U.S. President Donald Trump’s political attack on the legal profession has entered a realm we have never seen before. The campaign of intimidation against firms that represent clients and causes he does not like shows no signs of stopping.

The battle is at a turning point. From the outside, it appears the profession is divided, with two firms caving in to Trump’s demands and three firms fighting in court. Trump has promoted his success in bringing two large firms to heel so that he is viewed as holding the upper hand and his power is enhanced.

That is not what is happening in court. The momentum has shifted, and the president has the losing hand. Lost amid the shock that accompanied the initial wave of punishing executive orders is that those fighting back are winning in court and those cutting deals with the White House are suffering irreparable damage behind the scenes where law firm reputations, clients, and the best legal talent are won and lost.

Firms that have yet to be targeted have to ask themselves the question: When the law has dealt you a winning hand, why would you fold?

It is critical right now that the next firms targeted choose to fight and not fold. To understand why, law firms should take a close look at what has been happening in the three cases where firms are standing and fighting, and the fallout facing the firms that have folded.

So far, Trump has issued five executive orders against leading law firms. Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps capitulated, agreeing to provide as much as $100 million in free legal services to support Trump initiatives. Three other large firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block—are fighting in federal court, with remarkably quick and unanimous success.

Perkins, Wilmer, and Jenner all claimed that the retaliatory orders terminating all federal contracts with the firms, barring their employees from access to federal buildings, and subjecting the firms’ clients to onerous and punitive disclosure requirements constituted retaliation for protected “viewpoint” speech that violated the firms’ First Amendment, due process, and equal protection rights.

Judge Beryl Howell (appointed by Obama) was the first to rule, striking down the Perkins executive order and finding that it threatened “the very foundation of our legal system.” Her ruling was followed March 28 by similar decisions in the Wilmer and Jenner cases.

Judge Richard Leon, (appointed by George W. Bush), held that the retaliatory nature of the Wilmer order was “clear from its face” and that there was “no doubt” it “chills speech and legal advocacy or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.” He also found that the retaliation would cause the firm “irreparable injury,” noting that “at least 21 of the firm’s 25 largest clients in 2024 have contracts with federal agencies.” With the firm handling more than “100 open government contracting matters involving various federal agencies,” Judge Leon concluded the order threatened the firm’s “very existence.”

Judge John Bates (also a Bush appointee) moved within hours of receiving Jenner’s complaint to stop enforcement of the executive order targeting that firm, specifically directing the government to rescind parts of the order designed to intimidate the firm’s clients.

The speed and unanimity with which these decisions were reached by federal judges appointed by both political parties is remarkable. All have found the constitutional violations obvious. There is no reason to believe the Supreme Court will find differently.

Lawyers are officers of the court. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law. Entering into a deal that has been held to violate the Constitution violates our oaths as lawyers. That alone should be reason for firms targeted by Trump to fight these orders and not cave as Paul Weiss and Skadden have done.

Beyond the clear legal duty to oppose an unconstitutional practice, why would any firm capitulate when it can fight and win? All of Trump’s potential targets have the ability and resources to defend themselves. Firms that have yet to be targeted have to ask themselves the question: When the law has dealt you a winning hand, why would you fold? Surely, they would not advise their own clients to fold in similar circumstances.

Contrast these legal victories with the badge of infamy that is being applied to Paul Weiss and Skadden. Behind the scenes, lawyers and in-house corporate counsel at many of America’s largest and most influential corporations are talking. Many are shocked and disgusted by the craven and cowardly way these two firms have responded, and how they have sold out their own principles and those of the legal profession. Most recently, over 1,650 alumni of the United States Department of Justice signed a statement opposing the executive branch attacking lawyers and law firms, and the number continues to grow.

This is a decision that goes to the core of an institution, that defines it in ways that will not be forgotten. For many years, Skadden was defined by the prestigious public interest fellowship that it pioneered decades ago and has used as a recruiting tool for decades. When the news broke that Skadden might be signing a deal, close to 400 former Skadden Fellows opposed any deal, and urged the firm to stand up for the rule of law, fight unjust actions by the government, and speak publicly about the critical role lawyers play in defending democracy.

More than the Skadden Fellowship has now been tarnished. The brand of both Skadden and Paul Weiss has been irreparably damaged in ways that may well impair their ability to recruit quality attorneys and clients in the years to come. The decision these firms have made is already being discussed in law school classrooms where Paul Weiss and Skadden compete with the rest of Big Law for legal talent. The attention focused on these two firms is withering and threatens to drag them down.

No matter how one looks at it—from a legal, ethical, or pragmatic business perspective—it is increasingly clear Paul Weiss and Skadden have made a grievous mistake for which they will pay a price much larger than the ransom they have agreed to pay Trump. The next firm to face an executive order would be wise to take a page from the Perkins-Wilmer-Jenner playbook. It is far better for them, and the entire profession, to fight than fold. If law firms stand up for themselves and their clients, the campaign of intimidation can be shut down.

Almost no one who knew her can find a bad word to say about Rumeysa Ozturk, the doctoral candidate who was abducted by masked ICE agents on March 25. Tufts University President Sunil Kumar has come to her defense, as well as religious leaders such as Rabbi Dan Slipakoff, and numerous alumni. Her closest defender is her colleague and advisor Reyyan Bilge, who regards Ms. Ozturk’s abduction as “a betrayal of American values.” So do I—and for me, it’s personal. Not because I’m Turkish or an academic, but because I’m an American writer whose main subject is the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands. And I live in Vermont, which shouldn’t have had anything to do with it.

The video of Ms. Ozturk’s abduction is the worst nightmare we might have about what could happen to someone we love, or to us. She is walking along the street in broad daylight, on her way to break the Ramadan fast at an interfaith center. It all happens so fast—first a few masked officers; she screams; then she is surrounded by both women and men who slip out of unmarked cars. They forcibly take her phone, and handcuff her behind her back to ensure that this dangerous scholar of child study and human development cannot harm them. A Fulbright scholar invited to the United States because of her exceptional abilities, Rumeysa Ozturk’s high, terrified voice tells us that she wasn’t watching for these thugs to come after her, on the clean streets near her university.

I’ve seen all this happen in historic photo after photo, but having it come to life in Medford, Massachusetts slips us in time from one era to another, from one place to another. It takes me back to an idyllic stay in Amsterdam in 2001, when I found a 1941 photograph showing Jewish neighbors being rounded up on my doorstep. That changed my relationship to the city forever, and launched 13 years of research and writing about how good people colluded with the Nazis by doing nothing, and how a courageous handful resisted.

The authoritarian playbook will target writers and thinkers first.

When one of the five masked officers who surrounded Rumeysa Ozturk said, “We’re police,” was that supposed to reassure her? Does any common criminal have the capacity to kidnap someone across state lines and hold her for days in prison? Would that not be a federal crime if the federal government were not committing it? What was it that made her say, “OK, OK?” Was she making the transition from fearing that she would be robbed or raped to realizing that these people, even if masked, might actually be legitimate? Are they?

Rumeysa Ozturk is being persecuted because she is a writer who exercised her right of free speech. The government which transported her from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, then to Vermont, then to Louisiana, has brought no specific evidence that she was supporting Hamas. Her only “crime” is coauthoring an op-ed urging her university to acknowledge the genocide of more than 50,000 Palestinians, and to divest from related investment. The piece does not mention Hamas. While these positions may be offensive to the Trump administration, they are examples of the free speech people come to this country to secure—and which our ancestors fought to establish. PEN USA has taken a stand along with free speech organizations, but even more individual writers and others should demand that Ms. Ozturk be released.

Within hours, thousands gathered to protest what happened right there, on their streets. In the background of the security video, someone seems to be asking, “Why are you wearing masks?” Now we know. There are so many steps where Ms. Ozturk was denied equal protection under the law: when her visa was revoked without her knowledge, when she was accosted by masked ICE agents, when she was abducted, and now that she is being held without her consent. No one has put forward evidence that Ms. Ozturk ever spoke at a rally or even attended one, although she would have been within her rights to do so. She simply wrote what she believed.

Because of a court filing, we know that her lawyer wasn’t quite fast enough to get a judicial order to prevent Ms. Ozturk from being moved out of Massachusetts until she was already gone—or so the government claims. They whisked her across multiple state lines almost immediately, no doubt with this very thing in mind. It’s less than 40 miles to the New Hampshire border, then about an hour and a half to Lebanon, where they held her temporarily. But within a few hours, she was 26 miles north of my city of Burlington, Vermont, in the ICE holding tank in St. Albans, Vermont. The next morning, they took her to the airport which is only two miles from my home, and transported her to Louisiana. The highway they took her on—to St. Albans and then back to the Burlington airport—is so close that I can walk there in 15 minutes. In summer, I can hear the cars passing on it.

Until the last few weeks, my biggest fear has been for people like Vermont’s dairy workers who don’t have the class privilege that will motivate others to take up their cause with resources and alacrity. People who don’t have a lawyer they can call. I still fear for them, but now I realize that the authoritarian playbook will target writers and thinkers first. They don’t even have to be brown to be persecuted. We see it across the country now: Russians, French, Turkish, Palestinian.

For years, I’ve been speaking about collusion and collaboration with the Nazis. Now I feel the weight of those dilemmas intimately and personally. Is it OK for me to enjoy a beautiful meal or the coming of spring? I must, if only for my own sanity. But I must also think every day of Rumeysa Ozturk and what I can do about and for her. Otherwise, I might as well be the woman who obeyed the Nazis and drew the curtains of my Amsterdam apartment as the Jews were being rounded up on her doorstep.

Flashback to a pivotal moment in global politics.

It was a crisp evening in December 2021 when Donald Trump stepped onto a gilded stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida. The former president—reduced to a kingmaker, still without access to his Twitter account, and seething over his defeat in 2020, yet still nursing ambitions for a return—spoke to a raucous crowd about the need for a global “populist revival.”

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, another showman was making his mark.

In Buenos Aires, Javier Milei, then a fiery congressman with a penchant for theatrics and unfiltered invective, was delivering his own bombastic address on live television. Clad in his signature leather jacket and gesturing wildly, Milei railed against the political elite, vowing to obliterate the “parasitic state” with his ever-present chainsaw prop.

As the world braced for this new era of racist and xenophobic leadership, the intertwined fates of Trump and Milei offered a potent lens through which to examine the volatility of contemporary politics.

For a brief moment, the right-wing populist figures seemed like ideological satellites orbiting the same disruptive axis. Trump, sidelined but scheming, watched as the conservative media anointed him the leader of an imagined international populist alliance. Milei, meanwhile, was steadily building a cult following in Argentina, his rise to power hastened by a corporate media landscape eager for controversy and spectacle. Though separated by continents and cultures, Trump and Milei’s shared disdain for establishment politics and a mutual affection for shock value linked their trajectories in the imaginations of their supporters.

Fast forward three years to 2024, and the political world was turned on its head.

Milei, once dismissed as a fringe outsider, seized the presidency of Argentina in a landslide—a triumph of style over substance, fueled by promises of radical economic reform steeped in austerity and deep cuts to public interest spending. Trump, who had clawed his way back to power with a surprise 2024 election victory, eking by with a slimmer popular vote margin and narrower victory than any other in over a century, was mere weeks away from reclaiming the Oval Office.

The unlikely duo became the poster boys of a resurgence of right-wing, white nationalist populism. Trump, emboldened by his razor-thin victory, described Milei as a “brother in arms” during a congratulatory phone call. Milei, ecstatic, became the first world leader to congratulate Trump in person at the 2024 CPAC convention, claiming to be a mutual part of a blessed mission: “Today the world is a much better place because the winds of freedom are much stronger… A true miracle and proof that the forces of heaven are on our side,” Milei jovially proclaimed during his CPAC speech.

Yet, beneath the mutual admiration and bluster lay cracks in their respective facades. While Trump was busy assembling a cabinet that hinted at renewed chaos, Milei’s honeymoon phase was already crumbling under the weight of his own policies. Both men had ascended by exploiting dissatisfaction and anger, but their ability to govern was increasingly in question. And in Milei’s case, his credibility recently took an even greater hit as more details have surfaced that he had once enthusiastically promoted a now-collapsed cryptocurrency scheme, raising the question of whether Argentina’s self-proclaimed libertarian savior had been duped or, even worse, did the duping himself.

For Milei, the exhilaration of victory quickly gave way to mass protests (including ones covered by Unicorn Riot from last May and January / February 2024), economic stagnation, and plummeting public approval. For Trump, the looming challenges of his second presidency—a divided country, international skepticism, and mounting legal troubles—threatened to turn triumph into turmoil.

But if Milei and Trump seemed destined for a political bromance, the rest of Latin America wasn’t nearly as enamored.

While Milei threw himself into Trump’s embrace, other regional leaders responded with defiance. In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum made it clear she would not be bullied into Trump’s hardline immigration policies, standing firm in early diplomatic confrontations even as economic pressures forced some concessions. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro was even more direct in his opposition, warning that Trump’s return signaled renewed imperial aggression and pledging to resist the right-wing tide sweeping the hemisphere. Even Brazil, governed by the more pragmatic Lula da Silva, showed little enthusiasm for Trump’s reemergence, wary of his influence over the continent’s far-right.

Milei, in contrast, found himself increasingly isolated—Trump’s most reliable ideological ally in Latin America, but an outlier rather than the harbinger of a broader regional shift. As he struggled to implement his radical libertarian agenda amid economic turmoil and mounting protests it became clear that his populist revolution was already faltering.

As the world braced for this new era of racist and xenophobic leadership, the intertwined fates of Trump and Milei offered a potent lens through which to examine the volatility of contemporary politics. The parallels were impossible to ignore: two men, propelled to power by mainstream-media-manufactured personalities and plenty of controversy, now tasked with delivering on promises that many deemed impossible. The question wasn’t just whether they would succeed, but whether their respective nations—and the world—could withstand the consequences if they failed.

Milei’s Corporate Media-Facilitated Rise and Apparent Fall from Grace with Argentinians

In Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024, hundreds of thousands of people protested deep austerity cuts by Milei to Argentina’s education budget. (Photo: Matías Cervilla)

Javier Milei first gained notoriety as a radio talk-show host in the 2000s, and by the 2010s, he became a television personality and a regular guest on nationally known programs such as Intratables, A Dos Voces, and Todo Noticias (TN). Mainstream media took to Milei, as his propensity to yell and use inflammatory—and often profane—language lent itself toward viral social media distribution, with such antics gaining particular exposure among younger generations.

By November 2021, then, Milei was barely able to garner just a few congressional seats for both himself and his current vice president through a rag-tag and thrown together coalition called La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) which wound up only garnering 17.3% of the vote. That was Milei’s first foray into Argentinian politics.

By 2023, mainstream news media ran one image-driven, personalized story after another, ranging from pieces exploring his haircut and fashion sense to images distributed far and wide of Milei wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing campaign promises to slash through any number of the previous government’s policies.

Milei’s upset victory probably shouldn’t have been seen as a big surprise, given the global drift toward reality show politicians.

The chainsaw symbolism was covered at the expense of more serious coverage, like evaluating Milei’s idea of dumping the Argentinian peso for a dollarized economy—a promise he’s since walked back and will likely never implement.

The media brushed past the impact that cuts to government spending may have on the poverty rate, which rocketed higher throughout 2024. Milei’s characterization of social programs as being nothing more than bureaucracies without any benefit to the public was uncritically noted in passing, if that, while obsession over his “rock star M.O.” and “ loco”ways. Both narratives stemmed from coverage dominated by Clarin, Argentina’s largest newspaper.

In one sub-headline, Milei was generously quoted as saying, “I don’t brush my hair, the wind does,” with the main head asking, “ Who cuts Milei’s hair?”

Thus, instead of covering concerns about Milei taking heartfelt advice from one of his three dogs, whom he claimed transmitted the thoughts and ideas of yet another deceased pet dog, media accounts depicted this as just one of Milei’s many quirky ways, for which he has been long known with a nickname of “El Loco” first being given during his adolescence and lasting through the present.

Argentinian intellectuals, analysts, and critics alike have pointed to Milei’s firebrand public persona playing well to mainstream news coverage as a crucial factor in his quick rise to a viable, and eventually successful presidential candidate. Ricardo Foster, an Argentine philosopher and intellectual, argued that sensationalism and populism were given inordinate airtime without sufficient scrutiny, with an over-prioritization on personality over actual policy viability.

Forrest Hylton, columnist for the London Review of Books and professor of history at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, told Unicorn Riot that Milei cultivated a “cult-like persona,” which helped to obfuscate that he was an “ideological fanatic” who was armed with proposals, as opposed to chainsaws, that, “will only serve to worsen the continuing economic crisis.”

Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, a foreign policy analyst and critic with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) who’s intimately familiar with Milei supporters also spoke to Unicorn Riot.

Sánchez-Garzoli is originally from Argentina, and much of her family still resides there, and she assured Unicorn Riot that she “gets” Milei’s surprising and quick political rise all the way to the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s White House). Sánchez-Garzoli pointed to a good chunk of her family in Argentina as “all pro-Milei [and] just people who were very tired with the status quo, which is somewhat understandable, given that a whole generation has been raised on one economic crisis after another.”

Argentina’s status quo has been characterized by several decades of chaotic ups and (mostly) downs in its long-beleaguered economy. An entire generation of ordinary Argentinians has grown up “without a stable middle class or trade unions to turn to” and without first-hand awareness of Argentina’s dictatorial past, Sánchez-Garzoli explained. Many of the concerns about Milei’s autocratic tendencies were at least sometimes quoted in the media, but nevertheless fell on the deaf ears for a large chunk of the populace desperate for any kind of change.

Nonetheless, Milei’s inexperience with national politics still shocked the country after a very strong showing in the first round of presidential voting, with the threshold for winning outright nearly being cleared by Milei, even with support being split between him and a third-placed candidate. Milei’s push in the second round of voting got boosted by a poor and befuddling choice by his opponents. Although his opponent hailed from the incumbent party whose candidates had been in power for 16 of the last 20 years, the choice was, to say the least, a highly questionable one.

2023 was indeed a far cry from the days of Néstor Kirchner, the founding father of the 21st-century embodiment of “Peronists,” later dubbed the “K’s.” Néstor was widely credited with helping the country navigate through the extremely tricky waters of a debt crisis provoked by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Kirchner consequently became one of Argentina’s most popular presidents ever, with as many as 200,000 Argentinians attending his funeral in the wake of his unexpected death shortly after the end of his second term.

This was how the “K” legacy began as the country happily elected Kirchner’s wife, Cristina, after Néstor passed away shortly after his two terms in office.

In the long run, Argentina never really fully recovered from its IMF-induced meltdown. The “K”s became immersed in a quagmire as neoliberal opposition parties lobbed one accusation of corruption after another and endlessly embroiled Cristina with lawsuits (incidentally, a similar strategy was employed in neighboring Brazil against current president Lula and his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff).

Thus, matters couldn’t have been better for Milei as a challenger, as the Peronist and “K” loyalists witlessly nominated its minister of the economy, the often wooden Sergio Masa, as its presidential candidate. Sánchez-Garzoli remarked, “There was a superiority thing going on with the ‘Ks’ in Argentina that turned a lot of ordinary Argentinians completely off.”

Milei, who deftly established himself as a media darling thanks to an all-too-pliant corporate press, only had to beat the rather uncharismatic Masa. The “K” presidential candidate was saddled by an economy falling yet again into hyperinflation under his administration. Under Masa, inflation rose to levels that rivaled those of the most economically plagued African economies and thus also eclipsed even previous high inflation rates that had long plagued Argentina.

Argentinians found themselves counting away their drastically devalued currency in transaction after transaction, as bill denominations couldn’t keep up with raised prices and one-thousand peso notes were barely worth a U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, the Ks stubbornly refused to print up and distribute currency notes of higher denominations and no one wanted to deal with credit and debit card transactions, with traumatic historical memories of countless Argentianians having their savings wiped out in the wake of the first IMF-caused economic meltdown.

This is how cash became king in Argentina. After all, one cannot know with any degree of security how long their money will be worth anything, which only furthers the spiral of hyperinflation. This cash economy rests on top of a prevalent black market exchange for U.S. dollars, which the wealthiest of Argentinians regularly avail themselves of, causing further damage.

In response to a move by the “Ks” that smacked of hubris, Argentinian voters mercilessly punished the Peronists by electing Milei in a landslide victory against the party’s leading economic manager who oversaw the country’s descent into its worst inflationary recession.

Milei’s upset victory probably shouldn’t have been seen as a big surprise, given the global drift toward reality show politicians. Candidates the world over, ranging from India’s Narendra Modi to Brazil’s Jair Bolosonaro and Donald Trump, prefer to court media spectacles with jaw-dropping and often racist, sexist, and classist remarks via social media, instead of well-thought-out white papers and policy details.

Milei’s Apparent Decline After Hardline Reforms

In Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024, hundreds of thousands of people protested deep austerity cuts by Milei to Argentina’s education budget. (Photo: Matías Cervilla)

Less than a year into Milei’s presidency, Argentina erupted in its largest protests in decades. On May 9, 2024, a nationwide general strike brought as many as a million people into the streets, according to organizers, marking the second mass mobilization against his government in just a matter of months. The message was unmistakable: The country was on the brink, and its people were not backing down.

What prompted such extraordinary levels of political resistance and opposition to a president who had won a landslide electoral victory not even a year ago? Sánchez-Garzoli told Unicorn Riot that Milei has a sustainability problem, which presented a challenge considering that the overwhelming majority of the electorate put him into office to gain stability.

“Milei’s economic plans and austerity packages are having a devastating effect on the middle and lower classes in Argentina. Milei has brokered austerity packages with the IMF but has not compensated that with anything else. Cutting all of these public programs is one thing, but leaving the people out on the street without enough food is another. It isn’t sustainable,” explained Sánchez-Garzoli, and increasingly more and more Argentinians seem to agree.

Many observers were left wondering whether Milei had merely been an oblivious front man or something worse: a willing participant in a financial scam.

Milei not only slashed funding for public education but also managed to overcome a veto override attempt by the overwhelmingly opposition-based Congress. In both the lead-up to and in the wake of these events, Milei’s popularity has precipitously dropped, according to public opinion polls. Several sources indicate that his popularity has been steadily falling since the start of his presidency, with one mainstream outlet headlining and questioning, “Is the honeymoon over? Milei’s popularity dips while worry over poverty is on the rise,” even before the mass protest of early October 2024.

For example, one Zuban Córdoba poll highlighted that 57.3% of Argentines disapprove of his performance as of September 2024, a significant increase from the already high 52.5% in April of the same year (the first of two mass protests against Milei’s stance on public education also took place in April 2024). Over that same period, Milei’s “full support” dropped from 38.2% to just 20.3%. A survey from Torcuato Di Tella University showed a sharp decline in public trust in Milei’s government, down to 2.16 points out of a possible 5 as of September, the lowest level since he assumed office. Yet another poll showed only 33% of Argentines as having general confidence in Milei, reflecting growing disillusionment with the president’s lofty campaign promises, particularly as inflation has only been slightly stymied at best while 66% of those surveyed strongly believed unemployment and poverty rates continue to rise.

Results like these point to a slow but steady decline in support of Milei’s image, largely driven by doubts about his ability to resolve the nation’s economic woes while cutting public resources and a political movement lacking any foundation.

Milei’s party is only a recent creation of his own and not linked in any way to a popular movement of any sort. As a result it failed to capture a significant number of seats in Argentina’s legislature. In fact, no other Argentinian president since the U.S.-backed dictatorship was finally toppled in 1983 had been elected with their party receiving as little support as Milei’s, which received just 15% of the seats in the lower house and 10% in the Senate.

Finally, Milei made a slew of campaign promises, chainsaw in hand, that were virtually impossible to deliver on, ranging from dollarization to public spending cuts solving the economy’s woes. He fashioned himself as an evangelist for free markets by exalting cryptocurrencies as a pathway to economic freedom. In recent days (February 2025) it emerged that he’d promoted $LIBRA, a cryptocurrency that collapsed similar to a “pump and dump” (PDF) or Ponzi scheme, leaving countless investors in financial ruin. Videos surfaced of Milei, then a rising political firebrand, endorsing the company in slickly produced ads, describing it as a revolutionary financial opportunity. The coin’s implosion sparked investigations, a pinned tweet got deleted by Milei himself, and over a hundred lawsuits were immediately filed. Many observers were left wondering whether Milei had merely been an oblivious front man or something worse: a willing participant in a financial scam. Either way, the scandal added yet another layer of volatility to his already embattled presidency, fueling doubts about both his judgment and the sincerity of his right-wing populist rhetoric, adding damage to his already low public approval ratings and triggering calls for his impeachment.

Bygone U.S. Policies Cloud Argentina’s Past and Present

Argentine President Javier Milei speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2024 (Photo: WEF via Flickr/ Creative Commons)

The U.S. is widely accepted as the leading influencer, benefactor, and supporter of the IMF. Similarly, the IMF is widely seen as being a key catalyst for Argentina’s first economic downturn at the turn of the century, which it never fully recovered from. Thus, the question is unavoidable: Does the U.S. bear responsibility for Argentina’s continuing economic rut and subsequently Milei’s meteoric rise and apparent fall?

Unicorn Riot turned to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a household name in Argentina and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to get some answers. He did not mince words when it came to sizing up IMF and U.S. policy toward Argentina during an interview.

“[T]he U.S. continues to treat Latin America as a whole as its ‘backyard,’” Pérez Esquivel said, harkening back to a description first coined by Thomas Mann, a prominent State Department official who served during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. U.S. planners continued to refer to Latin America as America’s “backyard,” particularly Ronald Reagan’s officials who also actively supported an array of Latin American dictatorships in the 1980s, a campaign capped by the Iran-Contra scandal that broke in 1986.

An array of U.S.-supported IMF officials have acknowledged failing Argentina and leaving its economy in tatters for decades.

One high-ranking U.S. official after another, from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration, to Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration, to the late President Jimmy Carter, supported Argentina’s despotic 1970s regime directly or otherwise.

Pérez Esquivel thus approvingly mentioned one of Latin America’s most famous writers, Eduardo Galeano, the author of The Open Veins of Latin America, and his well-known criticism of so-called third world debt to the U.S. and the IMF working hand-in-hand together and its devastating impact on the continent: “The more the poor countries pay, the more they owe [to the IMF], and the less they have [for themselves],” Pérez Esquivel told Unicorn Riot.

In the midst of Argentina’s first IMF-provoked crisis, Paul Krugman, when he was The New York Times leading economic columnist, acknowledged that “much of the world, with considerable justification, views [the IMF as being a] branch of the U.S. Treasury Department.”

Even the IMF itself would come to admit wrongdoing and has, time and time again, been more a part of the problem than the solution to Argentina’s economic suffering. An array of U.S.-supported IMF officials have acknowledged failing Argentina and leaving its economy in tatters for decades: In 2002, Anne Krueger, the IMF’s first deputy managing director, admitted to the IMF’s strategies having backfired; in 2003, IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler acknowledged that its economic prescriptions were poorly designed; and in 2016, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde expressed regret over IMF failures in Argentina, merely saying the IMF did the “best we could.”

Milei’s Domestic “Trajectory”

Recently inaugurated President Milei poses with his cabinet on December 20, 2023, at the event signing decrees to slash hundreds of public interest laws and protections. (Photo: casarosada.gob.ar )

It was dinner time during a pleasantly mild spring night in December 2023; Argentina, far south of the equator, has opposite seasons to North America, and Buenos Aires was buzzing with spontaneous protest. Winter vacationing tourists from the Northern Hemisphere looked on with curiosity and confusion, but locals were plenty familiar with what was happening.

As is customary for many Latin American countries during spontaneous resistance, people drummed on pots and pans with kitchen utensils or whatever they could get their hands on. Some joined from their apartment balconies while others gathered in front of restaurants and other public places. This is known in Spanish as a cacerolaz and it was happening in the wake of Milei’s inauguration and one of his very first acts as president.

During one of Milei’s first public speeches, he immediately warned Argentinians of “tough times” to follow—a stark contrast to his enthusiastic campaign promises to instantly transform the economy. In one of the first presidential actions of the still newly minted administration, Milei issued a megadecreto (a mega decree, like an “executive order” in U.S. political parlance), giving credence to the many warnings sounded about Milei’s authoritarian bent.

Civil society has persisted and continued to resist, with more people in Argentina expecting additional mass protests happening before any semblance of poverty reduction and stability is brought to Argentina’s IMF debt plagued economy.

Milei did choose to deliver on a hostility he openly brandished toward civil society and political resistance throughout his campaign by having chosen Victoria Villaruel for his vice presidential candidate. Villaruel is the daughter of one of Argentina’s military generals who hailed from its dictatorial period of the 1980s; she and Milei have both expressed open admiration for the bygone era. Such nostalgia was made concrete just one day after Milei’s inauguration, as he created a national registry tracking a swath of political resistance against his administration, which facilitated increased surveillance by federal forces.

But it was the megadecreto that provoked spontaneous protest in the streets for months on end and up to the present as mass protest after mass protest has been successfully organized. The executive order—known in Spanish as the decreto de necesidad y urgencia—or DNU for short—is a far-reaching presidential decree which eliminated over 300 hard-fought and won domestic laws by civil society with the stroke of a pen and without congressional approval. The brushed-aside laws were mostly public-interested oriented ones, which slashed severance pay, significantly undermined collective bargaining rights, deregulated the rental market, and undermined dozens upon dozens of previously existing protections.

At the end of the day, the megadecreto wound up being reduced to a handful of about 60 executive orders, a significant decrease from the over 300 initially issued.

As Sánchez-Garzoli told Unicorn Riot, however, this was likely what Milei was banking on, in what amounted to a brazen and eventually partially successful “attempt to push his entire agenda onto Congress.”

It was a “a tangible example of his authoritarianism and an extraordinary measure to use to push one’s own agenda through, which is only supposed to be used for specific and limited, emergency purposes. What wound up actually going through were still some 64 laws and thus was a blitzkrieg strategy to make sure as much unilateral imposition as possible could stand,” Sânchez-Garzoli said.

All the while, civil society has persisted and continued to resist, with more people in Argentina expecting additional mass protests happening before any semblance of poverty reduction and stability is brought to Argentina’s IMF debt plagued economy.

“Libertarian” or a “Mecca for the West”?

Just hours after the official presidential election results reached Milei’s campaign, the White House called President-elect Javier Milei to congratulate him and assure him of U.S. support, emphasizing potential bi-national collaboration.

Such congratulations came despite Milei becoming the world’s first self-proclaimed “libertarian” president. Critics argue the label is questionable, given his hostility toward protest and mass assembly rights, as well as his hard-line stances against abortion. Additionally, he has shown little interest in decriminalizing drugs or supporting policies that promote immigration and free movement—stances traditionally associated with so-called “libertarianism.” Instead, critics contend that Milei’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” stops short of meaningful political and social reforms and claim his agenda prioritizes enlarging the power and wealth of corporations over expanding individual freedoms.

These contradictions were pointed out in an interview with Time reporter Vera Bergengruen, as she questioned Milei’s stances on abortion.

What are the implications of this political backslapping between Milei and leading Wall Street-friendly politicians and Silicon Valley CEOs when it comes to Argentina’s future?

As has been duly acknowledged by Milei, his priorities are more toward attracting foreign investment as opposed to passing domestic legislation to relieve the battered Argentinian economy. He has tried to court powerful political and economic elites through policy stances, rhetoric, and an ideology which caters to them. This has been reflected by Milei’s travel itinerary.

“Milei has spent more time abroad than he has spent in the provinces of Argentina,” Pérez Esquivel told UR. Indeed, the contrast with Milei’s Argentinian presence is one that attracts the ire of civil society in resistance, with Esquivel pointing to these jaunts abroad as evidence of Milei not caring about Argentinians.

Milei has personally met with some of the most powerful billionaires in the world such as Elon Musk, resulting in Musk encouraging his millions of followers to invest in Argentina on his X platform. Other Silicon Valley magnates, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and his peers at Apple, Alphabet (Google), and OpenAI—which is backed by Microsoft—have also been on Milei’s itinerary during his trips to the U.S. This cozying up to billionaire CEOs has attracted the enthusiasm of investors: One U.S.-based financier wrote that the “economic overhaul” by Milei is “not just refreshing, but essential.” Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller announced investments in five Argentinian companies after hearing Milei speak at Davos.

And while Milei has held two in-person meetings within a month of each other with Musk, he had only visited 5 out of 23 of Argentina’s provinces as of September 2024. In one of those provinces, Tierra del Fuego, Milei raced off to meet with Laura Richardson, the commander of United States Southern Command at the time, for a ceremony to announce the construction of a joint naval base, a stark contrast to prior “K” policies distancing the country from U.S. military relations.

U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican representing Florida’s 27th district, endorsed Milei even before the election. Salazar declared Argentina to be a country with “only one culture, only one religion, and only one race, completely homogenous.” Milei himself went so far as to fire an Argentinian Football Association official who merely criticized the Argentinian national soccer team after Manchester City star and national team standout, Julian Alvarez, uploaded an excerpt of its Copa America final winning celebrations to his Instagram account. The video featured racist chants against the French national soccer team, whom it had beat in December 2022’s World Cup final. (Milei wound up meeting with Prime Minister Emanuel Macron in France, in the aftermath of the scandal and shortly before France played against Argentina in an Olympics soccer match in which a brawl happened at the conclusion of the match.)

The affinity between Milei and Trump has not been lost on Salazar, as she has proudly told Politico that “extensive conversations” between the Biden administration and Milei have occurred. “[Argentina is] going through a very bad moment, but they are supported, and they are helped by the big guys, meaning us,” Salazar said.

Cozying up to both CEOs as well as leading public officials from both sides of the aisle in Capitol Hill and the White House is certainly part of how Milei has set out to make Argentina a “Mecca for the West,” as he put it in a during an address he gave in Los Angeles. However, foreign policy experts have expressed concerns about such warming up to the U.S. and the West in general.

Foreign policy expert Alejandro Frenkel wrote that the guiding doctrine of Milei’s foreign policy is a confused “Westernism,” subordinated to the United States and Israel. Others have described “an [outright] open subordination to Washington.”

Cynthia Arnson, an expert on Latin America from the Wilson Center, told Unicorn Riot that, “If Trump wins the White House, there will be an ideological affinity with Milei and there probably will be White House visits, even though there will likely be very little to offer by a Trump White House,” adding that “Milei has been mostly playing ‘footsy’ with the IMF, is looking for postponed payments, and has bent over backwards not to be hostile.”

It’s a strong contrast with past Argentinian efforts to combat the IMF’s corrosive influence on its economic struggles. Thus, this begs the question, what are the implications of this political backslapping between Milei and leading Wall Street-friendly politicians and Silicon Valley CEOs when it comes to Argentina’s future?

Given that Milei has centered his administration on inflation-reduction efforts to address Argentina’s economic woes, the leading economists who voiced concerns in a public letter before his victory are likely still uneasy about the country’s prospects for recovery. In the letter, one renowned economist after another who signed the critique took issue with the idea that “a major reduction in government spending would” help matters for ordinary Argentinians and thought instead that a likely “increase [to] already high levels of poverty and inequality [will ensue], and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

In hindsight, this is exactly what has transpired: Argentina’s bleak prospects for improvement now hinge on further change—this time, in service of the public interest rather than against it.

As the world braces for another Earth Day, the environmental justice movement is at a critical juncture. While much of the climate conversation continues to focus on Big Oil and other corporate polluters, there is a glaring, often overlooked, contributor to the climate crisis: the U.S. military.

In a bold statement of solidarity and urgency, several leading environmental justice organizations—including 350.org, Sunrise Movement, Climate Defenders, and National Priorities Project as well as frontline groups like NDN Collective, Anakbayan, and Diaspora Pa'Lante—have signed onto an open letter initiated by CODEPINK, urging the world to take the arduous baby step of recognizing the deadly intersection of war and environmental destruction. It's time for more environmental justice groups to join this critical call.

The open letter is clear: The U.S. military is the world's largest institutional polluter. With its staggering consumption of 4.6 billion gallons of fuel yearly, the Pentagon accounts for 77-80% of all U.S. government energy use. If the U.S. military were a country, it would rank as the world's 47th largest greenhouse gas emitter. Yet the environmental consequences of militarism are still not a significant part of mainstream climate conversations.

The military-industrial complex must be held accountable for its role in the climate crisis.

The letter's signatories are speaking out against the catastrophic impact of U.S. military operations on our planet. Beyond the immediate environmental degradation of war zones—such as the release of harmful chemicals like PFAS into soil and water—U.S. military presence around the globe has caused irreparable harm to ecosystems, agricultural lands, and local communities. There are 800 U.S. military bases around the world, many built on Indigenous lands or in violation of national sovereignty. These bases don't just exist in isolation; they are part of a larger, profoundly interconnected war economy that fuels environmental destruction.

Take the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, for example. The devastation wreaked by the genocide in Gaza released more carbon emissions in its first two months than 20 countries combined. In Ukraine, the war has already emitted more than 119 million tons of carbon dioxide while destroying vast swaths of forest. The environmental toll of the conflict is horrific, yet the conversation about militarism's role in climate change is woefully absent in most climate spaces. It's time to change that.

Everyone should be alarmed that the use of nuclear weapons—an existential threat to the survival of humanity—is not out of the question. As we inch closer to potential nuclear war in places like Ukraine and the South West Asia and Northern Africa (SWANA) region, the implications for the climate are terrifying. Sustained warfare in both areas has the possibility of escalating to the use of nuclear weapons. A global "nuclear winter" can cause unprecedented disruption to the Earth's systems, food production, and biodiversity, directly tying geopolitical violence to the climate crisis.

Recent failures of global climate negotiations, such as COP, further underscore the urgency of this message. Countries in the Global South continue to bear the brunt of climate devastation. Not only is the Global North the main contributor to the pollution and environmental segregation that excavates climate disasters, but it also fails to provide the necessary funding for climate reparations. But beyond financial inequities, these summits fail to recognize one of the most significant threats to global environmental health: militarism. The climate crisis will never be solved while war and militarism are allowed to continue unchecked.

This is why the open letter signed by a coalition of environmental justice groups, frontline communities, and anti-war activists matters. It calls for a shift in how we view the climate crisis, acknowledging that the war economy is directly responsible for some of the most egregious environmental destruction we face today. The public must realize that the environmental degradation caused by war is not a separate issue from climate justice work but rather an integral part of it.

This movement needs more allies. The organizations already signed on are committed, but more environmental justice organizations must join this call. It is no longer enough only to target Big Oil or corporate interests. The military-industrial complex must be held accountable for its role in the climate crisis.

The letter's closing statement is a simple, common-sense statement. Yet it calls for a radical shift in the current landscape of political, economic, and non-governmental structures that our peace and environmental movements need to unite in: "We reject militarism, war, occupation, genocide, and degradation. Instead, we choose our continued global existence: peace, sovereignty, diplomacy, and liberation!"

This is not just a vision for a peaceful world but the only way forward for a planet that can sustain life. We all must start working for a future where climate justice isn't just about protecting ecosystems in isolation but understanding what causes the destruction of these ecosystems that we rely on and rely on us as well. We must start working for a future beyond war, empire, and militarism. The time to act is now.

You can read the full letter and/or sign on here.

Chairman of the Democratic National Committee DNC Chair Ken Martin on Friday announced the launching of a People’s Cabinet! This is potentially exciting news. As I wrote about last month, a People's Cabinet is a powerful way to combat the latest unlawful, unconstitutional, cruel, and downright stupid action from the Trump-Musk administration.

And it's a great way to lift up leaders who can propose common sense, people-centered alternatives.

One proposal that may be a stretch for the DNC, though: Instead of the same old top-down decision making, please make this an open process. Invite everyone to help select cabinet members—Democrats, Independents, and even non-MAGA Republicans (MAGA already has a cabinet).

The Democratic Party’s approval ratings are very low and there is a lot of ground to make up after the party first insisted Joe Biden would be the 2024 presidential candidate and then anointed Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate—with no public input. This mistake was in addition to their failure to understand the pain experienced by so many non-billionaire Americans, the marginalizing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, and their unconscionable neglect of the horrors taking place in Gaza.

Instead of choosing the People's Cabinet behind closed doors, the cabinet should be selected through an open process based in local caucuses. Allowing "we the people" to select the People's Cabinet could draw tremendous energy and excitement, bring fresh ideas into the process, give people at the grassroots a reason to gather in their communities to build power and momentum for the midterms and beyond, and it would generate ongoing local and national news coverage.

We need locally based, sustained grassroots work to build the power for change. The Democratic Party could find this is exactly the reboot it needs to get beyond the stale and the stuck politics of its current form—a way to gather the many voices and populations that have felt left out until now.

Please, DNC, open the doors, bring in fresh air and new voices, and you’ll see the energy unleashed by the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour multiplied across the nation.

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The presidential announcements and outrage come at us so viciously fast that it is difficult to keep up with the latest assault on governance, our intellect, decency, or humanity.

Much of the perceived chaos is planned and judiciously meted out to keep our heads spinning leaving little time or energy to respond to anything before something new intrudes the space. Their goal is to produce as much confusion and chaos as possible so the public will struggle to keep up and lose the ability to pay close and constant attention to the important things of democratic and constitutional order. Our national setting has become a mixture of reality TV with the sensationalism of that genre, where mean-spirited sound bites emanate from those in power who smirkingly stare into the cameras knowingly creating the next news cycle. There is a racist, hate-filled, untruthful, and vindictive blanket covering this government and suffocating the country under its weight. We have never seen anything like this before.

There has been one attack followed by another. The announcement of tariffs has sent financial markets into a tailspin. Those who are reliant upon 401K plans and the likes are feeling anxious wondering how fall the markets will fall, and how deep it will cut into their retirement. Consumers already worried about the costs of everyday living are frightened by the possible consequences of this latest announcement.

Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to reel from the attacks on federal employees, the Department of Education, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, the Courts and law firms, media, colleges and universities, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and The Smithsonian Museums (particularly The National Museum of African American History and Culture). Each have fallen under the axe of DOGE or the accusation of promoting "Woke" ideology.

Immigrants have been a favorite target of this administration. The undocumented have been hounded, hunted, arrested, and transported to prisons in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba which are known for human rights violations. But the long authoritarian arm of government is not only extended to the undocumented, but also against scholars and students legally here. We were shocked when Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped. He was a graduate student at Columbia University and had been a spokesperson during that school's 'stop the genocide' demonstrations.

Rumeysa Oztur was recently picked up by plain-clothed goons and transported to Louisiana while on her way to an Iftar near Tufts University in Massachusetts. She is a doctorate student and, like Khalil, legally in the country. Each is apparently guilty of decrying the genocide in Gaza and indicting the white supremacy of Zionism for those atrocities. These two names have been widely reported, but we should not assume that these are the only names. These arrests however signal a First Amendment crisis where it appears that anyone can be criminalized for supporting Palestinian rights. My fear is that these seem to be a trial runs that start with those with the undocumented, then moves on to those with vulnerable legal status, and finally is used against citizens who express points of views critical of and unsanctioned by the government. Where does the creep towards totalitarianism end?

If you are not already weary from the list of head spinning encroachments on democratic order, there is much more to add to the list of insults. There is the re-installation of Confederate statues, renaming bodies of water and land to fit an imperialistic paradigm, and the removal of photographs and references to Black people and women, and any image or phrase that speaks to diversity, inclusion, or equity. Even the word "Gay" emblazoned on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, the Enola Gay, came under attack. There are no-so-funny teases about the annexation of Canada, Greenland, and taking back the Panama Canal that adds to the dizziness of any day. In Washington, D.C., the city government was ordered to dismantle "Black Lives Matter" plaza that was erected during the George Floyd unrest and after first-term Trump held a bible up in front of a church after the crowds had been tear-gassed and attacked by police and military.

The callous war criminality of this administration in collaboration with other war criminals have quipped about removing the population from Gaza and turning the devastation produced by that illegal war into a coastal resort. And now there is the insinuation that Trump may try to extend his time in office.

Some of the news and reports from this government are real and some are not. It is difficult to tell what is real from what is not. But one thing we understand with these demagogues and anti-democratic criminals in office or serving the government is that we need to take everything as real. We have discovered that there is nothing beyond the pale for these gangsters let loose on the world stage.

Since the strategy is to wear us down and out, keep our heads spinning, and make us feel powerless in the face of these avalanches of rumors, innuendoes, and news means simply that we cannot lose our focus, let ourselves become weary or tired, or stop paying attention. We must pay attention to all the mess, all the rumors, and all the insanity coming from this group of White Supremacists, Zionists, and Christian Nationalists.

The plan of this government is to change the discussion daily, create a new issue, a new controversy, and orchestrate a new debate to fill the media's bandwidth. It is their way of moving things in and out of the public scrutiny so fast that you can't deal with one thing before the next thing comes along.

But no matter what they do or say Palestinians are still struggling and dying every day. Israel is still bombing Gaza, Lebanon, and Israeli settlers are still attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. The U.S. is still bombing Yemen and Syria. Children are still being exploited for their labor in the mineral pits of Africa. Federal workers still have been fired or are in danger of losing their jobs. And we the people are still trying to remain plugged in and aware of what is going on at home and around the world. But we need to do more than being aware.

We need to find ways from the reserves of our strength to do what we can to hold up and onto the light, bring the hope, and maintain a very vocal and very loud demand for justice. We need to remind ourselves that we need to keep our focus and watch over everything and continue to stand, march, demonstrate and confront the wrongs that abound with a strength drawn deep from the reservoirs of our being.

Yes, we are weary, tired, and frightened. Yet in times like these when our lives or the lives of loved ones are endangered people have been known to find a Herculean strength that has lifted cars, fought bears, and turned ordinary strength into incredible power.

We have the surprising ability to reach beyond ourselves to muster the strength and power in moments of fear and great distress. We know the histories of the many movements that produced extraordinary results, brought down mighty systems, freed people, and changed the outcomes of the human story. The movements of labor, civil rights, climate change, LGBTQIA, and every other movement was sparked by a faint flicker in vast darkness when the heaviness of the moment felt unbearable, frightening, and too threatening.

When a new outrage, the proverbial final straw of insults and injury is thrust upon us that is when the small amber of resistance begins to spread into the great fires of change. Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

We are in those moments now and may the sparks that ignite the flames of hopefulness and light drive out the heaviness and darkness and grow into something large and fierce enough to save us from this madness.

I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man named Elon Musk. But he lost out on one thing: He didn’t get a top secret briefing on Pentagon war plans for China. And the news people breathed a sigh of relief.

With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles, a day in the life is getting increasingly tough to take here in the land of the free. I’m meant to be reassured that Musk didn’t get to see America’s top-secret plans for—yes!—going to war with China, even as I’m meant to ignore the constant drumbeat of propaganda, the incessant military marches that form America’s background music, conveying the message that America must have war plans for China, that indeed war in or around China is possible, even probable, in the next decade. Maybe in 2027?

My fellow Americans, we should be far more alarmed by such secret U.S. war plans, along with those “pivots” to Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and the military base-building efforts in the Philippines, than reassured by the “good news” that Comrade Billionaire Musk was denied access to the war room, meaning (for Dr. Strangelove fans) he didn’t get to see “the big board.”

If you judge him by deeds rather than words, he’s just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).

It’s war, war, everywhere in America. We do indeed have a strange love for it. I’ve been writing for TomDispatch for 18 years now—this is my 111th essay (the other 110 are in a new book of mine)—most of them focusing on militarism in this country, as well as our disastrous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; the ruinous weapons systems we continue to fund (including new apocalyptic nuclear weapons); and the war song that seems to remain ever the same.

A few recent examples of what I mean: President Donald Trump has already bombed Yemen more than once. He’s already threatening Iran. He’s sending Israel all the explosives, all the weaponry it needs to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza (so too, of course, did former President Joe Biden). He’s boasting of building new weapons systems like the Air Force’s much-hyped F-47 fighter jet, the “47” designation being an apparent homage by its builder, Boeing, to Trump himself, the 47th president. He and his “defense” secretary, Pete Hegseth, continually boast of “peace through strength,” an Orwellian construction that differs little from “war is peace.” And I could, of course, go on and on and on and on…

Occasionally, Trump sounds a different note. When Tulsi Gabbard became the director of national intelligence, he sang a dissonant note about a “warmongering military-industrial complex.” And however haphazardly, he does seem to be working for some form of peace with respect to the Russia-Ukraine War. He also talks about his fear of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Yet, if you judge him by deeds rather than words, he’s just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).

Consider here the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by that lucky man Elon Musk. Even as it dismantles various government agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, it has—no surprise here!—barely touched the Pentagon and its vast, nearly trillion-dollar budget. In fact, if a Republican-controlled Congress has any say in the matter, the Pentagon budget will likely be boosted significantly for Fiscal Year 2026 and thereafter. As inefficient as the Pentagon may be (and we really don’t know just how inefficient it is, since the bean counters there keep failing audit after audit, seven years running), targeted DOGE Pentagon cuts have been tiny. That means there’s little incentive for the generals to change, streamline their operations, or even rethink in any significant fashion. It’s just spend, spend, spend until the money runs out, which I suppose it will eventually, as the national debt soars toward $37 trillion and climbing.

Even grimmer than that, possibly, is America’s state of mind, our collective zeitgeist, the spirit of this country. That spirit is one in which a constant state of war (and preparations for more of the same) is accepted as normal. War, to put it bluntly, is our default state. It’s been that way since 9/11, if not before then. As a military historian, I’m well aware that the United States is, in a sense, a country made by war. It’s just that today we seem even more accepting of that reality, or resigned to it, than we’ve ever been. What gives?

Remember when, in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”? Fortunately, after much struggle and bloodshed, he was proven wrong. So, can we change the essential American refrain of war now, war tomorrow, and war forever? Can we render that obsolete? Or is that too much to hope for or ask of America’s “exceptional” democracy?

Taking on the MICIMATT(SH)

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern did America a great service when he came up with the acronym MICIMATT, or the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, an extension of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, or MIC (from his farewell speech in 1961). Along with the military and industry (weapons makers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin), the MICIMATT adds Congress (which Eisenhower had in his original draft speech but deleted in the interest of comity), the intelligence “community” (18 different agencies), the media (generally highly supportive of wars and weapons spending), academia (which profits greatly from federal contracts, especially research and development efforts for yet more destructive weaponry), and think tanks (which happily lap up Pentagon dollars to tell us the “smart” position is always to prepare for yet more war).

You’ll note, however, that I’ve added a parenthetical SH to McGovern’s telling acronym. The S is for America’s sporting world, which eternally gushes about how it supports and honors America’s military, and Hollywood, which happily sells war as entertainment (perhaps the best known and most recent film being Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, in which an unnamed country that everyone knows is Iran gets its nuclear ambitions spanked by a plucky team of U.S. Naval pilots). A macho catchphrase from the original Top Gun was “I feel the need—the need for speed!” It may as well have been: I feel the need—the need for pro-war propaganda!

Yes, MICIMATT(SH) is an awkward acronym, yet it has the virtue of capturing some of the still-growing power, reach, and cultural penetration of Ike’s old MIC. It should remind us that it’s not just the military and the weapons-makers who are deeply invested in war and—yes!—militarism. It’s Congress; the CIA; related intel “community” members; the mainstream media (which often relies on retired generals and admirals for “unbiased” pro-war commentary); academia (consider how quickly institutions like Columbia University have bent the knee to Trump); and think tanks—in fact, all those “best and brightest” who advocate for war with China, the never-ending war on terror, war everywhere.

Wage war long and it’s likely you can kiss your democracy, your rights, and just maybe your ass goodbye.

But perhaps the “soft power” of the sporting world and Hollywood is even more effective at selling war than the hard power of bombs and bullets. National Football League coaches patrol the sidelines wearing camouflage, allegedly to salute the troops. Military flyovers at games celebrate America’s latest death-dealing machinery. Hollywood movies are made with U.S. military cooperation and that military often has veto power over scripts. To cite only one example, the war movie 12 Strong (2018) turned the disastrous Afghan War that lasted two horrendous decades into a stunningly quick American victory, all too literally won by U.S. troops riding horses. (If only the famed cowboy actor John Wayne had still been alive to star in it!)

The MICIMATT(SH), employing millions of Americans, consuming trillions of dollars, and churning through tens of thousands of body bags for U.S. troops over the years, while killing millions of people abroad, is an almost irresistible force. And right now, it seems like there’s no unmovable object to blunt it.

Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve written dozens of “Tomgrams” suggesting steps America could take to reverse militarism and warmongering. As I look over those essays, I see what still seem to me sensible ideas, but they die quick deaths in the face of, if not withering fire from the MICIMATT(SH), then being completely ignored by those who matter.

And while this country has a department of war (disguised as a department of defense), it has no department of peace. There’s no budget anywhere for making peace, either. We do have a colossal Pentagon that houses 30,000 workers, feverishly making war plans they won’t let Elon Musk (or any of us) see. It’s for their eyes only, not yours, though they may well ask you or your kids to serve in the military, because the best-laid plans of those war-men do need lots of warm bodies, even if those very plans almost invariably (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) go astray.

So, to repeat myself, how do you take on the MICIMATT(SH)? The short answer: It’s not easy, but I know of a few people who had some inspirational ideas.

On Listening to Ike, JFK, MLK, and, Yes, Madison, Too

Militarism isn’t exactly a new problem in America. Consider Randolph Bourne’s 1918 critique of war as “the health of the state,” or General Smedley Butler’s confession in the 1930s that “war is a racket” run by the “gangsters of capitalism.” In fact, many Americans have, over the years, spoken out eloquently against war and militarism. Many beautiful and moving songs have asked us to smile on your brother and “love one another right now.” War, as Edwin Starr sang so powerfully once upon a time, is good for “absolutely nothin’,” though obviously a lot of people disagree and indeed are making a living by killing and preparing for yet more of it.

And that is indeed the problem. Too many people are making too much money off of war. As Smedley Butler wrote so long ago: “Capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.” Pretty simple, right? Until you realize that those whom we elect are largely obedient to the moneyed class because the highest court in our land has declared that money is speech. Again, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. Nor did Butler.

As a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, I want to end my 111th piece at TomDispatch by focusing on the words of Ike, John F. Kennedy (JFK), Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), and James Madison. And I want to redefine what words like duty, honor, country, and patriotism should mean. Those powerful words and sentiments should be centered on peace, on the preservation and enrichment of life, on tapping “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln wrote so long ago in his First Inaugural Address.

Why do we serve? What does our oath of office really mean? For it’s not just military members who take that oath but also members of Congress and indeed the president himself. We raise our right hands and swear to support and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

There’s nothing in that oath about warriors and warfighters, but there is a compelling call for all of us, as citizens, to be supporters and defenders of representative democracy, while promoting the general welfare (not warfare), and all the noble sentiments contained in that Constitution. If we’re not seeking a better and more peaceful future, one in which freedom may expand and thrive, we’re betraying our oath.

If so, we have met the enemy—and he is us.

Ike told us in 1953 that constant warfare is no way of life at all, that it is (as he put it), humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. In 1961, he told us democracy was threatened by an emerging military-industrial complex and that we, as citizens, had to be both alert and knowledgeable enough to bring it to heel. Two years later, JFK told us that peace—even at the height of the Cold War—was possible, not just peace in our time, but peace for all time. However, it would, he assured us, require sacrifice, wisdom, and commitment.

How, in fact, can I improve on these words that JFK uttered in 1963, just a few months before he was assassinated?

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living…

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age… when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn… surely the acquisition of such idle [nuclear] stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war—and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Are we ready to be urgently rational, America? Are we ready to be blessed as peacemakers? Or are we going to continue to suffer from what MLK described in 1967 as our very own “spiritual death” due to the embrace of militarism, war, empire, and racism?

Of course, MLK wasn’t perfect, nor for that matter was JFK, who was far too enamored of the Green Berets and too wedded to a new strategy of “flexible response” to make a clean break in Vietnam before he was killed. Yet those men bravely and outspokenly promoted peace, something uncommonly rare in their time—and even more so in ours.

More than 200 years ago, James Madison warned us that continual warfare is the single most corrosive force to the integrity of representative democracy. No other practice, no other societal force is more favorable to the rise of authoritarianism and the rule of tyrants than pernicious war. Wage war long and it’s likely you can kiss your democracy, your rights, and just maybe your ass goodbye.

America, from visionaries and prophets like MLK, we have our marching orders. They are not to invest yet more in preparations for war, whether with China or any other country. Rather, they are to gather in the streets and otherwise raise our voices against the scourge of war. If we are ever to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks and make war no more, something must be done.

Let’s put an end to militarism in America. Let’s be urgently rational. To cite John Lennon yet again: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Together, let’s imagine and create a better world.

We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.

Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead.

Originally formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, NATO not only failed to disband with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it increased from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. Despite promises not to expand eastward, it ploughed ahead against the advice of senior, experienced U.S. diplomats who warned that this would inflame tensions with Russia. While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine, in violation of the UN Charter, we cannot deny the disastrous role played by NATO in provoking and then prolonging the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine had brought on the Ukraine war. “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” he said.

NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized.

The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism. Watch a video of the Secretary General of NATO publicly telling the European Union to move money from healthcare and retirement to war. It should be clear which side of the Hands Off agenda NATO is on.

NATO is a destabilizing, law-breaking force for militarization and war provocation. Its existence makes wars, including nuclear wars, more likely. Its hostility toward the few significant militaries in the world that are not among its members fuels arms races and conflicts. The commitment of NATO members to join each others’ wars and NATO’s pursuit of enemies far from the North Atlantic risk global destruction.

We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter. If we are truly committed to human needs and the environment, as well as peace, diplomacy, and the UN Charter, then we should eliminate NATO from the Hands Off agenda.

We should go beyond that. We should recognize that while many government agencies are being unfairly cut and need to be defended, one enormous agency that makes up over half of federal discretionary spending is being drastically increased and needs to be cut. That is the Pentagon. The U.S. government spends more on war and war preparation than on all other discretionary items combined. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more on militarism than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. The U.S. spends more on war per capita than any other nation, except Israel.

This is not normal or acceptable, or compatible with funding human and environmental needs. NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized. Trump has recently switched from demanding 2% of economies for war to 3%, and then almost immediately to 5%. There's no logical limit.

Companies that profit from war, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will always push for more military spending. So will NATO. While NATO allies consider Russia their most immediate and direct threat, their long-term adversary is China. The constant search for enemies leads to a vicious cycle of arms races. But there is a different path: the pursuit of disarmament negotiations, the rule of law and global cooperation. If we pursued that path, we could move massive amounts of money away from weapons to invest in addressing the non-optional dangers of climate, disease, and poverty.

The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.

On April 2, Donald Trump declared a national emergency and announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all imported goods. The headlines were dramatic — tariffs on China, allies like Canada and Mexico, and everything from cars to coffee beans. His administration framed the move as a patriotic stance for “reciprocal trade” and economic sovereignty.

Don’t be fooled. This isn’t the collapse of “free trade.” It’s the continuation of corporate globalization — just with a MAGA bumper sticker slapped on it.

Trump says he’s standing up for American workers. But he’s the same president who signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and called it “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.” The rebranded North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal — despite some improvements forced in by congressional Democrats and civil society organizations — contained much of the same structural rot that has enabled outsourcing, empowered monopolies, and tied the hands of governments trying to protect their people and environment.

Trump is not rejecting the corporate trade model. He’s weaponizing it.

For decades, “free trade” deals like NAFTA locked in rules written by and for multinational corporations: rules that made offshoring easier, gutted environmental protections, and prioritized investor rights over worker rights. Stagnant wages, emptied factory towns, and rising income inequality have caused widespread pain and frustration among working Americans — which Trump has weaponized again and again.

Tariffs can be part of the answer to these problems, but Trump’s ham-handed approach is not it. There’s no industrial strategy. No labor plan. No climate protections. Just a unilateral, top-down stunt that does nothing to dismantle the corporate architecture still rigging the global economy.

Pair this “concept of a plan” with the rest of his agenda: gutting investment in vital sectors such as biomedical research, support for basic science and clean and affordable energy technologies and products; slashing all efforts to combat child labor and other egregious labor rights violations around the world, providing tax cuts for billionaires and corporations; stripping away health care, food support and other vital services for the most vulnerable Americans, undermining Social Security, and decertifying and undermining the power of labor unions.

It’s clear working people will not be the winners here.

Who Wrote the Rules? U.S. Corporations, Not Foreign Adversaries

Trump loves to blame other countries, claiming global trade has “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered” the U.S. economy in his “Liberation Day” speech. He claims that the U.S. has been victimized by other countries and has been “too nice” in response.

Nothing could be further from the truth — the rules of the neoliberal trade system were rigged in favor of large corporate interests in the Global North. While workers in the U.S. and around the world were the losers, Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and other U.S. corporate giants have always been the winners.

For decades, U.S. corporate lobbyists have used their privileged access to closed-door trade negotiations to rig the rules to maximize their profits, not to serve working people, small businesses, or the environment.

They pushed for extreme intellectual property rules to entrench Big Pharma monopolies that keep the price of medicines sky high, with deadly consequences. They demanded open capital markets and deregulated financial flows for Wall Street while securing rules that let agribusiness giants flood foreign markets with subsidized U.S. commodities, displacing millions of farmers and leading to forced migration.

Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.

At the same time, they ensured that governments couldn’t support domestic industries, raise labor standards, or enforce environmental protections without being accused of “trade distortion.” The result was a race to the bottom for workers and communities — here and abroad — with record profits for corporate giants.

It matters a lot that Trump is identifying the wrong perpetrators of the failed global trade system because that sets the table for wrong solutions.

Once we identify multinational corporations as the architects of the current system, we’re directed toward the right solutions – not blanket, high tariffs based on mindless formulas, but a new trade policy and new trade rules that prioritize the interests of workers, consumers, and the environment.

NAFTA to USMCA: Same Corporate Model With Some Improvements (No Thanks to Trump)

Trump spent years railing against NAFTA as the “worst trade deal anybody in history has ever entered into,” tapping into the legitimate grievances of workers and communities harmed by its race to the bottom. He campaigned on a promise to eliminate it and replace it with a better agreement for workers.

However, once elected, he opted to renegotiate and rebrand the deal in the form of the USMCA, which he then insisted was “the best trade deal in history.” Now, in a dizzying reversal, he’s claiming the USMCA has been a disaster that only an aggressive wave of “retaliatory” tariffs on Canada and Mexico will fix.

In reality, while some improvements were forced into the negotiation, the USMCA largely preserved the core logic that made NAFTA so harmful in the first place. It expands corporate rights, limits democratic oversight, and undermines public protections in the name of increased trade.

The new labor provisions — often cited as proof of a “new era” in trade — were not original features of Trump’s deal. They were won through months of intense organizing and negotiation by House Democrats, labor unions, and civil society groups.

Congressional Democrats working in close alliance with the AFL-CIO drew a hard line. Backed by the relentless organizing of groups like Public Citizen, the Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers, and a transnational coalition of Mexican and Canadian labor and civil society partners, they made it clear: they would block passage of any deal unless meaningful labor enforcement were included and damaging Big Pharma giveaways were removed.

Trump’s administration favored language that preserved corporate prerogatives and offered only symbolic nods to labor rights. Still, in the end, it acquiesced to congressional Democrats’ demands. It incorporated essential tools like the facility-specific Rapid Response Mechanism for labor enforcement and eliminated some of the most egregious giveaways to Big Pharma.

However, the structural rot from NAFTA remained.

While experts across the ideological spectrum lauded the drastic reduction of controversial investor privileges that allow corporations to sue governments over public interest laws through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), Trump preserved ISDS for fossil fuel firms operating in Mexico — a carve-out aggressively pushed by Big Oil.

Agribusiness also retained its arsenal. The ongoing U.S. trade challenge to Mexico’s restrictions on genetically modified corn — measures rooted in precautionary health standards and cultural preservation — reveal the deal’s true intent. Rather than respecting national policy space over food safety, trade rules are once again being deployed to dismantle domestic protections at the behest of corporations.

Not only did Trump fail to fix NAFTA, but he made it even worse in at least one crucial way: Big Tech secured its wishlist in the form of a digital trade chapter. These new terms undermine the ability of U.S. states, Congress, and other countries’ governments to hold Big Tech accountable for gender and racial bias in AI, rampant abuse of our privacy, and monopolistic overreach.

Performative “Protectionism” and the Authoritarian Trade Playbook

Far from dismantling the corporate trade regime, Trump’s first term revealed him as a loyal steward of it — so long as he could plaster his name on it. Despite the USMCA rebrand, he left the core NAFTA structure intact and continued to stoke public anger over working people’s struggles — not by confronting the root causes but by scapegoating other nations. And he has been increasingly employing tariff threats as his weapon of choice — not in pursuit of justice but as a blunt instrument of control.

Just weeks ago, Trump threatened new tariffs unless Mexico deployed troops to militarize the border. He pressured Colombia to accept a deportation flight of asylum seekers.

Big Tech companies are awaiting their handouts, as it is widely expected that Trump will lift tariffs on countries that agree to undo tech accountability policies.

And perversely, he is using tariffs as a cudgel to pressure other countries into signing the very liberalizing trade agreements he claims to oppose.

“Liberation Day” was more of the same from this ever-more-authoritarian White House: an emergency decree bypassing Congress, escalating instability, and concentrating power in the executive. Trump hasn’t rejected the anti-democratic nature of the neoliberal trade model — he’s replicating it with a vengeance.

All Madness, No Method

While tariffs can be a useful tool, they must be transparently employed in strategic sectors for a clear purpose following careful analysis and open debate.

Trump’s tariffs, however, are based on misleading data and flawed logic. He uses exaggerated trade deficit calculations and stays silent on how the U.S. dollar’s dominance enables America to import far more than it exports, a luxury most Global South nations — burdened with debt and structural trade deficits — cannot afford.

The methodology behind these tariffs has experts scratching their heads.

Trump claimed that the “reciprocal tariffs” were derived from a detailed assessment of each country’s tariff and non-tariff barriers (more on these in a moment). In fact, the number assigned to each country seems to be based on the difference between the total value of imports the U.S. receives from a country versus the amount we export to it.

Apparently, no regard was given to why there may be a large imbalance. For example, Lesotho, which Trump dismissed as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” was hit with the highest tariff of any country at 50%. Forget the fact that the small, landlocked country’s population of 2 million may not be able to afford Made in America products, leading to a lopsided trade balance.

The crude formula used to determine each country’s “reciprocal” tariff was described by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as something that appeared to be “thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice,” and “reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.”

As some commentators have noted, this tariff breakdown is what you get if you ask ChatGPT to come up with a U.S. trade policy. This could very well be the first global economic policy written “of, by, and for” our robot overlords. What could possibly go wrong?

The Corporate Wishlist

Since the Trump administration clearly did not take on the, admittedly Herculean, task of reviewing the thousands of tariffs and trade barriers imposed by hundreds of countries, it simply used trade imbalances as a crude proxy. It’s a stand-in for the cost of that country’s tariffs and, importantly, its non-tariff barriers.

“Non-tariff barrier” is trade-speak for “any policy that’s not a tariff” but might restrict trade — from climate protections to minimum wage laws to consumer protections in the form of toxic food additives. While many non-tariff barriers serve vital public policies, corporations and trade negotiators often treat them as obstacles to profit.

According to the April 2 executive order, Trump can unilaterally decide to lower the tariffs imposed on a country if it takes “significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters.”

What constitutes a “significant step” isn’t defined, but it certainly looks like an open invitation for governments to slash their tariffs and reverse policies to appease Trump and his billionaire buddies.

For what exactly those policies may be, just look to the report Trump waved around at the beginning of his so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement speech in the Rose Garden.

That document is a 400-page list of the policies that other countries have enacted — or are even considering enacting — that U.S. corporations don’t like. It’s the National Trade Estimates Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, an annual government report that has long been criticized as an inappropriate overreach to name and shame other countries’ legitimate public interest policies. It’s also a glimpse of the policies that Trump may seek to have destroyed in exchange for tariff relief.

The policies targeted in this year’s report include climate protections, including Canada’s Clean Fuel Standard, the European Union’s Deforestation-Free Supply Chain Regulation, and Japan’s renewable energy incentives — all of which are aligned with global climate commitments.

Public health regulations aimed at protecting consumers, preserving biodiversity, and preventing long-term health risks were also attacked. Employed by dozens of countries, these include bans, testing requirements, or even labeling policies on pesticides like Roundup’s glyphosate, genetically engineered food, ractopamine in beef and pork, and heavy metals in cosmetics.

Regulations that promote competition in the digital ecosystem, laws that impose digital services taxes on Big Tech firms, place conditions for cross-border data transfers, promote fairness in the digital economy, and laws that regulate emerging technologies such as AI.

Benefits for Trump’s Buddies

Countries are not the only ones who will be supplicating to avoid the full weight of Trump’s tariffs. Despite Trump’s claims that other countries foot the bill on tariffs, it is U.S. importers who must pay this fee … unless they can convince Trump to grant them a special exemption.

It is well-documented that the opaque and chaotic tariff exclusion process created in Trump’s first term quickly overwhelmed government agencies and enabled a quid pro quo spoils system that rewarded the rich and well-connected. A revolving door of lobbyists, including former and future Trump administration officials, were able to secure lucrative tariff exceptions for their CEO clients through political pressure, informal meetings, and campaign contributions.

Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn.

Through this system, Trump wielded tariffs and tariff exceptions to reward his friends and punish his enemies. CEOs that donated to Republicans had a 1 in 5 chance of having their exemption request granted versus 1 in 10 for CEOs that supported Democrats, according to a January 2025 study.

If Trump’s recent attacks on law firms, universities, and the press are any indication, he’s prepared to double down on using his second term to punish enemies and enrich himself and his friends. And his dismantling of watchdog agencies and boosting of big business ties set the stage for tariff exemptions to be even more corrupt and harmful to workers, consumers, and the U.S. and global economy.

What other displays of political loyalty might companies offer to Trump for a tariff exclusion this time around? Public endorsement of his policies? Promises to monitor employees for DEI ideologies or views critical of the administration?

We Deserve Better

Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.

There’s no industrial plan. No support for unions. No climate-resilience vision. Just a chaotic, performative tariff regime, which in practice will surely be wielded to reward loyalty and punish dissent.

Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn. Trump talks a big game but serves the same corporate interests that gutted labor rights in the first place. Working people deserve a system with them at the center, not one that favors corporations.

This isn’t trade justice. It’s a con.

By Ralph Nader April 4, 2025 Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard…

Feeling liberated yet?

People of a certain age will remember Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny around with a shotgun, blasting holes in walls, ceilings, and windows while completely missing his target. It’s the perfect metaphor for Trump’s tariff policy announced this week.

Trump is acting as if tariffs were a form of warfare, and he’s “fighting back” against the countries that have “taken advantage of us.” This is how he’s behaving like Yosemite Sam with his blunderbuss, shooting everywhere and just making a mess while missing the target altogether.

He’s not only throwing wild tariffs on every country that trades with America (except Russia), but he also put a flat 10% tariff on every product imported into the United States (except from Russia).

Additionally, this sort of rhetoric — and making tariffs country-specific instead of product-specific — is what drives trade wars that also run the risk of increasing the danger of actual wars.

If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.

“Shooting” at countries instead of at products is not only hostile; it’s also generally counterproductive except, literally, during time of war.

Further demonstrating Trump‘s ignorance about the difference between business-based tariffs on products and war-based tariffs on countries, his commerce secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, is warning countries not to engage in reciprocal tariffs or trade restrictions.

The second solid criticism of Trump’s tariff plan is that only Congress has the legal power to impose them, and that’s a good thing.

No manufacturer is going to invest billions of dollars and years of construction to build a factory here in response to a tariff thrown up on the whim of a mercurial president; they want to know that that tariff will be there for decades so they can earn back their investment.

Which is why, outside of wartime, tariffs should be specific to products, not countries.

Our Department of Commerce specifies over 17,000 separate categories of products that tariffs can be attached to, and they’re often startlingly specific. Steel, for example, has 740 sub-categories ranging from rolled steel to ingots to hundreds of items as specific as “Semi-finished iron/nonalloy steel, ≥ 0.25% carbon, rectangular/square cross-section, width ≥ 4x thickness.”

Products that we make in America, or want to make here again, should be the targets of tariffs, not the countries that make them. And while there are thousands of product categories that are amenable to tariffs, there are also things it would be stupid to put tariffs on because we don’t make them here — and don’t plan to.

For example, we don’t grow coffee in the US, but they do in Mexico; that’s why we imported 65.5 million kilograms of unroasted beans from that country in 2022. Slapping a tariff on all Mexican goods will sweep up coffee, which will only succeed in driving up inflation here, as the cost of the tariff is added to every cup in every kitchen and restaurant across America.

Bringing back manufacturing also a really good thing to do, because it’s historically been one of the most important ways that workers can find entrée into the middle class without a college education.

Sadly, though, Trump may be doing more damage than good to the cause of the middle class with his bizarre country-based tariff policy.

Trump is able to do his uninformed tariff song-and-dance because there’s a loophole in our tariff laws that allows the president — during a time of national emergency — to impose emergency tariffs. It makes sense that the president should have that flexibility in the event of another Republican Great Depression or World War III, but that isn’t what’s happening today.

Trump declared a state of emergency at the beginning of his administration specifically so he could put his tariffs into place — which means the next president can simply reverse them. Again, no CEO in her right mind is going to invest billions based on that level of uncertainty.

At least four Republican senators get this; Tuesday night, Trump did one of his signature weird 1 am screeds on his Nazi-infested social media platform, calling out Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski by name because they’re supporting a Democratic effort to end the state of emergency so Congress can reclaim its trade authority. They voted with Democrats last night and the resolution passed; it goes to the House now, where Mike Johnson will probably kill it.

If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.

But, no; understanding anything other than how to cheat on golf and your taxes, screw vendors, stiff workers, and sexually assault women is beyond his limited abilities. And, of course, running companies into bankruptcy and being bailed out by Russians. Repeatedly.

When Congress imposes tariffs there’s a far better chance they’ll stay in place long enough to assure American companies it’s worth building new factories. Instead of imposing his tariffs by fiat, Trump should have put them into the form of a proposed bill that he’d then submit to Congress.

Sadly, he’s not that smart or well-informed about history, and apparently neither are his advisors.

So, here we are with actions taken that may throw the entire world into recession, or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression.

That said, there’s also a huge risk to any Democrats who might want to play Yosemite Sam themselves, blasting away at Trump’s tariffs and missing the nuance — and the multiple truths — that make up today’s trade situation.

The simple reality is that tariffs do work to protect domestic manufacturing; they have since the founding of our republic, and are used today by every country in the world (including the US) for that purpose. (There’s a great explainer of all this, including the American history with tariffs going back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, here.)

And, when Reagan embraced neoliberal cuts in tariffs, negotiating the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 — which led to the WTO and NAFTA (also negotiated by Reagan and Bush respectively) — those two Republican presidents began the long slide of American manufacturing.

As the union guy who spoke at Trump’s event yesterday noted, anybody over 50 can remember when everything in Walmart — and pretty much everywhere else, including the cars on the dealership lots — was made in America.

Hell, Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan “100% Made in the USA” which is also the title of his autobiography; it was only when those tariffs collapsed as a result of Clinton signing off on Reagan’s/Bush’s NAFTA and the WTO that Walton’s stores began to import from cheap-labor countries and stopped stocking American-made products.

Because of this simple reality, Democrats who simply fall back on the old neoliberal talking points that tariffs are sales taxes and that countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other (the original explicit neoliberal rationale for tariff-free trade) are risking political suicide.

It’s hard to make political arguments that use nuance, but in this case, Democrats really don’t have a choice. Having grown up in the Midwest (Michigan) I can tell you that most anybody who hails from a former manufacturing region is cheering Trump on right now.

Regardless of party.

And today’s Democrats haven’t been all that hostile to tariffs: Not only did President Biden keep Trump’s tariffs from his first term in place, he added additional tariffs of his own (although almost nobody knows it).

Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% in 2024; his tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by the end of this year; Democratic tariffs on some electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% last year; Biden’s tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration even put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

(Notice that none of those are tariffs on countries, just on products. The only country-specific tariffs Biden approved were against Russia, in response to their invading Ukraine, as a form of economic warfare.)

Opposing tariffs just because Trump loves them, in other words, isn’t just ineffective politics; it doesn’t even conform to Biden’s new Democratic trade policy.

So, here’s how modern Democrats need to talk about this situation. It’s not only good political messaging; it’s also good trade policy, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

First, Democrats need to answer the question, “Why tariffs, particularly if they act as taxes on imported goods?”

That answer is easy; it’s an accurate explanation of what Trump is totally garbling: Tariffs encourage manufacturers to produce their products here in the USA instead of in cheap labor or high pollution countries.

But the “how to do it” is the critical part.

Democrats, in other words, need to differentiate between “smart tariffs” and “stupid” or “wartime tariffs,” advocating the former while ridiculing the latter.

“Put tariffs on products, not on countries” would be a great start, for example.

Our dim-witted president is being called out on his shoot-from-the-hip tariff policy from both left and right. The country is confused, and needs to understand what is going on and how it will impact their future.

Democrats must therefore take a clear position in favor of smart, targeted tariffs — on individual products rather than countries — like Biden did.

And then they must point out that Trump’s obsession with slapping punitive tariffs on countries (except on Russian products) stupidly risks utterly crashing our economy — and possibly even the world’s economy — while starting a trade war that nobody will win.

And, tragically, it’s all being done not for any good reason, but just because Trump is not that bright.

Streaming 10 AM Eastern & 8 AM Mountain time + Streaming Afterwards:

Ted Rall and Manila Chan welcome auto industry expert Lauren Fix to dissect the impact of President Trump’s new 25% tariffs on foreign cars. The discussion explores how these tariffs, effective immediately, are shaking up the automotive landscape. Ford and GM, with 20-30% of their U.S. sales tied to imports, face pressure, prompting Ford to announce price cuts to offset rising costs. The episode delves into projections of auto prices climbing $5,000-$15,000, as even American-made vehicles rely on foreign components, leaving consumers squeezed amid persistent inflation.

The conversation also covers Tesla’s position, fully U.S.-produced and thus insulated from the tariffs, though its stock has dipped 5% after hours due to unrelated backlash. Broader market effects take center stage, with the tariffs triggering volatility—Ford’s stock rises 2%, GM’s falls 1.5%, and global trade tensions loom. Potential retaliation from Canada and Mexico, key players in the $460 billion auto trade network, adds fuel to the fire, unsettling investors further. Lauren Fix provides data-driven insights, while the hosts keep the pace brisk and engaging, blending economic analysis with real-world implications. The episode captures a pivotal moment as policy shifts ripple through wallets, assembly lines, and Wall Street, delivering the raw, unfiltered breakdown TMI fans expect.

The post TMI Show Ep 111: “Car-azy: Tariffs, Ford Price Cuts and Tesla Attacks” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dear Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman, School of International and Public Affairs Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, Columbia University Trustees, SIPA Administrators, and SIPA Program Heads:

I am writing to you on my own behalf, as an individual alumna of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

It has been 27 days, and SIPA has not meaningfully spoken up for Mahmoud Khalil.

On Saturday, March 29—SIPA Alumni Day 2025—rather than celebrating the school and our association with it, a number of SIPA alumni including myself held a press conference and protest at 1:00 pm outside the Columbia gates at 116th St. and Amsterdam Avenue. We condemned SIPA's collusion with the Trump administration (including ICE and DHS) and the NYPD, and the school's failure to act against the Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people by:

1. Renouncing our degrees and our association with SIPA and Columbia University;
2. Destroying our diplomas;
3. Pledging to end our donations to SIPA and Columbia University; and
4. Pledging to continue to speak publicly on these matters.

As you are no doubt aware, the protest was extensively covered by local, regional, national, and international press outlets, including Democracy Now!, The Guardian, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Post, Daily News, Fox News, AJ+ (Al Jazeera Plus), The Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye, and many more.

Among the many points that were made at the press conference, we alumni made clear that the false conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the false conflation of Judaism and Zionism by Columbia University, are, in fact, cynical antisemitic ploys that put Jews and all people in danger.

Acting President Shipman: In your first message to the Columbia University community, you wrote, "...to our alumni community, I want to emphasize how important you are to the strength of our institution. Your engagement is critical, and I look forward to your partnership."

However, past statements that you, Ms. Shipman, have made as co-chair of the Board of Trustees do not suggest that common ground can be found. Are you interested in taking rapid steps to change course by:

• Divesting Columbia's holdings in all endeavors making possible the Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people;

• Reversing actions taken by your predecessor(s) in acceding to (colluding with) Trump administration demands;

• Protecting free speech and the right to dissent for ALL on campus;

• Condemning the draconian and illegal actions taken against Mahmoud Khalil and other anti-genocide students, faculty, and staff;

• Renouncing Columbia's partnership with the NYPD in repressing Columbia students and militarizing the campus;

• Permanently closing the Tel Aviv Global Center and the Columbia dual degree program with Tel Aviv University; and

• Joining in a "Mutual Defense Compact" to block Trump's campus attacks, as advocated by the Rutgers University Senate, in which schools embody the values of democracy and "commit meaningful funding to a defense fund to provide immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement"?

If so, perhaps the large and rapidly increasing number of alumni who are deeply alienated by the university would believe common ground might be found.

Speaking for myself, I have no optimism on any of these scores. I believe Columbia has become, in the words of Professor Rashid Khalidi in an article for The Guardian on March 25, "Vichy on the Hudson." I believe it has damaged its reputation beyond repair. Far more than capitulating to American fascism, I believe Columbia is collaborating with it, colluding with it, and emboldening it, thereby putting at risk not just countless other institutions of higher learning across the country, but our society, global humanitarian values, and the lives of the Palestinian people as well.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Scarlott, SIPA MIA '86 (renounced degree)

It’s the Donald Double Whammy.

Grocery price are not “coming down fast,” as U.S. President Donald Trump promised. And Trump’s tariffs are about to boost the price of everything we buy that’s imported—from cars to gasoline to clothing to shoes to computers, cellphones, toys and, yes, groceries, too. America imports one-fifth of our food from abroad, and tariffs will make fruits and vegetables more costly.

Two of the false promises Trump made during the election will be haunting us.

Trump did not tell inflation-afflicted voters before November that a vote for Trump was a vote for more pain.

First, he pledged to fix inflation. The economy was issue number one for most voters, and Trump attributed his victory to Americans’ anger over food prices. He promised “inflation will vanish completely,” and vowed “prices will come down... and they’ll come down fast... with everything.”

“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” Right up to election day, Trump assured us, “A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper.”

Trump never revealed his plan for dealing with inflation because he had no plan. And after the election, he admitted prices were not going to come down. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he acknowledged a few weeks later. “Very hard.”

By January, Trump confirmed that inflation was not his No. 1 issue, and by Inauguration Day, he ceased talking about it at all. Prices did not start coming down on Day One, and still haven’t on Day 75. They won’t because of his second false claim.

Trump promised that the tariffs he imposed would be paid by other countries, not by American consumers: “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”

“I am going to put tariffs on other countries’ [goods] coming into our country and that has nothing to do with taxes to us.”

Trump knew this was wrong. As the right-leaning Tax Foundation explained, a tariff is simply “a tax on people who buy things from foreign businesses.” The conservative Cato Institute reports “overwhelming evidence that Americans bore the brunt” of Trump’s first-term tariffs and will do so again.

And now, finally, Trump admits it himself. When confronted with the fact that his 25% tariff on autos and auto parts will cause prices to surge, Trump did not dispute that tariff costs would rest on the backs of American consumers. Instead, he cheered!

“I couldn’t care less,” said Trump. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars.”

Trump understands perfectly well that tariffs are not “a cost to another country.” He no longer says, “It’s not going to be a cost to you.” Now he says Americans will feel “some pain,” but that it’s a good thing.

Trump did not tell inflation-afflicted voters before November that a vote for Trump was a vote for more pain.

Can Trump’s tariffs increase manufacturing in the United States by forcing us to buy American-made cars? Economists are dubious. To begin, there aren’t any 100% “American-made cars.” “Almost 60% of the parts used in vehicles that are assembled in the country” are imported.

Auto manufacturers created a system based on free trade among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada in which parts made in any of the three countries may freely move among the others. Then cars assembled in one country may be sold into another.

Half of the parts in a “made-in-the-USA” Cadillac are manufactured in Mexico. Thirty percent of the parts in an Acura assembled in Mexico come from the U.S. or Canada.

Trump claims the trade agreement underlying this system is “unfair” and that Mexico and Canada “took advantage of the United States.” “Who would ever sign a thing like this?” Trump recently asked.

Donald Trump, actually. The U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) was negotiated and signed by Trump on November 30, 2018. Then, he hailed USMCA as “a colossal victory for our farmers, ranchers, energy workers, factory workers, and American workers in all 50 states.”

“An especially big win for American auto workers,” Trump bragged. “The USMCA is the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.”

Back then it was “incredible,” “the best agreement we’ve ever made.” Now it’s a target for Trump’s irrational tariff mania. What will come of tariffs on everything we buy from abroad? Unemployment, as cars and other goods become more expensive and demand plummets. More unemployment as other countries retaliate with tariffs that bar American exports. And more inflation, with China, Canada, and Mexico tariffs alone costing the typical household $1,600 to $2,000 a year.

Trump has moved on from his false promises. And American families are left to bear the costs.

Of all the slash and burn terminations U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk are inflicting on public agencies, few will have a more far-reaching, devastating impact than the frontal assault on Americans' health, safety, and living standards.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, warned that the shock and awe cuts of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff—a 25% decimation—and programs, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy." It also advances a decades-long dream of the far-right.

For half a century, extremist libertarian, corporate, and Republican ideologues have sought demolition of public safety net programs, regulations, and reforms, and elimination of personnel to carry them out. But it has required the authoritarian collaboration of Project 2025, Trump, Musk, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to begin to implement this program.

"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits."

Public protests and legal challenges were already underway as the first round of layoffs and forced retirements undermined healthcare. The widespread scope of the latest mass firings, especially at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reinforces the urgency of a response.

It included the agencies responsible for medical research, tracking disease, drug approvals, and regulating food safety, said The Associated Press. The Bullwark's Sam Stein termed it "an absolute bloodbath" with a "generation of scientists, healthcare officials being wiped out," Common Dreams noted.

Union officials said CDC layoffs eliminated programs focused on smoking, lead poisoning, gun violence, asthma and air quality, and occupational safety and health, AP added.

Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental protections were gutted, The New York Times reported. Officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told their offices were being eliminated. HIV prevention was a target. Funding cuts for the healthy aging program apparently eradicated the government's Alzheimer's program, noted Rachel Maddow. Layoffs also hit people working on bird flu and measles.

The cruel spirit of the actions was evidenced by ultimatums given to multiple health experts to relocate to remote areas of the continent from Indian Health Services territories to Alaska. Or leave their jobs, in malicious messaging characteristic of Trump's reign, as voiced by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik that only "fraudsters" would complain about Social Security recipients losing their earned monthly checks. Among them were directors at the National Institutes of Health and the directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Nursing Research.

"The FDA as we've known it is finished, since most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed," former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf wrote on LinkedIn. Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, said the HHS cuts, paired with an $11 billion cut in funding to state and local health departments announced this week, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy."

"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits," said National Nurses United.

"From a policy perspective, the changes initiated at HHS by the second-term Trump administration are far-reaching. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to reshape the U.S. public health agenda," wrote Simon Haeder, Texas A&M University public health professor.

In addition to the mass firings, the Trump administration is pursuing plans to weaken the Affordable Care Act and challenge state programs focused on health disparities. And the House is moving forward with its plans to devastate Medicaid with up to $880 billion in cuts to help pay for its $4.5 trillion tax gift for billionaires.

The scheme is particularly manifest in plans to roll back numerous regulations on "everything from clean water to safe vaccines," Haeder emphasizes. "Regulation has emerged as the most prolific source of policymaking over the last five decades, particularly for health policy...Vast cuts to the HHS workforce will likely curtail this capability, resulting in fewer regulatory protections for Americans... With fewer experienced administrators on staff, industry influence over regulatory decisions will likely only grow stronger."

Putting 'Democracy in Chains'

Corporate titans and the libertarian far-right have long pushed deregulation and privatization. In her seminal work Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean profiles right-wing economist James M. Buchanan who for half a century promoted a definition of "liberty" that insulates private property rights from government. Through his "public choice theory," for which he won a Nobel Economics Prize, he condemned majority rule as self-centered voting rights that results in "overinvestment in the public sector" and subjects the minority, meaning corporations and the elite, to "discriminatory" taxation and legislation.

Buchanan established a libertarian think tank at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, enthusiastically funded by oil magnate Charles Koch. Its goals included destroying Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Buchanan showed his disdain for anyone harmed by writing that people who failed to save money for the loss of public protections "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent." Tyler Cowen, Buchanan's successor at Mercatus, MacLean notes, projected "rewriting of the social contract" that included slashing Medicaid. Compensation for a "fiscal shortfall" from the handouts to the elite, "will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers."

Buchanan would see his views come to fruition in Chile, MacLean notes, after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's murderous coup in 1973. It was followed by a rewriting of the country's constitution, advised by Buchanan, so that post-Pinochet the "capitalist class would be permanently entrenched in power" in which, adds Sam Tanenhaus, "labor unions were banned and social security and healthcare were privatized."

With the Project 2025 blueprint, Trump, Musk, and their Republican Party followers embracing similar authoritarian rule, that program is on speed dial. A populist uprising, which ultimately deposed Pinochet and other dictators, is the challenge to all of us. Fortunately, street protests are increasing, as is a voter response, demonstrated by the electoral trouncing of Trump and Musk's handpicked candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, a positive sign in troubled times.

President Donald Trump has caused so much devastation over the last several weeks that it is hard to calculate the loss. It is easy to lose sight of the people who are being hurt. Earlier this week, the Trump administration's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a vast restructuring of the agency. As a result, literally thousands of workers were fired and entire sections of HHS eliminated and countless programs—spanning the gamut from world health to food safety—negatively impacted.

One of the programs devastated was the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) which helps low-income individuals and families pay for heating or cooling homes. According to the New York Times, the entire staff of LIHEAP was fired. LIHEAP helps over six million low-income people and has an annual budget of $4.1 billion.

Over the years, both Republicans and Democrats have supported LIHEAP. The program found supporters in New England who depended on LIHEAP for heating assistance and those in the southwest who used the assistance to help cool their homes. Those days of bipartisan cooperation are long gone.

Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP...

No one should have been surprised by the severe cuts to LIHEAP. The program was targeted by Project 2025 and by the House Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget last year. Interestingly, this position puts the GOP at odds with utilities/energy companies which support LIHEAP.

In terms of bureaucracy, the LIHEAP staff was very small (25 people) when compared with overall staffing at HHS. Given the number of people LIHEAP helps, the program seems very efficient. Furthermore, LIHEAP serves a vital—that is, life-saving—purpose. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey shows that families across the country are having problems affording their energy costs. In October of last year, Louisiana (31%), West Virginia (28.%), and Massachusetts (27%) topped the charts in states with the highest percentage of adults in households that were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last 12 months.

Congress has already approved $4.1 billion for LIHEAP subsidies and implementation costs for the current fiscal year and about 90% of that amount has already been awarded to the states who administer the grants to individuals in need. However, it is unclear how the rest of the funds will be disbursed as there is no staff to administer the program. It is anyone’s guess as to what happens when the money runs out.

One thing is for sure: If LIHEAP is eliminated, people will die and these will be the most vulnerable among us. In case you are interested in proof of this common-sense conclusion, check out the paper “The Mortality Effects Of Winter Heating Prices” in the Economic Journal.

On Thursday, Kennedy told ABC News that some of the HHS cuts had been made in error and would be rescinded. This whole situation will be clarified when Kennedy testifies on April 10 about the HHS reorganization before the Senate Health Committee. Hopefully, LIHEAP will be one of the programs that was cut in error. Given the fact that Project 2025 singled out LIHEAP, this may be a forlorn hope.

Written just over a hundred years ago, T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland proffered that “April is the cruelest month.” Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP to stay warm in their homes and survive in this world.