mass layoffs of government workers occur. Governments play a key role in maintaining infrastructure, social services, and public sector employment, which support the economy at large. When governments reduce their workforce through austerity measures or budget cuts, the immediate consequences affect the foundational services people rely on—healthcare, education, public safety, and more. These cuts often lead to decreased economic activity in local communities, as government workers are consumers themselves, spending on goods and services. Moreover, when government employees lose their jobs, the ripple effects can harm the private sector, as unemployment rises and consumer demand falls, further destabilizing local economies. The loss of these vital workers often undermines the very systems that hold society together, from the safety nets that protect the vulnerable to the systems of governance that enable economic stability.

Much like a polluted ocean, neglecting the "depths" of the economy—whether through environmental degradation, mass reductions in vital services, or economic policies that favor the wealthy over everyday people—ultimately pollutes the economic waters above. By weakening the economy's foundations, mass layoffs and economic instability erode confidence in the system, resulting in diminished growth, further instability, and a more fractured society. Both ecosystems—natural and economic—are delicate, requiring careful, long-term stewardship to avoid collapse and ensure prosperity for future generations.

Just as we fight for environmental protections to sustain our planet, we must fight for policies that sustain economic stability and fairness.

I understand this reality firsthand. As someone who experienced homelessness while raising a child, I've seen what happens when economic policies fail the most vulnerable. Losing stable housing wasn't just a personal hardship—it was a direct consequence of a system that prioritizes short-term profits over long-term stability. The economic ocean had already been polluted, and I was caught in the current, struggling to survive in a world that often overlooks those in need. I faced the consequences of an economy that fails to support its most essential workers, the ones who are too often invisible in the greater economic landscape.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I witnessed another failure of economic stewardship. Many homeless individuals had no information about the virus, no access to protective measures, and no healthcare support. My daughter and I took it upon ourselves to educate and distribute resources to those left behind. Later, while filming my docuseries In Correspondence With Eric Protein Moseley, a spin-off of Homeless Coronavirus Outreach, I contracted Covid-19 myself. I was fortunate to receive care from St. Jude Center—Park Central and Catholic Charities Dallas, but my experience further solidified the urgency of healthcare and economic policies that serve everyone—not just the privileged. It became clear to me that a system that neglects its most vulnerable citizens will ultimately collapse under the weight of its own inequities. The pandemic illuminated the deep cracks in our social systems, with those at the bottom facing the greatest hardships and suffering the most severe consequences.

The current economic landscape shows us that public resources must be protected, not gutted. Economic justice and environmental justice go hand in hand. If we continue to strip away vital support systems—whether through mass layoffs, corporate greed, or government neglect—we are poisoning the waters we all rely on. Those at the bottom will feel the effects first, but soon enough, the instability will reach every level of society, affecting businesses, communities, and entire nations. This instability doesn't just threaten the most vulnerable, but the entire fabric of society itself. When the foundations weaken, it's only a matter of time before the entire structure is compromised.

We cannot afford to let the ocean of our economy become toxic. Just as we fight for environmental protections to sustain our planet, we must fight for policies that sustain economic stability and fairness. We need long-term solutions, not short-term cuts that deepen inequality and erode trust in the system. If we fail to act now, the waves of economic instability will continue to crash down, leaving millions struggling to stay afloat and threatening the future prosperity of us all. Our failure to protect the foundations of the economy will not only harm those already at the bottom—it will have consequences for all of us, as the ripple effects of neglect reach every part of society. The time to act is now—before the waters of economic injustice drown us all.

U.S. President Donald Trump is killing the economy, reducing the U.S. government to rubble, and destroying our relationships with our allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin may love it, but it’s a catastrophe for us and much of the rest of the world.

Many of you ask me: Where’s the Democratic Party?

I wish I had a good answer. At a time when America needs a strong, bold, courageous opposition, the Democrats’ silence is deafening.

What the hell does it mean to be a “moderate” today anyway? When the choice we’re facing is between democracy and dictatorship, where’s the midpoint?

My old friend James Carville advises Democrats to “roll over and play dead.” With due respect to James, he’s full of sh*t.

Democrats have been rolling over and playing dead too long. That’s one reason the nation is in the trouble we’re in.

If Democrats had had the guts years ago to condemn big money in politics, fight corporate welfare, and unrig a market that’s been rigged in favor of big corporations and the rich, Trump’s absurd bogeymen (the deep state, immigrants, socialists, trans people, diversity-equity-inclusion) wouldn’t have stood a chance.

My simple advice to congressional Democrats: Wake the hell up!

Tonight, Trump will address both chambers of Congress. He has taken over the brains and intestines of Republican lawmakers, who will applaud his stream of lies.

Democrats will do—what? Sit on their hands? Applaud a few insipid things?

Ideally, Democrats should boycott the whole event. Even sitting in the well of the House as if this were just another president addressing just another Congress legitimizes Trump’s coup.

Democrats should not signal to a nationally televised audience that what we’re living through is normal.

If Democratic lawmakers feel they must be there, then make good and loud trouble. Disrupt Trump’s speech. Arrive in Revolutionary War costumes and hold signs proclaiming America is not a monarchy. Wave American flags and copies of the Constitution.

Every time he utters the word “tariff,” hold up a sign that says “It’s a tax.”

When Trump lies—about Ukraine, about DOGE, about immigration, about the tariffs he’s just put into effect, about his plan for robbing working people to give another huge tax cut to the rich—boo loudly. Hold up a “lie meter” for the cameras.

Then walk out en masse.

Show America there’s still life in the democratic opposition, even as America slides toward dictatorship.

The good news is most of America is firmly against Trump (and with Democrats) on the big things. According to polls:

1. Most don’t want a Trump Republican budget that cuts almost $1 trillion out of Medicaid, food stamps, and child nutrition in order to make way for a $4.5 trillion tax cut mostly for the wealthy.
2. Most don’t want the richest person in the world destroying departments and agencies that protect our health, safety, financial security, and environment.
3. Most don’t side with Putin. Most don’t want us to abandon Ukraine. Most don’t want us to turn against our traditional allies that are democracies in favor of a bloodthirsty dictator.
4. Most don’t want tariffs that drive up the prices they pay for food, gas, housing, and clothing. Most understand that tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers.
5. Most don’t want a government of, by, and for billionaires.
6. Most believe in democracy and the rule of law and don’t want Trump trampling on the Constitution, acts of Congress, and federal court orders.

Not only should Democrats be making noise (and hay) about all this, but Democrats should not rely on so-called “moderates” (such as Michigan’s Sen. Elissa Slotkin) to speak for them. Democrats selected Slotkin to deliver the Democrats’ “response” to Trump’s address tonight.

Democrats need Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), or anyone else with fight in their hearts and rage in their bellies who can make the case that Trump is bad for working people and terrible for America and the world.

What the hell does it mean to be a “moderate” today anyway? When the choice we’re facing is between democracy and dictatorship, where’s the midpoint?

We are in clear and present danger. Democrats must stand up for American ideals at a time when Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Elon Musk are riding roughshod over them.

The rest of you, my friends, should make a ruckus, too. Call your Democratic senators and Democratic representatives (if you have any) today, and tell them what I’ve just told you. Again, the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.

During or after Trump’s speech tonight, call the White House and tell the operator that you disagree with what Trump has said. White House operators keep track of positive and negative responses. (The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414.)

Have no doubt that we are the true patriots of this nation. We are the voices of democracy, freedom, social justice, and the rule of law. We are the people.

Our lawmakers—including Trump and Vance (and even de facto lawmakers like Musk)—are supposed to be working for us.

The waiting is almost over, Donald Trump is about to hit America’s workers with the largest tax increase they have ever seen. Trump’s taxes on imports (tariffs) from Canada, Mexico, and China will cost people in the United States somewhere around $260 billion a year or around $2,000 a household.

This is far larger than any tax increase we’ve seen in the last half-century, and unlike tax increases put in place by Clinton and Obama, it will primarily hit low and middle-income households. Their tax increases primarily hit the top 1% percent, which is probably why they got so much more attention from the media.

It is not clear what our reality TV show president hopes to accomplish with these tax hikes. His stated reasons don’t make much sense. Canada, Mexico, and China are already cooperating with the U.S. on the issues he is complaining about. There is a minimal flow of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants from Canada.

If Trump can’t find major savings in the budget, then he will have to raise other taxes if he doesn’t want to hugely increase the deficit with his tax cuts for the Elon Musk crowd. This is the most obvious explanation for Trump hitting us with his huge import taxes.

Mexico sharply curtailed the flow of undocumented immigrants following a deal with Biden last summer. We can look to reduce the flow further, but that could probably be accomplished by negotiations rather than imposing a big tax on U.S. households.

China has also cooperated in reducing the flow of precursor substances for making fentanyl. Here also there were probably better prospects for further reductions through a path of negotiations rather than Donald Trump’s big tax increases.

Also, unlike Canada and Mexico, China’s economy is not that dependent on its trade with the U.S. China’s exports to the U.S. come to less than 2.5 percent of its GDP. If Donald Trump’s taxes reduce that by half, it could look to export to other countries (like Canada or Mexico) or increase domestic demand.

It seems implausible that Donald Trump’s stated reasons for his tax increase are his actual reasons. In principle, taxes on imports can be used as part of an industrial strategy to build up key industries, as was explicitly the case under Biden. His tariffs were intended to promote the advanced semi-conductor industry, as well as solar and wind energy and electric cars.

However, it would be difficult to find any evidence of an industrial strategy in Trump’s plans. He actually is deliberately sabotaging the industries Biden sought to foster.

There is an old saying in Washington that if you want to understand politicians, look at what they do, not what they say. On that front there is no ambiguity. Donald Trump is imposing big new taxes, and he is doing it in a way that does not require congressional approval.

He has made no secret of his intention to cut taxes on the wealthy. While Elon Musk and DOGE boys have put on a good show with the chain saw and breaking into various government agencies, the savings they can actually identify don’t amount to much.

If Trump can’t find major savings in the budget, then he will have to raise other taxes if he doesn’t want to hugely increase the deficit with his tax cuts for the Elon Musk crowd. This is the most obvious explanation for Trump hitting us with his huge import taxes. It sounds much better to pretend he’s cracking down on fentanyl and illegal immigration than to say he’s whacking ordinary workers with a big tax increase. But that is what Donald Trump is doing.

Correction/Update: This post has been updated from its original to better reflect estimates based on what the Trump administration clarified exactly what tariffs would be put into place.

“This is going to be great television.”

But it wasn’t great. It was tragic. U.S. President Donald Trump’s comment at the conclusion of his unprecedented public outburst directed toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked a milestone in a momentous week: Trump’s “America First” agenda became “America Alone… with Russia.”

Trump and Vice President JD Vance shouted at Zelenskyy—a beleaguered wartime leader struggling to defend his democratic nation against Russia’s invasion. They scolded him for not thanking Trump, who slowed to a trickle the flow of American weapons to Ukraine.

In rejecting Trump’s request, Zelenskyy joined Trump’s list of “enemies.” To get even, Trump is now helping Russia negotiate what it could not achieve after three years on the battlefield: the conquest of Ukraine.

Russian leaders could not hide their glee. On social media, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev posted: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office. And @realDonaldTrump is right: The Kiev regime is ‘gambling with WWIII.’”

Democracies throughout the world rallied around Zelenskyy.

A Useful Idiot Throws a Tantrum

In the 1930s, Soviet President Joseph Stalin referred to Westerners who supported him as “useful idiots.” That description understates Trump’s value to Putin. Far beyond the praise that Trump lavishes on other dictators, Trump parrots Russian propaganda and ignores these facts:

• Russia invaded Ukraine, making it a victim of unlawful Russian aggression and alleged war crimes. But Trump claims falsely that Ukraine “started” the war.

• In 2019, Zelenskyy won a landslide victory with 73% of the vote in a free and fair democratic election. Russia’s 2022 invasion resulted in martial law, which made future Ukraine elections during wartime impossible. But Trump repeats another false Putin talking point that Zelenskyy is an illegitimate leader—a “dictator without elections.”

• Zelenskyy has an approval rating in Ukraine exceeding 50%. But contrary to the evidence, Trump says that it’s only 4%. He’s pushing Putin’s positions aimed at excluding Zelenskyy from settlement negotiations and destabilizing Ukraine: “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings,” Trump said in a February 21, 2025 Fox News interview. “He has no cards, and you get sick of it… And I’ve had it.”

Why has Trump turned against Zelenskyy and toward Putin? Observers say that it reflects Trump’s “transactional” approach. But that’s too benign. More likely explanations are that Trump is: 1) beholden to Putin, and 2) vindictive toward Zelenskyy.

Trump Owes Putin

Commentators have largely ignored the passages that are key to understanding Trump’s tirade.

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump told Zelenskyy.

“With me” is the key. In Trump’s mind, he and Putin together suffered through investigations into Russian election interference. As Trump explained, “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony… And he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it.”

By adopting Putin’s positions, Trump and Vance have destroyed any leverage that Ukraine, Europe, or the U.S. had in negotiating a resolution of the war.

The truth is that Putin had everything “to do with it” and “went through” nothing, except perhaps delight when his candidate won the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia wanted Trump to win and took steps to achieve that outcome. To this day, the factual findings remain unrebutted.

Russian intelligence officers hacked Democratic National Committee computer systems and spread disinformation on social media. Communications between the Trump campaign and Russians were numerous and frequent. And when members of the Russian parliament learned of Trump’s victory, they burst into applause.

But Trump is still pushing the lie that investigating Russian interference was a “witch hunt.”

For Trump, Everything is Personal

Another explanation for Trump’s explosion was six years in the making. Shortly after 9:00 am on July 25, 2019, Trump asked Zelenskyy for a “favor:” If Ukraine opened an investigation into Hunter Biden’s dealings in the country and thereby tarnished the likely Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, Trump would release previously appropriated U.S. military aid.

Zelenskyy refused. Eventually, Trump was impeached over what he falsely described as his “perfect call” with Zelenskyy. And Biden won the 2020 election.

In rejecting Trump’s request, Zelenskyy joined Trump’s list of “enemies.” To get even, Trump is now helping Russia negotiate what it could not achieve after three years on the battlefield: the conquest of Ukraine.

For Trump, retribution was a no-brainer. He could please Putin while getting even with Zelenskyy. A two-fer.

Carrying Putin Across the Finish Line

Trump has told Zelenskyy to end the war on Putin’s terms or else. He “better move fast or he’s not going to have any country left,” Trump warned.

Vance relished his role as Trump’s attack dog. He asserted that Trump’s diplomacy would end the war and berated Zelenskyy for not thanking Trump. Zelenskyy responded with Putin’s track record of breaking prior diplomatic agreements and asked, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you speaking about?”

“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance said smugly. But he was actually referring to the kind of diplomacy that emboldens Putin’s self-proclaimed effort to recreate the Russian empire through brute force.

By adopting Putin’s positions, Trump and Vance have destroyed any leverage that Ukraine, Europe, or the U.S. had in negotiating a resolution of the war. Specifically, those positions include:

• Ukraine cannot join NATO;
• Ukraine must cede permanently portions of Ukraine that Russia has captured;
• Economic sanctions that are crippling Russia’s economy should be removed; and
• America should side with Russia against democracy—as it did on February 24 when the U.S. voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ninety-three nations—including America’s most loyal allies—voted in favor of the resolution.

The Danger of Useful Idiots in High Places

Like a child with arrested development, Trump doesn’t care about the larger consequences of his actions. He has no global strategy for retaining democracy’s friends or resisting its foes. His goals in Ukraine are to help Putin and to humiliate Zelenskyy. The fact that he will make the world a more dangerous place does not factor into his limited thinking.

When asked whether sacrificing Ukraine would undermine European security, the NATO alliance, and America’s national interests, Trump said that the “big, beautiful ocean” would protect us. That strategy might have worked in the 18th century; it’s an absurd approach to protecting America today.

Apologists for authoritarians are nothing new. But now Putin’s most useful idiot ever occupies the Oval Office. Fear and personal ambition have caused Republicans in the legislative branch to abandon their constitutional responsibility to check him.

Only six weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the results for America and the world are already catastrophic.

It will get worse.

In 2015, writer Adrian Bott famously tweeted: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” This went viral, coining the phrase, “Leopards ate my face.” It’s so tempting to mock people who act against their own interests such as Trump voters.

Many people voted for Trump due to their perception of economic self-interest, as MAGA promised to restore America's economy and national pride after recent hardships. Additionally, Trump's charismatic leadership and the appeal of his nationalist and anti-woke rhetoric attracted widespread support among various segments of the population.

Wait, no. That’s my paraphrased analysis of how Adolph Hitler rose to power. I substituted Trump for Hitler, MAGA for Nazi Party, America for Germany, and woke for communist. I couldn’t resist. My bad. You can find the original source: How Did Adolf Hitler Happen? on the National WWII Museum website.

So how did Trump rise to power? In a November 13, 2024 article entitled What Trump supporters believe and expect, the Pew Research Center reported “[T]he economy was the most important issue for Trump voters this year. In a September survey, 93% said it was very important to their vote. Immigration ranked second, as 82% said it was very important to their vote.”

Many people voted for Trump due to his lies about immigration and the economy. He and his team effectively tricked people into believing that he would effectively address these issues. This, because his supporters see him as a decisive leader who would change America.

According to the same Pew Research article, among Trump voters: “92% believed that biological sex is not mutable. Just 7% said a person can be a man or woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. 89% said gun ownership does more to increase than decrease safety. 83% viewed the criminal justice system as not tough enough on criminals. 75% did not think the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society today much or at all.”

So not all that much different from Hitler’s rise to power. Trump’s voters are already learning to their dismay that Trump’s fascistic attacks on trans people, immigrants, women, and minorities won’t do anything to help anyone.

Trump’s frantic dismantling of government and mass firing of public servants—including veterans—harm these essential government employees immediately. This anarchic frenzy will hurt all of us eventually, including Trump voters. His regressive, reckless policies certainly won’t lower the price of eggs which are far more likely to infect people with food borne diseases now that Trump fired inspectors charged with keeping our food safe.

Any way forward against fascism must repudiate faux populism by championing inclusive economic policies—such as a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights based on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

Many Trump voters already realize that their lives are getting worse, not better, due to Trump’s assaults on education, science, health, and nearly every other essential government service. We may feel compelled to say, “We told you so!” to Trump voters and even to other people who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. That’s understandable, perhaps unavoidable, but I think it makes more sense to commiserate with them. After all, so many of them already lament Trump’s eating their faces off.

After we commiserate, we could listen to Trump voters and others, learn why they voted the way they did. We could urge them to vote for better candidates to cure the harms their vote caused. If that prospect disgusts you, then we could consider learning from interviews with Trump voters and public opinion polling instead.

We could engage with persuadable Trump voters and persuade them to vote for candidates courageous enough to stand up to oligarchs and corporatists. We could listen to and learn from those who rejected Kamala Harris. Trump voters, Jill Stein voters, and those who stayed home have valid views about the weaknesses of Democratic candidates and policies. After we listen to them, we could ask them to help us make the Democratic Party better.

Alan Minsky explained how and why this makes sense as a viable theory of change in his article, Our 2 Choices: Join the Democratic Party to Transform It, or Acquiesce to Fascism published by Common Dreams last month. Minsky wrote, “Because of the structure of American society and politics, the Democratic Party is the only institution positioned to challenge, defeat, and reverse the Trump administration’s ongoing destruction of our constitutional order.”

Of course this prescription involves a powerful mass movement working inside and outside of the Democratic Party. This, to effectuate an evolution in the Party to reject neoliberal economics in favor of an enlightened economics of inclusion. One that fits neatly beside, rather than works at cross purposes, with the Democratic Party’s commitment to social inclusion. Good economic policy has always been good politics.

Alan Minsky added a post script, “The one thing I think I should have added—and which I will add at the top of my next essay—is that the Democratic Party right now is flat on its back. Now is not the time for progressives to abandon the party.”

Make no mistake, Trump’s economic policies elevate special interests and oligarchs above the needs of every day Americans at least as much as any other neoliberal scams. Also, as mentioned, Trump’s style of identity politics is at least as cynical as any Democrat’s. Much worse, Trump’s demagoguery instigates death threats, stochastic terrorism, and violence. Most notably the January 6th attacks against the U.S. Capitol seeking to halt the peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 election.

Yes, they voted for Trump. Yes, Trump is eating their faces. Yes, we may feel an almost irresistible urge to wipe what’s left of their noses in the rotten fruits of their folly. That won’t help beat back Trump’s fascism or help us win elections.

Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso 2018), wrote a commentary published in Salon entitled Despite his loss, Bernie Sanders' campaign proved that organizing around class interests works. Haider explained, “First and foremost, liberals are constantly worried about people ‘voting against their interests.’ ... According to a certain liberal common sense, working class voters are continually supporting Republicans, against ‘interests’ which haven't yet been defined.”

I estimate that between a fourth and a third of voters actually believe that scapegoating and harming immigrants, minorities, women, disabled people—aka Trump’s anti-woke, anti-DEI attacks—are in their interests. Of course they’re wrong. Still, it may well be extremely time consuming and difficult to deprogram them and free them from their hatefulness.

That said, reaching out to such people with an economic message might help begin a constructive conversation, or it may not. Calling them “deplorable” etc. gains us little more than a feeling of moral superiority. Cold comfort for people subjected to Trump’s ruthless predation, including almost all of them and us sooner or later.

By my calculus, at least two thirds of voters remain open to listening to a progressive agenda. In fact, they’re eager to support candidates and policies that center the economic needs of the poor, the working class, and the increasingly insecure middle class. This, in a marked repudiation of Carter-Clinton-Obama-Biden neoliberal policies that favor greed and power of the economic elite over the vast majority of Americans.

Bernie Sanders proved outreach based on economic imperatives works. In an article entitled Bernie Sanders influenced US politics more than any other failed presidential candidate in the country's history published in 2020 by Business Insider, John Haltiwanger wrote:

His push for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and tuition-free college, among other policies aimed at eradicating inequality, has set the tone for the future of the party. This is evident via young leaders such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who volunteered on Sanders' campaign in 2016 before going on to win a shocking victory in the 2018 midterms.

Haltiwanger added, “Sanders has also set a new standard in the way campaigns raise money, rejecting high-dollar fundraisers while building a massive grassroots movement via small-dollar donations.”

Failing to make a Bernie Sanders-style economic appeal to voters, candidates running as Democrats keep ceding the high ground on economic inclusiveness. Trump took advantage of this failure. Other faux populists will continue doing so as well.

By running on identity rather than kitchen table issues, neoliberal Democrats squander political advantages on economics, the most important issues for many if not most voters. Candidates may shy away from inclusive economics, hoping to secure generous campaign contributions from oligarchs and elites.

In any case, the dismal results of this utterly failed approach speak for themselves. No amount of slick television ads or performative inclusion can overcome the stench of duplicitous neoliberal policies. Voters reject these broken promises. Bad economic policy remains bad politics.

Diversity, inclusion, and equity remain essential. That understood, absent a clear parallel commitment to economic inclusion, candidates relying on to DEI may appear out of touch. Worse, tokenism and other hollowly symbolic identity politics alienates increasingly cynical voters. This, including poor, working class, and middle class voters of all ethnicities, across all demographics.

Decades of bipartisan neoliberal repudiation of New Deal economic policies set the stage for Trump’s faux populism. Generations of Democrats’ failure to offer a competing inclusive economic vision opened the door for Trump’s fascism. This dismal dynamic creates an opportunity for a people-centered policy advocates. As Trump eats their faces, his voters are more likely to support proven effective progressive solutions to our shared challenges.

So-called “centrist” Democrats may try to camouflage their rob from the poor to enrich the rich policies behind a cheap and increasingly cynical strategy focusing on identity politics. That tactic isn’t working. Not as politics, nor as policy.

This approach keeps failing so spectacularly that I find it hard to imagine it’s any kind of accident. I blame million dollar a month consultants whose allegiance lies with billionaire benefactors. Their advice consistently prevents Democratic political victories. They must know this. Their income depends on it.

We can and will continue making social progress, and we must struggle for a more perfect union, no matter the backlash, and no matter how long it takes.

Overpaid pundits would rather lose to fascists like Trump than win by backing progressives like Bernie Sanders, A.O.C., and the rest of The Squad. So should people abandon the Democratic Party? As mentioned, Alan Minsky addressed that dilemma in his Common Dreams article Our 2 Choices: Join the Democratic Party to Transform It, or Acquiesce to Fascism.

Bernie eschewed high priced consultants and relied on small donations. This lets Sanders and other progressive candidates shake off shackles of campaign contributions with strings attached, freeing them to advocate for policies that benefit everyone—not just the wealthiest elite. This is important.

Any way forward against fascism must repudiate faux populism by championing inclusive economic policies—such as a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights based on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Alan Minsky and Professor Harvey J. Kaye wrote about this in their February 2022 Common Dreams article entitled A Call for All Progressive Candidates and Officeholders to Embrace a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.

Melding economic and social policies, Minsky and Kaye wrote, “We must guarantee all people residing in the United States the right to the essentials of a good life regardless of their income, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or country of origin.”

It’s true. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and other Trump targets disproportionately suffer from neoliberal economic neglect. Promising people equal access to college means nothing when we can’t afford to feed ourselves or our loved ones, heat our homes, or even pay the rent—much less pay for tuition, books, room, and board.

Sadly, trying to impose enlightenment on an unwilling majority usually backfires. Trump’s two electoral victories, along with appallingly sweeping victories by hate-mongers like Ron DeSantis prove these points.

We can and will continue making social progress, and we must struggle for a more perfect union, no matter the backlash, and no matter how long it takes. As Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I hope those of us who warned against Project 2025 and the rest of the Trump wrought wreckage will extend an empathetic hand of welcome to all those who voted for Trump or failed to vote against him.

Progress toward economic and social justice makes winning culture wars more likely. By contrast, failure to address the economic needs of the majority makes social progress impossible. As the decades of New Deal coalition domination of U.S. politics proved, we can win elections and win over swing voters by addressing their economic needs. Bernie Sanders showed that the New Deal resonates as well today as it did from the 1930s all the way into the 1960s.

I hope those of us who warned against Project 2025 and the rest of the Trump wrought wreckage will extend an empathetic hand of welcome to all those who voted for Trump or failed to vote against him. This, in order to reclaim and remake the Democratic Party into a people’s party worth of the name. I hope this happens sooner rather than later.

Yes, they voted for Trump. Yes, Trump is eating their faces. Yes, we may feel an almost irresistible urge to wipe what’s left of their noses in the rotten fruits of their folly. That won’t help beat back Trump’s fascism or help us win elections. We’re better off offering the increasing numbers of repentant Trump voters a sweeping, common sense set of solutions to their economic woes. They’re our woes too.

An income tax rate of over 100% would be hard for anyone to sustain. At a rate a smidge over 100%, our deepest pockets might be able to get by if they drew down their wealth or borrowed against it. But keeping up, year in and year out, with an income tax rate of over 1,000%, 10 times income? That seems, on its face, totally implausible.

Yet the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation would have us believe Warren Buffett did just that for at least five years running, all while enormously growing his own personal wealth.

This conclusion about Buffett’s tax situation emerges inescapably out of the claims the Tax Foundation makes in a research paper published just after last year’s November election. The paper’s title—America’s Super Rich Pay Super Amounts of Taxes, New Treasury Report Finds—could hardly lay out the Tax Foundation’s case more starkly.

Shareholders don’t pay corporate income tax obligations. Corporations do, from their corporate income.

But did the U.S. Department of the Treasury report the Tax Foundation paper references actually make such a finding? No, not even close.

The Treasury report does analyze the total tax payments of rich and ultra-rich taxpayers relative to their wealth. The report’s writers, all highly respected economists, took into account every tax that impacts a person’s wealth, directly or indirectly. One example: A corporate shareholder bears no personal responsibility for the payment of a corporation’s income tax. But the Treasury report attributes a proportionate share of that corporate tax to shareholders since corporate taxes reduce the value of shareholders’ holdings and, consequently, their wealth.

The Tax Foundation took this Treasury analysis of total tax payments by wealthy taxpayers and proceeded to blindly compare those payments to these taxpayers’ adjusted gross incomes. That comparison enables the Tax Foundation to insist, among other claims, that the nation’s richest 0.0001% of taxpayers are paying 58% of their adjusted gross incomes in taxes.

I didn’t find this specious Tax Foundation logic particularly surprising, given that I’ve commented in the past on the specious logic that runs through other Tax Foundation studies. But this new Tax Foundation paper vividly exposes how accepting the foundation’s logic and applying that logic to real life produces results so absurd that they demand some in-depth illumination.

Which brings us back to Mr. Buffett. Thanks to reporting by the independent news outlet ProPublica and publicly available information on the income tax payments of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s corporate investment base, we have considerable data on Buffett’s adjusted personal gross income, his ownership interest in Berkshire Hathaway from 2014 through 2018, and the income tax payments Berkshire made in each of those years.

We don’t have full information about Buffett’s other tax obligations, but let’s assume those obligations amounted to zero, since any additional payments would only have driven Buffett’s effective tax rate, according to the Tax Foundation’s methodology, even higher.

Warren Buffett’s ownership interest in Berkshire Hathaway—as reported in SEC filings for the years 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018—amounted to 20.5% that first year, 19.6% the next, and then 18.7%, 17.9%, and 17.2% the last three.

According to the data service macrotrends, Berkshire Hathaway’s income tax payments minus refunds for those years totaled $7.9 billion in 2014, $10.5 billion in 2015, and $9.2 billion in 2016 before sinking into refund territory in both 2017 and 2018, with $21.5 billion in refunds the first of those two years and $321 million the second.

Applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology would attribute to Buffett a share of Berkshire’s taxes paid—and refunds received—by multiplying his ownership stake in the corporation for each of the years by the corporate tax payment made or refund received for that year. Doing the math, Buffett ends up with a personal tax liability from Berkshire of over $1.5 billion.

That figure tops by more than 10 times Buffett’s adjusted personal gross income of $125 million for that same period, according to a ProPublica review of IRS records. The bottom line: All these numbers that we get applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology bring Buffett’s effective personal income tax rate to just over 1,200%.

And Buffett would end up having paid taxes at that rate, according to the Tax Foundation methodology, at a time when Berkshire’s income tax payments, net of refunds, were running relatively low. In 2017, the massive hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria had Berkshire’s insurance businesses incurring huge losses. Without those losses, and the tax refunds resulting from them, Buffett’s effective personal tax rate—according to the Tax Foundation methodology—would have topped over 4,000%!

Impossible? Of course. So what sleight of hand is the Tax Foundation playing here? Corporate income tax payments do reduce the wealth of their shareholders. Attributing a share of those tax payments to shareholders, as the original Treasury Department study does, makes eminent sense. But shareholders don’t pay corporate income tax obligations. Corporations do, from their corporate income. The Tax Foundation, for its part, doesn’t attribute corporate income to shareholders. It only attributes corporate tax.

By taking into account corporate taxes while ignoring corporate income, the Tax Foundation’s methodology drives up effective income tax rates for the super rich only because these rich happen to own a massive amount of corporate stock. We can better understand the dynamics at play here by considering the tax situations of business owners far from billionaire status.

Consider this comparison: Taxpayers A and B each own a profitable business that generates $49,999 of income in 2025. They each reinvest all business profits in their businesses, living off the savings they have sitting in tax-exempt bonds. A and B each have $1 of other income. A, who owns his business directly, reports the profits on his personal tax return, along with his dollar of other income, and pays $10,500 in tax. His effective tax rate is 21%.

B, who owns her business through a corporation, reports the profits on the corporation’s tax return, and the corporation pays $10,500 in tax. Since B’s own adjusted gross income is just one dollar, B’s effective tax rate according to the Tax Foundation would be 1,050,000%, 50,000 times A’s effective tax rate.

In its reporting, ProPublica also considered Warren Buffett’s effective income tax rate. Taking his personal federal income tax payments as a percentage of his true economic income, including the $24.3 billion increase in his wealth between 2014 and 2018, ProPublica determined his effective income tax rate to be 0.1%. Quite a far cry from 1,200%.

Before the Super Bowl brought global attention and hundreds of thousands of visitors to New Orleans in February, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry cleared out over 100 unhoused people from downtown, busing them to an unheated warehouse miles away.

In our community of Indianapolis, advocates fear similar clear outs will happen when a planned city shelter outside the downtown area is finished.

Which makes me think of Stanley Milgram and Bryan Stevenson.

“On that fifth day, the weather was very cold and rainy. All I could think about was the young dad and his son without a home, with a job disrupted, and the young boy missing school.”

Milgram was the Yale University psychologist who conducted the famous experiments in the 1960s that showed a disturbing willingness of study participants to follow orders to administer what they thought were powerful electric shocks to other study participants.

The unsettling results remain widely known. But one component of Milgram’s experiments is less often discussed: The study participants were far less likely to administer the shocks if they could hear or see the victims of their actions.

Milgram used the word “proximity” to describe that variable. Which is the same term that Bryan Stevenson uses when he describes how we can change the world.

Stevenson is the attorney behind the book Just Mercy and the film of the same name, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson traces his lifelong devotion to ending mass incarceration and promoting racial justice back to an event when he was still a law student. While interning for a human rights organization, Stevenson was assigned to go to a maximum-security prison in Georgia and deliver some procedural case news to a man on death row.

But the planned brief meeting turned into a three-hour deep, wide-ranging conversation. At the end of his time with Stevenson, the prisoner sang the hymn, “I’m Pressing on the Upward Way.”

Which launched Stevenson on his lifelong trajectory devoted to seeking justice. “It’s because I got close enough to a condemned man to hear his song,” he says. “When you get proximate, you hear the songs. And those melodies in those songs will empower you, they will inspire you, and they will teach you what doing justice and loving mercy is all about.”

What Gov. Jeff Landry, Stanley Milgram, and Bryan Stevenson can all tell us is this: The closer we get to the millions of people who are facing evictions or already unhoused, the more likely we are to be motivated to do something about it.

Carolyn Kingen can tell us that, too.

A retired critical care cardiac nurse, Kingen in 2020 joined some of her fellow members of the Meridian Street United Methodist Church in Indianapolis for a book study group that chose to read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. After reading and talking about the horrors of our nation’s eviction crisis, where 3.6 million households face forced removal from their homes each year, the group decided to see for themselves.

On one of Kingen’s first visits to eviction court, she heard a father of a seven-year-old boy explain to the judge that he had fallen behind on rent because he had not received expected overtime pay from his job. But, the father said, the overtime boost would be coming through in his next paycheck, which was arriving in a week. He could catch up on rent then, and pay late fees too.

The judge, unmoved, ordered the family to be evicted within five days. “The entire case lasted three or four minutes,” Kingen recalls. “In those few minutes, the decision was made that an employed father and mother had to pack their belongings and get out.”

“On that fifth day, the weather was very cold and rainy. All I could think about was the young dad and his son without a home, with a job disrupted, and the young boy missing school.”

“I Could Be That Tenant”

Experiences like this spurred Kingen and the book group to create a Housing Justice Task Force in their church, and then join with other congregations of different faiths to create the Indiana Eviction Justice Network. I teach a law school clinic where my students and I represent people facing eviction in the same area. I can attest that the presence of court watchers changes the tenor of the proceedings, ramping up the respect paid to tenants facing the loss of their homes.

And the eviction court watchers go beyond the doors of the courtrooms. They take the proximity-provided lessons and use them to advocate with elected officials and the judges themselves. Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, who as director of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance coordinates the court-watching program, connects the volunteers with lawmakers to push for housing reforms like mediation before eviction orders, sealings of past eviction records, living wages, and more and better affordable housing.

“Court watchers often know more about systemic housing issues than the elected officials they are talking to,” Spiegel says. Earlier this year, court watchers mobilized to lobby Indiana legislators in opposition to a bill that would have criminalized sleeping in public spaces. Last month, the legislation was withdrawn by its sponsor.

Court proceedings are open to the public, and several other communities across the country, in places like Greensboro, North Carolina; Houston, and Chicago, have court-watching programs, often connected to justice advocacy.

Kingen and many of the other court watchers are motivated by their faith or moral principles. “We are called to care for the poor, the orphans, widows—and in today’s society, we would include any group that is shunned or rejected,” she says. “I try to see Christ in the faces of every person I meet.”

Rabbi Spiegel says this same call to action crosses faith and moral traditions. “All religious traditions teach that we must take care of the ‘least among us’ and as such, housing is a human right,” he says.

The proximity Carolyn Kingen experiences in court allows her to see in those facing eviction not just the divine but herself as well. Kingen recalls a time when she could not pay her rent, but was fortunate enough to have a family member step up to help. “Each time I court watch, I try to remind myself that I could be that tenant appearing before the judge,” she says.

Placing herself in the shoes of those facing homelessness is far easier to do when she can be in the same room and hear their stories, Kingen says. Court proceedings are open to the public, and several other communities across the country, in places like Greensboro, North Carolina; Houston, and Chicago, have court-watching programs, often connected to justice advocacy.

Check and see if there is a program in your community. And if there isn’t, maybe consider helping start one yourself.