Trump may force a second civil war on America with his plan to use the military to round up at least 11 million undocumented people inside the United States — even if it means breaking up families — send them to detention camps, and then deport them.

As well as his plan to target his political enemies for prosecution — including Democrats, journalists, and other critics.

What happens when we, especially those of us in blue states and cities, resist these authoritarian moves — as we must, as we have a moral duty to?

What happens when we try to protect hardworking members of our communities who have been our neighbors and friends for years, from Trump’s federal troops?

What happens when we refuse to allow Trump’s lackeys to wreak revenge on his political enemies who live within our states and communities?

Will our resistance give Trump an excuse to use force against us?

This is not far-fetched. We need to answer these questions for ourselves. We should prepare.

Trump has said he’ll use the Insurrection Act — which grants a president the power to “take such measures as he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

He’s also said he’ll use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to end sanctuary cities. Such cities now limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner that “we can do things in terms of moving people out.”

The Enemies Act states that “Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government … and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”

The Enemies Act was part of a group of laws enacted at the end of the 18th century — the Alien and Sedition Acts — which severely curtailed civil liberties in the young United States, including by tightening restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limiting speech critical of the government.

Would Trump essentially declare war on states and communities that oppose him?

When he was president last time, he acted as if he was president only of the people who voted for him — overwhelmingly from red states and cities — and not the president of all of America. He supported legislation that hurt voters in blue states, such as his tax law that stopped deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes.

Underlying Trump’s dangerous threats is the sobering reality that we are rapidly becoming two Americas.

One America is largely urban, college-educated, and racially and ethnically diverse. It voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris.

The other America is largely rural or exurban, without college degrees, and white. It voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Even before Trump’s win, red zip codes were getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super-landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80 percent of the vote — jumped from 6 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2020 and appears to be even higher in 2024.

Just a dozen years ago, there were Democratic senators from Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana (two!), and West Virginia.

Today, there’s close to a zero chance of a Democrat being elected to the Senate from any of these states.

Surveys show that Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values.

Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two percent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil.”

Almost 40 percent would be upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party.

Even before the 2024 election, when asked if violence would be justified if the other party won the election, 13.8 percent of Democrats and 18.3 percent of Republicans responded in the affirmative.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade left the issue of abortion to the states, 1 out of 3 women of childbearing age now lives in a state that makes it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion.

Even while red states are making it harder than ever to get abortions, they’re making it easier than ever to buy guns.

Red states are also banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in education. Florida’s Board of Education prohibited public colleges from using state and federal funds for DEI. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has required all state-funded colleges and universities close their DEI offices.

In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” were created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s big lie.

They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their sex at birth.

They’re making it harder to protest.

They’re making it more difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits and other forms of public assistance.

And harder than ever to form labor unions.

They’re even passing “bounty” laws — enforced not by governments but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortion to vaccination.

Meanwhile, several blue states, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion.

Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortion that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states.

Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. California has expanded access to abortion and protected abortion providers from out-of-state legal action.

After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California enacted a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

California already bars anyone on a state payroll (including yours truly, who teaches at Berkeley) from getting reimbursed for travel to states that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

Trump would like nothing better than a civil war over himself. He loves to be at the center of attention, which is often at the center of the chaos and outrage he has created.

Short of a civil war, the gap between red and blue America might continue to widen — roughly analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce and simply drift apart.

But a civil war is not inevitable. We must do what we can to protect those who are most vulnerable to Trump’s fascism. But this doesn’t mean allowing him to goad us into civil war.

What do you think?

NOW READ: Kemp has complex political calculus ahead as he ponders leaving Georgia Governor’s Mansion

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

The media has it all wrong about Trump’s picks for his administration. The conventional view is they’re “Trump loyalists” whom Trump “recruited.”

Rubbish.

First, they’re not loyalists; they’re subservient hacks.

There’s a crucial difference.

All politicians want their underlings to be loyal, but Trump wants them to be more loyal to him than to the nation, and he demands total subservience without regard to right or wrong.

For the FBI, Trump has picked Kash Patel, who has pledged to prosecute Trump’s political opponents and “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

Trump’s selection for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has said that when Trump returns to power, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

Moreover, Trump didn’t recruit these people or anybody else. They recruited him.

Every one of his nominees campaigned for these jobs by engaging in conspicuous displays of submission and flattery directed toward Trump.

Elise Stefanik, whom Trump has nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, repeatedly boasted that she was the first lawmaker to endorse Trump’s reelection bid.

Before Trump tapped Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security, she sent him a four-foot replica of Mt. Rushmore with Trump’s face next to those of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

Mike Waltz, who Trump has picked for national security adviser, supported a move in Congress to rename Washington Dulles International Airport the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

Lee Zeldin, whom Trump has picked for EPA administrator, said publicly that the criminal prosecutions of Trump were akin to Putin’s persecution of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Stephen Miller, who will be a Trump White House adviser, said during a Fox News interview that Trump is the “most stylish president” in our lifetimes. “Donald Trump is a style icon!”

Ten of Trump’s picks so far were Fox News hosts or contributors who repeatedly mouthed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen, about January 6 being a “peaceful protest,” and Biden being the force behind Trump’s prosecutions.

Some of Trump’s picks showed up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, where they verbally attacked members of the presiding judge’s family on behalf of Trump, who was under a rule of silence.

Some picks appeared at his campaign rallies, expanding on Trump’s lies and lavishing him with praise.

Many made large donations to Trump’s campaign. Five of his picks so far are billionaires.

All knew that Trump wanted people who would do whatever he asked of them. So they prostrated themselves to show their deference to him.

All knew that Trump liked to be fawned over. So they debased themselves by giving him gushing compliments.

They knew that Trump wanted people lacking an independent moral compass. So they went out of their way to demonstrate they have no integrity by retelling Trump’s lies in public with even more verve and intensity than he displayed when telling them.

Time and again they have performed acts of cringeworthy subservience toward Trump, proving themselves reliable conduits for his scheming vindictiveness.

This is a rare bunch. How many Americans would eagerly repeat to national audiences bald-faced lies spouted by an authoritarian — lies that undermine our democracy? How many Americans would publicly grovel before Trump, making it clear they’ll do whatever he asks of them regardless of consequence?

To be a member of this unique group, one needs to be both colossally ambitious and profoundly insecure, willing to demean oneself to gain Trump’s favor.

Trump didn’t find these people; these people found Trump. And to get in his good graces, they saw to it that he noticed their servile deference, fawning adulation, and total submission.

But these people will also bring about Trump’s downfall, and possibly the downfall of America.

That’s because one of the most important things a president needs is accurate and useful feedback. These are in short supply even in the best of administrations.

People who work for a president are often reluctant to be bearers of bad news. Presidents are typically surrounded by “yes” men and women afraid to say anything that will ruffle powerful feathers.

As a result, presidents can make huge mistakes — invading Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulating Wall Street and then bailing it out when its gambling gets out of hand, pardoning Richard Nixon, waging war in Vietnam.

Trump’s toadies are even less likely to cross him. To the contrary, they’ll egg him on.

The years ahead would be dangerous enough if Trump sought out unprincipled enablers.

The coming years will be even more perilous because unprincipled enablers have sought out Trump.

NOW READ: Which of Trump’s Cabinet picks is least likely to be confirmed?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

The cast of characters Trump has chosen to populate his second term are a Star Wars cantina of fanatics, extremists, conspiracy theorists, sexual harassers, and disreputable no-goods. They have little or no experience running government, let alone expertise in the issues confronting the agencies and departments Trump wants them to lead.

But starting January 3, Senate Republicans will be the only firewall America has against this crowd. Assuming all Democrats vote against Trump’s nominees, Trump can stand to lose only a handful of Republican votes.

That firewall may still have some fire retardant in it. When Republican leaders apparently let it be known that Matt Gaetz for attorney general was a bridge too far, Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration.

Will Republican senators stand behind the other Trump nominees requiring Senate confirmation? Those who appear to be in the most trouble are:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for heading the Department of Health and Human Resources. Kennedy Jr. is a well-known anti-vaxxer who has claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Kennedy Jr. keeps repeating the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism in kids, along with his insistence that the COVID vaccine has killed more people than it’s saved.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, has a reputation for sexual harassment and assault, including an allegation of assault in 2017. (His own mother accused him in writing of repeatedly abusing women but subsequently disavowed the statements). According to a new report, he was ousted from leadership roles in two military veterans organizations following allegations of financial mismanagement, aggressive drunkenness, and sexist behavior.

Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to direct the FBI, has called for firing the top ranks of the FBI, prosecuting leakers and journalists, and replacing the national security workforce with “people who won’t undermine the president’s agenda.” He has pledged to investigate Trump’s political opponents and “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, has publicly called for the U.S. to allow Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to remain in power and traveled to Syria to meet with him. She even challenged U.S. intelligence that found Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons. She is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a favorite on Russian propaganda. In 2022, she used her platform to amplify a Russian talking point that the U.S. had somehow provoked Putin to invade Ukraine.

**

Many other of Trump’s picks are controversial, but none has caused the same degree of public uproar as these four. (Rather than subject Trump’s nominees to the Senate’s constitutional duty of providing “advice and consent,” Senate Republicans may opt to go into recess, as Trump wishes, which will allow Trump to make so-called “recess appointments.”)

So today’s Office Hours question: In your view — assuming the Senate plays its constitutional role in assessing Trump’s nominees — which of his picks is least likely to be confirmed?

NOW READ: Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

My first reaction to the Sunday news that President Biden was pardoning his son Hunter was sadness.

Biden has a constitutional right to pardon his son, and I can understand his concern that Trump’s overt aim to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue “retribution” against political enemies might subject Hunter to further charges and harassment.

House Republicans have claimed Hunter is guilty of more than the felonies he was charged with: lying on a firearms application form about his drug addiction and failing to pay taxes that he later did pay.

My sadness comes from President Biden’s suggestion that the charges against his son were influenced by Republican politicians. “It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” he wrote. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.” Biden continued: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

I can understand President Biden’s frustration, but his claim that Republican politicians were responsible for Hunter’s legal problems lends credence to Trump’s long-term claim that the justice system was “weaponized” against him and that he was the victim of selective prosecution, as Biden says his son was.

Biden’s claim also makes it more difficult for Democrats to stand against Trump’s plans to use the Justice Department for political purposes as Trump seeks to install as director of the FBI the cringeworthy sycophant Kash Patel, who has vowed to “come after” Trump’s enemies.

Of course, we know that the prosecution of Hunter Biden was completely different from the prosecutions of Trump. Many legal experts agree with President Biden’s contention that his son’s offenses wouldn’t normally have resulted in felony charges.

Trump, on the other hand, was charged with near treasonous actions — illegally seeking to overturn the results of an election he lost in order to hold on to power, and endangering national security and trying to obstruct justice by taking classified documents when he left office and refusing to return them. These cases are being dropped because of his election.

But in suggesting that the charges against his son were politically motivated, President Biden has handed Trump something of a Trump card for arguing that of course the Justice Department is used for political ends, so watch me do the same.

Biden’s pardon also makes it more difficult for Democrats to criticize Trump for his use of the pardoning power to immunize friends and allies, at least one of whom he’s now appointing to an important diplomatic role.

Almost immediately after the news broke of President Biden’s pardon for Hunter, Trump used it to justify his planned pardon of the January 6 rioters. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he wrote on social media. “Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Among the people Trump pardoned in his final weeks in office was Charles Kushner, the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who spent two years in prison on tax evasion and other charges. Over the weekend, Trump announced he would nominate the pardoned Kushner to be ambassador to France.

**

There’s a larger issue here. The pardoning power was never supposed to be a means for presidents to put themselves, their families, members of their administration, and campaign staff above the law. Yet that’s precisely what it has become.

Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, on old drug charges. George H.W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others in his administration on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair.

As the framers of the Constitution saw it, the pardoning power was supposed to be a safety valve against injustice. The origins of the power in the United States Constitution are found in the “prerogative of mercy” that originally appeared during the reign of King Ine of Wessex in the seventh century.

George Washington first exercised the power in 1795, granting amnesty to those engaged in Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson granted amnesty to any citizen convicted of a crime under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Lincoln used clemency to encourage desertions from the Confederate Army. In 1868, President Andrew Jackson pardoned Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy.

In another act of mercy, President Warren G. Harding commuted the sentences of 24 political prisoners, including socialist leader Eugene Debs.

But in what was clearly a political use of the pardon rather than a use for humanitarian reasons, Nixon commuted the sentence of James Hoffa, former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a Nixon ally who was convicted for pension fund fraud and jury tampering.

Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon was arguably the most famous exercise of executive clemency in American history. Ford explained that he granted the pardon as an act of mercy to Nixon and for the broader purpose of restoring domestic tranquility in the nation after Watergate.

We need a constitutional amendment to prevent the continuing misuse of the pardoning power.

Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee’s 9th District, has repeatedly introduced just such an amendment, which would prohibit a self-pardon and pardons of family members, administration officials, and campaign employees. It would also bar the president from issuing pardons to those whose crimes were committed to further a direct and significant personal interest of the president or others close to him or her, and those whose crimes were committed at the direction of, or in coordination with, the president.

Cohen’s proposed amendment deserves widespread support.

What do you think?

NOW READ: How to fix MSNBC

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

I hope your Thanksgiving Day was peaceful.

Today I’d like to raise a less peaceful question that many of you are asking me: As we enter the darkness of the Trump regime, where can we find trusted sources of information? What and whom can we count on to give us the truth?

I will give you the sources I rely on in a moment, but first let me explain why reliable and independent sources of news are threatened by a growing alliance of oligarchs and authoritarians.

The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to monopolize information and turn it into propaganda — but it’s the most accurate term, because that’s exactly what’s happening: from Elon Musk’s X to Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to Vladimir Putin’s worldwide disinformation campaign to Donald Trump’s continuing stream of lies on Truth Social and X.

Even legacy mainstream media — which mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership — refrained during the 2024 campaign from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.

The New York Times headlined its coverage of the September 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris — in which Trump bellowed conspiracy theories about stolen elections and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs — as: “Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.”

Trump has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within.” He has threatened to revoke the licenses of television networks and jail journalists who don’t reveal their anonymous sources. Last month, Trump sued CBS, based on conspiratorial claims that “60 Minutes” made “edits” favorable to Harris for the final cut of its interview with her.

Come January 20, Trump and his billionaire toadies — including Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, and Linda McMahon — will control the executive branch of the United States government, and Trump’s MAGA Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress.

Members of the Supreme Court (some of whom, like Clarence Thomas, have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts) have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for what he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into American politics.

All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.

Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.

It’s a vicious cycle: Citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.

Trump and his lapdogs lionize Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.

Trump’s success is already encouraging Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical right-wing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.

Trump’s triumph will surely embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin — the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch — not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation to undermine democracies.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk — the world’s richest person, self-described “First Buddy” of Trump, and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts — has been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022.

Evidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.

During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video “amazing.” It received hundreds of millions of views.

According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2 billion views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.

Murdoch, another oligarchic champion of authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into ever-louder outlets of right-wing propaganda, further amplifying Trump’s lies.

Artificial intelligence may make it even easier for oligarchs and demagogues to manipulate the public. Trump has nominated right-wing FCC commissioner and Musk bro Brendan Carr to chair the agency. Don’t expect him to do anything about weaponized disinformation. Carr ranted publicly about NBC featuring Kamala Harris on “Saturday Night Live” during the election.

Bezos barred The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts. The mere possibility of a Trump presidency forced what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the U.S. to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”

The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris as well, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent,” adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”

Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require — monitoring those in power, acting as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenging those abuses, and sounding the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.

But how to “stand up” without reliable sources of the truth?

So, as we enter the darkness of the Trump regime, please make sure you and others you know have access to accurate information about what’s occurring.

Here are the sources I currently rely on for the truth: The Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, The Economic Policy Institute, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.

Please add in the comments any additional sources you rely on.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Some of you make it a daily or weekly practice to express gratitude for all the good things in your life. Others of us wait until days like today, or religious holidays.

I fear I’m becoming a grouchy old man who doesn’t appreciate nearly enough all the things I should be grateful for. I’ve become even grouchier since Trump was elected.

Even before he takes office on January 20, Trump has cast a darkening cloud over America. His picks for the White House and Cabinet insult the very idea of self-government. His ability to avoid accountability for his crimes turns my stomach.

So what am I grateful for on this day for giving thanks? With your leave, let me count my blessings.

On a personal level, my family. Just thinking about my sons and their partners and my granddaughter brightens my day.

My health, which is still reasonably good at my ripening old age.

My students — brilliant, optimistic, and committed to social justice — keep me sane and give me great hope for the future.

My young colleagues at Inequality Media Civic Action are extraordinarily talented, inventive, and great fun to hang out with.

I’m also grateful to you. Connecting each day, and receiving your thoughts and insights, is a continuous source of encouragement. Thank you.

**

As to politics, it’s difficult to come up with reasons for gratitude at the moment, but I find some solace in the fact that Trump won less than 50 percent of the popular vote (49.85 percent, to be exact), while Harris won 48.27 percent.

That means that the “party of non-voters” — Americans who didn’t bother to vote — is larger than the number who voted for either for Trump or Harris. So, there are lots of people who could be organized and energized over the next few years to do what’s right for the country and the world.

I’m confident that if Democratic candidates for the House and Senate who are now beginning to organize for the 2026 midterms, and presidential hopefuls now getting ready for the presidential campaign of 2028, spoke to the real needs of working people, they’d win by a landslide.

That’s partly because Trump and his stooges will inevitably overreach — handing out so many tax benefits and subsidies to the wealthy and big corporations, raising tariffs (and the cost of living) so high for average Americans, and attacking programs so many depend on, like Medicaid — that Americans will be eager to get rid of them.

But this will happen only if Democrats shift ground — from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrists” — to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of working Americans.

It’s possible.

Consider what just occurred in several so-called “red” states.

Citizens in Arizona, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada voted to protect reproductive rights by putting such rights directly into their state constitutions. (Floridians voted 57 to 43 to protect them, but the measure was just short of the 60 percent threshold needed to pass.)

Voters in Alaska and Missouri decided to increase their state minimum wages to $15 an hour; they and Nebraska also passed measures to require employers to provide paid sick leave.

Voters in Kentucky wisely rejected a measure that would have allowed the state to fund K-12 students outside the public schools.

And Democrats defended their liberal majorities in the Minnesota and Montana legislatures.

Democrats also expanded their majority on the Michigan Supreme Court to 5-2, flipped a state Supreme Court seat in Kentucky, and in Mississippi won a Supreme Court seat in an upset victory for a public defender. (Democrats are also narrowly leading North Carolina’s Supreme Court race as of this writing, with the race going to a recount.)

How did Democrats manage all this in “red” states?

They organized and mobilized and they planned for the long term.

Wisconsin offers a good illustration. There, Democrats picked up four seats and broke the GOP supermajority in the state Senate, picked up 10 seats in the state Assembly, and are on track to flip both chambers in 2026 and potentially get a trifecta if they win the governor’s race that year too.

This was possible because Democrats flipped Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court in April 2023, and that court then struck down the gerrymandered GOP-drawn state legislative map. Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed into law a new competitive state legislative map.

There’s reason to believe that most working Americans want a fairer and more just society. But achieving it depends on un-rigging the politics we currently have, which is dominated by corporations and wealthy individuals. It means organizing for the long term.

America is not Donald Trump. To the contrary, Americans still believe in social and economic justice, and we believe in democracy.

As a nation, we are rich enough to provide all workers paid family leave, give all of our children a first-class education, give all our people access to health care and affordable homes, and enable all our families to care for their elderly.

We don’t want government forcing women to give birth, or checking on whether we’re using bathrooms consistent with our sex assigned at birth, or demanding our citizenship papers, breaking up families, and holding people in detention camps.

We don’t want corporations that bribe public officials with campaign donations, or pay their CEOs 300 times the pay of their typical workers.

And we don’t want a president who has attempted a coup against the United States.

Trump is a conman. He is not America.

I’m grateful for the ideals the vast majority of us continue to share.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

According to a report submitted to Trump by several of his attorneys, Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn — the man who coordinated legal defenses in Trump’s criminal cases and has been a powerful figure in the Mar-a-Lago palace intrigue transition — asked potential appointees to pay him in order for him to promote them for jobs in the new administration.

Epshteyn’s shakedowns included Scott Bessent, from whom Epshteyn sought $30,000 to $40,000 a month to “promote” him for treasury secretary.

Another whom Epshteyn shook down was a defense contractor, from whom Epshteyn sought $100,000 a month, telling him that the payments would be “do or die” for the defense contractor’s prospects. The contractor did not hire Epshteyn and is fearful of retaliation.

The report concluded that Epshteyn’s proximity to Trump should be “terminated.”

Trump’s response to the report was, “I suppose every president has people around them who try to make money off them on the outside. It’s a shame, but it happens. But no one working for me in any capacity should be looking to make money.”

Epshteyn is currently under indictment in Arizona in connection with trying to overturn the 2020 election results.

Epshteyn has been at Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s election, and Trump has repeatedly sought his counsel on appointments. One of Epshteyn’s strong recommendations, The New York Times has reported, was Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

**

Epshteyn was doing only what Trump himself has done — shaking down just about anyone who wants anything from him.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump shook down every one of his current appointees, seeking large donations with the understanding that they’d be in line for big jobs in the Trump administration. Elon Musk’s tab was $200 million. Stephen Bessent’s hedge fund donated at least $6 million.

This isn’t a new practice. Seeking to curry Trump’s favor, representatives of foreign governments have stayed at Trump hotels and played on Trump golf courses.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump proposed to Big Oil executives that they come up with $1 billion for his campaign, in return for which he’d roll back environmental regulations.

In his first term, Trump asked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to come up with dirt on Biden, in return for which Trump would release military aid to Ukraine.

Everything in Trumpworld is transactional. In his very first presidential debate, Trump boasted of paying politicians so they would do whatever he wanted. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”

Making money through connections with Trump is common. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has made a bundle in deals with the Arab petro-states to which he was Trump’s de facto emissary.

In Trumpworld, Epshteyn’s real mistake was not that he shook down prospective Trump appointees. It was that he failed to share the proceeds of his shakedowns with Trump.

NOW READ: Trump proves there's no such thing as an imposter

Connect these dots:

• Trump initially nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general despite charges that Gaetz paid for drug-filled orgies with underage girls.
• Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, is alleged to have raped a woman. In a newly released police report, the woman said Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has admitted paying the woman hush money because, he says, he was afraid he’d lose his job at Fox News if the allegation became public.
• Hegseth’s nomination had already generated concern because of his opposition to women serving in combat.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, is alleged to have groped a family babysitter. She went public with her allegation in July.
• Kennedy allegedly had an affair with reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose former fiance said in a court filing that she told him Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her.
• Elon Musk is being sued by several former employees for “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,” and creating a sexually charged workplace that treats women as objects.
• Trump himself was found in civil trial to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and she won two civil court judgments against him for $83.3 million.
• Trump says that the more than two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct were lying.
• And, of course, Trump is heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
• Trump’s Republican National Convention was an exercise in hyper-masculinity, including Hulk Hogan roaring and ripping off his shirt.
• During the 2024 election, Trump surrogates mocked Democrats for not being able to define a “woman.”
• In the election, more than 40 percent of the advertisements aired by Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups focused on Harris’s support for transgender people: The ads claimed Harris “supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports.”
• Trump said he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
• During the campaign, JD Vance said that declining rates of birth in the U.S. constituted a “civilizational crisis” and proposed that adults without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights.
• In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance continued: “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
• Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
• Among them was Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation was dominated by allegations that he sexually assaulted a young woman.
• In recent court filings, the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri claim that expanded access to abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.”

What’s the connection?

Disdain of women, a belief that they exist for male pleasure and reproduction, and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.

All are deeply embedded in Trumpism.

Zoom out and we can see that neofascism (as exemplified by Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin) is organized around male dominance. Women are relegated to subservient roles.

Under neofascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Anything that challenges the traditional female role as reproducer of the male bloodline is viewed as a danger to society.

Neofascism targets gay and transgender people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.

Seen through this prism, Trump’s appointment of many men charged with sexual harassment, men who believe women should not be in combat and should be mothers, and men who oppose abortion and believe women should be forced to have babies even if they don’t want them, forms a coherent neofascist belief system.

The basic tenet is male dominance and female subservience.

What do you think?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Yesterday, the rule of law was thrown out the window — not by Trump but by special counsel Jack Smith.

Smith asked a federal judge to dismiss the indictment charging Trump with plotting to subvert the 2020 election.

Smith made a similar filing to an appeals court in Atlanta, thereby ending Smith’s attempt to reverse the dismissal of the federal case accusing Trump of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office.

Both filings were a grave mistake.

What happened to the rule of law? What became of the principle that no person is above the law, not even a former president? What happened to accountability?

Smith says he had no choice, given the Justice Department’s policy that it’s unconstitutional to pursue prosecutions against sitting presidents.

But he did have a choice. He could have asked the courts to put the cases on hold until Trump is no longer president.

That’s essentially what Judge Juan Merchan did Friday with regard to sentencing Trump on his May conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Sentencing in that case had been scheduled for November 26 but has now been stayed, according to an order issued Friday by Merchan. No new date for a potential sentencing has been set, delaying it indefinitely, although it could be reimposed later.

To be sure, Smith’s requests were for dismissals “without prejudice,” which technically leaves open the possibility that charges could be refiled after Trump leaves office. But refiling charges is vastly more cumbersome than simply ending a stay.

It’s no answer to say there’s no point in trying to keep the two cases alive because Trump will force his new attorney general to quash them.

Let Trump do that, so all the world can see him seek to avoid accountability for what he has done. And let Trump’s Justice Department — which will likely be headed by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi — ask the federal judges involved in the two cases to dismiss them, so all the world can see Trump’s Justice Department acting as Trump’s handmaiden.

Smith should have put the responsibility for avoiding the rule of law squarely on Trump.

In the meantime, Smith should release all the evidence that his team has accumulated about Trump’s plot to subvert the 2020 election and illegally possess highly classified information.

That’s my view. What do you think?

Connect these dots:

• Trump initially nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general despite charges that Gaetz paid for drug-filled orgies with underage girls.
• Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, is alleged to have raped a woman. In a newly released police report, the woman said Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has admitted paying the woman hush money because, he says, he was afraid he’d lose his job at Fox News if the allegation became public.
• Hegseth’s nomination had already generated concern because of his opposition to women serving in combat.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, is alleged to have groped a family babysitter. She went public with her allegation in July.
• Kennedy allegedly had an affair with reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose former fiance said in a court filing that she told him Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her.
• Elon Musk is being sued by several former employees for “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,” and creating a sexually charged workplace that treats women as objects.
• Trump himself was found in civil trial to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and she won two civil court judgments against him for $83.3 million.
• Trump says that the more than two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct were lying.
• And, of course, Trump is heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
• Trump’s Republican National Convention was an exercise in hyper-masculinity, including Hulk Hogan roaring and ripping off his shirt.
• During the 2024 election, Trump surrogates mocked Democrats for not being able to define a “woman.”
• In the election, more than 40 percent of the advertisements aired by Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups focused on Harris’s support for transgender people: The ads claimed Harris “supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports.”
• Trump said he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
• During the campaign, JD Vance said that declining rates of birth in the U.S. constituted a “civilizational crisis” and proposed that adults without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights.
• In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance continued: “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
• Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
• Among them was Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation was dominated by allegations that he sexually assaulted a young woman.
• In recent court filings, the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri claim that expanded access to abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.”

What’s the connection?

Disdain of women, a belief that they exist for male pleasure and reproduction, and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.

All are deeply embedded in Trumpism.

Zoom out and we can see that neofascism (as exemplified by Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin) is organized around male dominance. Women are relegated to subservient roles.

Under neofascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Anything that challenges the traditional female role as reproducer of the male bloodline is viewed as a danger to society.

Neofascism targets gay and transgender people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.

Seen through this prism, Trump’s appointment of many men charged with sexual harassment, men who believe women should not be in combat and should be mothers, and men who oppose abortion and believe women should be forced to have babies even if they don’t want them, forms a coherent neofascist belief system.

The basic tenet is male dominance and female subservience.

What do you think?

NOW READ: Too many Democrats need to hear this truth bomb

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Will anything stop Trump?

He will have control over both chambers of Congress, a tractable Supreme Court, a political base of fiercely loyal MAGAs, a media ecosystem that amplifies his lies (now including Musk’s horrific X as well as Rupert Murdoch’s reliably mendacious Fox News), and a thin majority of voters in the 2024 election.

He doesn’t worry about another election because he won’t be eligible to run again (or he’ll ignore the Constitution and stay on).

Of course, there are the midterm elections of 2026. But even if Democrats take back both chambers, Trump and his incipient administration are aiming to wreak so much havoc on America in the meantime that Democrats can’t remedy it.

The Republican-controlled Senate starting January 3 won’t restrain Trump. Yes, Trump overreached with his pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Apparently even Senate Republicans can’t abide sex trafficking girls for drug-infested orgies, but this is a very low bar.

So, as a practical matter, is anything stopping Trump?

Yes, and here’s a hint of what it is: On Friday, Trump picked Scott Bessent to serve as treasury secretary.

Bessent is the man Elon Musk derided only a week ago as the “business-as-usual choice” for treasury secretary, in contrast to Howard Lutnick, who Musk said would “actually enact change.”

Musk’s view of “change” is to blow a place up, which was what Musk did when he bought Twitter.

Over the last two weeks, Musk has convinced Trump to appoint bomb-throwers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth to Defense, and to put Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget.

But Bessent is the opposite of a bomb-thrower. He’s a billionaire hedge fund manager, founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management, and a protege of the MAGA arch-villain George Soros (he’s also gay, which the MAGA base may not like, either).

Why did Trump appoint the “business as usual” Bessent to be treasury secretary? Because the treasury secretary is the most important economic job in the U.S. government.

Trump has never understood much about economics, but he knows two things: High interest rates can throttle an economy (and bring down a president’s party), and high stock prices are good (at least for Trump and his investor class).

Trump doesn’t want to do anything that will cause bond traders to raise long-term interest rates out of fear of future inflation, and he wants stock traders to be so optimistic about corporate profits they raise share prices.

So he has appointed a treasury secretary who will reassure the bond and stock markets.

Stock and bond markets constitute the only real constraint on Trump — the only things whose power he’s afraid of.

But wait. What about Trump’s plan to raise tariffs? He’s floated a blanket tariff of 10 to 20 percent on nearly all imports, 25 percent on imports from Mexico, and 60 percent or more on Chinese goods.

Tariffs of this size would increase consumer prices and fuel inflation — driving interest rates upward. (The cost of tariffs are borne by American businesses and households, rather than foreign companies.)

Tariffs could also invite retaliation from foreign governments and thereby dry up export markets for American-based corporations — in which case the stock market would tank. (The last time America raised tariffs on all imports — Herbert Hoover’s and Congressmen Smoot and Hawley’s Tariff Act of 1930 — the Great Depression worsened.)

In short, tariffs will rattle stock and bond markets, doing the exact opposite of what Trump wants.

So Trump has appointed a treasury secretary who will soothe Wall Street’s nerves — not just because Bessent is a Wall Street billionaire who speaks the Street’s language but also because the Street doesn’t really believe Bessent wants higher tariffs.

Bessent has described Trump’s plan for blanket tariffs as a “maximalist” negotiating strategy — suggesting Trump’s whole tariff proposal is a strategic bluff. The Street apparently thinks tariffs won’t rise much when other countries respond to the bluff with what Trump sees as concessions.

Instead, the Street expects Bessent to be spending his energies seeking lower taxes, especially for big corporations and wealthy Americans, and helping Musk and Ramaswamy cut spending and roll back regulations.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of American democracy when the main constraint on the madman soon to occupy the Oval Office is Wall Street.

I suppose we should be grateful there’s any constraint at all.

NOW READ: Now is no time to be a 'good German'

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

At the same time Democrats and progressives are justifiably enraged at Trump’s gonzo Cabinet picks, they’re all but mute about corporate America’s continued siphoning of economic gains to the top.

Yet this siphoning has created the stagnant wages and insecure jobs that helped propel Trump into the presidency and give Republicans control over both chambers of Congress.

Trump at least gave workers an explanation for what’s happened to them — although it was a lie: It isn’t undocumented immigrants or the “deep state” or transgender kids or any other Trump bogeyman.

It’s corporate greed.

The most recent example: On Friday, GM announced it was laying off 1,000 workers. These layoffs followed another round of GM layoffs in August, which saw 1,500 jobs cut. The cuts affected both salaried and hourly staff, including some United Auto Workers members.

Most of the workers being laid off Friday were notified via email early Friday morning. Some had been working for GM for over thirty years.

GM says it has no choice. It must cut costs.

This is what we hear again and again from corporate America. We’ll be hearing even more of this as Artificial Intelligence takes over white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs.

No choice?

GM is on track for making record profits this year, surpassing its 2022 record profit of $14.5 billion. In the third quarter of 2024 alone, GM made $3.4 billion. That’s a $200 million increase from the same period last year.

GM CEO Mary Barra’s compensation for 2024 is $27.8 million. This includes a base salary of $2.1 million, stock awards of $14.6 million, stock option awards valued at $4.9 million, an “incentive plan” compensation (as if she needed more incentive) of $5.3 million, other payment of $997,392, and perks (personal travel, security, financial counseling, company vehicles, and an executive health plan) valued at $389,005.

The ratio of Barra’s compensation to that of the typical GM employee is estimated to be 303-to-1.

In June, GM announced $6 billion in stock buybacks. This means $6 billion of GM’s record profits will be used to purchase its own shares of stock — thereby boosting share prices (and the portion of Barra’s compensation in stock grants and options) simply because fewer shares of GM stock will be in circulation.

Keep in mind that the richest 1 percent of American hold over half of the value of all shares of stock held by Americans, and the richest 10 percent hold 92 percent.

So, in fact, GM’s savings from axing 1,000 jobs will be transferred into the pockets of wealthy Americans (including GM’s CEO).

Why aren’t Democrats up in arms about this? I haven’t heard Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, or any other leading Democrat say a critical word about GM’s latest move.

Why isn’t Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer — who may be in the running for president in 2028 (assuming we have another election) — accusing GM of sacrificing jobs for profits that are siphoned off to big investors?

Why aren’t Democrats, who still control the Senate and presidency, moving more aggressively to outlaw stock buybacks — which were considered illegal stock manipulations before Ronald Reagan’s SEC gave them the green light?

Why aren’t they demanding that capital gains taxes be increased on the super-wealthy, whose stock gains this year alone have made America’s billionaires 30 percent richer?

Why aren’t they moving to increase corporate taxes on corporations whose ratio of CEO pay to their median workers is more than 50 to 1? And impose even higher taxes if the ratio exceeds 100 to 1? (Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse, along with Representatives Barbara Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have introduced just such a bill, but no one knows about it. Why isn’t the Democratic leadership loudly pushing this?)

The lesson of the debacle of the 2024 election is that big corporations and the wealthy have shafted average working Americans, whose wages and jobs have gone nowhere for decades and who are understandably frustrated and angry at what they see as a rigged system.

But Democrats have offered no alternative explanation for what’s happened to average working people or agenda for remedying it. Trump's baseless explanation and agenda are the only ones available. So it’s no surprise that many working Americans voted for Trump on Election Day.

Now Trump and his Republican stooges think they’ve been given a license to blow the system up — initially by appointing a bunch of clowns, conspiracy theorists, and sexual predators to key posts.

It’s important to rail against Trump’s appointments. But unless we attack the sources of the outrage Trump has tapped into, working Americans will continue to go along with whatever Trump and his lapdogs want to do.

NOW READ: Matt Gaetz is just what Trump voters wanted — and now they deserve an explantion

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk and Donald Trump watched SpaceX’s launching of a rocket that could someday take people to Mars. It could also make Musk even richer if Trump awards him government contracts to try.

Musk’s increasingly powerful role in the Trumposphere has led some progressives to suggest we temper our criticisms of him.

On Saturday, Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman representing the South Bronx and a self-described “pragmatic progressive,” asked online why Elon Musk “came to be the favored punching bag of the far left,” as Torres put it (on the Musk-owned X).

Torres continued:

“Whether you approve of him or not, whether you agree with him or not, the man is leading two of the most innovative companies on earth. But for SpaceX, the US would be losing the space race against China. But for Tesla, the EV industry in the US would be a shell of itself. The country thrives on intrepid innovators like Elon Musk. Why antagonize him so intensely that you drive him into Trump’s corner and make a permanent enemy out of him? Politics should be a game of addition, not subtraction.”

With due respect to Congressman Torres, Musk is no “intrepid innovator.” He’s an intrepid government contractor. And he’s caused extraordinary harm to America — from the dangerous lies he’s spewing on X, to his war on workers, to the $120 million he spent to get Trump elected.

Musk’s so-called “innovations” have depended on government money. Tesla and SpaceX got started with assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts, and loans.

By January 2010, Musk had sold fewer than 2,000 Teslas. He then received a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy, months before Tesla’s initial public offering. With that loan, Tesla developed its Model S car, its first major success, and repaid the loan through proceeds from an additional sale of stock in 2013.

Every Tesla purchaser also received a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, a subsidy that totaled an estimated $3.4 billion for Tesla. Even if the subsidy let Musk raise prices by half that amount, that would be another $1.7 billion in federal help.

In addition, state and federal tax credits aimed at reducing greenhouse gases generated another $2 billion for the company between 2008 and 2019, accounting for nearly 25 percent of its revenue in 2008 and 10 percent of its revenue over the next five years. Overall, sales of regulatory credits have brought in nearly $11 billion to Tesla.

Not until 2021 was Tesla able to post a profit without the help of credit sales. Without regulatory credits, Musk wouldn’t be the richest person in the world.

Musk is also dependent on government funding for his SpaceX. In 2021 and 2022, SpaceX got NASA contracts worth a total of $4 billion to take humans to the moon.

In June, NASA announced that SpaceX received an additional $843 million contract to “de-orbit” the space station when it is ready for retirement in a few years. SpaceX also has contracts to launch military and spy satellites.

All told, according to USASpending.gov (the government database that tracks federal spending), SpaceX has signed contracts worth nearly $20 billion. If the Trump administration increases funding for NASA’s efforts to return to the moon and travel to Mars, SpaceX’s value could easily increase to $500 billion or more.

Since Trump’s election, Musk’s net worth has increased $64 billion, or nearly 25 percent, according to Bloomberg’s estimate, based in part on investors’ assumptions that Musk will get contracts from the Trump administration for more rocket launches, satellites, artificial intelligence, and self-driving vehicles, and avoid the regulatory constraints and legal troubles he’s faced before.

His companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, are now the subjects of over 20 investigations or regulatory reviews, according to an examination by The New York Times. Musk has given his middle finger to laws designed to protect the health and safety of workers, laws enacted to protect workers’ right to organize a union, and laws to protect consumers and small investors.

Tesla’s push for autonomous driving is a particular focus for regulators. Just last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was investigating several self-driving crashes involving fog and dust.

Musk has also regularly tussled with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The commission has investigated Musk’s 2022 purchase of X, then called Twitter. Musk did not show up for a deposition in September, leading to an SEC request that sanctions be imposed on him.

**

There is an abiding assumption in America that the rich must be smart and that the free market doesn’t play favorites. In fact, the rich have often gained their wealth due to their skill at getting government subsidies, grants, bailouts, and contracts; their cleverness at skirting government regulations; and their hubris in ignoring conflicts of interest. Wherever great wealth connects with significant power, democracy suffers.

Donald Trump is Exhibit A. Elon Musk is Exhibit B.

That Trump has tasked Musk to find some $2 trillion of cuts in the federal budget through more “efficiency” is as bonkers as putting the Justice Department in the hands of an alleged sex trafficker, or assigning an anti-vaxxing conspiracy theorist to run public health, or choosing a possible Russian mole to direct U.S. intelligence.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

I keep asking myself how the hell more than 70 million of our compatriots could vote for that jerk. For the purpose of thinking through what happened and what Democrats should do in the future, I’ve organized Trump voters into four groups.

1. The fanatic MAGA base: racists, misogynists, homophobes, nativists, xenophobes, and know-nothings. They’ve always been part of America, but they’re more visible now because they wear MAGA hats and attend MAGA rallies. (They also don’t always admit to pollsters they’re voting for Trump because they don’t want to admit their bigotry even to themselves. Democrats shouldn’t try to court them.)

2. Those who haven’t yet felt the beneficial effects of Biden’s policies. These voters work hard and play by the rules. They are not ideological, are not wedded to one party or the other, and are pragmatic. They’ll listen to reason if and when they perceive Democrats to be genuinely on their side.

3. Angry voters who have been shafted for decades. They don’t have college degrees and live in areas of America that have been abandoned by industry. They want to flick their middle fingers at college-educated elites — successful, affluent, healthier, seemingly happier people with wonderful futures. Democrats should listen to their legitimate grievances and stop acting as if Democrats are superior and enlightened.

4. Men — white, Black, and Latino — who have been losing ground, status, and power. They want to return to an America when their fathers or grandfathers were the major breadwinners in their families and ruled the roost. They wouldn’t describe themselves as misogynistic, but they feel bewildered and lost in a society that no longer values or rewards physical strength, endurance, stamina, tenacity, toughness, and other traditional “male” virtues. Dems should open paths to them toward good jobs.

Admittedly, these four groups overlap, and there were others who helped Trump win, such as the religious right and people outraged by Biden’s cooperation with Netanyahu. But for this week’s Office Hours question, please identify which of these groups you believe were most responsible for Trump’s win of the popular vote.

Now read: People expecting Trump voters to turn on him are fooling themselves

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

It’s been just two weeks, but it feels like an eternity.

It feels like an eternity because of the immensity of the loss — not just the loss of the election but the seeming loss of America. Not just America, but the apparent loss of the world as we knew it.

In reality, we lost by a relatively small number of votes, but in our winner-take-all system of government, that doesn’t much matter. We lost.

Two weeks in, and the magnitude of the loss may be hitting you differently than it did on the night of November 5.

It has been coming to me in the early morning, just as dawn is breaking and I’m starting to awaken. It has been coming to me in the form of dread.

What exactly do I dread? Trump, and all the anger he has exploited. Trump, and all the people he has manipulated. Trump, and all the power he will have to do atrocious things. Trump, and all the dreadful people he is surrounding himself with or is seeking to appoint. Trump, and his use of the military on hardworking people in my community.

Some of you probably awaken as I do.

Alternatively, some of you are using coping mechanisms — not reading the paper or listening to the news, or giving up on politics, or relying on music or poetry or the beauty of nature to blot out what is occurring.

I get it.

However you might be coping with the loss and the shock, it’s very important that you know what they’re trying to do.

What they want most is to take away our hope.

If they can make us hopeless, they win everything. If they can abscond with our hope, we will stop fighting for a more just society, stop defending those who are most vulnerable to them, stop protecting what’s left of our democracy.

If they can destroy our hope, we won’t join together to try to stop them. They will win everything. They will get it all.

I understand if at this point, two weeks after a grievous election, you feel depressed. Dispossessed. Empty. Angry.

I understand if you feel the grief of losing what should never have been lost.

I understand if you feel the gross, mind-numbing unfairness of a system that rewards horrendous lies backed by big money.

I share all these feelings.

Some of you ask: Even if I had a shred of hopeful energy remaining inside me, what would I do? Trump has it all — the entire executive branch of government, which he wants run by dangerous people who will do whatever he wants. He has both chambers of Congress. He’s got an election-denying Republican Party purged of people with integrity. He’s got a pliable Supreme Court.

Given all this, many of you feel powerless. You ask: As a practical matter, what can I do?

First and perhaps most importantly, connect and reconnect with people who share our values — who want a decent society, who reject bigotry, who treat people equally and respectfully, who seek social justice, and who keep in mind the common good. All of us need the support and reassurance that come with connection to these kindred souls.

Don’t be an election-only activist. Practice your activism. Meet regularly, in person or online. Hear each other’s stories. Listen to the grieving of others. Know you’re not alone in this.

Second, sketch a plan for your activism. You don’t need to put it into effect right away, but have it ready. Work with others to organize and mobilize.

Maybe it involves protecting people in your community who are most vulnerable to Trump’s dragnet. Or people who are (or will be) on Trump’s enemies list.

Or women and girls of childbearing age who will need help, advice, encouragement, and resources if they’re to exercise their rights over their own bodies.

Maybe it involves establishing new and more reliable sources of news and analysis, and sharing those sources with others.

Maybe it involves boycotting X, or companies that advertise on X or on Fox News. Or other products and services generated by billionaires who supported Trump.

Or cutting back on buying things you don’t need and putting your money into the work of groups advancing the common good.

And joining such groups. Starting chapters in your community. Getting others involved.

Third, pace yourself. Don’t try to do it all immediately. The fight we’re engaged in will not be won anytime soon. There are likely to be elections next November in your community and state. The next major federal engagement will be the midterm elections of 2026.

Don’t expect clear and decisive victories. We are up against forces that use bigotry and lies to entrench their power. It will take time, patience, and tenacity to change course.

Fourth, avoid the blame game. There’s nothing to be gained by picking on Biden or on Harris or on Democrats in general or on this or that identity group.

But an accurate explanation for what has occurred can be a precursor to making necessary changes.

An explanation is not a justification. To my mind, there is no moral justification for electing Trump, although I think I understand why people voted for him.

At the most basic level, they voted for him because for many decades they have not benefited from the fruits of their hard work. The median wage of the bottom 90 percent buys less today than it did 40 years ago. For decades, most of the gains have gone to the top.

Grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, opportunity, and power have caused most Americans to feel angry, surly, cynical, and ready to take a wrecking ball to the whole system.

But Trump’s wrecking ball will only hurt most Americans and further enrich oligarchs like himself. We must help people understand this.

Fifth, please be kind to yourself. You are not alone, and you’re not crazy. You will have bad days.

Many of us are still in shock. Many are experiencing a kind of trauma. Sometimes these sorts of shocks and traumas dredge up shocks and traumas from our past.

Get plenty of rest. Read a good novel. Watch a good streaming series. Find things to laugh at — and share laughter with others.

Most of all — even if you don’t feel it now at all — don’t lose hope.

Find green shoots of hope wherever you can.

Some people, some communities, and even some states, continue to do great things. Celebrate them.

Others are doing small but important things. Thank them.

Others are doing courageous things. Appreciate them.

Keep hope strong. Keep hope alive. Don’t let them take it away.

We are together in this.

Also Read: Trump's bamboozle — and the real reason behind his controversial cabinet picks

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

What do card sharks, magicians, pickpockets, and tyrants do to hide their tricks? They deflect your attention. “Look over here!” they say, as they create a commotion that preoccupies your mind while they bamboozle you.

At first, I thought Trump’s gonzo nominations were intended to flood the zone — overwhelm us, demoralize us, cause us to lose our minds.

Alternatively, I thought, they had a strategic purpose: Smoke out Senate Republicans who might stand in Trump’s way on other issues — such as allying with Putin and destroying NATO — so Trump could purge the holdouts through primary challengers and angry MAGAs.

But while flooding the zone and purging recalcitrant Senate Republicans may be part of it, I’ve come to think there’s a larger plan at work.

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Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.

As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.

Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.

Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.

America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic.

Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.

But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.

The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.

The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.

This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).

Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.

Trump has tapped Elon Musk, who invested some $130 million to get Trump elected (not to mention in-kind gifts of support from X and a swing-state operation to register right-leaning voters) and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Musk calls it DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency — whose value, not incidentally, has soared since Musk began using its name for his incipient department.

It now appears that DOGE won’t be an actual “Department” but a powerful advisory group outside the official government yet inside the Trump White House. It will announce — presumably posted with great fanfare on X — what Musk allies describe as “slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.”

Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”

Hardship for whom? Not for Musk. Not for Trump. Not for the billionaires heading Trump’s transition team. Not for all the billionaires who will profit from the planned tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

And not for people responding to Musk’s recent X post calling for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”

Musk says we have to reduce spending “to live within our means?” Whose means?

Since Trump’s election victory on November 5, Musk himself has become $70 billion richer due to the rising value of his enterprises.

Why have Musk’s companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — risen so much in value? Because investors expect some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Musk’s companies to wind down. (Lawsuits involving alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of environmental laws, consumer fraud, and vehicle safety defects.)

Investors also expect SpaceX to become more profitable from more multibillion-dollar contracts. Musk’s xAI could also reap vast rewards as the new administration considers AI regulations.

Other billionaires who invested in Trump have also been raking it in.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person — a close friend of Musk’s and a former Tesla board member — is a longtime Republican donor who’s enjoying his own Trump bump. Since the election, Oracle’s share value has increased 10 percent, increasing Ellison’s own wealth by some $20 billion.

Venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super PAC that supported Trump, expects to cash in by having Trump ease the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech, in which Andreessen has invested heavily. Andreessen’s wish has already been partly monetized: Big Tech has reaped most of the stock market gains since Election Day.

There’s also crypto. Since the election, the price of bitcoin has surged to record levels. The crypto exchange Coinbase, a major contributor to candidates friendly to crypto, expects regulators to keep their hands off it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become about $4.5 billion richer since Trump’s victory, as Coinbase shares soared 67 percent.

Oh, there are also the private prison corporations. George Zoley, a top executive at GEO Group and another major donor to Trump, expects Trump’s reelection to drive up demand for empty beds at detention centers the company runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the election, GEO Group has had the largest surge in its stock price since 2016, after Trump was elected the first time.

GEO Group executives told Wall Street analysts on a recent earnings call that Trump’s election could help GEO Group fill as many as 18,000 empty beds at its facilities, which would generate as much as $400 million in annual business.

Venture capitalists and investors in new military technologies are now swarming around the Defense Department like bees over a vast flower bed. They also donated to Trump and expect a big quid pro quo.

The fossil fuels CEOs who plunked down millions of dollars for Trump in the expectation they’d get a fat return in the form of rollbacks of environmental regulations are also celebrating.

The list of wealthy beneficiaries from Trump’s election goes on and on.

So who will suffer the “hardship” Musk predicts?

I doubt that Musk will recommend cutting the billions of dollars in government contracts Musk’s corporations receive, or the GEO Group’s contracts for private prison space, or the military budget. Quite the contrary: Government spending on all these will increase.

Instead, Musk will want to cut the enforcement of antitrust laws, securities laws, workplace safety laws, labor laws, civil rights laws, laws against consumer fraud, laws mandating vehicle safety, tax laws, and environmental laws.

And because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion he’s promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect Musk will turn to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Here’s where the trick comes in. We’ll all be so distracted by what Gaetz is doing at the Justice Department, Gabbard to national intelligence, and RFK Jr. to public health, that we may not notice.

After all, the next months will be filled with Trump theatrics — a major fight in the Senate over the Gaetz nomination, another fight over recess appointments, another over RFK Jr. and his plans for destroying public health.

Meanwhile, Musk and company will be recommending all sorts budget cuts that cause hardship for hardworking Americans but almost no one will notice because of the distractions.

I prefer to end this post on a hopeful note, so here goes.

There has always been a close relationship in America between wealth and power, but it has usually been thought slightly shameful — something to be hidden or elided — because it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy.

Recall the admonition credited to Justice Louis Brandeis that America has a choice: either great wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy — but we cannot have both.

Hence, American politicians typically play up their humble origins. CEOs and bankers minimize their political clout. The wealthy refrain from overt displays of power.

But in Gilded Ages — such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in — the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout.

In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence.

Ultimately, these insults to democracy — delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly — go too far. They invite a backlash.

If history is any guide, at some point the public will become revolted by the stench of legalized bribery. It will not abide the quid pro quos of billionaire campaign donations for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

The public will also become fed up with brazen billionaire propaganda delivered through billionaire ownership of key media, such as Musk’s X, right-wing radio, and Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the The Wall Street Journal.

More than a century ago, this sort of revulsion generated what historians refer to as the “Progressive Era.” It was responsible for pushing Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, institute the nation’s first income tax, stop corporations from funding candidates for president and Congress, and create the Food and Drug Administration.

And when the excesses finally caused the economy to collapse, another upsurge in progressivism prompted Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D., to raise taxes even further on the affluent, create the 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, force corporations to negotiate with unions, institute unemployment insurance, create a minimum wage, and establish Social Security.

If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted. So Gilded Age excesses are almost guaranteed.

And when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, that majority will once again demand systematic reforms that bring us closer to those values.

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The two finalists to become Trump’s Treasury Secretary — the person will have a major hand in cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising tariffs so everyone pays more — are Howard Lutnick, who’s CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Trump’s co-transition chair, and Steven Bessent, the founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management.

Lutnick had been in the lead but a few days ago, according to the The Wall Street Journal, he heard from Trump’s allies that he might not get the nod.

So Lutnick turned for help to Elon Musk, who now calls himself Trump’s “First Buddy.” Bessent’s supporters also reached out to Musk to endorse Bessent, which tells you alot about the palace intrigue going on now in Mar-a-Lago, and how much power Musk is now wielding.

Yesterday, Musk, posted on his X that Lutnick would be a better choice for treasury secretary than Bessent:

“My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change. Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”

I’ve spent quite some time around presidents and president-elects and even advised them about personnel decisions. The most basic rule of such advice-giving is you never make your advice public.

Doing so puts the president-elect in an impossible position: If he does what you’ve publicly urged him to do — even if he was going to do it anyway — your public advocacy makes it look as if you pushed him into it, so he seems to be your patsy.

If the president-elect is Donald Trump, who thinks mainly in terms of dominance and submission, you’re playing with fire.

Bad enough that Musk broke this basic rule. He went even further, publicly encouraging his nearly 205 million followers on X to weigh in, in favor of Lutnick.

So Musk has very publicly cornered Trump. If Trump names Lutnick, it looks as if all Musk needs to do from now on is publicly urge Trump to do this or that, with the implicit threat of getting his 205 million followers stirred up to follow suit, and Trump will do it. Musk becomes de facto President.

I don’t know what Trump will do but I’m sure he’s seething. The most likely outcome is Trump doesn’t offer the job to either Lutnick nor Bessent, and fires Musk.

Musk’s public advocacy of Lutnick because he will “enact change” rather than “business-as-usual” also signals Musk’s and Trump’s criterion for filling high-level positions (besides unbridled fealty to Trump): The picks don’t need to know anything or share any large vision of the public good. They just have to be bomb-throwers who’ll shake things up.

The worst that can be said of any candidate is he’ll govern as usual.

Trump is well on his way to “crush the system,” as he promised — which most Americans appear to want because the “as usual” system has for decades been rewarding big-money donors, monopolists, CEOs living off government contracts (like Musk) and fat-cat denizens of Wall Street (like Lutnick and Bessent) — all of whom have been siphoning off most economic gains for themselves.

But if the new system that Trump installs (with or without Musk’s help) siphons off even more of the gains for those at the top, while destroying what’s left of our democracy, most Americans will find themselves even worse off and more resentful.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

The most powerful levers of control in the United States government are found in the six positions where intelligence-gathering and brute force overlap — the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Director of the CIA, and Director of National Intelligence.

These six constitute the raw muscle of the federal government, where information about the nation’s security is gathered and force is wielded.

Trump could turn America into a police state by putting people into these positions who are more loyal to him than they are to America and the U.S. Constitution.

Trump has repeatedly warned of a so-called “enemy within.” If he is serious about this putative threat — and we must assume he is — he, and the people around him now planning all of this, must be ready to wield the power of the nation to spy on and use military force against such so-called internal enemies.

Consider Trump’s nominations this week, and he seems well on his way.

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Trump has chosen Pete Hegseth, a Fox News TV host, for Defense Secretary; Matt Gaetz, a firebrand right-wing congressman, for Attorney General; Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, for Secretary of Homeland Security; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress turned fierce Trumper, for Director of National Intelligence; and John Ratcliffe, a former Republican member of Congress, to be director of the CIA.

What do these people have in common?

For one thing, none of them has any experience or expertise that would make them a natural fit in any of these roles, if experience or expertise mattered to Trump.

Their most important “qualification” is that they have demonstrated fierce and unblinking loyalty to Trump.

Pete Hegseth showed on Fox News that he was a dedicated Trump loyalist during his first term, defending Trump’s “America First” agenda and espousing far-right views about rolling back “woke” policies in the armed forces and rooting out military leaders who implemented them.

Hegseth has already promised to purge the Pentagon of top brass harboring questionable loyalty to Trump. “Well, first of all, you got to fire … the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast last week, when talking about how to take control.

Trump’s transition team is drawing up a list of military officers to be fired. Trump is also considering a draft executive order to create a “warrior board” of retired senior military officials to review three- and four-star officers for dismissal, allowing a fast-track to reshape the military command structure, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Surely anyone who was elevated or appointed by General Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — who was quoted in Bob Woodward’s book War as calling Trump “fascist to the core” — will be gone.

Kristi Noem — whom Trump has nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security — was an early backer of Trump’s reelection campaign and echoed Trump’s harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration — calling the situation at the southern border an “invasion.”

Since becoming governor of South Dakota, Noem has deployed her state’s National Guard troops to the southwest border at least five times.

The Department of Homeland Security is an enforcement powerhouse with a $60 billion budget and more than 230,000 employees, most of whom are involved in enforcement. Only the Defense Department is larger.

Homeland Security contains the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

DHS also has the capacity to spy on Americans. It is tasked with cybersecurity and election security, has an in-house intelligence office, and includes the Secret Service.

Policies for cracking down on the U.S.-Mexico border and rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants will be run out of the White House by Stephen Miller and incoming border czar Tom Homan, but Noem would enforce the policies.

Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, has zero qualifications for the job but has been one of the most outspoken Trump loyalists in Congress.

As I said yesterday, ever since Trump was indicted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Gaetz has defended him — alleging that the prosecutions of Trump were politically motivated, that Biden was behind them, charging the Biden administration with vindictiveness toward Trump and asserting that Trump would have every right to engage in similar vengeance toward Trump’s political enemies.

In making these bogus charges, Gaetz has often used identical language to Trump’s wildly partisan and incendiary claims.

Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman whom Trump has picked for Director of National Intelligence, has advanced many of the same conspiracy theories that Trump has floated — which defy the conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence agencies she would oversee.

She has also espoused narratives peddled by Russia. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, Gabbard tweeted that the “war and suffering” could have been avoided if the Biden administration had acknowledged “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.”

The following month, she called for a cease-fire in a video message, citing the alleged presence of twenty-five or more U.S.-funded “biolabs in Ukraine” which could release and spread deadly pathogens — the same claims Russian officials had made and U.S. officials had denied.

The Director of National Intelligence has charge over all sources of information coming into the U.S. government about potential threats, foreign and domestic.

Gabbard’s portfolio would include the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Security Council, and Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters. In effect, she’d be the nation’s chief spymaster.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for the CIA, was an aggressive Trump defender as a member of Congress. Ratcliffe was skeptical about former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, forcefully questioning the prosecutor and blasting his report.

Ratcliffe called the House vote to impeach Trump over the phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen.”

As Trump’s Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term, Ratcliffe rejected claims by a dozen former intelligence officials that disclosure of emails from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

***

Keep your eyes on these people and these positions. They are the places where information about potential threats to the nation is assembled and where America’s power and force are exercised.

If — and I emphasize if — Trump is aiming to replace our system of self-government with an authoritarian or fascist one, he would begin by gaining control over these centers of intelligence-gathering and enforcement — staffing them with unquestioning loyalists — and aiming them at so-called “enemies within” the nation.

I don’t want to be unduly alarmist, but within just 10 days after the election, Trump appears to be well on his way.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Trump is giving his middle finger to America.

Nominating the alleged sexual trafficker Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General, Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense, and bizarro Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence are acts of nihilistic disruption.

Now, nominating conspiracist and fabulist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the nation’s leading health job — overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sensitive positions — is an act of utter hubris.

At a time when the truth is a precious common good, and the public’s health is already precarious, RFK Junior has made a name for himself spreading dangerous health lies.

He claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”

He has promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved.

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.”

All nonsense.

Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the ever-growing pool of bottom-feeding fringe characters encircling Trump like ravenous slugs.

So why nominate this collection of bozos?

If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for Senate confirmation.

I can see why Trump might want total loyalists in key positions that would enable him to turn America into a police state — more on this tomorrow — but why nominate a nut job to run America’s health system?

What possible point is there to subjecting Americans to poisonous food or drugs? Why undermine the Centers for Disease Control when Americans and their children need the protections vaccines provide?

Or is all this just another manifestation of Trump becoming deranged?

If Americans suffer buyer’s remorse for electing him, the next time we’ll have a chance to do anything about it will be the midterm elections of November 2026. But how much damage can Trump and his cantina do between next January and then?

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Trump is saying the election gave him a “very big mandate.”

Rubbish. It wasn’t a mandate at all. It wasn’t even a “red shift” to Trump and the Republicans.

It was a blue abandonment.

We now know that nine million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020.

Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That’s no big deal.

The bigger news is that Harris got 10 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 (400,000 fewer in the battleground states).

Harris campaigned hard in the battlegrounds, so her erosion from Biden’s vote there wasn’t nearly as much, proportionately, as it was everywhere else across the country.

The biggest takeaway is that Biden’s 9 million votes disappeared.

Why?

It couldn’t have been because of virulent racism because we elected a Black man, twice. It couldn’t have been misogyny, since Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, and Clinton’s actions and statements probably triggered more misogyny in 2016 than did Harris’s in 2024.

There’s no evidence of illegal vote tampering or of voter suppression nearly on this scale. In fact, it was easier to cast a ballot this year than in 2020.

So what happened to the 9 million?

We can’t know for sure but it seems most likely that those 9 million potential voters — mostly working class — said to themselves, “I won’t vote for Trump because he’s an asshole. But I won’t vote for the Democrats either, because they don’t give a damn about me.”

The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90 percent — the party of people who don’t live off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy.

Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure.

Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago.

Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what’s the Democrats’ task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.

This isn’t a blue-state versus red-state phenomenon. It’s a class phenomenon.

In Missouri, one of the reddest of the red, voters passed an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by a wide margin, even as they overwhelmingly rejected Harris. It looks like they did the same in Alaska.

In ruby-red Nebraska, roughly 75 percent of voters backed a measure to institute paid sick leave, although they rejected Harris. (Nebraskans also came close to unseating their incumbent senator in favor of Dan Osborn, a union activist who ran as an independent and railed against corporate overlords.)

Americans across the board want a fairer economy. Trump Republicans won’t deliver one. Instead, Trump and his allies are readying more tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy and regulatory rollbacks. They’re preparing to hand the country over to billionaires.

Democrats! This is your opportunity! Take it!

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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Trump has nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as America’s next attorney general.

This would be laughable were it not so utterly dangerous.

Gaetz as attorney general would all but guarantee that Trump weaponizes the Justice Department against his enemies — past, present, and future.

Ever since Trump was first indicted, Gaetz has been defending him nonstop, alleging that the prosecutions of Trump have been politically motivated, claiming that Joe Biden is behind them, charging the Biden administration with vindictiveness toward Trump, and saying that Trump would have every right to engage in similar vengeance toward Trump’s political enemies.

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In making these bogus claims, Gaetz has often used Trump’s wildly partisan and incendiary language.

I worked in the Justice Department in the years following Richard Nixon’s attempt to use the department to prosecute and intimidate Nixon’s enemies.

To restore faith and trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi as attorney general. Before his appointment, Levi had been dean of the University of Chicago Law School and president of the University of Chicago.

One of Levi’s most important accomplishments was to insulate the Department of Justice from political interference by establishing a set of rules that prevented the White House from privately contacting an attorney general or any other Justice Department officials.

How far we’ve fallen.

Gaetz, a 42-year-old congressman from Florida, has zero qualifications for being the highest law enforcement official in the land. He has never been a government attorney. He has never been a judge.

Gaetz is now under investigation by the House Ethics Committee in connection with a sex-trafficking scandal. (The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for his alleged involvement with a girl who was 17 at the time to determine if he paid for sex in violation of federal sex-trafficking laws, but it closed the investigation last year after career prosecutors were reportedly unsure about the credibility of two central witnesses.)

If confirmed, Gaetz would lead the Justice Department’s more than 100,000 employees at a time when Trump’s allies are demanding a purge of career DOJ staffers who may have opposed some of Trump’s efforts during his first term or worked on cases involving Trump or his supporters.

Gaetz has defended Trump at every turn, arguing that Trump has never violated any federal laws. After Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Gaetz was defiant. “We’re ashamed of nothing,” he publicly said.

In other words, nominating Gaetz to be attorney general is only slightly less ridiculous than nominating Vladimir Putin to be secretary of defense.

The key question is whether Gaetz can be confirmed by a Republican Senate.

Two key Republican moderates have already indicated they would likely vote against him. Senator Susan Collins said she was “shocked” by the nomination; Senator Lisa Murkowski said he was not a serious contender for the job.

But Senator Lindsey Graham — a reliable weather vane for the unscrupulous, and currently the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — said he was surprised Trump picked Gaetz, whom he called “clever,” and predicted Gaetz would face “tough questions” at his confirmation hearing.

But Graham also said he was inclined to support presidential appointments.

Gaetz’s nomination is really a test by Trump of how far he can go in intimidating, bullying, and generating fear among Senate Republicans.

No Senate Democrat will vote for Gaetz, so Trump and his allies are seeing the Gaetz nomination as a litmus test of loyalty to Trump.

This will be the clearest signal yet of how far Republican senators are willing to go to do Trump’s bidding on all sorts of sensitive issues, including cutting back Social Security and giving Putin what he wants in Ukraine.

If Trump can get 51 votes for Gaetz, he can get a Senate majority for anything Trump wants to do.

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Many of you are still in shock about what happened a week ago today. Some of you don’t even want to read a newspaper or hear the news.

I get it.

A few of you are coping with the catastrophe by minimizing or denying it. Several friends assure me that a second Trump term won’t be much different from the first and that the checks and balances in our system will continue to constrain him.

This is wishful and dangerous thinking.

Trump and his Republican lapdogs will almost certainly win the House, which means that starting January 20, they will take full control of the federal government — both chambers of Congress as well as the presidency.

The Republicans soon to be in control of Congress are more MAGA, less principled, and more intimidated by Trump than the Republicans who had control when Trump took office in 2017. There are no Liz Cheneys in the House, no Mitt Romneys in the Senate. Republican senators seeking to become the majority leader are already competing to please Trump, promising immediate confirmation of his appointments.

The Republican Party as a whole has now been effectively purged of people willing to stand up to Trump.

ALSO READ: Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

Trump already has effective control of the Supreme Court, a majority of whom have ruled that he (or any president) is presumptively immune from criminal liability for whatever he chooses to do.

This time, moreover, there won’t be people in the administration to stop him. Trump learned from his first term about the importance of surrounding himself with lackeys who will do whatever he wishes.

His early picks (Susie Wiles as chief of staff, Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Thomas Homan as border czar, Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the U.N., and Michael Walz as national security advisor) have only one thing in common and it’s not their expertise. It’s their unblinking loyalty to Trump.

Don’t get me started about Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has turned his X platform into a swamp of Trump lies and propaganda, and now seems joined at the hip to Trump — appearing wherever Trump is. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a nut job.

And unlike Trump’s first term, the president-elect is now backed by a network of dangerous extremists — including those who have been imprisoned for their part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, whom Trump has suggested he’ll pardon. They will feel emboldened to carry out what they understand to be Trump’s wishes.

Finally, also unlike before his first term, Trump has explicitly told us what he plans to do and already has people working on getting it done starting January 20: mass deportations, prosecution of his political enemies, the use of the military against U.S. citizens, the purging of the civil service across the government and substitution of Trump loyalists, and a promise to play politics with disasters.

Project 2025, which was written by more than 140 people who served under Trump the first time around, including several of his former Cabinet secretaries, explicitly calls for “abortion surveillance” and the stripping from Americans of reproductive freedom (page 455).

It also calls for jailing teachers and librarians over banned books (page 5), gutting of overtime pay rules (pages 587 and 592), and prioritizing “married men and women” over other types of families (page 489).

To enforce these attacks on our rights, Project 2025 would use the Justice Department to prosecute district attorneys Trump disagrees with, invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down protests, and mobilize red-state national guard units against blue states that resist his authoritarian agenda.

In sum, my friends, we are facing a catastrophe far worse than what occurred in Trump’s first term of office. The meager guardrails that existed then will be gone.

We must not avert our eyes from this calamity, or minimize it, or throw up our hands in despair or retreat.

We must prepare to fight it.

But how? Let me ask you: If this were Germany in 1933, what actions would you take? How different will this be from Germany in 1933?

I put this question to some of you last Wednesday during my weekly Office Hours. Forty percent said your most important goal will be to protect those in harm’s way, and 34 percent said it will be to organize and mobilize politically. Of the remainder, 9 percent said it will be to resist with civil disobedience. (Others had additional or different ideas.)

Obviously, none of these alternatives is exclusive. We must consider all, and many others.

Protecting the vulnerable and preserving our rights and liberties will require a great deal of hard work by people who believe in our Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law. The work includes:

• Monitoring Trump and his government — despite the disinformation, propaganda, and lies we’ll be receiving — and disseminating the truth.
• Maintaining a watch over the people and institutions we value.
• Being ready to sound the alarm in our communities and networks when those people and institutions are under assault.
• Organizing and mobilizing nonviolent resistance to such assaults.
• Using civil disobedience wherever possible.
• Litigating through state and federal courts where possible.
• Speaking out against malicious lies like those that spread during the election by Elon Musk on his propaganda machine X and against vicious lies amplified on other MAGA mouthpieces.
• Using our economic muscle to boycott corporations that support Trump, Musk, and other centers of MAGA power.

And much more.

It will be up to us — the American people who still cherish democracy — to protect and preserve our system of self-government.

As difficult as it is to fully accept what we are up against, the first step is to acknowledge it.

ALSO READ: Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

So many of you have asked me how one of the most loathsome people in America was just reelected president that I thought you might find it helpful if I shared with you some personal history. This may also suggest how to root out Trumpism.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina while doing research on the changing nature of work in America.

I spoke with many of the people I had first met when I was secretary of labor in the 1990s. Several brought their friends and grown children to my informal meetings, which became a kind of free-floating focus group spread across states that had once been economic powerhouses but were now economic basket cases.

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked my “focus groups” which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were the likely Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.

Yet almost no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, oftentimes both, as candidates they’d support for president.

When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the 1990s, many of these people (or their parents) had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. By 2015, that frustration had morphed into raw anger.

The people I met were furious with their employers, the federal government, and Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, upset that they had no job security, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and outraged that houses were unaffordable, schools second-rate, and everything far more expensive.

Several people I talked with had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis of 2008 or the Great Recession that followed it. Now most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party; some had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political.

They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common was their position on the income ladder: middle class or below. All were struggling.

Many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met condemned big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions.

A group of farmers in Missouri were livid about the emergence of “factory farms” — owned and run by big corporations — that abused land and cattle, damaged the environment, and ultimately harmed consumers. They claimed that giant food processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers dry, and the government was doing squat about it because of Big Agriculture’s money and influence.

In Cincinnati, I met with Republican small-business owners who were still hurting from the bursting of the housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street. “Why didn’t underwater homeowners get any help?” one of them asked rhetorically. She answered her own question: “Because Wall Street has all the power.” Others nodded in agreement.

Whenever I suggested in a public appearance that big Wall Street banks be busted up — “any bank that’s too big to fail is too big, period” — I got loud applause.

In Kansas City, I met with Tea Partiers who were angry that hedge-fund and private-equity managers had wangled their own special “carried interest” tax deal. “No reason for it,” said one. “They’re not investing a dime of their own money. But they’ve paid off the politicians.”

In Raleigh, I heard from local bankers who thought Bill Clinton should never have repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that separated investment banking from commercial banking. “Clinton was in the pockets of Wall Street just like George W. Bush was,” said one.

Most of the people I met in America’s heartland wanted big money out of politics and thought the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was shameful.

Most were also opposed to trade agreements, including NAFTA, that they believed had made it easier for corporations to outsource American jobs and destroy their communities.

Regardless of political party, most thought the economic system was biased in favor of the rich.

The more conversations I had, the more I understood the connection between people’s view of “crony capitalism” and their dislike of government. They didn’t oppose government per se. In fact, most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure.

Rather, they saw government as the vehicle for big corporations and Wall Street to exert their power in ways that hurt them.

They called themselves Republicans, but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland were economic populists. Heartland Republicans and progressive Democrats remained wide apart on cultural issues, such as immigration or abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. But wherever I went, the economic populist upsurge was real.

***

In 2016, Sanders — a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary — came within a whisker of beating Hillary in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses.

Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary Clinton, I believe Sanders would have been the party’s nominee in 2016.

Trump, a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America.

Something very big was happening: a rebellion against the establishment.

Hillary and Jeb Bush had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers, all the name recognition you could want — but neither of them could convince voters they weren’t part of the system, and therefore part of the problem.

When I did my interviews, the overall economy was doing well in terms of the standard measures of employment and growth. But those indicators didn’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans felt and continue to feel, nor did they show the seeming unfairness most people experienced.

The indicators didn’t reveal the linkages many Americans saw, and still see, between wealth and power, crony capitalism and stagnant real wages, soaring CEO pay and their own loss of status, the emergence of a billionaire class and the undermining of democracy, and globalization and the loss of their communities.

The standard measures didn’t show the frustration of American workers without college degrees, who for decades have had to work harder with very little to show for it, and whose lifespans have shrunk.

***

Fast forward to today. Much of the political establishment denies what has just occurred. They prefer to attribute Trump’s reelection to political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, and the weaponization of the internet with racism, misogyny, or nativism.

Wrong. Trump has been able to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class away from the real causes of working-class distress — away from the big corporations, wealthy individuals, and denizens of Wall Street whose money has rigged the game against average working people.

It was not the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of their distress, and it won’t be the last.

In 2016 and then again in 2024, Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in communities that have never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings and loss of good jobs.

Big money in politics has been the root of the problem. Campaign donations from wealthy individuals and big corporations have turned the economy over to large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.

Large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires have embraced global trade without giving blue-collar workers any means of coping with it.

They have turned Wall Street into a gambling casino without insuring the rest of America against the risk that those bets would turn bad.

They have allowed giant corporations to monopolize without giving workers the countervailing power to unionize.

This was the premise of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”) — although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted. And, of course, his promises were empty ones.

In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Hillary Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. Sanders sought to remedy the disease of the Democratic Party — its abandonment of economic populism and of the American dream.

Now that Trump has been reelected and his Republican lapdogs are in control of the Senate and likely to be in control of the House, it’s critically important for Democrats, progressives, and everyone concerned about social justice to see where the anger in America’s heartland has come from, to channel it toward its real causes, and to commit to taking power back from the big corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.

A political disaster such as what occurred Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.

This is known as The Lesson of the election.

The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.

And therein lies its power. When The Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom — when most of the politicians, pundits, and journalists come to believe it — it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives, and journalists approach future elections.

There are many reasons for what occurred on Tuesday and for what the outcome should teach America — about where the nation is and about what Democrats should do in the future.

Yet inevitably, one Lesson predominates.

Today, I want to share with you six conventional “lessons” you will hear for Tuesday’s outcome. None is or should be considered The Lesson of the 2024 election.

Then I’ll give you what I consider the real Lesson of the election.

1. It was a total repudiation of the Democratic Party, a major realignment. Rubbish. Harris would have won had there been a small, less than 1 percent vote shift in the three main battleground states. The biggest shift from 2020 and 2016 was among Latino men. We don’t know yet whether Latino men will return to the Democrats; if they don’t, they will contribute to a small realignment. But the fact is America elected Trump in 2016, almost reelected him in 2020, and elected him again in 2024. We haven't changed much, at least in terms of whom we vote for.
2. If the Dems want to win in the future, they have to move to the right. They should stop talking about “democracy,” forget “multiculturalism,” and end their focus on women’s rights, transgender rights, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, civil rights, and America’s shameful history of racism and genocide. Instead, push to strengthen families, cut taxes, allow school choice and prayer in public schools, reduce immigration, minimize our obligations abroad, and put America and Americans first. Wrong. Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights. While Democrats might reconsider their use of “identity” politics (in which people are viewed primarily through the lenses of race, ethnicity, or gender), Democrats must not lose the moral ideals at the heart of the Party and at the core of America.
3. Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda. They won over young men because of a vicious alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers and podcasts appealing to them. The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built.Partly true. Misinformation and right-wing propaganda did play a role, particularly in reaching young men. But this hardly means progressives and Democrats should fill the information ecosystem with misinformation or left-wing propaganda. Better messaging, yes. Lies and bigotry, no. We should use our power as consumers to boycott X and all advertisers on X and on Fox News, mount defamation and other lawsuits against platforms that foment hate, and push for regulations (at least at the state level for now) requiring that all platforms achieve minimum standards of moderation and decency.
4. Republicans cheated. Trump, Putin, and election deniers at county and precinct levels engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress votes. I doubt it. Putin tried, but so far there’s no sign that the Kremlin affected any voting process. There is little or no evidence of widespread cheating by Republicans. Dems should not feed further conspiracy theories about fraudulent voting or tallying. For the most part, the system worked smoothly, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to election workers and state officials in charge of the process.
5. Harris ran a lousy campaign. She wasn’t a good communicator. She fudged and shifted her positions on issues. She was weighed down by Biden and didn’t sufficiently separate herself from him. Untrue. Harris ran an excellent campaign, but she had only a little over three months to do it. She had to introduce herself to the nation (typically a vice president is almost invisible within an administration) at the same time Trump’s antics sucked most of the oxygen out of the political air. She could have been clearer about her proposals and policies and embraced economic populism (see below on the real lesson), but her debate with Trump was the best debate performance I’ve ever witnessed, and her speeches were pitch perfect. Biden may have weighed her down a bit, but his decision to step down was gracious and selfless.
6. Racism and misogyny. Voters were simply not prepared to elect a Black female president. Partly true. Surely racism and misogyny played a role, but bigotry can’t offer a full explanation.

On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy — and their votes reflected their class and level of education.

While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.

In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90 percent is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.

The real lesson of the 2024 election is that Democrats must not just give voice to the anger but also explain how record inequality has corrupted our system, and pledge to limit the political power of big corporations and the super-rich.

The basic bargain used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do better and your children would do even better than you.

But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.

Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.

Democrats embraced NAFTA and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations gain enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.

They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.

They welcomed big money into their campaigns — and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.

Joe Biden redirected the Democratic Party back toward its working-class roots, but many of the changes he catalyzed — more vigorous antitrust enforcement, stronger enforcement of labor laws, and major investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, semiconductors, and non-fossil fuels — wouldn’t be evident for years, and he could not communicate effectively about them.

The Republican Party says it’s on the side of working people, but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous antitrust enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.

If Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts. As in 2017, these lower taxes will benefit mainly the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — their objectives for decades.

Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class.

They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.

In doing this, Democrats need not turn their backs on democracy. Democracy goes hand-in-hand with a fair economy. Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, as seems likely, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America. Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.

The Democratic Party should use this inflection point to shift ground — from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrism” — to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

This is and should be The Lesson of the 2024 election.

What do you think?

All day today, people I’ve worked with over the years have been contacting me — some in tears, some in abject panic, most deeply worried. It has been a hard day for so many.

Since 2015, I’ve been saying that America is better than Trump. I’m no longer so sure.

Yet the roots of Trumpism extend many years before 2015. I first came across them in 1994, when the Democrats lost both houses of Congress in what was then termed a “repudiation” of the Democratic Party.

Trumpism is the consequence, not the cause, of a long-term structural change in the American political economy.

Over much of the past 30 years, as the Republican Party embraced bigotry, lies, and hate to stir up working-class fears and resentments, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and embraced global trade, deregulation of finance, and lower taxes on the wealthy, and has allowed corporate bashing of labor unions and monopolization of industry.

As a result, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has risen just 15 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the stock market has soared 5000 percent.

To its credit, the Biden administration is the first Democratic administration in more than 30 years to reject additional moves toward globalization and deregulation, propose higher taxes on the wealthy, strengthen labor unions, aggressively utilize antitrust, and adapt a forward-looking industrial policy.

But these measures require years to take effect, and many working-class Americans have not yet benefited from them.

So who are we, and where do we go from here? I will share my thoughts about these questions over the next weeks and months. But today, as we process what’s happened, I want to share with you three short pieces.

The first is the transcript of a radio call-in program I did in the fall of 1994 when, as secretary of labor, I was campaigning for Democrats in the midterm elections that resulted in losses of both chambers of Congress.

***

“You’re on Talk Radio 95, The Charles Walter Show, where you hear the news when it’s news! Joining us this evening, the United States secretary of labor! Here to take y-o-o-o-u-u-u-r calls! … John from Garden Park. You’re on Talk Radio 95!”

“Hello?”

“You’re on the air, John! Do you have a question for the secretary?”

“Yes. Mr. Secretary, have you ever held a real job in your entire life?”

“Well, John, I used to teach.”

“Just what I thought. You don’t know nothing.”

“Thank you, John! Diane from Oak Brook, you’re on the air!”

“Hi, Charlie.”

“Hi, Diane!”

“Love your show, Charlie.”

“Thanks, Diane! A question for the labor secretary?”

“Why does the secretary think government has all the answers?”

“I don’t think government has all the answers, Diane.”

“Yes you do. You and all the other liberals in the Clinton administration. Ever heard of free enterprise? Socialism doesn’t work!”

“Thank you, Diane! Next up, Peter from Lakeview! Pete, you’re on the air!”

“Great show, Charlie.”

“Thanks, Pete! Your question?”

“I don’t understand something.”

“What is it you don’t understand, Pete?”

“I don’t understand where these guys get off.”

“Your question for the labor secretary, Pete?”

“Mr. Secretary, why do you think you have the right to tax honest hard-working people? It’s our money.”

“Pete, your federal taxes pay for national defense, Medicare, highways, environmental protection, air-traffic control, safe workplaces, all sorts of things you rely on.”

“It’s my money. I should decide what I need. You have no right.”

“Thank you, Pete! We’re cooking tonight, folks! The board’s all lit up! Ted from Orleyville, you’re on the air!”

“I really appreciate your show, Charles.”

“Thank you, Ted! Your question for the secretary?”

“Yes. Mr. Secretary, you’re a fucking —”

“Michelle in Garden View! You’re on the air!”

“I’d like to know why we spend billions and billions of dollars on welfare for people who do nothing all day but sit around and watch TV.”

“Michelle, all welfare spending is less than 3 percent of the federal budget, and most people on welfare are off it and into jobs within two years.”

“You’re lying.”

“Tony in Lakeview! You’re on the air!”

“I just lost my job. My company went to Mexico. I want to ask the labor secretary how anybody can get a good job in America if we have to compete with Mexicans who are paid a nickel an hour?”

“Good question, Tony! Mr. Secretary?”

“Tony, I’m sorry you lost your job. But there are millions of good new jobs out there, some of them exporting to Mexico and other countries. You can get —”

“Good new jobs? Where? The new jobs pay nothing. They pay shit. You’re talking out of your asshole.”

“Afraid that’s all the time we have! Mr. Secretary, thanks so very much for being with us this evening!”

***

The second piece is an essay by Carlos Lozada from today’s New York Times.

I remember when Donald Trump was not normal.

I remember when Trump was a fever that would break.

I remember when Trump was running as a joke.

I remember when Trump was best covered in the entertainment section.

I remember when Trump would never become the Republican nominee.

I remember when Trump couldn’t win the general election.

I remember when Trump’s attacks on John McCain were disqualifying.

I remember when Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape would force him out.

I remember when Trump was James Comey’s fault.

I remember when Trump was the news media’s fault.

I remember when Trump won because Hillary Clinton was unlikable.

I remember when 2016 was a fluke.

I remember when the office of the presidency would temper Trump.

I remember when the adults in the room would contain him.

I remember when the Ukraine phone call went too far.

I remember when Trump learned his lesson after the first impeachment.

I remember when Jan. 6 would be the end of Trump’s political career.

I remember when the 2022 midterms meant the country was moving on.

I remember when Trump’s indictments would give voters pause.

I remember when Trump’s felony convictions would give voters pause.

I remember when Trump would win because Joe Biden was old.

I remember when Kamala Harris’s joy would overpower Trump’s fearmongering.

I remember when Trump was weird.

I remember when Trump was not who we are.

There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. “Normalizing” Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment.

We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad.

After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening?

In recent years, I’ve often wondered if Trump has changed America or revealed it. I decided that it was both — that he changed the country by revealing it. After Election Day 2024, I’m considering an addendum: Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.

Throughout Trump’s life, he has embodied every national fascination: money and greed in the 1980s, sex scandals in the 1990s, reality television in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s. Why wouldn’t we deserve him now?

At first, it seemed hard to grasp that we’d really done it. Not even Trump seemed to believe his victory that November night in 2016. We had plenty of excuses, some exculpatory, some damning. The hangover of the Great Recession. Exhaustion with forever wars. A racist backlash against the first Black president. A populist surge in America and beyond. Deaths of despair. If not for this potent mix, surely no one like Trump would ever have come to power.

If only the Clinton campaign had focused more on Wisconsin. If only African American turnout had been stronger in Michigan. If only WikiLeaks and private servers and “deplorables” and so much more. If only.

Now we’ll come up with more, no matter how contradictory or consistent they may be. If only Harris had been more attuned to the suffering in Gaza, or more supportive of Israel. If only she’d picked Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. If only the lingering fury over Covid had landed at Trump’s feet. If only Harris hadn’t been so centrist, or if only she weren’t such a California progressive, hiding all those positions she’d let slip in her 2019 campaign. If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw from the race, or if only he hadn’t mumbled stuff about garbage.

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant. She called him divisive, angry, aggrieved. And that was a smart case to make if, deep down, most voters held democracy dear (except maybe they didn’t) and if so many of them weren’t already angry (except they were). If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was bad, then Harris was the right candidate with the right message at the right moment. The prosecutor who would defeat the felon.

But the voters heard her case, and they still found for the defendant. A politician who admires dictators and says he’ll be one for a day, whose former top aides regard as a threat to the Constitution — a document he believes can be “terminated” when it doesn’t suit him — has won power not for one day but for nearly 1,500 more. What was considered abnormal, even un-American, has been redefined as acceptable and reaffirmed as preferable.

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Trump has long conflated himself with America, with the ambitions of its people. “When you mess with the American dream, you’re on the fighting side of Trump,” he wrote in “The America We Deserve,” published in 2000.

The Democrats tried hard to puncture those fantasies in this latest campaign. They raised absurd amounts of cash. They pushed the incumbent president, the standard-bearer of their party, out of the race, once it became clear he would not win. They replaced him with a younger, more dynamic candidate who proceeded to trounce Trump in their lone presidential debate.

None of it was enough. America had voted early, long before any mail-in ballots were available, and it has given Trump the “powerful mandate” he claimed in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

This time, that choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office and what he’ll do to stay there. He hasn’t just shifted the political consensus on a set of policy positions, though by moving both parties on trade and immigration, he certainly has done that. The rationalization of 2016 — that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties — is no longer operative. The grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly but a summation. It was Trumpism’s closing argument, and it landed.

The irony of one of the more common critiques of Harris — that her “word salad” moments and default platitudes in extended interviews made it hard to know what she believed — is that Trump manages to seem real even when his positions shift and his words weave. Authenticity does not require consistency or clarity when it is grounded in pitch-perfect cynicism.

We don’t call this period “the Trump era” just because the once and future president won lots of votes and has now prevailed in two presidential contests. It remained the Trump era even when Biden exiled him to Mar-a-Lago for four years. It is the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party but also a national mood, or at least enough of it. And when Democrats presented the choice this year as a referendum on Trumpism more than an affirmative case for Harris, they kept their rival at the center of American politics.

Harris gave it away whenever she called on voters to “turn the page” from Trump. Didn’t we do that in 2020 when we chose Biden and Harris? Not really. Trump was still waiting in the epilogue.

For those who have long insisted that Trump is “not who we are,” that he does not represent American values, there are now two possibilities: Either America is not what they thought it was, or Trump is not as threatening as they think he is. I lean to the first conclusion, but I understand that, over time, the second will become easier to accept. A state of permanent emergency is not tenable; weariness and resignation eventually win out. As we live through a second Trump term, more of us will make our accommodations. We’ll call it illiberal democracy, or maybe self-care.

“We’re not going back,” Harris told us. The tragedy is not that this election has taken us back, but that it shows how there are parts of America’s history that we’ve never fully gotten past.

In her book “America for Americans,” Erika Lee argues that Trump’s immigration policies and statements are part of a long tradition of xenophobia — against Southern Europeans, against newcomers from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East — a tradition that has lived alongside our self-perception as a nation of immigrants. In his book “The End of the Myth,” Greg Grandin warned of the “nationalization of border brutalism” under Trump, whereby harsh policies at the U.S.-Mexico border would spread elsewhere, an “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”

When Trump first began his ascent into presidential politics, some readers turned to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about homegrown authoritarianism in the United States. In the story, Doremus Jessup, a liberal-minded newspaper editor, marvels at the power of Buzz Windrip, a crudely charismatic demagogue who captivates the country and imposes totalitarian rule. The stylistic similarities between Trump and Windrip are evident, but Lewis’s real protagonists are the well-meaning, liberal-minded citizens, like Jessup, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to grasp what was happening.

Jessup tells his readers that the insanity won’t last, that they can wait it out. “He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure,” Lewis wrote. When it does endure, Jessup blames himself and his class for their obliviousness. “If it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another. … We had it coming, we Respectables,” he laments.

For too long, today’s Respectables have insisted on Trump’s abnormality. It is a reflex, a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear. Because if Trump is normal, then America must be, too, and who wants to be roused from dreams of exceptionalism? It’s more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment than a pre-existing condition.

When Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” in September of 2016, she did more than dismiss a massive voting bloc and confirm her status as a Respectable in good standing. What she said about those voters moments later was even more telling: “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But, thankfully, they are not American.”

It’s a neat move: Rather than accept what America was becoming and who Americans could become, just write them out of the story.

Are we what we say, or what we do — are we our actions or our aspirations? From America’s earliest moments, we have lived this tension between ideals and reality. It may seem more honest to dismiss our words and focus on our deeds. But our words also matter; they reveal what we hope to do and who we want to be. That yearning remains vital, no matter in what direction our national reality points.

The way to render Trump abnormal is not to insist that he is, or to find more excuses, or to indulge in the great and inevitable second-guessing of Democratic campaign strategy. It begins by recognizing that who we are is decided not only on Election Day — whether 2024 or 2016, or 2028 for that matter — but every day. Every day that we strive to be something other than what we’ve become.

I remember when I thought Trump wasn’t normal. But now he is, no matter how fiercely I cling to that memory.

***

The third is a short essay by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit:

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

There’s a dirty Trump trick you need to look out for. He used it in 2020 to try to overturn the election, and he’s going to do it again. But it doesn’t work if you know it’s coming.

Watch out for Trump to exploit something elections experts call the “red mirage” to prematurely declare victory before all the votes are counted.

You see, in almost every election, Republicans appear to take an early lead. That’s the red mirage. Then that lead gets smaller throughout the night, which is called the “blue shift.”

This happens because Republican votes tend to be counted before Democratic votes.

It’s not magic. Votes are counted by precinct, and Democrats tend to live in more densely populated, urban precincts, while Republicans tend to live in more sparsely populated, rural ones. It just takes longer to count the votes in a precinct with a lot of people than in a precinct with fewer people.

In Georgia, for example, there are more than 300 times as many people living in Fulton County as in deep-red Glascock County. If Fulton County has 300 times as many ballots to count as Glascock, obviously Glascock is going to finish counting first.

In 2020, when numbers came in from counties like Glascock first, it made it look like Trump was leading in Georgia, when he really was not. It was a red mirage.

Also, Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, and mail-in votes take longer to count.

Anyone who follows elections knows about the red mirage and blue shift, as the former political director of Fox News, Chris Stirewalt, has testified: “In every election, and certainly a national election, you expect to see the Republican with a lead, but it’s not really a lead.”

But in 2020, Trump pretended that the blue shift was surprising and suspicious. He said: “We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our number started miraculously getting whittled away in secret.”

There was nothing miraculous or secret about it. But it’s easy to see why people who don’t know about the red mirage could be tricked into thinking that something unusual had happened.

According to Trump ally Steve Bannon, that’s exactly what Trump was counting on: “What Trump’s going to do, is just declare victory, right?” Bannon said before the 2020 election.

“But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner. The Democrats — more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in the mail. And so they’re gonna have a natural disadvantage, and Trump’s gonna take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”

Bannon said this in October of 2020, before the election. And this is exactly what Trump did on election night.

Not incidentally, Bannon is advising Trump to do the same thing again tonight.

As Trump said on Election Day 2020: “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” Wrong.

Trump’s nonsense claim that the votes counted earlier in the night were more legitimate than those counted later became the underpinning of his entire Big Lie, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

It looks as if the 2024 election will be close. Early tonight, Trump is likely to appear to be ahead and again use that early lead to falsely claim victory.

Mirages can be confusing, but if you know what they are, you won’t be fooled by them.

Please help spread the word about the red mirage so people know what to expect tonight.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Yesterday, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and the richest man in the world, tweeted that Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan “will be fired soon.”

Musk is hardly the only billionaire upset by Khan’s aggressive use of antitrust law to limit the power of big corporations — and, hence, to limit the power of billionaires like Musk.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire surrogate for the Harris campaign, has also said Khan must go. So have major Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman and Barry Diller.

When a bipartisan group of billionaires agree that a government official who’s limiting their power must be fired, you have every reason to believe she’s doing her job.

ALSO READ: The 101 worst things about Trump's sham presidency

One of the biggest structural problems in the American economy is the size and power of large corporations, which have grown larger and more powerful over the last three decades. They can (and do) set or coordinate prices to keep them high. They can (and do) set or coordinate pay to keep it low. They can (and do) use their political clout to get lower taxes, public subsidies, and regulatory rollbacks.

Antitrust law provides a means of reversing this trend and limiting the size and power of large corporations. Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department are using antitrust law as it should be used. Last year alone, Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions; mergers reached a 10-year low.

Forty years ago, I was in charge of advising the five commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission what they should do. The chairman at that time was Michael Pertschuk, who — like Khan — aggressively used the power of the FTC on behalf of consumers and workers.

Also like Khan, Pertschuk was targeted by big business. He was called an enemy of capitalism. But Pertschuk’s efforts helped save capitalism from its own excesses and thereby helped maintain the legitimacy of the private sector in the public’s eyes.

Of course, 40 years ago corporate America didn’t have nearly the clout it has now, the super-rich weren’t nearly as wealthy, and money didn’t play nearly as great a role in American politics.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump pose the greatest threats in recent history to American capitalism. If given the authority to do what they’ve said they will do — including Trump’s giant 20 percent tariff on all goods imported into the United States, which will function as a giant regressive sales tax — Americans will not only be far worse off; they will be less inclined to support the capitalist system.

Musk’s pledge to remove Khan came after he stood on stage and said he would personally oversee a $2 trillion cut to the Federal budget — a cut that would cause, in Musk’s words, “hardship.”

Musk’s personal fortune is about a tenth of the cut he says he’ll oversee. That’s enough to shield him from any hardship. But most Americans depend on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government spending that would be cut if Musk has his way.

I have a better idea. If Musk is as concerned as he seems about getting the federal budget deficit under control, he should consider supporting a 25 percent tax on great wealth, starting with fortunes over $100 million.

ALSO READ: A stupefying poll shows Harris breathing down Trump’s neck in Kansas. Here’s what that means.

Some people seem to have forgotten how bad a president Trump was, so I made a list of the worst things about the Trump presidency, in no particular order. Please share and add anything I missed.

There's so much more, from exchanging “love letters” with North Korea’s brutal dictator to late-night tweet binges.

I can understand why a lot of people want to block all this out of their memories. But we cannot afford to forget just how terrible Trump’s time in the White House was for this nation.

And remember this, too: Trump would have done far worse but for people around him who refused to follow his orders. If he gets another shot at the White House, he’ll make sure he’s surrounded by lapdogs who will do whatever he wants.

We sure as hell can’t afford to put him back there.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Elon Musk (worth $271 billion) and Jeff Bezos (worth $262 billion) — the richest and second-richest people on the planet — are now showing America why it’s dangerous to have great wealth concentrated in so few hands.

In August 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. On Friday, just as the Post was preparing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Bezos stopped the paper from doing so.

Partly as a result, the Post has already lost 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its subscriber base.

In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billon, turned it into X, and became its biggest user, with 202 million followers.

Musk has endorsed Trump — and weaponized the platform into a supporter of Trump, smeared Harris, and amplified rumors and conspiracy theories.

ALSO READ: Experts sound alarm over Trump's promise to let RFK Jr. 'control' health agencies

Independent analysts such as Edison Research said in March that X’s usage in the United States dropped 30 percent since last year. Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.

Why have these two oligarchs been willing to take actions that cause so many of their customers to jump ship? What’s the connection between Bezos’s preventing the Post from endorsing Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump?

Here’s a hint:

Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.

Although Blue Origin is running far behind Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.

For years, Bezos has focused on beating Musk for the multibillion-dollar contracts to launch payloads and rockets. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said in 2016, according to the Post. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

Musk’s company appears so far ahead in the competition that it won a contract to rescue astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.

But that could change. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been looking to unload their own joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), which has billions of dollars in government contracts, extensive infrastructure, and an experienced team.

Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly the favorite to take over ULA. Even the head of the U.S. Space Force’s purchases seems to be pushing for the two rocket companies to merge, telling an industry audience that “they need to scale” in order to meet an aggressive launch schedule.

ULA is still a major force in the space industry, competing for dozens of launches over the next four years, which can bring in billions more revenue. Combining with Blue Origin would make a lot of sense. The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has already submitted a bid to buy ULA.

If that’s the goal, Bezos’s biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.

Trump has been out to get Bezos since 2017, when Trump first started blaming Bezos for poor coverage in The Washington Post — a grievance that has hurt Blue Origin.

In April 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted Blue Origin officials to Bezos’s poor reputation in the White House, telling them that they have a “Washington Post problem.”

Trump also said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, according to a memoir by his Defense Secretary James Mattis. (It’s since been reported that Oracle, led by Larry Ellison — Trump donor, Musk mentor, and Oracle founder, who ranks just behind Musk and Bezos as the third-richest person in America with an estimated $211.2 billion in wealth — had sought to sabotage the deal.)

So Bezos has been courting Trump. After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, prompting a Musk endorsement of the former president, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation.

Soon after Trump formally secured the Republican nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy phoned Trump, introducing himself and outlining the company’s plans for the future. The call concluded with Trump suggesting that the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.

In this sense, then, both Bezos’s refusal to allow The Washington Post to endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars — thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.

But the casualty in this war is American democracy, for which neither Bezos nor Musk apparently has a scintilla of concern.

America is now in its second Gilded Age, in which a handful of supremely wealthy men are determining the nation’s future. We must not let them. Bezos should never have been able to purchase The Washington Post in the first place; his conflicting business interests should have prevented it.

Nor should Musk have been able to buy Twitter. Antitrust laws should have been used to break Twitter up, or the platform should be deemed a public utility.

Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.

When the smoke clears from this rancorous presidential campaign and Kamala Harris is president, she must rescue democracy from these and other oligarchs.

As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, “America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”

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I was getting coffee this morning at my local coffee bar when a complete stranger approached me with tears in her eyes.

“I can’t cope,” she said. “This election is so stressful.”

“I know,” I responded. “It’s hard on everyone.”

“I haven’t slept in weeks,” she said, tears now streaming down her cheeks. “What can I do?”

I didn’t know what to tell her. Each of us is coping in our own way.

Some people I know have stopped watching or listening to any news and abandoned the internet.

Others have become even more involved in the election — writing postcards, knocking on doors, getting out the vote. A few have relocated to battleground states where they can be even more active.

Others have created their own support groups, relying on friends to provide reassurance that Harris will win or to vent about the horrors of Trump’s fascism.

And others have taken up yoga or meditation or a musical instrument or hiking, or some other private activity that gives them some peace.

So in these last tense days before the 2024 election, today’s Office Hours question is for you: What’s your coping strategy for dealing with the stress of this election?

My strategy for coping with the stresses of the final week of this election:

Becoming even more activist.

Yoga, meditation, hiking, etc.

NOW READ: Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/