Commentary

You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.

The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.

If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.

Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.

So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?

When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.

Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.

With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.

With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.

These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.

Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.

You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.

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This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.

And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.

For example, the former CEO of the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage provider, UnitedHealth, walked away with over a billion dollars in total compensation. With a “B.” One guy. His successor made off with over a half-billion dollars in pay and stock.

Good work if you can get it: all you need do is buy off a hundred or so members of Congress, courtesy of Clarence Thomas’ billionaire-funded tie-breaking vote on Citizens United, and threaten the rest of Congress with massive advertising campaigns for their opponents if they try to stop you.

And while the companies refuse to tell us how much of the $64 billion that we’re throwing at them this year to offer “free” dental, etc. is actually used, what we do know is that most of that money is not going to pay for the freebies they advertise. As Cunningham-Cook noted, in one study only 11 percent of Advantage policyholders who’d signed up with plans offering dental care used that benefit.

Another study showed over-the-counter-drug freebies were used only a third of the time, leaving $5 billion in the insurance companies money bins just for that “reimbursable” goodie. A later study found that at least a quarter of all Advantage policyholders failed to use any of the freebies they’d been offered when they signed up.

That’s an enormous amount of what the industry calls “breakage”; benefits offered and paid for by the government but not used. Billions of dollars left over every month. And, used or not, you and I sure paid for them.

In my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out the story of this scam and how badly so many American seniors — and all American taxpayers, regardless of age — get ripped off by it.

And now it looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse.

When he was president last time, Donald Trump substantially expanded Medicare Advantage, calling real Medicare “socialism.” Project 2025 and candidate Trump both promised to end real Medicare “immediately” if Trump was re-elected; at the very least, they’ll make Medicare Advantage the “default” program people are steered into when they turn 65 and sign up for Medicare.

These giant insurance companies ripped off us taxpayers last year to the tune of an estimated $140 billion over and above what it would’ve cost us if people had simply been on real Medicare, according to a report from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.

But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.

The FTC news release laid it out:

“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”

And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.

And it’s huge organized money. Medicare Advantage plans are massive cash cows for the companies that run them. As Cigna prepares for a merger, for example, they’re being forced to sell off their Medicare Advantage division: it’s scheduled to go for $3.7 billion. Nobody pays that kind of money unless they expect enormous returns.

And how do they make those billions?

Most Medicare Advantage companies regularly do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle so they just write a check, pull out a credit card, or end up deeply in debt in their golden years.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. And in rural areas many hospitals are simply going out of business because Medicare advantage providers refuse to pay their bills.

California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Traditional Medicare has been serving Americans well since 1965: it’s one of the most efficient single-payer systems to fund healthcare that’s ever been devised. But nobody was making a buck off it, so nobody could share those profits with greedy politicians. Enter Medicare Advantage, courtesy of George W. Bush and the GOP.

While several bills have been offered in Congress to do something about this — including Mark Pocan’s and Ro Khanna’s Save Medicare Act that would end these companies’ ability to use the word “Medicare” in their policy names and advertising — the amounts of money sloshing around DC in the healthcare space now are almost unfathomable.

So far this year, according to opensecrets.org, the insurance industry has spent $117,305,895 showering gifts and persuasion on our federal lawmakers to keep their obscene profits flowing.

It’s all one more example of how five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalizing political bribery with Citizens Unitedhave screwed average Americans and made a handful of industry executives and investors fabulously rich.

They get away with it because when people choose to sign up for Medicare Advantage at 65 (or convert to these plans in their 60s or early 70s) they’re typically not sick — and thus cost the insurance companies little.

Tragically, the people signing up for these plans have no idea all the hassles, hoops, and troubles they might have to jump through when they do get sick, have an accident, or otherwise need medical assistance.

And since the last three years of life are typically the most expensive years for healthcare, the insurance denials are more likely to happen then — long after the person’s signed up with the Advantage company and it’s too late to go back to real Medicare.

This is why it typically takes a few years for people to figure out how badly they got screwed by not going with regular Medicare but instead putting themselves in the hands of private insurance companies.

The New York Times did an exposé of the problem in an article titled “Medicare Advantage Plans Often Deny Needed Care, Federal Report Finds.” It tells the story of “Kurt Pauker, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor in Indianapolis” who’d bought an Advantage policy from Humana:

“In spite of recommendations from Mr. Pauker’s doctors, his family said, Humana has repeatedly denied authorization for inpatient rehabilitation after hospitalization, saying at times he was too healthy and at times too ill to benefit.”

This is not at all uncommon, the Timesnotes:

“Tens of millions of denials are issued each year for both authorization and reimbursements, and audits of the private insurers show evidence of ‘widespread and persistent problems related to inappropriate denials of services and payment,’ the investigators found.”

If you have “real” Medicare with a heavily regulated Medigap policy to cover the 20% Medicare doesn’t, you never have to worry.

Your bills get paid, you can use any doctor or hospital in the country who takes Medicare, and neither Medicare nor your Medigap provider will ever try to collect from you or force you to pay for what you thought was covered.

Neither you or your doctor will ever have to do the “pre-authorization” dance with real Medicare: those terrible experiences dealing with for-profit insurance companies are part of the past.

But if you have Medicare Advantage — which is not Medicare, but private health insurance — you’re on your own.

As the Times laid out:

“About 18 percent of [Advantage] payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019. In some cases, plans ignored prior authorizations or other documentation necessary to support the payment. These denials may delay or even prevent a Medicare Advantage beneficiary from getting needed care…”

Buying a Medicare Advantage policy is a leap in the dark, and the federal government is not there to catch you. And it’s all perfectly legal, thanks to Bush’s 2003 law, so your state insurance commissioner usually can’t or won’t help.

Thus, here we are, handing billions of dollars a month to insurance industry executives so they can buy new Swiss chalets, private jets, and luxury yachts. And so they can compete — unfairly — with Medicare itself, driving LBJ’s most proud achievement into debt and crisis.

Enough is enough. Let your members of Congress know it’s beyond time to fix the Court and Medicare, so scams like Medicare Advantage can no longer rip off America’s seniors while making industry executives richer than Midas.

And if you got hooked into switching out of real Medicare and now find yourself in a Medicare Advantage plan, you have three days to back out and return to real Medicare. For more information, you can also contact the nonprofit and real-Medicare-supporting Medicare Rights Center at 800-333-4114.

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South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.

In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.

Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.

Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.

The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.

Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.

Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.

Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.

Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have already surrendered their ability to resist him.

This, as I noted but our media seems to be ignoring, is where Yoon failed. Trump — if he’s successful at cowing Republicans in the Senate into rubber-stamping his picks or allowing recess appointments — may not have those constraints, since he will have ended opposition in the Senate, and his MAGA-seized GOP now also controls the House and the Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, if he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him. Will they still exist by next February?

This is not a new strategy, as Timothy Snyder, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, or Ruth Ben-Ghiat will tell you in their excellent Substack newsletters.

One of the big points Fritz Thyssen made in his book I Paid Hitlerwas to note how he and other industrialists and politicians were required to scrape and bow before Hitler in the early months and years. There was a competition among the industrialists and German politicians alike after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor to see who could be the most publicly obsequious, slavish, and unctuous toward the new German leader.

Today in America we see a similar spectacle as politicians, media figures, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries flock to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s golden ass.

It was that exact behavior that paved the way for Hitler to shut down the German press, subserviate the Reichstag, and essentially shatter all opposition to his regime in less than half a year.

And it wasn’t just the political class who bowed to him; so, too, did most average Germans, who had become exhausted by the conflict exploding across the political spectrum and so tuned out, immersing themselves instead in sports, family, and entertainment.

As a result, every day brought a new outrage, a new norm destroyed, a new red line crossed, but each was small enough — like appointing an accused rapist and drunk or drug user to run the Justice Department or the Pentagon — that it created a buzz in the political media but wasn’t sufficient to bring even a dozen people out into the streets.

Fascism comes in on cat’s feet, step by gradual but inexorable step. It never starts with one great clashing explosion of evil or corruption that causes an entire nation to suddenly wake up and pour into the streets. There are no trumpets, drums, or cymbals. As Hemmingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises using the metaphor of bankruptcy, it happens “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

It’s usually the story of an insidious gradualism, like what a German professor told Chicago reporter Milton Mayer about in 1954:

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

Yoon’s declaration of emergency and martial law was explicit: It banned all political activities of the National Assembly, local councils, political parties, and associations; prohibited gatherings, protests, and labor strikes; and placed the media under the authority of the Martial Law Command.

Trump has made similar threats to our media and promised to use the state’s power of guns and jails to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” claiming, like Yoon did, that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Yoon’s effort to quickly convert South Korea into an autocratic state has so far backfired, in large part because of public opinion, a still-free press, and the courage of opposition and his own PPP politicians alike. The lesson Trump should learn from Yoon’s unsuccessful attempt is the need to avoid authoritarianism and instead embrace coalition-building, transparent governance, and a balanced approach to both domestic and foreign policy challenges.

Instead, it’s a virtual certainty that Trump is thinking Yoon should have acted before April, before the more progressive DPK took back over the parliament, and should have helped friendly oligarchs to seize the media in advance of his proclamation. And that he needs to move fast, before Democrats can regain power in the 2026 midterms that will be only 22 months away.

The resilience of democracy depends on the strength of its institutions, the vigilance of its citizens, and the commitment of its elected leaders of all parties to uphold democratic values. Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles. As Trump’s return looms, these lessons cannot be ignored.

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If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.

The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.

President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.

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“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.

Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.

The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:

— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.
— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.
— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.
— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.
— Attacking our right to vote.
— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).
— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.
— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.
— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.
— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.
— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.
— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.
— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.

Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.

This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.

Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.

From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.

FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.

After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.

Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.

And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.

Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.

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“The ideas you are about to hear are not idle conjecture. I have built upon a foundation of indisputable first causes, so that the unifying force which controls the cosmos is revealed in full clarity.” — Jack Vance

Trump named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47,” although for reasons known only to them, America’s mainstream media persists in ignoring it. They shouldn’t.

At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans — which we’ll probably see implemented during his first 100 days — include:

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, as they will now have both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Trump’s appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to identify “fraud and waste” in federal agencies, a mantra since the Reagan presidency used to strip agencies his donors and their corporations resent. Every Republican president has used this phrase in this way, but Trump promises to turn Reagan’s and Bush’s scalpel into a meataxe.

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information,’” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US. Is the announced divestment of MSNBC by Comcast an early indicator that corporate media sees this coming?

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Similarly, Trump’s appointee to head the FBI says they’ll be coming after reporters and opinion writers and their publications:

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Trump has already tested the limits of his own lawbreaking when it comes to creating a police state and gotten away with it. In 2020, he sent armed federal officers — without identification and in unmarked vehicles — into Portland to illegally snatch unarmed peaceful protestors off the streets, intimidate and beat them up, and dump them. Expect this test to go nationwide.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies.

As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day last year, this will quickly go way beyond the “illegal immigrant criminals” he’ll use an an excuse to build the camps and mobilize the police and military:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda. Have you recently posted anti-Trump screeds on social media? Putin and Orbán put people in prison or sue them for such behavior.

And, as Europe’s most famous dictator did during our grandparents’ generation, he’ll start by rounding up unfavored groups with his promised incarceration and deportation of “millions” of undocumented immigrants. That’ll establish the physical infrastructure that he can later use to imprison members of the media and his “enemies within.”

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of to the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his first presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his first presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of Black people in the South who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined by using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 8 years.

Already Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to run the DOJ, has said she wants to prosecute and imprison the people who participated in investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office in 2017, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this was just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in his second term. Nancy Mace’s supercilious, vicious, and bigoted attack on trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride is just the earliest warning of what’s to come nationwide.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”
Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

At the same time, three states have now authorized or mandated Christian bible instruction in public schools. While all are currently on pause because of lawsuits, expect this trend to go national as Trump repays the multimillionaire televangelist and megachurch grifters who helped him get elected.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts with everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner.

A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by, presumably, simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation criminally attacking another nation to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab any nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this signals a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans next year for this nation. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Now is the time to join the resistance, while it’s still possible. Show up at your local Democratic Party meetings and help infiltrate the Party. Join Indivisible or one of the other great organizations. Get active on social media. Evangelize friends and family.

We have a hell of a lot of work ahead of us; let’s get started!

NOW READ: How to fix MSNBC

I want to borrow some of your valuable time today to explain how I would not only save the faltering MSNBC, but also help it positively thrive, all while putting Republicans’ ongoing attack on America and our flickering Democracy on the front burner of the national discussion.

I admit that I come to all this as an unlikely savior.

As a curmudgeonly newspaperman, I have not been a fan of 24/7 cable news ever since it so unfortunately came into existence. I mean, what in the hell prompted us to think we needed “BREAKING NEWS” shoveled at us all day via these oh-so-sweet and handsome television toothies to further complicate our busy lives?

Much better newspaper professionals packaged all you needed to know in a neat, tight bundle delivered at your doorstep so you could process it all with your coffee in the morning, or an extra-dry martini after work. And if you needed a stiff chaser, there was always Walter Cronkite kicking around to serve it to you straight.

When it was clear the never-ending news blaring from our TV sets was here to stay, I let go this stellar quote in the newsroom one gloomy afternoon: “Turn that shit off. Nobody has time to watch this amateur crap all day.”

Well, it turns out I was wrong about all that, and I’ll spare you what I said about the Internet when it barged into our lives, because chances are you’d quit reading right here and now.

(I did think the Beatles would be a major hit when they came long, so occasionally my predictions hit in spectacular fashion.)

Ever since the latest godawful election night in America, MSNBC’s ratings have been in the toilet, with some parts of their programming dropping audience share by nearly 50 percent. Turns out, many viewers aren’t happy with their appeasement of the American-attacking Trump in some parts of their 24/7 programming, or their attempt at “fair and balanced” news coverage that preceded the election by normalizing a hardcore racist who writes love letters to dictators. Then there was the not-so-subtle banging on the Democratic Party by some of their mouthy, daytime anchors, who just couldn’t acknowledge the party was correct on nearly every single major issue, but ironically lacked the bandwidth to tout their stellar work.

There’s speculation that MSNBC’s ratings dive will slow when the America-attacking Trump is sworn in on January 20th, and all the terrible things he ran on officially become all-too real. Good people are just tired right now, and trying to claim the next two months for themselves, before all the blood righteously pumps from their hearts with a gush straight into their exploding heads.

Fox News went through a similar down cycle after Joe Biden beat the America-attacker in 2020. The right-wing propaganda station lost lots of its viewers, but they all returned in time.

I am not sure that will be the case here — my shaky history of predictions aside.

The gods at Comcast, who own MSNBC, have announced they have plans to “spin off” the network, along with some other channels in their vast catalogue into a separate company. Nobody knows what in the hell all this means, but in researching this write, I can tell you there are a s----ton of “media insiders” who aren’t shy about making semi-educated guesses.

Some have speculated whatever it is that is spun will be sold to the highest bidder — maybe even Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. Others say the place will just look a little different, but remain under current ownership.

Only one thing seems crystal clear: America has never needed reliable, left-leaning news programming more than it does right now.

The notorious messaging problem wasn’t as prevalent for Democrats this past election cycle, but platforming their message was. They (we) simply no longer have the bandwidth to compete with the Republican’s myriad industrial pollutants that poison the air with their lies. They are literally everywhere. They control the radio airways, our TV channels, and the digital media. Billionaires like the grotesque Elon Musk are throwing their money and their allegiances to fascists like Vladimir Putin to help finish off America for good with their odious, never-ending lies.

Our corporate media is now officially disgraceful, and failed to do its job by giving the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the attention it deserved. Democracy and our rights as Americans are hanging precariously by a thread, and these incompetent, bought-off boobs in the working press are in large part to blame for it. Regular visitors to this space will know how I feel about all this and them, so for the sake of time, I’ll just leave it at that for now.

The communications landscape has been turned completely on its head, and liberals’ rigid, straight up approach to reaching people is honorable in its intent and embarrassing in its execution and results. Unless and until this is fixed and pronto, Democrats and left-leaners in this country are in deep, deep, trouble.

We are losing the communications battle, but if MSNBC would just get the hell out of its own way, we could start to reclaim the high ground.

Here’s how that happens:

• Start listening to your audience, MSNBC. They hate you right now. They believe you have failed and betrayed them. Stop trying to be some “both-sides-do-it” news organization, and start capturing the millions of people who are starving for truth, and know a revolting racist when they see and hear one. Stop trying to be too many different things to too many different audiences. Immediately dump the half-baked garbage on your station — like, Morning Joe, for instance. Seriously, what is it that show supposed to be doing? What crucial niche is it fulfilling? Is showcasing two lily-white people kissing the two-ton ass of a dictator that important? Their stupid show bleeds into a significant problem I’ll delve into a bit more shortly: What the hell is your penchant for recruiting Republican refugees as headliners on your station? It’s disgusting. Start listening to what your audience wants immediately. Start giving them what they want instead of what you think they should want. It’s haughty as hell. They, not you, are all that matters.
• Screw it, let’s deal with this Republican problem right now. The station is littered with them. Do these people really think their noxious party is coming back from the America-attacking Trump? Is being a part of the gruesome Tea Party movement something to be proud of and looked back on with reverence? Are trying to kill abortion rights and Obamacare a badge of honor? Were things “great” for them when they had the House and Senate back then? And former staffers for the hideous George W. Bush are everywhere. Here’s a bulletin: He is a terrible, terrible man. A damn war criminal. A complete idiot. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to make of all this, people? Look, I’m not here to entirely wipe ‘em out, but how is it they have ascended to such loud platforms in the Democratic communications ranks? The Lincoln Project, despite some pretty significant hiccups, has done some good work, but nobody deserves extra credit for simply doing the right thing and turning away from a revolting political party that falls at the fat, little feet of a complete lying racist, deviant, who assaults women and our country and brags about it. But MSNBC can’t seem to get enough these old, white Republican men, and as an old, white liberal man I find it really creepy and disturbing. Here’s what I’d like to hear them all say, “We were wrong. The party we supported is terrible, it really is. Turns out the folks on the Left were right about us all these years. I fervently hope they will accept our apologies.” Otherwise, they can hit the road, and shouldn’t be trusted. I have warned before that many of them are just dying to do the wrong thing again, and go back to their revolting party.
• Don’t be shy about letting your audience know that you are direct counter-programing to the ghastly Fox network, and in fact are taking them and their bulls--- head on. Make a point of destroying them. Belittle them. Fact-check the hell out of them. This will be delightfully easy to do and so much damn fun to watch. WE NEED SOME FUN, DAMMIT. Say what you will about Murdoch’s odious network, but it has succeeded beyond the ancient man’s wildest dreams. There is no America-attacking Trump without Fox. Period. They are ratings stalwarts that traffic in lies and are expert at exploiting what is buried in their audience’s cold, white hearts. They are proof as Mark Twain once quipped, that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Call them out on this 24/7.
• Focus. Make it clear as day you are 100 percent, left-leaning programming that proudly and unswervingly stands for women’s right, human rights, voters’ rights, environmental rights, workers’ rights, healthcare rights, and Social Security and Medicare rights. In other words, all the things the Democrats have stood for during the past 100 years. Except too many Americans don’t know that in 2024, because the message and that fact have been completely stolen. This horses--- that Republicans are running with the idea that they care about working-class Americans is grand larceny and should have NEVER been allowed to happen. By their dirty deeds, Republicans actually HATE working-class Americans. This has been a massive messaging problem for the Democratic Party, yes. But the pathetic mainstream media, with your help, MSNBC, helped people buy into this. Stop trying to do too many things half-decently, and home in on doing one thing great: spreading the truth.
• Give Pete Buttigieg a big, fat contract and as much airtime as he wants. I’m being partial here, but the dude might be the best communicator I have ever heard. Maybe even consider some Crossfire variant where he calmly smashes a conservative lackey to smithereens on a weekly basis. Again: WE NEED SOME DAMN FUN.
• Enough already with all these double-talking “legal experts” on your shows. This should need no explaining after what happened first with Bill Barr and the Mueller Report, and then Merrick Garland and the attack on America he ignored. It took forever to hear a single criticism of Garland from any of these on-air lawyers. Some still haven’t gotten there yet. They have been wrong about almost everything, but have proven the legal system in this country is in a complete shambles. The notion of law and order, and that nobody is above the law in the United States is a pathetic joke. Our Supreme Court is the most gory example of this. Give me legal people who say what need saying in plain, non-lawyered terms, and will be critical of other lawyers, and keep the rest of them the hell off the air.
• Create the biggest, ever-expanding, liberal, pro-Democracy bubble in history, and don’t apologize for it. If the worst thing that happens is that your growing audience is stuffed full of righteous, good-hearted people, while all hell comes raining down from the White House the next four years, things could be worse. You have a real opportunity here, MSNBC. Tens of millions of us, are looking for a place we can trust to hang our hats, while the storm rages. I suggest you get the hell out of your own way and just take it.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

— Trump is taking off the mask, after lying to us for over a year about not knowing anything about Project 2025. Former President Trump, who previously kept his distance from Project 2025, is now selecting its key architects for potential cabinet positions and wow, are they doozies. The 900-page conservative policy blueprint, which has alarmed Democrats, appears to be moving from the sidelines to center stage in Trump's plans for a potential second term. His choice of Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, along with several other picks tied to the project, tells us he was lying (surprise!) when he repeatedly disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s project to take apart America’s government; we saw a smaller version of this in 1981 when Reagan took Heritage’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” and implemented nearly 80 percent of its suggestions, including massive tax breaks for billionaires and deregulation of pollution and consumer protections for corporations.

— Trump picks herd immunity advocate to lead National Institutes of Health (NIH). Want more death with your health policy? The appointment of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a vocal critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President-elect Donald Trump represents a radical departure from established public health strategies. The Great Barrington Declaration called for achieving herd immunity through natural infection — a strategy widely criticized by health experts, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who labeled it as dangerous and not aligned with mainstream science. If America had pursued herd immunity it could have meant millions more deaths, particularly among the vulnerable. Bhattacharya’s stance against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, coupled with his promotion of herd immunity, raises questions about how far the NIH will be degraded under his leadership. This appointment, alongside other controversial nominations such as Bob Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggests a shift away from science-based public health policies in our agencies that were specifically created to promote science-based public health. This could not only undermine efforts to control infectious diseases but also erode public trust in health institutions, posing a direct threat to the integrity of American public health and scientific research. More death and disease? Apparently that’s what many Americans just voted for, whether they knew it or not…

— Trump Chooses Megadonor Art Collector To Head U.S. Navy. Yep, an art collector and investment guy. To run the Navy. Trump’s nomination of John Phelan, an art collector and Republican megadonor who has never served in the military, as Secretary of the Navy, represents another radical departure from traditional appointments. Phelan, who leads the private investment firm Rugger Management and previously managed investments for billionaire Michael Dell, hosted a high-profile fundraiser for Trump at his $38 million Aspen, Colorado, home, raising a huge pile of money. Now Trump’s rewarding him. Phelan’s lack of military background undermines the leadership of the Navy, since his primary qualification is apparently his shoveling cash to Trump. This appointment raises alarm bells across the military about the prioritization of political loyalty over expertise in critical defense roles, potentially compromising the effectiveness and integrity of military leadership. Exactly the sort of thing Putin would love Trump to do. Surprised? No…

— So much for that “wall of separation between church and state” that Jefferson wrote about. Trump’s selection of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) signals a significant shift toward embedding Christian nationalist ideologies within federal governance. Vought, a self-identified proponent of “Christian nationism,” claims — incorrectly — that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed accordingly. Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, prioritizes affirming the U.S. as a Christian nation, advocating a form of Christian supremacy, where, despite the presence of diverse faiths, Christianity is at the core of a government-approved American identity. This blows apart the separation between church and state, marginalizing non-Christian communities and undermining the pluralistic foundations of American democracy. If you’re not a Christian — or you’re not the rightwing variety of Christian promoted by Trump and his multimillionaire televangelist huckster supporters — buckle up. The ride is going to get bumpy.

— Musk wants to get rid of the anti-fraud police. Why? Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has raised significant concerns that the grifter in the White House wants to empower banking and investment grifters to rip us all off. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), stating, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” The CFPB, established in 2010 following the Bush Crash, is the main agency safeguarding consumers from predatory financial practices. Its dissolution will leave consumers vulnerable to exploitation and massive rip-offs by financial institutions. Musk’s leadership of DOGE, combined with his substantial business interests and political influence, also means he and his friends may even benefit from silencing the regulators and increase the problem of crony capitalism. He’s already called for de-funding a government agency that helps low-income rural people get broadband, saying his company Starlink should provide that service. This move aligns with longstanding Republican efforts to curtail the CFPB’s authority in exchange for massive contributions from banks and investment firms, raising alarms about the preservation of essential consumer safeguards for average working people. Get ready to get ripped of big-time.

— Embarassed Tesla owners are taking steps… Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump and engagement with far-right conspiracy theories have grossed out many Tesla owners, leading to a explosion of anti-Musk sentiment within the community. Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker, has seen a surge in sales of anti-Musk stickers, with hundreds sold daily to Tesla owners seeking to distance themselves from Musk’s political affiliations. These stickers feature slogans like “Anti Elon Tesla Club” and “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy.” Hiller, who decided against purchasing a Tesla due to Musk’s behavior on Xitter, notes that many customers now feel embarrassed driving their Teslas. Will rightwing Tesla buyers make up for the loss of environmentally conscious peple who’d previously been the car’s base? Apparently that’s what Elon is betting on, as Tesla is the largest source of his wealth.

— Jair Bolsonaro — aka “Brazil’s Trump” (he fled to Mar-a-Lago when his followers attacked the legislature like Trump’s did on January 6th) — thinks Trump and his people will get him back into power. Fascists of a feather gotta stick together, or at least that’s what Bolsonaro thinks: he told an interviewer that he’s relying on Trump’s help to get back into power in Brazil. He’s been charged with attempting a coup in his own nation, and says he’s hoping Trump will slap harsh sanctions on Brazil if they continue to prosecute Bolsonaro or prevent him from running for president again. It’s like the gang is getting back together to destroy democracy worldwide: Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Putin, Xi and every tinpot dictator in the world…

— Crazy Alert! JD Vance posts a re-do of the famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting with him as Trump’s wife — and rightwingers are going nuts with cringe. Seriously, here’s the picture. You can’t make this stuff up.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World:

— Wisdom School:

For Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with:

“What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?”

So here’s the rest of the story:

Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope.

Although you won't learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

It started when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bache supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically close to today’s Republicans).

Bache attacked Adams in an op-ed piece by calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”

To be sure, Bache wasn’t the only one attacking Adams in 1798. His Aurora was one of about 20 independent newspapers aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and many were openly questioning Adams’ policies and ridiculing Adams' fondness for formality and grandeur.

On the Federalist side, conservative newspaper editors were equally outspoken. Noah Webster wrote that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were “the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Another Federalist characterized the Democratic-Republicans as “democrats, momocrats and all other kinds of rats,” while Federalist newspapers promoted a weird collection of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jefferson and his colleagues.

But while Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans had learned to develop a thick skin, University of Missouri-Rolla history professor Larry Gragg points out in an October 1998 article in American History magazine that Bache’s writings sent Adams and his wife into a self-righteous frenzy.

Abigail wrote to her husband and others that Benjamin Franklin Bache was expressing the “malice” of a man “possessed by Satan.” The Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were engaging, she said, in “abuse, deception, and falsehood,” and Bache was a “lying wretch.”

Abigail insisted that her husband and Congress must act to punish Bache for his “most insolent and abusive” words about her husband and his administration. His “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” must be stopped, she demanded.

Abigail Adams followed the logic employed by modern-day “conservatives” who say that those opposed to Trump’s policies are “unpatriotic,” by writing that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”

Worked into a frenzy by Abigail Adams’ and Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of John Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into its most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.

Empowered with this early gift of presidential power, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested, and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.

Bache, often referred to as “Lightning Rod Junior” after his famous grandfather, was the first to be hauled into jail (before the laws even became effective!), followed by New York Time Piece editor John Daly Burk, which put his paper out of business. Bache died of yellow fever while awaiting trial, and Burk accepted deportation to avoid imprisonment and then fled.

Others didn't avoid prison so easily. Editors of seventeen of the twenty or so Democratic-Republican-affiliated newspapers were arrested, and ten were convicted and imprisoned; many of their newspapers went out of business.

Bache’s successor, William Duane (who both took over the newspaper and married Bache’s widow), continued the attacks on Adams, publishing in the June 24, 1799 issue of the Aurora a private letter John Adams had written to Tench Coxe in which then-Vice President Adams admitted that there were still men influenced by Great Britain in the U.S. government.

The letter cast Adams in an embarrassing light, as it implied that Adams himself may still have British loyalties (something suspected by many, ever since his pre-revolutionary defense of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre), and made the quick-tempered Adams furious.

Imprisoning his opponents in the press was only the beginning for Adams, though. Knowing Jefferson would mount a challenge to his presidency in 1800, he and the Federalists hatched a plot to pass secret legislation that would have disputed presidential elections decided “in secret” and “behind closed doors.”

Duane got evidence of the plot, and published it just after having published the letter that so infuriated Adams. It was altogether too much for the president who didn't want to let go of his power: Adams had Duane arrested and hauled before Congress on Sedition Act charges.

Duane would have stayed in jail had not Thomas Jefferson intervened, letting Duane leave to “consult his attorney.” Duane went into hiding until the end of the Adams' presidency.

Emboldened, the Federalists reached out beyond just newspaper editors.

When Congress let out in July of 1798, John and Abigail Adams made the trip home to Braintree, Massachusetts in their customary fashion — in fancy carriages as part of a parade, with each city they passed through firing cannons and ringing church bells. (The Federalists were, after all, as Jefferson said, the party of “the rich and the well born.” Although Adams wasn’t one of the super-rich, he basked in their approval and adopted royal-like trappings, later discarded by Jefferson.)

As the Adams family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes. Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said:

“There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected the new attitude Adams and his wife had brought to Washington D.C. in 1796, a take-no-prisoners type of politics in which no opposition was tolerated.

For example, on January 30, 1798, Vermont's Congressman Matthew Lyon spoke out on the floor of the House against “the malign influence of Connecticut politicians.” Charging that Adams’ and the Federalists only served the interests of the rich and had “acted in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents,” Lyon infuriated the Federalists.

The situation simmered for two weeks, and on the morning of February 15, 1798, Federalist anger reached a boiling point when conservative Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswold attacked Lyon on the House floor with a hickory cane. As Congressman George Thatcher wrote in a letter now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society:

“Mr. Griswald [sic] [was] laying on blows with all his might upon Mr. Lyon. Griswald continued his blows on the head, shoulder, & arms of Lyon, [who was] protecting his head & face as well as he could. Griswald tripped Lyon & threw him on the floor & gave him one or two [more] blows in the face.”

In sharp contrast to his predecessor George Washington, America’s second president had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of fear and division in the new republic, and it brought out the worst in his conservative supporters.

Across the new nation, Federalist mobs and Federalist-controlled police and militia attacked Democratic-Republican newspapers and shouted down or threatened individuals who dared speak out in public against John Adams.

Even members of Congress were not legally immune from the long arm of Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts.

When Congressman Lyon — already hated by the Federalists for his opposition to the law, and recently caned in Congress by Federalist Roger Griswold — wrote an article pointing out Adams’ “continual grasp for power” and suggesting that Adams had an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice,” Federalists convened a federal grand jury and indicted Congressman Lyon for bringing “the President and government of the United States into contempt.”

Lyon, who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was led through the town of Vergennes, Vermont in shackles. He ran for re-election from his 12x16-foot Vergennes jail cell and handily won his seat.

“It is quite a new kind of jargon,” Lyon wrote from jail to his constituents, “to call a Representative of the People an Opposer of the Government because he does not, as a legislator, advocate and acquiesce in every proposition that comes from the Executive.”

Which brings us to today. The possible ray of light for those who oppose the attempts of Donald Trump to emulate John Adams is found in the end of the story of Adams' attempt to suborn the Bill of Rights and turn the United States into a one-party state:

— The Alien and Sedition Acts caused the Democratic-Republican newspapers to become more popular than ever, and turned the inebriated Luther Baldwin into a national celebrity. In like fashion, progressive websites and talk shows are today proliferating across the internet, and victims of Trump’s ending women’s right to abortion are often featured in the press.

— The day Adams signed the Acts, Thomas Jefferson left town in protest and never again saw John Adams face-to-face. Even though Jefferson was Vice President, and could theoretically benefit from using the Acts against his own political enemies, he and James Madison continued to protest and work against them. Jefferson wrote the text for a non-binding resolution against the Acts that was adopted by the Kentucky legislature, and James Madison wrote one for Virginia that was adopted by that legislature.

— Jefferson beat Adams in the election of 1800 as a wave of voter revulsion over Adams’ phony and self-serving “patriotism” swept over the nation (along with concerns about Adams' belligerent war rhetoric against the French).

— When Jefferson exposed Adams as a poseur and tool of the powerful elite, the rot within Adams’ Federalist Party was exposed along with it. The Federalists lost their hold on Congress in the election of 1800, and began a 30-year slide into total disintegration (later to be reincarnated as Whigs and then as Republicans).

— In what came to be known as “The American Revolution of 1800” (the title of a book by Dan Sisson and me), Thomas Jefferson freed all the men imprisoned by Adams as one of his first acts of office. Jefferson even reimbursed the fines they’d paid — with interest — and granted them a formal pardon and apology.

Two weeks before the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, June 1, 1798, as Adams was already rounding up newspaper editors and dissidents in anticipation of his coming legal authority, Jefferson sat down at his desk and, heart heavy but hopeful, put quill pen to paper to share his thoughts with his old friend John Taylor, one of his fellow Democratic Republicans and a man also in Adams cross-hairs.

(Two decades later, Taylor would write down his thoughts on the issue of government in a widely-distributed book, “Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated,” noting that: “A government is substantially good or bad, in the degree that it produces the happiness or misery of a nation...”)

Several states had gone completely over to Adam’s side, particularly Massachusetts which was filled with preachers who wanted theocracy established in America, and Connecticut, which had become the epicenter of the wealthy who wanted to control the government’s agenda for their own gain.

It was red states and blue states, writ large. There was even discussion of Massachusetts seceding from the rest of the nation, which had become too “liberal” (to use George Washington’s term) and secular.

“It is true that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut,” Jefferson wrote to Taylor, his friend and compatriot, “and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength and subsistence. Their natural friends, the three other Eastern States join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union, so as to make use of them to govern the whole.
“This is not new,” Jefferson added, “it is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.
“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that the theocrats and the rich did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-monger about war with France (the infamous “XYZ Affair”) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Our nation’s wisest political commentator noted the problem of politics:

“Be this as it may, in every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and delate to the people the proceedings of the other.”
“But,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “will the evil stop there?”

Apparently he thought so, and his next paragraph to Taylor gives progressives a reminder for these times.

This must be our mantra, even as we work harder every day:

“A little patience,” Jefferson wrote, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true, that in the meantime, we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war, and long oppressions of enormous public debt. ...
“If the game runs sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost. For this is a game where principles are the stake.”

Ever the optimist and the realist, Jefferson ended his letter with both hope and caution.

“Better luck, therefore, to us all, and health, happiness and friendly salutations to yourself," he closed the letter. But under his signature, Jefferson added:
“P. S. It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public; a single sentence got hold of by the Porcupines, will suffice to abuse and persecute me in their papers for months.”

It is time, now, for us to once again follow Jefferson’s wise advice. Hope for the best, organize for a better America, and recognize the power and evil unleashed by politicians who believe that campaign lies are defensible, laws gutting the Bill of Rights are acceptable, and that the ends justifies the means.

America has been through crises before, and far worse. If we retain the vigilance and energy of Jefferson and his contemporaries — as today we face every bit as much a struggle against the same forces that he fought — we shall prevail.

For the simple reason that, underneath it all, “this is a game where principles are the stake.”

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