Amidst the tragifarce of President Donald Trump’s apparently off-the-top-of-his-head war on Iran may lie a silver lining for the 2028 presidential election—a silver lining that comes with two big ifs. One, of course, is the if that goes with everything involved with the race: If there is a fair election. The if specific to the hoped-for silver lining is if there is a candidate willing and able to make use of it.

Ever since Gallup started public opinion polls, when it has come to questions of war, they’ve shown the American public favoring every one at the start—until now, with Donald Trump launching the first war to encounter immediate objection from a majority of the American public. A man who exults in doing things that no president has ever done before has certainly done it up proud with this one—ending a more than 85-year stretch when the American people gave the government the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of every military action, no matter how much they may have come to regret it later.

War. What Is It Good For?

Not surprisingly, the Second World War—the first one ever polled—enjoyed the broadest support, with 97% backing the declaration of war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And all these years later, World War II is still widely thought of as the “good war.” Not so much with the war that was the next most broadly supported at the outset—the Afghanistan War then enjoyed 92% support from a population that could never have imagined it dragging on for two decades. Eighty-two percent supported the first George Bush’s Iraq War, now remembered as the Gulf War. And even though Americans would eventually turn against all three of them, the (Second) Iraq War, Korean War, and Vietnam War started out with76%, 75%, and 65% support respectively. (Public polling only on the Vietnam War began in 1965, as America started coming to grips with the fact that we were actually in a war there.)

Much less remembered conflicts that also found initial approval included Bush's 1989 Panama invasion, with 82%favorable; Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War bombing of Yugoslavia, at 58 percent; and 53 percent for Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. In fact, the only American military operation not enjoying majority support from the start was Obama’s 2011 bombing of Libya, favored by only 47 percent. But even then, only 37 percent outright opposed it—You others perhaps not even considering us to be at war (a stance that the Administration would subsequently adopt in arguing that it did not qualify as war under the War Powers Act.)

So far as Trump’s current Iran War, Gallup encountered only 34 percent immediate support. This then, would seem to qualify as what political scientists might call, “a really big deal.” Despite a solid history of uniting behind the flag first and asking questions later, the American people have decided to believe their own eyes, seeing a president aid and abet the Israeli assassination a foreign head of state; bomb a population half a world away, threatening that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again;" and deploy the American military seemingly at whim, with little apparent concern as to cause or effect—all this in a war that he has several times claimed to have already won. In short, for the first time in living memory, the American people have concluded that a Commander-in-Chief—and his Department of War—has betrayed their trust. If there’s been a better opportunity in the entire post-World War II era to chart a course away from our permanent war footing, I can’t think of it. That is, if we can find the right candidate.

The Right Candidate?

We can probably safely assume that all 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will have opposed the Iran War and will in some sense claim title to any “silver lining” that may come with public rejection of that war. Not all, however, will be able to credibly argue that they offer the prospect of any real change in this arena, should they become president. After all, opposing a war entered into by “the other party’s” president may not be the norm, but it is common enough; opposing “your own party’s” president’s war is, however, quite another thing. That type of opposition, which would seem reasonable evidence of intent to buck the everlasting-war trend, is virtually non-existent among Republicans and rare among Democrats. For the latter, their foreign policy stances during the Biden Administration would logically seem more telling as to how they might operate in the White House.

The obvious touchstone in this realm is Israel’s Gaza War, continuous through both Biden and Trump Administrations. The questions for many Democratic primary voters will probably run along the lines of: “When did you recognize that the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attrocity—1,200 Israelis killed, 250 hostages—had become a campaign of destruction of just the sort that Trump threatened Iran with? And what did you do when you came to that realization—assuming you ever did?”

From that vantage point, the field currently in the 2028 presidential discussion mix seems to run the full gamut of plausibly in regard to taking advantage of any Iran War “silver lining.” On the less plausible end, we have Kamala Harris. The most recent Democratic nominee, now said to be considering another run, comes with a Biden Administration record that seems to offer scant ground to argue that a vote for her would be a vote for a significant foreign policy shift: As Vice President she supported arming the Israeli military through the end of her term, as the estimated Palestinian death toll reached 48,000 (out of a current total of 74,000), with the overwhelming majority being civilian, and a substantial portion children.

At the other end, we have Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who says she hasn’t ruled out a presidential run. By late October, 2023, with the Palestinian death toll already at 7,000, Ocasio-Cortez was one of only nine House Democrats both sponsoring an immediate cease fire resolution and voting against support of continued Israeli military action. At the moment, the only other currently chatted-about potential candidate to stake out a firm anti-Gaza War position that dates back to the Democratic Biden administration is Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

While these wars, and foreign policy in general, may not command center stage in the next presidential election, it’s been generally recognized that—Pete Hegseth notwithstanding—one facet of Trump’s appeal to some has been the belief that he was less committed to continual overseas wars than his recent predecessors—of both parties. While he arguably was no worse than they during his first term, his Iran War has shattered any illusion of that—both for him and the Republican Party that has backed him all the way. The challenge will be to produce a Democratic nominee who can credibly appeal to the antiwar sentiment within the Trump electorate. Although we are in no position to say exactly how the presidential primary field will ultimately shake out, the current snapshot does give us a sense of the hard reckoning we will have make as to which candidate would actually pursue altering our course of continuous conflict and spiraling military expenditure.

Just a Small Part

Foreign wars are, of course, neither the only, nor even the principal cause of Donald Trump’s disapproval ratings now running over 60 percent. So, given that no prominent Republican has bucked Trump in any significant way during his second Administration – and politically survived to talk about it—any imaginable 2028 Republican presidential candidate will likely have plenty of unpopular positions to talk their way around. All of which may eventually make it conventional wisdom that the race for the White House is the Democrats’ to lose—again if we assume a fair election.

But these foreign policy questions do provide an early, clear example of the type of choices that lie in front of us. More broadly, will the next Democratic presidential campaign be largely confined to—rightly—attacking the Republican Party for its support of a corrupt and stupid administration, on the assumption that simply being not-Trump will be good enough? Or will it attempt to deliver a candidate capable of credibly addressing the growing economic inequality, the unaffordabilty of healthcare, the concentration of corporate power, and the host of other issues closer to home that have sent a significant part of the American working class looking for love in all the wrong places?

The biggest Medicaid fight today isn't happening in Congress—it's happening inside the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Now, a year after H.R. 1’s passage (the 2025 federal reconciliation bill enacting significant cuts and changes to Medicaid), CMS’ recently issued interim final rule (IFR) implementing the law’s work-reporting requirements in the program narrows the very protections Congress included to prevent vulnerable people nationwide from losing the health coverage they need.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that more than 5 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because of these requirements. Already a conservative estimate as other organizations estimated over 10 million people are at risk of losing coverage, the number will surely be higher given CMS' IFR goes beyond the statutory language of the law.

The clearest example of this is the IFR's treatment of the medically frail exemption.

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Congress recognized that people living with complex medical conditions, disabilities, and chronic illnesses, including substance use disorder (SUD), should be protected from burdensome work-reporting requirements. As such, H.R. 1 specifically includes “medically frail” individuals among those exempt from the new requirements.

Yet CMS has added a new hurdle, putting millions of eligible Americans at dire risk of losing access to essential healthcare.

Under the IFR, people with SUD and other qualifying health conditions must also demonstrate that their condition "significantly impairs" their ability to satisfy the requirement before they can qualify for the exemption. This additional standard does not appear in the statute and will inevitably reduce the number of people who can secure the exemption.

For people living with SUD, the consequences could be profound.

While SUD is a chronic but treatable medical condition, pervasive stigma and discriminatory barriers have led to fewer than 1 in 5 people who need treatment actually receiving it. Amid persistent addiction and overdose crises, we should be making it easier for people to access the services and supports they need to become and stay well, not erecting additional barriers to lifesaving care.

Moreover, while CMS' rule relies heavily on Medicaid claims data and provider documentation to identify individuals who qualify as medically frail, the administration’s approach overlooks the reality that many people with SUD have never entered treatment due to the above-mentioned stigma and discrimination. Requiring additional documentation will not "motivate" people to seek care, as CMS suggests. Instead, it creates yet another barrier for people who are already among the hardest to reach.

When people are deprived of Medicaid access, their ability to engage in preventive care, behavioral health services, medications, and treatment that keep chronic conditions under control is also lost. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how untreated health conditions can not just impede a person’s capacity to work but quickly lead to costly emergency services.

These are not only personal tragedies—they are costly public policy failures.

Taking away health coverage does not eliminate health needs. It just shifts and raises costs while undermining public health and safety. Access to healthcare is precisely what enables many people to work, care for their families, and be productive community members, so why are we erecting so many barriers?

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Last month, both our organizations, along with many other leading advocates nationwide, explicitly articulated these concerns and submitted comments urging the agency to reverse course and faithfully reinforce the protections Congress included in the law. While CMS' public comment period on the IFR is now closed, all those who share the same perspective can still take action by calling their members of Congress to share their concerns about the impact of H.R. 1 and specifically, how the administration is planning to implement the law.

A year after H.R. 1’s passage, the question is no longer simply about what Congress enacted—it is whether the regulations that make the law real will preserve purposeful protections or quietly erode them through administrative action.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• At least one in four NFL players will probably get chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Should football be banned? At least 215 of 878 players who died from 2016 to 2021 — 24.5% — had CTE. The actual prevalence could be far higher. This does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Studies have shown that the rate of CTE in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero. Professional football’s rate of brain disease is an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace: asbestos workers and coal miners. Symptoms include memory loss, confusion and uncharacteristic mood swings, decreases in executive function and increases in erratic and impulsive behavior, including addiction.

Should we ban other sports with high rates of CTE, like boxing, ice hockey, rugby, soccer and wrestling?

• Huge mudslides sweep through villages in Nepal and Tibet, and China’s Gyirong port. Hundreds are missing and feared dead. Nepal’s foreign minister said an earthquake triggered a large landslide, which in turn blocked a river, sending a torrent of water downstream. Could Central Asia’s “Sword of Damocles”—Lake Sarez—be next?

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly flew to Russia, where he met with his FSB intelligence counterparts. The topic of discussion, however, was probably not the Russo-Ukrainian War.

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The post Should Football Be Banned? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A year ago we warned that President Donald Trump had a concerted strategy to undermine the midterm elections.

Here’s news you can use: That effort is failing so far. For every move, there’s a countermove from voting rights groups, local and state governments, and more. In November, we should be able to have elections that are free, fair, and secure. But it will take a lot of work between now and then.

We saw that for sure this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to upend mail voting. That is the way 1 in 3 Americans vote. Trump purported to order the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver lawfully cast ballots unless the voter is on a list—which doesn’t exist yet—created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots. It’s absurd. And, no surprise, it’s illegal.

Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

Earlier this summer, in a lawsuit brought by 23 states, a federal court blocked the executive order in part of the country. The judge also blocked the order nationwide in a lawsuit the Brennan Center and others brought on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.

On August 24, the US Supreme Court jumped into the states’ case. It issued an unsigned order holding that the states did not yet have legal standing to sue. In particular, it concluded the states had not suffered an injury, because the Postal Service had not implemented the policy. In other words, the trial court had ruled too early.

This made big news, understandably, but those headlines confused matters a bit.

This was a procedural vote that let the Trump administration continue working on its plan to have the Postal Service decide who receives a ballot.

As the court itself explained, “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”

And in fact, late last Friday, under pressure from the administration, the Postal Service published a “Final Rule” to implement Trump’s scheme. The agency explained that it had the power to set rules for mail ballot delivery because ballots are like “animal remains” or “replica explosives” and deserve special treatment.

Both the states’ case and the case brought by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups remain ongoing. The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling is not the final word. Our attorneys are assessing next steps, and things will no doubt move quickly in this complex legal back-and-forth.

But a few things are as true today as they were before the court’s order.

This executive order is still illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution’s Elections Clause is clear, as courts have ruled over and over: States run elections. Congress has a legitimate role in passing national legislation and can override states. You know who has no role in elections, under the Constitution? The president.

And the Supreme Court? This is the “shadow docket” at work. Rather than letting the legal process unfold, the justices jumped into the litigation to help Trump. Justices like Samuel Alito bristle at the ominous phrase “shadow docket” and complain it should be called an “emergency” order instead. Here, the only “emergency” would be that Trump could not move forward with his push to restrict voting, just weeks before an election.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that, while the order is unsigned, it was backed by the Republican-appointed justices. Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote dissents. Trump has repeatedly said, as he wrote in June about the SAVE Act, that without voting restrictions, “The Republican Party will never win another Election.” The Supreme Court, already at record lows in public trust, will further bleed credibility if it is seen as a partisan electoral actor.

And as for voters—what should we know?

This legal fracas is happening so close to the election that, however it turns out, it is highly unlikely that changes will affect voting this year. Federal law requires that the first mail ballots be sent to military voters starting September 4. We cannot let chaos engulf our elections.

All of which means that, in one sense, this is a lot of noise and manufactured chaos. Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

You know who knows that? Someone who voted by mail this month from his house in Mar-a-Lago: Donald Trump.

His campaign to undermine the midterm elections is losing. The only way it wins is if people stay home.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home. This is welcome news after hearing of its abhorrent conditions. Yet, the situation lived by sailors and Marines aboard the carrier over the last nine months, the continued threats that troops still deployed in this unpopular war face, and the unpatriotic negligence both the president and members of his own party have demonstrated paint a grim, but unsurprising picture of how servicemembers are treated under this administration.

Donald Trump is the most hostile president to troops and veterans in modern American history. Look no further than his comments about the service members who have been at sea for more than 250 days—that they have not been deployed “nearly long enough”—or House Republicans parroting that line back to reporters. That’s how this administration treats its military members, and it should be a wake-up call for every American.

Yes, the USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home, but with the USS George Washington replacing it, how many more troops must suffer until we end this forever war? That is why veterans of Common Defense, like myself, are demanding a full-scale congressional investigation into this case. More than 4,000 of our members and their families agree: This can never happen again, and the war against Iran needs to end.

The war these carriers are supporting has already killed at least 18 US service members and wounded roughly 500 more, alongside thousands of Iranian civilians killed. As an Iraq veteran, I’ve come to understand the costs of war begin long before the first shot is fired. Diplomacy is what keeps the world safe, and certainly not bombs that pad shareholder value at the expense of service members, and military families, who have everything to lose.

If a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react?

The USS Lincoln is carrying 5,000 sailors and Marines, 5,000 souls who have touched communities far and wide throughout our nation. They’ve played in our little leagues, attended school dances, walked college campuses, and have full lives waiting for them at home. Whatever reason each of them had for raising their right hand, that oath reflects a rare kind of commitment—to a mission, and to a country they intend to keep giving back to. War is the price many military families pay, and veterans carry its scars, visible and invisible, long after they take off the uniform. It is time for this administration to uphold its end of that bargain.

Instead, this White House has gutted the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); sent troops to a highly unpopular, illegal, unjust war; and used the military as a political prop. None of that improves troops’ or veterans’ lives. What would actually improve their lives? Ending the war, investigating what happened on the USS Lincoln, expanding the VA instead of hollowing it out, and making sure military and working families can actually thrive.

As the USS Lincoln returns home, it’s worth remembering what most Americans already sense: War doesn’t accomplish what makes a life worth living. It doesn’t keep your family safe, cover your healthcare, give you a good-paying job, or protect the freedoms our Constitution promises. That’s why most Americans oppose the war with Iran. Yet, we’re all paying for it—in a cost of living already at historic highs, in gas prices, and in the roughly $1,000 per household experts say Trump’s decision to go to war has cost every one of us. The more hawkish members of his party will argue that this is part of the mission: to spread freedom and to contain Iran’s power. So ask them if a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react? We already know the answer. These very politicians would be first in line, demanding that America intervene. What our service members experienced on the USS Lincoln is abysmal and should infuriate every single American whose tax dollars are funding Donald Trump’s war.

Let’s not forget this was a choice made by Donald Trump’s hostile administration and enabled by its congressional allies. Lawmakers must demand a full-scale investigation into what happened aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln so it never happens again. Veterans and military families see clearly how failed leaders and politicians who carry every whim of the president’s disastrous war put our troops in danger. We must demand an investigation now—and we won’t stop until this country ends its forever wars.

Most people probably think that global warming will cause problems for their children and grandchildren, but not for themselves. I used to assume that those of us who are older need not worry.

But recent personal experience suggests that global warming can lead to financial disaster in the very short run. Even those of us in our mid 80s are not immune.

Several months ago, our house caught fire, forcing us into temporary accommodations. Only one room suffered major damage, but smoke permeated the whole house, requiring extensive remediation and destroying lots of furniture and clothing.

Fortunately, we had good insurance, which included coverage for contents and temporary housing as well as the cost of the repairs themselves.

If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Temporary housing is not cheap. We probably ran up $20,000 in hotel bills during the nearly two months before we could find more adequate housing. And temporary furnished housing itself is not cheap, easily amounting to thousands of dollars a month.

To state the obvious, owning a house without insuring it is highly risky. But what does this fact have to do with global warming?

Global warming has been setting off an increasing number of floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes, damaging or destroying more and more homes. Up until now typical homes have been insured, which—as in our own case—has protected their owners from financial ruin.

But the money insurance companies pay for repairs or replacements has to be obtained through the premiums charged to homeowners. When the percentage of homes damaged by extreme weather increases, the insurance companies must increase what they charge for their coverage. If they do not do this, they will not be able to stay in business.

As a result, it is getting much more expensive to insure houses in many states, especially in California and some southeastern states. But the higher insurance premiums are making it more and more difficult for people to afford property insurance in the first place.

Some people may be forced to get no insurance, in effect self-insuring themselves. Since houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are often the principal assets of families, those without insurance risk being wiped out financially.

And people cannot escape from this problem by renting a place to live instead of buying one. Landlords from whom people rent apartments and houses must increase rents in order to pay for the insurance they need.

Anybody following the news cannot help but be aware that floods, heat domes, hurricanes, and tornadoes are becoming more frequent and more devastating. And although climate has been always changing, the size and speed of the current changes cannot be explained away as just more of the same historical pattern.

A lot of future global heating is already “baked into” the world by carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil, and gas during the last 200 years. But there is no reason why the human race should continue fouling its own nest now that we understand why climate change is accelerating.

At some point, people are going to stop falling for the propaganda emitted by coal, oil, and gas corporations; by political leaders these companies have bought; and by media organizations like Fox News catering to these wealthy and powerful interests.

Fortunately, new solar energy facilities are now cheaper than new atomic, coal, oil, or gas generators. And solar’s local intermittency, the principal weakness cited by anti-green spin doctors, will disappear when the already expanding distribution systems are united into a single worldwide high voltage direct current (HVDC) grid.

In recent decades we have seen similar movements to worldwide systems with telephones and computer networks. The technical and economic advantages of a worldwide electrical grid are so huge that it will be built.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote about nine different “levels” of hell in "Inferno," the first part of his long narrative poem, The Divine Comedy. If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Hell has generally been considered a hot place. The longer these folks are allowed to continue putting their own interests over the general welfare, the more Earth itself may become like hell for its inhabitants.

"Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give…"—United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 1959

There were Iraqi children before Gaza, before Hind. Before Iran and the Minab School bombing. Iraqi children dying by the thousands, as many as 500,000 as a result of US-supported UN economic sanctions and wars in Iraq. Governments expressed “concern.” International scholars and lawyers called it a genocide. Former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, called it a price worth paying.

Who are we; what universe is this where one writes again and again in support of children, of “the child” as if they were some political cause. It’s the new abnormal, where everyday brings news of children suffering, injured and dying, in Iraq, in Ukraine, and Sudan. In Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, in Iran and Lebanon to name a few.

The child is trapped in a car, shot dead; they are buried under the rubble of their bombed-out house, of their school or the hospital where they have just been born. They’re wounded, missing eyes, arms, and legs; missing parents and siblings, aunts and uncles.They’re missing all the little as well as the significant “stuff” that is, that should be, a child's life. They’re sick and there are no doctors or medicines; they’re hungry and there’s no food or clean water. There’s no school, no mosque, no church, and no more neighborhood. Out of a house, in a tent or on the street, forcibly moved from here to there. What sort of world is this, what kind of culture. What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?

We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues.

While instinct—some call it maternal—helps insure the future of a species, caring about and for one’s own offspring doesn’t necessarily translate to caring about all children. This enormous responsibility has been taken up by governments and international organizations; children need guaranteed special protections because they are “…innocent, vulnerable, and dependent.” The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1990), the most widely endorsed human rights document in history, committed world leaders to giving children the “first call” on human and financial resources and know-how to address critical issues such as: poverty, education, child and maternal health, and protection during armed conflicts. With great fanfare, they reaffirmed these aspirations, calling for a world “fit” for children in 2002 at the UN Special Session on Children, the largest ever gathering for a UN Special Session.

The disconnect of words to actions and to the actual situation for children in 2002, as the Special Session convened, was not lost on those of us who cared about Iraq and Iraqi children. An estimated half million had died. The alarming increase in birth defects and childhood cancers was stressing a medical system under siege. The overall health of Iraqi children as measured by the Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) “…the single most significant indicator of the state of a nation’s children…” had declined by 160% in the decade since the CRC. It was the largest decline in well-being by far for children in any country in the world. And this, like the overall destruction of Iraq and Iraqi society was brought on by war and sustained by the severe US-supported UN economic sanctions imposed by the very agency pledging to take responsibility for the world’s children.

International law failed to protect Iraqi children; it has failed Palestinian children for decades despite their well-documented fragility under Israeli occupation. And now, we watch as the already precarious “child” in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank suffers unimaginable atrocities.“Atrocity in the ordinary sense of the term, as evoking simply the shock and horror that most would feel in the face of such enormous and gratuitous human damage; a circumstance in which we would be hard-pressed not to disparage the justifications” (Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, 2010).

UN and human rights organizations wring their hands and issue condemnations. Some do not call this a genocide. The majority that might help to end this catastrophe has stood by—including women, mothers, and global health and human rights organizations—and watched the occupation and genocide kill and maim thousands and thousands of Palestinian children and their extended families. Watched as the very country is rendered uninhabitable. Stood silently by as the very ones seeking to protect Palestinian children are treated and prosecuted as terrorists.

The moving promises of UN declarations and their aspirations on behalf of children have come to nothing. We’re being subjected to a form of global violence Joy Gordon warned about, that of "a single nation," or in today’s world, two nations—the US and Israel—"hijacking an institution of international governance, substituting their own agenda in place of the interests and will of the international community.” This should not stand.

According to the Ministry of Health, 73,386 Palestinians—including 21,000 children—were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 174,256 were injured between October 7, 2023 and August 9, 2026. This includes 1,258 fatalities and 4,295 injuries between the announcement of a ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025 and August 9, 2026. We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues. I’m at a loss. What can be said that hasn’t been said, or written that hasn’t been written. What poem or investigative article, what personal narrative could possibly bring an end to this carnage.

In 1915 Henry James declared, “The war has used up words, they have weakened, they have deteriorated…” Dr. Salma Al-Hadad, head of the pediatric oncology unit at Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital in Baghdad since 1992, shared his view. After years of interviews revealing the struggles to save increasing numbers of patients with increasingly difficult cancers without even the most basic medicines and technology, she went silent. “The very hard times I’ve experienced over these years,” she wrote sometime in a mid-2000 email, “have rendered me silent. I find no comment.”

The moral universe owes a deep debt to the people of Palestine who have not gone silent, or ceased to document the atrocities against them. They pay for this every day with their lives, and in many cases the lives of other family members. I urge myself on. We have to repay that debt by breaking the silence even when we feel there is nothing more to say. Silence cannot be an option for those who are suffering under the weight of the atrocities being committed against children.

"All people,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.” If we truly care about “the child,” we have to increase our efforts on their behalf.

Many professional women complain that they can’t find “quality men,” which means those who are financially and professionally successful. Seventy years into feminism, however, female advancement has largely come at the expense of men, who cannot reasonably be expected to continue to be dominant providers as women advance in a zero-sum workplace.

The post No Love for the Defeated appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For once, let me write about something I know almost literally (and rest assured that I don’t mean literarily) nothing about. This ancient fellow—I’m now 82 years old and, like all of us, growing older by the day—is thinking—and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that, even at my age, I can still think less than artificially—about artificial intelligence, which has, of course, been reduced to AI by those who suspect that they already know all too much about it.

What brought this up for me? Well, one of my political favorites (or maybe he’s just a favorite, plain and simple), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has called for a moratorium on data center construction across this country and only recently took on AI directly, writing a letter to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, asking them: “Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development... It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

Of course, I couldn’t agree more with him, though I wonder if it isn’t already too late.

Let me start by telling you this: I made a decision that I would never purposely use AI in my lifetime. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all too aware that, if I last another decade or so, I will undoubtedly be in a fully AI-ified world, whatever that might prove to mean. And I already know that, if I ask my computer to look for something online for me, AI instantly lends me a hand (if you can even say that AI has a hand), responding to my desires, whether I like it or not, with a pile of information and an “AI Overview,” and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about that.

AI already uses energy as if there were—gulp!—no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).

Obviously, I have what I do (and don’t) know about this ever-changing world of ours on my mind right now. As a start, if you think about it for a moment (I mean really think about it), just calling it artificial intelligence is weirder than anyone seems to let on. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word “artificial” above all else as “made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural” and, of course, as it notes, it can also mean “fake.” In fact, what about renaming it Unnatural Machine Intelligence (UMI), or Strange Machine Intelligence (SMI), or even Eerie Machine Intelligence (EMI)? Or what about just Ificial Intelligence (II), since this old guy at least can’t see any “art” in it at all?

And as you might imagine, there’s still a fair amount that I can figure out for myself with only the slightest helping hand from AI (if at all). I don’t need artificial intelligence, for instance, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that Donald Trump is the most disturbingly artificial president in our history, period. And it’s all too clear to me that, whatever else AI may do (or undo), its data centers are going to use energy in a staggering fashion and so, undoubtedly, continue to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet in a big-time fashion.

In short (or do I mean in all too long?), artificial intelligence is guaranteed to add immeasurably to the Anything But Artificial Heat (ABAH) on this already Distinctly Overheating Planetary Environment (DOPE) of ours. After all, we already know that this July was the hottest month (no, not just the hottest July, but the hottest month!) in the recorded history of weather in the United States. In fact, as far as we know, as long as humans have been on this continent, ever.

And, honestly, how intelligent is a result like that, artificially or otherwise? Truly, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that that’s anything but good news for my children and grandchildren, no less everyone else on this world of—I was going to say “ours,” but I can’t help wondering whether that’s faintly accurate anymore. Maybe I have to start saying, “of AI’s.” And, of course, above all else, AI already uses energy as if there were—gulp!—no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).

And of course (yes, again!), if I needed any confirmation of such fears, all I’d have to do is turn to You Know Who (and crew). After all, as Tony Romm wrote at The New York Times recently:

To the administration, AI can do little wrong. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump and his top aides have dismissed the suggestion that widespread automation could carry real negative consequences for families, businesses, and the broader US economy. Even as the electorate grows uneasy about the technology—and the data centers that power it—the president has only hardened in his view that AI will supercharge everything from medical research to military action.

After all, Trump has already claimed that AI is “bigger than anybody ever thought possible.” And he’s also said, “The way you look at AI, whoever wins AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.”

Our DAUI President

As Prabhjote Gill pointed out at Yahoo-Finance recently, our president is AI all the way (to the bank). “The way you look at AI,” he’s said, “whoever wins, AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.” And on the subject of this country and AI, he just couldn’t be prouder: “So, we are leading with AI on China. Nobody thought that was possible. The reason was energy. China can create unbelievable amounts of energy, and they use coal, and they use oil, and gas, and they make a lot of windmills, but they don’t use too many windmills because they’re smart. Because wind is a disaster.”

Yep, in case you didn’t realize it, while wind (power) may be a disaster for our president, the same isn’t true of AI. In fact, I’m anything but surprised to learn that the people handling his money have evidently already invested it in the AI universe in a significant fashion. No surprise there, since he’s already claimed that, in the end, it could prove “bigger than oil.” (And according to a headline at Yahoo-Finance, “President Donald Trump owns roughly $5M in surging AI stock”—and in case you wondered, that’s five million dollars!)

And to put AI in a Trumpian context, once upon a time, for our windy president, you couldn’t have gotten bigger than oil.

And believe me, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence to know that it’s anything but good news that (as I mentioned) this July was indeed the hottest month ever recorded in this country. And that our all too windy president, while milling around at the White House or, for that matter, at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, is clearly exhibiting his own remarkable version of DAUI when it comes to this planet. No, that isn’t a Hawaiian word but—in case you’re not up on your acronyms—it is short (at least in my own personal dictionary) for Distinctly Artificial UnIntelligence.

Perhaps the whole phenomenon should indeed be renamed Ificial Intelligence or II. After all, there can be no question, with Donald Trump in the White House, that the art part of it is distinctly from another era, given his own version of Artifishy Intelligence.

Now, excuse me if I take a moment to myself just to think (anything but artificially) about this ever-stranger world of ours.

There is a remarkably simple test for whether the AI boom is actually as economically transformative as its boosters say it is: Make the companies building it pay their own damn electricity bill.

Not just the meter at the server warehouse. The whole bill.

If a hyperscale data center requires a new power plant, transmission line, substation, distribution upgrade, water system, or grid-reliability backstop, put that cost on the project that caused it. If the economics still work, excellent. Build it. If they don't, then the public has just learned something extremely important about the business model.

Pennsylvania moved sharply in that direction on August 18. Gov. Josh Shapiro's new executive order requires data-center developers seeking state permits to meet Responsible Infrastructure Development standards. Among them: Developers must cover the cost of new generation, transmission, distribution, and related infrastructure needed for their projects without shifting those costs to households and businesses.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

The order also requires local approval, ends the use of nondisclosure agreements for data-center projects, demands energy and water reporting, and ties state tax benefits to compliance. Pennsylvania's special counsel for energy affordability is also supposed to work with utility regulators so data centers, rather than ordinary customers, absorb the cost of reliability measures created by their demand.

This shouldn't be treated as an anti-AI policy. It's a pro-accounting policy.

The AI industry has been allowed to narrate electricity as though it were weather: Demand is "surging," capacity is "tight," the grid is "strained," and somehow billions of dollars of wires, turbines, transformers, and land just need to appear around the technology.

But demand isn't weather. Somebody made a decision.

And there is another reason to force the accounting now: A lot of the supposed demand isn't load yet. It's proposals. Pennsylvania says more than 100 data-center projects have approached the state, while the governor says only a handful currently look viable enough to have the necessary permits. Across the country, regulators have worried about speculative projects showing up in multiple interconnection queues and inflating forecasts before anybody has proved the customer, financing, or power plan is real.

That matters because utilities build decades-long assets against forecasts. If a speculative 500-megawatt project gets counted as inevitable, everybody can end up paying for infrastructure long after the spreadsheet that justified it has disappeared.

So add another rule: Prove you're real before the public builds around you. Put down financial security. Identify the end user. Show the power source. Accept a minimum bill that covers infrastructure reserved for you. And if you walk away, you don't get to leave a transformer-shaped hole in everybody else's rates.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in April that electricity consumption by data centers jumped 17% in 2025, while electricity use at AI-focused facilities rose even faster. Its 2026 outlook still sees total data-center consumption roughly doubling by 2030 and AI-focused consumption tripling.

In the United States, data centers accounted for roughly half of total electricity-demand growth in 2025, according to the IEA. The Department of Energy had already estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of US electricity in 2023 and could reach 6.7-12% by 2028.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about using that much power. Aluminum smelters use enormous amounts of electricity. Steel mills use enormous amounts of electricity. Electrifying transportation and heating will use enormous amounts of electricity too. A serious industrial society needs to know how to build power.

The illegitimate part begins when one customer's expansion becomes everyone else's compulsory investment.

That risk isn't theoretical. In Virginia, the world's largest data-center market, Reuters reported this month that Dominion's fuel costs have risen nearly 90% in five years as data-center growth leaves the utility more exposed to expensive wholesale electricity. Across PJM, which serves 67 million people, the grid operator is now proposing rules that would put some new data centers first in line for curtailment during shortages unless they bring adequate power with them.

Good.

If an AI company wants the upside of scale, it can own the downside of scale too.

That means at least five things.

Make large-load customers pay for the incremental grid infrastructure they cause. Require financial security so households aren't stuck with stranded assets if a project disappears. Make large-load forecasts public enough to detect speculative projects being counted multiple times. Give communities access to energy, water, and ownership information before approvals. And establish emergency curtailment rules before the emergency arrives.

This is what mature industrial policy looks like. It doesn't worship growth, and it doesn't panic about growth. It prices the actual machine.

The alternative is a familiar political trick: Call the upside private innovation and the downside public infrastructure.

No.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

If a company needs a new power plant, let it pay for the whole damn thing.

On August 18, President Donald Trump said no talks with Iran were underway or scheduled, while the US naval blockade remained in force and Tehran insisted the Strait of Hormuz would stay closed until Washington met the terms of the June interim agreement. The impasse sharpens the most consequential question surrounding Trump’s legacy: not whether he wins or loses this war, but whether he leaves behind expanded presidential power, weakened constitutional checks on war making, and a diminished commitment to a rules-based international order. A president can leave office. A war can outlive him.

That is increasingly the danger confronting the United States. Trump’s confrontation with Iran has evolved from a military campaign into a constitutional and institutional test: Can an American president initiate and sustain major hostilities without explicit congressional authorization, and can Congress still meaningfully restrain him once the fighting has begun? The answer will shape far more than the remainder of Trump’s presidency. It will establish a precedent for every administration that follows.

The central issue is therefore not simply Trump’s foreign policy. It is the emergence of unchecked presidential power in the conduct of war. The United States entered the Iran conflict without a specific congressional authorization. Since then, the administration has advanced expansive interpretations of executive authority while Congress has struggled to reassert its constitutional prerogatives. The War Powers Resolution remains an important, if imperfect, mechanism for limiting the executive branch’s ability to sustain hostilities without congressional consent.

The danger becomes particularly acute when an administration can redefine the status of a conflict without ending the underlying military posture. The War Powers framework was designed to prevent presidents from converting temporary military action into an open-ended commitment: Absent congressional authorization, the law generally requires the president to terminate the use of US armed forces after 60 days. Yet the Trump administration has challenged the idea that this statutory clock should operate as an automatic constraint on presidential authority.

If lawmakers fail to reassert their authority, Trump’s most consequential legacy may be the normalization of a presidency capable of committing the United States to war without meaningful congressional authorization and leaving later administrations to deal with the consequences.

That creates a dangerous precedent. If a president can initiate hostilities, characterize them as limited or defensive, reinterpret the statutory clock, and then continue military operations without explicit authorization, the constitutional allocation of war powers becomes increasingly theoretical. The consequences are no longer hypothetical.

Congress has repeatedly attempted to invoke its war powers over Iran. In June, the House passed a measure directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran, and the Senate later adopted it. In July, the House again approved a war-powers resolution by 214-208, while the Senate rejected its own measure, 47-49. These votes expose the political problem: Congress is being asked to choose between institutional loyalty to the presidency and constitutional loyalty to the republic. For Republican lawmakers, the choice is especially consequential. Allowing a Republican president to expand executive authority without meaningful resistance establishes powers that a future Democratic president—or another Republican—could inherit in very different circumstances.

The question, therefore, is not whether Congress likes Trump. It is whether Congress is willing to allow presidential power to become self-expanding. Trump’s legacy also extends beyond the domestic constitutional order. His approach has placed pressure on the foundations of the liberal international system: predictable alliances, institutional constraints, multilateral diplomacy, and the assumption that American power operates within rules rather than merely according to presidential preference.

The Iran conflict demonstrates the problem with extraordinary clarity. The June agreement was intended to extend a ceasefire and create a pathway toward a permanent settlement, including negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. That framework has effectively collapsed. Trump has ruled out extending it; the confrontation around the Strait of Hormuz continues; and he has threatened military action against Oman, a US partner involved in efforts surrounding the strait. A mechanism meant to create a pathway out of war has become another stage in an unresolved confrontation.

Washington has even declared that it can maintain its naval blockade of Iran indefinitely. This is how wars acquire a life of their own. Once forces are deployed, enemies mobilize, allies become involved, economic interests are affected, and political credibility becomes attached to the outcome, withdrawal grows more difficult. The president who starts the war may eventually discover that ending it is politically more dangerous than continuing it.

And the president who inherits it may discover that he has inherited not merely a conflict, but an entire strategic architecture: deployed forces, military commitments, sanctions regimes, regional alliances, adversaries with incentives to retaliate, and political expectations that make disengagement appear equivalent to defeat.

Trump may therefore leave office, but the war may remain. This is the deeper paradox of his “America First” approach. A doctrine supposedly designed to reduce unnecessary foreign entanglements can instead produce new and potentially durable ones. The more Washington relies on military coercion without a clearly defined political end state, the more difficult it becomes to determine what victory actually means—and therefore what conditions would permit the United States to leave.

The consequences for American democracy are equally serious. Democracy does not depend solely on elections. It depends on institutions capable of constraining whoever wins those elections. If Congress becomes unwilling or unable to prevent reckless escalation without congressional consent, then the constitutional system has lost one of its most important safeguards.

This is why the current confrontation should not be reduced to a partisan dispute between Democrats and Republicans. The real issue is whether the United States still believes that war is a national decision rather than a presidential prerogative. Congress must therefore make a choice that transcends Trump himself: party loyalty or constitutional patriotism.

Republican lawmakers who defend Trump’s authority today should consider what they are actually defending. They are not merely protecting the foreign policy of one president. They are helping define the permissible scope of presidential power for decades to come. Once extraordinary powers become precedent, they rarely remain confined to the circumstances in which they were created.

The United States has survived presidents with radically different visions of executive authority. What allows the constitutional system to survive them is the willingness of institutions to impose limits on presidential power. If lawmakers fail to reassert their authority, Trump’s most consequential legacy may be the normalization of a presidency capable of committing the United States to war without meaningful congressional authorization and leaving later administrations to deal with the consequences. Trump will eventually leave the White House. The precedent he creates may not.

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 ET.

Today we discuss:

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims Iran tried to kill one of his sons, but gave no details about ​when the alleged plot took place, which son was targeted or how ‌close it came to being carried out. Netanyahu’s oldest son, Yair, lives in Miami.

• The Supreme Court cleared a roadblock for Trump’s push to restrict mail-in ballots via the U.S. Postal Service, but a separate nationwide injunction keeps the rule blocked for now. The administration’s proposed rule for mail-in ballots could scramble the 2026 midterms by forcing local and state officials to adopt an untested federal system on short notice and potentially undermine confidence in U.S. elections.

• British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the U.K. will help Ukraine make its own long-range missiles by sharing classified technical information for British components. Burnham, who was in Kyiv for Ukraine’s Independence Day, said defense firm MBDA will release details on U.K.-made parts for the SCALP missile to Ukraine to help the country assemble the weapons.

LIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShow

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The post Netanyahu: “Iran Tried to Kill My Son” | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

We are breaking past heat records, but they will not stand for long. Summer heat now arrives earlier, lasts longer, spikes higher, and lands in places that never planned for it.

For the tens of millions of Americans who work outdoors, and the millions more in warehouses, kitchens, and factories without air conditioning, there is still no federal standard requiring an employer to give a worker water, shade, rest, or training on a day when the heat can kill.

Between 1992 and 2019, more than 900 workers died from heat on the job, and every year tens of thousands more are sickened or injured—farmworkers collapsing in fields, roofers baking on exposed surfaces, laundry and dollar store workers laboring in buildings that trap heat like ovens. Those official numbers are undercounts, because heat deaths are chronically underreported.

Heat illness is not a scientific mystery. Heat stroke can kill in minutes, but staying safe is mostly about staying cool, hydrated, and getting help fast when confusion or dizziness sets in.

No one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

We protect workers from ladder falls, electric shocks, even excessive noise, with clear and enforceable rules. Yet there is still no federal standard requiring employers to provide the basics on dangerously hot days.

We came close. In 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed the first-ever national heat safety standard. In 2025, the agency heard weeks of testimony from workers, doctors, unions, and employers. Then the progress on a strong rule stalled.

Now, some in Congress want to bury it for good. The House Education and the Workforce Committee recently voted to advance the Heat Workforce Standards Act, which would bar the Labor Department from finalizing or enforcing the heat rule.

This isn't a pause. It's a lock on the door, designed to stop not just this administration but any future one from protecting workers from heat. The bill's sponsor called workplace heat a problem that doesn't need solving. Easy to say when you spend every day in air conditioning. Impossible to accept when your loved one doesn't come home.

The industry groups behind the bill insist protections cost too much, the argument once made against seatbelts, hard hats, and fire exits. The numbers say otherwise. OSHA estimates a single average case of heat exhaustion costs more than $79,000 in medical bills, lost time, and lost productivity. Water and rest breaks are cheap. Hospitalizations and funerals are not.

So if Washington won't act, who will?

Investors can. Companies that get ahead of this aren't only doing right by their workers; they're managing a financial risk that shows up in turnover, litigation, and lost output. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Trillium's new guide for investors gives shareholders the questions to ask in the boardroom, and boards tend to listen when the people who own the company start asking them.

States can, and are. Seven now have heat standards, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Virginia are working to join them. Every state that acts protects its own workers now and builds the case that no one's safety should depend on their zip code.

The people facing this risk grow our food, build our homes, deliver our packages, and cook our meals. Many of them will not ask for water or a break today—afraid of retaliation, afraid of losing a shift, afraid of losing a paycheck they cannot afford to lose. No one should have to weigh a livelihood against a life. And no one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

Employers who resist these rules imagine that breaks cost them too much. They have it backward. Heat is already hurting both workers' health and their bottom line. Protections like water and rest don't subtract from a workday, they only help workers do their job.

The toll from this summer is still being counted. Every party to this—Congress, employers, investors, states—can still decide how high it goes.

On July 11, 2026, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law, making it the most significant federal housing package enacted in more than three decades. Many are celebrating the bill for “simply existing.” However, for many working-class tenants, the bill is not enough.

The 21st Century Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream, or ROAD, to Housing Act contains more than 60 provisions covering housing construction, manufactured and rural housing, homeownership, rental housing, veterans’ housing, federal program reform, and community banking. Its central strategy is to increase the housing supply by reducing regulatory barriers and encouraging state and local governments to allow more construction.

The problem is that the bill relies too heavily on private-market principles to fix a housing crisis that was largely created by the private market itself.

Where new housing construction has accelerated due to reforms like those in the bill, new development is overwhelmingly catering to the wealthy. This does little to prevent the displacement of working-class neighborhoods, as overall rents continue to climb to match what landlords hope to extract from newer residents.

“Tenants today are paying more rent than they’ve ever paid for the worst conditions they’ve ever endured, but our ultimate power is our rent.”

Everyday Americans are left facing the consequences. Rapidly rising rents, home prices, and other living expenses have made housing the single largest monthly expense for millions of American families.

These rising costs are compounded by a national shortage of 7.2 million affordable, available rental homes for extremely low-income renters. Not a single state has an adequate supply of affordable rental housing for its lowest-income renters.

Together, these conditions have created a nationwide housing crisis.

There are many reasons why this crisis persists. One is financial pressure on landlords, according to Ruthy Gourevitch, director of housing policy at Climate and Community Institute.

“In the current market context, where landlords are taking out large loans to acquire properties, they have to increase rents and cut back on maintenance to make those loan obligations,” she told Inequality.org in an interview.

Private landlords are buying and leasing in a highly speculative market. They must charge high rents to maximize profits on risky loans. The brunt of that risk is borne by tenants, according to Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenants Union Federation.

“The tenant is also the one who suffers the most when the risk starts to fall apart,” Raghuveer told Inequality.org. “That’s what’s happening right now, and this bill has nothing to do with that reality.”

When examined more closely, the ROAD Act is timid in its approach to tackling the private power that prioritizes profit over affordability. Large institutional investors were banned from purchasing single-family homes under the bill, but dominant corporate landlords in the multifamily rental market remain untouched and are still driving up rents. This bill only continues to subsidize their dominance.

The bill contains provisions that boost programs like Community Development Block Grants, enabling municipalities to finance affordable housing construction. However, these programs still result in mostly privately owned housing.

Public funds provide subsidies that feed profits to private developers and landlords. While these subsidies may start off providing affordable housing, they do not remain so in the long term, perpetuating rent instability and poor tenant protections for low-income tenants.

“Currently, the public sector plays a massive role in subsidizing private profits,” says Raghuveer. “We propose an alternative, which is that the public sector actually reclaims and owns responsibility for delivering housing.”

Profit is priority for private developers and landlords. To fight this, tenant advocates are fighting for policies that decommodify housing. Investment in publicly-owned housing can build a large supply of environmentally sustainable, high-quality housing that everyone can access, regardless of wealth or market forces.

The HOMES Act proposes one such vision for bold and broad social housing investment. It would establish a federal Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) to build, acquire, and upgrade millions of green, affordable, publicly held housing units with permanent capped rents for mixed-income tenants.

An SHDA would allow the public to buy housing from those who took out risky loans. It also ensures that public investment and rental income result in long-term, lower, capped rents and builds a revolving loan fund for further upgrades and social housing construction.

Gourevitch, along with other housing researchers and progressive organizers, has found social housing investment consistently contributes to racial and economic housing equity, while public management allows democratic control over tenant protections, rents, and amenities.

Social housing investment can also create more climate-resilient infrastructure without relying on climate-myopic private developers.

“What we see in other countries with governments that have more agency over their housing is the ability to move at the speed and scale that the crises we face demand. In Singapore or Vienna, you see the government innovating on questions of decarbonization, energy efficiency, and resilience as different climate shocks and stressors come their way,” Gourevitch explains.

Climate resiliency upgrades under private landlords may lead to rent hikes or property flipping. Instead, Gourevitch’s research has found that, “with green social housing, what we see is that because rents are capped and stay affordable over a long period of time, those energy efficiency and decarbonization investments do not translate into displacement.”

Achieving this policy vision across the United States, under these political conditions, may seem far off. Still, tenants across the country are organizing for a different vision. Tenants are fighting for immediate rights to stay in their homes. For emergency rent caps to protect tenants’ housing stability. For broader power over their homes from their landlords.

“Tenants today are paying more rent than they’ve ever paid for the worst conditions they’ve ever endured, but our ultimate power is our rent,” as Raghuveer says. “When we organize tenants as collectives, we articulate a vision for the world that looks very different from the one we live in today.”

There is no bigger con man in the United States than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Not even President Donald J. Trump.

The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at 50 years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight senators, including 22 Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment.

The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).

As is his prerogative as chief justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent.

The court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms.

Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”

In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration, Roberts authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”

In another exchange at his confirmation hearing, this time with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, Roberts sought to explain away his memos as just part of the job he had been assigned at the time rather than a reflection of his personal views, saying, “I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships [with Second Circuit Judge Fred Friendly and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist]. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the Attorney General... It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change.”

Despite young Roberts’s warnings, the 1982 amendments were passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support by a vote of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate. President Ronald Reagan quickly reversed course and signed the amendments into law on June 29, 1982. In 2006, Congress extended the VRA for another 25 years with even greater bipartisan support, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.

Once installed as the nation’s 17th chief justice, it didn’t take Roberts long to show his true colors, declaring in a 2007 majority opinion on busing in public schools (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number One) that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Two years later, in an otherwise obscure case (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder) involving the elected board of a municipal water district in Texas, he turned his attention to Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter discrimination, to obtain advance federal approval—known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Although his opinion left the sections intact, Roberts warned that unless Congress updated the formula to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance process, the Supreme Court might stop the process altogether.

In 2013, he made good on that threat. Writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Shelby County v. Holder, he invalidated the preclearance formula and effectively put an end to the process, reasoning that racism in American elections was a thing of the past and there was no longer any justification for singling out Southern states for remedial measures. Shelby led swiftly to an upsurge in restrictive voter ID laws, voting-roll purges, and limitations on mail-in balloting in Republican-led states across the country, especially in the South.

Although Roberts also declared in Shelby that Section 2 of the VRA “is permanent, [and] applies nationwide,” he returned to the attack with his 2019 majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that “political gerrymandering” claims cannot be brought in federal courts because they present nonjusticiable “political questions.” Political gerrymandering has a long history in the United States, Roberts noted, dating back to the salamander-shaped voting districts created by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 to give an advantage to his Democratic-Republican Party. “The Constitution,” Roberts argued in Rucho, “supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly” and thus provides no basis for proportional political representation. Lacking objective standards to work with, he concluded, the federal courts had no business entering the redistricting wars.

Rucho, in turn, set the stage for Callais in 2026, which put an end to claims of racial gerrymandering, the last bastion of relief from discrimination available under the VRA. Callais gave red states permission to redesign their electoral maps to eliminate “majority-minority districts” (where a minority group comprises a majority of the population) that had been created to boost the electoral power of Black and Latine voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Election law predicts that as a result of Callais, as many as 19 seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, starting with the November midterms, potentially returning the bulk of the former states of the Confederacy to virtual one-party rule.

As The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal put it in a mournful post-Callais column, “The ruling effectively ends the VRA, and with it the all too brief era of multiracial democracy in America.” And as Ari Berman added in a piece for Mother Jones, Callais may have been written by Alito, but it “represents the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts... [who] has been trying to kill the Voting Rights Act for more than 40 years.”

The severe negative reaction to Callais forced Roberts to do damage control. Addressing a judicial conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in early May, he said: “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides... I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty... We’re not simply part of the political process.”

The problem for Roberts is that his shtick just isn’t working anymore. Any lingering pretense of impartiality ended with his stunning majority opinion in 2024’s Trump v. United States, which offered the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. In addition to shielding Trump from legal accountability, the immunity ruling embraced the Reagan-era “unitary executive theory,” which posits that all executive power is concentrated in the person of the president, as a settled principle of constitutional law.

The unitary theory was on full display again in late-June opinions this term on immigration and independent agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, another 6 to 3 majority opinion written by Roberts involving the firing of a Federal Trade Commissioner, the court overturned a federal law that bars the president from firing members of the independent agencies created by Congress without just cause. In the process, Roberts overruled a precedent decision that had stood since 1935 (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States), which had upheld the contested statute.

In rulings on the immigration cases, both written by Alito and resolved 6 to 3 along party lines, the court upheld the administration’s termination of temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian nationals who were allowed to come to the United States to avoid persecution (Mullin v. Doe), and authorized the administration to revive Trump’s first-term policy denying asylum-seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the US-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado).

The immigration decisions sparked uncommonly vitriolic dissents from the court’s three liberal Justices, exposing deepening fissures on the bench. In the asylum case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the majority, writing: “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” In the TPS case, Justice Elena Kagan all but accused the majority of enabling Trump’s racism, citing the president’s public statements accusing Haitian refugees of “eating” cats and dogs, “poisoning the blood,” and saying they come from a “shithole country” and “probably have AIDS.”

The court’s racial bias was also evident in its “shadow docket,” the term given to emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and are typically resolved rapidly without full briefing and on an interim basis while litigation proceeds in lower courts. In one particularly egregious ruling (Noem v. Perdomo), the Court permitted immigration agents to detain suspected undocumented immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, location, and occupation, green-lighting unbridled racial profiling.

The shadow docket also included an emergency order permitting Alabama to reinstate a congressional map that eliminates a Black-majority district that the court had invalidated under the VRA just three years ago.

Even in the handful of major decisions the Trump administration lost this term, the cases were narrowly framed. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, with Roberts writing for a 6 to 3 majority, the court invalidated Trump’s worldwide “liberation day” tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but left the door open for more targeted duties under different statutes. Similarly, in Trump v. Cook, with Roberts writing for a 5 to 4 majority, the court temporarily barred Trump from firing a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors while her lower-court challenges continue.

Continuing the trend, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the court held that existing federal election laws do not prevent Mississippi, and by extension other states, from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days thereafter. Barrett, however, very carefully noted that her opinion did “not consider the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections” through legislation, possibly a covert nod to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that Trump has insisted Congress pass, which would outlaw nearly all mail-in voting.

The same is true for the court’s much-anticipated decision in Trump v. Barbara, on Trump’s Executive Order declaring an end to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment for the children of undocumented people. In years past, the court would have unanimously rejected Trump’s gambit. Instead, in a 5 to 4 opinion written by Roberts and joined by Barrett, the order was barely rebuffed for violating the text and history of the amendment.

Roberts may have gained a small measure of redemption with his Barbara opinion, but the court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms, including the imposition of term limits for the justices and, most far-reaching of all, for an expansion of the bench to as many as 13 members.

To accomplish any significant reforms, however, will require Democrats to stiffen their spines and to take back both houses of Congress later this year and the presidency in 2028. In the meantime, we can take heart that the long con Roberts started in 2005 has been exposed for all to see. And we can heed the call of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to remind ourselves that Roberts and his GOP confederates do not own the future of the Constitution. We do.

What if you were scrolling through job listings, and you found one that said “Assassin/Assassination Assistants”?

You’d think it was a sick joke.

“Organization with rich and powerful history, but deeply in debt and facing decline with few prospects of improvement, seeks paid assassin willing to unquestioningly injure, maim and/or kill anyone and everyone as directed, including men, women and children. Must be willing to live anywhere on earth (or outer space), perform any task indirectly or directly related to killing, for a minimum of 4-6 years (may be extended indefinitely by employer). You assume risk that some men, women and children may injure, maim or kill you (instead of you doing it to them). Base pay plus net benefits begins at approximately $50,000/year.”

Who would take a job like that?

There is a long-term trend toward lower propensity to serve—military jargon for willingness to enlist in a branch of the armed forces—from 16% of youth in 2003 to 10% in 2022. Nevertheless, 150,000 to 200,000 Americans enlist in the U.S. military annually.

They accept these crazy work conditions. Why?

Even when you consider the question from the perspective of coastal elites who conjure up an image of the typical recruit as poor, uneducated and desperate to escape the opioid-ravaged postindustrial hellscape of their hometowns in flyover land, it’s hard to see why so many people would trade away their freedom of movement, bodily autonomy and personal freedom for a relatively modest set of benefits—much less why they would sign a blank check over to any organization, much less one like the United States military.

Anyone who accepts a gig working for a private institution or a government entity other than the military knows that there’s always a risk that things might turn sour after they begin work. Salaries may freeze or stagnate, departments will merge, demotions happen in name or in fact, you might survive layoffs only to have your workload soar, benefits might vanish, an employer’s top management might make bad decisions that affect workers’ pay. A company may get acquired, or a new CEO could come on board; a good place to work could move to another state or transfer you to a less desirable office or otherwise deteriorate into 9-to-5 hell.

Whatever happens, though, you have an out. You can quit.

Military enlistment, on the other hand, is indentured servitude without the upfront loan or fixed expiration date. Once you’re under contract, you don’t freely determine if and when you can leave. After the initial term, you can reenlist or separate out, but the military controls the timing and conditions of your release. Then you’re in the reserves and can be called up for another four years. And there’s “stop loss,” which keeps you in whenever the president decides to declare an emergency.

If Apple hires you in Cupertino and transfers you to a data farm in Nevada, you have a choice. You can move or look for another job. Service members do not choose where they live. Your wife may have a job in Indiana; you wind up in Qatar. The military assigns duty stations based on what they deem to be their needs. You can request preferences, and some programs influence your location assignment, but it’s up to them.

If GM hires you for the C-suite and wants to move you to the assembly line, you can say no, and leave—hell, you can probably sue a private employer who messes with you for “constructive termination.” Recruits choose or are assigned a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) rating, or Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) based on aptitude tests, medical exams and available slots. You can apply for retraining, special programs or career progression, but the boss decides where you work and what you do. You say: “yes, sir.”

Especially if you’re willing to move to a major metropolitan area where starting salaries are higher, military pay scales don’t cut it. Either way, after all, you’ll have to move—but not necessarily to the Middle East. As occupational safety goes, the Army is as bad as it can get.

You’ll be asked to hurt people who have done you no harm and bear you no ill will, victims who will be selected today by a president and a Pentagon team whose policies and priorities you may or may not approve of today. But what about tomorrow? Presidents change, politics change, and the wars that you might like now can easily be set aside in favor of conflicts that make no sense to you in the not-so-distant future. Are you willing to sign over a blank check, not just to today’s presidential administration, but those of the future?

Who knows what scoundrel/dirtbag/mental turnip may sit in the Oval Office?

Why die for someone who no one has yet heard of, yet may be elected Commander-in-Chief?

Young recruits, politicians tell us, are primarily motivated by a desire to protect their country. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be needed for that, given that the United States homeland has not been attacked by a nation-state in a military conflict since the War of 1812.

Others want to travel. But there are many ways to do that without killing people or working for a machine whose primary task is killing people: work exchange programs, the Peace Corps, applying to one of the many foreign colleges and universities that admit American students for very low tuition, backpacking while jumping from job to job.

Some young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, fall for the smooth-talking recruitment officer’s argument that they need the discipline and structure that only the military can provide. Here, too, there are alternatives: martial arts academies, engineering schools, trade apprenticeships, intentional communities.

Generations of soldiers and sailors have learned that military service is a sucker’s game. The Pentagon breaks beautiful young people and discards them like a filthy old snot rag when they are no longer of use to a system built for the benefit of the rich and powerful. From unpaid Revolutionary War veterans left with worthless scrip and doomed to poverty (officers got bounty land grants on soil stolen from Native Americans), to Civil War soldiers enduring years of pension delays, World War I “Bonus Army” marchers violently dispersed by federal troops in 1932 and Vietnam veterans long denied care for Agent Orange exposure and PTSD, American veterans have repeatedly faced neglect and abuse.

Antiwar activists want young men and women to reject the military on ethical grounds. While that would be best—no organization on the planet harms more people and degrades the national environment more than the United States military—we should also consider another tack. Strip away the patriotic propaganda surrounding military service, and what you have is just another job.

A lousy job.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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Events are transpiring rapidly in US-Korea relations. The Pentagon announced recently that the 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercises with South Korea would be cut in half a few days after President Donald Trump’s social media announcement that he would “substantially reduce” these exercises.

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung stated he respected Trump’s decision and efforts to create conditions for dialogue toward peace. North Korea’s leadership dismissed the reduction of exercises on the basis that US policy remains “hostile,” though noted that the relationship between Trump and Kim “remains excellent.”

As reports increase on Trump’s push to meet with Kim this year, US lawmakers must ensure high-level diplomacy is supported by working level talks and support policies that enable peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.

US Lawmakers Must Support De-escalation and Diplomacy

The US-North Korea summits in 2018-19 failed to produce a durable agreement. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton later admitted to derailing that process, encouraging President Trump to walk away from negotiations by demanding full denuclearization up front. These failed summits led to a prolonged freeze in US-North Korea relations.

The US Needs to Coordinate With South Korea

For 30 years, this disarmament-first policy has failed. This is why South Korea’s Unification Minister Chung Dong-young has said South Korea would no longer insist on North Korea’s complete and immediate denuclearization as the starting point for diplomacy.

The United States must act to end its longest war and pursue peace, engagement, and diplomacy. Peace cannot wait for another generation.

More than 70 years after the Korean War began, it is long past time to convert the armistice and frozen conflict into real peace. On August 15, South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung announced his desire to end hostilities and laid out a policy of peaceful coexistence with North Korea that includes respect for the North's system, no unification by absorption or hostile acts, concrete steps to restore the 2018 Comprehensive Military Agreement, resumption of economic and humanitarian cooperation, and a nuclear approach that begins with a freeze rather than demanding disarmament up front.

US Support for Diplomacy and De-Escalation Is Strong

Recent public opinion polling shows that the majority (69%) of US respondents support diplomatic engagement with North Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has previously said that they would meet if Washington sets aside denuclearization as the goal of talks and accepts peaceful coexistence. US experts say that Washington must deal with North Korea as it is.

The US and South Korea have previously scaled back exercises in order to facilitate dialogue—including under President Bill Clinton’s administration prior to the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework. During President Trump’s first-term diplomacy, a bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress argued that reducing joint exercises could serve as a confidence-building measure in negotiations. Congress should again raise its voice to support de-escalation with North Korea, ensure policy coordination with South Korea, support formally ending the Korean War, and ensure high-level diplomacy is supported by working level talks.

Escalation Won’t Lead to Peace

The US and South Korea have held joint military exercises for decades since the end of the Korean War. Past joint war drills have included nuclear-capable B-2 bombers, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, and other weapons that cause significant harm to local residents and the environment. The drills are based on operation plans that reportedly include pre-emptive strikes and “decapitation measures” against North Korea. In his post, Trump criticized the exercises as costly. He’s not wrong. A new report from the Center for International Policy reveals that the Pentagon massively underreports its military spending to maintain US bases and troops in South Korea, spending $5.58 billion in FY24, which is almost $2.19 billion more than what the Pentagon reported to Congress. A single exercise costs US taxpayers an estimated $14 million with US and South Korea planning to conduct 159 field exercises this year.

Experts argue that joint military exercises create a more threatening security environment and elicit greater provocation, despite claims of deterrence. On the other hand, 25 years of data show that when the US is at the negotiating table with North Korea, they launch fewer missile tests. Joint Forces exercises heighten military and political tensions on the peninsula, divert critically needed resources away from urgent human needs in both the US and South Korea, and delay stability on the peninsula.

It’s Time for a Proactive North Korea Policy

For over 70 years, the ongoing Korean War and escalating tensions have undermined human security for 80 million people living on the Korean Peninsula. The United States must act to end its longest war and pursue peace, engagement, and diplomacy. Peace cannot wait for another generation.

US lawmakers must support steps towards de-escalation and hold the Trump administration accountable by:

1. Speaking out in support of de-escalation measures and endorsing proposals for talks with North Korea to officially end the war and for peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula;
2. Calling for clear communication and coordination between US policy and the Lee administration's policy of peaceful coexistence;
3. Co-sponsoring H.R.1841 (the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act) to formally end the Korean War with a peace agreement; and
4. Ensuring high-level diplomacy is supported by working level talks between the US and North Korea. Congress must act as an independent check to keep any renewed process from being undermined internally.

President Donald Trump may have handed Democrats the issue they need to win Congress.

Affordability.

It is a word Trump increasingly seems unwilling to hear. He has called it a Democratic “hoax,” mocked the way his opponents use it and, more recently, suggested the media suddenly discovered the word after he returned to office.

Democrats should do exactly the opposite.

How great does America feel when you can no longer afford to live in it?

They should embrace it.

Not as another slogan to throw at Trump, but as a promise to voters: We see what it costs to live your life. We understand why it matters. And we intend to do something about it.

Because affordability is not a Washington talking point. It is the grocery bill, the electricity bill, the prescription waiting at the pharmacy, the insurance premium, the rent or mortgage payment, and the tank of gas needed to get to work.

It is everyday life.

And for millions of Americans, the political question behind all of it is brutally simple:

Can I afford my life?

That question could become one of the most powerful Democratic messages of the midterms.

Trump Already Proved It Works

Two years ago, Trump understood its power himself. During the 2024 campaign, he stood beside tables piled with groceries and attacked Democrats over rising prices. He promised Americans he would bring those costs down.

Today, the political landscape looks very different.

Food prices remain high. Gasoline prices are squeezing household budgets. And the cost of living has become the top issue for American voters.

Trump's response has too often been to argue with the premise.

That is an extraordinary political opening.

Democrats should not spend the next few months trying to convince Americans that Trump is dangerous, chaotic, or unfit for office. Those arguments have been made countless times, and most Americans have long since formed an opinion about Donald Trump.

Instead, Democrats should talk about something voters encounter every single day.

The price of living in America.

Make Affordability Personal

If instability surrounding Iran and the Strait of Hormuz pushes energy prices higher, explain what that means when someone fills the tank on the way to work—and how higher fuel and transportation costs eventually find their way into the price of food and other necessities.

If tariffs make imported goods more expensive, do not begin with a lecture on international trade. Show voters where those costs appear in their household budgets.

If healthcare, housing, electricity, and insurance consume more of a family's income, talk about that.

Then ask the question Trump may least want this election to be about: How great does America feel when you can no longer afford to live in it?

That is not an argument about ideology.

It is an argument about everyday life.

Trump has always understood the political power of making things personal. His language is simple, his enemies identifiable, and his promises easy to repeat.

Democrats too often answer with policy papers.

They should learn something from him.

Make affordability personal.

Talk about the supermarket checkout rather than an inflation chart. Talk about filling the car rather than energy markets. Talk about the prescription someone postpones because there is not enough money left in the account.

And above all, listen.

Own the Solution, Not Just the Problem

Because Democrats cannot simply replace Trump is dangerous with Trump is expensive. If they want to own affordability as an issue, they must also own the responsibility for offering solutions.

They need to explain what they would do to reduce pressure on household costs, make healthcare and medicine more affordable, address housing and energy costs, and protect consumers from policies that leave them paying more.

Not 20-point plans buried on campaign websites.

A few priorities people can remember. Promises they can repeat. Policies whose effects they can imagine in their own lives.

This may be Trump's greatest political gift to Democrats.

He has taken an issue that helped return him to the White House and increasingly allowed himself to sound dismissive of the very anxiety that made it powerful.

Democrats should not make the same mistake.

They should make affordability their own.

Not because a pollster tells them to use the word.

Because when a voter sits down at the end of the month with a grocery receipt, an electricity bill, a prescription, and a bank account that does not stretch as far as it used to, that voter does not need Washington to explain what affordability means.

They already know.

For years, Trump's opponents have explained Donald Trump.

Perhaps they have explained him enough.

Now they should explain what they would do for the people sitting around the kitchen table.

Because that may be exactly where the next election is won.

While the US has a long history of signing treaties, making commitments, and then walking away from them (ask Native American tribes about this), this century’s record of American policy in the Middle East is something quite extraordinary. Dramatic policy shifts, broken treaties, promises made and forgotten, foolish wars fought without attention paid to the mess left for others, and the shattering of international law and conventions—all of these have done substantial damage to the region and to the trust that others have in the US.

It’s convenient for Republicans and Democrats to point the finger at the “other side” for America’s loss of standing and support in the world. In reality, there’s plenty of blame to be shared by all of this century’s administrations. President George W. Bush started the disastrous wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, but Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph Biden ended both badly, compounding the damage that had been done. And while Bush may have flaunted international law and conventions with the use of torture, rendition, and extrajudicial targeted killings, Obama further undermined the US’ commitment to the rule of law by refusing to call for accountability for these crimes.

Biden waxed eloquent in his defense of what he called the “international rules-based order.” But he undercut himself when it became clear that his commitment was selective since it only applied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and not to Israel’s genocidal policies in Palestine.

And speaking of Palestine, during the first quarter of this century, no administration has taken the firm measures needed to curb Israeli behaviors in the occupied Palestinian territories or in Lebanon and now Syria. The impact has been clear: Israel acts with impunity, Palestinians have lost hope, and the people of the region have lost even a shred of belief that the US can play a constructive role in peacemaking.

If the US is to even have a place in this new order, we will need more than a just a new president with promises of change.

Upon this dismal record of this century’s first four administrations, President Donald Trump, since reentering the White House in 2025, has pounded the final nail in the coffin of trust for American leadership in the Middle East.

While on one occasion Biden went to the United Nations Security Council and secured passage of a ceasefire for Gaza—telling the council that Israel approved it, knowing full well that Israel had not agreed to its terms—Trump has taken this practice of dissembling even further. With great fanfare he assembled leaders to an event celebrating his 20-point peace plan to end the Gaza conflict. The problem, of course, was that none of the combatant parties—neither Hamas nor especially Israel—had agreed to its terms. And Trump’s boastful handling of his war with Iran has reached new levels of absurdity. On at least 42 occasions he has announced that the war was over, he had won, or that Iran was begging to negotiate on his terms, only to pivot a day or two later threatening, in violent or vulgar language, to obliterate Iran if they didn’t, as he put it, “wave the white flag” of surrender.

Added to this mess are the thousands of Lebanese who’ve been killed and the scores of villages laid waste by Israel since the Trump-backed ceasefire, the displacement and frightening violence that Israeli settlers and soldiers are wreaking in the West Bank, the continuing genocide unfolding in Gaza, and the insecurity in the Arab Gulf States housing US bases which are being recklessly attacked by Iranian missiles and drones. It is no wonder that Arabs have lost faith not only in the US’ commitment to regional peace and security, but also to the trustworthiness of the US as an ally.

A problem so big can’t be fixed by one US election. After decades of a dizzying roller coaster ride of wars based on lies, violations of international laws and conventions, promises made and then broken, and now an administration that acts impulsively and makes contradictory pronouncements as if words have no meaning—trust has been lost.

After the disasters resulting from the Bush administration’s Iraq war; its anti-Arab, anti-Muslim domestic policies; and its ill-conceived “democracy agenda,” President Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a speech designed to open a new chapter in US relations with the region. After seven years without decisive follow-through on the promises he’d made in his Cairo address, Obama gave a long interview to The Atlantic magazine in which he blamed the Arabs for not doing enough. When I spoke with him about the speech and that interview, he told me that the expectations of the Arabs had been too high. I responded that he was the one who set the high expectations and made the promises that he would “change Washington, change America, and change the world.” “Don’t blame them,” I said, “for believing you.”

What’s evident now is that the Arab world isn’t believing US promises or even our words. They are beginning to find their way in a post-US world order by creating new alliances, finding new partners, and putting their own interests first. If the US is to even have a place in this new order, we will need more than a just a new president with promises of change. What will be required is a thoughtful examination of our decades of shortcomings and betrayals leading to new policies toward justice for Palestinians and regional partnerships and security. But acknowledging the problems is only the first step. A demonstrated and sustained commitment to implement a changed approach to the multiple crises we have helped to create or exacerbate across the region must follow. Since it took us a generation to dig deep holes for ourselves in the Arab World, getting out won’t be quick or easy. Restoring trust will take time and hard work.

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 ET.

Today we discuss:

• President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this weekend that his former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov was wrong to call for national elections and that holding a vote in the middle of war could divide Ukraine. “Elections right now would be a tsunami for the state that would split Ukraine apart,” he said. Without a cease-fire, which Russia would not agree to, holding elections carried “major risks,” Zelensky said.

• The Trump administration will announce what it is describing as its most comprehensive assault to date on Iran’s economy, unveiling a bigger “Operation Economic Fury” or “Economic D-Day” of measures that are intended to isolate Iran from the rest of the world.

• Ohio voters are furious. Could they turn purple again? A governor’s race, a Senate contest and enough congressional contests to swing control of the House are all in play, where voters of all stripes express a deep sense of anger and powerlessness.

• Democrats and other Trump critics reacted incredulously to a New York Times report that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries met with Jared Kushner, the president’s influential son-in-law, to discuss possible areas of collaboration.

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