America’s richest have never been richer. Our over 800 billionaires ended 2024 worth a combined $6.72 trillion. Today, almost two months later, Americans make up 14 of the 15 richest people in the world. Just these 14 alone hold a combined net wealth of over $2.5 trillion.

One predictable consequence of numbers like these: Our world’s “super yacht” sector is doing spectacularly well, as the annual Miami International Boat Show this month convincingly confirmed. The star of this year’s show turned out to be a super yacht nearly the length of a football field.

Drivers on America’s highways and byways, meanwhile, are now needing to make room for the newly released latest luxury super car from Rolls-Royce. The new Black Badge Spectre can “sprint from zero to 60 mph in just 4.1 seconds.” The base price: a mere $490,000.

We need more, let’s all agree, than shows and movies that skewer the rich.

Amid all this excess, the fortunes—and power—of America’s most fortunate just keep mounting ever higher. At the expense of the rest of us. The world’s wealthiest billionaire, Elon Musk, has found an particularly lucrative new hobby: axing the jobs of federal employees working at agencies that protect the health and economic security of average Americans.

Researchers and analysts worldwide are, for their part, continuing to carefully track the ongoing—and historic—concentration of America’s wealth. But Hollywood, these days, may actually be tracking this concentration even closer.

The wealth, privileges, and formidable clout of our richest, Hollywood understands, are outraging average Americans. We’ve become a nation hungry for entertainment that expresses that outrage, and Hollywood has been all too happy to offer up that entertaining.

“The popularity of ‘eat the rich’ media—like Saltburn, White Lotus, Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Infinity Pool, The Fall of the House of Usher, and the Knives Out movies—has reached a fever pitch,” as the culture critic Kelsey Eisen puts it.

This “vilification of the rich,” adds Eisen, regularly includes “rich characters undergoing some terrible event—ranging from marital troubles to shipwrecks to even death—as some sort of comeuppance for being wealthy.”

“We do love watching the 1% get their comeuppance, don’t we?” agrees Adrian Lobb, another widely published and perceptive writer on contemporary culture.

Lobb last year interviewed Jason Isaacs, one of the stars of The White Lotus, an Emmy Award-winning comedy drama created for HBO. Isaacs told Lobb that he also “absolutely” loves the joy of the “comeuppance” moments swirling all around us.

“We watch these people who look like they’ve got everything,” Isaacs explains, “and console ourselves with the fact that they’re miserable as hell.”

The White Lotus features “sun, sea, sex” and super-rich secrets, notes the culture analyst Lobb, “with a side order of slaying.” Each season of the series showcases a set of gastronomically obsessed wealthy out to enjoy life at an exotic luxury resort, with no guest, quips writer and filmmaker Alyssa De Leo, “safe from being skewered—figuratively and literally.”

Another skewering of the “successful” takes place, De Leo observes, in the widely acclaimed film Triangle of Sadness, the story of an ultra-wealthy cruise ship that sinks and leaves the survivors “stranded on a desert island” with “the upper-class guests lacking any resources or knowledge of how to survive.”

Still another popular entry in the “comeuppance” genre, the thriller You’re Next, has a wealthy family celebrating an anniversary in a country mansion that masked assailants suddenly besiege. The assailants turn out to be hired guns that some members of the family had retained to ensure and hasten the inheritances they saw as their due.

And atop the genre’s most-watched list sits Squid Game, “one of Netflix’s most important and impactful television shows ever.” This “too-close-for-comfort dystopian thriller,” the Observer’s Brandon Katz celebrates, “cleverly spins socioeconomic inequality into thriller life-or-death games.”

Are entertainments like these seriously acknowledging the deep-seated anxieties—and anger—that Americans are feeling today? Or is the entertainment industry just shamelessly exploiting those anxieties and that anger? Are “eat the rich” films and series, as the arts critic Kelsey Eisen muses, “moving the political conversation forward” or merely “providing soothing, satisfying, and self-congratulatory entertainment”?

Eisen herself sees the answer to that question through the latter prism. She considers “eat the rich” entertainment as “less of a political statement and more of a soothing concession,” as “basically class-anxiety pornography, pure catharsis without a real message or call to action.”

Even so, Eisen readily confesses that she does indeed enjoy watching many of today’s “eat the rich” shows and movies and does see real value “in using art to encapsulate popular sentiments and anxieties and to normalize progressive sentiments.”

So should you dare enjoy “class anxiety-soothing media”? Sure, Eisen concludes. Just be sure that this media “doesn’t soothe you into being too complacent to ever actually do anything” to end that class anxiety.

Amen. We need more, let’s all agree, than shows and movies that skewer the rich. We need, now more than ever, a political movement powerful enough to break the billionaire lockgrip on our future.

What is occurring now in the United States has very little to do with making the government more “efficient,” or rooting out “incompetence," or “depoliticizing” parts of government that should be nonpartisan.

Nor is it motivated chiefly by President Donald Trump’s desire get rid of “DEI” and “woke,” or “weaponize” law enforcement, or establish white Christian nationalism, or wreak vengeance on his enemies.

The real story is this.

In every part of the government that involves the use of force—the military, the investigation and prosecution of crimes, the authority to arrest, the capacity to hold individuals in jail—Trump is putting into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the United States.

As he tries to consolidate power, we must protect the institutions in our society still able to oppose Trump’s tyranny—independent centers of power that can stop or at least slow him.

He has purged (or is in the process of purging) at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Inspectors General, and the FBI, anyone who is not personally loyal to him.

Trump is rapidly gaining a personal monopoly on the use of force. This is his most fundamental goal. This is the essence of tyranny.

On Friday, he fired Air Force General CQ Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, as well as the principal military adviser to the president, secretary of defense, and National Security Council.

This was followed by the firings of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Jim Slife.

The media sees the firings as “part of a campaign to rid the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.” This may be part of Trump’s motivation, but it is not the major driver. The firings are part of a campaign to purge the Defense Department of leaders who are not totally loyal to Trump.

For Brown’s replacement, Trump has nominated retired Air Force Lt. General John Dan “Razin” Caine—a career fighter jet pilot.

Caine has not served in any of the positions—Joint Chiefs vice chairman, chief of staff for one of the branches of the armed service, or head of a combatant command—that nominees are legally required to have held in order to be nominated. By law, a president may waive those requirements if he “determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”

Trump isn’t putting Caine in this pivotal position because of the national interest. He’s putting Caine there because of Caine’s unequivocal personal loyalty to Trump. Trump boasted to an audience at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference that Caine had told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

The same is occurring at the Justice Department, where Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal lawyer who’s now the chief enforcer there, is imposing a Trump loyalty test on prosecutors—demanding they comply with Trump’s demands, however unacceptable and incompatible with norms, or leave.

It’s no accident that Bove has targeted the Justice Department’s most powerful officials and divisions—shaking up the national security division, insisting that the FBI’s acting leadership turn over a list of agents who worked on the Capitol riot investigations, and targeting the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (the most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office in the country, known for guarding its independence).

Trump says he’s “depoliticizing” law enforcement in response to former President Joe Biden’s supposed bow to partisan politics. But Biden’s actions had nothing to do with partisan politics. And, ironically, neither are Trump’s: His are about personal loyalty.

On Sunday night, Trump announced that MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino will be deputy director of the FBI, alongside newly installed chief Kash Patel. Bongino is a former cop, Secret Service agent, conspiracy theorist, and Fox News commentator who joined Trump’s MAGA world in the 2010s and now hosts a popular podcast.

The media sees this as another example of Trump embracing Fox News (Bongino is the 20th ex-Fox News host, journalist, or commentator to bag a senior job in the new Trump administration).

But that’s not it. Bongino’s most important attribute is the same as Patel’s—unswerving personal loyalty to Trump. As elsewhere, Trump is turning the FBI into an extension of his personal will.

Every tyrant throughout history has gained a personal monopoly on the use of force so he can impose his will on anyone, for any purpose. Tyrants achieve this by delegating power only to people personally loyal to them.

Trump is even testing the personal loyalty of federal judges.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump recently posted on social media (a direct nod to Napoleon and other dictators), attached to a headline that his administration refuses to obey a district court order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal grants.

All this is happening just as Trump is effectively handing over large swaths of the world to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—the only world leaders he respects and understands, because they, too, are tyrants.

On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and 14 other authoritarian Moscow-friendly countries against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. The resolution passed overwhelmingly nonetheless.

Why am I telling you this when you’re probably already feeling rage and despair over what’s happening? Because seeing the whole for what it truly is — rather than being upset by this or that part of it — is essential for fighting back.

We—the vast majority of people in the United States—do not want to live in a dictatorship. Yet we now have a president and a regime bent on an authoritarian takeover of America and on joining the other major authoritarians of the world.

As he tries to consolidate power, we must protect the institutions in our society still able to oppose Trump’s tyranny—independent centers of power that can stop or at least slow him. Not this Congress, tragically, but federal courts and judges. Many of our state governors and attorneys general, state legislatures, and state courts. Perhaps even our state and local police. Hopefully, our communities.

Ultimately this will come down to our own courage and resolve: To engage in peaceful civil disobedience. To organize and mobilize others. To fight against hate and bigotry. To fight for justice and democracy.

Remember this: Tyranny cannot prevail over people who refuse to succumb to it.

Democrats’ idea of “resistance” to Trump is considerably less substantial than actual resistance to fascism looked like during World War II. And it probably shouldn’t have started with a unanimous vote for neoconservative maniac Marco Rubio.

The post Hard-Boiled Tales of Resistance first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Hard-Boiled Tales of Resistance appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

            For this essay, let’s not debate the pros and cons of our new old president. Detailing specific reasons that many Americans are upset with/scared of/annoyed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be a distraction from a point that desperately needs to be made. Suffice it to say, millions of people are angry, disappointed and would prefer entirely different political policies and priorities out of Washington.

The fact that we should linger upon is this: Many, many liberals feel very, very impotent. And this should be a major cause of concern.

When Republicans celebrate their win by mocking their opponents, they’re whistling past the small-d democratic graveyard of history. Winning an election is good. Crushing your opponents’ political will to live is dangerous.

For liberals, there is a lot not to like about politics since January 20th. Trump has signed a blizzard of sweeping executive orders on a myriad of controversial issues. His administration is attempting a radical revamp of the relationship between the American people and their government, much of it carried out by a brash break-things-move-fast tech-bro billionaire. Given the high stakes and the polarizing nature of the issues involved and that Trump’s approach is so radical, resistance should be expected from both Democratic politicians on high and street demonstrations from the grassroots.

Instead, Democrats at all levels have been compliant and largely silent. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a centrist Democrat, complains: “[Congressional Democrats are] failing to do what is their fundamental responsibility constitutionally—to be a check.” Republicans barely control the Senate, yet all of Trump’s nominees have been approved. Democrats even voted unanimously to support a far-right neocon, Marco Rubio, as secretary of state.       

Activists have been passive. There have only been sporadic protest marches. Trump’s proposal to annex and ethnically cleanse Gaza, a would-be war crime, elicited little measurable reaction from the anti-imperialist Left, certainly no protests analogous in size to last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests. Compared to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and similar demonstrations opposing Reagan, attendance at marches has been anemic. Seven out of ten Democrats are tuning out political news. Liberal-leaning cable news networks CNN and MSNBC have seen their ratings plummet and are shaking up their line-ups.

Democratic donors, taking note of the disarray, are closing their checkbooks. “[Democrats] want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” a donor told The Hill.

When a substantial portion of a republic’s population believes that there is nothing it can do to influence political leaders, the system is in trouble.

With Trump barely a month into his second term, history may record Democrats’ current beaten-down-dog mien as a momentary blip preceding a spurt of determined reenergization and a journey to recovery, reinvention and future victory. A devastating 1964 defeat left the GOP crestfallen and depressed. “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come; it is not even likely to control the wreckage,” James Reston wrote in The New York Times on November 4, 1964.

He was wrong. Ray Bliss, chair of the Republican National Committee Chairman from 1965 to 1969, led the GOP out of the wilderness by patching up ideological divides and organizing at the local level. Nixon won in 1968—barely—and a landslide in 1972. Reagan shaped much of the way government looks today.

 But Democrats don’t seem likely to pull off such a trick. As they say in 12-step programs, the first step is admitting you have a problem. The party is addicted to campaign contributions from corporations like Big Pharma and Big Tech who influence it against doing much to appeal to the working-class voters they need to win elections and are migrating to Trump and the Republicans. But there’s no evidence they see that as a problem. Some top Democrats want to wean themselves off big corporate money by adopting Bernie Sanders’ proven small-contributor model, but the only suggestion we’ve heard from  new DNC chair Ken Martin is that the party needs more and better messaging.

“We also need to give people a sense of who we are as Democrats, what we believe in and what we’re fighting for,” Martin said on February 17th. While Democrats say they oppose Trump, they don’t seem to believe in much at all. They’re not fighting, whether for or against anything. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to them: “The courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “are the first line of defense” against Trump.

What of the Senate, where Democrats hold seven more seats than needed to jam up legislation with filibusters? They’re abdicating their checks and balances to the judiciary.

If you’re a liberal voter, the ideological battlefield currently looks like the Ukrainians’ situation. You keep losing. You’re deploying the same old failed strategies and tactics. No new miracle weapons are coming. There’s no reason to think that anything will improve.

Liberals see that there’s no hope. So they’re alienated and checked out.

So Trump runs wild and the streets remain empty.

If you’re conservative, the prospect of a Great Liberal Vanishing should spook you. In late-stage Rome, citizens got tired of politics and allowed themselves to be distracted by bread and circuses. The Republic slid into autocracy. German liberals disengaged from Weimar Republican politics as the SPD, the dominant left-leaning party at the time, governed in a coalition with bourgeois parties who blocked attempts to address popular priorities like unemployment relief after the depression began in 1929. In our time, low voter turnout correlates with stagnant governance and populist takeovers—and U.S. elections begin with a lower turnout rate than many other countries.

A democratic republic can limp along, hollowed out, for a while. But the less people care about the system, the easier it is for a demagogue to step in and claim, “I alone can fix it.” By then, no one’s paying attention.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)

The post The Incredible Vanishing Liberals first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post The Incredible Vanishing Liberals appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

When German politics shift to the Right, the world gets nervous. German’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party came in second in parliamentary elections, largely on the strength of German anger over the economy and anti-migration nativist sentiment. Has AfD peaked out? Does this presage results in France and other European countries? How should we feel and respond to the right of the German Right?

On today’s episode of “The TMI Show,” Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss the AfD’s victory in Germany.

The post TMI Show Ep 85: Germany’s Politics Move Right. What Could Go Wrong? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 85: Germany’s Politics Move Right. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

According to the preliminary results of the Bundestag, or parliamentary, elections, the extreme right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the second-strongest force in Germany. It now has 20.8% of the vote, doubling its result compared to the last election. The conservative CDU/CSU got 28.5%. The Social Democrats and the Greens, who have been in government so far, were punished, receiving 16.4 and 11.6% of the vote, respectively.

However, the party Die Linke was able to achieve a success. For a long time, it was stuck in polls well below the 5%, which is the mark to enter the Bundestag. But in a final sprint, it was able to significantly increase the result and garner 8.7%. Above all, strong speeches by Member of Parliament Heidi Reichinnek against the anti-migration agenda of all other parties and for real social change were able to mobilize.

Now the established parties and the mainstream press are engaging in the usual complaints and soul-searching about how things could have come to this. In the face of the rapid rise of the Alternative for Germany, journalists and political commentators often say that dissatisfaction with the established parties is the reason why more and more people are voting for the AfD. The dissatisfaction is then mostly seen as created by "mass immigration," the rejection of climate protection, and a left-liberal view of society ("wokeness")—in other words, a growing front against overly left-wing, progressive, liberal politics. This is seen to be the central cause of the shift to the right in society. Politicians must now respond to this.

The political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.

This is a narrative that is not only convenient and leads to false right-wing solutions, but also distorts reality by blaming those who are supposedly rebelling against progressive politics and thinking backward. At the same time, the other parties and their supporters appear as a haven of reason and morality, striving to hold society together.

The thesis that a shift to the right in the population is the reason for the rapid rise of the AfD also obscures the root of the problem. Looking closer, large portions of today's AfD voters have by no means been attracted to the AfD and its better policy proposals.

Even significant portions of AfD voters agree with the majority of Germans on polls that favor a fair solution to refugee protection and a quarter believe that the energy transition is indispensable; only a few describe themselves as extreme right and "only" 40% have right-wing tendencies. Most of them demand a social policy that benefits them, as many of them are unemployed or low-income earners, while the AfD takes a diametrically opposed, extreme position on all these issues, and their neoliberal program would make the rich even richer and the poor poorer.

In fact, more and more people were driven from the so-called "extreme center" into the arms of the AfD. In some ways, the political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.

The term "extreme center" was coined 10 years ago by the British intellectual Tariq Ali in his book The Extreme Centre: A Warning. It essentially refers to what often is referred to as "bourgeois parties," "parties of the political center," "established parties," sometimes also as "democratic parties" or "parties capable of forming a government." In Germany, these are the CDU/CSU, SPD, the liberals FDP, and the Greens. They distinguish themselves from the "extremes" on the left and right, which they regard as a danger to society and democracy, and see themselves as a force that balances interests and creates harmony.

According to Tariq Ali, the parties of the so-called center have been indistinguishable from each other in important policy areas since the 1980s. In the Western industrialized countries, a kind of "government of national unity" has emerged. It has implemented and maintained extreme policies—including the neoliberal turn and an aggressively oriented foreign policy under U.S. leadership—against the needs of the general population.

In the process, the space for alternative policy proposals and democratic debate has been reduced to a minimum. It created a dangerous democratic vacuum. This vacuum can now be exploited in particular by extremist parties on the right.

Let's take a look at how the "non-partisan political class, beyond particular interests" has operated in Germany in recent decades. Since the 1990s (or even earlier, in the years under chancellor Helmut Kohl, CDU), various governing coalitions have implemented policies that have led to Germany becoming the country in Europe with the greatest material and social inequality.

On the one hand, the established parties created a high concentration of wealth through various neoliberal measures. On the other hand, parts of the middle class were put under financial pressure. A huge low-wage sector was built up, widespread poverty (especially child and old-age poverty) was created, and the welfare state was dismantled.

Many services that people in the country rely on to live in safety have been commercialized, privatized, and "streamlined." The state of Germany's railways, healthcare system, pensions, agriculture, real estate markets, and education systems shows where this has led. Once in comparatively good condition, these infrastructures are now dysfunctional, expensive, unjust, and environmentally harmful.

The austerity for the poor and many ordinary citizens, and the welfare state for the rich and super-rich, has led to Germany becoming increasingly divided—especially the eastern federal states that were hit hard by the inequality policy after reunification.

The Agenda 2010, introduced and enacted under the red-green government in the early 2000s, was pushed forward by massive pressure from corporate and business lobbying groups (see the tens of millions of euros spent on the so called "reform movement," including the Initiative für Soziale Marktwirtschaft led by the employers' federation of metal and electronics industry Gesamtmetall) has finally turned on the inequality turbo. As a result, the lower and middle classes have become poorer and the rich and hyper-rich fantastically richer.

This process is uncontroversial today. According to the Global Wealth Report, in 1970 the top 1% of the German population (around 800,000 people) owned 20% of the total private wealth. That, too, is enormous, meaning that Germany was by no means a balanced or even just society at the time.

By 2020, the share had risen to 35%. The super-rich, the top 0.1% (around 85,000 Germans), can now claim up to 20% of the national wealth for themselves (as much as the top 1% in 1970). The top 10% own around 67%, which corresponds to two-thirds of total private wealth. Like many large properties, corporate assets are almost exclusively in the hands of the top 1%. The lower, poorer half of the population in Germany, on the other hand, owns practically no wealth, apart from a few small credit-financed and self-occupied apartments, houses, or cars.

This extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of very few continues to grow without countermeasures being taken. For example, the number of millionaires in Germany rose from 2.1 million to 2.8 million between 2019 and 2024, an increase of 30% in just a few years. A similar curve can be seen among billionaires. In 2001, there were 69 billionaires in Germany; by 2022, this number had already risen to 212, and last year there were 249 (including extended families) who own a billion or more.

According to the Global Wealth Report and other studies, "wealth inequality in Germany is higher than in other large Western European countries. For example, the Gini coefficient [it measures inequality: 100% means that all wealth is in one hand, at zero everyone would own the same] for wealth in Germany is 82%, compared to 67% in Italy and 70% in France."

In other rich industrialized countries, a comparable process of concentration and inequality can be observed, despite slight differences. The division of society is increasing everywhere in Western democracies, deliberately set in motion and nourished by the politics of the extreme center.

The regime of inequality has been further expanded in the United States and Great Britain than in Germany. There, neoliberal programs were initiated under former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s, and were implemented particularly rigorously in the U.S. by the business class and the political establishment.

Above all, these were drastic tax cuts for the rich and super-rich, i.e. for capital, and the deregulation of the financial industry, while the real wages (purchasing power adjusted for inflation) of the lower and middle classes fell and the welfare state, on which large sections of the population depended, was forced to retreat.

The U.S. extreme center, both Republicans and Democrats, wanted it that way. The media celebrated the policy as a dynamic growth strategy, even though growth rates and productivity were significantly lower than in the three "golden decades" before.

The direct effects of these neoliberal measures are mind-boggling. A 2020 study by the U.S.-based Rand Corporation shows that the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. have siphoned off $50 trillion (50,000 billion) from the bottom 90% in recent decades.

If the more equitable distribution of the approximately 30-year post-war period had continued, with wages rising in line with productivity, the total annual income of the bottom 90% of American workers in 2018 would have been $2.5 trillion higher, or about 12% of gross domestic product. In other words, the upward redistribution of income has enriched the top 1% by about $50 trillion at the expense of American workers.

Or to put it another way, the average income of a full-time employee in the U.S. in 2020 was $50,000. If wages had kept pace with economic output since the mid-1970s, the average worker's salary would be around $100,000 today.

But politicians and corporations blocked wage increases in the wake of the growing national income and handed out ever greater proportions of it with "reform measures" (i.e., redistribution measures) to the hyper-rich. U.S. labor unions speak of a "trillion-dollar robbery," criticizing an extremely successful "class war from above."

For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.

A similar redistribution from bottom to top has taken place in Germany, albeit not as blatantly as across the Atlantic. Even though there is no comparable study for Germany to that of the Rand Corporation, most Germans would earn significantly more today if it had not been for the neoliberal redistribution policy.

The structural change, or rather the structural break, has had of course far-reaching effects. Studies show that the effects of inequality range from very negative to destructive. Accordingly, inequality generates and promotes economic crises and ecological catastrophes and intensifies conflicts, wars, global injustice, and the plight of refugees. Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology at the Department of Health Sciences, and Richard Wilkinson, professor at the University of York, have been systematically studying the effects on living standards in rich countries for many years.

Their research, summarized in the books The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, shows that income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—has a strong influence on people's health and well-being, as well as on human capabilities and social cohesion. Inequality causes health and social problems.

This ranges from lower life expectancy and lower levels of education and social mobility to higher levels of violence and mental illness. The scientists argue that inequality hinders the creation of sustainable economies that ensure the well-being of people and the planet.

Above all, inequality undermines solidarity, provision for future generations, and social cohesion, and encourages more and more people to vote for right-wing or even far-right parties—initially as a form of protest, but then increasingly out of conviction.

In general, inequality and isolation lead to selfish, even authoritarian and irrational attitudes that lack solidarity. When a large part of the population sees a tiny minority amassing enormous wealth and bathing in luxury while many others do not know how to make ends meet in the face of skyrocketing rents and prices and a lack of public services, this is toxic for any society.

Instead of addressing these problems and their causes, the parties and the major media have chosen a different strategy to counter the growing dissatisfaction in the country. And that has created a second mobilizing factor for far-right answers, alongside inequality.

In principle, it is the well-known logic of "Divide and Rule" or "Us" against "Them" that allows frustration to be deflected and groups to be set against each other. It is simple but very effective: It is not the hyper-rich, entrepreneurs, and profiteers of the redistribution from bottom to top (the 0.1 or 1% class), including the political extreme center and their accomplices in the media, who are responsible for the conditions and frustration. It is "the others." They take away the prosperity of the Germans and make them dissatisfied.

This has allowed the privileges of those who own the companies and large portions of German wealth, as well as the politics that serve their interests, to be protected from real reform, while also deflecting people's anger at inequality and grievances from the causes of that frustration.

To illustrate this, Guardian columnist Fatma Aydemir cites a joke: A banker, a welfare recipient, and an asylum-seeker are sitting at a table. In front of them are 12 biscuits. The banker takes 11 biscuits and says to the welfare recipient: "Watch out, the refugee wants your biscuit."

In this way, minorities were declared scapegoats, marginalized, and stigmatized as a danger to the lower and middle classes. In the 1990s, after the Yugoslavian wars and the NATO bombings, opinion makers and prominent politicians blamed refugees from the Balkans for social and economic problems and ultimately shredded the right of asylum enshrined in the German constitution.

The same spectacle has been taking place since 2015. In major waves of campaigning, people fleeing from war, persecution, and misery have been presented by the media and politicians as the central threat to the social order.

They are portrayed as illegitimate "social parasites" and ungrateful "misogynists" (see the artificially scandalized "Sodom and Gomorrah" of Cologne during New Year's Eve 2015-2016, of which nothing remained in the investigation committee of the NRW state parliament) or terrorists and knife murderers (see the exaggerated coverage of isolated acts by mostly traumatized asylum-seekers and refugees) who want to snatch the last biscuit from the Germans.

The AfD was finally able to reap the political rewards, the grapes of wrath. In 2015, the party was in a tailspin after a desperate attempt to capitalize on anti-E.U. sentiment. Internal squabbles weakened it more and more, so that in September 2015 it plummeted to 4% in the polls and was on the verge of disappearing into insignificance.

But then came the dramatic turnaround. In the fall of the same year, the party's unstoppable rise began when the extreme center decided to spread a historic moral panic through all channels in the wake of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016. A year later, in September 2016, the AfD was at 16% in the polls. Riding the wave of success, it was able to push ahead with political radicalization and spread "Vogelschiss" (bird droppings) theories about the insignificance of the Holocaust.

The AfD did not become what it is today on its own. It was the political class and the mainstream press that served and continue to serve up the "illegal intruders" as the perfect scapegoats for the authoritarian right. Only then did the far-right experience a rapid rise, successfully campaigning on the issue of refugees, who were widely vilified, and winning votes.

It is often claimed that the refugees, their influx, and their numbers have strengthened the right wing. The blame lies with the "migration pressure." But that is not true. As stated in the 2018 annual report of the Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy (Midem) Migration and Populism, it was not the influx of refugees that was the central factor, but the media and political discourse about the crisis.

As long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current.

Support for the AfD fell, as already mentioned, to four% in the opinion polls between 2015 and late summer of the same year (from 9% the previous year), while—calculated from 2014—750,000 refugees came to Germany during this time. Support for the AfD was indeed negatively correlated with the sharp increase in the number of refugees in Germany. During this period, more refugees actually led to a decline in support for the AfD.

From October 2015, when the discourse of crisis was launched by politicians and the media, the AfD's poll numbers rose sharply, reaching a preliminary high of 18% in September 2018. During this "AfD growth phase," the number of refugees coming to Germany and the E.U. dropped significantly, so that by the end of 2018, when the AfD reached its peak, almost no refugees were able to enter Germany thanks to the brutal sealing of the country's borders under the leadership of the Merkel government.

Hence, also during the "crisis phase," support for the AfD correlates negatively with the influx of refugees, according to the rule: fewer refugees, more support for the AfD. The actual influx of refugees is obviously not the reason for the success or failure of the AfD. What the AfD has actually benefited from since 2015 has been the political discourse of permanent crisis and alarmist reporting on asylum-seekers and "illegal migration."

Even today, the rise of the AfD is still associated with a conjured up second "refugee crisis." Although asylum-seekers from the southern Mediterranean region make up only a small proportion of those admitted (190,000 compared to over a million Ukrainians in 2020), they are once again the focus of media debate, which, as with the last "refugee crisis," focuses on deportation and strengthening "Fortress Europe"—a "refugee crisis" that in fact was a crisis of the European repulsion regime that was met with even more sealing off.

Meanwhile, the Germans at the bottom of society are also being discredited in order to deflect the frustration of the groups above them, especially the middle classes, onto them (and not upward, onto the culprit of the frustration). Thus, journalists and politicians discredited the unemployed and welfare recipients as "social parasites" and "work-shy" in order to push through the Hartz IV reforms to pressure the unemployed and the dismantling of the welfare state against popular resistance. As surveys show, majorities were against it and wanted a different, more solidarity-based modernization.

And while today the multimillionaires and billionaires in the country can hardly walk because of all their wealth, property, and investment portfolios, more and more money is being put into their pockets, while for those who (due to a lack of jobs, low wages, or exploding rents and prices) have to stay afloat with state support, every euro is questioned. So the political opinion makers argue about a too-high support for the long-term unemployed, the so called "Bürgergeld" (now 563 euros for a single person per month), with the adjustment in recent years barely offsetting inflation, but they don't talk about the constant pampering of millionaires and billionaires.

The mainstream media continue to spread the myth that basically everything is fine and a few Band-Aids here and there would suffice: a euro more minimum wage, for example—which would do no more than compensate for inflation and is often undermined by companies anyway.

But anyone who wants to address the extreme salaries and wealth, the capital gains of investors and companies (often parked in tax havens), is either met with ignorance (see the left-wing demands in the Bundestag) or attacked with economic doomsday scenarios.

And yet another group has become the target of the political establishment. Politicians and journalists have fueled toxic narratives on climate protection. To appease fossil lobbies and slow down the transition to renewable energy, the establishment (or rather, significant parts of it) sabotages the energy transition, denounces calls for immediate action, discredits demonstrators as "eco-terrorists" and presents climate protection as an economic burden and a brake on prosperity, especially for the lower and middle classes. At the same time, wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars are drawn into culture wars.

This makes it easy for the AfD and right-wing forces to present climate policy as an elite project and to portray themselves as guardians of ordinary people, protecting them from the burdens and costs of the energy transition. Similar things could be said about the "wokeness" debate—pushed by conservative sectors of the extreme center, while the resulting defensive reactions in the population could be used by the extreme right for campaigns.

The "political center" has created an extreme social situation, from which only the AfD is profiting in Germany. Its rise is closely linked to the failures of the establishment, which has shifted the overall frustration onto the weak, while the representatives of the political class shed crocodile tears over the popularity and election wins of the AfD. The same is true in other European countries and the United States.

The question remains as to why left-wing solutions have not been able to fill the gap created by the extreme center in the same way as right-wing extremist ones could—although the surprising election result of the Left Party on Sunday shows that this does not have to remain the case. Certainly, mistakes have been made by left-wing parties. But the real reason lies elsewhere. For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.

While AfD talking points such as the threat posed by refugees, an energy transition that is harassing citizens, and a mass indoctrination of wokeness have been flooding the media for decades, a debate on progressive measures that address the social causes of frustration is suppressed.

As the asylum law and the sealing-off regime are tightened ever further and the energy transition is blocked, people continue to wait for the reintroduction of the wealth tax in Germany (suspended in 1997), a real inheritance tax for the hyper-rich, a closure of tax havens and loopholes, the end of destructive subsidies, the regulation of the finance industry, or a revival of the welfare state. If anything, Germans are put off with vague promises before elections. After that, the popular ideas are put on ice or not seriously addressed.

The progressive political climate, as it existed to at least some extent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has been systematically deprived of oxygen ever since—a very significant process that effectively blocked democracy. However, as long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current. To the detriment of society, its prosperity, and stability.

On February 10, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order that directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA was the first law in modern history to ban a country’s own citizens and companies from bribing foreign officials.

Citing the law as one of the “excessive barriers to American commerce abroad,” President Trump has instructed the attorney general to—at her discretion—“cease the initiation of any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions.” The executive order further requires the DOJ to provide remedial measures for those who have faced "inappropriate" penalties as a result of past FCPA investigations and guilty verdicts.

This move by the Trump administration to pause enforcement of the foreign bribery law now and allow it to be put on the shelf later risks a revival of the pre-1970s period, when bribery was a routine practice among major U.S. arms contractors.

If President Trump is serious about his campaign pledge to “stop the war profiteering and to always put America first,” it is the worst possible time to shelve the FCPA, given that bribery by U.S. companies is alive and well.

In the post-Watergate reform period in Congress, in late 1975 and early 1976, Idaho Sen. Frank Church’s Subcommittee on the Conduct of Multinational Corporations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee exposed widespread foreign bribery on the part of U.S. oil and aerospace firms, with the starring role played by Lockheed Martin, which bribed officials in Japan, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Mexico, and Colombia in pursuit of contracts for its civilian and military aircraft.

The revelations caused political turmoil in the recipient countries, led to the resignation of Lockheed’s two top executives, and prompted Congress to pass the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

The repercussions were most severe in Japan, where Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was arrested and convicted of receiving bribes in the scandal—the first time a sitting Japanese prime minister had been arrested, in what one analyst called “Japan’s biggest scandal of the postwar era.”

Sen. Church made it clear that in his mind, the problem went far beyond the question of corruption: “It is no longer sufficient to simply sigh and say that is the way business is done. It is time to treat the issue for what it is: a serious foreign policy problem.”

Among the issues he cited were potential destabilization of democratic allies and closer ties with reckless, dictatorial regimes driven by financial motivations rather than careful consideration of U.S. security interests.

As noted above, President Trump’s primary reason for freezing enforcement of the anti-bribery law is that he believes it has been used unfairly, to the detriment of U.S. companies and U.S. security. This argument does not hold up to scrutiny.

First of all, there is no evidence that outlawing bribery has hurt the U.S. arms industry. The United States has been the world’s largest arms supplier by a large margin for 25 of the past 26 years, and major U.S. arms offers reached near record levels of $145 billion last year.

The real issue is how to stop dangerous, counterproductive arms transfers, not how to make it easier to cash in on sales that too often undermine U.S. interests.

A 2022 Quincy Institute study found that U.S.-supplied weapons were present in two-thirds of the world’s active conflicts, and that at least 31 clients of the U.S. arms industry were undemocratic regimes. Fueling conflicts and supporting reckless authoritarian regimes are destabilizing to regions of importance to U.S. security. They also risk drawing the United States into a direct, boots-on-the-ground conflict.

If President Trump is serious about his campaign pledge to “stop the war profiteering and to always put America first,” it is the worst possible time to shelve the FCPA, given that bribery by U.S. companies is alive and well. Just last October, RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) was forced to pay over $950 million in fines after it was found to have engaged in multiple schemes to defraud the Department of Defense and violate the FCPA and the Arms Export Control Act by paying bribes to Qatari officials in pursuit of major military contracts with that nation.

Not only should the FCPA be vigorously enforced to stop bribery of foreign officials by U.S. companies, but the law must also be strengthened to combat the flip side of the corruption coin—foreign bribes accepted by American officials. The recent sentencing of former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to 11 years in prison after being found guilty of bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Egypt and Qatar underscores the need for stronger enforcement mechanisms.

Menendez’s guilty verdict as well as Rep. Henry Cuellar’s (D-Texas) indictment on charges that included unlawful foreign influence and bribery reveal how those who wield influence over American foreign policy can be paid off in exchange for exerting unwarranted influence on behalf of a foreign government.

The debate over bribery may be obscuring a larger truth: U.S. arms sales policy is in desperate need of an overhaul. The governing legislation—the Arms Export Control Act—was passed in 1976, when the world was a very different place than it is today.

The law gives Congress the authority to block a major arms sale by passing a joint resolution of disapproval in both houses. But given that they would be opposing a sale already approved by the Executive Branch, they would likely need a veto-proof majority. This standard is too hard to meet. For example, when Congress voted against a sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia in the midst of that nation’s brutal intervention in Yemen, the measure was vetoed by President Trump

A major change that could have a significant impact on U.S. arms sales decisions is legislation that would “flip the script” by requiring an affirmative vote of Congress before major sales to key countries are allowed to go forward. This would strengthen Congress’ hand and make it easier to stop reckless sales that might fuel conflict or enable human rights abuses.

Instead of lifting restrictions on bribery to grease the wheels for additional foreign arms sales by U.S. weapons makers, Congress and the Trump administration should be crafting a policy designed to make sure overseas arms sales are governed by U.S. national interests, not special interests that profit from selling ever more weaponry to any and all customers.

In the capricious tapestry that is U.S. foreign policy, you can find a recurring pattern: Washington champions sovereignty as a holy principle of the international order when it aligns with its interests—think Ukraine under Biden—but casually disregards it when inconvenient.

The latest thread in this tapestry is last Thursday’s unprecedented State Department decision to formally designate eight groups, including major Mexican drug cartels such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Beneath the Trumpian tough-on-crime pose lies a policy that threatens to violate Mexico’s sovereignty and destabilize a vital relationship, and reinforces the imperialist tendency that has caused so much damage here in the U.S. and across the globe.

Labeling cartels as FTOs isn’t just a symbolic gesture; it opens the door for military intervention under the guise of counterterrorism. The U.S. could justify drone strikes or cross-border raids without Mexico’s consent—a blatant affront to its sovereignty. President Claudia Sheinbaum highlighted: “This classification should not serve as a pretext for the United States to invade our sovereignty.” Any such military intervention would violate Congress’s constitutional war powers, but Trump is unlikely to respect such legal niceties.

The desire to rise out of extreme poverty can not be bombed out of existence.

Elon Musk has made this clear. Musk recently declared on his social media platform that the FTO designation would make cartels “eligible for drone strikes,” a comment that is both legally dubious and deeply unsettling.

They’re Entrepreneurial Criminals, Not Terrorist Ideologues

Mexican cartels are not terrorists in the way most people understand that word. They’re not trying to overthrow governments or spread extremist beliefs. Yes, they commit horrific acts of violence—killings, kidnappings, extortion—but their primary motive is profit, not ideology. As the narcocorrido (“drug ballad,” a musical genre popular on both sides of the border) "Clave Privada" by Banda el Recodo goes:

I was poor for a long time
Many people humiliated me
I began to earn money...
Things are flipped around now
Now they call me boss.

Understanding the driver of these cartels isn’t rocket science: it’s all about the Miguelitos (i.e. the 1000 peso note). Imposing travel bans might inconvenience cartel leaders but it won’t dismantle their billion-dollar empires. The terrorist designation is unlikely to even cut profit margins because many cartels are already designated as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), so the FTO designation does not provide significant new policy tools to target their finances.

Drone attacks are unlikely to stop a notoriously violent business where cartel leaders are already frequently killed in assassinations by competitors or shootouts with government forces. The war on terror has shown to the U.S. that “Decapitate the Kingpin” is a loser’s game. In fact, Mexico’s own “kingpin strategy” targeting and elimination of high-ranking cartel members has created power vacuums and increased violence. Combining the failed strategies of the war on terror and the war on drugs is not just misguided—it’s doubling down on failure.

The desire to rise out of extreme poverty can not be bombed out of existence. Meanwhile, the other main drivers of this problem are illicit markets fueled by U.S. demand for drugs and corruption within Mexico—issues that require smarter policies to address. Words matter in policymaking. Using “terrorist” as a catch-all term is already destructive and distorting, from the U.S. “war on terror” to the Netanyahu-Biden-Trump war in Gaza to China’s oppression of the Uighur in Xinjiang. This action exacerbates the problem.

The Imperialist Echo

There’s something disturbingly familiar about this whole idea—a familiar whiff of paternalism. For decades, the U.S. has intervened in Latin America under various pretexts: fighting communism during the Cold War, waging war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, and now combating “terrorism.” The results have often been disastrous for the region. Designating cartels as FTOs feels like another chapter in this playbook: framing another country’s problems as existential threats to justify American imperialism. So long liberal internationalism, hello Make the Monroe Doctrine Great Again.

This approach doesn’t work in today’s interconnected world. Problems associated with drug trafficking—and migration—don’t respect borders; they require multilateral solutions rooted in trust and mutual respect—not unilateral declarations from Washington. Meanwhile, Trump is cutting thoughtful, nonviolent programs like U.S. funding for an organization that has reduced the number of children recruited by gangs to help move drugs and migrants across the border. Trump froze another program targeting fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking at key ports.

A Smarter Path Forward

None of this is meant to downplay the seriousness of cartel violence or its devastating impact on both sides of the border. Tackling this issue requires nuance and humility—especially from the U.S.. Instead of designating cartels as FTOs, policymakers should focus on strategies that address root causes: reducing demand for drugs through treatment programs; cracking down on gun trafficking from the U.S. into Mexico as some members of Congress are working to do; supporting anti-corruption efforts within Mexico; and strengthening bilateral cooperation rather than undermining it.

On August 24, 2023, a headline blared “La Maga Nostra” over the front page of the New York Post.

Dominating the layout was a photo of then-ex-President Donald Trump, his chin slightly raised in veiled contempt. The comparison was unmistakable: Trump as Don Corleone, the shadowy figurehead of The Godfather.

An accompanying news box underscored the irony. Trump had been hit with RICO charges, a legal framework famously pioneered by his own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to bring down New York’s mafia families, including the infamous “Teflon Don,” John Gotti.

Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.

The former real estate mogul has long invited comparisons to the mafia. His favorite films include The Godfather and Goodfellas, and his personal style—big pompadour hair, boxy suits, and flashy red ties—reflects that influence.

Michael Cohen once described himself as Trump’s consigliere, akin to Tom Hagen in The Godfather. Former FBI Director James Comey, who spent part of his career investigating organized crime, remarked that Trump’s approach to cultivating loyalty gave him “flashbacks” to his days taking down capos.

Then who could forget Trump’s infamous dig at Chris Cuomo, calling him “Fredo”—a jab that prompted one of the cringiest displays of Italian American male insecurity in decades.

From his “Teflon” ability to evade legal consequences to his swaggering machismo and Joe Pesci-like fragile ego, the affinity is laid bare.

Recent attempts on his life all but cemented Trump’s image as a modern-day mafia man. Whether or not the Post’s editors realized it, they captured the essence of his appeal.

It’s often remarked that unchecked social and economic pain leads to the emergence of “strong men.” In the classic authoritarian model, outlined by thinkers like Theodor Adorno, the disenfranchised turn to leaders who embody defiance, control, and simplicity in the face of chaos.

For millions of Americans mired in debt, struggling to pay rent, and unlikely ever to own a home, calling our society “neo-feudal” hardly feels hyperbolic.

It also tracks with the history of the mafia. The mafia evolved out of feudalism’s wake in southern Italy. As absentee landlords managed vast estates from afar, a vacuum was filled by vicious overseers and middlemen—figures the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia called “parasitic intermediaries.”

Sciascia is widely credited as Italy’s first “anti-mafia” voice, following his 1961 novel The Day of the Owl. He viewed the mafia’s emergence in Sicily, shortly after the country’s unification in 1861, as a metaphor for the modern corruption of power—representing a distorted “ideal” of justice that promises order and protection for society’s have-nots while thriving on internal exploitation.

That this distorted image developed within a historical context marred by colonization and exploitation in Sicily—where peasants often romanticized the mafia and longed for a return to monarchy—pained Sciascia.

Equally, he recognized similar patterns in other contexts.

Trumpism operates in a similar way—not as a rejection of power consolidation, but as its acceleration.

Recent developments in Trump’s second term illustrate how a cartel-like consolidation of power among billionaires is carving out fiefdoms and aligning their interests with Trump’s administration in ways that echo mafia-like dynamics.

Peter Thiel’s role in “disrupting” the establishment sees him pumping money into Trump-friendly candidates and tech ventures that favor the privatization of state functions—a classic power consolidation strategy.

Jared Kushner’s financial deals with Saudi Arabia suggest a patronage model where money secures access and influence. Saudi investments in Silicon Valley, defense, and U.S. real estate could be seen as a geopolitical deal—leveraging Trump’s power for long-term economic control.

Elon Musk’s role, however, may be the most revealing. If Trump is the Don, Musk is shaping up to be his new consigliere, not unlike the old mafia’s lawyer-fixers—except with a global tech empire at his disposal.

His control over X (formerly Twitter) allows him to dictate the flow of political discourse, much like a mafia boss controlling the press. If Cosa Nostra kept power through silence—omertà—Musk ensures loyalty through algorithms, shadowbans, and the subtle privileging of certain voices over others.

Federal deregulation benefiting Musk’s empire (Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink) might reflect the kind of crony capitalism once associated with political machines, but at a planetary scale. Meanwhile, Trump sides with Musk over H-1B visas, even as the MAGA rank and file rebelled, and Musk called them “retarded.”

The direction we are headed in is shocking. But it would be a terrible mistake to view it as aberrant. Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.

His rise exposes a sickening continuity. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton played the game with suit-and-tie professionalism—the neoliberal, financialized version of patronage. Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney did it through defense contracting and old-money oil interests.

Trump now strips this down to its rawest level: outright transactionalism, loyalty oaths, and a government that operates like a family business.

He presents himself as the “honest liar,” exploiting well-founded perceptions of corruption while openly admitting to behaviors that elites deny. His blatant displays of donor back-scratching feel almost refreshing in their vulgar transparency.

Just like the old Sicilian mafia called itself Cosa Nostra—meaning “our thing”—Trump presents himself as “Our Monster,” so to speak; a kind of anti-hero who embodies the public’s disgust with a distant and dismissive establishment.

Like Al Capone, who opened a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Great Depression, he swoops in to get “close” to the people. As a distorted Robin Hood-like figure, he plays up his everyman appeal, toggling between his gilded digs and disaffected base. His diction is street-level, his parlance tabloid. He eats the food (McDonald’s). He speaks the language.

Sciascia wrote about the insidious spread of corruption, describing how “the palm line”—as a symbol of mafia influence—creeps northward from Sicily to Rome.

In America, Trump represents its teleological end. He doesn’t need to resort to brute violence.

His power lies in painting a romanticized picture—MAGA—over a bleak reality—“American Carnage.” In an Italian context, Sciascia dubbed this Sicilianità: the tendency to “decorate” harsh realities and mask corruption with rhetorical flourish. The Democrats tried to do something similar with “Joy.” But it failed.

The one thing that Sciascia hated more than the mafia was fascism. Yet in a sense, he viewed them as codependent. Ultimately, he viewed the mafia’s power as resulting from a “historic failure, the failure of the Centre-Left,” and the ravages of “eternal bourgeoisie fascism”—the inability of elites to distinguish their dream-hoarding interests from the needs of the masses.

Which brings us to Musk—a billionaire who sells himself as a free-thinking outsider while constructing a world where he remains the gatekeeper of discourse itself.

If Trump’s rise was a mafia movie, Musk’s role makes it something else entirely—a Pirandellian farce, in which power’s corruption is so blatant that it becomes surreal.

We are now through the looking glass. And whatever comes next will be even more profane than the system Trump claims to oppose.

I think that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have been misinformed. I don’t disagree with their shutting down USAID, but I think it’s rather small fry. There are much, much bigger fish to fry if you want to really save U.S. government money that is being wasted in programs that are mischievously justified as aid to the poor people of the world.

Elon, hear me out: if you walk northwest from your headquarters at the Eisenhower Executive Building along Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll come after one long block upon two ugly buildings squatting beside each other. One is the World Bank. The other is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You can actually just walk in and demand to look at their books since they are extensions of the U.S. government. And you would have a very good reason to do so, since these are two of the most questionable and controversial institutions directly or indirectly funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money.

The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South.

Let me start with the World Bank, which is located at 1818 H St NW. This institution has so-called development projects throughout the Global South, otherwise known as developing countries. This agency says that its mission is to end poverty in the developing world. To fulfill this goal, its lending has risen from nearly $55 billion in 2015 to $117.5 billion in 2024. Yet, despite this massive increase, the bank admits that global poverty reduction “has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.” Some 3.5 billion people, or 44% of the globe, remain poor, after decades of massive World Bank lending. And a major part of the reason is that World Bank programs have created poverty instead of alleviating it.

Living in Luxury While “Fighting Poverty”

To manage its operations, the Bank’s full-time staff rose from nearly 12,000 in 2015 to over 13,000 in 2023. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. If one includes all employees—permanent, non-permanent, contractual, part-time—throughout the world, the bank employs close to 41,000 people. The vast majority, 26,000, or 63%, work out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and only 3,200 are located in Africa, where most people in extreme poverty live.

The Bank’s economists and top administrators are among the highest paid financial functionaries in the world, which explains the reason why the bank is a major cause of the brain drain from developing countries: a great number of highly trained economists from developing countries prefer to work at the bank instead of their home countries, with some going straight from Ivy League or British graduate schools to Washington, D.C. Many within the bank and the International Monetary Fund complain about the “South Asian Mafia” that they claim controls employment opportunities for economists and higher-level staff in the two organizations.

The World Bank has come under fire for the billions it has spent supporting fossil-fuel projects throughout the Third World that have contributed to global warming and to mega-dam projects that have displaced millions. The bank, along with the fund, has also gained notoriety for imposing “structural adjustment” programs guided by the radical principles of the “Washington Consensus” that are designed to promote globalization but have, instead, increased poverty and deepened inequality. The reason World Bank projects and programs don’t work or create exactly the opposite of their intended goals is because they are based on questionable propositions built on little or no empirical evidence. An assessment made a few years ago by an all-star team of renowned economists led by Princeton’s Angus Deaton, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, was damning:

[The] panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that these preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all bank research.

The bank’s refusal to acknowledge real-world refutations of its pro-globalization advocacy and its unbalanced, one-sided research led to justifiable rejection of its advice by the people who were suffering from the policies it was implementing, confessed Paul Collier, head of the Research Development Department of the Bank from 1998 to 2003:

The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes [of globalization]. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to reestablish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.

Despite the high rate of failure of its lending programs acknowledged in internal World Bank assessments, the World Bank administrative budget that supports the high salaries of its economists and other high-level staff just keeps growing. The World Bank (IBRD/IDA) administrative budget was approved at $3.5 billion for FY25, a sizable rise from the $3.1 billion authorized for FY 2024, with no convincing reason at all.

The IMF and the Art of Worsening Financial Crises

The International Monetary Fund, whose address is 700 19th St NW, is the World Bank’s sister agency. It has a full-time staff of 3,100, supported by a budget of $1.5 billion. The IMF’s economists are paid even higher than those at the World Bank, and they evoke more fear, hatred, and contempt than the Bank.

The IMF has an equally controversial history. It has a record of coming in to supposedly assist developing economies in crisis, only to make things worse. Its greatest debacle and scandal was its performance during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the so-called “tiger economies “of the East and Southeast Asia were destabilized by the massive inflows and outflows of foreign portfolio investment.

The fund was heavily criticized on three counts. First, it had encouraged the governments of the region to eliminate capital controls, thus provoking uncontrolled capital flows. Second, it assembled multi-billion dollar “rescue packages” that went to rescue not the people suffering from the crisis but to compensate the foreign financial speculators that had lost millions in dubious speculative ventures, thus encouraging “moral hazard,” or irresponsible investing. Third, its measures to stabilize the damaged economies intensified the crisis, since instead of encouraging government spending to counteract the collapse of private sector, it told the governments to radically cut spending, leading to a “procyclical” negative synergy that ended in deep recession.

So long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.

In just a few weeks, 1 million people in Thailand and 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line. The only country that contained the crisis was Malaysia, which refused to follow the fund’s dictates and imposed capital and currency controls

So disastrous were the IMF’s interventions that George Schultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, called for its abolition for encouraging moral hazard, and prominent economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs accused it of provoking global macroeconomic instability. Indeed, a rare conservative-liberal alliance in the U.S. Congress came within a hair’s breath of denying the IMF a $14.5 billion replenishment.

Eventually, the fund was forced to admit that the “thrust of fiscal policy… turned out to be substantially different… because the original assumptions for economic growth, capital flows, and exchange rates… were proved drastically wrong.” But things were never the same again. The IMF was so reviled for its performance that Asian governments developed IMF-phobia, swearing never again to ask the IMF for rescue even in the most dire circumstances. For instance, after paying off what Thailand owed the IMF, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared the country “liberated” from the fund in 2004.

Instead of learning from its debacle during the Asian Financial Crisis, the IMF stumbled into another fiasco more than a decade later, during the Global Financial Crisis. It allowed itself to be hijacked by Germany, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank to provide billions of public money to rescue German financial institutions and investors that had engaged in an orgy of irresponsible lending to Greece to the tune of 25 billion euros. To get the so-called rescue funds, the Greek government, like the Asian governments previously, was forced to adopt severe austerity measures that drove unemployment up to 28% and condemned the Greek economy to permanent stagnation, only to turn the money it was ostensibly receiving over to the German banks.

Not surprisingly, so long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.

The U.S. and the Bretton Woods Twins: Fiction and Fact

There is a fiction that the IMF and World Bank are multilateral institutions that are owned by their many member governments. The reality is that the United States controls both institutions, with a 17.4% share of total quotas at the fund and 15.8% share of voting power at the bank. These shares give the U.S. government a veto power over any policy change. But the truth is that U.S. power is not limited to its being able to veto policy decisions it does not like. No country would dare oppose a move by the United States to radically cut the administrative budgets (by, say, 75% initially) and the number of personnel in the two organizations (to 600 personnel each, as in the case of USAID) if it wanted to do so. All it needs to do to get its way is to threaten to withhold its contributions to the two organizations. I can guarantee that immediately the interest rate at which the bank borrows in international capital markets would leap upward, paralyzing its lending operations.

The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South. They are institutions that no longer serve any purpose except to perpetuate and enlarge themselves. If Elon Musk and Donald Trump are really serious about radically downsizing bloated bureaucracies, they could not have better targets than the Bretton Woods twins.

Few of the members of Donald Trump’s administration best illustrate the phrase “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” than Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. Every now and then, he says something reasonable, even helpful. And then he says all of the other things he likes to say.

While for many years, the alarm over the American diet, fueled as it is by high doses of calories and capitalism, was sounded from elements of the political left, a post-Covid realignment has emerged, “a scrambling of left and right, where all of the sudden, some progressive food policy ideas were being adopted by parts of Trump’s base alongside health freedom activism driven by the pandemic,” says Helena Bottemiller Evich, who led food coverage at Politico and now runs the online publication Food Fix.

Last summer, that shift was cemented when Kennedy suspended his own presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump and the phrase “Make America Healthy Again,” MAHA for short, entered into the mainstream. How MAGA somehow came to be seen as an agenda that could include MAHA seems to be a real-life case of an idea jumping the shark (or, more appropriately, the whale head): Could the man who regularly feasts on fast food, whose private golf club menu features the “Trump Trio”—a cheesesteak egg roll, three honey stung chicken fingers with ranch, and fried pickle chips with campfire sauce—usher in an era of healthier eating for Americans?

Trump’s appetite for power saw the advantage of bringing Kennedy into his campaign, a point he acknowledged following Kennedy’s confirmation. “He had tremendous support, unbelievable support, and I think a lot of that support came my way when we decided to do a little merger.”

But what kind of “little merger” is this, really?

Kennedy finds himself in Part II of an administration whose Part I proposed—on the birthday of Michele Obama, whose White House vegetable garden and signature focus on child nutrition was ridiculed by Trump and other conservatives—to let schools cut the amount of fruits and vegetables served to nearly 30 million American public school kids.

Kennedy supports limiting the amount of less healthy (though often less expensive) food that can be purchased by families on SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, saying the federal government “shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.” Meanwhile, House Republicans have proposed a budget bill supported by the President that will likely lead to a 20 percent cut to the program—it’s hard to see how less food will make poor families healthier.

The firing of Food and Drug Administration staffers last week includes the very workers in charge of reviewing safety of new food additives and ingredients, which will make Kennedy’s call for eliminating chemicals and dyes in food a lot harder to realize. The cuts prompted the head of the FDA’s food division, Jim Jones, to resign. “I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jones wrote. With the gutting of staff, he wrote, “it would be “fruitless for me to continue in this role.”

The MAHA PAC website says the organization is “leading the charge for sustainable farming practices that rebuild our soil, reduce chemical reliance, and promote biodiversity.”

But Project 2025, which has guided much of the policy agenda of the Trump administration, has other plans. “If farmers are allowed to operate without unnecessary government intervention, American agriculture will continue to flourish, producing plentiful, safe, nutritious, and affordable food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can and should play a limited role, with much of its focus on removing governmental barriers that hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.” And the MAGA folks who freaked out that the government was going to take away their gas cars and gas stoves aren’t going to let their Twinkies go without a fight.

The MAHA site also calls clean air, water, and food “non-negotiables,” saying the PAC promotes “candidates and policies that remove harmful chemicals and pollutants to ensure every American lives in a toxin-free environment.” It’s hard to see how that squares with “Drill, baby, drill,” the mantra of the man they supported for President, or his assertion that climate change and the corona virus were “hoaxes,” or with the polluting industries who helped put the President back in office.

Is Kennedy right that our current food policies have helped lead to poorer health for Americans? Sure. He’s right twice a day on that score.

But it would take the flexibility of the most esteemed and experienced yoga practitioner to follow the twisted logic that Kennedy’s better ideas will get traction in an administration so dedicated to dismantling the very guardrails that might help him accomplish any goal that might make any Americans healthier. (And with the MAHA crowd apparently unbothered by the devastating cuts to USAID and the roundup and deportation of immigrants, it’s clear they only care about making Americans healthier—to hell with the rest of the world.)

To make progress on the progressive part of his agenda, Kennedy will have to go to war with his boss, the president, and every other department of his administration, not to mention the rest of his own unsteady, unscientific, unhealthy agenda.

Among the significant differences between Donald Trump’s first term as president in 2017 and his return to the White House in 2025, this time around he appears more in control and better prepared. And despite the drastic measures of his first weeks in office, the opposition he is facing appears more subdued and less focused.

Though he won the presidency in 2016, Trump was not yet master of the Republican Party. The party’s “old guard” found him not conservative enough, a personal embarrassment, and too erratic to lead the Grand Old Party. His Make America Great Again movement, though substantial, had not yet demonstrated its capacity for mobilizing its ranks to sway members of Congress to fully embrace Trump and his agenda.

That has clearly changed. Trump’s control of the Republican Party, its apparatus, and congressional cohort are complete. His opponents have been silenced or faded into the background.

In the end, it will most likely be Mr. Trump’s own hubris and the contradictions between his promises and his policies that will prove to be his undoing.

In 2017, to bolster confidence in his administration, he brought on board a number of older, respected individuals to fill sensitive posts in the White House and Cabinet. Some of them, at times, served as a check on his penchant for unpredictable behavior.

The cast of characters in the 2025 Trump White House and Cabinet are themselves more unpredictable and less qualified to serve in their assigned posts than the 2017 appointees. The number one qualification is being a longtime Trump devotee—or having made amends and groveled sufficiently for any past opposition.

The most significant difference between Trump 2017 and Trump 2025 is that he now has a more clearly defined agenda and is more prepared to impose it.

When Ronald Reagan won in 1980, he arrived in Washington with a well-developed conservative game plan designed by the Heritage Foundation to transform the federal government according to conservative principles. In 2017, Trump entered the Oval Office with an array of ideas, complaints, and actions to be taken, but without a plan to implement them.

In 2025, many of the ideas, complaints, and actions are the same as 2017, but they are now bigger, bolder, more thought through and backed up by extensive plans for implementation developed by the very same Heritage Foundation that helped guide Reagan’s time in the White House. And just as Heritage helped populate Reagan’s administration with hundreds of staff in agencies to help implement the conservative agenda, this year Heritage boasts of having tens of thousands of vetted individuals waiting to serve in the new Trump administration.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his “hatchet-man,” are running roughshod over the federal government’s institutions and workforce. Entire agencies have been shuttered, and tens of thousands of workers have been fired or placed on indefinite leave, setting the stage for the kind of Trump takeover in 2025 that he was unable to accomplish in 2017.

There’s one final difference to be noted. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was greeted by an eruption of mass protests. They came in waves with advocates for women’s rights and immigrants, and those calling for more restrictive gun laws and an end to police brutality each in turn making their mark. While there have been protests since last November’s election, they’ve lacked the numbers and emotional intensity of those in Trump’s first term.

Much has been written about the threat posed by Trump 2025 for democracy and the impact of the programs and staff that have been terminated by the Trump-Musk wrecking-ball approach to reform. Much less attention has been given to the public’s reaction to these developments. Opinion polls are one way to measure that—a recent Washington Post poll indicates that the American electorate is as divided as ever. 45% approve of Trump’s job performance as opposed to 53% who disapprove. What also comes through in this poll is that there are significantly more respondents who say they “strongly disapprove” than those who say they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job in office.

Given this, why the lack of intensity in the public’s reaction to White House’s actions? One reason may be that the Trump-Musk “shock and awe” assaults on so many targets in just a few days have left the opposition disoriented and demoralized. Add to this the lack of Democratic leadership. In a recent discussion, an elected Democratic leader outlined his party’s approach as simply to keep proposing amendments to Trump’s budget bills to demonstrate how the GOP wants tax cuts for the rich while placing greater burdens on the working class. This, he said, would drag Trump’s favorable ratings down, enabling Democrats to win back the Congress in 2026. This isn’t leadership. It’s crass opportunism and yet another reason why no coherent or effective opposition has been mounted to President Trump’s efforts to take excessive power in his second term.

In the end, it will most likely be Mr. Trump’s own hubris and the contradictions between his promises and his policies that will prove to be his undoing. Just one example: Polls show that while his supporters love his bold actions, what they most want to see is the drop in prices and inflation that Trump promised during the campaign. But his use of tariffs and the mass deportation of migrants (who perform essential tasks in the agricultural and service sectors) will inevitably cause prices to rise, without the results that Trump voters were promised. If the improvements in the daily lives of his supporters don’t come, Trump2 could end worse than Trump1.

Get ready.

The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

Comrade Krasnov’s…er, Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing as fast as his embrace of Comrade Putin is growing. Fascism expert and On Tyranny author Professor Timothy Snyder notes over at BlueSky:

“Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”

James Carville told Dan Abrams:

“This whole thing is collapsing. … I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.”

At the same time, four Republicans have now thrown Nazi salutes, three over this past weekend at CPAC. They think they can overcome their fear of the people by intimidating us.

These fascists are getting panicky, and panicky would-be tyrants are dangerous.

This is a moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms because if, as Rachel Bitecofer documents, Trump and his followers really are following Hitler’s script to seize total power and turn America into an authoritarian dictatorship, the next step may well be to exploit an attack on America.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-two years ago this week: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.

A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)

And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that February day.

Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the socialists and Jews.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for “terrorists” was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.

His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.

Similarly, in 2002, the new Russian President Putin was engaged in a war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.

A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).

Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia; he launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.

In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya to elevate his own profile while finally seizing full control of the region.

It was an echo of the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to leverage himself into the presidency the following year. He’d used those terror attacks to consolidate his power, and repeated the trick in 2003 beginning with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil. By the following year most serious voices of dissent or opposition in Russia were either dead, in prison, or fleeing for their lives.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Both George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu — at a time when their popularity was in the toilet and charges of impropriety were swirling (in Netanyahu’s case, actual criminal charges) — ignored multiple warnings of attacks coming.

The 9/11 and October 7 attacks — predicted by agencies and nations warning American and Israeli intelligence services respectively — were then successfully used by both to consolidate their own popularity and power.

Which is why this is such a dangerous moment that requires vigilance and preparation.

Trump’s popularity is now collapsing as his largest campaign donor takes a chainsaw to the American government, threatening virtually every aspect of federal and state functions from Social Security to Medicaid to medical research and foreign aid. An attack on America that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.

In an extreme case, which he has publicly mused about, an attack could justify his declaring a national state of emergency, suspending elections, and putting the Constitution on ice. He could then shut down media he doesn’t like, imprison people who speak out, and suspend the 2026 and 2028 elections.

All legally.

At the same time he’s contemplating this, the FBI — America’s premiere counterterrorism organization — is being scattered with as many as 1500 agents leaving Washington, DC. An open apologist for Putin has been put in charge of our intelligence services. And the senior leadership of our military was just purged, replaced with toadies who’ll praise Trump as if this were North Korea at every opportunity.

And the JAG officers of each branch of the military along with their senior commanders — the people who would determine the legality of presidential orders to, say, shoot at protestors or open detention camps for journalists and dissidents — have been fired and replaced by loyalists who’ll do whatever Trump demands.

Brett Holmgren was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until a few weeks ago; he recently warned that the threat levels right now are at unprecedented highs.

Muslims around the world are incensed by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza; Ukrainian expats and refugees are furious about Trump’s embrace of Putin; and the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan has already carried out attacks killing 13 Americans along with a recent slaughter in Moscow.

And, pointing to the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans last month, Holmgren added:

“I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home…”

Anybody remember the bombs left at the RNC and DNC on January 6th? The bomber is still at large, not to mention groups across the political spectrum — and recently fired federal workers — who may have grievances against our government. And people from nations around the world where USAID was keeping friends and relatives alive but isn’t any longer.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong in my concern that we’re facing the very real possibility of an imminent attack that will be exploited by Trump to put a final nail in the coffin of American democracy, but we all — and Democrats, in particular — need to be ready. The Reichstag Fire scenario could be closer than any of us expect.

As the saying goes: “Stand back and stand by.”

Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.

The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.

Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage, boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.

Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:

“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations, World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization – while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be done.”

But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis, obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists, global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.

For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues, half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.

Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024, including 800 in one day.

Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S. co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”

Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or “animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).

Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”

In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records, we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over 400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.

At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II. This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia.

To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:

ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA

1. Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.
2. Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
3. Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.
4. Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian civilians.
5. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.
6. Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
7. Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.
8. Forcible relocation of civilian population.
9. Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the importance of any legitimate military objective.
10. War of aggression against Gaza Palestinians.

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Even before the election, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times read Trump’s polls and censored their own Kamala endorsements. Then the tech bros who run social media donated to his inaugural. ABC News and Meta decided to punt in court and pay out big defamation claims Trump would probably have lost–were they bribes?Is Trump’s bullying chilling the media? It certainly looks like it. MSNBC has canceled Joy Reid’s primetime TV show. In another indication that journalists are under siege, a Mississippi judge ordered a newspaper to take down an editorial.On “The TMI Show” Ted Rall and Manila Chan, fresh from CPAC–where the big names didn’t bother to engage reporters–discuss the muzzling of the news media, the watchdog of democracy.

The post TMI Show Ep 84: Media Mayhem: the Trump Effect? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 84: Media Mayhem: the Trump Effect? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Count on one thing: in some almost unimaginable future, no American president (if we even have them anymore) is going to rename a mountain for Donald Trump as he’s recently tried to do with North America’s tallest peak. He wants Alaska’s Mount Denali (to hell with Native American names!) to be called Mount McKinley in honor of President William McKinley, the man who, in the 1890s, launched this country as an imperial power of the first order.

Of course, it’s just possible that someday someone running (or do I mean: walking, hobbling, limping?) this country might rename the Bertha Rogers Borehole, the deepest hole (now plugged and abandoned) in North America, for President Trump. After all, it should be clear enough that, with a helping hand from the world’s richest man, he’s already taking this country down in a remarkable fashion. It seems that we now inhabit an ever more strikingly 3D world and call me D (as in depressed) about it.

Once upon a time, 3D was a form of movie-making in which — I remember this from my youth in the 1950s — something could seemingly fly off the screen and grab you by the throat (or an arrow, spear, or missile could whiz right at you).

Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world.

Today, 3D (at least to me) has quite a different meaning. The 3Ds of the world of my old age (and believe me they, too, can in some fashion reach right off the screen and grab you by the throat) are The Donald, Dysdopia, and Decline. And yes, I’ve admittedly done a little 3D fiddling of my own with that classic word “dystopia” meant for a deeply negative, apocalyptically horrific future world (think 1984, or do I mean 2025?) — the very opposite, in other words, of utopia. I’ve replaced its “t” with that extra “d” in “honor” (and indeed, that word does have to go in quotation marks) of Donald Trump who is already ushering us into what looks to be the most devastatingly disastrous presidency in this country’s long history.

Denier-in-Chief

In case you don’t think he’s taking us all for one hell of a ride, think again. After all, he and his family started cashing in on his second presidency even before it began. As the New York Times reported, three days ahead of his inauguration, he announced on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump. And if that stumps (or do I mean $trumps?) you, I’m hardly shocked. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, in fact, that each of its memecoins quickly surged in value from eight cents to $75 before — of course! — dropping off a cliff. It’s now estimated that it made the Trump Organization and its partners an instant $100 million or more, while other crypto-traders lost an estimated $2 billion in the process. And if that doesn’t sum up Donald Trump’s presidency to come, I’ll be surprised.

In fact, I suspect that offered just a hint of the unnervingly dysdopian world we’ve entered. Let’s face it: we couldn’t find ourselves in a more dopily dangerous 3D moment today. After all, Donald Trump and his alter ego Elon Musk, the richest man on earth and growing richer by the hour, possibly even heading for the trillion-dollar mark, seem remarkably intent on stepping off-screen and grabbing us all by the throat, while dismantling the American government as we’ve known it. Their goal is evidently to leave both the courts and Congress, the other two parts of our tripartite form of government, in the dust (the mud?) of history.

After all, Vice President JD Vance has already made it clear that the courts — even the Supreme Court — can have no ultimate power to stop a second Trump administration from running rampant. Or, as he wrote recently in response to the first attempts of various courts to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk from all-too-literally dismantling significant parts of the government, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power.” Do tell! (Of course, as Joe Biden’s presidency ended, the Supreme Court granted Trump substantial immunity from prosecution for more or less anything he had done as president and now he may decide he doesn’t even need them anymore.)

Oh, and despite those three Ds, I actually forgot the fourth and most important one of all: denier. Yes, Donald Trump, the elected president of the United States, is a climate-change denier first class and, once again, this country’s denier-in-chief. In the past, he couldn’t have been blunter on the subject. In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastating path across the Southeastern U.S. in 2024, he called climate change “a scam.” He’s also dismissed it as a “hoax” invented by China. Worse yet, he ran successfully for president this time around on the phrase “drill, baby, drill” and the promise of a presidency fossil-fuelized to the hilt. It mattered not at all to him and his crew that the planet was experiencing its hottest months and hottest year ever; that his first month in office, this January, once again broke all heat records; and that climate scientists are predicting far worse to come.

Now back in the White House, President Trump has already taken steps to shut off moves made by the Biden administration to put money into green energy and withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (again), while removing mentions of anything related to climate change from government websites. He’s clearly preparing to advance coal, oil, and natural gas development in any way he can. Consider it a deep irony that the executives of the major oil and gas companies, while distinctly in his camp, aren’t eager to over-drill, baby, over-drill, fearing that the price of their products could fall. Of course, to put all of this in even grimmer perspective, in the Biden years this country was already the historically top producer of oil and exporter of natural gas on this planet. In short, President Trump’s goal, it seems, is simply to turn up the heat even further. (Phew, I’m getting hot just writing this!)

In other words, in more or less every way imaginable, as the oldest president ever to enter the Oval Office, his next four years, fossil-fuelized to the hilt, seem all too intent on taking the planet down with him.

President Decline

Think of him as President 3D, or if you prefer 4D, or simply add in the Ds of your choice — disaster, dreaded, dumb, or [fill in the blank here].

Once upon a time, decline (even the decline of great nations) usually proved to be a long, slow process. There were admittedly moments — when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, for instance, leaving the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth — when it happened more quickly, but they were rare.

Thanks to Donald Trump, however, it’s possible that the decline of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower could, in this moment, prove uncomfortably closer to the Soviet model than, for instance, to the fading of the British empire. The Big Triple (Quadruple?) D and his buddy, the richest man on Planet Earth, seem remarkably intent on taking us all over a cliff with them.

Admittedly, this country has been on its own trajectory of decline from its status as the planet’s sole superpower for quite a while now. Otherwise, the man once best known for being the host of a TV show, The Apprentice, and for the line “You’re fired!” (as well as for having overseen six companies that went bankrupt — You’re fired!), would never have won in 2016; nor would he be having such an instant blast firing people and closing down or simply shattering government departments the second time around. And again, it would have been inconceivable for Donald Trump to be elected president again if the American imperial world weren’t already declining at home and abroad.

All he’s really doing now is hurrying along the pace, as he (with a helping hand from the most prominent once-illegal immigrant on Earth) tries to wipe out so much, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Education Department. And — count on it — this country’s courts aren’t likely to be able to stop him in the end. Why, only the other day, Vice President JD Vance insisted that “if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” and obviously the same is true for the president. And in just that spirit, the Trump administration is already beginning to ignore or openly defy court orders on how to deal with parts of the government.

In the end, in his own fashion, Donald Trump may be in the process of closing down this country (at least as we once knew it) and lending a hand to doing the very same thing for Planet Earth (at least as we once knew it). Just what the results of all this will be, we obviously don’t yet know. Count on one thing, though: it ain’t going to be pretty and not just because, with his latest 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel, the costs of products that use either of them (and probably so much else) are going to rise grimly.

No question, though, that decline preceded him into office or, best guess, he never would have been elected in the first (no less second) place. After all, this country was already losing some of its stature globally long before The Donald decided to shut down most aid to the world, while doing his damnedest (with the 13 billionaires he’s appointed to his administration) to ensure that the already wildly wealthy will, in the future, leave the rest of America in a ditch.

And yes, he’s certainly going to be President Decline, Baby, Decline. Don’t, for a second, be fooled by his very open urge, in a strikingly McKinleyesque fashion, “to expand our territory” — to grab, that is, or at least dream about grabbing yet more territory for imperial America, ranging from Greenland and the Panama Canal to that 51st state Canada, and, of course, Gaza. The urge to return to a nineteenth-century version of imperialism, even as he does his best (or worst?) to take this country and this planet down, is striking, to say the least. Especially as, in the wake of the McKinley moment, the American version of imperialism normally involved a far more subtle kind of control over significant parts of this planet, rather than the Trumpian urge to simply grab what you can, bit by bit, island by island, country by country.

Of course, on a planet that itself is beginning to come apart at the seams, such a president, a man focused on himself above all else, is no small disaster. Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world. In fact, think of Donald Trump’s America as the planetary equivalent of a memecoin. While he and his family may win something significant, don’t count on that for the rest of us, including the 49.7% of American voters in the last election who bought into his scheme.

The Big D — whether you want to think of it as Decline, Dysdopia, Denial, or simply Donald — is now ours for four long, long years. And that couldn’t be sadder.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance threw a molotov cocktail into European politics with his speech in Munich last week where he said that Europe was abandoning “fundamental values” on democratic issues such as free speech and free press. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”

The broader European reaction to Vance’s speech was a mixture of shock, outrage, satisfaction, and glee.

For the outraged, Vance’s hypocrisy was staggering. The man who represented a government that had voided the convictions for all who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an effort to overturn a democratic election was lecturing Europe about values and democracy. The man who represented a government that has banned research funding based solely on the presence of specific words in the grant applications was lecturing about being offended by words. The man who represented a government that banned a news organization from being in the White House because it used the term “Gulf of Mexico” was lecturing Europe about free press. And, as a cherry on the cake, the man who represented a government whose leader would say that Ukraine was responsible for the Russian invasion was lecturing Europe on geopolitical security.

But there was a second category of responses to Vance’s speech—those who praised it as “refreshing” and important—where his blatant hypocrisy was both rationalized and diminished.

Vance knew he was being a hypocrite and these responses were precisely what he wanted.

Those who said, "Yes, it's hypocritical and I don’t like everything that’s happening in the U.S., but that doesn't invalidate his point” fail to understand that Vance's hypocrisy was the point. It was a conscious tool to undermine the very democratic values those in Europe who support him claim to protect.

Attacking European democracy, while representing a government that undermines democracy, fits perfectly with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon's famous political strategy of "flooding the zone with shit." You pump so much contradictory information into the public sphere that citizens can no longer distinguish truth from lies. Or, they simply don’t have the energy to care. And, in a sea of shit, everything stinks equally and thus everything is of equal value.

Here’s the central problem: if one minute you say “rule of law, democracy and free press are non-negotiable values,” you can’t then then turn around the next minute and say, “I don't like everything that's happening in the U.S., but JD Vance has a point.” If European politicians and opinion-leaders are willing to waive off Vance’s hypocrisy because he made some points with which they agree, what they are saying is that undermining the rule of law, the free press and free speech isn’t actually that important. And that's precisely the morally and ethically relativistic political ecosystem Vance wants to cultivate.

By getting European political allies to rationalize or tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy and law, what Vance was doing was carefully setting the stage for an environment where the same things would be rationalized or tolerated here in Europe. Those who waive off Vance's hypocrisy as secondary to his "main point" encourage the erosion of the very rights they claim to defend.

In short, if undermining democracy in the U.S. is dismissed as a mere rhetorical inconvenience, we set the stage for rationalizing and tolerating the same undermining process in Europe.

The hypocrisy wasn’t a mistake. It was a trap.

The Capitol’s phone lines have been overwhelmed this month, and some Democrats are complaining about the deluge of calls from voters who implore them to fight the Trump administration. Too often the responses to the calls have amounted to passing the buck rightward.

“It's been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’" Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer explained. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) is offended by what he’s hearing from constituents. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” he said.

Such reactions are political copouts. Those two congressmembers represent deep-blue districts, and both of their states are represented by Democratic senators. Responding to outraged constituents by telling them to “call the Republicans” is a way of dodging responsibility and accountability.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash.

It's easy enough for Torres, Beyer and others in the Democratic caucus to gripe about the volume of irate calls to their offices. And at first glance, telling constituents to contact Republicans instead might seem logical. But that’s actually a way of telling an angry Democratic base not to be a nuisance to Democratic lawmakers.

What’s more, as a practical matter, their constituents often have no way to message GOP members of Congress. The congressional email system doesn’t allow non-constituents to send a message to a representative or senator. And the first thing that a staffer wants to confirm on the phone is whether the caller is in fact a constituent.

Fully half of the nation’s citizens—and a large majority of Democrats—live in states with two Democratic senators. And so, routinely, when Democratic officeholders say that their agitated constituents should leave them alone and “call the Republicans,” it amounts to a brushoff that can be translated from politician-talk as “Stop bugging us already.”

But in primaries next year, some are liable to be held accountable. Few serving Democrats with blue electorates will face tight races in the 2026 general election—but if they’re perceived as wimps who failed to really put up a fight against President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, incumbents risk facing primary challenges propelled by grassroots anger.

The anger might seem overheated inside Capitol Hill bubbles. But it’s real for millions of engaged activists—the ones who volunteer in droves and can get behind insurgency campaigns with plenty of fundraising, canvassing power and social-media impacts.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash. “The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools to grind Senate business to a halt to delay and defy the Trump-Musk coup,” the activist group Indivisible points out. “The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent -- parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.”

The needed opposition goes way beyond procedural maneuvers. The tenor and vehemence of public statements every day, from the hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, set a tone and convey messages beyond mere words on paper and screens.

The week after Trump’s return to the Oval Office, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) traveled to California and met with donor powerhouses in Silicon Valley, where he reportedly “said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.” Here we have the prospective next House speaker pledging to move in the direction of a president whom Gen. Mark Milley has described as “fascist to the core.”

Jeffries’ goal of hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters. Early this month, CBS News reported that its polling shows “the nation's rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly looking for more opposition to President Trump from their congressional delegation.” The trend has been emphatic. Only 35 percent want Democrats in Congress to “try to find common ground with Trump,” while 65 percent want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”

Hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters.

A rally last Thursday at Jeffries’ central Brooklyn office drew hundreds of protesters. One of them, Molly Ornati, an activist with the group 350 Brooklyn Water, said: “He’s acting as though this is a normal part of the political process, when this is a completely never before seen violation of the Constitution, of federal laws, separation of power, democratic principle—all of the key American values. He’s not standing up with the level of outrage that people meant to see, that Democrats want to see.”

The next day, on his latest California trip, Jeffries spoke in the Bay Area and generated headlines like “Hundreds Protest Outside Event With House Minority Leader” and “Oakland to Hakeem Jeffries: Do Your Job!” One of the local TV news reports summed up a theme of the demonstration this way: “Democratic Party has been paying lip service to the working class.”

To most registered Democrats, there’s nothing more important for lawmakers with a “D” after their names to do than battle tooth-and-nail against the Trump-Musk agenda for gutting the government while enriching the wealthy at everyone else’s expense. While Trump’s forces are setting fire to the basic structures of American democracy, Democrats in Congress are widely perceived to be wielding squirt guns. That’s no way to prevent tyranny or win the next elections.

As Elon Musk’s DOGE cost-cutting brigade ordered mass layoffs and targeted entire agencies, Democrats who tried to use the cuts to rally Americans may have been surprised to learn that the trials and tribulations of bureaucrats don’t resonate with voters who don’t understand what bureaucrats do in the first place.

The post To the Barricades for Beleaguered Bureaucrats! first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post To the Barricades for Beleaguered Bureaucrats! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.

Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.

Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions.

In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.”

Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.

Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.

“We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. The firing of Wilcox “did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.”

As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB.

The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers’ rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were “far-left appointees with radical records.”

These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary. The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate.

As these and other curbs on workers’ rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will.

After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far―such as its mass firing of federal workers―is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump’s second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought, appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is “one of the most influential positions in the federal government,” acting “as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making.”

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws.

All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: “Which Side Are You On?”.