One year ago, President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, DC, claiming, without evidence, that the city had been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

In response to this alleged crisis, Trump deployed roughly 800 members of the DC National Guard as well as more than 1,000 National Guard members from several cooperating states “to protect law-abiding citizens from the destructive forces of criminal activity.” A year later, 4,600 troops patrol the city against the wishes of the district’s elected local government.

This deployment violates long-standing American traditions, jeopardizes public safety, and has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars—all without any discernible impact on violent crime rates in Washington. Yet Trump wants to keep troops here, and he’s counting on Americans to stop paying attention. We can’t let that happen.

From the beginning, Trump’s claim of a “crime emergency” stood on weak footing. In fact, the murder tally in Washington had declined from 274 in 2023 to 187 in 2024.

The founding generation would immediately have seen the danger in a president trying to normalize the domestic use of troops.

But even if day-to-day crime in Washington had instead been trending upward, that would not have justified the invocation of emergency powers. Such powers are intended for sudden, unforeseen crises—the definition of an emergency—that normal legal frameworks and systems are too slow-moving to address. Urban crime, in contrast, is a foreseeable, ongoing problem that can and should be addressed employing the ordinary tools of government.

Use of the military raises additional concerns. A president deploying troops to police street crime is unprecedented; it violates centuries of American civic tradition and political thought. Americans have long rejected military interference in civilian affairs, and particularly military involvement in law enforcement, because an “army turned inward” can easily become an instrument of tyranny. Domestic deployment of the military is a tool of last resort, to be used only when civilian authorities are overwhelmed.

There are other, more immediate reasons to be wary of domestic military operations. Military personnel, including members of the National Guard, are trained to be soldiers, not police officers. Most National Guard members have little or no training in local criminal law, how to uphold constitutional rights, or how to preserve and collect evidence. Over the past year, there have been disturbing incidents where guard members have improperly detained DC residents and, in at least one documented case, used excessive force.

Trump’s use of the National Guard in Washington has also largely failed to serve its stated purpose. Although there was a narrow reduction in opportunistic property crime over the first six months of the deployment, recent analysis has found little to no impact on violent crime. On the other hand, the deployment has proven to be extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, with a current cost of over $3 million per day.

Those costs will only accelerate in light of the recently announced $292 million deal to provide National Guard members deployed to Washington with apartment-style housing. In return for these huge sums of money, guard members across DC are spending their days standing idle on street corners and in metro stations—a form of non-activity euphemistically labeled “presence patrols.”

Yet Trump shows no signs of reversing course. To the contrary, he has doubled down. A “summer surge” brought the number of guard forces in DC close to 5,000, and the administration has announced that it intends to keep troops here through January 20, 2029, at an estimated cost of $1.4 billion beyond the money already spent.

The duration of the deployment might be what’s most concerning. No true emergency can be predicted to remain in place for another two-and-a-half years. If there was any doubt before, it’s now clear that the deployment was never meant to be a quick response to an immediate crisis.

It is designed to normalize something that should never be normal in this country: the use of the military as a domestic police force. It would be a small step from National Guard forces assisting in the arrest of people who dip their hands in the reflecting pool to guard members policing protests. And if Trump were to try to illegally block Congress’ certification of the 2028 presidential election—this time using military force, rather than exhorting an angry mob—there would be thousands of troops already arrayed within a short distance of the US Capitol.

It is no small irony that armed troops are patrolling the streets of our nation’s capital in the same summer as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That document denounces King George III for, among other things, using “among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” The founding generation would immediately have seen the danger in a president trying to normalize the domestic use of troops.

We must see it, too. The longer the deployment lasts, the less shocking the sight of National Guard forces on nearly every street corner becomes, and the easier it is to view the situation as a new normal. The American people must resist that instinct and demand an end to the deployment.

It was 1974. The Bronx was burning. Abandoned cars littered the streets, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. I’m still surprised my overprotective Holocaust-survivor parents let their preteen daughter ride the subway to school every day, but somehow they did.

For five years—from eighth grade through high school—I took the No. 5 Dyre Avenue train from our apartment in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx to my Jewish day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The commute was nearly an hour each way and always coincided with rush hour.

Mornings weren’t so bad; I lived near the beginning of the line and could usually get a seat. But heading home, the 86th Street platform was packed five to eight people deep.

When it was my turn to board, I would throw my entire body weight onto the person in front of me, as the person behind me did the same. We all pushed forward together, forcing ourselves into an already crammed car, as more people tried to pack in behind us.

The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.

Once the doors closed, we stood packed together in a dense sea of bodies. When the train lurched, the entire crowd swayed as one. Usually, I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of sweat and bad breath. I tried to pull away from a hand on my behind that might have been accidental, but probably was not. I remember thinking I was too young for this.

At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity.

Now, like three-quarters of Americans, I go everywhere by car. It’s faster and more convenient but I never see my fellow travelers—only their vehicles speeding past on the highway. And while I don’t miss the discomfort of the subway, I feel more cut off from other people’s lives.

When you don’t see people, you know them less. When entire groups remain unseen it becomes easier to turn them into abstraction—to fear them, dismiss them, or vilify them. It’s much harder to do that when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with someone, both of you grasping the pole as the train jolts you from side to side.

These were the days before smart phones or even portable music players. There was little to distract me from just looking and listening to the people around me. For two hours a day, I heard people speaking Spanish. I absorbed its rhythms long before I understood the words. Years later, when I finally learned the language, I picked it up quickly.

The subway exposed me to a depth of poverty I hadn’t seen in my own working-class Jewish neighborhood. I saw people asleep on the seats, curled around garbage bags that held everything they owned. There was a young man with no legs or lower torso who moved through the cars on a wheeled platform, collecting money. I watched him cross the treacherous gaps between cars as the train rattled and swayed.

The subway also showed me where people lived. Unlike highways, which are designed to bypass neighborhoods, the elevated train trestle cuts straight through them.

The No. 5 ran through the South Bronx at a time when more than 80% of buildings had burned or been abandoned. On dark winter evenings, we passed through blocks of hollowed-out shells, with the occasional occupied apartment. From the train I could see into people’s living rooms, glowing blue from the television.

As a teenager, I didn't know much about redlining, disinvestment, or the policies that had helped create those conditions. I only knew that children my age lived there and I wondered what it was like to grow up in what felt like a war zone.

There are, of course, other ways to encounter difference. My husband, a nurse in one of the poorest communities in Massachusetts, has cared for people from all walks of life. But that’s a different kind of interaction. People meet him when they’re sick, in pain, or in crisis. When you commute, you’re simply sharing space.

But not all forms of transportation create the same kind of shared space. Recently, riding the Amtrak train home from Philadelphia, I watched miles of rundown brick rowhouses slide past the window. Some were boarded up. Inside the train, however, the conversations I overheard were about road races in Cancun and the best spin classes in Manhattan. The passengers' lives appeared far removed from the neighborhoods we were passing through.

Having last lived in a city decades ago, my rural life is now quieter, more controlled. I move from one place to another sealed inside a car. It’s comfortable and efficient. But it’s made my life smaller. It’s made it possible to live a life where one rarely sees anyone outside one’s own orbit.

How can that not affect one’s ability to empathize—if your neighbors, coworkers, and classmates all reflect some version of yourself? The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.

Which is not to say that riding the No. 5 Dyre Avenue made me a kinder person. I still judge people; I could be nicer and more patient. But the commute gave shape and texture to lives I might otherwise reduce to stereotypes. Day after day, it reminded me that everyone, just like me, was simply trying to get home.

The world knows Bethlehem as the city of the Nativity. It is a city of churches, olive groves, ancient stone streets, and a history that attracts pilgrims and visitors from across the globe. For many, Bethlehem symbolizes peace, hope, and human resilience.

Yet in recent weeks, another image has emerged. Overflowing garbage containers. Piles of waste left uncollected for days. Unpleasant odors drifting through neighborhoods. Stray dogs searching through torn plastic bags. Flies, rodents, and growing public concern about health and sanitation.

For residents, these scenes are disturbing. For visitors, they are difficult to reconcile with the image of one of the world's most recognized and beloved cities. But the garbage accumulating in Bethlehem's streets is not the real story. It is merely the most visible symptom of a much larger crisis. The question is not why a container is overflowing. The question is what happened to the system behind it.

At first glance, it may seem like a simple municipal problem. A shortage of fuel. A broken truck. Workers on strike. Delayed collection rounds. The reality is far more complicated.

The environment does not understand politics. It understands only what we do—or fail to do—to protect it.

Waste management depends on an entire chain of institutions, workers, vehicles, roads, fuel supplies, disposal facilities, municipal revenues, and public cooperation. When enough pressure is placed on that chain, it begins to break. And in Bethlehem, pressure has been building for years.

The city has suffered repeated economic shocks. The tourism sector, once a major source of income, was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Before it could fully recover, the war and the broader economic crisis brought new hardships. Businesses struggled. Workers lost jobs. Household incomes declined. Many families found themselves prioritizing food, rent, and basic necessities over municipal fees.

As revenues declined, local institutions found it increasingly difficult to sustain essential services. At the same time, operational costs continued to rise. Fuel became more expensive and, at times, harder to secure. Vehicles required maintenance. Equipment aged. Service providers struggled to balance growing needs with shrinking resources.

The crisis does not stop there.

Road closures, military gates, and movement restrictions have increasingly complicated daily life throughout Bethlehem Governorate. What should be a routine collection route can suddenly become longer, slower, or more expensive. A delayed truck today may become an overflowing container tomorrow.

Even the final destination of the waste is not immune from these pressures.

The Al-Minya landfill, which serves communities in southern parts of the West Bank, represents a critical component of the region's waste management system. Any disruption affecting access, transportation, security, or operations along this chain eventually reaches the streets of Bethlehem and surrounding communities.

The result is a problem that residents experience every day. A container left uncollected. A street corner filled with waste. A smell that lingers in the summer heat. A growing sense that something is no longer working as it should.

When waste accumulates, the consequences extend beyond appearance.

Overflowing garbage attracts stray dogs, insects, rodents, and other disease vectors. It increases environmental risks and can create fire hazards during hot weather. It affects public health, community well-being, and the quality of life in neighborhoods already facing multiple challenges.

This is why waste management should never be viewed as a secondary service. It is not simply about removing garbage from the street. It is about protecting public health. It is about preserving human dignity. It is about maintaining the environmental quality of cities and communities. It is also about protecting the people who perform this difficult work.

One night, at around 2:00 am in the morning, I drove into Bethlehem to take my wife to catch an early bus to Allenby Bridge Boarder with Jordan. While most of the city slept, sanitation workers were already on the streets. Wearing reflective orange uniforms, they swept roads, emptied containers, and loaded waste onto trucks. Few residents would ever see them. By sunrise, most traces of their work would have disappeared.

Their presence reminded me that waste management is not an abstract system. It depends on real people working under difficult conditions, often exposed to hazards that most citizens never think about.

But workers alone cannot solve this crisis, neither can municipalities, nor can citizens. Responsibility is shared.

Citizens must reduce the waste they generate, support cleaner public spaces, and contribute to the sustainability of essential services whenever possible.

Municipalities and service providers need stronger planning, better resource management, and long-term financial stability.

National institutions must support local governments struggling under extraordinary economic and political pressures.

And international partners should recognize that environmental services are not luxuries. They are fundamental to public health, social stability, and human dignity.

There is another reason this issue deserves greater attention. Pollution does not recognize borders. Smoke from burning waste does not stop at a checkpoint. Contaminated water does not respect political divisions. Air pollution travels wherever the wind takes it.

The environment does not understand politics. It understands only what we do—or fail to do—to protect it. That is why environmental protection requires cooperation, shared responsibility, and long-term vision.

Bethlehem does not simply need more garbage trucks or more containers. It needs investment in sustainable solutions. It needs stronger institutions. It needs public awareness. It needs serious efforts to reduce waste generation, expand reuse and recycling, and create economic opportunities through a circular economy approach.

Most importantly, it needs recognition that environmental challenges are not isolated technical problems. They are deeply connected to economic conditions, governance, public services, and the daily lives of ordinary people.

The overflowing containers seen today across Bethlehem are telling a much bigger story. They are telling the story of a city under pressure, a story of institutions struggling to maintain essential services, a story of workers trying to do their jobs under increasingly difficult circumstances, a story of economic hardship, environmental vulnerability, and a community searching for sustainable solutions.

And perhaps they are also reminding us of something simple: Garbage does not appear overnight. Neither do environmental crises. Both are the result of problems left unresolved for too long.

If Bethlehem is to remain the beautiful city that the world knows and cherishes, addressing those problems can no longer wait.

Imagine 2-year-old Malek, growing up in an Arabic-speaking home, entering childcare for the first time. At home, language carries feeling, memory, and family connection. In care, it may be the first time he learns that only one language is recognized and that the other must stay behind. As New York City expands care for 2-year-olds, the public conversation has largely centered on key logistics: seats, speed to implementation, and salaries for home-based providers. Another fundamental question is how this expansion will shape children’s relationships to language, community, and belonging, especially for multilingual families whose experience with formal education is associated with estrangement from their home culture and language.

For decades, growing up with more than one language was wrongly framed as a deficit; it was once described as “semilingualism.” A large body of research has documented the social, communicative, and educational benefits of multilingualism, including stronger connections to family and community, and broader cultural and economic opportunities. The evidence is clear: Multilingualism is an asset, not a liability, supporting not only how children learn, connect, and participate in the world, but also adding to their professional pathways in the future.

Anyone who works in education knows the pattern of language loss that begins when a child enters the school system. Over time, heritage languages begin to fade, a loss that is often normalized as an inevitable part of schooling and assimilation. Research, including our own, shows that heritage language attrition follows a predictable pattern when children enter settings where one language dominates socially and institutionally, causing the dominant language to expand at the expense of the other. This is not only a cultural issue; it is foundationally developmental. Sustained exposure to both languages supports more stable language development, while early shifts away from the heritage language can disrupt that balance.

In one of the most linguistically diverse cities, we continue to reproduce monolingualism despite overwhelming evidence of the benefits of multilingualism. New York City’s 2-K program, with its focus on community- and home-based providers, is significant not only for expanding access, but for reshaping how early education is experienced. These programs, and their providers, who are often members of the same community as the families, offer services that are qualitatively different from formal institutional care, offering environments where language, culture, and relationships are not separated from learning, but are its foundation. They are truly a child’s home away from home.

Taken together, the expansion of 2-K home-based care can reshape how language, culture, and education interconnect as a foundation for learning.

In home-based settings, children are more likely to hear and use multiple languages in meaningful, everyday interactions with caregivers and children across ages. Care is organized around relationships and participation, rather than standardized expectations of academic performance. These are not incidental features. They are developmental conditions that support how language is sustained, how children come to belong, and how communities reproduce themselves across generations.

If supported intentionally with professional development opportunities, mentorship, and resources, these community environments could play a critical role in addressing one of the most persistent and overlooked challenges in US education: the systematic erosion of heritage languages beginning in early childhood. One proven way to enhance language development in home-based settings is strengthening the quality of adult-child interactions. In a randomized controlled trial we conducted in linguistically diverse communities, we found that babies in home-based child care vocalized far more when their providers used a program designed to strengthen relationships than did babies in the control group. We also found that the program led to reductions in background noise (such as television and other electronic sounds).

Together, these transformations in the babies’ language environment point to a simple lesson: When caregivers are intentionally supported in building warmer, more responsive interaction patterns, children’s language environments improve in measurable ways. This matters because early language development lays the groundwork for school and lifelong success. Providers can be supported to embed language-rich emotionally responsive interactions across home and care settings, and to facilitate collaboration between families and early learning environments. This potential will not realize itself; it requires deliberate investment.

In addition, home-based settings may address a critical gap in New York’s Early Intervention (EI) system. EI under federal law, is intended to provide support early in a child’s life, before small differences become larger barriers. Each state defines its own criteria. In New York, children with mild delays in a single developmental area, such as communication, often do not qualify for services. The result is inequity: Families with resources turn to private providers, while others must wait until delays become severe enough to meet eligibility thresholds. What is intended as early intervention becomes, in practice, delayed access.

Language can also be supported through family-centered approaches that sustain bilingual exposure when designed from a strengths-based perspective. In our work with Arab American families in New York, this meant creating community-based spaces where parents strengthened their children’s bilingual language use and their own sense of belonging, along with a renewed commitment to bilingualism, and greater confidence in navigating and engaging with public institutions such as libraries and educational spaces. In clinical treatment settings, birth-to-five therapists strive to provide both treatment and supervision in the home languages; it is simply best practice.

As early care becomes more widely available for younger children, providers in these settings are increasingly positioned to notice differences in children’s development, support social participation, and guide families toward resources. This requires ongoing professional support, not only in developmental frameworks, but in approaches that are culturally grounded, transdisciplinary, inclusive, and evidence-based. This means building an interprofessional, holistic, and community-based system of care that brings speech-language pathologists, early childhood educators, mental health professionals, and other healthcare providers to work alongside home-based caregivers and families collaboratively as partners embedded in the same communities.

Evidence from community-based programs shows that when caregivers are supported in building responsive, relational environments, children’s communication skills increase. They grow not through more instruction, but through more meaningful engagement. The question, then, is not only how many seats we create, but what those seats make possible and whether we are willing and able to build the systems needed to sustain them. Home-based providers are already embedded in the communities they serve, often sharing language, culture, and lived experience with families. With intentional and focused support, they will be uniquely positioned to sustain children’s languages, relationships, and development. Without it, expansion risks reproducing the very inequities it seeks to address.

Taken together, the expansion of 2-K home-based care can reshape how language, culture, and education interconnect as a foundation for learning. This direction challenges approaches that pathologize differences and individualize the effects of poverty. It offers a possibility we can realize in New York, where children thrive without giving up who they are, and systems, not families, are accountable.

For Malek, this means entering childcare without being pulled away from his language, home, and identity. Arabic does not stop at the classroom door; it lives in caregivers’ voices and neighborhood interactions. His mother is not measured against narrow expectations of “engagement,” but recognized as a partner in his learning through everyday interactions grounded in their culture. She is not positioned as lacking. Malek does not have to choose between belonging and opportunity because he grows within both.

You’d never know it by the title “Dancing in the Dark,” but the Washington Spectator’s recent investigation is about the various steps (mostly illegal) Trump is taking, including the use of enforcement tools and violence, to prepare to reverse any overall Democratic victory in the November Congressional races. The authors, Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, believe Trump needs such a coup to save himself from impeachment, congressional investigations and subpoenas seeking more proof of crimes throughout his lawless, corrupt, dictatorial regime.

Currently, Trump’s polls are so low that he is endangering enough Republican seats in the House and Senate to give the feeble, corporate money-indentured Democratic Party a chance to win control of Congress. This is precisely what Trump fears, even though he has control of the Executive Branch and the immunity given him by six Injustices of the Supreme Court. Take note, he knows that impeachment and removal from office in the Senate are final, not reviewable in the federal courts.

In 23 single-spaced pages, Medish and McCleary walk readers through the events, directives, ballot seizures, and draft emergency orders Trump could use to assert federal control over a midterm election and use a domestic paramilitary force of unprecedented size and budget. Trump and his minions have already expanded their dictatorial control of our democratic institutions. (See: The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026.)

To obstruct the vote in key precincts, then fabricate a need for national-security powers to purge and miscount ballots, falsely charge fraud, illegally seize ballots, threaten precinct workers, and claim without evidence foreign interference are preparations for instant escalation.

They then describe the “Devil’s Accordion File” meaning “the elements of a ramified, radical strategy to hold on to power at almost any cost as we approach the test of the 2026 elections…” Although they describe Trump as a brilliant mastermind concentrating extraordinary power in his hands, they remind us that he is also in “full command of his office, directing the Justice Department, the FBI, ICE (the largest new federal police force in American history) the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, the intelligence community and the armed forces. [Under total acolyte Pete Hegseth.] He is using each agency in a coordinated attack on his political adversaries in ways that would have been dismissed as fantasy only a few years ago.”

Trump’s iron grip on institutional controls was further strengthened by the Trump/Musk DOGE criminal enterprise which tore through federal agencies in 2025, closing some, shredding others, grabbing huge troves of personal data on Americans, and destroying the non-partisan civil service that could have used federal laws to resist his coup d’état.

Focusing on swing electoral districts—including those politically redistricted earlier this year—and on the various junctures between now and the final certification process in the House of Representatives on January 3, 2027, the authors write that “the political will, personal motivation, legal architecture and technical infrastructure by now [are] all in place.” They could have added Trump’s unlimited pardon power to facilitate the violence and theft by his criminal operatives.

Trump has also precluded any opposition from corporations and the “contented classes” with tax cuts, non-regulation, subsidies and other inducements from which his family also lavishly benefits. (In 2025 Trump took in $1.1 million an hour when measured over a 40-hour workweek —see my column $1.1 MILLION AN HOUR!!—Trump’s Personal Profit in 2025.)

To obstruct the vote in key precincts, then fabricate a need for national-security powers to purge and miscount ballots, falsely charge fraud, illegally seize ballots, threaten precinct workers, and claim without evidence foreign interference are preparations for instant escalation.

Trump tried a dress rehearsal in his July 16 national televised address, pushing his Save America Act, which is stalled in Congress. The speech “bombed” drawing widespread criticism, ridicule and dismissal even by the mainstream media along with some of his Republican partisans.

Undeterred and personally deeply fearful of losing, Trump plunges ahead. He makes the notion that “it can’t happen here” the Achilles heel of Democratic Party opposition, which had better prepare—and work overtime.

The authors warn: “The full election subversion strategy mixes subtlety and brutality, subterfuge and open tactics. It represents unprecedented intensification and escalation of the attack on our once seemingly settled Constitutional order…”

Led by Stephen Miller, his fascistic White House adviser, Trump and his Injustice Department have already launched attacks on so-called “antifa” advocates labeling them “domestic terrorists.” Trump could falsely use this moniker to include any of his selected political opponents. Remember, in 2025, he called for the execution of six Democratic Members of Congress, including two Senators, for reminding U.S. soldiers that they have under Army law a legal obligation to resist illegal orders from their superiors. Hegseth filed charges against Senator Mark Kelly (Dem. Ariz.), a retired Navy Captain for making such a statement; the case was dismissed in federal court.

Trump has often mentioned using the vaguely worded Insurrection Act, which he claims could enable him to quell unrest, including by using unrest as the pretext for his own false-flag operation. Imagine the chilling effect of Trump arbitrarily and illegally deploying federal soldiers to a city or region.

In their conclusion, “What Is to be Done,” the authors have numerous suggestions for the citizenry and state officials. However, they omit the need to mount an Impeachment drive, which, as it intensifies, can serve as a deterrent to Trump. He knows that his blatant disregard for the Constitution and his mounting impeachable offenses could further provoke the public and Congress to use this final remedy provided by our Founding Fathers—telling Trump: “You’re Fired.” This is Trump’s biggest nightmare. Remember the stubborn Richard Nixon, who after winning 49 of 50 states in 1972, was forced to resign when his Republican base collapsed in Congress before the 1974 elections.

In my podcast interview with Joel McCleary, I suggested that he and his allies (he served in the Carter White House) press some House Democrats to conduct a public “shadow hearing” on Impeaching Trump, an effort that polling shows is already supported by 90% of Democratic voters and two-thirds of Independents. (See our July 22, 2026 Symposium on Impeachment.) He replied: “I think that’s a fantastic idea.” We’ll see if these savvy authors can move from words to action. As a 14th century Chinese philosopher once wrote: “To Know and Not to Do is Not to Know.”

Furthermore, the group Indivisible seems to be planning another mass protest march in the Fall. It should replace its weak, obsolete name of “No Kings” with “Impeach Trump Now.”

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” declared the State Department in a new video tying, somewhat improbably, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to killing people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific 200 years later. Blowing up speedboats supposedly to stop fentanyl smuggling—which notably does not come to the US on speedboats—appears senseless. As a counter-narcotics strategy, it is ineffective, an assessment echoed by the DEA. The performative violence overshadows its role in building a new US policy towards the hemisphere: acts of murder as a tool to create permanent structures of US dominance and extraction.

Laid out in the December 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the “Donroe Doctrine” aims to restore US preeminence in a region where it has been eclipsed by China, convert security claims into exceptional military authority against “narco-terrorists,” institutionalize that authority through permanent commands, “enlist and expand” governments aligned with Washington, and use it to secure strategic and commercial access. The desired end: military cooperation, trade agreements, access to critical minerals and rare earths, likely accompanied by shady personal deals for the Trump family. Democratic backsliding, in a region where democracy is still relatively young, is a necessary condition for its success.

The Donroe Doctrine's architecture is still under construction. Latin American governments can still resist Washington’s pressures, refusing to co-create his transactional order. Greater regional integration would rebalance that bargaining power, helping less powerful countries impose conditions, defend constitutional limits, reject particular operations, and withstand the costs of US pressure. More than 100 legislators, political leaders, and experts from 15 countries are gathering at the Third Pan-American Congress in Montevideo this weekend to strengthen regional collaboration, the basis for an alternate architecture to one premised on US domination.

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Resistance to US coercion, however, also depends on democratic repair within the region. Governments captured by authoritarian leaders cannot provide a durable basis for sovereignty. Corruption erodes state capacity and public trust, making foreign military solutions more appealing. The Trump administration is betting on a hemispheric doctrine that favors authoritarian leaders, eager to share in corruption.

The Donroe Doctrine’s highest profile proof of concept began with airstrikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela, to the killing of fishermen in the Pacific—since revealed to be a covert CIA program—to August’s announcement of a new Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere, establishing a standing headquarters for efforts to turn such extrajudicial killings into joint operations with allied governments. This maps onto the administration's Shield of the Americas, a coalition of right-wing Latin American governments allied with the Trump administration. From the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to the boat strikes murders, all leaned on two forever wars framing and justification that long predated Trump: The War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

The Trump administration is betting on a hemispheric doctrine that favors authoritarian leaders, eager to share in corruption.

Targeting supposed smugglers, many of them probably fishermen, as “narcoterrorists” is a way to move trafficking from the framework of criminal law into the claimed authorities of war. Suspects become targets not of investigation but of immediate execution, secret assessments replacing due process and evidence in courts. The urgency of national security puts executive discretion over judicial authority. The boat strikes publicly declare exceptional authority of the executive. The Pentagon’s and CIA’s programs institutionalize it.

Like the War on Terror, this framing pictures an enemy and creates an industry to manage. It creates quid pro quo partnerships with other governments who leverage military cooperation into access to US foreign assistance, weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover for unsavory ends, whether domestic repression, corruption, or state murder of their own. With public opinion showing falling trust in all institutions but the military, stoking fears of all-powerful narcoterrorists serve mutual interests of reactionaries in Washington, Bogotá, and Tegucigalpa. The main risk is that it creates bureaucratic structures that outlive sitting administrations. With multilateral cooperation and institutions on the decline, this new military-industrial complex makes it nearly irreversible.

It also creates tools for meddling in domestic partisan politics. The success of Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” is predicated on Latin America’s continued turn to the right. Ecuador and Colombia have already agreed to “joint” military strikes on their territory, which are likely to become unilateral US strikes. Trump openly intervened in supporting the election of Nasry Asfura in Honduras, as it is currently doing with Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil. That many of these allies are themselves tied to the drug trade is of little consequence: Colombia’s President de la Espriella made a career as a defense attorney for top narcos, Ecuador’s president Noboa’s family’s fruit business was found to be transporting cocaine, and Honduras’ former president Juan Orlando Hernández won a Trump pardon after his US conviction on drug-trafficking charges.

The project functions more easily where democratic foundations are weak and leaders face fewer constraints from citizens, legislatures, courts, and independent institutions, reflecting Trump’s own effort to weaken checks on executive authority inside the United States. Bukele in El Salvador provides a marquee case for using the specter of crime to consolidate a permanent “state of exception” and authoritarian rule. Such regimes can authorize operations, share intelligence, sign agreements, allocate land, and suppress opposition with less scrutiny.

Democratic scrutiny can expose the climate costs of extraction, contest land allocations and territorial interventions, demand transparency over contracts, and insist that resource wealth benefit the public. Corruption circumvents those checks by connecting external power with local gatekeepers able to transfer public resources and protect the bargain. The lack of transparency surrounding more than $13 billion collected by the United States from Venezuelan oil sales illustrates the scale of the accountability problem.

For the region, the emerging system depends on governments choosing to participate and institutions holding its authority. As progressives in the United States, we must challenge the false counternarcotics claims, unchecked lethal force, and waste of public resources sustaining this project, and hold our government accountable. Regional resistance and democratic repair must proceed together.

Since last fall, I and a group of fellow animal rights activists have been holding protests at the upscale Lincoln Park restaurant Galit, urging it to stop serving foie gras. Each weekend, activists hold signs, chant, shout through a megaphone, write on the sidewalk with chalk, and pressure Galit to remove foie gras from its menu. We are a grassroots group of people from all walks of life who care about animals. Our group is made up of people with diverse occupations and perspectives, but we are united by an opposition to the worst abuses animals face. Now, Galit and one of the top law firms in the country have dragged us into court, calling our protests “harassment.”

Our group chose to protest at Galit—after emailing the restaurant for two months, initially seeking to remove foie gras from its menu through dialogue—because of its progressive values. The restaurant prides itself on paying its workers well, and providing a robust benefits package, including paid time off, substantially subsidized health insurance, and retirement benefits. The restaurant is closed on major holidays, allowing employees to have a holiday as well. It reports inclusive hiring practices and provides harassment and bystander intervention training. Galit’s website notes that its two co-owners have Israeli and Palestinian-Cuban-Spanish backgrounds. Galit is rightly proud of these practices, which are uncommon in service industries. But all too often, such values exclude the most vulnerable of all: animals.

Foie gras is a luxury product made from the fattened liver of ducks and geese, using a process called gavage, in which birds have a pipe forced down their throats in order to force-feed them to the point that their livers become painfully engorged and diseased. It is, frankly, systematic torture. That’s why entire countries, states, and cities have banned it, including nearly all of Europe, the UK, Australia, Israel, Türkiye, India, Argentina, California, New York City and, just last month, Portland, Oregon. Each of these bans is based primarily on the cruelty involved in foie gras production.

In the US, animal rights activists have been protesting this for around 30 years. Over the last few years, these protests have intensified and largely focused on specific restaurants—holding protests just like those I’ve participated in at Galit. Our movement has succeeded in getting 400 restaurants across the world to permanently remove foie gras from their menus. Our protests urge Galit to join the ranks of restaurants that have made this ethical choice, extending the same concern to animals as it has to so many other important values.

Instead, Galit went to court. After attempting to limit our protests by urging police to issue tickets to demonstrators—each of which has been dismissed—Galit and its general manager have filed for anti-stalking orders against me and other protesters.

The restaurant is represented, for free, by the top law firm Jenner & Block. This is rather stunning. Jenner & Block is known for handling major litigation, including arguing several cases before the US Supreme Court. The firm is also notable for the stand it took early in the second Trump administration, refusing to cave to Trump’s demands that it not represent the president’s political foes, while other large law firms folded. Jenner & Block described its position as a principled stance against political interference with a client’s right to vigorous, uncompromising representation. For this, it was targeted by a Trump executive order. The firm vowed to remain “fearless.” But once again, when it comes to animals, principles go out the window. Jenner & Block knows full well that protesting is not harassment or stalking, that it is protected by the First Amendment. Yet the firm has provided its prestige legal services—and attached its name—to an effort to protect a local restaurant from a dozen animal advocates armed with megaphones and chalk.

There is yet another odd twist to this story. While Galit has refused to remove this single product, the result of extreme animal cruelty, from its menu, some have begun accusing us of protesting not to stop it from serving foie gras, but because we are antisemitic. They argue that, because we are protesting against Galit and not other Chicago restaurants that serve foie gras, we are targeting it because one of its owners is Israeli (the critics do not explain how such a motivation makes sense in light of Galit’s own website reporting that the other owner identifies at Palestinian-Cuban-Spanish). But some members of the group protesting against foie gras at Galit, too, are Jewish and Israeli, and Israel itself is among the countries that have banned the production of foie gras.

Accusations of antisemitism are cynical at worst and intentionally ignorant at best. First, it underscores how so many people simply cannot see that animals might be worthy of treatment short of torture. Apparently, it makes more sense that we would target Galit due to antisemitism than that we chose to protest there because we want it to bring its treatment of animals into line with the restaurant’s otherwise admirable values. Antisemitism makes more sense than that a commitment to values like workers’ rights, community, and equality should include a commitment to animal welfare. It is not out of hatred for Galit, but out of respect for its stated values, that we chose to press it to stop serving foie gras.

It also saddens me because I, myself, am halachically Jewish. That is to say, I am Jewish on my mom’s side of my family. In recent years, I have been a regular at a Chabad house. For a while, I was there every shabbos evening. I have spent the last year teaching middle school math at a haredi school in West Ridge, wearing a kippah every day at work.

To be clear, across the country, protests to stop restaurants from selling foie gras have proceeded one restaurant at a time. This is a decision based on strategic value and activist capacity, and it has proven remarkably successful. Were Galit to provide a written commitment to, and stick to, a foie gras free policy, we will move on to another restaurant.

In the meantime, activists will continue to protest Galit. (Unfortunately, for now, I cannot personally participate in these protests because of Galit’s baseless lawsuit against me.) The judge presiding over Galit’s request for a protection order—again, oddly, filed by the top law firm Jenner & Block—threw out the complaint. But Galit has amended its complaint and continues to seek restraints on our protests.

It is worth wondering why one of the nation’s top law firms is representing a local restaurant, pro bono, in an effort to restrain the protests of a dozen animal rights activists. We may also wonder why Galit is so committed to serving a product that multiple entire countries have deemed too cruel to allow its production. All of this, rather than simply adopting a foie gras free policy.

I do believe there will come a time when Galit sees foie gras for what it is, and agrees to a foie gras-free policy. Force feeding is not kindness. It’s not food, it’s violence.

Mothers are seemingly given endless choices: to work or be a stay-at-home mom. Sleep train or not, breastfeed or bottle-feed. The list is endless.

But true choice only exists when the options are genuinely possible. For millions of mothers around the world, they aren't.

Reshma Saujani’s recent documentary, No Country for Mothers, has reignited a conversation about what it means to be a mother in a society that was never designed to support it. As clear evidence of this, more than 400,000 mothers of young children have left the US workforce, the steepest decline in 40 years. While Saujani’s documentary focuses on the United States, the friction it exposes is global.

There is a design flaw at the heart of modern motherhood:

Rather than judging mothers for these choices, we need to create a society that better supports them.

Our economies rely on the assumption of an uninterrupted worker, and our families rely on the expectation of an endlessly available mother.

We have witnessed this firsthand, as the founders of Kidogo Childcare Centres and Maziwa Breastfeeding, working alongside low-income mothers in Kenya, and as women who have confronted these tough choices ourselves.

Many of the mothers we work with either work informally, receiving sporadic daily income, or are living from paycheck to paycheck. For them, returning to work is not about ambition or professional identity. It is the only way they can feed their families. A few weeks without income can push a family onto the street.

However, if a mother is compelled to return to work, how is her child adequately cared for and fed?

Globally, the World Bank estimates 350 million children below primary school age need childcare but do not have access to it. Similarly, optimal breastfeeding could prevent more than 820,000 child deaths every single year and countless cases of serious illnesses, but working mothers are not supported to maintain breastfeeding.

Unfortunately, in the contexts we work in, maternity leave, safe and affordable childcare, lactation rooms, and breastfeeding breaks are nonexistent. Yet, when a child is left in unsuitable care or weaned off of breastmilk prematurely, we shift the blame to the mother—rather than the system that has failed her.

Society cannot expect mothers to work and then treat childcare and breastfeeding as a private burden for each woman to solve alone.

As female entrepreneurs, we face these impossible choices personally as well: Sabrina, feeling like she has missed out on early childhood development milestones for her own daughter, ironically while building the largest childcare network in Kenya; and Sahar, freezing her eggs to delay motherhood, while launching Kenya’s first wearable breast pump to allow mothers to balance working and breastfeeding.

Time and time again, we see these trade-offs play out: If a mother is working, she needs to find safe and adequate care. If she stays home, she must absorb the income loss. If she breastfeeds, she must do so without support, time, space, or privacy. If she cannot breastfeed, she is made to feel like she has failed.

When all these expectations collide, we call it choice. But for many mothers, it is not a choice at all. It is a system asking them to do the impossible.

Rather than confronting this friction directly, we often turn mothers against one another. The "trad wife" and the "girl boss" are presented as opposing ideals. Breastfeeding and formula feeding become moral tribes. Stay-at-home mothers and working mothers are asked to defend their choices as if one woman’s path invalidates another’s.

This reduces structural failures into identity camps. These divisions are not accidental. They distract us from the systems that create these impossible choices in the first place.

The choices are not being made from a place of agency—nor are they taken lightly. There is an immense amount of motherhood guilt with every decision. Rather than judging mothers for these choices, we need to create a society that better supports them.

To be sure, progress has been made to better support motherhood in some countries. For example, Sweden offers 480 days of parental leave with 80% of pay. However, across the globe, women's participation in the workforce is rising faster than the policies needed to support working mothers.

No Country for Mothers has clearly highlighted how mothers have been “failed by economic policies, workplace structures, political agendas, and cultural narratives that were never designed to support caregiving or family life.”

The impossible choices mothers face are the symptom, not the cause. Rather than expecting mothers to solve structural failures through individual sacrifice, we need our systems to adapt to motherhood.

I have never been a deficit hawk, and I’m not about to change my religious affiliation now. But whatever we think of debt and deficits, there is one point that should be very clear: it has been run up almost entirely due to Republican tax cuts and their inept management of the economy.

Every Democratic president of the last half century has left with a deficit that was lower, measured as a share of GDP, than the one they came in with, except Obama, who left it unchanged. By contrast, every Republican president has left with a considerably higher deficit than what they inherited.

Starting with Carter, the deficit for fiscal year 1976 was 4.1% of GDP. When he left office in 1980, it was down to 2.5% of GDP, despite a recession that year. That was the starting point for Reagan. (These figures refer to fiscal years, which end on October 1 of the year.) Reagan’s tax cuts, along with a big military buildup, were most of the story of higher deficits. When his successor, George H.W. Bush, left the White House in 1992, the deficit was 4.5% of GDP.

For better or worse, Clinton took deficit reduction seriously. He was helped by an explosion of tax revenue associated with the tech bubble, but he both made budget cuts and increased taxes. When he left office in 2000, the government was running a surplus equal to 2.3% of GDP.

George W. Bush quickly reversed the picture. A big part of the story was the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001-2002, which both led to a recession and a plunge in tax revenue from capital gains. He also had big tax cuts and a military buildup associated with his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. When Bush left office after 2008, he handed Obama a deficit equal to 3.1% of GDP, as well as a financial crisis and severe recession, resulting from the collapse of the housing bubble.

The deficit initially exploded in 2009 under Obama, as the country faced the worst recession since the Great Depression. As the economy gradually recovered, the deficit came down, falling back to 3.1% of GDP in 2016, just as Obama was leaving the White House.

Trump’s tax cuts caused the deficit to rise again. It hit 4.6% in 2019, but it really took off the following year, as a result of the pandemic. It reached 14.7% of GDP in 2020, the largest since World War II. The recovery and some modest increases in tax collections brought the deficit down to 6.3% of GDP in 2024.

Taking the cumulative changes from Democratic and Republican presidents, Democratic presidents have reduced deficits by 16.7 percentage points of GDP during their terms in office, while Republican presidents have raised them by 18.9 percentage points. Somehow, many people talk about Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility.

As I said earlier, I am not hugely troubled by the debt. It would be better to be paying less money in interest, but 3.0% of GDP going to interest is not a disaster. The more important issue is to have a healthy economy with solid growth.

Here is where the big failure is. Trump’s war is leading to shortages, most importantly of oil, but also fertilizer and other products. His tariffs have led to higher prices for a wide range of products, as has his mass deportations. Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s open corruption and self-dealing undermine confidence in the U.S. financial markets and business system more generally.

In the past, investors could view the United States markets as relatively clean and stable. Unlike in some other countries, getting your investment back didn’t depend on staying in the good graces of the political leadership. Under Trump, this is no longer true. He has openly threatened companies and their management for saying and doing things he does not like. That is not a good recipe for a stable economy with solid growth.

If there is a run on the dollar, and interest rates soar higher, it is far more likely to be the result of Trump’s corruption and incompetence than the high debt. This is what people should be losing sleep over, not the debt crossing the $40 trillion mark.

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.

So it’s time for all of us to raise some hell, letting our friends and neighbors know what’s happening, and demand that our elected officials act now to protect our elections. The number for Congress is 202-224-3121 and don’t forget to check your voter registration at vote.org, particularly if you live in a Red state.

We just have a few weeks to go before early voting starts and we have a hell of a lot of work to do to get out the vote and keep it honest.

If you want to understand how the Supreme Court became the sinkhole of ideological extremism and corruption it is today under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, you have to go back to the beginning and examine the institution’s own origin story. A good place to start is with the debates on ratification of the Constitution that played out in 1787 and 1788 in what are now known as the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, in which the pros and cons of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a new national charter were laid out in passionate detail.

Totaling 85 essays, Alexander Hamilton was the author of 51 of the Federalist Papers; John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia penned the remainder. Of the three, Hamilton was the staunchest advocate for creating an independent federal judiciary fortified with the power of “judicial review” that would enable judges to declare acts of Congress and the executive unconstitutional.

Writing under the pseudonym “Publius,” Hamilton outlined the principles of judicial review in Federalist No. 78, explaining:

The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body.

Hamilton was aware of the potential for overreach, but he believed the federal judiciary would prove “the least dangerous” of the Constitution’s three branches of government. Unlike Congress and the president, he reasoned, the courts would have “no influence over either the sword or purse,” but would possess “only judgment,” rendering them repositories of detached wisdom and impartiality. To put it plainly, his argument was that we could trust the judges.

Hamilton got a lot right about the need for judicial independence, but the faith he placed in the president and the Senate to select and confirm only well-qualified judges was egregiously wrong.

This was a novel and highly controversial idea at the time and remains a subject of contention nearly 240 years later.

Among the earliest dissenters was New York state Judge Robert Yates, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Yates feared that the power of judicial review would result in judicial supremacy, and historians consider him the probable author of several anti-federalist tracts published under the pen name of “Brutus.”

In Anti-Federalist essay No. 14, Brutus rebuked Hamilton, writing that under the new Constitution, the Supreme Court “would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control.” In No. 15, Brutus added in words that echo eerily to the present that the Supreme Court

[will] have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. … Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Hamilton’s position triumphed, and a Supreme Court equipped with judicial review became official doctrine with the landmark 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison. But the triumph came with a price. Although it is difficult to imagine an independent court system that lacked authority to invalidate legislative and executive acts, judicial review has proven to be a two-edged sword. It has been wielded at times to advance democratic ideals (Brown v. Board of Education) but at others to thwart, damage and reverse those ideals (Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the cases invalidating key legislative pieces of the early New Deal).

We are in one of the dark periods now. With Roberts at the helm, the Supreme Court has used the power of judicial review to tack hard to the right on a number of fronts: reinterpreting the Second Amendment to include an individual right to bear arms, undermining the legal foundations of union organizing, removing political gerrymandering from the jurisdiction of federal courts, opening election campaigns to unlimited spending by corporations and wealthy individual donors, overturning the right to abortion, endowing the president with immunity for official acts and neutering the Voting Rights Act.

Hamilton got a lot right about the need for judicial independence, but the faith he placed in the president and the Senate to select and confirm only well-qualified judges was egregiously wrong. While he lived long enough to see Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase impeached by the House of Representatives in 1804 (he died in a duel with Aaron Burr before Chase’s acquittal in the upper chamber), he scarcely could have imagined a court completely dominated by a chief justice who has falsely portrayed himself as an institutionalist committed to calling “balls and strikes,” and a supporting cast of grifters, ideologues and political hacks. He also likely would have been surprised to see how Roberts and his confederates have fulfilled Brutus’ fears by elevating themselves to the status of unaccountable and inscrutable Delphian oracles, who deign to tell the rest of us that they alone get to determine what the Constitution means.

The Roberts court’s rollback of constitutional rights is deeply unpopular, as reflected in recent polling showing that the court faces a legitimacy crisis of its own making. The rollback has sparked renewed calls for structural reforms, ranging from the imposition of term limits to restrictions on the court’s appellate jurisdiction and an expansion of the bench to as many as 13 members. Accomplishing any of these, however, will require Democrats to do three things: stiffen their spines, take back both houses of Congress and win the presidency. Even then, reforms will be difficult to achieve and slow to implement.

In the meantime, we need a theory of constitutional interpretation and reform to rival and ultimately displace the “originalism” that Roberts and his forerunners have deployed to engineer the right’s takeover of the Supreme Court. Fortunately, one such alternative, known as “popular constitutionalism,” already exists and is gaining traction.

As set forth by the legal scholar Larry Kramer in his 2004 book, “The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review,” popular constitutionalism is the idea that “the people” — not as an abstract concept but as actual engaged citizens — are the ultimate source of constitutional meaning rather than the nine unelected black-robed members of the Supreme Court. We may be legally bound by the court’s rulings, but we have the right to criticize them, promote alternative interpretations and take peaceful action to overturn wrongly decided cases through voting, demonstrations, litigation, legislation, impeachment, amendments to the Constitution and a myriad of other means.

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote in June:

Constitutional meaning deals with the shape and structure of our political community. And as much as courts help build our collective constitutional understanding, the question of meaning is as much the purview of the public as it is the job of a jurist. … It is only in the last half-century, in fact, that we have fully conflated legal decision-making with the production of constitutional meaning. The result … is a strong form of judicial supremacy, where the meaning of the Constitution and therefore the structure of our political community are fixed in place by the decisions of a small, cloistered and often self-interested tribunal.

Even Hamilton, the principal proponent of judicial review, conceded in Federalist 78 that his vision for the courts “did not by any means suppose a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both. …”

There are a number of examples from the past that illustrate popular constitutionalism in action — the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1950s and ’60s, and more recently, the recognition of same-sex marriage, to cite just a few.

This summer, the legal commentators at Slate launched a series of articles and podcasts called By the People to renew this tradition. The series unpacks the history of popular constitutionalism and provides a guide to citizen involvement. After a brief hiatus, the series will resume in the fall, just as the Supreme Court convenes for another harrowing term.

It will take a long time to produce meaningful change, but as we move forward, we should remember that it took the radical right decades of organizing by groups like the Federalist Society and the promotion of originalism to highjack the Supreme Court. With that history in mind, we need to prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. More than anything else, we must be prepared to win.

I’ve lived in Northern Virginia my whole life, but no one told us we would soon be living alongside one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world.

No one asked our community whether we wanted them. No one explained what they would mean for our neighborhoods, our landscape, or our monthly bills. Then, almost overnight, they were everywhere. Massive industrial buildings rose where open space once stood. The constant hum became part of daily life. And one month, our electricity bill didn't gradually creep upward, it nearly doubled.

We were told these projects would bring jobs, innovation, and economic growth. What we weren't told was what residents would be expected to give up in return.

Now, as I watch Maryland debate whether to accelerate data center development, I can't help but feel like I've seen this story before.

As someone living with the consequences of Virginia's choices, my advice is simple: Don't wait until the bills arrive, the forests are gone, and the data centers are already built to ask whether they were worth it.

For years, Virginia has been held up as the nation's data center success story. But if Maryland leaders only see Virginia's balance sheet, they're missing the growing backlash from the people who live here.

I have watched forests disappear, industrial buildings replace open land, electricity demand surge, and communities be transformed by sprawling server farms. Everyone I know is asking whether the promised economic benefits outweigh the environmental and financial costs.

Maryland has a choice. You can rush to replicate Virginia's model, or you can learn from our mistakes before it's too late.

The conversation surrounding data centers has largely centered on artificial intelligence and economic development. But too often, what gets left out are the communities expected to absorb the costs.

Supporters frequently describe data centers as major job creators, but the reality is more complicated. Construction creates temporary employment, yet once operational, many hyperscale facilities require relatively few permanent workers. Communities are often asked to trade farmland, forests, neighborhoods, and increased pressure on utilities for projects that may never deliver the long-term economic engine they were promised.

That trade-off deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

The race to build data centers is being driven largely by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Every major technology company wants more computing power, faster infrastructure, and greater capacity. But history teaches us that economic booms rarely continue unchecked. America has seen speculative waves in office construction, shopping malls, and commercial real estate that far exceeded demand before markets eventually corrected.

No one can say with certainty whether today's data center boom will follow the same path. But uncertainty itself is reason for caution, not acceleration.

Maryland should pause before repeating Virginia's mistakes. A statewide moratorium would give policymakers time to complete a comprehensive assessment of the environmental, economic, and energy impacts of these facilities; strengthen safeguards for communities; ensure developers bear the costs of new infrastructure; and give the public a meaningful voice in decisions that will shape their neighborhoods for generations.

Virginia spent years asking how quickly it could build data centers.

Maryland has an opportunity to ask a better question: How do we embrace innovation without sacrificing the affordability, environment, and quality of life that make our communities worth living in?

As someone living with the consequences of Virginia's choices, my advice is simple: Don't wait until the bills arrive, the forests are gone, and the data centers are already built to ask whether they were worth it.

By then, the answer may come too late.

As he was leaving office in 2017, President Barack Obama urged Americans concerned about where their country was headed to act. “If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing,” he said (Time, 1/11/17). “If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clip board, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.”

Ten months earlier, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had made a similar comment (The Hill, 3/1/16). At a campaign stop in Minnesota, a young woman pressed Clinton about her past remarks on “superpredators.” After a brief exchange, Clinton said, “You know what, dear? You have a different opinion… Why don’t you go run for something?”

A decade later, it’s clear that a new generation of leaders has taken that advice. But instead of being praised for contributing to civic life by participating in democracy, they and the organizations that support them have been pilloried as threats to both the Democratic Party and democracy itself.

DSA as ‘Parasite’

The Atlantic, which published a 2024 essay (5/17/24) asserting, in the context of Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally,” ran an article (7/21/26) on the Democratic Socialists of America headlined “The DSA Is a Parasite.” (I belong to the organization’s New York City chapter.) Writer James Kirchick averred that “ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the [Democratic] party.” He suggested that the organization’s rise was enabled by a

yearslong effort by socialists and progressive activists to steer one of America’s two major political parties toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism.

Kirchick’s disdain for those who join standard efforts to influence political parties is anti-democratic, ahistorical, and willfully obtuse. He also conflates and misrepresents the goals of progressive and socialist activists. “Hostility to capitalism” is accurate enough if one is describing socialists—not necessarily progressives—but “identity politics” and “isolationism” are not.

DSA opposes military bases and economic warfare, but it explicitly champions immigration and international law, and working toward “a world without war or poverty”—that’s not “isolationism.” The group also calls for “a world where no one suffers for their race, gender, or religion”—an enormously popular view that Kirchick dismisses, insultingly and inaccurately, as “identity politics.”

Kirchick and his ilk, of course, wouldn’t be able to caricature socialists’ views so easily if they were held to basic editorial standards, and if socialist perspectives weren’t almost entirely excluded from corporate media.

Hijacked by a ‘Radical Fringe’

A recent spate of articles have, like Kirchick’s, sought to repackage normal political practices as novel, violent, or disease-like threats unrelated to the will of voters. An Axios column (7/28/26) by the site’s co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen began: “Republicans didn’t decide to become President Trump’s party. They surrendered to him, one stage at a time, over a decade, in plain sight.” It then posed the (paraphrased) question: Will the Democratic Party similarly surrender to the creeping threat of socialism?

While acknowledging that socialism is popular with the Democratic base, the Axios story portrays it as a disease whose “transmission is slower” than Trumpism. It’s not clear why Axios treats socialism as a pathology; in what way is it harmful to, or impairing the normal functioning of, America or American democracy?

The Hill (7/24/26) also noted “fears” that “the [Democratic] party is being taken over” by democratic socialists.

The Wall Street Journal warned darkly that

DSA’s advances are stirring consternation—and sometimes panic—among mainstream Democrats dreading their own Tea Party moment, in which a radical fringe hijacks the party and taints their brand just as they are trying to appeal to swing voters to win control of Congress.

Odd if true, given that recent socialist wins have coincided with an uptick in favorable views of the Democratic Party, which suggests that DSA’s success may in fact be burnishing the party’s brand.

DSA’s leaders, the Journal continued, “scarcely hide their disdain for a Democratic Party they view less as a partner than a hostile takeover target.” It’s true that DSA does not view most senior Democratic Party leaders as its partners; the organization is succeeding by appealing directly to the party’s supporters. (In the words of DSA member and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “What’s a party if not its voters?”) If those who regularly vote or are inclined to vote in Democratic Party primaries ultimately succeed in changing the party’s platform to better represent their views, that’s not a hostile takeover—that’s democracy.

The “takeover” language is telling: The corporate press sees any assertion of agency on the part of everyday people as a threat to establishment interests. The Free Press (7/21/26) sounded the alarm in an article headlined “What the Movement Taking Over the Democratic Party Wants.” And Fox News (7/27/26) went further with a story headlined “[US Rep. Steve] Scalise Warns ‘Bolshevik Revolution’ Taking Over Dem Party After Socialist Primary Wins.”

DSA does, like the Bolsheviks of more than a century ago, defend people’s rights to peace, land (housing, in a contemporary US context), and bread. But unlike the Bolsheviks, the organization is not armed or violent, and is committed to democratic change (hence the name).

‘Getting Away With’—What?

Seeking to change a political organization by appealing to its supporters and competing in its primaries is what politicians of all stripes do; it is how democracy works. Yet The New York Times(6/20/26) has characterized quotidian political participation as “an uprising from the left,” which poses a larger “threat”—it’s not clear to whom, other than House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who may eventually be primaried from the left. To the Times, DSA is not competing in congressional primaries but “targeting high-profile House races.”

And though the Times (8/10/26) acknowledges that “democratic socialists and their allies have scored a series of victories over traditional Democrats with superior messaging and organizing tactics,” it also reports that these tactics have “terrified” the party establishment, causing them to “burn through gobs of cash,” and leaving them to wonder: “How do progressives keep getting away with this?” Most see winning a primary election thanks to better messaging and organizing as entirely above board; the Times tells readers it’s a scary heist.

Martial analogies are common in political writing, but the corporate press covers intra-Democratic Party tensions as if progressives and democratic socialists were the only combatants. As a recent AP article (7/27/26) noted:

Establishment Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison, have forcefully pushed back against DSA candidates who run in the party’s primaries while criticizing the way the party is going.

But if you’re seeking to change a party’s direction, forming organizations to influence it, running in its primaries, and organizing caucuses within it are the most obvious and common ways of doing so. Centrist Democrats—including Bill Clinton, who went on to win two of his party’s presidential primaries—did this when they founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 and the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989. Clinton and his allies were fighting in what some at the time called a “battle for the party’s soul” (Time, 7/10/95)—a struggle that continues to this day.

Working together to alter the priorities and structure of theoretically representative institutions like Congress and the Democratic Party is a necessary and crucial form of democratic participation. It is precisely what leaders like Obama and the Clintons have repeatedly enjoined Americans to do. And when done by individuals and organizations that are honest and forthright about their intentions—e.g., those with clear public platforms—there is nothing sneaky, underhanded. or sinister about it.

Research assistance: Emily Marie Spencer.

With the second term of the current United Nations Secretary-General, Antònio Guterres, expiring on December 31, 2026, the organization is in the process of selecting its 10th secretary-general. The UN’s first-ever Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, famously described it as “the most impossible job in the world.” That was at a time when there were 60 UN member states and the world’s population was 2.6 billion; now there are 193 members and the world’s population is 8.3 billion. It is also, arguably, the most important job in the world.

As the current President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock (1 of only 5 women ever elected to this post in 81 years; the other 76 were men), explains, “Our choice will send a powerful message about who we are, and whether we truly serve all 8 billion people of the world in all their diversity.”

The overall selection process is prescribed by Article 97 of the UN Charter: “The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” But the charter offers little other guidance, so various informal procedures and practices have evolved over time. One is the rule of regional rotation, with it currently being Latin America and the Caribbean’s “turn,” although candidates from other regions can also be nominated, as they have been in this round. Seven candidates have been nominated to date—five from Latin America and the Caribbean (four women and one man) and two from Africa (both men). Although women have only been nominated as candidates since 1991, no woman has ever been appointed, in spite of campaigns to see a woman selected in 2006 and 2016.

It is generally accepted that candidates should come from small or mid-sized countries but not from the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council. To be considered, a candidate must be nominated by one or more of the 193 member states, although the nomination does not have to come from the country of a candidate’s nationality.

This momentous decision will most likely occur in early October. How the process is carried out and how its outcome is perceived will have significant implications for the restoration of confidence in the UN’s ability to fulfill its mandate in an increasingly turbulent world.

For many years, the selection process was not transparent, but that has recently improved. The current round of nominations was initiated on November 25, 2025 by a joint letter from the presidents of the General Assembly and the Security Council addressed to all member states, inviting nominations and explicitly encouraging countries “to strongly consider nominating women as candidates.” The letter requested that nominations be accompanied by a nomination letter, a vision statement, a curriculum vitae, and a statement of campaign financing disclosures. As nominations were received, the two presidents jointly informed all member states and the information was posted on a UN website.

In response to General Assembly resolution 79/327 of 5 September 2025 on the revitalization of the work of the General Assembly, the president organized interactive webcast dialogues with all candidates (each lasting three hours), where candidates responded to questions posed by representatives of member states and civil society. As anyone who has ever interviewed applicants for a job knows (and as I learned from watching the webcasts), this is a useful means for identifying the best candidates.

In addition, on July 23, a UN Town Hall was organized in the General Assembly Hall by the president of the GA and broadcast live on Bloomberg, with two Bloomberg moderators presiding. All six candidates at the time (a seventh was subsequently nominated) appeared together on the stage and answered questions from the moderators, as well as the audience, who were again representatives of member states and civil society. The Security Council also organized confidential closed-door sessions with each of the candidates.

Subsequently, on July 30, the Security Council held its first confidential “straw poll,” an iterative process repeated over a number of weeks to decide which candidate has the most support. In each, the 15 members of the council, i.e., the P5—the US, Russia, China, France and the UK and its 10 elected members (E10) who serve two-year terms (currently, Bahrain, Colombia, Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia) indicate which candidates they are willing to support by voting “encourage” (in favor), “discourage” (against), or “no opinion” (abstain).

During the first rounds, the ballots are all identical. However, after a few rounds (the number is not specified), the council introduces color-coded ballots: “red” for the P5 and “white” for the E10. From that point onward, votes carry different political weights, since a “discourage” vote from a P5 member is equivalent to a veto. At least nine “encourage” votes with no “discourage” votes from the P5 are required for a candidate to be selected. Candidates with a poor showing may withdraw from the process, although there are no rules requiring this. Votes are intended to be confidential, but results usually leak. The leaked results of the July 30 straw poll are shown here.

Once a determination has been made, the Security Council holds a formal vote on the outcome. The council then makes a formal recommendation to the GA, which can be accepted by acclimation or by a formal vote of the 193 member states. In theory, the GA can send the council’s recommendation back for reconsideration, although this has never happened.

In 2026, there are four impressive women candidates. Readers are encouraged to examine their curricula vitae, vision statements and to view at least a portion of the webcasts. Given that the appointment of a woman in this post is long overdue, there is reason to be hopeful that this will be the outcome.

But for this to happen, it will require that none of the P5 veto her candidature. As noted by a report of Women in International Security, “All things considered, the chances of women in the running will depend heavily on the veto power of the United States or Russia who could block their appointment.” The UK, France, and China have all indicated that they are positive about the appointment of a woman, but Russia has shown resistance to framing UN leadership selection around gender, and the US, under the Trump administration, has been averse to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

In a report which discusses the possibility of a “discourage” vote from the P5, Rebeca Grynspan is generally “viewed as the candidate with the lowest ideological controversy,” and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett “carries the lowest visible P5 friction,” although as Guyana’s permanent representative on the Security Council, she abstained on a 2024 US-sponsored Gaza ceasefire resolution which might annoy the US. Maria Fernanda Espinosa’s prior support for Julian Assange when she was Ecuador’s UN representative and then foreign minister could “unsettle the UK which spent years pursuing his extradition.” Finally, it is suggested that China could “pose a challenge for Michelle Bachelet” since, at the end of her tenure as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she authorized publication of a UN report (despite China lobbying against it) stating that abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities constitute crimes against humanity.

Although the P5 have veto power, the E10 also have power since, if seven members agree on a single candidate and refuse to change their vote, the P5 would not be able to advance a candidate, even if they all agreed—because nine votes are required. With seven E10 members voting “discourage” on a P5 candidate, there would be only eight voting “encourage” and the vote would be blocked. This has even been called the “sixth veto power.”

While support from the E10 is necessary, it is not enough. A single “discourage” vote from the P5 would end a candidate’s prospects, however, early momentum within the E10 would make it harder for a P5 member to block a candidate with sufficient E10 support without paying a reputational price.

Of course, as a Stimson report comments: “A female Secretary-General will not solve every institutional or geopolitical challenge, but electing a strong woman signals that the UN could lead by example… A female SG would reflect half the world’s population, introduce fresh perspectives into global problem-solving, and navigate institutional hurdles with skill, authority, and resilience. After 80 years, the question is no longer whether the world is ready for a woman Secretary-General, it is whether the UN is.”

This momentous decision will most likely occur in early October. How the process is carried out and how its outcome is perceived will have significant implications for the restoration of confidence in the UN’s ability to fulfill its mandate in an increasingly turbulent world. Let us fervently hope that the Security Council will make a wise decision.

The U.S. national debt has officially surpassed $40 trillion, months earlier than forecasters had expected — because of billions of dollars in lost revenue from Trump’s invalidated tariffs, Trump’s tax cuts (mostly to big corporations and the very wealthy), and the soaring costs of Trump’s war.

Trump’s hair-brained treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, says there’s nothing to worry about because the fiscal trajectory will stabilize. Investors obviously don’t believe him because they’re demanding much higher compensation for buying and holding American bonds. The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries hit its highest level in nearly two decades this week, reflecting those growing concerns.

Should you worry? Well, it’s not as if we’re heading into a depression. Passing the $40 trillion threshold doesn’t suddenly cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar.

The problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget — and your tax dollar — is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. Annual net interest payments on the federal debt have surpassed $1 trillion, making servicing the debt one of the largest of all federal budget expenditures.

That’s money we don’t spend on schools, healthcare, roads and bridges, and social safety nets. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend annually on Medicare.

So, who exactly receives these interest payments? This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you not know. (And don’t expect Trump suck-up Bessent* to tell you, because he’s too busy denying that economic inequality is worsening.)

Foreign governments and foreign investors hold only about 30 percent of our debt. The rest — roughly 70 percent — is held domestically. That is, we pay the interest to ourselves.

And who, exactly, is the “ourselves” who receive these interest payments? The Federal Reserve holds part of this debt, state and local governments hold part.

But the biggest chunk — nearly half — is held by mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and banks.

And who owns them? Americans who invest in these funds — and who thereby, directly or indirectly, hold Treasury bills.

And who, exactly are these Americans — the Americans who are directly or indirectly collecting a large amount of the interest we’re paying on the national debt?

People at the top.

The richest 1 percent of U.S. households hold about 35.6 percent of all financial assets — shares of stock, corporate bonds, and Treasury bills — so it’s safe to assume they hold at least a third of all Treasury bills.

Here’s where things get really interesting.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far higher than it is today.

In the 1950s, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid a marginal tax rate of 91 percent. (Tax deductions and tax credits lowered this top effective marginal rate somewhat.)

Today, the tax rate on wealthy Americans is far lower. The richest 400 Americans pay an average effective total tax rate of about 24 percent — including federal, state, local, and corporate taxes. Jeff Bezos — America’s second or third richest person — paid no federal income taxes in 2018. Trump paid no federal taxes for years before he became president.

So now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans.

As I said, interest payments on the national debt this year have surpassed $1 trillion, and a big chunk of that is going to wealthy Americans.

Keep following the money.

One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts — starting with the George W. Bush administration in 2001 and extending through Trump’s 2018 and 2024 tax cuts — have reduced government revenues by $10.6 trillion.

Most of the benefits from those tax cuts are also going to the wealthy.

Since 2000, 65 percent of the benefits from tax cuts have gone to the richest fifth of Americans — 22 percent to the top 1 percent.

So, you see what’s happened?

Decades ago, the wealthiest Americans financed the government by paying higher taxes. Now, the government pays wealthy Americans interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on wealthy Americans.

Which means a growing portion of your taxes and mine is now paying wealthy Americans interest on those loans instead of paying for government services everyone needs.

So, from now on, whenever you hear someone fret about how huge, horrible, and out-of-control the national debt is, explain to them that it’s largely because of tax cuts to the wealthy — who are also the major recipients of interest on that debt.

America’s wealthy have never been wealthier. Scott Bessent* may deny we’re in a K-shaped economy, but he’s dead wrong. If the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes, we wouldn’t have such a huge federal debt. And we wouldn’t be paying them so much interest on that debt.

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008 and must be a smart fellow. He wrote on Substack August 11, “The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized, and there’s nothing radical about wanting to end insurance company parasitism.”

Krugman explained that taxpayers currently pay two-thirds of US healthcare costs. It’s not just the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, the Indian Health Service, the VA, and the Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, but also employers deduct their contribution for their employees’ private insurance as a tax-deductible expense, while the employees owe no income tax on the value of employers’ contribution. Maybe that’s a bit wonky, but the point is simple - when we give tax breaks that subsidize heath insurance for employees, then the rest of us taxpayers have to make up the difference.

US taxpayers shelling out 2/3 of the cost of our healthcare system is more per capita than taxpayers in any other nation. Krugman says, “Much of U.S. healthcare is already ‘socialist’. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market.”

Krugman goes on, “How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates—it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income—could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom.”

Krugman continues: “The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare.”

Krugman’s conclusion on August 11: “So let’s be clear: Abdul El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time.”

Then, on August 14 he published another piece: “The Case for a Medicare Buy-In Option, Mandates vs options: The good, the bad, and the feasible.”

Just three days later and he is back-peddling like crazy. Suddenly, Medicare for All is not politically feasible: “There’s a strong case for a soft transition in which people can choose to be covered by Medicare via a Public Option… Why won’t making the legitimate case that Medicare for All is the best system be enough to win the political argument? The pervasive corruption of our political environment by corporate and right-leaning money is part of the answer. Health insurers may be parasites, but parasites make campaign contributions.”

From there, Krugman is in full retreat. He admits “No major government program is as popular as Medicare, which has an 82 percent favorable rating.” He continues by noting that “Americans have strongly negative views, verging on hatred, about the insurance industry.” Despite that, Krugman now wants a Public Option, or Medicare Buy-In as it is also called, which he claims would be less of a political lift. He describes, “A healthcare system in which many Americans under 65 buy into Medicare would not immediately deliver all the advantages of full Medicare for All. Some people and employers, despite the disadvantages, might retain private insurance… It would lack the clarity of a system in which every citizen knows that they are entitled to care. But it would be far better than what we currently have. Moreover, a system in which private health insurance is a rump industry, covering a dwindling fraction of the population, would be a better starting point for a full transition to universal coverage… There’s no obvious reason a public option would be any harder to implement than payments to the Medicare Advantage plans offered by private insurers.”

Medicare Advantage is a model for the Medicare Buy In? Remember in Krugman’s August 11 Substack he noted that "an independent advisory commission estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion.”

Medicare Advantage is the poster child for how privatized Medicare is corrupted by private for-profit insurance companies. I’m worried about Krugman’s memory.

Does Krugman remember 2009? We have been down this Public Option/Medicare Buy-In road before.

Does anyone remember the Blue Dog Caucus?

When the Affordable Care Act was being formulated in the summer of 2009, Democrats had a 257 to 178 majority in the House of Representatives, but there was a block of moderate Dems known as the Blue Dogs, and Baron Hill, Indiana’s 9th district Congressman, had a leadership role in the group. It included a number of skeptics about the ACA whose votes were going to be needed. I persuaded Baron to have me make a presentation, along with binders to distribute with the facts, figures and citations about the advantages of a Medicare for All system, even though few if any of them were singe payer supporters.

The meeting on June 18th in the Longworth Office Building was well attended, and with my wife Karen Green Stone, we had 20 minutes to make our pitch. They were engaged, had good questions, and let the time run over until they all had to leave to cast a vote. The idea was to present the “ideal system” and then work out the best achievable compromise.

As the ACA took shape in the House, the Public Option was under attack as soon as it was proposed. The entrenched healthcare industry deployed thousands of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to frame the Public Option as a costly “government takeover” and funded studies predicting severe disruptions to insurance markets. They partnered with conservative groups to run intense national advertising campaigns targeting vulnerable lawmakers. The Public Option was amended and weakened repeatedly until the version that passed out of the House was almost unrecognizable.

Then the Senate put it out of its misery. Democratic US Senators like Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh of Indiana insisted that any Public Option/Medicare Buy-In be removed completely in order for them to provide filibuster-proof support to pass the Senate.

The Public Option proponents had insisted it would “keep insurance companies honest.” They used language similar to Krugman that a Public Option would be an easier way to eventually eliminate private insurance.

How could they think they could pass a bill that was intended to create a slippery slope to eliminate the insurance industry, and somehow the insurers wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t see it as just as much an existential threat as Medicare for All?

In 1998, 20 years before Paul Krugman was awarded his Nobel Prize, he predicted that the internet’s economic influence would be insignificant, “no greater than the fax machine’s,” because “most people have nothing to say to each other.” He has been wrong before.

My life’s goal is to practice medicine in a country where everyone has healthcare, everybody in and nobody out. I think expanding traditional American Medicare is the obvious way to get there. It has already been taking care of the oldest, sickest, most expensive patients for the past 60 years. It makes no sense to take that option off the table before we even start negotiating.

Why not take on the insurance industry and their billionaire backers?

Why not take them on?

In the almost-over primary season, Democratic voters chose a mix of progressive nominees like Abdul El Sayed, Peggy Flanagan and Angie Nixon and moderates like David Crowley and Jared Moscowitz, often by slim margins. These candidates often disagreed on issues like Medicare For All and military aide for Israel.

But in the 11 weeks between now and the general election, Democrats progressives and moderates need to form a United Front to take back the Senate and House and have checks and balances on an increasingly unhinged fascistic Donald Trump. As I pointed out in Common Dreams last week, in 1930s Germany moderately left and far left parties fought against each other as hard as they fought against the Nazis and ended up with Hitler in power who outlawed them both and sent them to prisons and eventually concentration camps.

Until Election Day, Democratic leaders need to encourage a United Front against fascism.

But that's the opposite of what House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is doing. He squarely took the side of the so-called moderates and attacked the progressives.

On Meet The Press, host Kristen Welker mentioned that Jeffries co-sponsored Medicare For All legislation for ten years from 2013-2021 but hasn't co-sponsored it since he became Democratic House leader. She asked him if he would even put Medicare For All up for a vote if he became speaker.

Jeffries repeatedly evaded answering the question, but then finally declared: “It's not legislation that I currently am cosponsoring or that I support.” He would not even promise to put it up for a vote. At least 104 current Democratic House members are co-sponsors of Medicare For All legislations and Jeffries won't even promise to give them a chance to vote on it.

This despite the fact that recent polls show that 65% of voters, including 78% of Democrats, 71% of independents and even 49% of Republicans support Medicare For All. And even after respondents were told that Medicare for All would eliminate most private insurance and require higher taxes, support remained above 60 percent.

(It's worth noting that in the current election cycle, Jeffries has received $391,000 of campaign cash from the healthcare sector’s political action committees.)

Jeffries then went on to attack the Democratic Socialists of America telling Meet The Press, "I don't support the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself." But his attacks on the DSA focused just on three positions which may have been taken in the past by small factions of the DSA, like defunding the police, open border, and abolishing the Senate. None of these positions are backed by actual DSA candidates who have won Democratic primaries.

Jeffries deciding to put his thumbs on the scale and back one sector of the Democratic Party is directly contrary to the role of a party leader whose job should be to unite the party to win the House and Senate in the General Election.

As Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to the late Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid wrote in The New York Times, "It is not up to party leaders or the Democratic National Committee to litigate whether a candidate’s views are acceptable; the voters of a state or district decide. The coalition that passed the New Deal included everyone from a Communist sympathizer to self-avowed white supremacists, putting the compromises asked of us today in perspective."

Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, "Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media."

In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant 40 years later—when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its attendant advances in social justice and quality of life) could cause US citizens to question their own system, it regularly imposes an embargo and sanctions against the country. Next, the news media reports on the suffering caused by these policies while, at the same time, avoiding any mention of the embargo and sanctions. Finally, when after years or decades of suffering, the people of this blockaded country take out their anger on the closest target and begin protesting against their government, the US steps in. It places a puppet president in power and pours into the country the money it had withheld throughout the embargo. Then, the media reports on how well everyone is now doing without, once more, acknowledging the oversized role the embargo played in the prior devastation.

In the aforementioned NPR interview, host Scott Simon perfectly perpetuated this model of media complicity by announcing towards the interview’s conclusion, “Arturo Sandoval, I’ve got to put you on the spot a little. You’ve been pretty quiet about politics over the years, but obviously you fled Cuba. When Fidel Castro died, you spoke out about your disdain for his regime. It was ten years ago.” Then, with no historical or even recent context, Simon concluded with, “Cuba seems to be almost worse than ever now.”

With this final declaration in which he erroneously implied a connection between Cuba’s current immiseration and Fidel Castro’s rule, Simon led Sandoval into his response: “Sixty-seven and a half years is way too long, man… The people in Cuba are desperate and hopeless.”

Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process.

Simon allowed his guest to say this unchallenged as if these decades of desperation and hopelessness are the result of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. To the contrary, in addition to footing the bill for Sandoval’s musical education (he attended the free Cuban National Art School, founded by Fidel Castro), the Cuban Revolution redefined human rights as access for all to free education, free healthcare, low-cost daycare centers, and highly subsidized housing.

The desperation Sandoval referred to is the direct result of the 67-year-old embargo against Cuba imposed by the United States, the longest embargo in the history of the world. Combined with its multitude of supplementary sanctions (more than 200 of which were enacted during Trump’s first term in office), these punitive measures prohibit Cuba from purchasing products, including medicine, manufactured abroad if they contain more than 10% of US-origin components. They restrict US residents’ ability to travel to Cuba. They hinder Cubans residing in the US from wiring money to their families, a common way for immigrants from all parts of the world to supplement the income of relatives back home.

The Cuban embargo has received worldwide condemnation. For more than three decades now, the UN General Assembly has annually presented its members with a resolution to denounce the embargo. Year after year, its 193 member states cast a near-unanimous vote affirming the resolution. The only two countries that consistently vote against it—and in favor of the embargo— are, unsurprisingly, the US and Israel.

Unfortunately, the UN resolution, while a significant show of solidarity, has no authority to end the embargo. As codified by US law, only the US Congress has this power.

In addition and sadly, the suffering caused by the embargo is not a mere result of the blockade but the explicit objective of it as stated in a declassified 1960 government document posted on the National Security Archive’s website and abstracted as follows: “This memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lestor Mallory, provides the original, unvarnished, policy rationale for imposing trade restrictions on Cuba. Fidel Castro’s revolution is quite popular in Cuba, Mallory points out; since there is no effective opposition against him, the only way to undercut Castro’s support is ‘through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.’ Mallory advocates a set of punitive economic actions designed to deny ‘money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.’”

Beyond the embargo and its sanctions, the US designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) contributes to what Sandoval referred to as the Cuban people’s hopelessness and desperation. The partisan political boomerang of the SSOT was initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 for Cuba’s support of Latin American leftist groups. It was removed by Obama in 2015, reinstated by Trump in 2021, symbolically removed by Biden on January 14th, 2025, at the end of his presidency, and again reinstated by Trump on January 20th, 2025, at the start of his second term.

Along with other restrictions, the sponsor-of-terrorism status forbids US international aid organizations, including Food for Peace and the Peace Corps, from offering humanitarian assistance to Cuba. It prohibits Cuba from receiving loans from the World Bank and other international financial institutions. These are loans which could be used for much-needed projects such as an overhaul of the island’s aging electrical grid, which has caused multiple nationwide blackouts over the past two years.

Furthermore, as described by the Washington Office on Latin America, the SSOT “has a chilling effect on businesses, including banking or telecommunications investments that are crucial to promoting the type of transformation essential to expanding freedom on the island.” Ironically, this freedom (ie: the opening of business and economic opportunities) is precisely what the US purports to desire for the Cuban people. And it is this lack of this freedom, which Sandoval said in the somber closing statement of his NPR interview, that prevents him from returning to Cuba and will leave him to “die dreaming” of a homecoming.

At this point in the interview, what Scott Simon didn’t say becomes as, if not more, significant than what he did. It is that, in Fidel Castro’s final two years of life, a sense of hope and a feeling of, yes, freedom pervaded Cuba.

Hope came to Cubans with Obama’s 2014 détente, which, while not a revocation of the embargo [only able to be repealed by Congress], still enabled the US Embassy in Cuba and the Cuban Embassy in the US to reopen for the first time in 50 years. Washington’s rapprochement permitted commercial and direct mail flights between the two countries to be reinstated and for restrictions on remittances to be loosened. This, in turn, allowed Cuban-Americans, like immigrants from other countries, to now easily send money to their families on the island.

Freedom came from an opening of the Cuban economy, from the government’s expanded opportunities for private businesses. Cubans responded enthusiastically, opening record numbers of cafés and restaurants and music and art venues, among other enterprises to which their new American friends, now able to travel freely to Cuba, flocked in record numbers.

It was a boon for both sides—and evidence that another way of engaging with Cuba was possible. Until, that is, Trump was elected at the end of 2016 and, soon thereafter, began systematically shutting everything down once more.

If not for the very real damage it inflicts on the country, the SSOT designation could be considered laughable, as, during all these decades as a supposed sponsor of terrorism, Cuba has remained steadfast in its commitment to a peaceful coexistence with its neighbors near and far. For the past quarter of a century, Cuba’s Latin American Medical School, esteemed for both its size (enrollment-wise, it is considered the largest medical school in the world) and its focus on preventative healthcare, has offered a full-ride, plus a monthly living stipend, for students from low-income communities around the world, including the US.

Additionally, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered aid workers to the US, although President Bush rebuffed this overture. In the early days of COVID-19, Cuba sent medical brigades to help Italy contain its outbreak. And this was in addition to the doctors Cuba regularly sent to countries in need from Algeria to Honduras to Sri Lanka. Until, that is, in 2025 the US began threatening to deny visas to the leaders of countries accepting assistance from Cuban doctors; and the targeted countries, fearing retribution, terminated their contracts with Cuba.

This past March, as Jamaica’s Cuban doctors headed home following one such termination, hundreds of Jamaicans took to the streets for what they called a “Gratitude Walk.” For three miles, they marched wearing t-shirts reading, “Thank you Cuba for 50 years of medical service” and chanting, “We love Cuba” and “Bring back the doctors.”

Walk participant Rupert Walters, President of the Jamaica-Cuba Friendship Association’s St. Catherine’s chapter and a beneficiary of Cuban care for his prostate cancer, called his government’s decision to cave to US pressure “crazy.” Walters told the Jamaica Observer that he wished the government had “allowed the Cubans to support and give their services to the hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans who can’t afford it,” and warned that, as a result of the medical program termination, Jamaicans would die.

Rather than supporting terrorism, Cuba has long been the target of terrorist attacks by the US government. There was the CIA’s half-century of documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, involving everything from poison pens to exploding cigars.

Less comical and more lethal were terrorist attacks led by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile and CIA operative. In 1976, 35 years before September 11th, Posada Carriles masterminded the Western Hemisphere’s first act of political terrorism against a civilian flight. His bombing of a Cubana de Aviación airplane killed all 73 passengers, 24 of whom comprised the entirety of the Juvenile Cuban National Fencing team. In the summer of 1997, Posada Carrilles began another bombing campaign, this time targeting Havana hotels, restaurants, and discotheques—and killing an Italian tourist. Finally arrested in Panama in 2000 for attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro at a conference he was attending there, Posada Carrilles later fled to the US, where he was detained for illegal entry and then pardoned by President Bush. In 2018, he died a free man in Miami.

Although Scott Simon didn’t say this in his interview with Arturo Sandoval, the current “worse-than-ever” situation he referenced is due to the US’s oil blockade, initiated by an Executive Order from Trump in January. Under this latest act of economic warfare, tankers trying to deliver petroleum to the island are threatened with tariffs and, if they still attempt to do so, they are chased away by US Coast Guard vessels.

Like the embargo, like the sanctions, like the SSOT status, the fuel blockade has caused widespread suffering for the Cuban people. It impedes access to electricity and also to water, which arrives at most houses in Cuba via an electric pump. It prevents the preservation of not just food but also of medicines that need refrigeration.

Many Cubans now sleep outside, on rooftops or on the Malecón seawall, to escape the sweltering summer heat, made all the more unbearable without the electricity to run their fans. Because electricity (which has been prioritized for hospitals and schools) is now available in most houses for just two hours per day, Cubans must wake up whenever it arrives (even if it is at 3 AM) to do all they couldn’t without it—wash clothes and dishes, cook and bathe. And collect water for the next outage. So, sleep too, has become a casualty of this US-provoked humanitarian crisis, referred to by a group of US Representatives who visited the island in July as a “silent Gaza.”

By engaging in de-contextualized reporting rather than shedding light on the reasons why the current situation is as it is, mainstream US media outlets like NPR do their listeners a grave and dangerous disservice. For, as The Washington Post’s motto warns us, albeit a little more ironically after Jeff Bezos’ purchase of it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process. Without the full story as to why what is happening in our world is happening, we are rendered powerless to change it. Without our consent, we become cogs in the bulldozer of US interventionism and imperialism.

Life in Cuba is full of suffering not because of socialism but because of a 67-year-long blockade by the world’s largest superpower. In a government now absent of checks and balances, we need to call out the offending media. We need to let them know that we’re paying attention, that we hold them accountable for their lies of omission— and that we demand better.

This weekend, President Donald Trump is turning the heart of our democracy into a taxpayer-funded racetrack. Through an executive order, the administration mandated the "Freedom 250 Grand Prix"—an IndyCar street circuit winding directly through the National Mall. We are being told this is a celebration of America. But earlier this year, IndyCar quietly launched and then hastily deleted a new piece of official merchandise: a gauche, blatantly racist T-shirt. This is exactly what the current administration is substituting for our national heritage.

Trump is perfectly willing to risk the destruction of the nation's most priceless cultural assets to create a public spectacle that honors him, and almost assuredly puts carloads more of our money in his pocket.

Let me be clear: Live athletic competition can be a great cultural unifier, and celebrating America should be a joyous occasion. But this race is a fabricated, exhaust-choked spectacle designed entirely to feed Trump's obsession with personal grandeur. And it’s the public who is paying for everything and likewise the liability falls right into the lap of the public. We are being forced to subsidize a 200-mile-per-hour vanity project with an estimated cultural liability of up to $183 billion.

When you map the racecourse, the sheer negligence becomes terrifying. The circuit wraps directly around the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian. If a catastrophic, high-speed crash were to occur—scattering carbon-fiber shrapnel and burning ethanol fuel, or triggering a massive structural fire—the cultural devastation would be irreversible. The vibration of the race alone has already forced the National Gallery of Art to remove paintings from the wall. But not everything can be protected like that.

Replacing the pinnacle of global art, foundational Indigenous artifacts, and the physical documents of our democracy with the cheap, offensive aesthetics of a racist IndyCar T-shirt is the ultimate manifestation of Trump’s corrupt worldview.

By forcing this race onto the Mall, the administration is playing Russian roulette with irreplaceable artifacts of American art and history. They are risking the original Declaration of Independence and the Constitution at the National Archives. They are endangering Leonardo da Vinci’s "Ginevra de' Benci"—the only da Vinci painting on public view in the Americas. They are threatening the 1903 Wright Flyer and the Apollo 11 Command Module.

And there is incredible risk of damage to the over 2,500 square feet of priceless, New Deal-era buon fresco murals physically bound into the walls of the Wilbur J. Cohen building, which could be obliterated by structural shockwaves or water damage from emergency fire suppression.

Mary Okin, assistant director of the Living New Deal, told WTOP: “Given how important these artworks are, there should be all kinds of protections taken, and also a case made that this race should not happen here. I don’t think a race like this would ever happen under other administrations, because it’s just foolish and reckless.”

Replacing the pinnacle of global art, foundational Indigenous artifacts, and the physical documents of our democracy with the cheap, offensive aesthetics of a racist IndyCar T-shirt is the ultimate manifestation of Trump’s corrupt worldview. Public goods hold no value to this administration unless they can be leveraged for a fleeting television broadcast.

We cannot allow an administration that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing to destroy the American legacy for a weekend of noise.

America’s farmers understand that some degree of uncertainty comes with the job. They can’t control the weather, after all. But for most of them, the biggest source of uncertainty is not nature, but politics.

As US foreign and domestic policy becomes less predictable, it becomes more difficult for families who work the land to make informed long-term decisions.

The partisan wrangling over the most recent Farm Bill provides the perfect example. This legislation would give farmers more access to government-backed credit, help them sell their crops overseas, and provide much-needed relief to those facing droughts or floods. Unfortunately, the process of passing it devolved into a partisan slap fight due to Republicans’ insistence on cutting the food stamps low-income Americans rely on to feed their families.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), himself a farmer, could hardly believe how ugly the process got. “I think every other Farm Bill that I’ve worked on in the 46 years I’ve been in the United States Senate has been a bipartisan bill,” he told the press. If future Farm Bill negotiations prove equally contentious, it could lead to disastrous funding lapses for key agricultural programs.

The farming sector can only manufacture so much certainty in the marketplace when Republicans keep changing the marketplace rules, ignoring the very forgotten men and women in rural America that they espouse to protect.

The Trump administration’s ongoing war with Iran has only added fuel to the uncertainty fire for America’s farmers. About one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has mostly remained closed since the bombs started falling on February 28. Within weeks, urea prices spiked from a pre-war level of less than $500 a ton to over $700 a ton, and although they’ve fallen since then, prices remain significantly higher than they were just two years ago and have continued to fluctuate amid tense negotiations and broken ceasefires.

Another source of uncertainty is President Donald Trump’s global trade wars. It’s true that some of his trade agreements—like the one he reached with the United Kingdom last May—increased market access for American farmers. But it’s also true that those deals are only worth as much as the word of the president who made them. In February, Trump threatened to blow up his newly inked trade deals with the UK and other European nations unless they agreed to sell him Greenland. The ever-shifting legal justifications for Trump’s tariff regime muddy the waters even further.

Should a farmer invest in increased production to meet demand from new British buyers? Or will a surprise judicial ruling or fit of presidential pique cause the tariffs and trade deals that undergird those contracts to disappear overnight? Guess wrong and you might go bankrupt.

Closer to home, Trump’s refusal to renew the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement has scrambled relationships between American farmers and their Canadian and Mexican customers and competitors. These stakeholders were just barely getting used to the new status quo after USMCA replaced NAFTA in 2020, and now they might have to start all over again.

Immigration policy also plays a role in creating uncertainty for farmers. A survey of 2,250 agricultural workers conducted by the United Farm Workers Foundation found that 88% of respondents worried about being detained or deported due to the increase in immigration raids at farms. The administration has mostly stopped these raids but could restart them at any time.

Some companies impacted by the Trump administration’s anti-worker, anti-farmer, nativist policies are trying their best to stabilize the agricultural industry’s conditions so that they can have more certainty. John Deere, for example, recently offered its unionized employees a contract extension that preserves its employees’ cost-of-living wage adjustments, no-deductible health coverage, and pension benefits through 2029. Even though the country is in a crop sector recession, the economic logic behind this proposal is sound because studies show that workplace anxiety severely impacts worker productivity. Giving workers additional certainty over their ability to put food on the table for their families thus improves both efficiency and employee retention. Nevertheless, the farming sector can only manufacture so much certainty in the marketplace when Republicans keep changing the marketplace rules, ignoring the very forgotten men and women in rural America that they espouse to protect.

An administration that thinks only in terms of news cycles is bad news for farm families who think in terms of seasons—or even generations. If we want to keep farmers on their land and help underrepresented communities break into agriculture, we’ll need a consistent, predictable policy. Our government might not be able to control the weather, but it should be able to pass a Farm Bill and play nice with our trading partners.