In March, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, targeting the Smithsonian Institution and its museums—including the National Museum of African American History and Culture—for promoting “divisive narratives.” In doing so, Trump continues a pattern of erasing federal websites about notable African Americans and undermining institutions that honor our full national story.

Trump’s campaign echoes other recent efforts to whitewash the past. For example, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month, and recognized Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday—one of several Southern states that continue to honor the Confederacy. These endeavors are part of a coordinated attempt to revise the Confederacy’s racist history and diminish the impact of slavery in the Civil War.

Last month, reports emerged of historic artifacts being removed from the African American History Museum. In response, civil rights leaders have formed a coalition and will hold a “Freedom to Learn” campaign and march at the museum. They know what I do: that the GOP’s coordinated efforts to whitewash the past cannot erase the truth we carry within us.

I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA.

As an African American originally from Memphis, Tennessee, I learned about our nation’s complicated history from a young age. I grew up in the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, where my parents were born under the yoke of Jim Crow segregation, and where cotton was king during slavery.

Some of that history I learned in school. Most of it came from my family who lived that history. They taught me not just to remember, but to bear witness.

Even the physical landscape of the South helped tell the story: Confederate monuments, parks, and highways named after Confederate generals. I saw the Confederate flag and “Riding with Forrest” bumper stickers, referencing Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. They were everyday reminders of the brutal history of slavery that refused to stay buried.

I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA. That’s why the GOP’s campaign to rewrite history will fail.

Recently, I visited D.C. with my 73-year-old mother. I was there to give a talk about my book, which examines how race and immigration status have affected access to healthcare. We visited the African American History Museum and Culture on a Monday. The line stretched outside, as it often does. Since opening in 2016, it has welcomed more than 12 million visitors—Black, white, young, old—each one seeking a fuller understanding of our shared past.

I had visited the museum before. But Trump’s latest threat made me want to return—and to bring my mom. As a child, she picked cotton and endured taunts from white kids as she and her siblings walked to their segregated school. She didn’t need the museum to validate her story. But it did. It also validated mine.

Inside, I stood with her in front of exhibits honoring W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells. Their legacy helped shape my career. As a sociologist, I teach about many of the historic events covered in the museum’s exhibits, which don’t shy away from the ugly contradictions of America’s founding ideals. Instead, they make them plain.

Etched inside the building is a quote from founding museum director Lonnie Bunch III: “[T]here is nothing more powerful… than a nation steeped in its history. And there are few things as noble as honoring our ancestors by remembering.”

That’s what this new wave of revisionism seeks to stop: truthful remembrance. But history doesn’t disappear when you shut down a website, threaten a museum’s funding, or remove museum exhibits. Despite banning books, stifling academic freedom, and targeting scapegoated groups that culminated in the genocide of European Jews, we still know about the Holocaust. Why? Because survivors carried that truth forward.

As we left the museum, another African American family was entering. The father asked me, half jokingly, “Have they changed anything in the museum yet?”

“No,” I said, “but that’s exactly why we came—before he [Trump] can.”

We smiled in shared acknowledgment. That exchange shows why the GOP’s efforts to erase the truth are sparking the opposite effect: a renewed urgency to preserve it.

Regardless of what happens to the museum or Confederate Memorial Day commemorations, that unfiltered history lives in us. In the words of James Baldwin, also etched on the museum’s walls: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it… history is literally present in all that we do.”

Almost everyone I know loathes U.S. President Donald Trump—and I don’t even live in the U.S. (I am Australian) They see him as a disaster for America and the world. Some denounce him at social gatherings, confident that no one will disagree. I do disagree—in a way—but I have realized that it is impossible to talk people out of their loathing.

Trump’s achievement was to demolish the political status quo. It was failing before Trump and had been for decades. Trump finished it off, although many within the system still don’t see it. Trump is an intensification—perhaps inevitable, perhaps necessary—of a decline in American society that deserves much greater attention. This decline represents the “deep politics” behind Trump’s success. And it is this politics I want to discuss: not the man, or his policies, but the deeper story behind his emergence and domination of U.S. politics.

Let me be clear about this. I want to transcend the furious debate about Trump and his administration. I am not denying the dangers and risks his election creates. But I want to examine something else that is almost wholly overlooked in the debate: the chance he provides to reassess the capacity of the U.S. political system to respond effectively to the foundational challenges it confronts. Destroying the status quo does not mean Trump himself will provide the answers America needs. More likely, his contribution will be to create the opportunity for others to do this.

Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

An international survey, published early last year, revealed starkly the political mood Trump tapped into, and the Democrats ignored. It found almost two-thirds of Americans believed the country was “in decline” and their society was “broken.” “Trump captures the prevailing zeitgeist as the champion of a broken country,” the report says. “Biden, in contrast, is the quintessential establishment candidate. Which worldview will prevail?” Well, now we know. The Democrats should be ashamed that they were seen as the establishment in today’s fraught world.

They ran a shockingly weak campaign, offering in former President Joe Biden an ailing, old man. What’s worse, they tried to deceive the voters by hiding his cognitive decline, and then replaced him too late with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was tied to Biden’s policies. If Harris had won the election, America would have maintained the status quo, its business-as-usual politics.

What were they thinking? How did they fail to see what was happening? No wonder there are reports of “a civil war” within the party. The many thousands who have attended the “Fighting Oligarchy” political rallies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is on the more radical wing of the Democrats, suggest the party is being stirred into more effective action.

The world—and the West in particular—is mired in crises it refuses to acknowledge, at least at the political level. I see this because my work concerns human progress, well-being and futures. To me, politics and the mainstream news media are locked in mutually reinforcing cultures that maintain the status quo, largely ignoring—or at least underestimating—our predicament. Politics may claim to be addressing the crises, but it is not. It took Trump to expose the pretence.

Trump’s First Term: a Missed Opportunity

I wrote in 2022 about the social and political antecedents of Trump’s first term as president. I said that the liberal media and Democrats, instead of seeking to understand what was troubling America and lay behind his victory, spent four years trying to remove him from office.

Trump’s relationship with the liberal media became one of mutual loathing and goading; it was hugely destructive. In showing such contempt for Trump, the liberal media also derided his base, deepening the national division they accused Trump himself of provoking. Politics and the media “zeroed in” on him when they should have also “drawn back” to consider the larger social context.

I said at the time liberal commentary took as a benchmark, a frame of reference, the old political status quo. It was as if they had forgotten the legitimate grievances that took Trump into office, and believed the task was to restore politics to what it had been before his election, even though everything had changed and needed to change. Much of the coverage implied that there was little wrong with the U.S. that removing Trump would not fix.

The liberal media embraced Joe Biden’s election victory with sighs of relief over his centrist policies and a return to political normalcy. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” The Guardian proclaimed. But the story did not end with Trump’s eviction from the White House. The liberal media’s celebration of Biden’s victory was another aspect of their failure to understand how profoundly things were changing.

Nothing had been settled, I warned. And so it proved.

Environmental writer and activist Joanna Macy expressed the opportunity succinctly at the time: Trump’s election was “a very painful waking up” she said; if Hillary Clinton had won, “we would have stayed asleep.” This was a relatively common view among environmental and leftist commentators around the time of the election. They saw Trump’s victory as exposing the failings of the entire U.S. political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda. And they were scathing of the Democrats, notably Clinton and former President Barack Obama, for their complicity and collaboration with this agenda.

It looks today like America has been given a second opportunity to “wake up.” Can the Democrats do this? Can they build on the Sanders-AOC rallies?

2024—a Second Chance to “Wake up”

Trump’s resounding election victory should not have surprised us. He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people and to acknowledge their unease about their lives. This unease goes deeper than the issues that the election campaign focused on, such as the economy, immigration, or reproductive rights. These may be what politicians and commentators believe matters most. Even voters may say these are the things that mattered to them. But this is, at least in part, because this is what pollsters, strategists, journalists, and politicians talk and ask about. They set the parameters of debate, which is framed in these terms. But I don’t believe people’s lives, the quality of their lives, can be captured so easily.

In my 2022 essay, I argued there were other ways of thinking about America and the challenges it faced. It was an attempt to consider what was happening from a different perspective. What I sought to articulate then, and seek to do again now, is the need to close the widening gap between a scientific view of the world and the prevailing political one, between a view that demands a transformation in our way of life if we are to meet the challenges we face, and an essentially business-as-usual politics.

Political debate needs to focus on this gap, on opening up the potential for radical changes in political priorities.

America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be.

My interest is in why so many Americans voted for Trump, regardless of his character and perhaps even his policies. My analysis falls well outside mainstream media opinion in that it has to do with the entirety of the American way of life, not specific issues—economic, social or environmental. Thus, it goes beyond the domain of policy to embrace questions of vision and narrative. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

This deeper context also explains the widespread mistrust, frustration, and disillusionment with institutions, especially government, with their specific purposes and inevitable inertia. And it explains how Trump sidestepped this hostility. Most political leaders are “organization people” chosen by their parties to represent their politics. Trump is not a party man; he chose his party, conquered it, and remade it to fit his vision of America.

I said in 2022 that a deep and dangerous divide existed in liberal democracies between people’s concerns about their lives, their country, and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism were too constrained and limiting to face up to our predicament. Those working within these cultures can’t see it, or if they can see it, they can’t imagine what it takes to address it.

My story drew on people’s profound disquiet about life in America and the existential challenges America faced, both physical and social. This condition was also true, to differing degrees, of other liberal democracies and beyond. I presented a lot of evidence of this. For example, a 2015 study I co-authored investigated the perceived probability of future threats to humanity in four Western nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Across the four countries, over a half (54%, U.S. 57%) of people rated the risk of “our way of life ending” within the next 100 years at 50% or greater. Three quarters (79%, U.S.75%) agreed that “we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world.”

We had to place the fundamental frameworks of how we understand the world at the center of political debate, I said. The interconnected risks facing humanity could not be solved by focusing only on the discrete, specific issues that characterized and defined today’s politics, however legitimate the concerns were in themselves. Trump offered, however negatively, at least a small chance of triggering systemic change.

Existential Risks

Decades of political action (or inaction) have failed to meet the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and other environmental problems; declining population health and well-being; growing technological anarchy where we lose or cede control of new technologies like AI; the growth of corporate political power and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands; the risk of spreading warfare, including nuclear war; and the emergence of a multipolar world in which America is losing its dominance.

These and other challenges pose a risk of societal and even civilizational collapse, as I have discussed in recent writing; the collapse may already have begun. America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be. This includes politically.

Several reports published in the past two years have highlighted the human predicament. An international team of scientists has provided a detailed outline of planetary resilience by mapping out all nine boundary processes that define a safe operating space for humanity. Human activity affects the Earth’s climate and ecosystems more than ever, which risks the stability of the entire planet. For the first time, all nine planetary boundaries have been assessed, six have now been crossed. These include climate, biosphere integrity, land systems, freshwater, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus).

Progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.”

“This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell, as pressure on the planet increases and vital boundaries are being breached. We don’t know how long we can keep transgressing these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm,” says co-author Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden.

Member nations of the United Nations adopted in 2015 a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, to be met by 2030. The goals aimed to end poverty, improve health and education, and reduce inequality—while tackling climate change and preserving our oceans and forests. An assessment in 2023, the halfway point, found that the world was not on track to achieve any of the 17 goals.

A major review, “Earth at Risk,” published in 2024, says human development has ushered in an era of converging crises: climate change, ecological destruction, disease, pollution, and socioeconomic inequality. The review synthesizes the breadth of these interwoven emergencies and underscores the urgent need for comprehensive, integrated action. “The imperative is clear: To navigate away from this precipice, we must collectively harness political will, economic resources, and societal values to steer toward a future where human progress does not come at the cost of ecological integrity and social equity,” the review states.

This scientific understanding helps to explain survey findings of public attitudes. For example, the study cited earlier of 28 countries across the globe by polling company Ipsos, conducted in late 2023 and published early in 2024, is especially revealing. It explains better than all the political polling the mood behind Trump’s success (a mood not confined to the U.S.).

The survey found across the 28 countries, 58% (59% in the U.S.) believed their country was “in decline,” 57% (U.S. 65%) that society was “broken,” and 67% (U.S. 66%) believed “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.” Two-thirds (67%, U.S. 60%) believed the main divide in their society was between “‘ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite.” A similar number (63%, U.S. 66%) said their country needed “a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.”

The Ipsos survey highlights the appeal to populism as a response. But it is wrong—or at least incomplete—to focus, as liberal commentary has, on populism as an illegitimate or bogus political stance. We also need to explore, as I do here, the validity of people’s perceptions about their countries.

Much has been spoken and written about Trump’s billionaire backers. But more billionaires backed Harris than they did Trump; they did very well under the Democrats. Sanders (who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats) said in a recent CNN interview: “In the Democratic Party, you've got a party that is heavily dominated by the billionaire class, run by consultants who are way out of touch with reality… the Democratic Party has virtually no grassroots support.”

I wrote in my 2024 essay about the powerful influence of neoliberalism, a variation of capitalism that has captured government in the interests of those with money and power. Many of the problems we face began or escalated with the neoliberal ascendancy that began in the West in the 1980s.

Given the scale and urgency of our situation, I said, we needed to use every (nonviolent) means—legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation—to reduce, even eliminate, the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations, which held so much sway over democracy, government, and our lives, and so often acted against our common interests. This must become the focus of political debate and action.

Transcending today’s turmoil

Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly said in 2018 that the opposition was not the Democrats, but the media. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” This is what is happening, much more so now than during Trump’s first term. And it isn’t just the Trump camp. Both the liberal- and right-wing media are wallowing in the muck—in conflict, contradiction, conjecture, speculation and, yes, nonsense and trivia—that makes up much of the public debate about Trump. Part of my Trump watching is via MSN (a Microsoft portal), which scans many news sites, both on the left and right. Trump’s every move and utterance is scrutinized, praised, or condemned; positions have become more entrenched and closed. America seems to be caught in a vortex of mass insanity, with Trump at its center.

What Trump does in his second term depends not only on him, but also on how the people, Congress, the media, and others respond. This response must be different from the way they reacted to his first term. It should accept the legitimacy of the deep-seated unease and anger that swept him into office, however flawed his policy responses might be.

In crushing the political status quo, Trump has broken the center left and center right’s hold on power. He has championed the far-right; in doing that, he has also created opportunities for the left. Specifically, progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.” Or to quote the poet William Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Political debate in the U.S. has become unanchored, untethered, from a shared story, a common cultural understanding of reality, as the Western narrative of progress becomes increasingly contested, and the American Dream fades. The current debate is so awful that it has become further evidence of a country in decline, a society that is broken. It may already be too late to change this situation, but America must keep trying. Out of the chaos of the times, something better might yet emerge.

Nonprofits and advocacy groups are in the midst of a mounting crisis: Social media giants are growing more chaotic, untrustworthy, and dangerous.

Just consider what’s happened in the past few weeks. Without warning, explanation, or human review, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Presbyterian Outlook—a progressive, well-established news outlet for the Presbyterian Church. The outlet noted that it had thoughtfully invested in the platform to expand its reach, but would not return given the possibility of another abrupt cancellation.

Then, weeks later, X—which has been plagued by reports of increasing misinformation and amplifying far-right accounts—was hit with cybersecurity attacks that downed the platform.

Just as social media platforms revolutionized our world decades ago—we are in the midst of another pivotal technology movement.

And Meta recently announced that it would draw from X’s technology to employ “Community Notes” on its platforms—which are purportedly meant to fill in the gaps left after the company fired its fact-checking team. Experts have warned that such a system could easily be exploited by groups motivated by their own interests.

These events are just the latest in a growing pile of evidence that organizations and advocates can’t count on social media giants like they once did. They’re fueling misinformation, inflammatory perspectives, and partisan divisions—all in the name of profits.

To continue to be effective in our increasingly digital world, organizations will need to adjust to this new landscape.

Unquestionably, charting the path forward is challenging. Many organizations and advocates have spent years investing in and building profiles on established media platforms. These groups depend on this technology to share their messaging, organize, provide educational tools, fundraise, and more. It’s difficult to shift all these resources.

Other organizations have yet to build up a robust digital presence, but don’t know where to begin, especially in today’s chaotic climate.

Wherever nonprofits and advocates fall on this spectrum, they can and should invest in technology. Here’s how they can be most effective.

First, organizations must recognize that—just as social media platforms revolutionized our world decades ago—we are in the midst of another pivotal technology movement. Given all the upheaval in today’s landscape, organizations must ensure they can reach their audiences in a multitude of ways, without relying on a single platform.

As such, they should build out opportunities for subscription-based data creation. That means reinvesting in collecting more traditional contact methods—like emails and phone numbers. It also means investing in technologies that allow them to share their messages without censorship from outside sources. Blogs and newsletter platforms can be powerful tools to communicate with audiences and provide rich discourse free from external interference.

Protected digital communities—which are only open to certain groups or are invitation-based—can also help strengthen connections between an organization’s supporters. We’re starting to employ this strategy at the Technology, Innovation, and Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL), which is housed at Union Theological Seminary. Right now, we’re working with a cohort of faith and social justice leaders to deploy new technology to advance their missions.

We’ve recommended a platform called Mighty Networks, which uses AI to help creators build and manage online communities. Two of our fellows are using this service to support Black clergywomen through education and practical application, focusing on mental health awareness and balance. Another pair of fellows is aiming to use the platform to deliver digitally-based educational programming and sustain a community of care professionals committed to improving access to spiritually integrated, trauma-informed care.

Make no mistake: Nonprofits and advocacy organizations need a digital presence to be effective. But they’ll have to adjust to shield themselves from the chaos and malice of social media giants.

U.S. President Donald Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation,” including legal filings for improper purposes and statements that are not based on evidence.

Bondi should start with the White House attorneys who drafted Trump’s executive orders targeting Big Law firms—and her Justice Department lawyers trying to defend them.

Did Real Lawyers Write These Orders?

Cloaked in empty rhetoric about “conduct detrimental to critical American interests,” retribution is at the core of Trump’s edicts.

For example, the only detailed rationale for Trump’s Jenner & Block order was the firm’s association with Andrew Weissmann, who returned to the firm in 2020 after completing his work for Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the Trump-Russia investigation. Other than the Weissmann diatribe, Trump’s order merely recited vague and unsupported assertions about alleged “partisan ‘lawfare,’” “abuse of its pro bono practice,” and “racial discrimination.”

But on that basis, Trump directed all federal agencies to: 1) limit the entire firm’s engagement with federal employees; 2) limit the entire firm’s access to federal buildings; 3) suspend the entire firm’s security clearances; 4) terminate the firm’s government contracts; and 5) require all government contractors to disclose any business that they do with Jenner—with an eye toward terminating those contracts as well.

Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits.

Four law firms have challenged Trump’s similar orders. In stark language, four separate federal courts have granted immediate relief:

• “Disturbing”

• “It sends little chills down my spine.”

• “It threatens to significantly undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all people to access justice.”

• “There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.”

• “The framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power.”

In three recent hearings, Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Lawson—Bondi’s longtime Florida colleague and Trump loyalist—struggled to answer judges’ basic questions about the orders targeting Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block:

• Do law firms have to make deals with Trump to avoid executive orders?

• “I can’t speak to that.”

• Are the deals in writing?

• “I have not been privy to this.”

• Has Trump achieved $1 billion in deals yet?

• “I do not know.”

When Lawson argued that Trump could target Jenner because it “discriminates against its employees based on race,” U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, snapped back, “Give me a break.”

In fairness to Lawson, Trump and his White House attorneys who wrote the orders hadn’t given him much to work with.

Jenner: A Case Study

Take a closer look at Jenner’s claims, followed by selected highlights of the government’s 37-page response:

The First Amendment:

• Prohibits retaliatory actions for protected speech and viewpoint discrimination;

• Bars government interference with a client’s right to associate; and

• Prevents the government from imposing unconstitutional conditions on access to government services and benefits.

The government says that Trump was just exercising his free speech rights. It asserts that Jenner’s lawsuit “carries with it a dangerous risk of muzzling the Executive.” The government also argues that Jenner’s speech is not protected insofar as it “consists of employment practices involving racial discrimination [favoring women and minorities].”

The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee a litigant the unfettered right to the effective assistance of counsel of his or her choice.

The government says that: 1) clients (not law firms) have to assert such claims; 2) any impact of barring Jenner from federal buildings or its clients from federal contracts is speculative; and 3) Trump’s order does not violate those rights in any event.

Due Process is required before the government can deprive a person of liberty or property interests. It requires notice of the claims, clarity about their meaning, and the opportunity to be heard before the deprivation occurs. None of that occurred. The resulting harm, including damage to the firm’s reputation, was immediate and ongoing.

The government says that: 1) the order is sufficiently clear; 2) it has not yet harmed the firm; and 3) the firm will receive any required notice before the order actually injures it.

Equal Protection requires the government to treat similarly-situated entities similarly or, at a minimum, have a rational basis for failing to do so.

The government insists that Jenner is not being singled out for unfair treatment.

The Constitution’s Separation of Powers prohibits Trump from acting as accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. But he wore all of those hats in his executive order.

The government says that Trump’s order is an appropriate exercise of presidential power.

Attention All Trump Lawyers: It’s Time for a Gut Check

Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits. Upon admission to the bar, every attorney swears an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and to uphold the rule of law. A code of professional ethics requires any legal argument to be “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument” for changing it. Attorneys must ensure that their statements about facts are “reasonably based” on evidentiary support.

Trump’s retaliatory orders seek to intimidate lawyers and law firms into submission and thereby undermine the legal system. His own conduct refutes his lawyers’ contrary arguments. As other firms have capitulated, pledged “political neutrality,” and collectively committed to provide almost $1 billion in free legal services to Trump-designated causes, his executive orders’ stated concerns about those firms’ “conduct detrimental to critical American interests” miraculously disappeared.

Trump even boasted, “And I agree they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell—they give me a lot of money, considering.”

In one of the many amicus briefs supporting Jenner’s challenge, more than 800 law firms—including Deputy Associate Attorney General Lawson’s former firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips—urged that Trump’s executive order “should be permanently enjoined as a violation of core First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment guarantees, as well as bedrock separation-of-powers principles.”

“But something even more fundamental is at stake… [Trump’s] Orders pose a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.”

I don’t know what Trump’s lawyers see when they look into a mirror. But I know this: History will not be kind to them.

My wife Janet and I started keeping chickens 14 years ago; we currently have four. Since we eat eggs, we figured we should take some responsibility for how those eggs come to us (I went vegetarian at age 20 once I realized the cruelty and suffering involved in producing the hamburgers I devoured). We wanted to see whether we could obtain eggs ethically and in a way that gave us more connection with our food. And, as bird lovers, we wanted to get to know some hens.

Lately, with egg prices soaring, there’s widespread interest in keeping chickens as a way of saving money. That was not our purpose, and raising hens hasn’t lowered our food bills—though they do give us plenty of lovely eggs. We invested in a secure chicken house and a covered run big enough to give our girls space to scratch and dust-bathe when it’s raining (on most days, we let them roam everywhere in our backyard except the vegetable garden, which they would happily destroy if they could). We feed them the best organic chicken feed. And we take them to the vet if required (one of our sweetest hens ever, Silvie, needed a hernia operation, a significant expense; that happened a year ago, and she’s fine now). We haven’t tried to calculate how much each egg costs us, but it’s more than a pittance.

There’s both good and sad to report from our years of living with hens. But we’re still at it and still learning.

What Motivates a Chicken?

One of the biggest payoffs of our hen hobby is the experience of living with alien creatures. Chickens aren’t much like dogs or cats. Birds have brains that are organized differently from mammalian brains, and birds see colors we can’t register. Chickens communicate vocally with about 25 different calls, screams, whines, cackles, purrs, and clucks. Janet and I spend a lot of time trying to understand what our hens are thinking and feeling, and we’ve learned a little about what motivates them.

Food is certainly at or near the top of the list. Chickens display extraordinary enthusiasm for food and are vigorously competitive whenever any treat is on offer. Their motto: Eat fast and ask questions later.

Reproduction sometimes takes top priority in the hen brain. We don’t keep roosters, since we live within city limits and an ordinance forbids them. Nevertheless, we have outlaw neighbors with roosters, and we are reminded daily that the male of the Gallus gallus domesticus species can indeed make a lot of noise. Roosters are required for fertile eggs, but in the absence of males, hens lay anyway. Some of our hens go broody occasionally, spending a couple of weeks sitting in their nest trying to incubate eggs that aren’t there, because we’ve collected them and put them in our refrigerator. Broody hens need special care, as they tend not to eat enough to keep themselves healthy. The hens often squat for us, as they would for a rooster wishing to copulate; when they do, we give them a backrub to partially fulfill their instinctive need—and to take advantage of a receptive moment when we can pet them or pick them up.

In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives.

Curiosity may be proverbially associated with cats, but we’ve found that chickens are perpetually inquisitive. They spend a large portion of each day exploring every corner of our yard, scratching in the dirt and digging holes. What’s down there? Who knows what might turn up?

Cleanliness requires effort. Sometimes chickens and other birds roll around in the dust as a way of discouraging mites and other pests (spa day!); afterward they shake their feathers in satisfaction. Feather maintenance is always a priority, and time must be devoted daily to preening. The versatile and sensitive beak must be cleaned occasionally by carefully wiping it on a hard surface (or our pants). Chickens and humans have very different ideas about cleanliness, but hens do care about it in their own way.

Affection might not be the strongest chicken motivator, but it certainly deserves to be listed. At first, we thought our chickens’ seeming enjoyment of human cuddles was merely a clever way of begging for more food treats. But long-term observation has shown us that some hens are just as affectionate as any dog or cat, and that food is not a strategic goal of cuddles. One of our hens, Lulu (more about her below) demands at least one cuddling session every day, and will sit in your lap for half an hour or more, soaking up love and offering all the hugs she can give, considering that she has wings rather than arms. Silvie is a cuddler too, but less demanding in that regard than Lulu. The hens’ affection for one another is a little more complicated, as we’re about to see.

Stella: avian elegance, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)

The Politics of Hens

Chickens are highly social creatures and instinctively establish a pecking order: One hen occasionally pecks others on the back of the head (often when everyone is eating) to show her dominance.

Lulu is at the top of the social ladder, and she’s a big, loud, confident hen. Friends have asked us whether chickens have individual personalities; the best answer is an introduction to Lulu. She is bossy around the other hens and demanding toward us. If she wants treats or cuddles, she lets us know by screaming—sometimes for minutes at a time—and, unfortunately, she’s as loud as any rooster. Being the top hen comes with perks, but duties as well. It’s up to Lulu to keep social order, watch for danger, and manage relations with the humans.

Stella and Sparrow—of rare designer breeds, while Lulu and Silvie are Orpingtons—are smaller, lower in the order, and relatively quieter and more skittish. Whenever Lulu is close by, they must be wary of a peck. But they’re not constantly bullied and seem to be happy, well-adjusted hens. They know the order and get their needs met within it. Sparrow is a cute comedian, always evoking chuckles from us humans. Stella is a self-reliant, industrious, elegant loner; she’s the smallest of our hens and has a scratchy voice but lays big pastel green eggs.

Some of our clearest insights into chicken social behavior come at dusk, as the hens enter their house and choose a spot on the perch. Who gets to sleep where, and next to whom? The lineup is different every night, and each night there are several tense minutes of jockeying. Sparrow seems to love snuggling up against big, fluffy Lulu, despite the prospect of a peck. Stella likes ascending the henhouse ladder last, and, though low in the hierarchy, usually gets her choice of sleeping spot. Always-agreeable Silvie (our vet called her “a very personable chicken”) just takes whatever space is available.

The whole gang: Stella, Lulu (front, naturally), Silvie, and Sparrow, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)

Generous Teachers

I’ve been astounded to learn the degree to which chicken evolution has been hijacked by humans. Genes matter, and for thousands of years people have been wittingly or unwittingly selecting chickens for humanly desirable traits.

Often, chickens pay a price. Humans want eggs; so, they breed hens that lay up to 300 of them a year—an astonishing feat. Laying an egg is no small matter. It literally takes a lot out of you. While wild relatives of the domestic chicken can live 20 years, most commercial hens live short lives, often (when they’re not killed for meat) perishing after 2 to 5 years. And while they’re pumping out those eggs, they can easily suffer from nutritional deficiencies and bone problems.

People have also bred chickens for size, feather and egg color, and behavior (I’ll refrain from discussing the commercial chicken meat industry, which has its own breeding priorities). Indeed, breeding has created more extreme varieties of chicken than of any other animal species except Canis lupus familiaris (dog). All our most affectionate hens have been Orpingtons of one sort or another: no accident, as most Orpingtons tend to be friendly.

Is it right for one species to interfere so much with the evolution of another? Not many humans seem interested in entertaining the question. One could conclude that chickens have benefitted from their relationship with people: Gallus gallus is by far the most numerous bird species (there are nearly 30 billion of them). So, humans have contributed to chickens’ evolutionary success. But that success depends entirely on chickens’ continued utility to a capricious ape whose overall activities are wrecking the biosphere. My advice: If you love feathered creatures, keeping chickens can teach you a lot about them, but you’ll do far more for this broad class of animals by creating or restoring habitat for wild birds.

In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives. Chickens are smart, emotional animals. They can decimate local insect populations, but they are resilient and courageous. They deserve our respect.

Oh, did I mention the poop? There’s lots of it. Everywhere. Every day. It’s good for the compost pile and the garden.

Recommended reading:

Andrew Lawler, Why the Chicken Crossed the World

Sy Montgomery, What the Chicken Knows

Melissa Coughey, How to Speak Chicken

Theodore Xenophon Barber, The Human Nature of Birds

Gail Damerow, Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens

Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book

Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles

Joseph Barber, The Chicken: A Natural History

Clea Danaan, The Way of the Hen: Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens

www.backyardchickens.com

https://the-chicken-chick.com

https://welcometochickenlandia.com

I’m trying to determine whether it would be viable to do public appearances in support of my new book, a manifesto that carefully explains what the Left is, what it should fight for, and how radical demands are realistic.

On the one hand, early sales are promising, and there would be value in holding discussions about how the real Left outside the Democrats can rebuild.

On the other hand, travel is expensive so it’s only worthwhile if there is a host–bookstore, community group, library, university–to sponsor and to promote an event.

If you’re interested, and you have connections to such a host, please contact me: Rall.com/contact.

What IS the Left? What should we fight for? How can we rebuild outside of the Democrats? Order my latest book “WHAT’S LEFT” here at Rall.com. It comes autographed to the person of your choice, and I’ll deliver it anywhere. Cost including shipping is $29.95 in the USA.

The post “What’s Left” Book Tour? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title) – “deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, “The Apprentice,” while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people – red state and blue state – “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a human must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first ‘presentation of self’ on January 20th was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 Inspector Generals mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILLING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated Congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health/safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, “ Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people, families and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental and community necessities – many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, giveaways and with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts, take over more of the public lands, and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destruction against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide/slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder/starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by the Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85 percent, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title)—“deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, The Apprentice, while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people—red state and blue state—“YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a Human, must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first “presentation of self” on January 20 was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute, or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 inspectors general mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence, and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry, and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health and safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people, families, and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental, and community necessities—many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, and giveaways; with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts; take over more of the public lands; and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases, and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destructions against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food, and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder and starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population, and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by The Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85%, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild, and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

U.S. President Donald Trump has turned a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that spans three states on the southern border into a “military installation” to “address the emergency” he previously declared over unlawful immigration and drug trafficking. Trump’s memo authorizing this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally bars federal armed forces from conducting domestic law enforcement. The apparent plan is to let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people who cross the border unlawfully.

This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms. Moreover, it continues a pattern of the president stretching his emergency powers past their limits to usurp the role of Congress and bypass legal rights. He has misused a law meant to address economic emergencies to set tariffs on every country in the world. He declared a fake “energy emergency” to promote fossil fuel production. And he dusted off a centuries-old wartime authority to deport Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights violations.

As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.

The Posse Comitatus Act and the Military Purpose Doctrine

Last week, the military announced that soldiers deployed on the New Mexico-Mexico border will have “enhanced authorities” because they are on land that has now been designated part of Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a military installation located more than 100 miles away. The new authorities include the power to “temporarily detain trespassers” on the “military installation” and “conduct cursory searches of trespassers... to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DOD) property.”

Searching and apprehending migrants would ordinarily run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from directly participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so is expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The law stems from an Anglo-American tradition, centuries older than the Constitution, of restraining military interference in civilian affairs. It serves as a critical check on presidential power and a vital safeguard for both personal liberty and democracy.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation.

Nonetheless, several exceptions exist. The most significant is the Insurrection Act—a law that Trump floated using to address unlawful migration (although for now, his secretaries of defense and homeland security are reportedly recommending against such a move). In authorizing soldiers to conduct apprehensions and detentions on lands that have been newly designated as a “military installation,” the president is relying on a lesser-known loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine.”

The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement. A textbook example is the circumstance in which a person has driven drunk onto a military base. Soldiers may legally detain the intruder until civilian law enforcement arrives to take them into custody. This does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act because the primary purpose of the military’s activity is not to enforce the laws against driving while impaired, but to maintain order on the base and protect military assets and personnel.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation. Federal troops thus have a legitimate military reason, the argument goes, to apprehend, search, and detain migrants without violating the Posse Comitatus Act and without the president needing to invoke the Insurrection Act at all.

Evaluating the Legality of the Order

Using the military purpose doctrine to justify direct military involvement in immigration enforcement is a transparent ruse to evade the Posse Comitatus Act without congressional authorization. The doctrine is meant to apply only in cases where any law enforcement benefit is purely incidental. Here, the situation is the opposite.

The nominal justification for apprehending and detaining migrants who cross the border is protecting the installation. But the installation itself was created to apprehend and detain migrants, as well as to secure their removal. In the memo, this is described as “sealing the border” and “repelling the invasion” at the border. No matter how the Trump administration frames those activities, however, they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental”—they are the reason for creating the installation. And apprehending migrants who “trespass” on the installation is the primary way in which this law enforcement mission will be furthered.

If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

This use of the military is fundamentally different from the border deployments that have occurred in recent presidential administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. The military’s role until now has been limited to logistical support, such as assisting border agents with surveillance, infrastructure construction, and transportation. Providing such support does not constitute direct participation in law enforcement, so it does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Having soldiers perform core law enforcement duties like apprehending or detaining people, however, steps over the legal boundary.

The move also skirts a separate statute requiring congressional approval of any Pentagon takeover of more than 5,000 acres of federal lands except “in time of war or national emergency.” Here, in order to transfer control of land from the Interior Department, Trump is relying on a declaration of national emergency he issued on January 20 to address the “invasion” at the southern border, in which he asserted that “our southern border is overrun.” But on March 2, Trump triumphantly posted on social media that “the Invasion of our Country is OVER,” adding that in the preceding month, “very few people came.” His administration continues to tout the fact that unlawful border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from March confirms a 95% decline in monthly unauthorized crossings.

Leaving aside the question of whether an emergency, properly defined, existed on January 20 (it didn’t), the Trump administration has made a powerful case that there is no emergency now. Trump should be revoking the emergency declaration, not relying on it to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense.

Why It Matters

Aside from legal concerns, there are practical reasons why the U.S. armed forces shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law. Federal troops are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they’re generally not trained for domestic law enforcement. Asking them to do law enforcement’s job creates risks to migrants, U.S. citizens who may inadvertently trespass on federal lands at the border, and the soldiers themselves. And it pulls our armed forces away from their core mission of protecting the United States from foreign adversaries at a time when the military is already stretched thin.

Using the military for border enforcement is also a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.

Trump’s misuse of emergency powers similarly has larger implications. Emergency declarations unlock enhanced powers contained in 150 different provisions of law. Many of these are far more potent than the ability to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense. They include the authority to take over or shut down communications facilities, freeze Americans’ assets, and control domestic transportation. If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

The Role of the Courts and Congress

Unfortunately, the president’s abuses could be difficult to check. The Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute, and those who violate it may be prosecuted. But it’s unclear whether violations may serve as a basis for migrants to challenge their detention. As for Trump’s misuse of emergency powers, courts generally are reluctant to probe a president’s decision that an emergency exists (although in this case, the administration’s own statements might be sufficient to overcome the presumption of deference). And as the law currently stands, it is very difficult for Congress to terminate a national emergency declaration or undo actions that presidents take using their emergency powers.

These challenges highlight the urgent need for Congress to establish meaningful checks on the use of emergency powers and domestic deployment authorities. Last year, legislation that would have made it much easier for Congress to terminate emergency declarations passed out of committees in the House and Senate with near-unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Similar legislation was introduced in January by Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The Brennan Center has also proposed several key changes to the Posse Comitatus Act that would close the loopholes that threaten to swallow the law.

It may not be possible to pass these reforms soon, but the fight against executive overreach is not just a short-term one. Understanding the ways in which Trump’s actions threaten the rule of law today can help build support for enacting reforms in the future.

It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.

U.S. President Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven’t escaped the threats.

You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to The New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they’ll fall out of their sockets.)

It’s probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they’re under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it’s still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.

Bad News

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he’s back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What’s new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.

Even before Trump won the election, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn’t followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper’s opinion section on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper’s editorial board and instituted AI-generated “political ratings” for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.

I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of The Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he’s been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby, and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.

It doesn’t help that other large media companies have recently capitulated to lawsuits that Trump, as one of his hobbies, filed or threatened to file. Last December, ABC News settled a defamation suit involving star anchor George Stephanopoulos’s description of Trump’s sexual abuse trial with an apology and $15 million for a Trump-related foundation. In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from 2021 over the company’s suspension of Trump’s social-media accounts in the wake of the January 6 assault on the Capitol. It agreed to pay him $25 million and, coincidentally (of course), tossed out all its DEI initiatives. Recently, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to mediation for a lawsuit Trump brought over editorial decisions made when “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Kamala Harris. (He later upped his demand to a whopping $20 billion in damages.) In all three cases, Trump’s legal claims were widely seen as weak, yet the companies chose not to test them in court.

Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump wasn’t satisfied with such groveling. He never will be. (He recently renewed pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS News’s license.) His need to dominate, which makes your average control freak look weak-kneed, keeps him demanding ever more obeisance. Take, for instance, his response to The Associated Press’ policy of continuing to call the body of water he renamed the “Gulf of America,” the “Gulf of Mexico.” He promptly banned AP reporters from covering most of his official events. Even after AP won a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds and the judge in the case, a Trump appointee no less, ordered the White House to lift all restrictions on the news agency, an AP reporter and photographer were still barred from a White House news conference on the very day the court order was to take effect.

AP, a 178-year-old cooperative, with four billion readers daily in nearly 100 countries, could afford to take the federal government to court. Many smaller news outlets can’t.

More Bad News

However much Donald Trump may overestimate his abilities, he is a pro at playing the media. His instinct, talent, skill—I don’t know exactly what to call it—is to read the room remarkably accurately, and his rooms are increasingly restricted to his boosters. He’s spent decades both courting and denigrating the press, all the while honing his innate sense of what makes news. You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

This is not for lack of trying. Back when newspapers delivered the news once or twice a day, reporters “worked a story,” filling in details to make it as complete as possible by deadline. Now, with our 24/7 news cycle, digitized news media, and myriad distractions, when news drops, reporters put up a quick placeholder—a few sentences on a website or live blog—and then add to it continually as the story and their understanding of it develop. The result is news dolloped out in bite-sized bits, digestible but seldom filling. Meanwhile, news outlets suffer from a journalistic version of FOMO (fear of missing out on a scoop), which can lead to their chasing dubious stories with sometimes unsettling consequences, as when multiple news outlets picked up a false report on X about Trump’s tariffs, which sent the stock market soaring and then erasing $2.4 trillion in value within half an hour.

Trump thrives in just such a context by carelessly creating chaos and a continuous loop of contradictory headlines. His former aide Steve Bannon seemed amused when he suggested in 2018 that the way to drive the media crazy was “to flood the zone with shit.” It’s a practice the humor-deficient Trump has ardently embraced.

Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better.

For a prime example, you need look no further than the staged unveiling of his tariff policies. Like a carnival barker calling out, “Step right up, ladies and gents, for the greatest tariff show on Earth!,” he teased for months about the tariffs to come, christening April 2 as “Liberation Day” and promising to divulge what they were then. That day dawned and percentages determined by a formula about as sophisticated as something scribbled on the back of an envelope were revealed to much fanfare and wall-to-wall press coverage. A few days later, some of the tariffs were imposed. A few days after that, many of them were paused, then some withdrawn, others left pending or threatened, and on (and on) it goes. With the policy changing by the hour, so did the rationales for it, leaving the media endlessly scurrying to catch up.

As the world economy tanked in response, news stories dutifully noted the justifications du jour, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s appraisal that it took “great courage” for Trump to “stay the course” as long as he did. (Most of the reciprocal tariffs lasted about 12 hours.) But the general tone of the reporting shifted, as if the media suddenly sensed that they could finally say out loud that the wannabe emperor had no clue. So I guess it is “the economy, stupid” (to cite President Bill Clinton’s aide James Carville), not civil liberties, healthcare, job security, historical accuracy, or any of the other basics, which I stupidly thought might tip the balance in reporting.

Some Good News

Tempting as it may be, the media can’t ignore what a president says. It’s unprofessional to abet the public’s ignorance. It’s also dangerous to democracy. An ill-informed populace is easily manipulated and, in regions without a local news source—in 2024, there were 206 “news deserts” in the United States, encompassing almost 55 million Americans—it’s hard to maintain a sense of community or organize to challenge bad governance. Still, amid all the chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration, the media are not defenseless. His endless efforts to undermine them attest to their continuing power and importance. Being of a practical turn of mind, I’ve culled some ideas for how to use that power from several sources and added a few of my own to come up with seven-and-a-half propositions for good journalism in the Age of Donald J. Trump.

1. Get the Story Right

If you think about it, the only thing journalists have going for them is that people believe them. Without that, their usefulness ceases to exist. So, it’s important (particularly in the Age of Trump) that they call out lies and flimflam in clear, accurate, precise, straightforward language, including in headlines. For example, Trump’s desire to turn Gaza into a golf course is ethnic cleansing, not a “plan to rebuild” Gaza, and tariffs are “import taxes,” not an incentive to reindustrialize America. It’s necessary also to keep repeating the truth in the face of lies: Immigrants, for instance, are considerably less likely to be imprisoned for crimes than U.S.-born people (though you certainly wouldn’t know that from listening to Trump and crew), and pulling funding from universities is as much about curbing antisemitism as Covid was about clearing our sinuses.

2. Supply Significance, Context, Proportion, and Consequences

Key tasks for reporters and analysts are to separate the substantial from the silly, the consequential from the sensational, and random musings from faits accomplis, then to report the hell out of the real issues, keep them prominent within the churn of news cycles, and explain why they matter. A place to begin is by giving less attention to Trump’s executive orders—aptly defined by a law professor as “just press releases with nicer stationery”—and more attention to the effects of his policies that get enacted. And while his ruminations may bear noting, they could appear, not in headlines, but on, say, page 11 (or its online equivalent), which is where The Boston Globe relegated its report of the local 100,000-strong Hands Off! protest.

3. Heed Framing

News stories are a snapshot of a specific, often fleeting moment during which reporters decide what to include, what to leave out, and what to emphasize. The problem arises when conventional thinking and herd instinct solidify those choices as the only choices. There may be just two dominant American political parties, for instance, but there are other political forces at work in the country and we’d all benefit if they weren’t covered primarily as nuisances or threats. And while gyrations of the stock market matter, they matter less to most people than gyrations in their rents or mortgages, grocery bills, or prospects for retirement.

4. Resist Euphemisms, Circumlocutions, and Normalizing the Abnormal

The term “sanewashing”—reporting Trump’s loony pronouncements as if they were lucid thoughts or comments—hasn’t been popping up much since the 2024 presidential campaign ended. It’s been replaced by the tendency of mainstream journalism to reinforce the status quo, as when the CEO of CNN instructed his staff to omit mention of Trump’s felonies and his two impeachments in their inauguration coverage. Or maybe it’s been folded into the journalistic task of trying to make sense of events—what The Atlantic‘s editor Jeffrey Goldberg called a “bias toward coherence”—which presented the schoolyard taunts about tariffs slung between Trump advisors Elon Musk and Peter Navarro as if they were serious policy discussions.

5. Lead With Empathy

They’re called news stories for a reason. As cheap as tug-the-heartstrings journalism can be, readers, listeners, and viewers pay attention to stories about people, especially when they’re like them. So, while USAID staff getting locked out of their offices by Elon Musk’s DOGE may not resonate with many Americans, parents whose kids are locked out of daycare because its funding was cut by Musk, a billionaire father of perhaps more children than he can keep track of, probably will.

6. Control the Message

Here’s the central messaging thing about Trump: He’s remarkably skilled at lassoing any discussion, any topic he brings up, and holding onto it. That means the media, whose relationship with politicians should be inherently adversarial, all too often starts out on the defensive if it tries to hold him accountable for his words and deeds. Of course, he never apologizes, never takes responsibility for anything, never rules anything out, and never admits to error or failure. Instead, when he says something outlandish and gets called on it, he doubles down and dispatches his minions to repeat and embellish it. The media then amplify and discuss it, as if it were actual governance, rather than gibberish, whim, or theatrics. Which means that we get stories about what Trump said and then stories about the stories about what he said, and on and on until he comes up with a new distraction.

7. Be Creative, Adventuresome, and Strategic, and Always, Always Stick up for Each Other

This is hardly the first time the press has faced government hostility, and the American news media have struggled for years to overcome skepticism and win over tough audiences. Trade publications, podcasts, newsletters, and other independent and niche outlets fill some gaps and help engage not-so-obvious audiences, but standing up to power can be a very lonely task. In a time when even Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski admits to being scared, self-censorship can seem like an all too appealing choice. So it’s essential for other journalists to unite to resist unfair restrictions on any journalist, as even Newsmax and Fox News did against Trump’s treatment of AP. Journalists can also highlight the courage of their colleagues to let them know they’re not alone.

Of course, just about all of the above costs money, so my final nudge is not to journalists but to those of us who value good journalism. Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better. For all the deserved criticism of the American media, they remain one of the strongest pillars propping up what’s left of democracy in a time that’s been anything but good for the First Amendment. We can’t afford to let them topple.

The Trump administration’s partial budget plan released Friday is just its latest repudiation of the Trump campaign’s promises to help people struggling at the margins of the economy—an economy that President Donald Trump’s misguided tariff policies are threatening to tank.

This partial budget does not discuss the president’s intended tax breaks—tilted to the well off—or policies he will include (like those he supports as part of the reconciliation bill) to take food assistance and health coverage away from people who need them to meet their basic needs and to make college more expensive. The full budget will come later. But while the administration’s partial plan is limited to the part of the budget that Congress funds through the annual appropriations process, its proposal to cut that funding by nearly one-quarter is plenty bad enough, harming people, communities, and the economy.

During the campaign, President Trump said, “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But his budget proposes a devastating cut to rental assistance—which makes rent affordable for 10 million people—reducing funding by $27 billion below the amount provided in 2025 across five programs. This would cause millions of people to lose assistance they need to pay the rent each month, placing them at risk of eviction and homelessness.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy.

These cuts would likely grow even deeper over time, since the budget would also consolidate multiple rental assistance programs into to a block grant that would be more vulnerable to cuts in the future. The budget also would impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance (apparently except for seniors and people with disabilities), a policy that would abruptly evict or end assistance for many low-paid workers and others who aren’t able to afford market rents after that period.

In addition, the budget proposes severe cuts to other housing programs, such as sharply reducing funding for housing and other services for people experiencing homelessness, cutting housing resources for Indigenous people, and eliminating funding for local agencies protecting people from housing discrimination and other fair housing violations, and block grants that fund affordable housing and community development at the local level.

The president also said “your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline—all can be cut down in half,” but this budget eliminates LIHEAP, the program that helps low-income households afford to heat and cool their homes; reduces availability of the most affordable sources of energy—solar and wind—by cutting efforts to bring these sources online and make them available in low-income communities; and cuts programs that reduce energy waste.

As the President’s ill-conceived trade policies threaten to tip the country into a recession later this year, the budget disinvests from key sources of long-run economic growth. The budget cuts the National Science Foundation (NSF) by more than half and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by about 40%. This is short-sighted: NSF and NIH funding supports foundational research that spurs innovation, leading to greater economic growth. The private sector will not support this work because there is no financial incentive to do so.

The budget also disinvests from America’s future workers, cutting $4.5 billion from K-12 education despite the Trump campaign’s statement that “we are going to keep spending our money” on education.

Most fundamentally, the budget fails to propose a serious agenda for the U.S. economy or for people who haven’t been included enough in the country’s overall prosperity. The budget presents no agenda for addressing housing or childcare affordability, improving educational outcomes for those our education system doesn’t serve well, maintaining and strengthening innovation, or broadening opportunity.

And today’s funding request again breaks President Trump’s repeated promises to protect Social Security, including “Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.” On paper, the administration provides the same amount of funding next year as this year, but this is not enough to keep up with inflation, fixed expenses, and growing demand as the number of Social Security recipients grows as the population ages. The administration has already pushed out 7,000 Social Security Administration staff despite having the money to pay them, and it has already made it harder for seniors and people with disabilities to get the Social Security benefits they’ve earned. This is not what Congress intended when it passed this year’s budget.

The administration is claiming these massive cuts are necessary under the guise of fiscal responsibility, but the proposed $2.5 billion cut to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding—primarily for tax enforcement—reveals that any commitment to fiscal responsibility is limited. Funding for IRS enforcement pays for itself multiple times over: It provides the staff and technology to catch wealthy tax cheats and encourage everyone to pay the taxes they legally owe.

The administration justifies many cuts by saying that states are better positioned to cover the costs of various public services and infrastructure needs. This ignores the federal government’s important role in ensuring adequate investment nationwide, including in states and communities that face more economic challenges. The problems would be compounded by potentially large cost shifts in Medicaid and SNAP being considered in Congress. States would face even greater challenges—and the impacts on people and communities would grow—in a recession when state revenues fall but they still have to balance their budgets.

The president’s budget counts on funding in the emerging tax and budget bill for immigration enforcement. With that, it continues to prioritize a mass deportation apparatus that has gone too far already by disappearing people without due process and ending lawful immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people.

Since taking office, the Trump administration, often acting through DOGE, has unilaterally frozen congressionally approved funding, implemented large-scale staffing reductions that are harming public services, and threatened the security of people’s personal information. Having frozen funding in contradiction to enacted funding laws, the president’s budget now asks Congress to codify and continue these unilateral cuts next year, including through the proposed cuts to NIH, NSF, and the Department of Education. Codifying these cuts would make congressional supporters accomplices in this administration’s endeavor to make government less effective in finding cures for diseases, maintaining American technological leadership, and getting a good education.

The president’s harmful agenda goes well beyond what was released today. The president and his congressional allies are moving forward on a budget and tax bill that deeply cuts health coverage through Medicaid, food assistance through SNAP, and college aid to partially pay for expensive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy.

At the same time, the president’s chaotic, indiscriminate, and steep tariffs have sharply increased the risk of recession, which could lead to a rise in unemployment and the number of people who need help to afford the basics, just as those supports are slated for cuts.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy—and plan a better course for the country.

What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.

These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."

The AI Disalignment Ruse

Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.

The Bezos/Musk Extra-Terrestrial Schemes

Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."

If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.

And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."

Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.

Counter Modes of Wisdom

There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.

I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.

The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.

Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?

The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.

Entangled Humanists and the Academy

It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."

For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.

They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.

On April 8, 2010, the United States and Russia signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), a landmark achievement that capped and reduced deployed nuclear arsenals, symbolizing hope for a safer, more stable world. Now, 15 years later, as the expiration of New START approaches in February 2026, the risks of a renewed nuclear arms race loom large. Over the past four years, repeated Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine have dramatically weakened the “nuclear taboo.” The risk of a potentially civilization-ending nuclear war has risen to levels some experts say is at least has high as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rather than turning back from the brink of nuclear war, nuclear armed states are accelerating nuclear weapons spending. The U.S. alone is estimated to spend $756 billion on nuclear weapons in the next ten years.

Amid this urgent landscape, the just introduced McGovern-Tokuda resolution - H.Res.317 provides a transformative framework to confront these challenges, offering a comprehensive roadmap toward a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative. Reps. McGovern and Tokuda understand that the story of nuclear weapons will have an ending. It will either be the end of nuclear weapons or the end of human civilization. We have been incredibly fortunate throughout the nuclear weapons era. As Robert McNamara famously declared after the Cuban Missile Crisis, “We lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”

Hoping for good luck is not an acceptable security policy and, sooner or later, our luck will run out.

The policies of the nuclear weapons states are essentially a hope that this luck will continue. But hoping for good luck is not an acceptable security policy and, sooner or later, our luck will run out. As William Perry has warned: “nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security, they endanger it.”

Comprehensive Roadmap Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

House Resolution 317 is not merely a legislative initiative; it is a bold declaration of humanity's collective determination to eliminate nuclear weapons and secure a future without weapons that risk the end of human civilization. This resolution encapsulates the vision of Back from the Brink, a grassroots movement unwavering in its mission to abolish the global nuclear threat. Building upon its steadfast advocacy, the coalition sees this legislation as a step forward in the fight for global disarmament and an unequivocal commitment to a nuclear-free future. Back from the Brink has supported initiatives to reduce nuclear risks, including the prior version of this resolution during the 118th Congress. Now leading efforts to rally support for the new resolution, the coalition recognizes this legislation as a vital step toward global disarmament.

The resolution complements the Foster resolution, H.Res.100, by calling for arms control negotiations with Russia and China while maintaining a focus on broader disarmament efforts. It explicitly opposes nuclear testing, supports theRadiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), to address the legacy of harm caused by nuclear weapons, and prioritizes a just economic transition for the nuclear labor force. Denise Duffield of Back from the Brink encapsulates the resolution’s importance: “The McGovern-Tokuda resolution is more than a statement—it’s a detailed, actionable roadmap to nuclear disarmament. It provides a clear strategy for reducing nuclear risks, ending outdated policies, championing justice for impacted communities, and advancing a future free from the threat of nuclear war.”

A Call for Leadership and Cooperation

The Arms Control Association and the Council for a Livable World are among the notable organizations supporting the McGovern-Tokuda resolution. Their endorsements underscore the resolution’s potential to restore U.S. leadership in reducing nuclear dangers. Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, emphasizes, “This timely resolution outlines a practical plan for action to restore U.S. leadership to lead the world back from the nuclear brink and build a safer world for our children and generations to come.”

John Tierney, Executive Director of the Council for a Livable World, points out the pragmatic benefits of the resolution, stating, “We cannot risk letting nuclear threats increase. That is why Council for a Livable World supports Congressman McGovern’s H.Res.317 to lower nuclear risks and promote diplomacy to work toward a world free from nuclear threats.”

Addressing the Legacy of Harm

The resolution goes beyond arms control and disarmament negotiations—it addresses the devastating legacy of economic harm caused by nuclear weapons, both past and present. Today, the United States spends billions annually on nuclear weapons programs, diverting critical resources away from urgent human and community needs. According to this year'snuclear spending tax calculator, the U.S. allocated over $94 billion to nuclear weapons programs in FY 2024 alone. These funds could have been used to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program for seven years or fund HUD’s mandatory affordable housing programs for nine years. Instead, this spending perpetuates environmental contamination, denies justice to impacted communities, and undermines investments in education, healthcare, and sustainable development. The McGovern-Tokuda resolution offers a path to redirect these resources toward building a safer, more equitable future.

The United States spends billions annually on nuclear weapons programs, diverting critical resources away from urgent human and community needs.

It also addresses the devastating legacy of radiological impacts. From environmental contamination to human exposure, the communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons production and testing deserve justice, healthcare, and full remediation. Martha Dina Argüello of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles describes the resolution as “a truly comprehensive nuclear disarmament framework—one that addresses the past and current harm caused by nuclear weapons and the need to care for and provide a just economic transition for the people and communities whose livelihoods depend on nuclear weapons.”

The Time to Act Is Now

The 15th anniversary of New START is a powerful reminder of what can be achieved through bold leadership and collective action. As the treaty’s expiration looms and the threat of nuclear catastrophe grows, the stakes could not be higher. The McGovern-Tokuda resolution provides a clear and actionable path to eliminate these risks, but success depends on all of us. Now is the time to take a stand. Join theBack from the Brink campaign to amplify this critical call for nuclear disarmament. Get involved, raise your voice, and rally your community to support this transformative resolution. Together, we can build a future free of nuclear weapons—one that saves the world and imbues our lives with profound hope and meaning. Take action today—the world is counting on you.

By Ralph Nader May 2, 2025 Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title) – “deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.” Launched from his TV program, “The Apprentice,” while a failed businessman, Trump, using the…

In the early hours of May 2, the quiet of night was shattered aboard the Conscience, a civilian vessel anchored in international waters, 17 kilometers off the coast of Malta. Aboard were 18 crew members and passengers, jolted from sleep by the sound of two explosions. Flames and smoke filled the air. The ship had just been struck—by what the crew members say were drone attacks.

The very day of the attack, more passengers from 21 countries were waiting in Malta to be ferried out to join the Conscience. Among those slated to join the ship were world-renowned environmentalist Greta Thunberg, retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright, and longtime CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry.

The Conscience is part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a network of international activists that has been challenging Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza since 2008.

“The U.S. condemns the Houthis for stopping ships carrying weapons to Israel—and bombs Yemen mercilessly for it. But will they condemn Israel for attacking a peaceful ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza?”

The group alleges that the attack came from Israel—an allegation bolstered by a CNN investigation. According to CNN, flight-tracking data from ADS-B Exchange showed that an Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft departed from Israel early Thursday afternoon and flew at low altitude over eastern Malta for an extended period. While the Hercules did not land, its path brought it in proximity to the area where the Conscience was later attacked. The plane returned to Israel approximately seven hours later. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the flight data.

The ship suffered significant damage, but fortunately, no one was hurt. That was not the case when the Freedom Flotilla was attacked in 2010. This May 2 attack comes just weeks before the 15th anniversary of the infamous raid on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship that led a previous flotilla to Gaza in 2010. On May 31 of that year, Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship in international waters, killing 10 people and injuring dozens. The Mavi Marmara had been carrying over 500 activists and humanitarian supplies. That attack drew condemnation from around the world and calls for an international investigation—calls that Israel dismissed.

One of this year’s flotilla organizers, Ismail Behesti, is the son of a man killed in the 2010 raid. In videos circulating after the recent strike, Behesti is seen walking through the damaged interior of the Conscience, his voice resolute as he condemns what he believes was another Israeli act of aggression against civilians on a humanitarian mission.

“People are asking how Israel can get away with attacking a civilian ship in international waters,” said Tighe Barry, speaking from the port in Malta. “But since October 8, 2024, Israel has shown complete disregard for international law—from bombing civilian neighborhoods to using starvation as a weapon by blocking food from entering Gaza. This is just one more example of its impunity.”

“Where is the outrage?” Barry continued. “The U.S. condemns the Houthis for stopping ships carrying weapons to Israel—and bombs Yemen mercilessly for it. But will they condemn Israel for attacking a peaceful ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza?”

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition and activist groups such as CODEPINK are calling on governments and international bodies to speak out and take action.

The Conscience was carrying no weapons. It posed no threat. Its only crime was daring to challenge a brutal siege and slaughter that the United Nations itself has condemned as illegal and inhumane. That’s the real threat Israel fears—not the ship itself, but the global solidarity it represents.

So, will the world speak up about Israel’s latest outrage? Or will this, too, be quietly buried beneath the waves?

Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aiming to eliminate federal funding for NPR and PBS. As a rationale for the move, the White House also released a so-called “fact sheet” detailing what it claims is evidence of “left-wing propaganda.”

Even if that were true—and it’s not—any government attempt to silence the press based on viewpoint is plainly unconstitutional. Expect this latest Trump order to face a comprehensive legal challenge, similar to other successful efforts in the courts to block illegal actions from the administration.

Trump’s ongoing attacks on public media are part of the administration’s concerted efforts to shut down journalism that displeases the president. Too often commercial outlets, including those controlled by conglomerates like Disney (ABC) and Paramount (CBS), are caving to official pressure, putting their profits before their democratic principles. This is why an independent, publicly funded noncommercial media system—one that holds power accountable—is essential to healthy democracies around the world.

If we care about democracy, we should spend more—not less—on public media.

Here are five ways this latest Trump order is an assault on democracy in the United States.

1. Serious First Amendment Concerns

The White House made it clear that it’s taking this action based on Trump’s unfounded claims about coverage from NPR and PBS. This most thin-skinned of presidents has made it his job—and that of his lapdog censor at the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Brendan Carr—to threaten and intimidate any news outlet that challenges, or even questions, his 100-day power grab. With this latest move, he’s taking it one step further, pushing to defund and destroy any public media outlet that doesn’t service his authoritarian agenda. Yet the First Amendment very clearly and succinctly prohibits the government from making any laws (and by extension, any executive orders) “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

2. Goes Against the Will of the American People

In poll after poll, people of all political stripes say that federal support for NPR and PBS is taxpayer money “well spent.” In other polling, Americans find PBS to be the most-trusted U.S. institution, with 63 percent of respondents expressing “a great deal of trust” or “some trust” in the network. The same survey found PBS is the “most-trusted news network” in the country. To eliminate funding for these media institutions clearly goes against the will of the majority of Americans—and that's not the way a democracy is supposed to function.

3. Undermines a Democratic Society

“Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the United States impoverishes its public media infrastructures,” writes professor Victor Pickard, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Media, Inequality, and Change Center (and Free Press' board chair). Pickard should know. In 2021, he co-authored a global survey with Professor Timothy Neff, which found that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy—with deeper public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage and lower levels of extremist views. If we care about democracy, we should spend more—not less—on public media.

4. Expands Local “News Deserts,” Cutting Communities Off From Information They Need to Participate in Civic Life

As local newsrooms downsize or outright shut down, public-media stations fill a void. Penny Abernathy, at University of North Carolina's Center for Media Law and Policy, has extensively documented the spread of news deserts across the country. Local newspapers are closing at an exponential rate, and many local radio stations have hollowed out their newsrooms and replaced programming with nationally syndicated talk formats, often hosted by far-right figures. The expansion of news deserts across the country is a democratic issue with profound implications for our communities. Local NPR and PBS stations often provide the only local news in countless communities—and provide lifesaving information during emergencies.

The expansion of news deserts across the country is a democratic issue with profound implications for our communities.

5. An Attempted End-Run Around Congress

Congress—not the president—has the power to craft our federal budget. While the president makes spending proposals, Congress ultimately considers, amends and approves them. The nation’s founders created the system in this way to specifically put federal spending outside of this sort of control. With this executive order, Trump is attempting to short-circuit this long-established check against runaway executive power.

With the right-leaning composition of Congress, few expect GOP lawmakers to speak out against Trump's move. But past Republican-led efforts to zero out funding for public broadcasting have met fierce opposition from people across the country who are ready to pick up their phones, call their representatives and senators, and tell them to save public media.

“All of us who care about an independent press, an informed populace, a responsive government and a thriving democracy have a stake in the outcome of this fight,” says my colleague Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press. “If we unite to defend public media—and I believe we can and will prevail—then we might just save our democracy, too.”

He's exactly right.

Streaming Anytime, LIVE 10 AM Eastern time!

Get ready for TMI with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan, as they dive into a seismic legal showdown that’s rocking the core of U.S. immigration policy! This week, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, Fernando Rodriguez Jr., dropped a bombshell ruling that’s sending shockwaves through the administration’s playbook. Tune in as Ted and Manila unpack the dramatic decision that struck down Donald Trump’s controversial use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process—a move that saw over 130 migrants fast-tracked to El Salvador, skipping standard hearings.

In a scathing 36-page opinion, Judge Rodriguez dismantled the administration’s legal stance, ruling that the wartime-era law—meant for enemy nationals during conflict—cannot be weaponized for routine immigration enforcement. The decision, which found Trump’s actions in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, marks a historic first in challenging the misuse of this centuries-old statute. While the ruling is limited to South Texas, its implications are monumental, potentially shaping future legal battles nationwide as Trump weighs an appeal. Immigrant rights advocates, including the ACLU, are hailing the decision as a victory for justice.

Expect a gripping discussion as Ted and Manila bring their signature blend of sharp insight and unfiltered analysis to this landmark case. Why does this ruling matter? It’s a pivotal moment in the fight over presidential power, immigration rights, and the rule of law. Don’t miss this episode of TMI—where hard-hitting truths meet fearless commentary. Catch it live and join the conversation that everyone will be talking about!

 

 

The post TMI Show Ep 130: “Judge Nixes Trump’s Deportation Power Grab” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Don’t look now, but the federal government just notched not one, but two, major antitrust victories against one of the biggest corporations on Earth.

In the past few decades, digital monopolists like Google have built far-reaching empires impacting almost every facet of our online lives. Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.

Back in 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google for illegally monopolizing the search market. In 2023, this was followed by a second suit over the company’s digital advertising monopoly. In the first case, federal Judge Amit Mehta stated the obvious in his ruling that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is a monopolist; in April, the DOJ pushed an ambitious remedy proposal to dismantle its search monopoly. Google was dealt another blow in April in the second case, where judge Leonie Brinkema agreed that Google has illegally monopolized online advertising.

Antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior.

There’s no question that Google’s monopoly is looking more fragile than ever. Even as Big Tech CEOs have bent over backwards to curry favor with the Trump administration, they’ve failed to stop antitrust efforts against them from continuing. And at a time when Meta is also in the antitrust hot seat in court, there’s real reason for optimism when it comes to finally taking Big Tech to task.

Nevertheless, when you consider the scale of Google’s empire, the search and digital advertising lawsuits should be seen as just the beginning of the battle. Sure, anyone who’s used a computer understands just how ubiquitous Google’s search engine is. But less obvious to most people is that it is set to control a media empire bigger than Disney, all while working to dominate the self-driving car market and gobble up promising startups. This doesn’t even get into the AI factor: As the DOJ noted in court, the rapid pace of AI development could further entrench Google’s monopoly if left unchecked.

Take YouTube, Google’s most powerful asset after search. As antitrust suits against Google in the U.S. and abroad have piled up in recent years, YouTube has often felt like a threat hidden in plain sight. Take the issue of advertising on YouTube, for example. The Information, a tech-focused publication, noted last year that Google has a policy of requiring would-be YouTube advertisers to use Google’s in-house DV360 tool. The impact of this rule has, predictably, been to put more money in Google’s pockets while deepening advertisers’ reliance on its services.

For $1.6 billion in 2006, Google was able to take control of what today is the world’s largest video platform, with the deal avoiding antitrust action. Almost 20 years later, there remains no real competitor to YouTube: Though TikTok and Instagram’s Reels compete with YouTube when it comes to short-form video, the service is without a peer in long-form, monetizable content.

In June 2024, a coalition of advocacy groups called on the DOJ to scrutinize YouTube. In their letter, they noted that the platform’s dominance is propped up by bundling practices that make it nearly impossible for rivals to compete. Of specific concern is that smart TVs emerging as a norm in U.S. households could allow Google and YouTube to cement its dominance in home entertainment.

Few moves better illustrate Google’s expansionist mindset (and arrogance in the face of antitrust lawsuits) than its bid to acquire Wiz. Though not a household name, there’s a reason that Google is intent on acquiring it, even after its initial bid was turned down. Despite launching just five years ago, Wiz has grown so fast that it is now used by roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies. By acquiring Wiz, Google will make other corporate giants even more dependent on its services, further fortifying its monopoly status.

Much of the coverage of the Wiz deal centers on its price tag, and for good reason. At $32 billion dollars, the Wiz acquisition stands to be the most expensive in Google’s history. This isn’t just notable because it is occurring in the face of multiple antitrust showdowns. But more unusual is that this figure is 30 times larger than Wiz’s expected revenue for 2025. While the math may seem peculiar at first, there’s likely more than meets the eye here.

Few have better insight into Google’s anti-competitive behavior than Jonathan Kanter, who took the company to court twice when he led the DOJ Antitrust Division under former President Joe Biden. In a recent CNBC interview, Kanter posited that the deal could be a “Trojan horse for Google to get access to data that is increasingly becoming out of its reach.”

In 2006, federal regulators fumbled the ball by allowing the acquisition of YouTube to go through unscathed. The next year, the Federal Trade Commission made the mistake of allowing Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a deal that would help build and cement the company’s digital advertising dominance. But two decades later, antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior. As federal officials work to correct the mistakes of the past, they should continue taking a multifaceted approach to Google’s monopoly.

Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.

Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for—at least some of us—ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil—more than any country ever (yes, ever!)—and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”

Worse yet—I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks—“we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?

Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us.

In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants—no matter that his mother was one—is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.

Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.

Honestly, that “drill, baby, drill” phrase of his couldn’t have been blunter, could it? And worse yet, unlike so much else that he’s said, he really meant it! Now that he’s back in the White House for a second time, he’s already doing his damnedest to increase drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States and globally, while he’s determined to bring back the worst of all greenhouse-gas producers, coal. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s been doing his damnedest as well to stop, if not humanity, then at least Americans from producing energy in ways that won’t pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Only his recent tariffs may stand in the way of his push to get oil companies to drill ever more.)

And hey, the president who hates “big, ugly windmills” has already been at work (if you don’t mind my using the word) torching wind-energy projects, including recently Empire Wind 1, which was to be the first major power project of its sort in a planned buildup of wind farms off the coast of New York State. Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us, not if it in any way hurts the fossil-fuel industry (which put so many millions of dollars into his recent reelection campaign). And similarly, his administration is planning to place tariffs of up to 3,521% (no, that is not a misprint!) on solar panels imported from Southeast Asia. I mean, you get the idea, right?

Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? Or rather, once upon a time, if you had done so, no one would have believed you. And yet here we are, watching this planet on its way down, down, down, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion, with not just a single helping hand but at least two of them from the president of the United States. And if that isn’t apocalyptic, what is? In fact, it isn’t faintly unreasonable, when it comes to climate change, to call him (in Mafia terms) the Apocalyptic Don.

A World of Nukes

Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity—that is, us—written all over it.

After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6 and 9, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as—forget global warming—a “nuclear winter.” We could by now destroy ourselves (or at least millions or even, over time, billions of us) with more or less the snap of a nuclear finger. Under the circumstances, consider it a largely unnoted and unmentioned miracle that, almost 80 years later, while such weaponry has spread far and wide, there has never been another Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-style catastrophe, no less one for Planet Earth itself (in terms of the potential destructiveness of such a nuclear winter and the large-scale global famine that would follow it).

Still, here’s the strange thing (or, in the age of Donald Trump, perhaps it would be safer to say, a strange thing): nuclear weapons and what they could do to this planet are distinctly not in the news anymore, with the sole exception not of the weaponry now possessed by nine countries—the United States, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—but of the possible future nuclear arsenal of a nonnuclear power, Iran. In 2018, if you remember, Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal by which that country had agreed never to make such weaponry, but he’s now back in negotiations with its leaders on a similar agreement.

What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating?

And here’s the even stranger thing, so let me mention it a second time. Consider it the unmentioned miracle—yes, a genuine miracle—of our era (one otherwise remarkably lacking in them): In the nearly 80 years since that second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki, while nuclear weapons have proliferated and grown potentially ever more devastating on Planet Earth, not one has ever been used again.

Here’s what makes that strange indeed, even possibly miraculous: Nuclear weapons aside, it seems as if, at any moment, some of us humans are always at war. At this moment, in fact, at least three devastating wars are underway—in Ukraine, Gaza and associated areas of the Middle East, and Sudan, two of them involving nuclear powers (Russia and Israel).

Today, such world-ending weaponry can still be delivered by plane as in 1945, or by land-based missiles, or missiles on submarines and, according to the Federation of American Scientists, there are now an estimated 12,331 nukes in the arsenals of the nine nuclear powers, ranging from 5,449 in Russia’s and 5,277 in the American one to, at the other end of the scale, 90 for Israel and 50 for North Korea.

And don’t for a second assume that those nine will be the last countries to create nuclear arsenals.

Think, for instance, of South Korea, facing a nuclear-armed North Korea, or, yes, Iran, facing a nuclear-armed Israel. And yet, except for the years when such weaponry was tested in the open or underground (something the Trump administration has at least considered doing again), not one has ever been used.

Of course, recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said his country “reserved the right” to use what are now known as “tactical” nuclear weapons (most of which are significantly more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in his war on Ukraine, but so far at least that’s been an empty threat. And yes, China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal at a rapid pace, making it the third great nuclear power after the U.S. and Russia to have the fate of the Earth in its hands.

And when it comes to my own country, unlike with climate change, Donald Trump has long seemed distinctly anti-apocalyptic when it comes to such weaponry. As he once put it, “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and”—referring to Russia and China—“they’re building nuclear weapons.” In a 2018 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he even called such weaponry “the biggest problem in the world” and has long warned of the possibility of a devastating “World War III.”

But no matter, the country he now rules (more or less) is still spending $75 billion annually and, as of now, planning to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to update or—the term of the day—“modernize” the American nuclear arsenal, while Russia and China are both working to update or, in China’s case, vastly expand theirs.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, that our world has not been devastated by nuclear weapons should, under the circumstances, be considered little short of miraculous.

Nuclear Winter or Climate-Change Summer?

Oh, and in case you feel relieved that, after so many decades, humanity hasn’t destroyed itself, despite having the ability to do so, take a breath. After all, it’s increasingly possible that, at some future moment, this planet could be blown apart without human beings initially doing much of anything. Yes, I’m thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), or worse yet, artificial general intelligence (AGI). After all, American military commanders like Air Force General Anthony J. Cotton are already talking about how “AI will enhance our decision-making capabilities” when it comes to nuclear weaponry and, even though he also warns that we should never allow AI to make nuclear decisions for us, letting another “intelligence” loose in the nuclear realm seems anything but a safe or sound thing to do.

Indeed, who knows what a future independent intelligence might decide to do with such weaponry on this planet of ours?

And there’s another thing that’s seldom thought about: What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating? After all, there’s no reason to believe that there are only two conceivable ways to do in a world like ours.

Consider all of this, after a fashion, both a story of epic failure and, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, strange success.

Still, isn’t it odd that, although we don’t often think about it, at any moment we live on the edge of ultimate destruction, whether immediately via a nuclear war or in a long-term fashion via a slow-motion version of the destruction of this planet, leading not to nuclear winter but to what might be thought of as climate-change summer? And yet, while the reality of climate change has at least led to major protests in recent times, the continued nuclear arming of this country and the planet has not.

Consider all of this a strange mixture of epic failure and eerie success in a world that—thank you, Donald Trump (but by no means just him)—is becoming more deadly by the month.

Whether in the short or long run, we, our children, and our grandchildren stand an all-too-unreasonable chance of living on a failed planet.

For nearly 90 years, the Social Security Administration has stood above the fray of partisan politics. The agency focused on its mission to deliver hard-earned benefits to every American, regardless of whom they voted for. Official communications channels, such as press releases, never endorsed or criticized a politician.

Indeed, the one time a president tried to politicize Social Security, he was forced to back down. Before benefits were automatically indexed to offset the rise in inflation, Congress would vote for increases that the president signed into law. Those benefits were accompanied by simple straightforward notices, stating that Congress had passed, and the president had signed into law, the enclosed increase.

Just prior to the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon explored the idea of substituting an insert with his signature and photo, hoping to imply that he alone was responsible for the increase (that, ironically, he in fact had opposed). The Social Security Commissioner threatened to publicly resign, and Nixon backed down.

Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are throwing that long-standing tradition of neutrality in the trash. The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it would be posting its official announcements on Elon Musk’s for-profit social media platform, alongside the platform’s paid advertisements. Consistent with that declaration, SSA’s official account posted a thread to Musk’s platform, X, that began “Former President Joe Biden is lying to Americans.”

This thread was filled with misleading information and used offensive, politically charged language, including “illegal aliens.” Contrary to the thread’s implications, undocumented immigrants do not and cannot receive Social Security. In fact, SSA has determined that undocumented workers have been subsidizing the rest of us to the tune of $25 billion a year, since many of them contribute (under fake Social Security numbers) but never receive a penny of their earned benefits.

This is a wildly inappropriate use of SSA’s resources. Like the rest of SSA, the agency’s official communications are paid for by the American people’s Social Security contributions. Normally, SSA is very efficient, spending less than a penny of every dollar contributed on administrative expenses. But now, some of that money is being wasted and misused on politics. Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.

Unfortunately, this is just one of many ways the Trump-Musk regime is weaponizing Social Security. After the governor of Maine publicly challenged Trump, Social Security canceled two contracts with her state.

The contracts, which the federal government has with every state, are extremely efficient and important. One of them allows parents to register their newborns for Social Security cards at the hospital, instead of dragging their babies to overcrowded field offices. The other quickly transmits when anyone in the state has died, so benefits can be immediately terminated.

To punish the governor of Maine, the Trump administration decided to punish the parents of newborns. After massive public outrage, the Trump administration was forced to reinstate the contracts.

Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.

Leaked emails leave no doubt that the Trump-handpicked acting head of SSA, Leland Dudek, terminated the contracts as political revenge. An SSA employee told Dudek that terminating the contracts “would result in improper payments and potential for identity theft.” Dudek replied, “Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” by whom he meant Maine Gov. Janet Mills.

Most chillingly of all, the Trump-Musk regime is illegally falsifying government data by adding people to Social Security’s death master file—despite knowing that they are still alive. Their initial targets are thousands of legal migrants, who have Social Security numbers so that they can work in the U.S.

When Social Security wrongly declares a living person dead, it ruins their life. Financial institutions, health insurance companies, and many other entities rely on Social Security’s data, and they react quickly when someone is declared dead. Imagine, in one keystroke from “Big Balls” or another Musk henchman, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more. This is financial murder.

Legal migrants are the first victims, but if the Trump-Musk regime gets away with this, they will not be the last. Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.

All of this is particularly outrageous because Social Security is a nonpartisan program. Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike all value their Social Security benefits and want to see them expanded, not cut. There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security.

The American people’s message for Trump and Musk is simple: There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from. Hands off.