On Monday, Donald Trump dropped his sham lawsuit against the federal government. In exchange, the Justice Department under his control will establish a $1.8 billion fund for “victims of lawfare,” as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it. This will be a slush fund for Trump’s allies—presumably January 6 insurrectionists and others already rewarded with a pardon.

There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office, erected by the Supreme Court when it granted current and former presidents effective immunity from prosecution if their crimes involved “official acts.” Loot the taxpayers, misuse government power for graft, and you’re off the hook.

Last week, the president filed a report with the Office of Government Ethics detailing the stock trades he made this year. It is a novelistic tale of profiteering, recognizable as insider trading in every way except, perhaps, under the law.

Former US Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer offers a useful guide.

It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.

In recent months, as Paramount and Netflix vied to buy Warner Brothers, Trump bought stock in all three companies. Now the Justice Department is considering whether to approve Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers.

As CNBC reported, Trump “scooped up shares” in the data firm Palantir. Soon after, he abruptly praised the firm. “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” Trump posted, even highlighting its ticker name. “Just ask our enemies!!!” All this while Palantir was winning big federal contracts.

He invested in Oracle while brokering its deal to buy TikTok.

Just this week, he paraded off Air Force One in China, flanked by the CEOs of Nvidia and Boeing. Trump bought millions of dollars of Boeing stock before the trip, which led to the sale of 200 Boeing airplanes to the Chinese government. Among his biggest purchases has been Nvidia stock, which has seen steep increases after the US government cleared 10 Chinese companies to purchase its advanced chips, in a big reversal from earlier national security concerns.

Altogether, Oyer writes, “You’ll find it hard to avoid the conclusion that, to Donald Trump, governing is synonymous with profiteering.”

This president is constrained by the weakest legal rules in history.

Start with that immunity ruling, Trump v. United States. Before that, presidents knew they could be criminally prosecuted if they looted the government. Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling all but stops any bribery prosecution before it starts, by preventing any inquiry into the president’s motivations, even when the act looks and smells like a bribe. Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the ruling would “hamstring the prosecution” in a case such as bribery. (Having critiqued the misguided majority, Barrett then mystifyingly voted with it.)

Insider trading laws are weak, in any case. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibits using nonpublic information to guide stock trading, but its application to elected officials remains murky. In 2012, Congress passed the Stock Act to prevent insider trading among members of Congress, but the president and vice president remain exempt.

It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.

In January, the Brennan Center published Nine Solutions for Political Corruption. In it, we call for a law to require the president to divest from all stocks and other assets that could generate a conflict of interest. That was the norm, and now it must be a law. Ethics rules should cover presidents and vice presidents too.

And we call for a constitutional amendment to end the unilateral power of a president to issue corrupt pardons.

What about that Trump v. United States ruling? In the past, after the Supreme Court has erred so gravely, we’ve changed the Constitution. The 14th Amendment, for example, undid the Dred Scott decision. Another amendment is needed to clean up the immunity mess.

The sturdiest protection against corruption would be fierce anger from fleeced taxpayers. A few months ago, when asked about his conflicts of interest, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

It turns out that Americans do care. In January, a YouGov poll found that “large shares of both Democrats and Republicans think their party focuses too little on corruption.”

Let’s make this a major issue for the campaign trail and press politicians from both parties to provide solutions, not just soundbites. Or else, as Oyer wrote, we risk having future presidents who “loot and pillage our country without a shadow of shame.”

As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.

To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.

Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)

If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.

Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.

At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.

His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.

Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."

He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."

Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.

Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.

When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. "The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn't big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base." He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace "economic populism with teeth."

Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.

This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden's administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza hurt the campaign "but not in the ways people think." He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden's support for Israel (and Harris' inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a "giant, rotting fish around [the campaign's] neck."

This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.

Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.

Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless war all rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.

Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Trump flexed his strength in primary elections, continuing the process of eliminating political enemies within the GOP. At the same time, his low ratings and the war have raised red flags among base voters who supported his “America First” agenda. The biggest win for the White House is defeating Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who opposed Trump on key issues, including on the “big, beautiful bill” and on pushing for the release of files related to Epstein. Massie lost to Ed Gallrein, who got 54%.

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune — and most of the GOP conference — is reeling from Trump’s snap endorsement of Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas GOP Senate runoff on May 26th.

• Trump sounds increasingly unhinged: “I thought the market would go down 25 percent, and I was OK with that to get rid of a nuclear potential holocaust. Would have been a nuclear holocaust. So, going down 25 percent’s OK when you get rid of a nuclear holocaust, so, uh, most people agree with me…Everyone tells me [the war] is unpopular, but I think it’s very popular. When they hear that it’s having to do with nuclear weapons, weapons that could take out Los Angeles, could take out major cities, very quick, when they hear that—I tell you what, when we explain it to people, I don’t really have enough time to explain to people. I’m too busy getting it done,” Trump said. “I think it’s frankly very popular, but whether it’s popular or not popular, I have to do it, because I’m not going to let the world be blown up on my watch. Not gonna happen.”

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

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The post The Trumpire Strikes Back | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Earlier this year a number of participants announced their withdrawal from Australia’s Adelaide Festival’s "Writer’s Week" following the disinviting of Australian-Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah. The event was subsequently cancelled.

This made me think of United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese’s words—“The occupation of Palestine must be understood as part of a broader project of domination. This is not merely about the physical borders of historical Palestine. It is a systematic assertion of permanent supremacy that knows no border…”—delivered in her Nelson Mandela Lecture.

Indeed, the impact of the ongoing genocide and occupation not only echo far beyond Palestine, because of our shared humanity, but also because of the impact it is having on freedoms across the globe. The censorship of Abdel-Fattah is yet another example of this, and it is not only happening in Australia. Even in South Africa, a country that charged Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), artists are facing attempts to constrain their work.

The global wave of solidarity with Palestine has been used by some governments as a pretext to diminish freedoms by attacking the right to protest and political participation. While some did this by using laws that were already in place, others enacted ambiguous or unduly expansive legislation criminalizing Palestine solidarity and weaponizing the battle against antisemitism.

Protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.

For instance in the US, Project Esther was released by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank also responsible for the odious Project 2025. The strategy’s recommendations have made their way into the policy of the Trump administration. This includes suing, firing, deporting, and defaming activists, organizations, and institutions by effectively claiming that involvement in advocacy for Palestine is material support of "a terrorist support network.” And also clamping down on college and university campuses where “more than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained.”

The United Kingdom, on the other hand, used counterterrorism legislation to ban Palestine Action. This despite an intelligence assessment report undermining the government’s claims by finding that most of the groups’ activities are “not terrorism” and the ban risked wrongfully criminalizing people. While the ban has been found to be unlawful, since put into effect in July 2025 terrorism arrests have increased by 660%, with the majority of these linked to it.

Across Europe Palestine solidarity was particularly targeted, like in Germany where the homes of pro-Palestinian activists have been raided and support for Israel has become a prerequisite for citizenship.

The effects of these actions will not be limited to Palestine advocacy and puts all movements at risk by diminishing freedoms that enable organizing across issues. So protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.

Research by investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory, Andrew Loewenstein, identified over 120 countries that have bought weapons or some form of repressive technology from Israel, all principally tested on Palestinians.

Israel provided military and strategic support to apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola, resulting in mass casualties; it is among the countries that armed perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide and Myanmar at a time it was found to be committing a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against its Rohingya Muslim population.

In modern times Israel’s offerings have included drones, spyware, and surveillance tools. Like the Israeli-made spyware being used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an immigration agency that has been found to not only undertake abusive practices, but also violate its own policies.

For us in South Africa though, this is no surprise. The "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, where I was born and raised, was a product of the South African apartheid regime’s segregationist policies—which Israel took interest in—and stripped Black people of South African citizenship.

Like other homelands when it declared "independence" in 1977, it was shunned by the world. Despite its official stance, Israel was the only country to quietly recognize Bophuthatswana through informal connections and a quasi-diplomatic mission. A Jerusalem Post editorial in 1992 even referred to Bophuthatswana as "Africa’s Little Israel."

The backdrop of this relationship was the “clandestine alliance” between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Not only did the two countries collaborate on nuclear, but Israel would also become South Africa's largest weapons importer after the 1977 UN arms embargo and support the regime’s attempt to undermine sanctions.

It was a relationship of mutual admiration, an ideological alignment that in recent times is only matched by India’s admiration of Israel.

Apartheid had far-reaching consequences that extended beyond South Africa's borders. Along with unlawfully occupying Namibia, a colonial legacy embraced by the regime, it also launched hostilities in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Similarly, Israel continues to conduct atrocities and aggression not only against the Palestinian people, but also in places like Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria. More recently, more than 300 people have been killed and scores injured following Israel's 10 minute assault in Lebanon—despite a two-week Middle East ceasefire, which Israel would afterwards claim did not include Lebanon. In the same way apartheid was deemed a threat to international peace and security, so too is the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all. Because beyond the bombs, Israel has used international humanitarian law to try to justify the murder of civilians—a template being adopted by others like the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

Like the people of South Africa and oppressed people everywhere, the people of Palestine too will continue to make their rightful claim to freedom. And for the sake of humanity everywhere, people of conscience must continue to stand with them and keep the fire of freedom within reach.

Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: In the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash?

Perhaps a reformer would come along—say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. US analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing—and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029—and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges—a sustained Covid-19 quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy—the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew—and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below—has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: Is it too late to avert catastrophe?

Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics; suppressed virtually all signs of civil society; and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage—through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption—that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult—by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on US coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun—military first—doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the US economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The US economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while US food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority—the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions—Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, US allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the US debt—at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world—could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called—not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the US electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks—such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the US economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign—led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani—it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in US actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upward, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air—though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit—just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001— and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

Last week, the British government quietly informed the United Nation's Green Climate Fund that it would halve the contribution it pledged just two years ago, not because the climate crisis has eased, but because it is spending more on weapons. The move was framed as a "hugely difficult decision," not ideological, and necessary to deliver what United Kingdom Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper called "the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War." The planet, apparently, can wait.

It cannot.

The UK's retreat from climate finance is not some isolated budget decision. It is part of a choice being made across the Global North: to rearm, to retreat from development commitments, and to leave the countries least responsible for the climate crisis to deal with its worst consequences on their own.

Global military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, pushing the global military burden to 2.5% of GDP, its highest level since 2009. Europe's alone surged 14% to $864 billion, the highest level ever recorded for the continent. Meanwhile, the UN's own analysis found that reinvesting just 15% of global military spending, roughly $387 billion, would be more than enough to cover the annual costs of climate adaptation in developing countries. The money exists. The will does not.

More conflict and more military spending will only deepen the crisis and make millions more people vulnerable to it.

The UK's Green Climate Fund cut does not happen in a vacuum; the US has refused to deliver any further money to the GCF under President Donald Trump and has also given up its seat on the fund's board. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, international development assistance fell by 23.1% in 2025, the steepest annual decline on record, with the United States slashing its aid budget by 57%, Germany by 17%, and France and the UK by 11% each.

The countries that industrialized on the back of fossil fuels, with the highest historical emissions and the highest per capita carbon footprints, are the ones least bothered by any of this.

And yet for the Global South, the signal being sent today is unmistakable: The nations least responsible for the climate catastrophe bearing down on them will have to bear its consequences largely alone, watching the world burn while the architects of that burning pivot to missiles and military budgets. The prospect of just and equitable climate finance from the developed world is beginning to look not merely uncertain, but futile.

The same wars that are killing climate finance are generating record profits elsewhere. Oil and gas companies' profits are soaring as the Iran conflict continues. Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, and TotalEnergies are projected to make $2,967 a second in profits in 2026, nearly $37 million more per day than in 2025, with total projected profits across the six companies reaching approximately $94 billion for the year. None of that windfall is going toward the energy transition. BP has slashed planned investment in renewable energy and increased oil and gas spending, Shell has watered down its 2030 climate targets, ExxonMobil has cut its planned low-carbon investment by a third, and TotalEnergies has declined to adopt a transition plan aligned with 1.5°C of warming.

If a handful of fossil fuel corporations are posting billions in profits in a single year, profits made possible by geopolitical instability, then holding them liable through regulation and taxation is not radical but logical. Windfall profit taxes on fossil fuel companies, long discussed and rarely enacted, could generate precisely the kind of revenue that developed governments claim they no longer have for climate finance.

A February 2026 report by Climate Action Network Europe shows the framework already exists, recommending a differentiated corporate tax on fossil fuel profits with revenues recycled directly into the energy transition and international climate finance. Oxfam makes the same case, calling for a Rich Polluter Profit Tax and an equity-based road map that reflects the historical responsibility and financial capacity of different states. The United States and Europe built their wealth on fossil fuels. Many countries in the Global South remain dependent on them not by choice, but by circumstance. Demanding they exit on the same timeline is neither fair nor realistic.

The tools and the arguments exist. What is missing is political will, and the Global South cannot afford to keep waiting for it. The path forward lies in demanding structural reform of the international tax regime that allows fossil fuel super profits and billionaire fortunes to escape accountability; of the debt architecture that forces climate-vulnerable nations to choose between servicing loans and financing adaptation; and of the COP process itself, which has too long allowed wealthy nations to treat climate finance pledges as suggestions rather than obligations.

So, while the world heats up and vulnerable countries face worsening heatwaves, floods, and disasters, while thousands lose lives and livelihoods, one thing is becoming painfully certain: More conflict and more military spending will only deepen the crisis and make millions more people vulnerable to it. The Global South did not start these wars. It should not be made to pay for them, not with its people, its economies, or its climate.

The American worker is under incredible stress from rapacious employers, a horrific job market, avaricious vendors, societal stressors, and an oppressive government. It would take a little more energy to change it all—but that may be asking too much for now.

The post Time for Revolution? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army.

It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant.

Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was.

I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

Consider what we learned just yesterday morning. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration. It’s an unprecedented mechanism that lets the president pay his own supporters — or fund his own private army — out of a government agency he controls with taxpayer money, with no functional constraints on who he can give that money to.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it plainly what it is, a political grievance fund Trump can use to pay off his friends, and the obvious beneficiaries are the roughly fifteen hundred people he already pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th.

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal:

“[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The men who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election engaged in exactly the kind of insurrection that language was written to address — several were even convicted by juries for seditious conspiracy — and now Trump wants to write them checks that could be as much as $1 million per person.

This isn’t some obscure or gray area of the law or the Constitution: that’s the document telling us all “No” in language a child could understand, and the answer coming back from the Trump regime is a number chosen, with a wink, to evoke 1776.

It would be one thing if this were an isolated outrage, but it isn’t. Instead of the exception, this kind of criminal activity is now the norm: this is the most corrupt, lawless administration in American history and, so far, they’re getting away with almost all of it. For example:

— Article I of the Constitution gives the power to make war exclusively to Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Act that Congress passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 spells out the only exception, which is that a president may use force when the nation has been attacked or such an attack is imminent, and even then he must come to Congress within sixty days for permission to continue.

Iran represented no threat to the US, there was no attack or imminent attack, and yet Trump bombed the country anyway without even notifying, much less asking permission from, Congress. And now far more than 60 days have passed and he and the toadies in his regime are giving the middle finger to us, the Constitution, and the law.

— Trump’s also been bombing small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September of 2025, killing well over a hundred people he’s never bothered to identify, charge, or even produce a shred of evidence against. This is a naked violation of both US laws against murder and is an explicit war crime under international law and treaties.

When the Senate unsuccessfully tried to rein him in, he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media sewer that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional” — as if he’s ever read the Constitution — and that the five Republicans who voted to constrain him should never be elected to office again.

Human Rights Watch described these strikes flatly as a campaign of “extrajudicial executions” carried out “without any credible legal basis.” The worst of them, the September 2nd strike, became what military lawyers call a double-tap, because after the first missile left two men clinging to the burning wreckage for forty minutes, the order came down, according to the ACLU’s account of the reporting, to hit them again and finish them off.

Killing shipwrecked survivors is a war crime under treaties we wrote and signed, and the Pentagon’s own manual says so, but we did it anyway, and the men who ordered and carried it out went on television and bragged about it.

— Similarly, the Constitution forbids in two separate places, Article I and Article II, the acceptance of gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress, a provision the framers wrote because George Washington’s generation understood, having just thrown off a king, exactly how a foreign prince could buy an American official’s loyalty one favor at a time.

Trump accepted a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the royal family of Qatar, a flying palace destined for his presidential library, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner took a two-billion-dollar investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund run by Mohammed bin Salman within months of leaving his White House job.

When Congressman (and constitutional law professor) Jamie Raskin pointed out that the Constitution says no present of any kind whatever may be accepted from a foreign state without congressional permission, the White House press secretary called the very question ridiculous. She literally laughed at the law and the Constitution.

— The Fourth Amendment says no home shall be entered and no person seized except on a warrant issued by a judge after sworn testimony about a crime:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Nonetheless, a leaked internal ICE memo, revealed by the Associated Press through a whistleblower, instructs agents that they may break down the doors of private homes on the strength of an “administrative warrant” ICE writes for itself, with no judge anywhere in the process.

This is precisely what the founding generation called a “general warrant” that the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid, and a Minnesota judge has already ruled that one such raid violated a man’s constitutional rights. They keep doing it anyway.

— The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the president to spend the money Congress appropriates, and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has now found the administration in violation of the law at least six times. The GAO’s general counsel has testified in dozens of open investigations and wrote that the Constitution grants the president no unilateral authority to withhold funds Congress has commanded him to spend.

Ignoring it all, Trump is withholding money from disaster aid to Medicaid funds to states and laughing at the law.

— The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump himself signed in November and which passed the House with only one single dissenting vote, required the full release of the files by last December 19th and explicitly forbade withholding anything to spare a public figure embarrassment.

Trump’s Justice Department, though, released fewer than half of the records, then quietly went back and added new redactions to documents it had already posted. You don’t have to wonder very hard why a president whose name reportedly appears in those files more than thirty thousand times might want them buried.

I could keep going, and that’s the part that would have blown my father’s mind. There’s the Logan Act being violated by Kushner, there’s the Hatch Act being trampled by Hegseth campaigning in Kentucky, there’s the Take Care Clause of Article II that obliges a president to faithfully execute the laws rather than treat the ones he dislikes as suggestions.

Several ICE agents are accused of murdering Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, but the state has been unable to investigate and prosecute the case because Trump is hiding the evidence from them. That’s a felony reminiscent of the old Confederacy.

Pile them up and instead of a handful of unrelated scandals like during Nixon, we see a method, the same method Hannah Arendt described when she wrote about how authoritarian movements don’t merely break individual laws but work to destroy the very idea that law constrains power at all, so that eventually the only question anyone bothers to ask is what dear leader wants.

Germany and Japan were here before, in the last century, and we didn’t like how it ended up requiring us to sacrifice blood and treasure to restore democracy and the rule of law to Europe and Asia.

The deepest damage, however, isn’t to any single statute. It’s to the thing my father believed in, the global understanding that America was the country where the law applied even to the powerful, even to the president, especially to the president.

Every dictator and strongman on Earth is watching the most powerful office in the world demonstrate that constitutions can be treated like paper tigers, that war crimes carry no consequences, that a leader can pay his own mob and pocket a king’s airplane and the system simply absorbs it.

They’re taking notes, and the next time an American diplomat lectures a foreign despot about the rule of law that strongman is going to laugh out loud.

What chafes me the most is the hypocrisy, because I remember, and you do, too. When Barack Obama used prosecutorial discretion to shield DREAMers from deportation, Republicans fought it in court; Speaker Paul Ryan declared it a major victory in the fight to restore the separation of powers and warned that the president is not permitted to write laws, only Congress is.

When Obama delayed an Obamacare employer mandate, Jonathan Turley warned that if a president can suspend federal laws then the legislative process becomes a pretense, and the Heritage Foundation thundered about “lawlessness” and “dangerous precedents” that weaken our constitutional balance.

Those same voices, confronted today with a president paying off insurrectionists, taking foreign jets, ignoring six GAO impoundment findings, violating the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, breaking the law on war, engaging in insider trading, and defying a transparency law he signed himself, have gone silent or, worse, become his cheerleaders.

For Republicans, apparently the principle was never about principle. It was, instead, always about whose side you were on.

American democracy can’t survive this sort of assault for long; it has to be stopped. And Democrats can’t afford to repeat the paralysis of the first two years of the Biden administration, when Merrick Garland’s Justice Department moved with such deliberate caution on Trump’s crimes that the clock simply ran out.

Democratic members of Congress should be forming investigative working groups right now, today.

One for the boat killings, one for the emoluments, one for the impoundment defiance, one for the Epstein noncompliance, one for the warrantless raids, one for tearing down part of the White House, one for his insider stock trading, one for taking us to war illegally, etc., gathering the documents and the testimony and the timelines while memories are fresh and witnesses are reachable.

They should be holding public hearings on each of these issues now, in the open, not as a campaign promise but as the constitutional oversight that is literally their job, so that when power changes hands, as it always eventually does, there’s no eighteen-month ramp-up and no excuse for one.

You have a role in this too, and it isn’t a small one. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want public hearings on these violations of the law and you want them now, not after the next election.

Make sure you’re registered and that everyone you know is registered at vote.org, because elections remain, as the law professors testifying about presidential power keep reminding us, the ultimate check on a lawless executive.

Track what your state legislature is doing at openstates.org, because the defense of constitutional government is being fought in statehouses too.

And if this piece said something you think other people need to hear, please share it, and support independent journalism at hartmannreport.com and elsewhere, because the work of holding power accountable has never depended on the powerful; it has always depended on ordinary citizens who refused to look away.

My father’s generation believed America was the country where the rules apply to everyone, and fought a brutal war to defend that ideal. Whether they were right is, finally, now up to you and me.

You know their names.

Renee Good was 37 years old, a poet, a mother of three, when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer named Jonathan Ross fired three shots into her car on a January morning in Minneapolis. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner has ruled her death a homicide. Evidence indicates she was still alive when other federal agents prevented a bystander physician from reaching her.

Alex Pretti, also 37 years old, an intensive-care nurse, was holding a smartphone—what Jon Stewart, in the kind of bitter eulogy that has lately become the medium for social media’s truth-telling, called “a 1080p, 60fps weapon of mass illumination”—when two Border Patrol agents, whose identities the federal government still refuses to release, shot him dead. Federal immigration officers have shot at least 14 people in the United States between September and February. Four are dead. No officer has been charged. Soon, the United States Congress will move to pass another $72-billion package—nearly all of it for the agencies that killed them and the immigration enforcement apparatus around them—on a procedural track designed expressly to bypass the majority of Americans who do not want this.

The track is called reconciliation. Created in 1974 for narrow fiscal adjustments, it allows the majority party to pass certain budget legislation with 51 votes instead of the 60 otherwise needed to overcome a filibuster. It has been steadily stretched into a vehicle for major policy, and this time the policy is the funding of an enforcement operation that has killed US citizens—with no Democratic input and no accountability reforms attached.

Signs memorializing Renee Good and Alex Pretti are seen pasted to the wall of a building on February 12, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The pending bill also tucks in $1 billion for the Secret Service to add security features to the ballroom President Donald Trump has been building at the White House. Read that again. Seventy-one billion dollars for the agencies Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, has accurately called “a personal paramilitary unit of the president”—and the immigration enforcement apparatus around them. One billion to harden the walls of the room where the architects of this oppressive system will raise glasses to one another.

What can be done? The odds are against stopping the bill outright—but the procedural fight is already producing results. One lever is the Byrd Rule, a 1985 Senate procedure that bars reconciliation bills from including provisions whose policy effect outweighs their budget effect, or that fall outside the relevant committee’s jurisdiction. The pre-floor adjudication is called the Byrd Bath, and it is the minority’s most powerful tool against a reconciliation bill. Last week, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that core sections of the bill—including most of the Customs and Border Protection funding and a provision that would undermine Flores Settlement protections for unaccompanied immigrant children—violate the Byrd Rule. Over the weekend, she ruled that the $1 billion in ballroom security money does too.

Beyond Byrd Rule challenges, Democrats can force costly amendment votes during the vote-a-rama (the marathon amendment voting that follows the 24-hour debate clock), refuse the unanimous consent agreements that would compress the procedure, and use every floor hour to make this vote painful for those who cast it. Democrats plan to use those amendments to tie the package to the unauthorized Iran war and the ballroom—putting Republicans on record on all three at once. Whether they will is a question worth asking—directly, by phone, in volume—of every Democratic senator before the floor vote. It is also worth asking the two Republican senators who voted against the budget resolution last month, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky, to hold the line on the substantive vote. And it is worth asking Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—who chairs Appropriations and is in the fight of her political life for reelection this November—whether she wants the vote her constituents remember in October to be a vote for this.

Gregory Bovino, the Commander-at-Large stands around the scene where ICE agents fatally shoot a woman earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, on January 7, 2026. (Photo by Christopher Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The House, where the bill must also pass, offers Republicans almost no margin for error. With one of the thinnest majorities in recent memory and several seats currently vacant, a small number of Republican defections—if Democrats hold together—would be enough to sink the bill.

The members worth calling are not only the obvious ones—the moderates and Latino-district Republicans whose constituents are already being targeted by the agencies this bill funds—but the Democrats whose offices need to hear, the same thing they heard from voters in January and February: that this is intolerable, that the silence of decent people in the face of it is intolerable, that the elected representative who does not, in this moment, expend every iota of political capital available to them is not in fact representing anyone whose vote they should expect to receive again.

This is what is happening: an agency whose officer shot a poet through her windshield is about to receive an appropriation of historic size, through a process designed to insulate the appropriation from democratic accountability, in a bill that also funds a ballroom. There is a way to oppose it. The way requires phone calls and every other form of direct action. They have to start now.

Call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your senators and your representative. Tell them to vote no, and to use every procedural tool available—e.g. Byrd Rule challenges, vote-a-rama amendments, refusal of unanimous consent—to slow, shape, and defeat this bill. Tell them this: funding the agencies that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without reform, without accountability, on a track designed to escape consent, is not something you will forget at the next election.

A delayed shipment of medication does not make headlines.

A generator failing in a maternity ward is not breaking news.

A woman rationing insulin or postponing prenatal care is not framed as political violence.

And yet, from Iran to Gaza, these are the quiet consequences of policies described in distant capitals as “pressure,” “security,” and “strategy.”

Whether through sanctions or siege, the mechanism is different, but the message is the same: Women’s health is negotiable.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement born out of Iran has captured global attention. Women in Iran are disproportionately affected by the intensity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with stricter restrictions on their dress, behavior, and livelihoods. The Iran sanctions regime, beginning in 1979 following the US Embassy crisis, refers to the network of international economic, trade, and financial restrictions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Part of these sanctions include limitations surrounding medicine and medical devices. In sanctions like those imposed on Iran, governments often default to a “humanitarian exemption.” Medical supplies can still be sold to Iran. Food and basic goods are allowed. The policy is framed as not harming ordinary people. So, while sanctions on Iran formally include humanitarian exemptions for food and medicine, these protections often collapse in practice. Banks refuse transactions, suppliers withdraw, and supply chains falter, leaving critical treatments technically permitted but effectively out of reach. Women are disproportionately affected due to their reproductive needs. While sanctions did not create gender inequality in Iran, they have intensified existing inequities in access to contraception, abortion-related care, and maternal care.

In Palestine, the long-term occupation and ongoing genocide have had their own implications for women’s health. Movement restrictions due to blockades delay care. The bombing of hospitals creates infrastructure damage, preventing people from accessing treatment within the Gaza Strip, leaving the healthcare system severely overburdened. Women in Gaza are deprived of sexual and reproductive health services and sanitary products. Women have been documented giving birth in cars, in tents, and on the side of the road. Young girls have reported using pieces of tents as menstrual cloth.

Rob Nixon describes the concept of slow violence in the context of environmental justice. The parallel to women’s health here is direct. Slow violence is gradual, invisible, and normalized. It is not dramatic like war headlines, but it is equally destructive. It is a long-term erosion of health and dignity.

Policies presented as “strategic” or “necessary” produce predictable civilian harm. This damage is not coincidental or accidental, but structurally foreseeable. In Iran, sanctions limit access to medicines and equipment. In Palestine, specifically Gaza, blockade and military conditions restrict healthcare infrastructure and mobility. The common thread is not just genderized violence; it is the collapse of mobility, supply chains, and legal access to care, with women’s reproductive health among the clearest casualties.

We should reject the notion that this harm is unavoidable and that no one is at fault. Policymakers are aware of these outcomes. Reports, data, and firsthand coverage document these consequences, yet the policies continue.

Official reports from the United Nations have documented the severe consequences of maternal malnutrition and food insecurity on infant and maternal health in Gaza. These conditions increase the risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, including low birth weight, premature delivery, and heightened neonatal and maternal mortality. Bombs kill people, but policy kills people too.

In Iran, internet access has been heavily restricted, resulting in limited and delayed reporting from within the country. It is important to recognize that the absence of coverage does not mean events are not occurring, but rather that information is being constrained by disrupted communications and censorship.

Predictable harm that continues becomes accepted harm. Whether through sanctions or siege, the mechanism is different, but the message is the same: Women’s health is negotiable.

Global attention is uneven and politicized, where some women’s suffering is amplified while others' is minimized or justified. There is complexity here. The task is not to reduce the rights of some women, but to uplift those who are actively pushed down. Politicians and policymakers use distant language such as “targeted sanctions” to make decisions sound precise and controlled, masking widespread civilian impact and distancing themselves from bodily consequences. The rhetoric gap remains. The reality persists. There is no true humanitarian exception.

These harms are ongoing and documented. Slow violence becomes background noise that we learn to live with. Women are often lost in this conversation despite their disproportionate burden. Their suffering is not always visible or measurable in geopolitical analysis.

If these outcomes are predictable, the question is not whether harm is occurring, but why it is so easily explained away. In reframing what is considered violence, we must account for all consequences, intended and “unintended,” because in practice they become indistinguishable. Societal acceptance of women as collateral damage should be challenged and dismantled, beginning with the recognition that no woman’s suffering is lesser than another.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Two teenage attackers fatally shot three men at a mosque in San Diego, California, in a suspected hate crime, before taking their own lives. Police were already on the hunt for the two when the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego began, and they found three victims with gunshot wounds outside the front of the building. Officers found the suspects – aged 17 and 18 – dead of self-inflicted wounds in a vehicle blocks away from the mosque.

• Iran has made a new proposal for a deal to end the war, with Donald Trump claiming he had postponed new military strikes so talks could continue. But there has been no sign of a breakthrough in the stalled negotiations.

•  Brian Morrissey, the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, quit in the wake of the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that could soon make payments to Trump’s political allies.

•  Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to host his “old friend” Vladimir Putin less than a week after Donald Trump’s ​high-profile visit, as Beijing seeks to project itself as a stable and predictable power in a world shaken by trade tensions, wars and an energy crisis.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

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The nuclear power industry is currently promoting designs for small modular reactors, or SMRs, that will supposedly be cheaper, safer, and faster to build than older nuclear power plants. Bill Gates and Amazon are investing in the technology. Moreover, some environmentalists, including Mark Lynas and Bill McKibben, support SMRs in the hope that they can lower carbon emissions. And, according to polls, far more Americans now approve of the development of nuclear energy than was the case just a decade or two ago.

This year, the world has been plunged into a global energy crisis: With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, nearly a fifth of world oil shipments have been held up, with economic impacts likely to reverberate for months or years. World leaders are suddenly desperate for energy alternatives, and are turning to solar, coal, and nuclear. At the same time, electricity demand for data centers is exploding, and builders of those centers hope to use SMRs to power artificial intelligence (AI).

In short, it looks like a great moment for the nuclear industry.

Yet Indigenous peoples, technology critics, and old-school environmentalists still oppose nukes—even in new, highly touted forms. I agree with their critiques. In this article, we’ll look at the current nuclear revival and see why it may end up being a zombie attack.

Nuclear Renaissance?

Before looking at SMRs specifically, it’s helpful to understand the status of the nuclear industry in more general terms. The industry’s potential resurgence comes after three decades in the doldrums following the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Today, roughly 440 nuclear power plants, spread across 30 countries and with a combined net capacity of around 400 gigawatts (GW), provide about 10% of the world’s electricity.

If you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.

The US, which has the largest number of plants of any country (96), is seeing a slow phaseout of old reactors (average age 44 years), but has commissioned three new ones during the last decade. China is now operating 60 reactors, with up to 40 others under construction. India is likewise hoping to grow its nuclear industry rapidly and is experimenting with fast breeder reactors. Globally, the International Energy Agency forecasts total nuclear power capacity to grow to over 700 GW by 2050, and small modular reactors are expected to make up a significant share of this growth. A year ago, the Trump administration unveiled an ambitious nuclear strategy that includes a goal to quadruple the United States’ nuclear capacity by 2050, with SMRs playing a key role.

The principal drivers of renewed interest in nuclear power are climate change (globally), the Trump administration (in the US), tech companies’ voracious demand for electricity, and Asian nations’ hunger for more industrial power. Most nations want to limit their carbon emissions, and the main low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels are solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear. Solar and wind are intermittent (“variable”) sources, requiring energy storage to align electricity supply with demand. Hydro has limited potential for growth. That leaves nuclear power, which has the advantage of being reliable and steady, and has possibilities for expansion.

If it’s helpful to understand why the industry is growing again, it’s just as important to know the reasons for its long period of dormancy:

• Cost: Nuclear power plants are complex and expensive, employing technology that’s internationally regulated due to concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons. Despite over 80 years of the industry’s development, nuclear plants still take a long time to build and are often plagued with cost overruns.
• Fuel: Uranium, the fuel for nearly all existing nuclear power plants, is a depleting nonrenewable resource, and supplies are running short. Uranium mining is a dirty, expensive process, and mine closures, mostly due to resource depletion, are expected to lead to fuel shortfalls by 2035. While geologists have identified more uranium resources, opening new mines will entail further environmental destruction and harm to human communities, of which the uranium mining industry already has a grim history.
• Waste: Despite decades of research, the global nuclear industry still has found no good place to put the 300,000 tons of nuclear waste—as well as 480,000 tons of depleted uranium in the US alone—that it has produced in the last 80+ years.
• Safety: While nuclear accidents are relatively rare, they can be devastating and expensive when they occur. The Fukushima disaster of 2011 resulted in direct cleanup costs of up to $180 billion as of 2016, but the damage still has not been completely contained, and indirect costs to human health have been estimated at half a trillion dollars. Further, nuclear power technology is still tied to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.
• Water Issues: Nearly all nuclear power plants use water as a coolant and are highly vulnerable to droughts and floods. Droughts reduce the availability of water for cooling, while floods (nuclear plants are generally built next to rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water) damage safety infrastructure and risk contaminating water sources.

If the nuclear industry can overcome its historic obstacles, a door is open. According to the industry, small modular reactors are the main way forward.

SMRs: Promise or Hype?

The main arguments for SMRs are that they would be cheaper and faster to build than conventional power plants; that they would be safer; and, being smaller, that they could be installed to power remote towns or data centers. The idea is to build components in a centralized factory and then assemble those components at power generation sites.

“Small” is defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less. While most existing nuclear plants are in the one-gigawatt (1,000 MW) range, some proposed SMRs are 20 megawatts or less; these are called “micro” reactors.

For the most part, SMRs are still at the design stage. China has one SMR under construction. In the United States, TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, has received a permit to build a 345-megawatt (not exactly “small,” but close) sodium-cooled reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Clearly it is possible to get funding and approval for these new-generation power plants. The big question is, can SMRs deliver on their promises to overcome the historic drawbacks of conventional nuclear power?

• Cost: SMRs will only be cheaper to build if large numbers are ordered; the first prototypes may be even more costly than conventional plants. Meanwhile, construction costs per MW of capacity will likely be higher, and operating costs are largely unknown until real-world data can be collected. The cost of electricity from SMRs is therefore also yet-to-be-determined, but preliminary estimates put it much higher than solar or wind.
• Fuel: Most proposed SMRs use uranium, but some designs on the drawing boards would use depleted uranium or thorium as fuels (see below). For now, however, the uranium fuel constraint looming over the nuclear industry remains in place. SMRs also won’t use their fuel more efficiently than conventional reactors, despite some claims to the contrary.
• Uranium From Seawater: The supply limits of uranium could be greatly expanded by harvesting it from seawater, where the potential resource is enormous—albeit at a concentration of about 3.3 parts per billion. The total oceanic uranium resource is estimated at 4.5 billion tons, over 500 times all identified land-based uranium resources. However, extracting the uranium will take a lot of energy: The best existing technology using absorbent materials will offer an energy return on energy invested (ERoEI) of about 4:1, which is lower than the ERoEI for solar, wind, hydro, fossil fuels, or conventional uranium mining.
• Waste: Some proposed SMR designs would be breeder reactors that could get rid of depleted uranium or even nuclear waste by using them as fuels—but this technology has faced significant challenges (see below). Otherwise, SMRs will do nothing to solve, and may actually worsen, the nuclear waste dilemma.
• Safety: SMRs are designed to be safer than conventional nuclear plants, using passive, gravity-driven cooling systems that don’t require electricity or human intervention to shut down. However, their overall safety is controversial. There is still no real-world data to support the industry’s promises. And having lots of smaller nuclear plants dotted across the landscape could make it easier for nuclear materials to end up in the hands of bad actors. The resilience of SMRs in the face of more frequent and more severe natural disasters is also controversial; a 2021 study concluded that storms, droughts, and higher ambient temperatures linked to climate change are likely to pose operational risks to all nuclear power plants.

The biggest remaining advantages of SMRs are the speed with which they could be deployed once the manufacturing infrastructure is in place, and the prospect of providing non-grid-tied dedicated power sources for data centers.

What About Further Technological Advances?

When confronted with the limits of one technology, nuclear advocates often shift the conversation to another. However, close examination usually shows that each technological “solution” has its own problems:

• Fast-Breeder Reactors: If nuclear fuel is scarce, why not develop fast breeders, which produce more nuclear fuel than they consume? Currently, Russia operates two fast breeders and India’s first one reached criticality in late April. China has a fast-breeder reactor for research. The US, France, and Japan operated breeders in the past but have shut down research along these lines due to high capital and operational costs, safety risks related to sodium coolant, and nuclear proliferation concerns.

• Alternative Cooling Systems: Water-cooled reactors (a category that includes nearly all existing commercial nuclear plants) pose risks of loss-of-coolant accidents due to pipe breaks, high-pressure operation failures, age-related component deterioration, and earthquakes or other natural disasters. The industry’s solution: Use sodium or helium as a coolant. Unfortunately, sodium is highly chemically reactive and ignites upon contact with air and reacts explosively with water, while helium is a depleting non-renewable resource that is becoming economically scarce at a rapid rate.
• Thorium Reactors: If uranium is scarce and might lead to weapons proliferation, why not use more abundant thorium? China already has an experimental two-megawatt thorium reactor in the Gobi Desert. However, thorium reactors have steep development costs and produce a highly radioactive byproduct, uranium-232, which decays into isotopes that emit penetrating gamma rays, making fuel handling and maintenance more hazardous and costly. Also, thorium reactors require a “driver” fuel: Thorium-232 is fertile, not fissile, meaning it needs a different radioactive fuel (like uranium or plutonium) to initiate the chain reaction. Therefore, proliferation concerns remain.

Currently, there is little real-world data regarding these “new” nuclear technologies, even though all have been discussed or experimented with for decades. The nuclear industry hasn’t actually solved its many dilemmas, and the current nuclear renaissance isn’t being driven by novel solutions so much as by the rapid worsening of society’s energy-related problems, primarily climate change: World leaders are now so desperate for reliable low-carbon energy sources that they are willing to overlook substantial risks, if only the nuclear industry will put a shiny gloss on its latest iteration of products. And leaders of the tech industry, keenly aware of the soaring electricity demand from AI, are even more desperate for ways to power the exponential growth of their companies without risking a backlash from the rest of society, which may suffer from higher electricity prices or shortages.

If Not SMRs, Then What?

Nuclear power is a product of high-tech modern industrialism. The proponents of nuclear power assume—and nuclear reactors rely on—global supply chains, uninterrupted grid power, reliable water resources, and functioning political systems. The future that’s unfolding around us is a polycrisis in which supply chains, grid power, water, weather, and politics-as-usual are all threatened. In these unfolding circumstances, the only solutions that make sense are ones that are small-scale, local, low-risk, and nature based.

What to do about carbon emissions? Yes, we need to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources—but these should be as low-tech as possible, and we should aim to reduce overall energy usage.

What to do about AI data centers? That’s easy: Don’t build them. We are rushing headlong into an AI-managed future without an adequate understanding of what AI is, does, or is likely to do in the future. Besides, AI appears to be perhaps the biggest investment bubble in history.

Most political and economic leaders have taken the attitude that we must go to any possible lengths to save industrial modernity. But industrial modernity is the essence of our problem: It is a crisis-generating machine—and one that, prior to its inevitable self-destruction, is creating enormous wealth for a small minority of people, while entrapping everyone else in dreary systems of employment, payment, debt, dependency, and distraction that leave little time for reflection on the futility of it all.

Moreover, SMRs will do nothing to solve our immediate global energy crisis. The oil shortages that are already sweeping over the world in the wake of the US-Iran war cannot, in most cases, be offset with electricity—at least not right away. While electrification is a good interim energy strategy for gradually winding down modernity with minimal casualties, it’s one that will take time, and some things will be hard or impossible to meaningfully electrify—including heavy manufacturing and air travel. Meanwhile, the world needs gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel now; SMRs will take decades to deploy.

The opinion you hold about SMRs will have a lot to do with your general attitude toward technology. If you think humanity’s fate and future rest with high tech (including AI and advanced rockets to enable colonization of other planets), then you’re almost guaranteed to believe that SMRs will help us get there. But if you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.

Once we see why industrial modernity is unsustainable, the most important question becomes: What is a viable exit strategy? On our way out the door of modernity and back toward simplicity, we need to minimize the creation of new problems and relearn nature’s elegant solutions. When our priorities are thus reoriented, nuclear power makes no sense.

On May 7, the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature passed new redistricting maps that dismantled the Memphis-based 9th District and split the city’s 63% Black population across three conservative, white-majority districts:

This hyper-partisan and blatantly racist gerrymander will have devastating effects for Memphians. Here, I’ll focus on one: the city’s struggles against AI data centers.

Memphis serves as the headquarters of xAI’s “Colossus” facilities. The Elon Musk-owned company brags that Colossus 1 is “the world’s biggest AI supercomputer.” It is the power source behind X-Twitter’s Grok, the deep-fake generating, misinformation superspreading chatbot.

The massive data center lies one mile away from Boxtown—a neighborhood in South Memphis founded by formerly enslaved Black people in the aftermath of the Civil War. Today, 95% of its residents are Black, the median income is less than $37,000, and the poverty rate is more than 31%. Like many Black communities in the South, Boxtown has been subject to decades of environmental racism. This refers to the disproportionate exposure of communities of colors to toxic waste, pollution, and other environmental hazards.

That is, of course, the entire point of this gerrymander: to render Memphis’ Black vote politically irrelevant; to undermine the power of Black communities to band together to fight against a common struggle.

Including Colossus 1, more than 17 polluting facilities are in or near Boxtown. This includes: an oil refinery, a steel mill, a wastewater treatment center, a gas-burning power plant (which burned coal from 1959 to 2018), and an abandoned military base designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a contaminated site.

This has had devastating effects on the health and well-being of Boxtown’s residents. Cancer rates are four times higher than the national advantage. Shelby county, which includes Boxtown, has an “F” rating in air quality for ground-level ozone (smog) from the American Lung Association. It also has the highest rate of children hospitalized for asthma across the entire state.

Colossus 1 worsens these problems. The Southern Environmental Law Center reports that xAI is deploying at least 35 methane gas turbines to power the data center. This is “far more than previously known and more than the company has submitted permit applications for.” These turbines emit enormous quantities of smog-forming pollutants, soot, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and formaldehyde, which are tied to increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, health problems, and various kinds of cancer.

Under Tennessee’s new congressional map, Boxtown is shoved into the state’s 5th Congressional District. This is Rep. Andrew Ogles’ (R-Tenn.) district. Ogles decries “climate tyranny” and the “woke energy elitists.” He advocates for returning “to producing and exporting American oil and natural gas, restoring the drilling and pipeline developments that [President] Biden blocked, and pursuing rational, common sense energy policies.”

Such policies include repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal investment in clean energy and climate action, as well as dismantling the Electric Vehicle Working Group, which offers recommendations regarding the development, adoption, and integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into the country’s transportation and energy systems. He also co-sponsored a joint resolution challenging the Biden administration’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0,” which sought to significantly cut emissions from coal and gas-burning power plants.

With regards to AI and data centers, his concerns are solely about national security. Ogles remarks, “If a major data center is attacked, disrupted, or taken offline, the consequences can reach far beyond one company or one sector.” In a hearing on advanced technologies and cybersecurity, he notes that AI is “now woven into how Federal, State, and local governments operate, how intelligence is collected and analyzed, how critical infrastructure functions, and how American companies compete in a global economy.” He continues, protecting these technologies and crucial infrastructure is vital for ensuring America’s “prosperity for years to come” and “our role as the, quite frankly, sole superpower.”

Ogles’s anti-environmentalist, pro-AI politics does not represent the interests and desires of the people of Boxtown. Yet, unfortunately, he is the representative that Tennessee state legislators elected for them. To make matters worse, because of the Supreme Court, Boxtown’s situation will be far from unique.

xAI’s Colossus 2 became fully operational in 2026. This data center, which is larger than Colossus 1, is located in Whitehaven—another predominately Black and poor South Memphis neighborhood.

Like Boxtown, Whitehaven is in Shelby County. However, under the new gerrymandered map, it is part of the state’s newly reconfigured 9th District. Its current representative, Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.), is among the most consistent advocates for protecting the environment and public health. However, in light of the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Memphians, Cohen has decided not to run for reelection.

Whitehaven’s future is in serious jeopardy. Minutes after the Tennessee General Assembly approved the state’s gerrymander, Tennessee state Sen. Brent Taylor (R-31) announced his candidacy for the representative seat.

Taylor praises xAI as “a great asset for Memphis.” When asked about the environmental concerns raised by residents, he responded: Tthose “environmental concerns predate xAI’s arrival in Memphis and the efforts to address them thus far seem to be misguided.” He explains: “The way I would address the concerns is not to attempt to close xAI or browbeat them to leave Memphis, but I would engage with them and local government to enter into conversations about potential buyout of nearby homes… This would seem to be a much more constructive way to address the environmental concerns of the neighbors.”

He praises how “xAI has worked to overcome every environmental concern raised.” This includes using “water that has been trucked in” to cool its systems (which is contributing to more pollution), and “purchasing a decommissioned energy plant in nearby Mississippi to generate a portion of their own energy.”

That Mississippi site is in Southaven, 5 miles away from Whitehaven. It is currently the subject of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuit alleging that xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without any permits.

If Taylor replaces Cohen, it is clear he would put xAI over Memphians. Given that the new 9th District spans nearly 300 miles from southern Memphis to the suburbs of Nashville, their diluted votes would be easy to ignore. That is, of course, the entire point of this gerrymander: to render Memphis’ Black vote politically irrelevant; to undermine the power of Black communities to band together to fight against a common struggle. Importantly, Boxtown and Whitehaven—communities that are less than six miles apart—are now burdened with having to secure two congressional seats to have their voices and interests represented.

Similar redistricting efforts are being pushed by Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Like Memphis, Black and poor communities in those states are also under threat by AI data centers. This includes: the recently green-lit Project Marvel in Bessemer, Alabama; the 20 data centers being planned across southern Fulton County in Georgia; a $27 billion data center being built by Meta in Richland Parish in Louisiana; and a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields being planned for the Walterboro area in South Carolina. These are just a few of the more than 3,000 operational data centers across the US.

The South’s Black communities are being disenfranchised by their state legislators and poisoned by AI data centers—a lethal combination that strips them of their political voice, while subjecting them to a slow death.

In both instances, their rights, health, and livelihoods are jeopardized by bad faith appeals to “progress.” On the one hand, the Supreme Court justifies dismantling the Voting Right Act because of the “great strides [made] in ending entrenched racial discrimination” across the US and “particularly in the South.” Here, decades of hard-won social progress become the pretext for erasing the Black vote.

On the other hand, Elon Musk touts that, as AI and robotics develop, “Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now.” Here, the promise of progress and a richer, healthier future becomes the pretext for callously exposing the most vulnerable communities to the most harmful toxins.

The path forward will be difficult, but two things are clear: We must put an end to these partisan and racist gerrymanderings. We must put a moratorium on AI data centers. Just as we cannot allow elected officials to steal our votes, we cannot permit a handful of tech companies to sacrifice our bodies for their profits. Now is the time to fight back—to defend the progress that we have made as a nation; to defend the vulnerable and give voice to those who are being silenced; and to bring about the future that we desire for ourselves.

As the Memphis-born civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin Hooks put it: “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”

“Hip hip, hypocrisy! Hip hip, hypocrisy!” My teenage son pumped his fist in the air. I can’t remember the chain of conversation that ultimately produced this sardonic version of “hip hip, hooray!”, but the phrase has quickly become a way to get each other to smile or self-reflect, and it often leads to a bout of shared laughter. But recently, this chant has also allowed me to reflect on the fraught crossroads of my homeland and my emerging life’s work; specifically, the troubling hypocrisy of the United States’ recent actions on two interconnected global issues—forced migration and war.

I grew up in small-town Virginia, in a family that nurtured an honorable form of gratitude-based patriotism. As a doctoral student who studies refugee issues and forced migration, I have long been proud of the United States’ global leadership in refugee resettlement (while also believing that we should do more to support refugees). From the 1980s to early 2000s, the US routinelyresettled more refugees annually than all other nations combined. While this began to shift following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there were only four years between 2002 and 2022 in which the US did not resettle the most refugees of any country in the world, coming in second to Canada in each of those four years. In 2023, our nation welcomed more than double the number of refugees resettled the previous year, and in 2024, we resettled over 100,000 refugees for the first time in 30 years. But unfortunately, US resettlement took an abrupt turn in 2025.

In an executive order issued on January 20th, 2025—the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term—the Trump presidency announced the suspension of the US refugee resettlement program. Another executive order followed on February 7, identifying South African Afrikaners as a group worthy of resettlement despite unverified claims of race-based persecution and misalignment with the globally recognized definition of refugeehood. Since October 2025, approximately 4,500 Afrikaners and three refugees from Afghanistan have been admitted under the US refugee resettlement program.

At the same time, our country’s leaders have waged war in the Middle East, creating “a new cycle of displacement” that continues to worsen. Whether or not you agree with the rationale behind this war, our country’s actions are increasing forced displacement on a global scale. Recent estimates project that this war has already forced up to 3.2 million Iranians and 1.3 million Lebanese citizens to flee their homes, and this number will almost certainly increase as the conflict continues. Furthermore, areas of the Middle East affected by the current war already host 24.3 million forcibly displaced people. As a scholar-in-training who cares deeply about both forced migrants and the United States, the hypocrisy of cutting off refugee resettlement domestically while acting in ways that force people to flee their homes abroad is excruciating.

The United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world.

But there’s also a double hypocrisy here, a vocal hypocrisy layered on top of this more tacit one. For years, President Trump has complained that other countries don’t pull their weight in NATO and the US shoulders an oversized portion of defense spending among the alliance. By the same logic, the US should pull our weight in supporting refugees, period—and especially when we are contributing to increases in global forced displacement. “Hip hip, hypocrisy.”

I hear you—don’t we have enough unmet needs among US citizens? Shouldn’t we fix everything in this country before we offer others permanent protection here? While there are many responses to these questions, for me the most compelling is summed up by Rabbi Sharon Braus, who maintains that “ultimately, the problem of the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”

The figures I’ve presented here are so much more than numbers—each one is a living, breathing person who has loved ones and a favorite color, and who also happens to have survived the harrowing experience of being forced to flee their home due to circumstances entirely outside of their control. Refugees are exceptionally resilient and resourceful people who contribute strength, wisdom, talent, tenacity, (and yes, taxes) to our society, helping us to address our collective needs together. Refugees are part of “we” and “our”—part of [the] “US.”

And yet, the United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world. The promise of America is not zero-sum—it is generative and generous and transformative. The American Dream I believe in includes not only those of us who were born in the US and have benefited from living here through no virtue of our own, but those who were born elsewhere and have been displaced from their home nations through no fault of their own.

As a future forced migration scholar, a deep longing for my homeland to treat refugees and other forced migrants with compassion, respect, and dignity has become a central feature of my own personal American Dream. Join me and make it an indispensable part of our collective American Dream!

Together, let’s not shy away from this needed and worthy work. Stand with me by imagining what it would be like to start over in a new place, talking about refugees and other migrants in humanizing ways, befriending a newcomer who might benefit from connection, or sharing this op-ed with a friend or loved one who might need to read it. The circle of our family grows as we expand it together, until the day we reach a full-throated “hip hip, hooray!”

Inflation, a general rise in prices, increased in April due to higher costs for energy primarily, at 40%; food; and shelter.

"The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis in April, after rising 0.9% in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.8 percent before seasonal adjustment."

Energy prices are up in no small way due to the unprovoked US-Israel war against Iran begun on February 28, 2026. That violation of international law has caused 3,468 deaths and over 26,500 injuries in Iran, according to Iranian authorities, and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

An estimated 20% of the world's petroleum passes through this route, which was open for business before the war began. Moreover, that closure is evidence of a US defeat, writes Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and Iraq War hawk who co-founded the Project for the New American Century, in The Atlantic magazine recently.

To say the impacts of the Trump tariffs on aluminum, steel, and other commodities from abroad has been chaotic understates the case.

There's another factor driving inflation, according to Dan Anthony, head of We Pay The Tariffs, a grassroots coalition of nearly 1,200 small US businesses that advocates against tariffs. “Tariffs raise prices," he said in a statement. Basically, the tariffs are part of a trade war spurring inflation.

Recall that President Donald Trump imposed tariffs, or taxes on imports from US global trading partners, on March 4, 2025. The tariff rates have increased and decreased since then. To say the impacts of the Trump tariffs on aluminum, steel, and other commodities from abroad has been chaotic understates the case.

Recent research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas agrees with Anthony's assessment of tariffs and inflation. The Fed researchers found that import-dependent businesses passing along the cost of tariffs on imports have added a full percentage point to the inflation of consumer prices. What can be done?

“There aren’t many levers the government can pull to lower prices," according to Anthony, "but permanently eliminating tariffs is one of them." That is accurate and also unlikely at least in the short term. Further, a brief look back reveals another presidential lever available, and a precedent for it, one that coincides with a past US military defeat and its role in triggering inflation.

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon, the Republican born a Quaker who later became an anti-communist crusader, subsequently dubbed "Tricky Dick” in the White House, imposed wage and price controls for 90 days. That lever froze wages and prices to fight inflation, an outcome of US deficit spending to wage war in Vietnam. The point that I am making is that presidents have battled inflation in more than one way.

In the meantime and on a related note, President Donald J. Trump might have delayed the signing of executive orders to temporarily reduce tariffs on beef imports, and back policies to increase the domestic cattle herd. The two policy aims of these proposed executive orders seem contradictory. Are they at odds with each other? What’s really going on here?

Sarah Carden is the research and policy director at Food Action. “The administration appears to be presenting this move as a way to lower beef prices for consumers while supporting domestic cattle ranchers," she said in a statement, "but we’ve already seen this approach fail. Previous import expansions from Argentina did not meaningfully reduce beef prices because the real problem is a highly consolidated meat-packing sector controlled by just a handful of dominant corporations."

Consider this. Four major meat-packers control roughly 85% of the US beef industry, according to Farm Action. This is the definition of market consolidation.

Such consolidation can and does spur higher prices. Fewer producers in the marketplace mean that they can and do avoid price competition. Why should monopoly companies with consolidated market power reduce prices if competitors do not offer lower-priced products to consumers? Why cut prices except to counter competitors' threats to grab market share and profits?

In a for-profit economic system, such a move to decrease prices absent competitive pressures to do so makes no business sense. Meanwhile at the end of the day, domestic cattle producers, some of whom make up the base of MAGA, are feeling the pain, along with US consumers and import-dependent businesses generally, coping with the impacts of inflation, tariffs, and war.

One reason why US policy in the Middle East has been so problematic is because policymakers refuse to consider its impact on the needs of Arab people. With Israel, it’s a different story. Overattentiveness to Israeli concerns coupled with the lack of sensitivity to what Arabs think about our actions has led to deep fractures between Arabs and the US and within the Arab World.

Since 2000, we’ve conducted over 50 multination opinion polls on a variety of topics. We explored Arab attitudes toward other Arabs, the US, China, Russia, Iran, and Israel. We also examined attitudes toward conflicts in the region.

It’s been over two years since we’ve polled across the Arab World, but based on what we saw developing during our two and a half decades of work, it’s clear that US policies are headed toward disaster—not only for the US and its stated goals, but also, and more importantly, for the Arab people.

What follows are some observations based on the trend lines we have culled from our surveys:

• After 9/11, President George W. Bush famously claimed, “They hate us because they hate our values.” Our 2002 polling found the opposite: Arabs liked American people, products, education, and values, but strongly disliked US policies toward the Arab world—especially regarding Palestinians. As I said during a congressional hearing on my polling: “Arabs like us and our values—what they resent is that we don’t apply those values to them.”

Bush’s Iraq war and neglect of Palestinians further lowered US ratings. They rose with President Barack Obama’s promise of change but fell when he didn’t deliver on them. Attitudes further plummeted with President Donald Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Muslim policies.

By late 2023, our last multination poll showed President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza generating even stronger negatives. To make matters worse, the complications created by President Trump’s US-Israel attacks on Iran, coupled with his assault on the very aspects of America that were respected worldwide—our universities, press freedom, and immigration policy—make it likely that Arabs are now finding it difficult to even like American values.

• Over the years, we have often polled on favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward China and the US. During this time, while opinions toward the US ebbed and flowed, attitudes toward China remained steady. By the end of 2023, for the first time, China’s ratings were competitive with those of the US in areas that had previously been the US’s strong suits—education and doing business. And in several Arab countries, China was seen as a more reliable partner than the US.

• Arab attitudes toward Iran have followed a consistent pattern. When Iran was perceived to be under attack for resisting the US and the West, it found a strong base of support among many Arabs. But when Iran directly meddled in Arab countries, opinion turned against it. And when its ally Hezbollah turned its weapons against its domestic Lebanese opponents and joined Iran in direct involvement in Syria’s civil war, majorities in most Arab countries turned against Iran.

Following this trajectory, one can reasonably assume that the US-Israel attacks on Iran coupled with Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and Israel’s boasts of becoming the regional power that was “defending Western civilization against barbarism,” won Iran some sympathy in Arab public opinion. The same might be true for the recent US-Israel attacks on Iran, except that instead of seeking Arab support, Iran deliberately attacked its Arab Gulf neighbors—the very countries that had been trying to restore relationships with the meddlesome Islamic Republic. This, no doubt, turned opinion among many in the Gulf against Iran. It is uncertain, however, how much intra-Arab friction this is causing in the rest of Arab world.

• Support for Palestinians has long been a central Arab concern. They showed little interest in making peace with Israel—even in those countries that had signed peace agreements with Israel. As Israeli repression of Palestinians intensified and the fractured and visionless Palestinian leadership failed to inspire, Arab opinion began to change. In late 2019, we asked Arabs if they felt it would be desirable to make peace with Israel, even if Israel didn’t accept the terms of the Arab Peace Initiative. When significant numbers said that it might be desirable, we asked why. The responses varied but many told us that it might help end the violence and give Arabs more leverage to convince Israel to grant Palestinian rights.

We repeated this question at the end of September 2023 and had completed about half of the questionnaires by October 7, the date of the Hamas attack. We interrupted the survey and only went back a few weeks later to complete it. The changes in the results were significant. Before October 7, responses were similar to the 2019 poll, but by the end of October, in reaction to the intensity of Israel’s assault on Gaza, attitudes shifted dramatically against any attempt to deal with Israel. Three years later, one can reasonably assume this hasn’t changed.

In 2024 and 2025, on three occasions, we polled in the Occupied Lands. Results were disturbing. Israeli policy had worked to discredit the Palestinian Authority, weakening its ability to govern. Opinion in the West Bank had turned against the PA, with respondents saying they preferred Hamas. In Gaza, we found that Hamas had fallen into deep disfavor, with a strong plurality of Gazans preferring the PA. In both the West Bank and Gaza there was little support for US, Israeli, or international governance. They preferred Palestinian unity.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to lay waste to Gaza and is running roughshod over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, further angering Palestinians and discrediting the PA. All the while Israel rejects any role for the PA in Gaza. As the situation further unravels, the US ignores Palestinians’ wishes and turns a blind eye to Israeli misdeeds.

• In Lebanon, when Hezbollah was seen as resisting Israel, it found favor among many Lebanese, especially since Israel frequently bombed Lebanon and occupied a swatch of its land from the late 1970s to 2000. However, when in 2008, Hezbollah turned its weapons against the state and in 2019 against the popular revolt, Lebanese opinion divided along sectarian lines. Our polling before 2023 showed that most Lebanese wanted Hezbollah disarmed or under the control of the Lebanese army. But Israel’s recent devastating assault on Lebanon; its bombing throughout the country; its forced expulsion of 1 million Lebanese from the south; its destruction of homes, farmlands, and entire villages; and explicit intention to annex a large portion of the country has no doubt restored some support for Hezbollah and exacerbated internal sectarian tensions, while turning more Lebanese against Israel and the US.

Seen in this light, US efforts to pressure the Lebanese government to forcibly disarm Hezbollah and make a peace agreement with Israel is dangerous for Lebanon’s stability.

***

In each instance, it is America’s lack of attentiveness to Arab sensitivities and needs that contributes to making a bad situation even worse—further embittering Arabs toward the US, deepening fissures within the Arab World, while fostering every-expanding Israeli impunity.

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner. Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hard-liners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness. In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.

Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.

First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon. At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures. Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use. The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.

Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.

Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.

This article was republished with permission from Trita Parsi's newsletter

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Hey, I always suspected that Donald Trump and I, having both grown up in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, had something in common. Now, I know just what it is — his boyhood love for the 1950s TV program Victory at Sea. (“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he asked reporters in January while talking about the new “Trump class” battleships he wants to build. “What a great thing that is to watch!”) I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of us possibly with our fathers, on what were undoubtedly black-and-white TVs. Of course, his father built barracks and garden apartments for the Navy during World War II, while my father, at age 35 and unlikely to be drafted, volunteered for the military the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up a major in the U.S. Air Force fighting the Japanese in Burma. (He seemed to have made it back just in time for my birth in July 1944.)

Oh, and there was another difference between us, come to think of it. Only one of us, possibly inspired by that very TV show, has the power to order that a fleet of new battleships — a “golden fleet,” no less (“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”), including one to be named the USS Defiant — be constructed to fulfill his childhood war-making fantasies. And only one of us has the power as well to fire any Navy secretary, most recently John Phelan, who doesn’t seem to be working hard enough to make the president’s version of Victory at Sea into our global reality. As President Trump put it at one point, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” (Hey, the Trump fleet is going to be a stunner! Count on it!)

And oh (yet again), as it turned out, only one of us would have the power late in life to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state, try to claim Greenland as the property of this country, prepare for a possible future war with Cuba, blow ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, launch staggering numbers of airstrikes in (yes, can you believe it?) Somalia — well, of course you can’t because, with the exception of Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com, those bombings are barely covered in this country — as well as at one point in Nigeria, launch a genuine war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and… well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples to cite. In truth, it’s probably not even worth trying to imagine what countries might prove to be next for the “President of Peace,” as he’s distinctly unpredictable on such matters (on just about any matter, in fact).

Trump Reigns (But Doesn’t Rain) Supreme

Whew! I’m already out of breath! But who wouldn’t be since we’re all now living in his world? And given what the “peace president” has done so far, the second time around, I suspect that everything I just brought up will be no more than the start of a future list that could prove all too breathtaking — and possibly even planet-breaking. (Yes, I’m out of breath just from writing all of that and I know perfectly well that I haven’t even managed to cover it all.)

Oh, and I’m so sorry! I almost forgot to mention one more Trumpian set of acts of war, undoubtedly by far the most important and devastating of all: those he’s launched against planet Earth itself. I mean, we’re talking about the president who has done his — and this word couldn’t be more appropriate — damnedest to shut down wind farms of any sort, cut solar energy projects, and expand the burning of fossil fuels in just about every way imaginable, including by opening up 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of U.S. coastal waters to further oil and natural gas drilling.

New York Times reporter Maxine Jocelow caught this Trumpian moment on Planet Earth perfectly in a recent piece on the “triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington” of climate-change denial. She summed up the Trumpian viewpoint this way: “Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.”

And in its own way, that also sums up “our” president and his crew to a T in their search for Victory (with a capital V) — a word spelled d-e-f-e-a-t in the age of Trump — on Planet Earth. After all, in an address at the U.N. last year, he labeled climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and insisted that, “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” And his White House even released a document labeled “Ending the Green New Scam,” promising that “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”

There really can’t be any question that this president is distinctly intent on nothing less than making war not just on specific nations like Iran, or on ships in the Caribbean Sea, or on anyone in or near the Strait of Hormuz, but on this very planet in every way imaginable.

It should be stunning, in fact, that on planet Earth at this moment such madness quite literally reigns (but unfortunately doesn’t rain) supreme in Washington, D.C., and will do so for (again literally) ever hotter years (at least two and a half of them) to come.

Defeat on Land, at Sea, and Anywhere Else Imaginable

Once upon a time, such wildly futuristic madness would have been left to the most dystopian of science-fiction novels — and undoubtedly not very popular ones at that, since such a plot and such a president would (once upon a time) have seemed far too unrealistic even for fiction. But now, thanks to President Donald J. Trump, the United States of America, in addition to all its other warring acts of recent months, is distinctly at war — and there’s no other adequate word for it — with Planet Earth (at least as a habitable place for future versions of us).

Someday, if anyone is still making TV series (since by then they’ll all undoubtedly be AI-created), I wonder if there will be one that young people, along with their parents, would be able to catch called not Defeat at Sea, but something far larger and more definitive like Defeat on Planet Earth. After all, we now have a president of the United States who seems ready not just to make war on Iran, but on more or less everything.

Hey, when the president’s military crew recently fired — and given what they’re doing to this planet of ours, they’re giving that word new meaning — Secretary of the Navy Phelan, it made perfect sense (at least in the Trumpian version of our world), given that he didn’t seem to be producing that Trumpian fleet in double (triple? quadruple?) time. Hey (again!), it’s strange that Phelan didn’t grasp the situation he was in, since it really wasn’t all that complicated. The only thing the president wanted from him was the most beautiful fleet of Trumpian naval vessels imaginable tomorrow.

And hey (yet again!!), since the president and I have so much in common from our childhoods, let me try to make some predictions about our Trumpian future on this beleaguered planet of ours. Let’s start with the fact — and it is a fact — that, despite everything Trump and crew are trying to do when it comes to destroying green energy in the United States, as the Guardian reported recently, “In March, the U.S. generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did via [natural] gas, the first time clean energy has surpassed the planet-heating fossil fuel for a full month nationally, according to data from the Ember thinktank.” (And mind you, despite Donald Trump and crew, 2025 was indeed a record year for green energy growth in this country.)

And yes, green energy production has already become cheaper than new oil and gas production and, even with a president who couldn’t be clearer — “We aren’t allowing any windmills to go up and we don’t want the solar panels. Fossil fuel is the thing that works” — it’s still clear where we humans are headed in energy terms. Just not, of course, fast enough.

No, none of what we’re doing when it comes to clean energy is (as yet) faintly enough. And Trump and crew, while working as hard as they can to launch a thoroughly useless fleet of naval vessels, have also been doing their damnedest to heat this planet to the boiling point. He has literally decided to transform himself into a hell-on-earth president at a moment when renewable energy has beaten out coal as the primary source of energy globally for the first time ever. And, of course, one other thing “our” president has done is to functionally hand over the production and sale of green energy (and the equipment to make it) to that rising power on planet Earth, China, which has already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into such energy development (though it also continues to pour greenhouse gases from coal, natural gas, and oil into the atmosphere in a record fashion).

And don’t forget something else. With their endless nightmarish decisions on green energy and climate change, Trump and crew are, among other things, in the process of all too literally reordering this planet of ours. Though you won’t hear much about it in the media, we are all watching in real time (whether we faintly realize it or not) what not so long ago was the greatest power in history, the United States, turning the future (imperial and otherwise) over to China.

Someday, if any of us are around to see it, we are likely to witness what could prove to be a historic trade-off of great powers. After all, in these years, Donald Trump has put remarkable energy (literally and symbolically) into taking down the planet’s greatest power, the United States. (Of course, if it hadn’t already been heading down, he would never have been elected in the first place.)

And China, while remaining distinctly quiet in this otherwise all-too-loud Trumpian moment, has been building what could prove to be a near-monopolistic control over our planetary future by becoming THE country that produces green energy (or, more importantly, the equipment to make it) for the rest of the planet in a record fashion.

Donald Trump, of course, is distinctly intent on making war on planet Earth (including, by recently making war on Iran, pouring yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere). War, after all, may be the world’s most efficient producer of such gases and the U.S. military, even in peacetime (which, unlike during his first term in office, is no longer Trump time), remains the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on this planet. In the process, he’s doing his damnedest to take both his country and the planet down with him.

All too sadly, if he’s successful, American children of tomorrow, when they turn on their machines (whatever they may be), could witness not Victory, but Defeat at Sea, on Land, and Anywhere Else You Might Imagine.

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)

Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.

Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.

Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.

The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.

In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:

“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.

As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

Former generations of Republican politicians had principles, beliefs, ideals. They thought the federal government too large. Or believed it spent too much money. Or was too lenient on criminals. Or was too eager to support the civil rights of Black people. Or any number of issues with which Democrats disagreed.

Today’s Republican Party no longer has any purpose other than achieving whatever Trump wants, which is making Trump richer and more powerful. The GOP is now Trump’s; it is no longer America’s.

Today’s Republican voters, by contrast, are showing increasing frustration with Trump. Those who think of themselves as traditional Republicans don’t like Trump’s expansive use of federal power. Those who are fiscally conservative, like Thomas Massie, are upset by Trump’s wanton spending, tax cuts, and soaring debt. “America-first” Republican voters are concerned about Trump’s intrusions into Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. And they want the rest of the Epstein files released.

Yet for elected Republicans, survival now depends on personal loyalty to Trump.

All of which raises a fundamental question: Has the official Republican Party — now nearly purged of anyone willing to reflect the concerns of Republican voters rather than Trump’s will — become complicit in Trump’s criminality? Is it aiding and abetting Trump’s lawlessness?

A case can be made that the official Republican Party is indeed complicit.

For Trump, the first and most basic sign of loyalty to him — and therefore survival as a politician in Trump’s Republican Party — is a willingness to publicly proclaim as truth what we know to be two big lies: that Trump won the 2020 election, and that he did not seek to overturn its results by illegal means. As a result, almost all congressional Republicans are now election deniers.

Trump has also made it clear that loyalty to him bars any criticism of his unlawful immigration dragnet, which has so far resulted in the murders of three U.S. citizens by ICE agents and the detention and deportation, without a hearing, of people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

To Trump, loyalty requires full support of his foreign policy — including the abduction of a foreign leader, an undeclared war with Iran, and the killing on the high seas of people only suspected of smuggling drugs, in violation of international law.

Loyalty also demands unquestioned support for other of his lawless acts — using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, building a mammoth White House ballroom, issuing no-bid contracts to his friends, promoting his family’s businesses and implementing policies favorable to them, accepting gifts from foreign powers, and defying court orders.

Is it fair to conclude from all of this that today’s official Republican Party — the people who are in office because Trump has put them there, or who maintain their office because they back whatever Trump wants — has in effect become a criminal organization, analogous to the mafia or a drug cartel, whose members are blindly loyal to their criminal bosses?