The best way of preventing authoritarian leaders from overthrowing democracies is to make sure that they never get into power in the first place. That’s what the French did last year when parties on the left united and then made a second-round pact with the centrists to prevent Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Rally from winning a parliamentary majority. And now the courts have convicted Le Pen of corruption and barred her from running for office.

Americans have obviously screwed the pooch on that particular method of preventing autocracy. Voted out of office, slapped with multiple suits, convicted of a felony, denounced by dozens of his former appointees, Donald Trump nevertheless managed to use these setbacks as evidence that even a billionaire ex-president can be an “outsider” who’s taking on the “establishment” and sticking up for the “little guy.”

A decade of Trump? That’s a sobering prospect. A 100-year-old president-for-life presiding over the dying embers of American society? A horror story indeed.

On the eve of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, the challenge has now become infinitely more difficult. America is now living through that horror movie cliché where the call is coming from inside the house. The seemingly indestructible culprit has returned for a more horrifying sequel to destroy U.S. democracy from within. Worse, all the failures of his first term are now helping him craft more successful disruptions in his second.

With a cowboy president shooting from the hip in all directions, what can Americans do to prevent Trump from taking down democracy (not to mention the economy, the international system, and the planet)? Even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who admits in a staggering understatement that “he’s not a movement guy,” has recently declared that “it’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising.”

Alas, America has no history of such uprisings from which to draw, except perhaps the American Revolution and that was a long time ago. With few domestic examples to inspire, everyone is now searching the globe for cases of successful resistance to authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, most examples of such uprisings involved years and years of organizing. It took a decade to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, nearly two decades to oust Augusto Pinochet in Chile, slightly more than two decades to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and more than a half-century to depose the Assad’s father-and-son regime in Syria.

A decade of Trump? That’s a sobering prospect. A 100-year-old president-for-life presiding over the dying embers of American society? A horror story indeed.

But there are other examples of more compressed resistance from which Americans committed to a national civic uprising can take inspiration. In recent years, autocrats have been defeated in Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. What can we learn from the brave people who stood up to the dragon and saved their villages?

Dumping Bolsonaro

Like the United States, Brazil is a deeply divided country, with an even larger wealth gap. As Oxfam reports, “Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the population; around 100 million people. The country’s richest 5% have the same income as the remaining 95%.”

The leftist Workers’ Party successfully mobilized the have-nots to win a series of elections in the 2000s. But in 2018, buoyed in part by Donald Trump’s win in 2016, an aggressive, nationalist outsider, Jair Bolsonaro, capitalized on voter frustration with corruption and persistent poverty to become the country’s president. The leading reason for voters to back the sexist, homophobic, religiously conservative Bolsonaro was anti-incumbent sentiment, a profound dissatisfaction with the political status quo.

Once in office, Bolsonaro threatened to pack the Supreme Court with his supporters and, when that failed, to ignore its rulings. He praised the country’s past military dictatorship and threatened to send troops into the streets to restore “order.” He ramped up the disastrous deforestation of the Amazon. Like Trump, he failed to address the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing Brazil to the top of the list of countries with the most fatalities (after the United States and Russia).

There were plenty of protests against Bolsonaro. But his allies in Congress provided a legislative shield against impeachment. Which meant that the most effective form of resistance turned out to be judicial. And that judicial resistance largely boiled down to one person, Alexandre de Moraes, a member of the country’s Supreme Court. As Jon Lee Anderson explains in The New Yorker:

After Bolsonaro took office, in 2019, de Moraes led an ever-expanding series of investigations into him and his family. As Bolsonaro’s supporters formed “digital militias” that flooded the internet with disinformation—claiming that political opponents were pedophiles, spreading blatant lies about their policies, inventing conspiracies—de Moraes fought to force them offline. Granted special powers by the judiciary, he suspended accounts belonging to legislators, business magnates, and political commentators for posts that he described as harmful to Brazilian democracy.

These actions went a long way toward constraining Bolsonaro’s power and reducing his overall popularity, so that by the time the next elections rolled around in 2022, the strongman lost his reelection bid.

U.S. Supreme Court justices don’t have the same kind of power as their Brazilian counterparts. The court as a whole has an even more limited ability to constrain the Trump administration if the latter decides not to implement the decisions it doesn’t like. It’s also going to be difficult to rein in Trump’s digital militias, given Elon Musk’s control of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump over at Facebook.

But one lesson from the Brazilian case is the need to launch immediate investigations into government corruption and misconduct. This can be done in the United States by way of congressional requests for reports by the Congressional Research Service, which for instance deemed the defunding of USAID to be unconstitutional, or to the Government Accountability Office, which has been tasked to study the impact of the mass firings of federal workers. Lawmakers can also hold informal hearings on the unconstitutional actions of DOGE and the executive branch.

Don’t wait and play a defensive game. Be as bold as the Brazilians against Bolsonaro and go on the offensive.

Displacing Law and Justice

The right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) took electoral advantage of the discontent of Polish voters, particularly in the countryside, who had not benefited from the country’s rush to capitalism after 1989. Poland A did well by the liberal reforms; Poland B didn’t and took revenge at the polls by voting for PiS.

Like Donald Trump and his MAGA forces, PiS had a first taste of power when it governed for two years in a coalition government and didn’t accomplish much. When it came roaring back in 2015, PiS knew exactly what to do. First, it went after the courts. PiS was determined to destroy the country’s constitutional order and remake Polish society according to conservative, nationalist, and religious principles.

The first target was the constitutional court, which had blocked PiS initiatives in that first administration. As Christian Davies writes:

The ruling party’s strategy played out in three parts: First, to deny opposition-appointed judges from taking their place on the court. Second, to pass laws designed to paralyze the court and prevent it from functioning effectively. Third, to force through the appointment of judges loyal to the ruling party. All this was done in open defiance of the law, the constitution, and multiple rulings issued by the Tribunal itself.

This attack on the judiciary, which was also accompanied by assaults on the media, free speech, and nonprofit organizations, precipitated a battle with the European Union, which put pressure on the Polish government to reverse its judicial “reforms.” But with the courts now aligned with its agenda, PiS looked as though it would consolidate its power indefinitely. In the 2019 elections, it even expanded its legislative majority in the lower house of parliament.

Four years later, thanks to its control of the media and other methods of rigging political outcomes, PiS again came out on top in the 2023 parliamentary elections with 35% of the vote. But this time, three opposition parties were able to unite to sideline PiS and form a new government. Poland’s constitutional crisis had come to an end.

How did the Polish opposition manage to beat a clearly still-popular party?

Perhaps the E.U. pressuring from the outside might have helped. But part of the PiS base was Euroskeptical, so the party could use E.U. pressure to rally its nationalist supporters.

More influential was the ability of the Polish opposition to overcome its fractiousness and bring together leftists, liberals, Solidarity true believers, traditional conservatives, and interest-group advocates like environmentalists and pro-choice feminists. In 2015, after the PiS government refused to follow a Constitutional Court verdict, major street protests broke out and a journalist called for a new civic movement patterned after the communist-era dissident group, the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR). “We have to remember, the goal isn’t to overturn the legally elected authorities of the country, but rather the defense of democracy,” the journalist wrote.

Out of this ferment came the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), which organized a series of massive protests around the country. Within a few months, it had garnered the support of 40% of the population. Because it wasn’t a party, KOD could appeal to a large segment of the population that had become disgusted with electoral politics. It successfully promoted the message that PiS was no ordinary party pushing for an ordinary platform of policies. Rather, PiS was a threat to the very legacy of the Solidarity movement that had liberated the country.

The United States needs just such a nonpartisan umbrella organization that can appeal to the largest swath of the anti-Trump community. Let’s call it the Society Organized to Save American Democracy (SOSAD). It stands for mom, baseball, apple pie, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, fairly compensated work, equal rights for all: in short everything that makes America truly great.

Reversing a Coup

To overcome a parliament that blocked his policies, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on the evening of December 3, 2024. The president ordered police to seal off the parliament and special forces to enter the building.

But the coup lasted for only a few hours. Enough members of parliament managed to get into the building that night and hold a vote to lift martial law. Meanwhile, spurred by news spread rapidly by electronic means, citizens began to gather in public places to protest Yoon’s actions.

South Koreans saved their democracy because of brave legislators and determined civil society activists. The country has a long history of civic engagement, going back to the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s and efforts to bring down former President Park Geun-Hye through months of candlelight vigils.

The defense of democracy perhaps feels more urgent in countries where it’s not taken for granted.

“The speed of this latest democratic defense suggests that lessons learned during decades of mobilization have strengthened South Korea’s institutional guardrails and nationwide vigilance against executive abuse,” writes Darcie Draudt-Véjares.

This month, the country’s constitutional court upheld the parliament’s impeachment and officially removed Yoon from office.

The lessons from the South Korean case are clear. U.S. legislators have to step up—as Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) did with his 25-hour filibuster and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have been doing with their recent rallies. Meanwhile, civil society must organize rapid responses, not just within silos (like the recent letter from university presidents) but across institutions.

One key lesson from the South Korean experience is the role of labor. After Yoon’s martial law announcement, the main trade union confederation immediately called for a general strike until the president stepped down. The prospect of a significant hit to the Korean economy was a wake-up call for many who hadn’t yet made up their minds about Yoon.

U.S. labor has had a love-hate relationship with Trump. Many labor leaders refused to back the candidate even as support among rank-and-file members surged. Several key unions—Teamsters, UAW—have been enthusiastic about Trump’s tariffs.

Any opposition to Trump must appeal to working people who feel ignored and undervalued by politicians and the elite. They are a core part of Trump’s support, but they are certainly persuadable. When the costs of Trump’s actions begin to rise—at the pump, in the grocery store, through reduced checks from Medicare and Medicaid—they may well be ready for a political change.

Why were Poles, Koreans, and Brazilians able to turn back authoritarianism where others have failed? All three have histories of strong civil society engagement in politics. All three had credible leaders—Donald Tusk, Lee Jae-myung, Lula—who could step in as alternatives.

And all three countries have had rather short experiences of democratic rule. In 1981, South Koreans were living in the shadow of martial law, which had been declared the previous year. Poles entered a martial law period in December of that year. And Brazilians were living under a military dictatorship that wouldn’t collapse until 1985.

The defense of democracy perhaps feels more urgent in countries where it’s not taken for granted. So far, America is failing the stress test that Trump is applying to the country’s democratic institutions. But if Americans are willing to learn some lessons from Brazil, Poland, and Korea, maybe we can defeat the dragon as well.

LIVE 1:30 PM Eastern Time/10:30 AM Pacific time + Streaming When You Feel It:

In this fast-moving episode of DeProgram, hosts John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer turned whistleblower who exposed the agency’s torture program, and Ted Rall, an award-winning political cartoonist and columnist renowned for his biting anti-establishment commentary, deliver a hard-hitting analysis of today’s most pressing issues.

The episode kicks off with an in-depth look at the high-stakes Rome meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, unpacking its ramifications for U.S.-Ukraine relations amid the ongoing Russia conflict. The hosts then turn to U.S.-Iran negotiations, offering sharp insights into the intricate dance of diplomacy and power shaping the Middle East.

On the domestic front, Kiriakou and Rall dive into the latest polls, dissecting public sentiment toward Elon Musk’s outsized influence and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s political ascent, revealing how these figures are redefining America’s political landscape. The episode also confronts the deeply polarizing issue of deporting U.S.-citizen babies, exploring its legal, ethical, and humanitarian consequences with unflinching clarity.

With Kiriakou’s insider perspective on intelligence and Rall’s razor-sharp cultural critiques, the duo dismantles mainstream narratives, exposing the systems driving these global and domestic developments. This episode of DeProgram blends wit, wisdom, and anti-imperialist fervor to connect the dots between geopolitics and power struggles at home. This is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand the world beyond the headlines. Tune in and get deprogrammed!

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“What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems” by Ted Rall comes out Thursday, May 1st. Your local bookstore can pre-order using this ISBN: 979-8-9986622-0-1 #socialism #left #radicalleft #communism #manifesto

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Global trade systems are not free, nor are they neutral. They were built to facilitate capital transfer and to transfer wealth upward—benefiting the rich while harming workers worldwide. This arrangement can feel too big, too abstract, and too disconnected from our experience. For these reasons, and as a sociologist across decades and schools, I have facilitated this race to the bottom activity to help students understand the problems inherent to our complex global reality.

In the Transnational Capital Auction: A Game of Survival simulation, students role play as leaders of countries with less wealth than GDP leading nation states. They are instructed that they rely on trade and economic development from wealthier countries such as the United States and powerful transnational corporations.

Capital flight occurs when transnational corporations move their factory or industry from one geographical area to another in order to seek better conditions for their bottom line, profits, or for shareholders. These moves highlight the antagonism between the working class and the owning class. For example, in the activity, teams gain points when they satisfy corporate demands: being lax on child labor laws and environmental regulations, maintaining a low minimum wage and corporate tax rate, and suppressing unionization of workers. This is not just a game with hypothetical conditions, it is a microcosm which echoes real-world socioeconomic and political dynamics.

Rather than denying our power and privilege in order to justify more bad behavior, we need to do our part to realign around policies that are internationally, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

We have seen this play out domestically and internationally. Sociologists have documented how corporations leave the United States to go to places more favorable to capital. For example, when an area develops unions, industry can flee to what it considers a safer space for business. In this way, capital for transnational corporations can accumulate faster when workers’ rights and environmental policy is lax. These conditions have led to countless deaths, especially among women and people of color, and have fueled global climate destabilization. These corporations are helped by policies and loopholes such as international tax havens like Nauru.

The human cost of this system is staggering. Body-catching nets were installed around Foxconn buildings because workers were unaliving themselves by jumping off their job site. Women, including mothers, leave their families and countries in order to work in other locations where the wages are higher.

The unjust arrangements are often complex by design. There are free trade zones or “special economic zones” in places like Jamaica, which allow companies to operate under a different set of laws than the rest of their country—sometimes with fewer worker protections. Meanwhile, local markets neglect or dispose of their natural resources because of the flux of imported goods dictated by trade agreements.

To be sure, the global working class harmed by these lopsided systems includes American workers who have lost their jobs, houses, and communities through capital flight. And yet, American consumers love the low prices these systems enable. The products we rely on—the food, the technology, the entertainment—these things are not created in a vacuum, and they are also not free. We have access to fast fashion and too soon obsolete technologies because people spend their lives working in conditions and receiving wages that we would consider un-American. Yet they are so very American.

The United States is no one’s victim. It helped create the race to the bottom and continues to benefit from its downward spiral. Trump’s narrative, justification, and chaotic enactment of tariffs are more than problematic. They are not a departure from business as usual, they are an extension of it and will overwhelmingly benefit the world’s financial elite.

Change is needed. The United States needs to reevaluate its relationship with itself and as part of a global community. We need reciprocal, resilient, and renewable structures in place. We will not get there by the same policies of violence, domination, and extraction that got us to the asymmetrical and disproportionate power that we have now. Rather than denying our power and privilege in order to justify more bad behavior, we need to do our part to realign around policies that are internationally, socially, and environmentally sustainable. We can all start by reflecting on our personal commodity chains, which tether us to global enterprise and its bottom rungs.

I recently wrote about a somewhat mysterious group of financial traders known as the bond vigilantes. Their actions caused Donald Trump to abort many of his Liberation Day tariffs, but that does not make them the good-guy defenders of democracy. In fact, they are quite the opposite.

Many understood that point, thankfully, but others wondered about the government bond market, how it worked, and why the value of something fully backed by the faith of the U.S. government might be mutable in value.

Readers had questions and the answers will help us understand why Trump flinched when the bond vigilantes drove up the interest rates on government bonds. As we shall see, what seems like a small change in interest rates has a very big impact on the value of outstanding bonds, causing the loss of trillions of dollars in a flash.

Warning: Do not use Google to research bond vigilantes. When I did so, its Gemini AI function hallucinated and used my article from last week as a source!

Let’s start with the basics:

Q: What is a bond?

A: When you buy a bond, you are making a loan to the issuer-- a government, a bank, a corporation. You give the institution your money and they agree to pay you back on a certain date, plus interest. The interest is your incentive for loaning your money.

How much interest you get for loaning your money depends primarily on two things: 1) How likely is it that the borrower will be able to pay you back; and 2) The overall rate of inflation. Interest payments should be above the current and expected inflation rates, because if you were paid less for your loan, you would be losing money in terms of purchasing power.

Q: What is the bond market?

A: It’s a big market, the biggest in the world, even bigger than the stock market. There are $140.7 trillion worth of outstanding bonds in the market, compared to $115 trillion worth of stocks. The bonds are traded just as stocks are traded, with investors buying and selling depending on their analysis of the market’s future performance.

Q: How is a bond different than a CD?

A: There really isn’t any difference between a CD and a government bond except that a CD is issued by a bank and is guaranteed up to $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The interest rate for any duration of CD (whether six months or five years) will be comparable to the interest rate on government bonds with similar durations.

Corporate bonds come with more risk. Your loan is not guaranteed so there is a chance that a corporation that takes your money will not be able to pay you back – that’s called the risk of default. Because of the risk, the rate of interest you receive on a corporate bond will always be higher than a CD or a government bond.

You can make more money, but you can also lose more money. That’s your risk.

Q: Aren’t US Treasury bonds risk free?

A: Yes, provided that the U.S. government pays its bills, which apart from a few extreme examples it always has. And notably, the U.S. government has never defaulted on its obligations to repay treasury bond holders.

Since World War II, U.S treasury bonds have been considered the safest investment in the world. The 10-year treasury bond is used as the benchmark for many other forms of credit, including mortgages, car loans and corporate borrowing.

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Q: OK, I understand that a bond is a loan, and the interest I get is based on how risky that loan is, as well as how much inflation there is. But in your article, you said a $1,000 bond might be worth less than $1,000. How is that possible?

A: A $1,000 government bond has a face value of $1,000. On its maturity date, let’s say in ten years, it will pay you back $1,000. In that sense, it is always worth $1,000.

But each bond also has an interest rate, and as that changes, so does the value of the initial $1,000 investment.

Q: So how could it ever be worth less than $1,000?

Let’s say on Day 1 you buy a $1,000 bond with a 4.5 percent interest rate. If you hold onto that, you will be paid $45 interest per year and then get back your $1,000 principle ten years later.

Now imagine that inflation rises, and a new 10-year bond is issued by the government a year later. Instead of 4.5 percent rate the new 10-year bond has a 5 percent interest rate. Each year, a bond holder of the new issue will get $50 in interest payments on his $1,000 investment, while you’ll be getting $45.

Both bonds will still return $1,000 at maturity, but the more recently issued bond is paying more in interest each year.

If, another year later, you want to sell your 10-year government bond because you need the money to buy a dozen eggs, you won’t be able to sell your 4.5 percent 10-year bond for $1000.

The market sets the price, and because there are other bonds out there paying a higher interest rate, your bond with the lower interest rate will be valued at less than $1,000. Even though in eight years you’ll be able to cash it in for $1,000!

Q: Wait a second. You said my treasury bond is risk free and will always be worth $1000, but now you say it’s not? How does that work?

A: On the secondary market, your bond is worth what its interest rate says its worth. (The primary market is when the government sells the bonds. The secondary market is when everyone else can buy and sell existing bonds.)

Here we need to do some simple math. Your bond pays $45 in interest payments, but the new bond pays $50. Why would anyone want your bond if it pays less than the new bond? They wouldn’t.

But they would if you lowered your price so that your bond would pay out at the new going 5.0 percent rate instead of 4.5 percent.

Here’s how that works on the simplest level. For your 4.5 percent bond to pay out at 5.0 percent, the price would have to go down to $900. At $900 your bond would then be paying out at the new going rate of 5 percent: $900 x 5.0 percent = $45 per year.

The market is willing to buy your 4.5 percent bond after it becomes a 5.0 percent bond by lowering its price. (The actual formula for bond pricing is more complicated because it also accounts for the number of years, the number of interest payments per year, and anticipated interest rate changes over the years, but the basic principle is the same.)

Q: Well, my bond is worth $1000 and that’s what I want and that’s what I’m guaranteed to get!

A: Right, if you hold it until it matures. You will indeed get back your entire thousand dollars. But you will also have earned only $450 in interest, while more recently issued higher-rate bonds will have earned $500. Which is why, if you want to sell before your bond’s term is up, and other bonds are at 5 percent, you’ll only get $900 for your bond. That’s just the way interest rates and bond prices work.

Q: What happens if interest rates go down?

A: If interest rates go down, when you sell your bond before its term is up, you’ll get more than $1,000. The process is exactly the opposite.

You have a bond that pays 4.5 percent interest, and a new bond is issued that pays only 4 percent because inflation has gone down. The new bond pays $40 per year, while your 4.5 percent bond pays $45 per year. Clearly, your bond is more valuable than the new bond even though they both are $1,000 bonds and will pay $1,000 when they mature.

If you decide to sell your 4.5 percent bond, the secondary market will sync your bond to the value of the new 4 percent bond, which will increase the value of your principle to $1,125. That’s because $1,125*4.0 percent = $45.

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Q: Where do the bond vigilantes fit into all of this?

A: The idea of bond vigilantes was cooked up by an economist in the 1980s named Ed Yardeni. It’s a vivid image that evokes the citizens in old western movies putting together a posse when the sheriff is unable to administer the law on his own.

Bond vigilantes act as a posse administering capitalist law and order. They buy and sell bonds and currencies in vast quantities based on their analysis of what governments are doing or not doing to protect financial and corporate capital.

The vigilantes work for big banks, hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds and any place that has lots and lots of investment capital.

Unlike a posse, they are not an organized cabal. They work for different financial entities, but they are united by their world view. They react badly to any policies or programs they see as being inflationary or harming the interests of high finance or large corporations. They want governments to step away and let market forces determine the forward march of human history.

Q Can you give us an example of how they function?

A: Sure. Let’s look at George Soros and the British pound.

(The valuation of currencies is very similar to the valuation of government bonds. Both depend on the health and well-being of a country’s economy and credibility.)

In 1990, as Europe moved closer to a common currency – the euro -- it set up the Exchange Rate Mechanism as a clearinghouse for EU currency values. The ERM set the British pound at a fixed rate against the German mark, trying to eventually move the currencies to common ground. All well and good, but George Soros thought that the ERM agreement overvalued the British pound, meaning that Soros thought one British pound should be worth fewer German marks than what the agreement stated.

Soros was so convinced that the pound was overvalued that he went into vigilante mode and shorted the British pound.

Shorting means that he borrowed pounds from brokers and sold lots and lots of them at the current ERM determined exchange rate. (BTW, Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, worked for Soros on this deal.)

Why would Soros do that? Because he was betting that the value of the pound was going to decline, correcting the ERM’s error, and he would then be able to buy many more pounds at a lower price, returning what he had borrowed earlier and pocketing the difference. Bonds and stocks can be shorted in the same way.

Soros was betting that the value of the pound would go down and it did. His mass selling of the pound was soon followed by other currency traders joining in, collectively putting a lot of downward pressure on the value because so many pounds were being sold in a hurry. The Bank of England saw the value declining and tried to protect it by buying pounds.

That created a currency tug of war, with Soros and others selling billions in pounds and the Bank of England buying up those billions. If the value of the pound held, Soros would lose his bet, but eventually the Bank of England gave up and the value of the pound went down.

Soros won his bet and made more than one billion dollars back when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The Bank of England gave up trying to defend the value of the pound and the United Kingdom had to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism because the value of the pound had declined against the German Mark and broke the ERM.

Q: Is this what’s called a “run”?

A: Yes. A “run” is when a lot of traders (vigilantes), mobilizing a lot of money, bet against a currency, a bond, a bank, a stock, etc. trying to force its value down. They are betting that the value of the currency, bond, or bank or corporate stock will go down enough for them to cash out, before they need to cover their bets.

Sometimes, lots of very big players follow each other in attacking a currency, bond, bank, or stock. Together these vigilantes have enormous power to weaken their targets and make them do what the vigilantes want.

Q: What did the vigilantes do to Trump?

A: They put the hammer down on Trump’s on-and-off-again crazily unpredictable Liberation Day tariffs. They used their tools to sell lots of 10-year US treasury notes, driving down their price and thereby raising the interest rates on them. The vigilantes were saying that if you do all this crazy stuff, we want a higher interest rate for the money we and millions of others are loaning to you.

When they hammered the 10-year U.S. treasury bond, they threatened the entire economy. That’s because that 10-year bond sets the rates for other loans. like mortgages, auto loans, and corporate borrowing. If those rates kept rising as the vigilantes sold more and more bonds, the U.S. economy would likely head towards increasing inflation, unemployment, or both.

And as we saw from our simple example, what seems like a small rise in interest rates translates into a very big loss of principle. Trump folded as trillions of dollars of bond value in the largest market in the world, evaporated in a flash.

Q: I’m no fan of Trump and his tariffs, but who elected the vigilantes to veto the policies of an elected president?

A: No one and that’s a real problem. Rampant and unregulated trading almost sunk the economy in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and it was a complex series of banking and market regulations put into place by President Franklyn D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal that saved the economy. For more than 40 years those regulations meant there were no banking crises, and we had a financial sector that didn’t reap runaway salaries.

The deregulation of Wall Street, starting in the 1980s or so, undid many of those safeguards and allowed high finance to move money around the world at will, increasing the power of financial markets over government policy. (I tell much of that story in Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

Bond and currency traders share a deep understanding of what is good for capitalist markets. When they see that a country is spending heavily on social programs or promoting stiff regulations on business, they are likely to place their bets against that country’s bonds and currencies.

Because money can be moved in and out of a currency or a bond just about instantaneously, the vigilantes, in effect, create capitalist discipline over nearly every country. The needs and wishes of capital face off against the needs and wishes of democracy, and so far, capital is winning.

With that toothpaste out of the tube after 40 years of financial deregulation, reining in capital is a Herculean task that may not be completed until there is another disaster on the scale of the Great Depression.

But letting capital run free and unregulated is proving to be a troubling idea that needs to be addressed. The very idea of democracy may hang in the balance.

America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.

With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.

A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window.

The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.

“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”

Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.

That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.

A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”

Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.

During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.

Mutual Abandonment

The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”

But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.

Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.

On no issue has the party leadership been more tone-deaf — with more disastrous electoral and policy results — than the war in Gaza. The refusal of all but a few members of Congress to push President Biden to stop massively arming the Israeli military for its slaughter there caused a steep erosion of support from the usual Democratic voters, as polling at the time and afterward indicated. The party’s moral collapse on Gaza helped to crater Kamala Harris’s vote totals among alienated voters reluctant to cast their ballots for what they saw as a war party, a perception especially acute among young people and notable among African Americans.

The Fact of Oligarchy

Pandering to potential big donors is apt to seem like just another day in elected office. A story about California Governor Gavin Newsom, often touted as a major Democratic contender for president in 2028, is in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.” As reported by Politico this spring, he “is making sure California’s business elite can call him, maybe. Roughly 100 leaders of state-headquartered companies have received a curious package in recent months: a prepaid, inexpensive cell phone… programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself. ‘If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,’ read one note to a prominent tech firm CEO, printed on an official letterhead, along with a hand-scrawled addendum urging the executive to reach out… It was Newsom’s idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some ‘valuable interactions.’”

If, however, you’re waiting for Newsom to send prepaid cell phones to activists working for social justice, telling them, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,” count on waiting forever.

The dominance of super-wealthy party patrons that Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been railing against at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies has been coalescing for a long time. “In the American republic,” wrote Walter Karp for Harper’s magazine shortly before his death in 1989, “the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us.” Now, in the age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the iron heel of mega-capital is at work swiftly crushing democratic structures, while top Democrats race to stay within shouting distance of the oligarchs.

A paradoxical challenge for the left is that it must take part in building a united front that includes anti-Trump corporatists and militarists, even while fighting against corporatism and militarism. What’s needed is not capitulation or ultra-leftism, but instead a dialectical approach that recognizes the twin imperatives of defeating an increasingly fascistic Republican Party while working to gain enough power to implement truly progressive agendas.

For those agendas, electoral campaigns and their candidates should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Still, here’s one crystal-clear lesson of history: it’s crucial who sits in the Oval Office and controls Congress. Now more than ever.

Fascism Would Stop Us All

A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window. The words of the young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, murdered in 1969 by the Chicago police (colluding with the FBI), ring profoundly true today: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”

But much of the 2025 Democratic Party leadership seems willing to once again pursue the tried-and-failed strategy of banking on Trump to undo himself. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the party leaders in the House and Senate, have distinctly tilted in that direction, as if heeding strategist James Carville’s declaration that Democrats should not try to impede Trump’s rampage against the structures of democracy.

“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” Carville wrote in late February. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” (Evidently impressed with his political acumen, the editors of the New York Times published the op-ed piece with that advice only four months after printing an op-ed he wrote in late October under this headline: “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”)

As for the Democratic National Committee, it probably had nowhere to go but up in the wake of the chairmanship of Jaime Harrison, who for four years dutifully did President Biden’s bidding. Now, with no Democratic president, the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, has significant power to guide the direction of the party.

In early April, I informed Martin that my colleagues and I at RootsAction were planning a petition drive for the full DNC to hold an emergency meeting. “The value of such a meeting seems clear for many reasons,” I wrote, “including the polled low regard for the Democratic Party and the need to substantively dispel the wide perception that the party is failing to adequately respond to the current extraordinary perils.” Martin replied with a cordial text affirming that the schedule for the 448-member DNC to convene remains the same as usual — twice a year — with the next meeting set for August.

The petition, launched in mid-April (co-sponsored by RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America), urged the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members — fully open to the public — as soon as possible… Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”

No matter what, at this truly pivotal time, we must never give up.

As Stanley Kunitz wrote during the height of the Vietnam War:

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

While reasons for pessimism escalate, I often think of how on target my RootsAction colleague India Walton was in a meeting when she said, “The only hope is in the struggle.”

Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration. On April 22nd, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. Trump’s policies are expected to drag U.S. growth down from 2.7% to 1.8%.

It’s now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. The U.S. has slapped massive tariffs—up to 245%—on Chinese goods. China hit back with 125% tariffs of its own and refuses even to negotiate until U.S. tariffs are lifted.

Ever since President Obama announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia” in 2011, both U.S. political parties have seen China as the main global competitor, or even as a target for U.S. military force. China is now encircled by a staggering 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73,000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the U.S. West coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China, and the rest of us along with it.

To put the trade war between the U.S. and China in context, we need to take a step back and look at their relative economic strength and international trading relations with other countries. There are two ways to measure a country’s economy: nominal GDP (based only on currency exchange rates) and “purchasing power parity” (PPP), which adjusts for the real cost of goods and services. PPP is now the preferred method for economists at the IMF and OECD.

If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, we could all lose everything.

Measured by PPP, China overtook the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 2016. Today, its economy is 33% larger than America’s—$40.7 trillion compared to $30.5 trillion.

And China isn’t alone. The U.S. is just 14.7% of the world economy, while China is 19.7%. The EU makes up another 14.1%, while India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and the rest of the world account for the other 51.5%. The world is now multipolar, whether Washington likes it or not.

So when Malaysia’s trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz was asked whether he’d side with China or the U.S., his answer was clear: "We can’t choose—and we won’t." Trump would like to adopt President Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” posture, but that makes no sense when China and the U.S. together account for only 34% of the global economy.

China saw this coming. As a result of Trump’s trade war with China during his first term in office, it turned to new markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative. Southeast Asia is now China’s biggest export market. It no longer depends on American soybeans—it grows more of its own and buys most of the rest from Brazil, cutting the U.S. share of that market by half.

Meanwhile, many Americans cling to the idea that military power makes up for shrinking economic clout. Yes, the U.S. outspends the next ten militaries combined—but it hasn’t won a major war since 1945. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the U.S. has spent trillions, killed millions, and suffered humiliating defeats.

Today in Ukraine, Russia is grinding down U.S.-backed forces in a brutal war of attrition, producing more shells than the U.S. and its allies can at a fraction of our cost. The bloated, for-profit U.S. arms industry can’t keep up, and our trillion dollar military budget is crowding out new investments in education, healthcare, and civilian infrastructure on which our economic future depends.

None of this should be a surprise. Historian Paul Kennedy saw it coming in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Every dominant empire, from Spain to Britain to Russia, eventually confronted relative decline as the tides of economic history moved on and it had to find a new place in a world it no longer dominated. Military overextension and overspending always accelerated the fall.

“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number one’ countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment…,” Kennedy wrote.

He found that no society remains permanently ahead of all others, but that the loss of empire is not the end of the road for former great powers, who can often find new, prosperous positions in a world they no longer dominate. Even the total destruction suffered by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, which ended their imperial ambitions, was also a new beginning, as they turned their considerable skills and resources from weapons development to peaceful civilian production, and soon produced the best cars and consumer electronics in the world.

Paul Kennedy reminded Americans that the decline in U.S. leadership “is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order…”

And that is exactly how our leaders have failed us. Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down—on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance. Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall.

Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force.

Trump and his team are no exception. They know the old policies have failed. They know radically different policies are needed. Yet they keep playing from the same broken record—economic coercion, threats, wars, proxy wars, and now genocide—violating international law and exhausting the goodwill of our friends and neighbors around the world.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. It took the two most deadly and destructive wars in human history to put an end to the British Empire and the age of European colonialism. In a nuclear-armed world, another great-power war wouldn’t just be catastrophic—it would very likely be final. If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, we could all lose everything.

The future instead demands a peaceful transition to international cooperation in a multipolar world. This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.

Today is the start of the 14th week of the odious Trump regime. Wednesday will mark its first 100 days.

The U.S. Constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.

At this rate, we won’t make it through the second hundred days.

Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump — judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself — but the regime is either ignoring or appealing their orders. It has even arrested a municipal judge in Milwaukee who merely sought to hear a case involving an undocumented defendant.

Recently, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit — an eminent conservative Reagan appointee who is revered by the Federalist Society — issued a scathing rebuke of the Trump regime. In response to its assertion that it can abduct residents of the United States and put them into foreign prisons without due process, Wilkinson wrote:

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

Judge Wilkinson’s fears are already being realized. Early Friday morning, ICE deported three U.S. citizens — aged 2, 4, and 7 — when their mothers were deported to Honduras. One of the children, having Stage 4 cancer, was sent out of the United States without medication or consultation with doctors.

Meanwhile, the regime continues to attack all the independent institutions in this country that have traditionally served as bulwarks against tyranny — universities, nonprofits, lawyers and law firms, the media and journalists, science and researchers, libraries and museums, the civil service, and independent agencies — threatening them with extermination or loss of funding if they don’t submit to its oversight and demands.

Trump has even instructed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support.

At the same time, Trump is actively destroying the economy. His proposed tariffs are already raising prices. His attacks on Fed chief Jerome Powell are causing tremors around the world.

Trump wants total power, even at the cost of our democracy and economy.

His polls are dropping yet many Americans are still in denial. “He’s getting things done!” some say. “He’s tough and strong!”

Every American with any shred of authority must loudly and boldly sound the alarm.

A few Democrats and progressives in Congress (Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy) have expressed outrage, but most seem oddly quiet. Granted, they have no direct power to stop what is occurring but they cannot and must not appear to acquiesce. They need to be heard, every day — protesting, demanding, resisting, refusing.

Barack Obama has spoken up at least once, to his credit, but where is my old boss, Bill Clinton? Where is George W. Bush? Where are their former vice presidents — Al Gore and Dick Cheney? Where are their former Cabinet members? They all must be heard, too.

What about Republican members of Congress? Are none willing to stand up against what is occurring? And what of Republican governors and state legislators? If there were ever a time for courage and integrity, it is now. Their silence is inexcusable.

Over 400 university presidents have finally issued a letter opposing “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Good. Now they must speak out against the overreach endangering all of American democracy.

Hundreds of law firms have joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of law firm Perkins Coie’s appeal of the regime’s demands. Fine. Now, they along with the American Bar Association and every major law school must sound the alarm about Trump’s vindictive and abusive use of the Justice Department.

America’s religious leaders have a moral obligation to speak out. They have a spiritual duty to their congregations and to themselves to make their voices heard.

The leaders of American business — starting with Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who in normal times has assumed the role of spokesperson for American business — have been conspicuously silent. Of course they fear Trump’s retribution. Of course they hope for a huge tax cut. But these hardly excuse their seeming assent to the destruction of American democracy and our economy.

Journalists must speak out, too. In the final moments of last night’s “60 Minutes” telecast, Scott Pelley, one of its top journalists, directly criticized Paramount, CBS’s parent company. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” he told viewers, explaining why the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, had resigned.

“Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial — lately, the Israel-Gaza War and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.”

Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, is seeking the Trump regime’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of the media company, and Paramount is obviously intruding on “60 Minutes” content to curry favor with (and not rile) Trump.

Kudos to Pelley for speaking out and to Bill Owens for resigning. We need more examples of such courage. (They both get this week’s Joseph Welch Award, by the way, while Shari Redstone and Paramount get this week’s Neville Chamberlain.)

***

Friends, we have witnessed what can happen in just the first hundred days. I’m not at all sure we can wait until the 2026 midterm elections and cross our fingers that Democrats take back at least one chamber of Congress. At the rate this regime is wreaking havoc, too much damage will have been done by then.

The nation is tottering on the edge of dictatorship.

We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.

Soon, I fear, the regime will openly defy the Supreme Court. Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him.

Then this shameful chapter of American history will end.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time + Streaming On Demand:

Join Ted Rall and Manila Chan on “The TMI Show” for a riveting episode featuring Jeff Dornik, CEO of Pickax, dissecting threats to free speech in tech. This urgent discussion unravels the forces reshaping digital discourse, delivering sharp insights for defenders of open dialogue.

Dornik’s expertise exposes how tech giants and regulations suffocate expression.

The episode ties to breaking news, analyzing the Pentagon’s controversial replacement of mainstream media with pro-Trump outlets in its press corps, sparking debates over media access and bias.

Further, they address X’s new content moderation policies under fire for allegedly throttling dissenting voices, as reported in tech blogs.
The episode examines a leaked memo from a leading social media platform, reportedly Meta, outlining plans to shadowban content labeled “divisive” by its algorithms. Exposed by tech whistleblowers and detailed in outlets like TechCrunch, the memo revealed intentions to suppress posts on polarizing topics like immigration and election integrity, sparking accusations of censorship and fueling distrust among users.

With the tech world reeling from a former Disney employee’s hack exposing safety system flaws, the stakes for digital freedom soar. Expect a rigorous, unfiltered exchange that challenges norms and arms viewers with insights to navigate this crisis. Rall and Chan’s incisive hosting blends intellectual rigor with pressing relevance, making this episode essential for anyone committed to safeguarding free speech. Don’t miss this compelling call to action—watch now and engage in the fight for open discourse!

The post TMI Show Ep 126: “Free Speech Under Attack” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Stocks, bonds, Treasury notes, and the US dollar falling together, a rare event, unsettle investors, driven by tariffs under President Trump. These tariffs fueled economic uncertainty, sparking selloffs in US assets. Stocks dropped from expected profit declines, bonds fell as yields hit 4.5 percent, Treasury notes faltered amid inflation fears, and the dollar weakened against major currencies. Safe havens, like gold or German bunds, gained favor. With diversification less effective, reliable refuges dwindle. Investors navigate a volatile market, where cash, despite low returns, offers stability. This turbulent environment demands caution, as traditional safe havens shrink rapidly.

The post Stocks, Bonds, T-Notes and Dollar Dive as Safe Havens Dwindle appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

From a recent peaceful student rally at Columbia University came a chant that summed up their protest: "FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD AND YOU’RE ARRESTING US INSTEAD."

This is the bloody omnipresence that the co-belligerent Trumpsters and their fearful university leaders, whom Trump has targeted for submission, are relegating to the shadows of the dying Hell in Netanyahu’s genocidal mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinian families.

A survey, reported in Harper’s Index (March 2025), reported that 49% of the children in Gaza “wanted to die,” while 96% of them “believed they would soon die.”

Instead of that annihilation’s intensification, with U.S. weaponry and unconditional U.S. government backing under both parties in Washington, D.C. being the subject of action, both Trump and the president of Harvard agreed that the big concern is “anti-semitism” against Jews at Harvard and other universities. Both men kept referring to such “anti-semitism” against Jews with no evidence, no examples, and no other substantiation.

Today’s operating “anti-semitism” is “ The Other Anti-Semitism,” to use the title of a lecture in Israel years ago by Jim Zogby. The “Other Anti-Semitism” is expressed lethally and daily by F-16s, Helicopter Gunships, and Tank Artillery from Israel’s regime against defenseless Palestinian Semites. Netanyahu’s genocidal policy, since the mysteriously collapsed Israeli border security apparatus on October 7 enabling the Hamas attack, is driven by the “no food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel,” for Gaza policy. After his truce-breaking in early March, blocking trucks carrying humanitarian aid, he is pushing more Palestinians into starvation.

Domestically, it is more than grotesque to describe Harvard University President Alan Garber parroting Trump’s accusations of anti-semitism against Jews on campus without mentioning that the students, including Jewish students, were protesting there and on other campuses and pressing for an end to the mass slaughter, a ceasefire, emergency humanitarian aid and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. In short, PRO-SEMITISM.

Instead of receiving praise, these protesters – Palestinian Americans and Jewish Americans in the lead, with many others – are beset upon by police, arrested, harassed, banished from their campuses, beat up (at UCLA), expelled, their events canceled, and, to rub salt into the wounds, labeled as “anti-semites.”

Leading Jewish commentators have reviled Trump – the hypocrite – for brandishing an unfounded anti-semitism smear as the laser beam for his illegal demands and freezing federal grants to these universities. They see his exploiting ploy as being cynically driven to silence or divide his opponents.

Nonetheless, until Trump demanded turning Harvard into his fiefdom, provoking Harvard to finally sue the federal government, Garber’s public communications were groveling to Trump. Especially those adopting Trump’s wild claims of anti-semitism thus further enabling Trump’s dictates.

Here is Garber on March 31, 2025 – “We fully embrace the important goal of combating anti-semitism…I have experienced anti-semitism directly even while serving as president.” Why no substantiation? Because he and others like former president Lawrence Summers, have accepted a definition of anti-semitism that mostly equates criticism of Israeli government policies (e.g., Netanyahu) with anti-semitism.

Mr. Garber has not spoken out against the Gaza genocide, or the U.S. backing it while violating six federal laws (Garber is a lawyer). His public statements reveal his own thinly veiled anti-semitism against Palestinian Arab Semites.

Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and Israelis were being eradicated and driven towards expulsion, would Mr. Garber have remained silent? Would he have labeled pro-Israeli rights advocates on campus as “anti-semites”? He needs to be educated by Jewish Voice for Peace, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Rabbis for Human Rights.

He also needs to confront his fears and demonstrate moral courage against large complaining corporate donors, with many camouflaged axes to grind, including their ludicrous belief that Harvard has long been a hotbed of radical Marxism against capitalism.

He needs to reverse actions against faculty studying the Middle East or collaborating on public health issues with a Palestinian university. He should find ways to exit his costly hiring of a lobbying firm and lawyers close to Trump in an attempt to appease Trump. Doesn’t he know that Trump is further goaded on seeing such weakness?

He could start his self-rehabilitation consonant with his powerful position in the world of academia by having coffee with a similarly fearful Dean Goldberg of the Harvard Law School. (See, my April 4, 2025 column, When the Dean of Harvard Law School Went Dark). They can start their reflections by absorbing Aristotle’s enduring insight, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” and apply it to their present predicaments imposed by a fascist dictatorship moving into a police state shredding all our basic civil liberties and civil rights.

The fascism unleashed upon Germany beginning in January 1933 with the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, the youngest ever, and that which unfolded within America with the second inauguration of Trump in January 2025 as President, the oldest ever, exhibited many sinister similarities, but also definite differences during their first 100 days of respective repressive rule. By May 1933 democracy in Germany was dead and buried; but American democracy—one in reality never fully identical with American ideals—still remained alive, though deeply wounded and increasingly afflicted, after just over three months of incessant blows from the Trump regime. The difference offers the antifascist resistance in the United States an opportunity for victory if a viable broad-based united front can be resolutely developed and firmly maintained.

Day One

In the evening of January 30, a bitterly cold winter day, the victorious Nazis staged a massive torchlight parade through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate which lasted over four hours and included some 30,000 uniformed Storm Troopers (SA). Perhaps as many as 1 million Berliners, around one-fourth of the city population, turned out to witness the Nazi spectacle. Among them were a few protestors who were summarily beaten up by the SA, a small taste of what was in store for dissenters. The march ended at the Presidential Palace and Reich Chancellory where Hitler and President Hindenburg stood together as a symbol of national reconciliation in what was portrayed as the “rebirth of the nation.” Among the songs echoing from the massive crowd was the Song of Germany with its infamous opening refrain of “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles.” Several other large pro-Nazi rallies were held across Germany in subsequent days, as were a few sporadic counter-demonstrations organized by Social Democrats and Communists.

By contrast, the parade celebrating Trump’s second inauguration, also on a bitterly cold day, was held indoors at the Capital One Arena. The inauguration ceremony itself was also held indoors, at the Capitol Rotunda, the site of a violent Trump-inspired putsch attempt four years earlier. Several major corporations and individual billionaires donated $1 million each to help fund the extravaganza attended by a number of authoritarian foreign leaders, including the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Similar to the nationalistic themes sounded at Hitler’s installment, Trump claimed his presidency marked the “beginning of a Golden Age for America.” As was also the case for the Führer, Trump gave voice that day to the Messiah myth claiming that his life was spared from an assassin’s bullet because he “was saved by God to make America great again.”

Fascist Laws and Orders

Within a week after he moved into the Reich Chancellory, Hitler reportedly declared “I’m never leaving here,” and then promulgated a series of anti-democratic orders to ensure fascist rule in perpetuity. The first major one came on the day after the convenient burning of the Reichstag on February 27, which provoked Hitler to declare at the scene of the crime, “We will show no mercy anymore; whoever gets in our way will be slaughtered.” The “Reichstag Fire Decree for the Protection of the People and State” nullified many civil liberties; expanded protective custody; and sanctioned removal of state governments. It was used to imprison anyone considered an opponent of Nazism and suppress publications deemed unfriendly to the Nazi cause. Significantly extending the repression was the “Malicious Practices Act” of March 21 and the “Enabling Act” of March 23. On April 7, six days after a nationwide boycott of businesses owned by Jews, the Hitler regime enacted the “Law for Restoration of Professional Civil Service,” which purged all Jews as well as those German citizens considered disloyal from civil service and teaching positions. Thousands of Germans immediately lost their jobs and others lost government contracts, as the mythical “peoples community” (Volksgemeinschaft) was systemically converted into a racist Aryan “community of blood” (Blutgemeinschaft), exemplified by the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Damaged Offspring” enacted in mid-July.

Within a week after he moved into the Reich Chancellory, Hitler reportedly declared “I’m never leaving here,” and then promulgated a series of anti-democratic orders to ensure fascist rule in perpetuity.

May Day 1933 in Nazi Germany was anything but a celebration of labor militancy and liberation from capitalist class rule. The Hitler regime declared this “Day of National Labor” to be a grand celebration of a rejuvenated nation, one which attracted the active participation of millions throughout the country. On the next day, the Nazis outlawed all free trade unions and integrated all German workers into a newly created German Labor Front led by a rabid anti-communist. By May 9, day 100 of the Hitler dictatorship there was no democracy or viable open opposition left in Germany; any resistance was driven underground or in exile. The fascist regime of terror proceeded triumphantly with a massive book burning on its 101st day in power.

Similar to Hitler’s stated intent to protect the German people from “criminals” with the draconian Reichstag Fire Decree and Enabling Act, Trump resorted to the 18th century Alien Enemies Act to protect the American people from allegedly vicious criminal gangs of foreigners, particularly Venezuelans. With the approval of SCOTUS, despite due process violations and cases of mistaken identity, those rounded up under provisions of the AEA were sent to the notorious concentration camp, CECOT, in El Salvador, likely never to return. Trump’s intense antagonism toward immigrants manifested itself on his first day in office when he announced his intent to end birthright citizenship; declared a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexican border; and barred asylum for people arriving through the southern border.

In mid-February, he fired 18 immigration judges; eliminated federal funds for undocumented immigrants; and proposed using U.S. military bases to detain targeted immigrants. In early March, he designated English as the official U.S. language, and announced plans to send an additional 3,000 troops to the southwestern border. Underscoring the racist nature of his immigration policies, he offered White South African farmers expedited U.S. citizenship, but expelled the Black South African ambassador after his government criticized Trump’s policies. In late March, Homeland Security revoked temporary protected status (TPS) for 532,000 people of color (Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans) and ordered their exit by late April. In early April, he revoked visas held by South Sudanese passport holders. Especially harshly targeted for deportation were pro-Palestinian students, activists whom Trump’s Attorney General Bondi ominously called “domestic terrorists.”

A demonstrator holds a placard showing a picture of US President-elect Donald Trump modified to add a swastika and an Adolf Hitler-style moustache during a protest outside the US Embassy in London November 9, 2016 against Trump after he was declared the winner of the US presidential election. - (Photo by Ben Stansall / AFP via Getty Images)

Purging the federal government of employees deemed disloyal was a nearly daily occurrence during Trump’s first 100 days, as was seeking retribution from law firms and officials critical of Trump’s actions. In late January, Trump fired the NLRB general counselor, a Democratic board member; fired dozens of Inspector Generals; and removed Democratic EEOC members. In early February, he fired 60 State Department contractors; fired the Director of CFPB; ordered AG Bondi to lead a task force designed to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” in the federal government; fired the head of the FEC; appointed loyalists as members of an independent advisory board on espionage; fired the inspector general for USAID; fired several workers at FEMA; directed that all Biden-era U.S. Attorneys be terminated. In mid-March, he fired 19 workers at NASA; replaced the top lawyer for the IRS; and fired two Democratic managers at the FTC. In early April, he fired the Vice Admiral in Greenland who was critical of Vice President JD Vance; and he removed a DOJ lawyer who questioned the decision to unlawfully deport a Maryland man to El Salvador. After a meeting with far-right activist Laura Loomer, who claimed the head of NSA was disloyal, he fired him. In March, Trump targeted a series of law firms perceived as foes, including the one at which Kamala Harris’ husband worked.

Project 2025, euphemistically called “Mandate for Leadership” by its misanthropic composers, the far-right Heritage Foundation, is a handbook for dismantling democracy and undermining social welfare in America, and its notorious recommendations have been largely followed by the Trump regime during its first 100 days. On January 24, Trump reinstated an anti-abortion policy and revoked two Biden directives designed to improve access to abortion. On February 13, he asked RFK Jr. to study the safety of the abortion pill, mifepristone. Project 2025 calls for ending medication abortion, and the Nazis considered abortion (by Aryan women) to be murder. Also in accordance with Project 2025, Trump signed an executive order to abolish the Department of Education (which he identified as a “big con job”) on March 20, and sharply reduced staffing at NOAA in late February. On the chopping block erected by the Heritage Foundation were also the Head Start program; federal student loans; climate change protection; child labor protection; the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice; and food assistance programs.

Adding to the long list of draconian measures to be enacted were the anti-democratic recommendations of the Capital Research Center, a right-wing think tank with access to Trump’s White House. Founded during the Reagan years by a former Vice President of the Heritage Foundation and funded in large measure by the far-right Koch family, CRC drew up a hit list of 150 groups it considered “pro-terrorist” and recommended their dissolution. Exclusively included in its cross hairs are a good section of the American Left, such as National Lawyers Guild; Democratic Socialists of America; CAIR; Jewish Voice for Peace; Code Pink; Black Alliance for Peace; and Center for Constitutional Rights. Especially singled out for deportation are members of Students for Justice in Palestine, “the group by far most responsible for the current anti-Israel protest movement,” according to the CRC. After providing testimony before several Congressional hearings in 2024, CRC president Scott Walter briefed White House officials about his research findings and deportation recommendations in late March 2025. Shortly afterwards, several pro-Palestinian activists were arrested and deported.

Whitewashing History

The Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy necessarily denigrated other racial and ethnic groups as inferior, even subhuman, and also devalued the role of liberating ideals and revolutionary movements, such as The Enlightenment and the 1789 French Revolution. In April 1933, Hitler’s newly appointed Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, declared that the whole aim of the new regime was “to erase 1789 from memory.” To accomplish this monumental scrubbing of history and culture, books antithetical to Nazi ideology were routinely burned; non-Aryan educators banned; pedagogy restructured; and scholastic texts rewritten. Within its first year, the Hitler regime enacted a series of discriminatory laws directed against non-Aryans. On April 25, the “Law Against Overcrowding Schools and Institutions in Higher Education” severely restricted academic admission of non-Aryans. A few weeks later, an “Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy,” a conglomeration of prominent Nazi white supremacists under Heinrich Himmler established the framework for marginalization of non-Aryans and implementation of eugenics. Within a month, the sterilization law was passed.

To accomplish this monumental scrubbing of history and culture, books antithetical to Nazi ideology were routinely burned; non-Aryan educators banned; pedagogy restructured; and scholastic texts rewritten.

On his first day in office, Trump issued an order “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness” designed “to promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure that future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of American heroes”; he then proceeded to rename the highest mountain in Alaska Mt. McKinley and declared that the Gulf of Mexico be called the Gulf of America. A week later, he issued an order “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday,” which established Task Force 250, housed in the Department of Defense, to take “actions to honor the history of our great Nation, including the naming of 250 Americans to he honored in the National Garden of American Heroes. With the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” enacted in early April, Trump ironically asserts that over the past decade there has been “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” and then proceeds to do exactly that. “It is the policy of my Administration,” the order states, “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” To begin to accomplish this whitewashing of American history he ordered that all “improper ideology” be removed from the Smithsonian museums and National Zoo, and that funding for any exhibit or programs which “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race” be prohibited.

Restricting Sexuality

Nazi ideology regarded homosexuality as a disease on the national community and homosexuals as “enemies of the State.” Transgender and other gender-affirming identities were regarded as mental illnesses. In a 1928 survey, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) officially stated that “anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.” Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, adopted in 1871, criminalized sexual relations between males; in 1935, the Hitler regime broadened the law to include any “lewd act” (e.g. mutual masturbation) and sharply increased penalties for violations. In February 1933, the Prussian Ministry of Interior ordered Berlin police to shut down all establishments catering to “persons who indulge in unnatural sexual practices,” an order which quickly spread to many other cities. On May 6, the SA raided and destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Persecution of homosexuals and transgender persons sharply escalated in subsequent years. In 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion. In the years between 1937 and 1939, some 95,000 German men were arrested for homosexuality and imprisoned, many in concentration camps to die.

On the first day of his second presidency, Trump announced recognition of only two sexes, male and female, and then repeatedly targeted the transgender community in the following weeks. In rapid succession, he required transgender women to be housed in prisons for men; ordered removal of third gender options on IDs; moved toward pushing transgender people out of the military; ordered federal agencies to end programs that recognize transgender people; aimed to prevent transgender students from participating in women sports; removed reference to transgender people from National Park Service websites; ordered the CDC to review gender ideology; denied student loans relief to workers aiding transgender youth; and moved to phase out gender-affirming medical treatment for veterans. In mid-April, Trump sued the State of Maine for allowing transgender people to participate in women’s sports. In late January, he rolled back protections for LGBTQ students and required federal workers to remove pronouns from their email signatures.

Celebrating Racism

Racism in Nazi Germany, much of it inspired by Jim Crow laws in America, directly or indirectly infested every action of the Hitler regime. Nazism had absolutely no tolerance for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Neither does the Trump regime. Unleashing his rancid racism with a vengeance, Trump took over 20 separate actions against DEI programs in the first 100 days of his reign. Terminating all DEI programs across the federal government was among his numerous orders on Day One. Ten days, later he even blamed DEI policies for a deadly midair crash between an Army helicopter and a commercial airline over the Potomac River. In his lengthy bombastic speech to Congress on March 4, Trump boasted that his regime “ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military” and “we removed the poison of critical race theory from our public schools”.

Suppressing Dissent

Even before the 1933 passage of the Editor’s Law, which permitted only journalists who refrained from criticizing the Nazi regime to continue to work in their profession, the German press was systematically forced to conform to Hitler’s views. After the rigged election on March 5 and passage of the Civil Service Law on April 17, German newspapers increasingly self-censored themselves and remained silent about the unfolding atrocities. On March 9, a prominent anti-fascist journalist, Fritz Gerlich, was arrested and eventually ended up in the Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered in late June.

America’s mainstream press, routinely identified by Trump as an “enemy of the people,” increasingly came under scrutiny and suppression in his second reign. Echoing the censorship sentiment of the Nazi Editor Law, Trump restricted the White House press pool to only those journalists hand-picked by him. In early February, he called for CBS to lose its broadcasting license, a charge he repeated two months later after the network aired a “60 Minutes” broadcast he disliked. On February 23, he called MSNBC a “threat to democracy,” and in mid-March he cancelled all contracts held by key news wire services (AP, Reuters, Agence France-Presse) with Voice of America. In late March, a manager of Trump’s re-election campaign sued The Daily Beast for defamation.

Echoing the censorship sentiment of the Nazi Editor Law, Trump restricted the White House press pool to only those journalists hand-picked by him.

In addition to a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News, Trump has sued the Des Moines Register, CNN, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. In late January, Trump’s FCC Chairman ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS, public news outlets which a Trump devotee, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, labeled “communist.” In mid-April Trump asked Congress to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by $1.1 billion. To make sure another liberal institution, The Kennedy Center, came under his far-right ideological control, he appointed himself as Chair and named two Fox News members to its Board. The National Endowment for Humanities had most of its grant programs cancelled, and its chair was forced to resign. Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, asserted critics of the deportation actions of his boss are “on the side of the terrorists” and might be criminally charged for “aiding and abetting” terrorism.

Trump’s repression of dissent and criticism extended beyond the media to include judges, prosecutors, and law firms. After calling federal judge James Boasberg a “radical Left lunatic” for blocking his unlawful deportation scheme, Trump said he should be disbarred and impeached. He also suggested federal judges be removed from cases reviewing his policies. In late February, he fired prosecutors involved in cases against him or the January 6 rioters. In late March, he fired two longtime career prosecutors in Los Angeles and Memphis, and in mid-February he directed all Biden-era U.S. Attorneys be terminated. He also fired the directors of the Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics. In late April, the FBI arrested a judge in Wisconsin for obstructing a deportation case.

Militarization

Nazi Germany increased its military spending faster than any other state in peacetime, with the share of military spending rising from 1% to 10% of national income in the first two years of the Hitler regime alone. Just after his first 100 days, Hitler approved a financial budget for his growing war machine of 35 billion Reichmarks over eight years; the entire national income of Germany in 1933 was 43 billion Reichmarks. Military spending for his first year in office was budgeted three times larger than spending on all civilian work creation measures in 1932 and 1933 combined.

Within the first week of his second presidency, Trump issued militaristic orders for “Restoring America’s Fighting Force”; “The Iron Dome for America”; and “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” That third order identified the U.S. military as the world’s “most lethal and effective fighting force,” and called for a “singular force on developing a warrior ethos” throughout the military. On March 21, he unveiled a new stealth bomber, the F-47. On April 10, he bragged that “we have a weapon that no one has a clue what it is, and this is the most powerful weapon in the world, which is more powerful than anyone even close.” Three days earlier, he announced a $1 trillion Pentagon budget for FY 2026, a 12% increase ($107 billion) over FT 2025. In its publication of all military-related expenditures, the War Resisters League claims Trump’s 2026 military budget constitutes 24% ($1.3 trillion) of all federal spending, and past military expenditures account for 26% ($1.4 trillion) of the federal budget. Accordingly, Trump’s real military spending accounts for 50% of the entire federal budget, a colossal military expenditure despite the fact that the Pentagon failed a 2024 audit, the seventh consecutive failure.

On June 14, the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and his 79th birthday, Trump is reportedly planning to hold a massive 4-mile-long military parade in the nation’s capital. On February 4, he drafted instructions to obliterate Iran if the Islamic Republic assassinated him; the same day he proposed a U.S. takeover of Gaza. A month later, he issued an ultimatum to Hamas: “either free all hostages or die.”

Privatization

Despite its nominal commitment to socialism, an economic system based upon public ownership of means of production, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), aka the Nazi Party, introduced a radical program of privatization of steel, banks, mining, shipping, railroads, and welfare organizations. Among the industries privatized within the early years of Hitler’s dictatorship were five major commercial banks; the United Steelworks, the nation’s second largest enterprise; German Railways; Upper Silesian coalminers; and the German Shipbuilding and Engineering Company. Privatization generated significant revenue for the Nazi war machine and also helped solidify political support from the super-rich.

Trump’s enthusiasm for privatization echoes the Nazi goals.

Trump’s enthusiasm for privatization echoes the Nazi goals. Following the Project 2025 playbook, he explored the possibility of privatizing the USPS, the Social Security Administration, and Medicare. With the confirmation of Dr. Oz, a fervent supporter of Medicare Advantage private alternative to traditional Medicare, as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services on April 4, the effort to privatize Medicare was significantly accelerated. Similarly, privatizing health services for veterans received a big boost with the appointment of a new Department of Defense chief, Pete Hegseth, who publicly promoted shifting more vets to VA-funded private care. Social Security remains in the crosshairs of privatization advocates in the Trump regime. DOGE cancelled leases for 45 Social Security offices and reduced its ten regional offices to four. In early April, the head of the Social Security Administration asserted that to streamline operations it would be necessary to “outsource nonessential functions to industry experts.” In early February, Trump fired more than 100 workers at Fannie Mae, and announced plans to privatize both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A month later he proposed the privatization of Amtrak, the Transportation Security Administration, and the federal student loan program. Also on the auction block are public lands targeted for massive sell-offs to wealthy private investors and developers.

Synchronization

In a major push to consolidate more power, the Hitler regime enacted laws introducing a national policy of Gleichschlatung, coordination of all government operations and social organizations under Nazi control. As a result, state parliaments not under Nazi control were dissolved; every public expression of pluralism was disallowed; political parties critical of Nazism were abolished; all Jewish and Social Democratic officials were fired; and all cultural and judicial institutions were aligned with Nazi ideology or disbanded.

The real purpose of DOGE is to consolidate power, synchronize government operations, and privatize government services as well as dismantle agencies long hated by the Far Right.

Trump announced the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on his first day in office with the ostensible purpose of saving American taxpayers around a total of $2 trillion by rooting out alleged massive fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government. Its purported purpose is itself a fraud. At most, only 15% of that savings goal is within its grasp. The real purpose of DOGE is to consolidate power, synchronize government operations, and privatize government services as well as dismantle agencies long hated by the Far Right.

Nine of the government agencies targeted by DOGE are highlighted in Project 2025. Its former co-chair, Vivek Ramaswamy, explicitly used the term “synchronizing” government operations when announcing a key purpose of DOGE. Elon Musk, the Nazi-saluting Chair of DOGE, revealingly used the same term in a bizarre podcast with Trump disciple Senator Ted Cruz. The Nazi policy of Gleichschlatung is commonly translated as synchronization. The executive order establishing DOGE directed its administrators to “work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks…and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” Technological synchronization appears to be a prelude to sociological synchronization, i.e. Gleichschlatung.

Militant Protectionism

Although protectionism through tariffs had been an official policy of Germany since the late 19th century, Hitler’s regime escalated militant foreign trade relations to a new level in an attempt to achieve autarky, economic self-sufficiency. The seeds for this new economic policy, formally adopted in mid-1934, were laid during Hitler’s first 100 days. In a February 11 New York Times article entitled “Danes See Hitler Waging Tariff War,” a German official is quoted as saying “Tariffs are the only emergency defense of my country.” That “emergency defense” received a major boost a month later with the appointment of Hjalmar Schacht as President of the Central Bank; Schacht was widely credited with saving Germany from devastating hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic.

The aggressive use of tariffs by Hitler pales in comparison to what Trump unilaterally imposed on so-called Liberation Day.

Through various financial manipulations to generate funds without adding to the budget deficit and implementation of favorable trade agreements with countries in South America and southeastern Europe, this banking wizard set Nazi Germany in 1933 on the path toward self-sufficiency in a war economy. Further progress, however, depended upon conquest of other countries, something the Nazis with their stated need for Lebensraum viciously accomplished in subsequent years.

The aggressive use of tariffs by Hitler pales in comparison to what Trump unilaterally imposed on so-called Liberation Day, April 2. Virtually all US imports were smacked with a 10% tariff, and 57 countries were saddled with reciprocal tariffs between 17% to 49% in Trump’s tariff blackmail scheme. Singled out for especially harsh measures was Communist China. What started with a reciprocal tariff of 34% escalated to 125% and then, in the wake of China’s countermeasures, rose up to 245% by late April. By contrast, increased tariffs imposed upon all other nations were paused for 90 days, as Trump claimed many were “kissing my ass” to cut deals.

As was the case for Nazi Germany, trade wars initiated by tariff escalations relied upon expansion of national borders in order for the economic aggressor to achieve success. This may explain Trump’s persistent determination to acquire Greenland, and his repeated wish to make Canada the 51st state.

Disappearing People

Disappearing people deemed outside the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft, and later massively exterminating them, was a barbaric speciality of the Hitler dictatorship. The pernicious practice began in earnest in wake of the February 27 Reichstag fire, which was blamed on a foreign communist but, in fact, represented a false flag operation staged by the Nazis themselves. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of communists were rounded up and incarcerated without trial in makeshift concentration camps under great cruelty. The first official concentration camp, Dachau, opened on March 23 and it was designated by Himmler as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners” to be used to restore calm to Germany. Many of its political prisoners, which also included Social Democrats and “intellectual instigators,” were murdered shortly after arrival. Mass incarceration and execution of political prisoners during Hitler’s first 100 days was a harbinger of an institutionalized barbarism to come which collectively consumed the lives of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, “asocials,” “professional criminals,” “Rhineland bastards,” and other “Untermenschen.”

The concentration camps of choice for Trump’s ruthless deportation actions are the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in El Salvador. On February 12, over 50 Venezuelans labeled “high-threat illegal aliens” were deported to Guantanamo Bay and imprisoned in Camp 6. Since January, some 250 Venezuelan “gang members” have been sent to El Salvador under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act; the bulk of these men, allegedly all members of the Tren de Aragua gang, were sent there on March 16 in defiance of a federal judge’s court order to halt the deportations. A day earlier, ICE deported Abrego Garcia, falsely claimed by Vice President Vance to be a “convicted member of the MS-13 gang” to CECOT where he remains, despite a unanimous ruling by SCOTUS that his deportation was illegal. The mass deportations in March have been denounced by the Venezuelan government as a “crime against humanity” reminiscent of Nazi behavior.

The mass deportations in March have been denounced by the Venezuelan government as a “crime against humanity” reminiscent of Nazi behavior.

Incarceration and/or deportation of political prisoners, specifically Palestinians or pro-Palestinian activists, have become routine under Trump’s reign. As of late March, the visas of over 800 international students have been revoked by the Trump regime’s policy of “catch and revoke.” Though reasons for this repressive action are often not given, participating in pro-Palestinian protests seems to be a common denominator.

The case of Mahmoud Khalid illustrates the extreme measures employed by ICE to rid the country of one legal resident deemed a threat. Khalid, a Palestinian student leader of protests at Columbia University against genocide in Gaza, was arrested by ICE agents on April 8 and sent off to a prison in Louisiana. No criminal charges were ever leveled against him; instead the Trump regime invoked a McCarthy-era law, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which provides for deportation of aliens if their presence is deemed potentially harmful to US foreign policy. The same law has also been used to set up many others for deportation. Instrumental in Khalid’s arrest was Betar, a far-right Zionist group hell-bent upon disappearing anyone it considers a Hamas supporter. Its executive director, Ross Glick, met in March with several senior government officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, and urged them to take action against Khalid and other “terror supporters.” Khalid, who has Algerian citizenship and was a green card holder in the U.S., is married to an American citizen who gave birth to their first child on April 21. Reflecting the callousness of current immigration policy, Khalid was not permitted to be present at his son’s birth. If the Trump regime has its way, Khalid and all others in his predicament will be disappeared.

Resistance

The parallels between the first 100 days of both tyrannical regimes are striking and chilling, with one big exception: the Resistance. The ferocity and velocity of Hitler’s NSDAP fascism had all but ended any open opposition by early May 1933. By sharp contrast, resistance to Trump’s MAGA machine tyranny slowly but steadily grew over the course of its turbulent first 100 days. The first significant outbreak of antifascist Resistance came in February, President’s Day, renamed “No Kings Day” and “Not My Presidents Day” by protestors who numbered in the hundreds of thousands and appeared in all 50 states.

The ferocity and velocity of Hitler’s NSDAP fascism had all but ended any open opposition by early May 1933. By sharp contrast, resistance to Trump’s MAGA machine tyranny slowly but steadily grew over the course of its turbulent first 100 days.

On April 5, which may eventually mark the beginning of the end of the Trump regime, an estimated 4 million protestors filled the streets at 1500 public sites throughout the nation in a massive display of resistance. Driven by outrage at Trump’s many repressive actions, they demanded “Hands Off” government agencies and services targeted for termination. Indicative of the stirrings of a sleeping giant at this historic protest is the fact that for many outraged participants, especially seniors, this was their first public protest. April 19, dubbed National Day of Protest and “We (the People) Dissent,” witnessed another massive demonstration. Over 800 local protests took place nationwide. Among the explicitly antifascist slogans displayed on a forest of signs were “Resist Fascism, Fight Oligarchy”; “Stop the Turd Reich”; and “The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go.” Capturing the sentiment of the growing Resistance was the popular sign present at all of these demonstrations: “We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America.”

A large balloon with an image of US President Donald Trump is seen above protesters holding signs during the nationwide "Hands Off!" protest against Trump and his advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in downtown Los Angeles on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images)

That refusal also made its appearance at the ballot box as well as on the streets. Despite pouring in over $25 million to elect a MAGA candidate to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Musk’s chosen one lost by a 10-point margin (55% to 45%) to a liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, on April 1. On the same day, Republican candidates for Congress in a special election in Florida prevailed, but by a much narrower margin than previously for the same seat, portending problems on the horizon for Trump’s MAGA machine in the midterm elections.

However, those crucial elections are 18 months away, a period fraught with danger as well as opportunity. For Trump’s MAGA march to full-fledged fascism to triumph, executive orders and laws far more pernicious than enacted in the past 100 days will be required. Still available in his arsenal of repression are the Insurrection Act and a declaration of Martial Law. Either requires a qualitative shift in the status quo. A false flag operation, the functional equivalent of the Reichstag Fire, would suffice. So would a declaration of war against Iran or China. Alternately, any significant domestic escalation of violence by the Resistance (or agent provocateurs) may also provide the excuse for mass incarceration of dissenters and cancellation of midterm elections.

It is imperative that the growing resistance movement remains strictly nonviolent, for as the wise counsel of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. informs us: “The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” Beloved community built on love, not a Volksgemeinschaft or MAGA dystopia built on hate, is within our reach beyond the present evil.

From the headlines and news tags, you’d have thought Pope Francis was a social justice warrior. To be sure, he was a “mold breaker” who emphasized “inclusion and care for the marginalized over doctrinal purity” and a “modernizer” who distinguished his papacy from the conservative positions that had steered the Church under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

But another way of thinking about the Jesuit Pope’s mission is to see how it was planted in deep Christian doctrines and practices.

When Francis inspired the world with gestures of humility and acts of Christian love—washing the feet of prisoners or of Muslim immigrants, for example—he was not being “radical” or innovative. In picture-perfect performances for the age of memes, he was meticulously reenacting ancient traditions of Christian iconography, which were themselves the condensed images of spiritual teachings.

Religious conservatives received his query, “Who am I to judge?” as a provocation, and perhaps it was. But Francis understood how his refusal to judge gay people resonated with liturgical and scriptural sources going back to the gospels. “I was paraphrasing by heart the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” the pope explained, “where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalized.”

Similarly, Francis rebutted JD Vance’s expressly anti-immigrant and implicitly ethnonationalist assertions about the “order of love,” not by directing the U.S. Vice President to his nearest HR office, but by inviting him to meditate on Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. That parable’s message has challenged believers for two millennia. It tells us that our neighbors are not necessarily members of our own ethnic group, those who think or worship like us, but those who undertake acts of kindness and charity.

The pope’s encyclical on capitalism provided a wide-ranging indictment of untrammeled markets, social inequality, social abandonment, and right-wing populism. Surely, it was informed by more contemporary ideas about the ecological crisis and instrumental rationality. But in tilting against a “deified market,” Francis expressed ideas about the order of social relations that predate capitalism and are older than modernity.

It would be a stretch to suggest that Francis was a socialist, although there is much for socialists to glean from his teachings about compassion, solidarity, and openness. One might better place him in the robust tradition of Christian humanism. The renewed salience of that tradition might prod us to reflect on the Church’s relationship to socialism.

To begin with, the Acts of the Apostles tell us clearly that the early Christians lived a communal life:

[T]hey had all things common. And … great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

Variations on the derived phrase, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” was circulated among Christian socialists and early materialists until it famously found a home in Marx’s description of communism.

A long tradition of medieval peasant revolts in Europe sought to overturn the exploitative world order. The Christian roots of these pre-modern movements are chronicled in Norman Cohn’s classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium. At the end of the 12th century, the Calabrian abbot and hermit Joachim de Fiore emerged as the foremost articulator of Christian messianic socialism. His prophecies, later systematized by Franciscan abbots, influenced similar movements across Europe, and put down roots in popular culture.

In the period of Feudalism’s long decay, Joachite prophecies intermingled with anticlerical, antipapal, and revolutionary movements until a wave of revolutionary ferment swept 15th century Germany. These movements took as their aim the abolition of private property, the leveling of social classes, and the establishment of an egalitarian millennium. The proliferation of such movements prefigured the Protestant Reformation and helped set the stage for The Great Peasant War of 1525, which Thomas Muntzer believed would bring about a state in which all would be equal and each would receive according to his need.

Philosophically, Marx carefully tried to derive socialism from humanism via atheism; the real-world story involves a complex millennial history. The Church is where socialism was born. Socialist ideas found their purchase there up until the birth of secular socialisms. Occasionally, socialist ideas were in the mainstream of Christianity, sometimes they were at its margins, and often they were suppressed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Premodern Christian socialist movements set the template, ultimately, for Marx's thoughts about broad epochs of world history culminating in socialism. And then, in the mid-20th century, liberation theology took up again and renewed this unofficial but not-very hidden tradition.

One would have thought that this tradition was dead, definitively killed off by John Paul and Benedict—to say nothing of the U.S.-backed death squads in Central America. When he was installed as pope, Francis seemed poised to continue the conservative line. But instead, he lifted the interdictions against the theology of hope. And something of it dawned again in the beneficent smile and instructive words and deeds of Francis, who ministered to the poor at a time when the working class had been routed, defeated, driven from the stage of world history.

What comes next is anybody's guess. Francis himself came as a surprise.

On Jan 17, 2025, on the heels of the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, we wrote about the failed system of our corporate controlled healthcare and the outrage against the health insurance industry the shooting spawned. We mentioned the possibility of setting a National Day of Action in 2025 to demand freeing healthcare from profit and covering everyone under a national single payer plan.

Today, we call on people across the country to gather on May 31, 2025, to put their “Hands Up” for:

• The recognition by our government that healthcare is a human right;
• The elimination of private health insurance and the banning of for-profit delivery of care;
• The enactment of a publicly financed, national single-payer program that would provide comprehensive coverage to everyone; and
• The transformation of care delivery from profit-seeking ventures into services organized to serve the people of our country, a system in which all caregivers are freed from corporate control.

President Donald Trump’s inauguration has introduced the prospect of severe hardships to working class and low-income people, people with disabilities, the elderly, and children with proposed cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security necessary to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. This moment demands more than the protection of our public programs; it demands a national, single-payer healthcare program, free from profit, for everyone. One people, one plan.

The complicity of our government in the profit-making enterprise of health insurance has been exposed once again when, on Monday April 7, the Trump administration raised payment rates for Medicare Advantage insurers by 5.1%, significantly more than the Biden administration’s proposed increase of 2.2%, which was bad enough. This rate increase has the potential to increase payments to MA by $25 billion next year. However, the final sum will be closer to $60 billion, when the impact of gaming the system through risk scoring is included.

Paying health insurance premiums to a for-profit company that has been given permission to restrict and withhold necessary care is the great scam of modern U.S. healthcare.

As predicted, Medicare Advantage continues to gain enrollment because they offer lower premiums compared to Traditional Medicare. Now they can expect payment from the Medicare trust fund at a higher rate as they have almost every year under Democrat and Republican administrations since 2016. Early this month, while the rest of the market spun out of control due to the announcement of tariffs, insurance stocks soared after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) announced the Medicare Advantage rate hike.

Despite rate increases, Medicare Advantage will continue to operate within narrow networks that often don’t include specialty care, such as Cancer Centers of Excellence. Unlike Traditional Medicare, beneficiaries in Medicare Advantage must accept pre-authorization requirements to receive care that create the delays and denials of care. Many seniors are unaware that in all but four states, once they have enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, they cannot change to Traditional Medicare without being subjected to underwriting and the potential of very high premiums if they have preexisting conditions. Paying health insurance premiums to a for-profit company that has been given permission to restrict and withhold necessary care is the great scam of modern U.S. healthcare.

Medicare is only one part of the privatization of government sponsored health insurance: Medicaid is now largely privatized in 42 states, subjecting children from low-income families and low-income adults to the delays and denials that are the mainstay of cost controls in managed care private insurance plans. Seventy five percent of all Medicaid beneficiaries now are enrolled in a Medicaid Managed Care Organization (MCO), and Medicaid MCO denials are twice as high as denials in Medicare Advantage. Five Fortune 500 health insurance companies enroll 50% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, all publicly traded and high performing profit makers.

Over 90 million Americans eligible for government supported healthcare, both Medicaid and Medicare, are now captives of private insurance managed care schemes that control their access to healthcare. Many more millions on Traditional Medicare are being “aligned” by CMS into profit-seeking Accountable Care Organizations. The underlying profit extraction inherent in these schemes prevents critical services from reaching the right people at the right time.

The same can be said for employer-based insurance where workers are paying excessive premiums to health insurance companies to be given the privilege of paying deductibles and coinsurance that make accessing care so expensive that many forgo needed services. According to the Commonwealth Fund, premiums and deductibles consume 10% of the median household income in the U.S. This means that every household with employer health insurance making $80,610 per year or less is underinsured. Employers are faced with increasing insurance premiums for their employees that challenge their ability to stay in business, or in the case of public schools, the ability to keep schools open.

Enough is enough! Over 70 local and national organizations have endorsed the National Day of Action. On May 31, join an action or plan an action in your community. Focus the outrage to move the engine of change and put single payer on the nation’s agenda and remove profit from healthcare. On May 31, put your “Hands Up” for National Single Payer—an Improved Medicare for All free from profit with everybody in and nobody out. Nothing less can heal the nation.

The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: Imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to think that many of us aren’t affected by the present gut-wrenching emotional tumult because we appear fine and don’t seem to care about what’s happening to the more desperate among us, our recent research suggests that people do care—including, perhaps, those you’d least expect to do so.

Last year brought a widely reported piece of news in mental health. Overdose fatalities in the United States declined substantially, a notable but qualified victory. As overdose deaths fell 9% from 2021 to 2023 for white Americans, such deaths increased 12% for people of other races, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Street drugs continue to kill more than 84,000 people in the United States annually, and overdoses remain the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 44.

In such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed.

In other words, many young Americans and people of all ages attempt to numb difficult, even unbearable feelings, and sometimes that numbing is fatal. Depending on who you are, your preferred numbing agent might be wine, work, prescription pills, social media, street drugs, or something else entirely. But in the second age of Donald Trump, as well as long before him, all too many of us have been grappling with profound pain, whether from a sense of hopelessness about the future, oppression, trauma, grief, job loss, or general financial strain in ever more economically difficult times. Those among us who are not U.S. citizens are increasingly seized with the fear of being deported due to false, unknown, or unsubstantiated allegations and without due process. In addition to sowing terror, this has also been exacerbating an already widespread sense of loneliness, as people stay inside for fear of being detained.

Another source of despair is the urgent overseas humanitarian crisis over which noncitizens and legal permanent residents are now being seized, shackled, and imprisoned or disappeared for expressing moral protest. One (but not both) of the authors of this article has the protection of U.S. citizenship, although experts now question whether even citizenship will continue to provide protection, and so, for safety’s sake, we’re not naming that crisis or the widely shared sense of grief and powerlessness as men, women, and heartbreaking numbers of children die there. Students and people in all walks of life continue to take to the streets in protest, including the one of us who is a citizen.

Indeed, in such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and so a ripe moment to take stock of the damage being done and to report that there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.

Dismantled?

In late January, the Trump White House issued a vague memo that put a temporary freeze on the disbursement of federal financial assistance. By early February, NBC News had reported that some health clinics were closing their doors. Then, in March, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of more than $11 billion in funding to deal with addiction, mental health, and related issues. A federal judge subsequently halted that cancellation of funds, saying such a sudden termination caused “direct and irreparable harm to public health.” The Trump administration requested a stay of the order, with plans to appeal.

By mid-April, around the same time that Elon Musk’s DOGE took over responsibility for posting federal grant opportunities for the public, Reuters published an extensive investigation on the subject. It drew on interviews with dozens of experts to conclude that funding cuts and associated layoffs were “dismantling the carefully constructed health infrastructure that drove the number of overdose deaths down by tens of thousands last year.”

In Philadelphia, where one of the authors of this article resides, the Inquirer reported that a forensic research lab that tests the nation’s illicit drug supply for new and harmful substances hadn’t received crucial funds from the federal government. That, in turn, meant the furloughing of staff and a growing backlog of untested samples. If you’ve followed news about the evolving nature of illicit and counterfeit drugs, you know that novel and dangerous molecules are continually turning up in unexpected places, whether the veterinary sedative xylazine or the more potent medetomidine found in batches of fentanyl, or as deadly levels of nitazenes in seemingly innocuous pills. Slowing or halting drug-testing is a dangerous proposition.

Meanwhile, a Philadelphia outreach program run by Unity Recovery was recently forced to shut down, while its workers who had offered services in addiction, nutrition, and other kinds of healthcare suddenly lost their jobs. At the time of this writing, the organization’s website features a red warning symbol and the message: “Due to federal funding cuts enacted on March 24, 2025, Unity Recovery has lost critical access to resources to provide peer support services.” It also notes that “information is changing rapidly”—a nod to the fact that a judge halted the cancellation of funds and no one now knows exactly how the pending cuts will (or won’t) unfold.

And while there is supposedly stark disagreement between the Trumpist and non-Trumpist halves of this country about whether such cuts should be taking place at all, extensive data from the purple state of Pennsylvania suggests there is far more agreement than anyone might have guessed.

“It Is in All Our Interests to Give Help and Support”

Over the past year, the two of us have worked on a research project that collected perspectives from thousands of Pennsylvanians about mental health, substance use, and the state’s criminal justice system. We also collected hundreds of surveys from Pennsylvanians who work in law enforcement and criminal justice. We guessed that such anonymous surveys would capture punitive viewpoints and a belief that people who use drugs should be put behind bars. And, yes, there was a bit of that, but to our surprise, on the whole, we found something quite different.

More than a quarter of Pennsylvanians said that, in recent years, they had become more sympathetic toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol. A majority of the respondents identified stress and traumatic life events as a primary cause of problematic substance use. And most surprising of all, we found broad agreement on policy priorities across—yes, across—the political spectrum.

It’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.

Eighty-three percent of Pennsylvanians agreed that “addressing social problems such as homelessness, mental health, and substance use disorder” was a greater priority than “strengthening social order through more policing and greater enforcement of the laws.” That view was shared across political affiliations: 71% of respondents identifying as conservative agreed with it, as did 88% of those identifying as liberal.

Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “It is in all our interests to give help and support to people who struggle with drugs and/or alcohol,” 68% of respondents identifying as conservative or very conservative agreed, as did 77% of liberal or very liberal respondents. Notably, there was majority support (61%) for increasing government spending for this cause. Even 54% of conservatives said they supported increasing spending to improve treatment and services for substance-use disorder.

We assumed that Americans who work in law enforcement and criminal justice would have more hardline views. Again, we were wrong. Compared with Pennsylvanians overall, over the past five years, those who work in the criminal justice system were—yes!—more likely to report feeling greater sympathy toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol, and an overwhelming 70% of them believed that this society was obliged to provide them with treatment. Asked what services they believed could help prevent people struggling with substance use from becoming involved in the justice system, 71% said “more access to mental health treatment providers or services.”

Because much drug use in this country is criminalized, those who work in criminal justice are on the frontlines of our mental health crisis. These new findings suggest that, at least in Pennsylvania, justice system workers feel a responsibility to offer genuine help and see bolstering mental health services as the best way forward.

Of course, the opposite is happening. Yet it’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.

The ongoing axing of services will likely prove devastating. It leaves many feeling like there is nothing they can do. Yet, as individuals, count on one thing: We are not powerless (as we so often believe).

Looking Out for Others

When life feels scary and uncertain, as it increasingly does in the Trump era, many people respond by thinking a lot about what might happen in their world and trying to anticipate the future in order to make plans and gain at least some minimal sense of control. Both authors of this article—one of us a doctor, the other a writer—struggle with our ruminations on the state and direction of this country, which can lead us deeper into anxiety and isolation.

And while we probably can’t escape those fearful feelings (and probably shouldn’t try to), we can at least stay in touch with others instead of giving in to the common urge to withdraw. That isn’t easy, of course. Both of us find ourselves struggling to pick up the phone. But this is a time when picking up that phone couldn’t be more important. A time when so much of our world is endangered is distinctly a moment to put special effort into looking out for one another and regularly experiencing the energy that comes from human connection.

We also understand that many Americans are living on the edge. We often don’t know who among our neighbors and loved ones is wrestling with the question of whether life is worth living. (Suicide rates remain high for Americans generally and especially for those with drug and alcohol use disorders.) Right now, there is a dire need for better services, but even if every person had access to quality mental healthcare, our actions as community members would still matter. It’s sometimes possible to save the life of someone you care about just by telling them you care.

Each of us, including you, has a role to play in keeping all of us alive and safe as best we can in ever more difficult times.

From Crisis to Care

No one yet knows exactly how the Trump administration’s potentially staggering cuts to community healthcare and social services will unfold. But amid the chaos, people across this nation continue to do meaningful, lifesaving work.

The Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit outfit that seeks to prevent harms associated with drug use and drug criminalization, recently published a report entitled “From Crisis to Care.” It presents an intelligent roadmap for improving mental health and addressing substance use and homelessness, including investing in treatment options that are evidence-based and voluntary, as well as housing programs and community-based crisis response systems. These are anything but radical ideas. They’re grounded in research and can serve as a model for the future. Of course, funding and some political power will be necessary to accomplish such things, and that might sound farfetched in our current situation. But simple actions in the present make it more likely that such services will be launched in the future.

We can save a life by reaching out to friends and neighbors, and it’s no less important to recognize when we ourselves are struggling. Sometimes we worry about others without acknowledging that we, too, are on the edge. With that in mind, we’re writing the following words for you and every other reader but also for ourselves: When you’re struggling, contact someone you trust for support. By doing so, you’re also implicitly giving them permission to ask for help from you when they need it, and by giving and receiving help, you create a new pattern of reciprocity.

Such reciprocity has political significance. It fosters social cohesion, a precursor for coordinated action on a far larger sale.

Elon Musk’s political and cultural influence—once feared as dystopic, transformative, and totalizing—is beginning to resemble a flash in the pan.

Not long ago, Musk seemed poised to remake the world—or at least to meme it into submission. His presence felt not only pervasive but inescapable. He was the heir apparent to techno-authoritarian chic: a “dark MAGA” demigod in a zip-up jacket, preaching a gospel of Martian salvation and machine-learning rapture.

But today, his standing is slipping. Recent reports suggest Musk has fallen out with U.S. President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Cabinet members reportedly clashed with him over his interference in federal agencies; others took him to task for rogue public statements. He drew further public ire for what many saw as a graceless and callous approach to mass firings. Polls show that while many Americans still express interest in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they overwhelmingly disapprove of Musk at the helm.

Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void.

Then came his public rebuke in Wisconsin, where a $20 million effort to influence a state Supreme Court election—complete with Musk handing out million-dollar checks at a rally—was soundly rejected by voters. All the while, Tesla faced mounting scrutiny from regulators, and average Americans started attacking the cars themselves.

Now, his jokes have gone stale. X (formerly Twitter) is drifting into irrelevance, and his once-magnetic pull over public discourse feels more like static than signal. The man who once stormed a stage wielding a chainsaw is now being quietly uninvited from the party.

But if this does mark the end of Musk’s political career, it shouldn’t be remembered as a sideshow. Musk represents a recurring fantasy: a transgenerational techno-messianic dream that imagines salvation through systems, transcendence through circuitry.

To understand Musk’s rise and fall, it helps to look backward—specifically, to his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. A Canadian chiropractor and political dreamer, Haldeman led the Canadian chapter of Technocracy Inc., a gray-uniformed movement in the 1930s that believed engineers—not politicians—should rule the world. It was a post-democratic fantasy of optimized control, an early prototype of what we now call algorithmic governance.

When that didn’t pan out, Haldeman joined the Social Credit movement around the time its Quebec chapter began promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and flirting with homegrown fascism. Censured and disillusioned, he moved his family to apartheid South Africa, a country he praised in his writings as a stronghold of Western Christian values and white self-governance. There, Musk’s father, Errol, built wealth through engineering and real estate ventures, and later acquired part ownership in an emerald mine in Zambia.

Elon Musk inherited this worldview and polished it. His own techno-utopianism is just a shinier version of this old settler dream. The medium changed. But the fantasy didn’t.

Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void. His vision is of a world run by smart people and smarter machines, with little room for emotional irregularity, biological vulnerability, or democratic friction. In this model, emotion is treated as a bug. The body becomes obsolete.

It’s not just Musk. His outlook is broadly shared among a certain class of technocratic elites who, despite appearing ideologically opposed, converge on a shared goal: the construction of a post-human world. Whether framed as innovation, inevitability, or progress, the underlying premise is the same—merge biology with technology, and minimize the complications of the human condition.

Klaus Schwab, the recently investigated former head of the World Economic Forum—and an advocate of implantable microchips—summarized this new paradigm in a 2022 interview with Swiss broadcaster RTS: “In this new world, we must accept transparency—total transparency. You have to get used to it. It must become integrated into your personality.” He added, “But if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.”

That same year, Yuval Noah Harari, a senior advisor to the WEF, declared: “We are now hackable animals… The idea that we have a soul, this spirit, and free will—that’s over.”

As the AI wave crested, the tech industry followed suit. Meta launched a child-friendly AI therapist. Microsoft patented chatbot technology to simulate the dead. Apple’s VisionOS 3.0 began muting family group chats based on an “emotional volatility index.” Emotional honesty gave way to managed vibes.

Amid it all, Musk tweeted: “It has become increasingly clear that humanity is the biological bootlicker of AI.” A curious comment from a man who has actively helped to tighten the laces.

But now, the music seems to have stopped. Musk appears increasingly out of step with the moment. For all his bluster and noise, he never figured out how to meet people where they are.

Utopian tech visions rarely do. They tend to hover above the friction of daily life—above labor, land, and limits—before, inevitably, they come crashing back to Earth.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to Klaus Schwab as the likely former head of the World Economic Forum. However, he resigned days before the piece was published. It has been edited to reflect this.

Imagine you are about to crack open a new book and begin reading. The opening sentence goes like this: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

You might think “worst” refers to the now on-going Trumpian fascistic makeover of government, economy, culture, health, education, and indeed all of U.S. society and beyond. Goodbye empathy. And you might think “best” refers to students, workers, moms, dads, daughters, and sons assembling to instead win a fundamentally better future. Hello solidarity. But Charles Dickens actually wrote the quoted sentence nearly 170 years ago to begin his “A Tale of Two Cities.” Please forgive that I have shamelessly adapted Dickens’ title to become “Trumpism: A Tale of Three Reactions.”

Consider reaction one, passive accommodation. Many millions of people who Trump disturbs, worries, sickens, or even enrages nonetheless remain quiescent. They ignore unravelling social ties. They deny impending social suicide. They accommodate. Why?

I would wager that two long-nurtured beliefs fuel people’s resignation. One: you can’t fight city hall and win. Two: even if you do fight and win, what you implement will lead right back to the vile conditions you sought to overthrow. Yes, fear undoubtedly also propels people to accommodate. We bow to avoid Trump’s cruel wrath. And yes, exhaustion or even eyes on only self likely play a part. We must go where it is quiet. But despite these latter possibilities, I think accommodation isn’t mostly people being scared, lazy, or uncaring. I think accommodationists mostly feel that to fight Trump is a fool’s errand. They believe we will lose big time, and more, if we did win our victory would just reinstall yesterday’s horrors. Accommodationists feel “doom is our destiny.”

When the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of lawyers in a big firm including the young ones who still have social ties and progressive feelings are told by their groveling “partner” bosses to obey cuts and restraints and acquiesce to Trumpian dictates, and they say, okay, yes boss, and lawyer on, what is that? It is passive accommodation. It is individuals seeking individual survival without even contemplating another path. We can understand, but why don’t they resist? Does it even occur to accommodationists to try?

The same holds for universities. When groveling Trustees tell faculty and students they must surrender to Trump and in response most faculty and some students say, okay, yes boss, and return to class, what is that? It is again passive accommodation. It is individuals seeking individual survival. It is individuals not even noticing their potential collective power. This too is understandable, but why don’t they resist?

What leads to accommodation? Protect myself, my future, my job, and my family? Okay, I can do that. Fight against Trump and my own immediate groveling boss, fight against just my own circumstances, much less fight to achieve a better world? No way. I can’t do that. I surrender.

For activists to ask working people to push endlessly on what they quite reasonably see as a revolving door will move few if any working people to resist. To go back to Bidenism will not inspire workers’ involvement. In contrast, to communicate positive intent and long-term strategy can inspire involvement. This is simple. For people who rightly mistrust institutions to decide to sustainably resist Trump, they need reasoned hope. They need positive achievable aims. It follows that if are to overcome accommodation, we need to address peoples’ hesitancy. We need to offer more than defensiveness.

But what about reaction two, active collaboration? What constitutes collaboration and what does overcoming collaboration require from us? To be collaborationist is to knowingly support Trump. Active collaboration doesn’t merely advocate confused choices that impose unanticipated collateral damage. Active collaboration sees fascism around the corner and celebrates its presence or at least knowingly enables it. Active collaboration is Trump’s billionaires. It is not head in the sand denial. It is eyes wide open support. So watch the list of collaborationist college Trustees grow well beyond Columbia University. Watch the list of collaborationist law Partners encompass nearly all the biggest firms. Watch cowering politicians genuflect. Watch some union presidents reject strikes. Collaboration is vile, but it is not one size fits all.

Some collaborators are deeply racist, misogynist, nationalist, and/or corporatist. They are personally Trump-like. Some collaborators are personally less or barely even at all that. But despite their differences, do collaborators have commonalities other than moral decrepitude? I think maybe they do. Collaborators lack empathy. Collaborators may not overtly rush to sadistically crush everyone who Trump targets, but collaborators do seem to have near zero sincere fellow-feeling for the targeted. Indeed, collaborators appear to have near zero empathy for anyone other than themselves and in some cases their families, or perhaps even a small circle of friends. They have zero sense of hypocrisy even as they rail at characteristics that they themselves exhibit in the extreme. Collaborators want all for one where the one is themselves.

Do collaborators bow to Trump out of devotion or do they bow out of abject fear? When a college’s Trustees or a law firm’s Partners or your state’s politicians hear Trump’s orders and comply while they know the horrific implications for others, they help Trump. Whether they are a profile in cowardice or a profile in greed, either way, they collaborate. To then obey their choice is to accommodate.

To be principled, doesn’t our resistance need to address active collaboration quite differently than we address confused or denialist hopelessness? While we energetically reach out to listen to and talk with the currently accommodationist population, and even with the horribly misinformed disoriented and highly hostile population, we need to unstintingly militantly oppose knowing collaborationists.

So what about reaction three, resistance? What is it? How does it win? Resistance doesn’t gleefully, cowardly, or knowingly aid Trump, nor does resistance merely privately dislike or even hate Trump. Resistance doesn’t delude itself that Trump isn’t utterly horrendous and socially suicidal. Resistance doesn’t deny the excruciating pain the recently born and the as yet unborn may suffer if sacrificed to Trumpism. Resistance knows that Trump’s full success would herald a blindingly dark and infinitely dystopian future. So resistance actively fights Trump. Resistance enlists others to actively fight Trump. Resistance includes anything anyone can do that will help stop Trump.

Resistance must envision positive gains as well as ward off horrible ills.

But here is the main thing about resistance. It has to win. Resistance is not mainly about feeling good or looking good, though it helps if one does feel fine and feeling good may even be necessary for sustainability. Resistance is not mainly about being brave and steadfast, though that too helps and courage may even be necessary for effectivity. Resistance is also not mainly about seeking and finding truths, though again that helps and is, indeed, honest accuracy is necessary for worthiness. Most difficult to manifest, resistance is not only about narrowly aiding self but is also about collectively aiding others. Our battle is zero sum. It will take time. But if in the end we don’t win, Trump wins. If in the end we don’t win we lose and that is unacceptable. But how do we win?

Before trying to answer, I should admit that I feel this message echos commentary that appears all over alternative and even to an extent mainstream media. This message is redundant of my own and other’s past formulations and yet it simultaneously seems to me that the points need repetition. I know you have often heard messages like this, as have I, but I also know that to stay on course I need to keep hearing/reading the call to resist. How about you?

It is excellent that sensible stuff is said and written, heard and read. And that is certainly happening. It is another thing for the sensible stuff to percolate far into our brains and emotions to thereafter guide our choices. We have to deeply register and not deny the sensible stuff. We have to deeply remember and not forget the sensible stuff. The real bottom line is that Trumpian darkness could last lifetimes unless we bring on a new dawn. This is not false news. It isn’t even exaggeration. But still, these worst of times can become the best of times. What kind and what scope of resistance can make that happen?

Resistance will grow if it reaches out to successfully overcome feelings of hopelessness and despair, feelings of impossibility, and feelings of futility. To do that, resistance must envision positive gains as well as ward off horrible ills. It must chart paths to success.

Growing resistance will in turn win if it raises sufficient costs to elites that they have to give up their agendas to avoid losing more than they would gain by continuing to pursue their agendas. Trump and Co. are amoral. They can’t even comprehend appeals to care for others. Trump and Co. understand only power and wealth. To grow and inspire enough commitment to win, resistance must make demands and use words and deeds that awaken desires for much more than survival. It must conceive, communicate, and seek positive program. To beat Trump and Co. it must threaten their power and wealth. Trump and Co. will comprehend that.

Yes, the rich and powerful profiteers and supremacists will manipulate, deceive, bait and switch, overload, and repress even more than they have done so far. That is their societal role. But if we are intent and strategic that won’t stop us. The bigger obstacle to beating Trump and then advancing toward fundamental change resides within ourselves. It is self denigrating baggage that we carry. It is crippling doubts that we harbor. It is tendencies to nitpick, undermine, and even assault one another. It is an inclination to go it alone for self rather than to u work together for all. Society’s pliers bend our minds and wills. But we can bend back. The truth is that these times are even worse than they appear. Yet these times are also better than the best we intuit. We just have to seize them.

When teachers seek not only better pay and conditions for themselves but also better education and inspiring care for the children and communities they serve, that is part of a winning path. When nurses seek not only better pay and conditions for themselves but also better and free health care and healthier conditions for all, that is part of a winning path. When workers in any industry seek better pay and conditions for themselves but also unite with other workers and surrounding communities to aid them too, that is part of a winning path. When students seek protections and improvements on campus but also to defend targeted communities off campus, that is part of a winning path. When women seek control of their own bodies and lives but also support others who seek health, dignity, and well being, that is part of a winning path. When minorities seek room to breathe and equity for themselves but also for all others who are disenfranchised and denied, that is part of a winning path. And yes when all too few politicians seek to name Trump what he is and to rail at him but also to build sustainable organization and positive program, that too is part of a winning path. Health care for all. Excellent free education for all. A higher minimum wage and shorter work week without loss of income for all. A more progressive income tax for all. A wealth tax for the exploiters. A rebuilt industrial base with dignified work to sustainably provide needed products and living incomes for all. Internationalist solidarity for all. And finally, of course, a massive program to save the planet from ecological nightmares for all. And yes, Doge-like thinking could have one legitimate target. The military.

You get the idea. To beat Trump and to reach a better America and world we need to have projects, organizations, and selves that empathize with and work to assist every person who suffers injustice. We need to collectively seek positive program that inspires and empowers. But what does “seek” mean? How do we “seek” successfully?

Partly we evidence and inspire growing numbers by displaying mass turnouts at marches, rallies, and town halls too. Partly we evidence growing militance and commitment by proliferating and escalating civil disobedience via encampments, blockades, sanctuaries, occupations, and, perhaps most critically, strikes. Imagine employees of gutted government departments and firms not rushing out the door to seek private income elsewhere but binding themselves to their desks to collectively overcome injustice right where they are. Imagine teachers at every level teaching truths as they know them, openly, in every classroom and even in the evenings to community residents. Imagine mutual aid, collective defense, and especially widespread collective disobedience all demanding positive gains. Imagine all that…it’s easy if you try.

To beat Trump and to reach a better America and world we need to have projects, organizations, and selves that empathize with and work to assist every person who suffers injustice.

Yes, lawsuits can help resistance but lawsuits alone will not win. Entreaties to obey law quite like entreaties to be moral are an activist currency that Trump and his collaborators literally cannot comprehend. If teachers, nurses, workers in factories and warehouses, workers driving trucks and producing them, students, women, and oppressed cultural communities wait on the generosity of elites to abide law, much less to display morality, we won’t win. Resistance must force compliance by raising threats to power and to wealth that elites fear. That can inspire. That can win. We can’t do it overnight. It takes organizing. But we can do it, if we try.

Can I please add a last point? One of the deadly obstacles to our success is for us to feel we can’t keep up with all Trump’s horrible announcements. We are buried in bad news. We can’t have sound opinions about all of it. We manage to get a tentative grip on one issue and suddenly that issue disappears. Something else demands attention. It is too damn much. We can’t keep up. We are shocked and awed. Where is my pillow to rest my aching head?

I think there is a cure for shock-and-awe that is meant to bulldoze us into passivity. We don’t each need to become expert on each and every idiotic Trumpian policy threat. On that front, we only each need to oppose Trumpist fascism in all its manifestations. Put differently, for every new manifestation that Trump launches there is one key recognition. What Trump unleashes is never an attempt to solve a problem on behalf of a suffering constituency. It is always instead part of Trump’s plan to remold society in his own image. The economy is indeed sick but Trump’s bullying tariffs aren’t a solution. Immigration indeed has real flaws, but Trump’s disgusting deportations are not a solution. Government agencies are often very far from wonderful but Trump’s gutting them to then privatize them is not a solution. Education and health care are very often utterly misdirected but for Trump to orient them further toward stifling students and profiting off illness is no solution. Trump’s policies don’t aim to solve problems but only to serve wealth and power in all its varied forms. We don’t have to become expert in every last idiotic, insane, cruel, Trump-serving, elite-serving, billionaire-serving nuance of each day’s new Trumpist Tweets. We instead need to understand our overarching situation which is actually sadly quite simple. We must understand that Trump’s agenda augurs hell. And then, ideally, also, the place where we really ought to stretch our minds, is that we should imagine, refine, and pursue that which we together collectively positively seek. A truly better world.

The Trump administration just gutted Meals on Wheels. Seriously. Meals on Wheels!

Donald Trump didn’t just “disrupt” America; he detonated it. Like a political Chernobyl, he poisoned the very soil of our democratic republic, leaving behind a toxic cloud of cruelty, corruption, and chaos that will radiate through generations if we don’t contain it now.

He didn’t merely bring darkness; he cultivated it. He made it fashionable. He turned cruelty into currency and made ignorance a political virtue.

This man, a grotesque cocktail of malignant narcissism and petty vengeance, ripped the mask off American decency and showed the world our ugliest face. He caged children. Caged. Children. He laughed off their cries while his ghoulish acolytes used “Where are the children?” as a punchline for their next QAnon rally.

He welcomed white supremacists with winks and dog whistles, calling them “very fine people,” while spitting venom at Black athletes who dared kneel in peaceful protest.

This isn’t policy: it’s a purge. A test run for authoritarian exile. And if Trump’s not stopped by Congress, the courts, or We The People in the streets, it won’t end there.

He invited fascism to dinner and served it on gold-plated Trump steaks. He made lying the lingua franca of the right, burning truth to the ground like a carnival barker selling snake oil from a flaming soapbox.

And let’s not forget the blood on his hands: 1,193,165 dead from COVID by the time he left office, 400,000 of them unnecessarily, dismissed as nothing more than “a flu,” while he admitted — on tape — that he knew it was airborne and knew it was lethal. His apathy was homicidal, his incompetence catastrophic.

He tried to overthrow a fair election. He summoned a violent mob. He watched them beat cops with American flags and screamed “Fight like hell!” while cowering in the White House, delighting in the destruction like Nero fiddling as Rome burned.

And now, like some grotesque twist on historical fascism, Trump’s regime is quietly disappearing even legal U.S. residents — snatched off the streets by ICE and dumped into El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, a dystopian nightmare of concrete and cruelty.

One such man, Kilmar Ábrego García, had legal status and a home in Maryland. But Trump’s agents defied a federal court order and deported him anyway, vanishing him into a foreign hellhole so brutal it defies comprehension.

This isn’t policy: it’s a purge. A test run for authoritarian exile. And if Trump’s not stopped by Congress, the courts, or We The People in the streets, it won’t end there.

But somehow, he’s still here, waddling across the political stage like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of authoritarianism, bloated with power, empty of soul, and reeking of spray tan and sulfur.

Donald Trump didn’t just bring darkness: he’s a goddamn black hole, a gravity-well of cruelty sucking the light out of everything he touches.

This is a man who desecrates everything good.

Empathy? He mocks it. Truth? He slanders it. Democracy? He’d bulldoze it for a golf course.

And if we let him continue, he won’t just end democracy — he’ll make damn sure it never rises again.

So the question is: are we awake yet?

Or will we let this orange-faced death-cult leader finish the job he started, grinning over the corpse of the America we once believed in?

Now is not the time to kneel: it’s the time to rise. Stay loud, stay vigilant, and show up. Every protest, every march, every call to DC, every raised voice chips away at the darkness.

Democracy isn’t a spectator sport: it’s a fight, and we damn well better show up for it.

A few years ago, three French peace activists met with Pope Francis and asked him for advice. “Start a revolution,” he said. “Shake things up! The world is deaf. You have to open its ears.” That’s what Pope Francis did—he started a nonviolent revolution and invited us all to join.

I’m grateful for him for so many reasons, but mainly because he spoke out so boldly, so prophetically in word and deed for justice, the poor, disarmament, peace, creation, mercy and nonviolence. It is a tremendous gift that we had him for 12 years, that he did not resign or retire, but kept at it until the last day, Easter Sunday.

We’ve been hearing a lot about how he was the first non-European pope in centuries, the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from Latin America, the first pope trained after Vatican II, the first pope who was not a Vatican insider and the first to take the name of St. Francis (which was a bold and daring thing to do). But perhaps best of all: He was the first pope who worked as a bouncer at a pub before entering the seminary.

Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world

Francis lived and proclaimed the Beatitudes. We Americans always think of ourselves in a kind of collective narcissism, but he always had a universal perspective. He looked at the whole human race and all of creation through the eyes of Jesus, one of the original nonviolent revolutionaries. As such, Francis spoke boldly about universal love, universal compassion, universal justice, and universal peace.

With this in mind, it’s worth focusing on the great themes of his papacy, and what they mean for us.

1. His Commitment to the Poor

Francis began his papacy saying he envisioned a church that is poor and for the poor. Yes, do charity work, he said, and serve the poor and marginalized, but have real relationships with poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised people. Get involved in their lives personally and join their struggle to end injustice and the systemic violence of poverty—and do it through love for actual suffering people. I loved that he opened a homeless shelter in the Vatican, visited prisoners, and met with and defended migrants and refugees, even bringing some to live at the Vatican.

2. His Commitment to Mother Earth.

Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world. But his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si,” might be one of the great documents in history. Not only does he denounce our destruction of the planet and its creatures, as well as the poor, but he denounces capitalism, corporate greed, and war as root causes of climate change.

The Earth “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote. He called climate change a spiritual and moral crisis and denounced what he called “an economy that kills”—a system that discards both people and creation in pursuit of profit. He denounced what he called our throwaway culture as moral failure, and named indifference itself as one of the greatest threats to our future. He insisted that “we can no longer turn our backs on reality,” and called everyone to take action for justice, compassion, and Mother Earth, our common home.

3. His Commitment to Mercy.

Over and over again, Francis called us to show mercy and clemency; to let go of grudges and put down our swords, guns, and weapons; to forgive to one another, reconcile, and seek peace. In particular, he changed canon law so there is not one sentence of support for the death penalty in church teaching. No Catholic, no Christian, can support the death penalty, he said. On many occasions, he tried to stop impending executions.

4. His Commitment to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

When a reporter asked him about LGBT folks, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” That’s precisely why the right hated him so much, because unlike U.S. President Donald Trump and so many others, he refused to make scapegoats of anyone or judge anyone, which, by the way, is a commandment in the Sermon on the Mount. However, he did judge and vehemently condemn hatred, prejudice, racism, war, corporate greed, capitalism, nuclear weapons, and, really, the U.S. itself for its imperial domination.

5. His Commitment to the Reformation of the Church

Francis tried to make many changes in the church, the Vatican, the Curia, and especially through the synod process, which has the potential to make the global church more egalitarian. If priests are good shepherds like Jesus, they need to “smell like the sheep,” he said. “The church is like a field hospital after a battle,” where people go for healing, recovery, and comfort—so it is messy and stressful because it is a place that welcomes and serves the suffering.

Could he have done more? Of course. I wish he had ordained women as deacons and declared that priests could marry. I wish he had placed women at the head of many, if not all, decision-making bodies within the Curia. As Joan Chittister just wrote, he really failed women. I wish he had made a much stronger response to the horrific sex abuse scandal, but I liked that he tried to get bishops and priests to stop acting like aristocrats—to let go of power and be of humble service to everyone.

6. His Commitment to Peace and Active Nonviolence

Everything Francis did was a form of Gospel peacemaking. Like Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and St. Francis, he was against war, all wars, no matter what the reason—and that’s the leap that few people make. One of his last books is called Against War. If you study the tributes in the mainstream press, you will notice that few mention his consistent stand against war, his opposition to nuclear weapons, and his efforts to end the wars in Africa and the Russian war on Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to the Russian embassy and violated protocol by dramatically begging for an end to the war.

Most of all, he denounced the horrific Hamas attack, killings, and kidnappings, and from then on, he denounced the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza that has killed over 51,000 people. Nearly every night since the war began, at 7:00 pm, he called the one Catholic church in Gaza, right up through Holy Saturday, to see how they were holding up. His last public words on Easter were a call for a lasting cease-fire in Gaza. I hope we can all speak out publicly like he did until the day we die calling for an end to all wars and all nuclear weapons.

He went to many places that few visit to fulfill Jesus’ commandment to make peace and practice the universal, compassionate love of God. He went to Iraq, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain, Mongolia, the Congo, South Korea, and Morocco. When he was in Palestine, he touched the shameful Israeli wall of occupation and prayed there, just as he had prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In the United Arab Emirates, he had a historic meeting with Muslim leaders. In Canada, he apologized for the church’s treatment of Indigenous people over the centuries and tore up the Doctrine of Discovery.

Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.

In Greece, he made a surprise visit to a refugee camp and then brought three Muslim families back to Rome with him. In the Central African Republic, he went right into the warzone, and could easily have been killed. He literally placed himself in harm’s way. In Hiroshima, he denounced all nuclear weapons, and begged the world’s leaders to abolish all nuclear weapons. He said that the mere possession of them, the threat of using them as a deterrent, was immoral. No Catholic can support, build, maintain, threaten, or profit from nuclear weapons, he said.

Perhaps the most dramatic of all was in April 2019 when he brought the president of South Sudan and the rebel leaders together at the Vatican for a two day retreat. At the end, after pleading for negotiations and urging them to end the killing, he went around the room, got down on his knees, and begged each one of them for peace, and then kissed each person’s feet.

Francis consistently rebuked Trump and the Republican Party, as well as the many U.S. Catholic bishops and priests who support them. He even asked an associate to read JD Vance a long statement on the fundamentals of compassion and welcoming immigrants.

At the same time, Francis consistently met with leaders of popular movements from the Global South, encouraging them and all grassroots movements. Being from the Global South himself, he was determined to listen to their voices, not ours.

He called former U.S. President Joe Biden last December and made a personal appeal to release Leonard Peltier, and that, along with the grassroots movement, is why Leonard was released from prison. When Julian Assange was in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, Pope Francis had called him and talked for an hour, which I learned (first hand) really helped him. No one knows that.

Of all the stances he took, it was his growing commitment to nonviolence that gave me the most hope. Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.

My friends and I went to the Vatican many times over the years asking for an encyclical on Jesus and nonviolence, to make this the official teaching, position, and law of the church. We never got that, but Francis did much to turn the church back to its roots in Gospel nonviolence. In April 2016, he welcomed the first ever conference on nonviolence at the Vatican, and at the end we issued a strong joint statement saying there was no such thing as a just war, calling on everyone to practice nonviolence.

It was there that Cardinal Peter Turkson asked me to draft the Pope’s next World Day of Peace message, which came out on January 1, 2017, called “ Nonviolence, a Style of Politics for Peace.” I call it the first ever statement on nonviolence in the history of the church since the Sermon on the Mount.

Francis continued to speak about nonviolence over the years, saying “I think of nonviolence as a perspective and way of understanding the world, to which theology must look as one of its constitutive elements.” He also called nonviolence a “universal value that finds fulfilment in the Gospel of Christ” and called for a “nonviolent lifestyle,” noting “how nonviolence, embraced with conviction and practiced consistently, can yield significant results… This is the path to pursue now and in the future. This is the way of peace.”

To the Anti-Defamation League, he said, “Faced with so much violence spreading throughout the world, we are called to a greater nonviolence, which does not mean passivity, but active promotion of the good.” Elsewhere, he wrote, “Let us remember that, even in cases of self-defense, peace is the ultimate goal, and that a lasting peace can exist only without weapons. Let us make nonviolence a guide for our actions, both in daily life and in international relations. And let us pray for a more widespread culture of nonviolence, that will progress when countries and citizens alike resort less and less to the use of arms.” In his last statement on Easter, he prayed for an end to all violence, everywhere. That was his prayer, his hope, his message, his life’s work.

A good way to honor Pope Francis’s peacemaking life and his death at Easter is to rise to the occasion as he did, to claim our power as public peacemakers; reclaim our collective power in global grassroots movements of nonviolence; speak out; march in the streets; take public action; and resist war, injustice, poverty, racism, corporate greed, fascism, authoritarianism, genocide in Gaza, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. He urged us to be “pilgrims of hope.”

I invite us, in the face of so much despair, to rise up, reclaim, and promote nonviolence as he did, see the world through the eyes of the nonviolent Jesus as he did, and do what we can publicly as peacemakers to welcome God’s reign of peace on Earth. As Francis demonstrated, that’s the best thing we can do with our lives. That is the spiritual life, the fullness of life, the life of the peacemaker.

For decades now, Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinian rights have been the weak link in the civil liberties chain.

During this period, when a U.S. president or Congress has sought to take measures curtailing a range of civil liberties, they would exploit the perception of the danger posed by Arabs to justify their actions. They feel comfortable in doing this because they understand that the negative stereotypes associated with Arabs make the measures more acceptable and opposition to their efforts less likely to occur. Examples abound.

On three separate occasions in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration sought to roll back civil liberties, they began their assault with an attack on Arabs’ rights. Having established the identity of Arab or Palestinian with terrorist, they assumed no public support would be forthcoming in defense of Arab civil liberties. On the other hand, if their targets had been persons of another ethnicity, opposition would have been more likely.

In 1981, the Reagan administration issued an executive order that dismantled all earlier reforms by the Carter administration to outlaw domestic surveillance by the CIA and FBI, using Arabs as the scapegoats to justify this measure. As a result, for five years, the FBI infiltrated and disrupted Palestinian student groups nationwide—finally disbanding the effort with nothing to show but agents’ hours wasted and millions of dollars spent.

What Trump’s administration policies share in common with his predecessors is the use of Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and their supporters, as convenient scapegoats to justify the erosion of rights and liberties.

Reagan’s Department of Justice was also able to rewrite U.S. extradition law, making it easier to fulfill the requests of foreign countries to extradite individuals without due process protections. They did so using the case of a Palestinian visa holder whose extradition had been requested by Israel. Based on this case, Congress rewrote the laws affecting all extradition requests.

It was also under former President Ronald Reagan that the Immigration and Naturalization Service released its “Alien Terrorist and Undesirables Contingency Plan,” detailing steps under provisions of the McCarren Walter Act to imprison, try in secret, and deport large numbers of aliens based solely on their ethnicity or their political beliefs or associations. Consistent with the approach taken, the “Plan” makes several references to Arab immigrants. In fact, the test case used to lay the groundwork for this “Plan” was the arrest of seven Palestinians and the Kenyan wife of one of them, charging them with nothing more than their political beliefs and association.

In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued an executive order “Prohibiting Transactions with Terrorists Who Threatened to Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process” and followed by the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995. Both efforts introduced draconian measures that would seriously erode civil and political rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and residents under the Constitution and international law. The law, for example, gave far-reaching powers to law-enforcement agencies, removed the presumption of innocence for those under investigation, made it easier for the government to conduct surveillance against persons suspected of violating conspiracy laws, allowed for prohibition of “material support deemed by the president to benefit terrorist organizations,” established procedures allowing the government to detain and deport individuals based on secret evidence with no opportunity for the detainees to defend themselves, and allowed law-enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance on individuals or groups, based purely on their beliefs and associations. Using the executive order and new legislation the Clinton administration unleashed a nationwide profiling program at airports, which harassed and questioned hundreds of Arab and Arab American airline passengers, even before checking in for their flights, based solely on their dress, appearance, or Arabic names.

After 9/11, the Bush administration and Congress upped the ante. While intelligence failures and lax airline safety requirements were at fault in allowing terrorists to be trained in the U.S. and carry out their horrific attacks, then-President George W. Bush issued a series of orders that resulted in the roundup and deportation of thousands of innocent Arab students, workers, and visitors. They also ordered tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim visa holders to report to immigration offices where many more were held for deportation. The anti-terrorism legislation that passed through Congress allowed expanded surveillance by law enforcement, including warrantless wiretapping, searching library records, and an expanded use of profiling. Using the expanded powers given to them by the administration, law enforcement agents infiltrated mosques and Arab social clubs, entrapping a few gullible individuals in plots that were often organized by the law enforcement agencies themselves.

This is only a partial history, but it lays the predicate for the actions being taken by the Trump administration: threats to civil liberties like freedom of speech, assembly, and academic freedom; expanded authority given to law enforcement agencies to use unconstitutional measures to detain and deport individuals based on their ethnicity or political beliefs; and an expanded interpretation of the “material support” argument used by the Reagan and Clinton administrations to violate the protected rights of citizens and residents.

There are differences to be sure. While the measures taken during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations were based on exaggerated fears of terrorism in the U.S., it’s important to note that a review of the profiling, surveillance, and immigration programs established during these administrations did little to uncover or prosecute actual cases of terrorism. At the end of the day, despite billions of dollars spent and precious law enforcement resources expended, these programs did nothing more than contribute to an expansion of law enforcement powers and erosion of rights. In the case of the Trump orders, there’s not even the pretense of fighting terrorism—rather, an exercise in the brutal use of power to create fear and force institutions and individuals to cower and submit.

What Trump’s administration policies share in common with his predecessors is the use of Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and their supporters, as convenient scapegoats to justify the erosion of rights and liberties. What Trump knows is that in the midst of Israel’s war on Gaza, his support base will enthusiastically back his efforts. He also knows that liberals in Congress, who might otherwise oppose his policies, will be hesitant to offer full-throated support to the victims of his policies if it appears they are defending Palestinians or critics of Israel. For Trump, it’s the perfect storm. For those who care about defending rights and liberties, it’s just another example of Arabs, Palestinians, and those who defend them being the weak link in the civil liberties chain.