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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give a gift subscription

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The FTC news release laid it out:

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

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

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

And how do they make those billions?

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

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

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

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

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not at all uncommon, the Times notes:

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

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

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

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

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

As the Times laid out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW READ: There's only one way to defeat Trump's billionaires boys club

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

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

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

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

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

ALSO READ: Trump finds a new lawman is who even more lawless than he is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

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

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

NOW READ: Trump is giving his middle finger to America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW READ: How to fix MSNBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World:

— Wisdom School:

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

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

So here’s the rest of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emboldened, the Federalists reached out beyond just newspaper editors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW READ: Inside the billionaires' plan to silence democracy

The stürm und drang all over the media this week is about Trump, on Monday, doubling down on his tariffs saying that he’d impose across-the-board 25 percent tariffs on all goods from China, Mexico, and Canada until there’s no more fentanyl or undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming into the US.

That’s a substantial lift, and if he follows through with the threat (which seems likely, although I’d bet money that he’ll drill lots of holes in those tariffs to satisfy corporate donors) it’ll cause a considerable disruption in American commerce. Those three countries, after all, account for more than 40 percent of all American trade.

Weirdly, Trump may be doing the Democrats a favor by taking this position, and I don’t mean the possibility that he’ll wreck the economy and thus his party’s chances in 2026 and 2028 (although that’s real, too).

Tariff-free trade was a central cornerstone of Reagan’s neoliberal agenda; he and Bush wrote the NAFTA agreement that Clinton later signed, for example. I lay this out in considerable detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America. Tragically, Bill Clinton and his Larry Sommers/Robert Rubin crew embraced neoliberalism with gusto, putting the final nail in the meaningful use of tariffs to protect American manufacturing and the jobs associated with it.

Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been working for years to pull the Democratic Party back from the neoliberal free trade brink, and if Trump pushes through his tariffs in a big way it may help shatter what’s left of the neoliberal consensus (at least with regard to trade) in the Democratic Party. That would be a Very Good Thing, both for the Party and for the nation.

Tariffs can be a good thing for a country, if done right. People who grew up in the Midwest (like me) know all about tariffs; we learned about them as children (I remember 5th Grade civics!).

Trump, however, did them so badly last time that they backfired, cost us a fortune, and forced the federal government to subsidize Midwestern farmers. Odds are, if he keeps to his current rhetoric, he’ll do the same, and Democrats should be ready with reasonable talking points; this could end up working tremendously to their advantage if they’re willing to embrace reasonable tariffs and other trade protections to bring manufacturing back to the US.

So, let’s re-examine how tariffs can work when done right, their role in American history, and why we should be discussing them now without hysterics.

Tariffs are taxes paid to the federal government on imported goods. And, like all taxes, they have two purposes: to raise revenue and to alter behavior. In the case of import tariffs, the second purpose (changing behavior, in this case encouraging entrepreneurs to start manufacturing companies aka factories here in America) is far more important than the first.

It all began here in America when General Henry Knox rode up to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1789 to tell George Washington that Congress had just elected him as the first President of the United States. Washington took the news, and had two requests for his old friend.

First, he asked Knox to let folks know he’d be delayed by a few days because he wanted to say goodbye to his mother, who was elderly and ailing (turned out, it was the last time he saw her alive).

Second, Washington asked General Knox to ride all the way up to Connecticut to visit Daniel Hinsdale, a man who’d been secretly manufacturing black-market American-made fine men’s clothing in defiance of British law for decades. Knox took Washington’s measurements and then, a month later, brought to New York (where the swearing-in took place on what is now Wall Street) a fine American-made suit, which Washington proudly wore. (The suit was brown; the black suit of his later, famous painting was British formal wear.)

This incident highlighted the manufacturing crisis facing our new nation, and Washington was acutely aware of it.

The British, for two centuries, had been extracting wealth from the American colonies by forbidding us from manufacturing everything from fine clothing (thus Hinsdale’s illegal business) to weaponry to sophisticated machinery: all such items had to be imported from British manufacturers. We sold England cheap raw cotton, for example, and they forced us to buy back expensive fine cotton clothing manufactured on the looms of British cities. (Homespun was still legal in the colonies.)

They also forced us to buy tea — then the primary American beverage — from the East India Company, an outrage that led directly to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which arguably kicked off the American Revolution. Thus, when Washington came into office, the first challenge he faced was how to build an American manufacturing base that wasn’t dependent on British imports.

Thirteen years before Washington’s inauguration, British economist Adam Smith had made worldwide headlines with his bestselling 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposing that the main thing that made a country rich was independence in manufacturing.

The process of converting raw materials of little value into finished products with a high value (manufacturing) was, to Smith’s mind, the best and only practical way a nation could grow wealthy without overseas conquest and plunder.

A tree limb laying on the forest floor, for example, had no monetary value, but when labor and the tool of a knife were applied to it and it was turned into an axe-handle — a process called manufacturing — it now had a value that could be passed down through generations.

Smith called that wealth. That axe-handle became part of the aggregate wealth of the entire nation, and even if it was sold overseas that wealth would still remain here because its value was simply converted into currency which stayed in America.

This understanding led President Washington to commission his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to propose to Congress in 1791 an 11-step Report on the Subject of Manufactures, also known as “The American Plan.”

At the core of Hamilton’s plan were protective tariffs on goods that were then being imported but could be easily made in the USA. The tariffs would increase the price of the imported goods so much that they’d encourage American entrepreneurs to start factories to make the same things here.

(Hamilton’s plan also included government subsidies for companies that wanted to move manufacturing to the US, federal subsidies for the development of new technologies, a massive investment in infrastructure [particularly roads and water-power systems] to support industry, and a requirement that the US government purchase only American-made products whenever possible.)

Within two decades, Congress and the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations had put nearly all of Hamilton’s plan into effect, and major parts of it stood all the way up until Reagan’s neoliberal revolution kicked off in 1981.

Hamilton’s plan was such a successful and important part of how America became the wealthiest nation on Earth, and produced so much revenue, that virtually 100% of the cost of operating our federal government — from our founding until the Civil War — came from tariffs. The salary of every president from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln was paid by tariffs (some were domestic interstate tariffs, like on alcohol), as was the salary of every federal official and the cost of everything else the federal government did.

Fully two-thirds of federal government revenue came from tariffs from the end of the Civil War until the World War I era and the 1913 passage of the 16th Amendment (the income tax); a third of federal government revenue came from tariffs between WWI and WWII.

Today, however, it is under 2%.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing — kept on this continent by the force of tariffs — was at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: if a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with US labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs.

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus).

And then came the neoliberal sales pitch of the 1980s, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

If only we could get rid of those nasty tariffs — we had over 20,000 categories of products with specified tariffs — by reducing them to zero or very, very low numbers, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton told us, then American consumers would benefit because big retailers like Walmart could buy products made with cheap labor from overseas instead of from higher-paid American workers. Prices, in other words, would be lower for consumers.

The result has been the shuttering of over 70,000 US factories and the loss of around 8 million good often-unionized manufacturing jobs. It typically takes companies between one and two decades to shift manufacturing overseas, given how large a logistical operation it involves, and reversing the process will probably also take a decade or two.

Entire regions of America were wiped out, producing a swath of our country now referred to as the “rust belt.” The situation was compounded by the Bush administration’s and the Supreme Court’s hostility to union rights.

Since Reagan’s “free trade” we’ve had nothing but annual trade deficits, each representing trillions in American worker’s wealth that’s been shifted to overseas manufacturing countries.

Sam Walton’s autobiography, titled Made in America, epitomized the situation prior to Reaganism when Walmart stores had big “100% Made In America” banners hanging over their front doors. Today, you’ll search for hours to find a single made-in-America product in most big-box stores.

Around that same time, another rationale for corporations seeking cheap labor and easy pollution regulations overseas began to take hold in the minds of the neoliberal intelligentsia: “Free trade,” they said, was so magical it could even bring about world peace!

The argument was simple, the neoliberals told us: history showed, they said, that countries that traded heavily with each other rarely went to war with each other. The example most often cited was that no two countries with MacDonald’s burger outlets had ever, at that time, gone to war (although they have since: see Russia and Ukraine).

Thomas Friedman jumped into the act at the end of the 20th century, promoting the MacDonalds’ Peace Theory and the transfer of American manufacturing overseas with his now-discredited 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Its impact, along with major campaigns encouraging “free trade” funded by American industrial and retail giants and their billionaire owners, echoed across American manufacturing and foreign policy for the next 20 years, as America continued to hemorrhage jobs along with the middle class “American Dream” wealth that accompanied them.

As a vast proportion of American manufacturing shifted to China, that nation — just like Hamilton predicted and proved with the US — underwent the most rapid transformation from Third World poverty to First World affluence in the history of the world.

All because the “wealth” of America was transferred to China every time a cash-register rang at Walmart, an Apple Store, or in pretty much any other American retail outlet. And continues to this day.

So, how do we bring back tariffs and how do we avoid a trade war disaster like Trump caused during his first presidency?

The main goal of a import tariff is to encourage Americans to buy the products of domestic — rather than foreign — manufacturing. For that to work, companies that may consider investing billions in factories here in the US need to know that the tariffs aren’t just a whim or election stunt like they were with Trump, but will be around for the coming years or even decades necessary to recover their initial billion-dollar investments in new manufacturing facilities.

Tariffs also need to be brought in on an item-by-item basis, organically, with each imported item that we want to put a tariff onto examined for the tariff’s impact, both on domestic inflation and international relations.

We really have no need to put a tariff on, for example, imported artwork from Mexico or moose-skin jackets from Canada; there’s no competing domestic industry here. It’s why Trump’s proposed “across-the-board” tariffs are so stupid.

But the manufacture of cars, steel, chips, computers, toys, clothes, pharmaceuticals, and hundreds of other products and categories of goods can be brought back to the US by appropriate tariffs, introduced gradually and predictably, done in a way that allows both foreign companies and US entrepreneurs to adjust without major disruptions.

There’s also a national security aspect to this. Right now, it’s nearly impossible for the US to manufacture a battleship or advanced aircraft without parts from overseas. Because tariffs had kept virtually all manufacturing here in the US prior to WWII, shifting to a war-based manufacturing economy in the 1940s, before Reagan’s neoliberal “reforms,” was easy. Today it would be extremely difficult.

On top of that, we no longer make most therapeutic drugs here in America. China makes many of the raw ingredients for the drugs we use here, and most pharmaceuticals used in America are manufactured there and in India.

One result is that often drugs we take are contaminated because they’re made in plants outside the US; an old friend got cancer from taking a drug contaminated by a toxic chemical, and my father got bladder cancer from taking a drug contaminated in India with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).

Also alarming, if we got into a serious conflict with China (for example) and they cut us off from all their manufactured goods, our economy would collapse overnight and we’d find it very, very difficult to manufacture some of our most important weaponry and telecommunications equipment. Not to mention the crisis of a massive drug shortage.

Thus, tariffs have to be put into place intelligently; after all, we’re reversing a neoliberal free trade process that took 44 years to get as bad as it is today.

We don’t want to start trade wars — like Trump did the first time with his tariff stunt and is threatening to do again in January — or wipe out people in poor countries (like Bangladesh or Malaysia, where much of our clothing is made), but we do want the “wealth of [our] nation” to be built and kept here.

We do this by having Congress openly discuss and debate tariffs, apply them gradually, and accompany them with supports for the poorer parts of the world that may be harmed by them, assisting them in developing sustainable domestic industries to replace their export losses.

This is not a radical idea.

China uses tariffs (and dozens of other trade restrictions) to protect its domestic industries. The European Union imposes tariffs on agricultural products to protect its farmers (averaging around 11.4%) as well as industrial goods (averaging around 4.1%). Some industries, like dairy products (38.4% EU tariffs) and confectionery products (24.6%), have asked for and gotten even higher EU tariffs to keep them viable domestically.

And, of course, that’s how America became the richest country in the world, and the loss of tariffs is a major part of why our standard of living has slipped so badly over these past 44 years of our neoliberal Reaganism experiment. Our wealth, along with our manufacturing and jobs, was simply shipped overseas — and now we must begin the process of bringing it back home.

Democrats know this, even if they’re unwilling to talk about it. The Biden administration took some good steps in this direction by imposing or maintaining multiple tariffs, and they’re already increased American prosperity, particularly for working people.

Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% this year; tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by 2025; tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% this year; tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

This is not a black-and-white issue. Yes, tariffs are a tax and, until domestic manufacturing replaces foreign imports, they’re a tax that’s mostly passed along to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods.

But when done right and gradually, those higher prices open the door for American companies to again become competitive, to manufacture goods here — and thus keep our jobs and our “wealth” here — while raising the wages and standard of living of American workers and people around the world.

Just because Trump was conceptually right about tariffs (but terribly wrong in how he executed them) doesn’t mean Democrats should freak out at any mention of them. They’re an important part — as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington taught us — of creating and maintaining wealth and independence for our nation.

And voters in the Rust Belt states know all this already.

As Trump behaves like a bull in a china shop, ready to slap punitive and politically-motivated tariffs on our top trading partners, expect considerable market and overall economic dislocation; a recession is a probable outcome.

But as he shatters the neoliberal tariff consensus, Democrats should rise to the occasion and argue for rational, targeted, and gradual tariffs, taking the Party back to its pre-1980s positions on trade.

And then they’ll be well positioned to both exploit the issue and rescue the American economy in 2026 and 2028 after Trump’s done his worst.

NOW READ: A dark mystery from America's past could save us from Trump's tyranny

It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?

Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.

In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?

My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.

In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.

Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.

Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.

But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.

Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.

The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.

At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).

Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.

Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.

On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.

“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.
“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

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

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

Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.

Jefferson later wrote in his personal diary:

“Their usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the [Democratic] Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch.”

Democratic Republican Congressman Albert Gallatin submitted legislation that would repeal the Alien & Sedition Acts, and the Federalist majority in the House refused to even consider the motion, while informing Gallatin that he would be the next to be imprisoned if he kept speaking out against “the national security.”

Adams then shut down almost thirty newspapers, throwing their publishers, editors, and writers in prison. The most famous to go to jail was Ben Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. Within a few months, Adams had effectively silence the opposition.

Then he went after average citizens who spoke out against him.

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

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes.

Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said, “There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

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

It was the darkest moment in our new nation’s short history. But then a new force arose.

When Adams shut down the Democratic Republican newspapers, pamphleteers — that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications — went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging people to stand tall with Thomas Jefferson.

One of the best was a short screed by George Nicholas of Kentucky, “Justifying the Kentucky Resolution against the Alien & Sedition Laws” and “Correcting Certain False Statements, Which Have Been Made in the Different States” by Adams’ Federalists.

On February 13, 1799, then-Vice President Jefferson sent a copy of Nicholas’ pamphlet to his old friend Archibald Stuart (a Virginia legislator, fighter in the War of Independence, and leader of Jefferson's Democratic Republicans).

“I avoid writing to my friends because the fidelity of the post office is very much doubted,” he opened his letter to Stuart, concerned that Adams was having his mail inspected because of his anti-war activities.

Jefferson pointed out that “France is sincerely anxious for reconciliation, willing to give us a liberal treaty,” and that even with the Democratic newspapers shut down by Adams and the Federalist-controlled media being unwilling to speak of Adams’ war lies, word was getting out to the people.

Jefferson noted:

“All these things are working on the public mind. They are getting back to the point where they were when the X. Y. Z. story was passed off on them. A wonderful and rapid change is taking place in Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York. Congress is daily plied with petitions against the alien and sedition laws and standing armies.”

Jefferson then turned to the need for the pamphleteers’ materials to be widely distributed.

“The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness in the course of the present summer,” he wrote, “if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. Under separate cover you will receive some pamphlets written by George Nicholas on the acts of the last session. These I would wish you to distribute....”

The pamphleteer — today he would have been called a Substack writer — was James Bradford, and he reprinted tens of thousands of copies of Nicholas' pamphlet and distributed it far and wide. Hand to hand, as Jefferson did with his by-courier letter to Stuart, was how what would be today’s independent progressive writings were distributed.

In the face of the pamphleteering and protests, the Federalists fought back with startling venom.

Vicious personal attacks were launched in the Federalist press against Jefferson, Madison, and others, and President Adams and Vice President Jefferson were no longer on speaking terms. Adams’ goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Jefferson’s Democratic Party, and he had scared many of them into silence or submission.

“All [Democratic Republicans], therefore, retired,” Jefferson wrote in his diary, “leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President.
“Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of [Democratic] Republicans in phalanx together, until the legislature could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain, than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the [Democratic] Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the [Democratic] Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair; and the cause would have been lost forever.”

But Jefferson and Gallatin held their posts and fought back fiercely against Adams, thus saving — quite literally — American democracy. Jefferson and Madison also secretly helped legislators in Virginia and Kentucky submit resolutions in those states’ legislatures decrying the Alien & Sedition Acts. The bill in Virginia, in particular, gained traction.

As Jefferson noted in his diary:

“By holding on, we obtained time for the legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions, saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period, can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country however.
“The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the XYZ imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself.”

The efforts of that century’s truth-tellers made great gains. As Jefferson noted in a February 14, 1799 letter to Virginia’s Edmund Pendleton:

“The violations of the Constitution, propensities to war, to expense, and to a particular foreign connection, which we have lately seen, are becoming evident to the people, and are dispelling that mist which X. Y. Z. had spread before their eyes. This State is coming forward with a boldness not yet seen. Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted [to Adams], have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President.”

Americans were so angry with Adams, Jefferson noted, that the challenge was to prevent people from taking up arms against Adams’ Federalists.

“New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State [of Pennsylvania], we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit.”

Like today’s progressive movement led by people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren, Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than violence or threats.

“But keep away all show of force,” he wrote to Pendleton, “and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition. If we can keep quiet, therefore, the tide now turning will take a steady and proper direction.”

A week later, February 21, 1799, Jefferson wrote to the great Polish general who had fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kosciusko, a close friend who was then living in Russia. War was the great enemy of democracy, Jefferson noted, and peace was its champion. And the American people were increasingly siding with peace and rejecting Adams' call for war.

“The wonderful irritation produced in the minds of our citizens by the X. Y. Z. story, has in a great measure subsided,” he noted. “They begin to suspect and to see it coolly in its true light.”

But Adams was still President, and for him and his Federalist Party war would have helped tremendously with the upcoming election of 1800. In France some leaders wanted war with America for similar reasons.

Jefferson continued:

“What course the government will pursue, I know not. But if we are left in peace, I have no doubt the wonderful turn in the public opinion now manifestly taking place and rapidly increasing, will, in the course of this' summer, become so universal and so weighty, that friendship abroad and freedom at home will be firmly established by the influence and constitutional powers of the people at large.”

And if Adams’ rhetoric led to an attack on America by France?

“If we are forced into war,” Jefferson noted, “we must give up political differences of opinion, and unite as one man to defend our country. But whether at the close of such a war, we should be as free as we are now, God knows.”

The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.

The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.

As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.

All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.

America has been burdened by lying presidents before, and even one who tried to destroy our Constitution like Trump is today threatening to do. But in our era — like in Jefferson’s — we are fortunate to have radical truth-tellers and political allies to warn us of treasonous acts for political gain.

If we stand in solidarity with today’s truth-tellers, and more politicians step forward to take a leadership role, then its entirely possible that with the elections of 2026 and 2028 American democracy can once again prevail.

So much for American democracy and the concept that “no man is above the law.”

There is no law and not a word in the Constitution that requires Attorney General Merrick Garland to order Jack Smith to drop charges against Trump.

It’s merely a policy written in a letter by Richard Nixon’s corrupt Justice Department (whose director, Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison for his corruption) when Nixon was being investigated…and doubled down on by Bill Clinton’s Justice Department when Clinton was being investigated for lying under oath.

It has no force of law. It’s merely policy. Written by an agency lawyer who was never elected by anybody to anything.

Merrick Garland — Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s suggestion to Obama for SCOTUS — could have easily ignored it, and you know that if the shoe was on the other foot a Republican president would have done just that. Joe Biden would be in confinement right now.

ALSO READ: Inside Trump’s testosterone-poisoned choices

As the Supreme Court wrote in the 1978 case Butz v. Economou:

“No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.”

That our nation’s highest “officer of the law” Garland is forcing Smith to allow a convicted and multiple-grand-jury-indicted criminal to go free because he gamed the system through an election is, itself, a crime. It’s a clear violation of the foundational principle of Anglo-American justice and politics, the Magna Carta, first signed into law by King John on the plain at Runnymede in 1215: That no man is above the law.

As Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice “obey in advance,” America is in crisis and Democratic leadership seems completely absent.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies on social media and in the checkbooks of billionaires. And, as we saw vividly in this month’s election, it dies when democracy’s sworn advocates fail to show up to fight for it.

And right now democracy’s advocates among America’s political class are shockingly quiet. Or they’re going on TV to pathetically claim that ending prosecutions against Trump means “the system has worked.”

That has to stop.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa — the first journalist to win the prize since 1935 when it was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, then a prisoner in a German concentration camp — makes this point over and over in her brilliant new book How To Stand Up To A Dictator.

The Philippine journalist writes that the war against democracy in her own country was fought “on two fronts: President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.” Noting that in 2016 “most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines,” she writes:

“[T]he absence of rule of law in the virtual world is devastating. We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century. Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances.”

We saw the same thing here in the United States over the past year. Billionaire Elon Musk turned Xitter into a massive rightwing echo chamber, allegedly spreading lies and Russian propaganda in service of Trump’s election and his own rise to political power.

Several hundred other rightwing billionaires poured a tsunami of cash into the world’s first $20 billion election (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court), saturating the airwaves with the message that Kamala Harris only cared about trans people in jail, while “Donald Trump cares about you!”

Not only did the Harris campaign fail to respond before the election — just like the Dukakis campaign failed to respond to Bush Sr.’s vicious, racist Willie Horton ads — but for almost four years both President Biden and Vice President Harris have been almost completely absent from the American media scene.

Biden, practicing the “normal” politics of the pre-social-media era, relied on the occasional speech or signing ceremony and the nation’s legacy media to carry the message of all the extraordinary — and they were extraordinary — accomplishments of his administration.

Thus, as a result of his and his advisors’ failure to exploit the media, 59 percent of Americans (and 88 percent of Republicans) falsely believed the Fox “News” lies that America was in a recession and inflation was still out-of-control as they went to the polls.

And, as history vividly shows, when there’s a recession during a presidential election the party in power almost always loses.

What this election taught us is that reality is no longer important in this social media-controlled world: perception is. And the GOP controlled the economic perception all year with their relentless appearances in media and on social media.

As incompetent as the Biden/Harris administration was on bragging on their economy, Trump and his billionaire supporters had a massive success in their effort to gaslight Americans about both Biden’s and the Trump-presidency’s economy.

While Trump’s economy had never been as good as, for example, Obama’s (and was far behind Biden’s), fully 69 percent of voters who pulled the lever for Trump this year falsely believed the economy during his presidency was better than either of those two Democratic presidents.

How did Trump pull this off?

He and his social media army (many from outside the US pretending to be Americans) hit the ’net and the airwaves literally every day of the week bragging about how well things were doing, even during the depths of the pandemic and the recession it provoked.

Fox “News” and 1,500 rightwing radio stations provided the chorus, along with rightwing newspapers owned by the Murdoch family from Australia, and hundreds of rightwing “news” websites funded by petro- and other billionaires.

While Biden spent almost 4 years only occasionally talking with the press, during Trump’s four years he did a mini-press-conference (often on his way to playing golf) virtually every single day. All the billionaire oligarchs and social media trolls had to do was amplify that message (which they did, as CBS’ CEO Les Moonves bragged), and it became widely believed.

While Biden and Harris did a marvelous job of getting meaningful legislation that aided working people through Congress and into law, neither ever did even a fraction of the self-promotion that Trump has proven is so necessary to build media narratives in this short-attention-span news era.

Biden and Harris apparently think that leadership means getting things done; how quaint is that almost childlike belief that it’s still the 1970s! Trump knows that in this era of social and electronic media, of newsletters and podcasts, repetition and outrage that triggers social media algorithms are the name of the game of leadership.

Trump’s mantra could easily be: “You’re not a leader if you’re not seen in the media daily.” And it appears that, in our modern era, he’s right.

Biden and Harris thought the media would stand up for democracy; the editor of The New York Times argued instead that advocating for democracy was “partisan” and he “won’t do it.” Leadership, even in the media, the Times would apparently argue doesn’t involve defending Jeffersonian principles of democracy.

By that definition, the Democratic Party is currently — and has been since 2015 — without leadership.

Think about it. Who stands up daily for Democratic priorities? Who hits the media several times a week to accuse Republicans and their billionaire owners of class warfare and theft from the middle class? Who’s all over social media fighting the good fight?

Was it DNC Chair Jaime Harrison? President Biden? Vice President Harris? Sadly, No.

Outside of Harris’ carefully-scripted campaign events, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) were far more visible in the media than any of them.

And so when AOC reached out to voters in her district who voted both for her and Trump and asked them why, the answers she got validated Trump’s “speak out bluntly and often” approach to leadership in the 21st century:

— “It’s real simple… Trump and you care for the working class.”
— ”Trump is going to get us the money and lets men have a voice. You’re brilliant and have amazing passion!”
— “I feel like Trump and you are both real.”
— “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways.”

Meanwhile, Trump not only built his own social media site, but with Elon’s and Saudi Arabia’s help his followers and the overall right wing and Nazi movements took over a substantial presence on Twitter. Trump’s name has appeared in headlines on virtually every major social, online, and legacy media outlet virtually every single day for the past nine years.

Another part of the Democrats’ problem is that there isn’t one single message; the party ranges from solid progressives to sellout “problem solvers” eager to suck up to corporate donors to those pandering to (or afraid of) AIPAC and Netanyahu.

In addition, the Overton window embraced by mainstream media has shifted hard to the right, largely the result of billions invested over the past 40 years in think-tanks and media silos.

But none of that should excuse the Biden administration and the DNC for having ignored the media all these years.

And what has happened to our champion, Kamala Harris? She seems to have vanished during her family vacation in Hawaii. That’s not leadership during a time of crisis, and if Trump’s plans for his presidency aren’t a crisis then the word has lost its meaning.

Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong, visible leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation’s??

If Trump is successful in going after “the enemy within,” the window for Democratic activism may close soon, much as it once did in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and every other democracy once taken over by strongman authoritarians.

Where is our clear leader? Our Donald Trump? The Democratic Party needs to get its media act together right away.

Define its message. Identify unambiguously the “enemies” of American democracy and call them out daily. Fully embrace the American working class. Declare class warfare. Express outrage, offer opposing policies, and point out GOP hypocrisy. Stop “obeying in advance.”

And they must do it now, before it’s too late. There’s still time…but it won’t last long…

NOW READ: Merrick Garland and his 'Justice' Department should never be forgiven

“The political folks believed that because [Covid] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.” — Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban quoting Jared Kushner’s team in March, 2020

Arguably the most important aspect of political leadership is the ability to deal with a crisis.

The massive incompetence and malice of the Trump administration in 2020 led, for example, to the unnecessary deaths of an estimated half-million Americans. And now we may well be facing a repeat that could be even worse.

The flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was the result of a bird flu (H1N1) that mixed, presumably in a pig, with a human-adapted flu virus and then killed over 50 million people worldwide and almost 700,000 in America (when our population was only 100 million people; it’s 334 million today).

So far, every person in America who’s become infected with this generation’s bird flu (H5N1) has gotten it from an animal, mostly birds (particularly chickens). It’s so widespread in the US chicken population, in fact, that it’s largely responsible for the high price of eggs leading up to the election and today (so much for the GOP/media inflation talking point).

In Canada, though, the science journal Nature published a rather alarming story last week, writing:

“In a children’s hospital in Vancouver, Canada, a teenager is in critical condition after being infected with an avian influenza virus that has researchers on high alert.
“Viral genome sequences released last week suggest that the teenager is infected with an H5N1 avian influenza virus bearing mutations that might improve its ability to infect the human airway. If true, it could mean that the virus can rapidly evolve to make the jump from birds to humans.”

The teenager doesn’t work or even live near farms and has had no known contact with birds. And it appears that the virus that has her at death’s door is a recent mutation:

“But researchers have homed in on three key differences between those [normal bird flu] viruses and the teenager’s: two possible mutations that could enhance the virus’s ability to infect human cells, and another that could allow it to replicate more easily in human cells, not just in the cells of its usual avian host.”

There’s a broad scientific consensus that the H1N1 flu of 1918 acquired its ability to easily infect humans and transmit from person-to-person because a pig with a case of a random human flu virus (pigs are easily infected by people) was simultaneously infected with bird flu. The two viruses are believed to have swapped genes inside the pig, producing the deadly variation that killed millions worldwide (although the hypothesis is still being debated).

And just last month, here in Oregon, a pig farm discovered five of their pigs were sick with bird flu. Public health authorities immediately sealed off the farm and euthanized the pigs to prevent them from picking up a human flu virus, but this is a pretty stark warning.

Another concern is that with Covid we had a virus that was transmitted by air, but died almost immediately when it landed on surfaces we could touch. Nobody got it from buckling a seatbelt used by an infected person on a plane, eating from a plate handled by an infected restaurant worker, or touching a package handed to them by an infected Amazon delivery driver.

The flu, on the other hand, is easily transmitted by touch; it’s why people are advised to frequently wash their hands during flu season.

Nobody wants to create a panic, least of all me, but this is alarming. Even more alarming is that if this mutation (or others like it) spreads, the guys running our nation’s response to a second pandemic this decade will be vaccine-skeptic Bob Kennedy and herd immunity advocate Marty Makary.

Herd immunity is the theory that when enough people are infected with a disease, the survivors have leftover “natural” immunity; some advocates (like Makary) even suggest it’s superior to vaccine-induced immunity.

The problem with the argument for “natural” herd immunity in the case of Covid or a deadly flu is that the disease often kills people so only the survivors have immunity, whereas the vaccine confers immunity without killing people.

Herd immunity is a real thing; we saw it play out during the Black Death in Europe in the 1340s. After a third of all the people on the continent were dead, the remaining two-thirds appear to have a minor immunity, the traces of which are still found in their descendants’ genome today.

Relying on herd immunity to deal with Covid would require roughly 80 percent of all Americans to get infected, leading to at least an additional 1-2 million deaths here as well as more multiple millions of Americans suffering permanent disability from long Covid.

Nonetheless, Makary went so far as to publish an article in The Wall Street Journal in February of 2021 arguing, as the headline read, “We’ll Have Herd Immunity By April”:

“Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction,” he wrote, “that there may be very little Covid-19 by April [2021] but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.”

Last week, Trump appointed Makary to head up the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees the production and distribution of vaccines. Not reassuring.

And his boss, of course, could be even more problematic.

That’s the Bob Kennedy who Trump wants to head up the Department of Health and Human Services who argued that:
— Efforts to deal with Covid were part of a “biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race”;
— The mRNA Covid vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made”;
— The Covid virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare “Jews and Chinese people;”
— And efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid were “instruments of compliance for authoritarian regimes.”

Leadership matters, particularly during times of crisis. As do expertise, experience, and competence. Kennedy is a lawyer, not a physician; he has no medical training whatsoever.

We’re facing Russia’s threat to turn their attack on Ukraine into World War III, China’s increasing belligerence toward Taiwan with their spies well-lodged inside every major US phone company, and now the possibility of a new pandemic.

Given how, during the last pandemic, Jared Kushner advised Trump that it would be an “effective political strategy” to ignore the spreading virus and blame it on Blue state (WA, NJ, CT, NY) governors — and Trump took that advice for the first several months while the pandemic blossomed out of control — now might be a good time for us all to assess how prepared we are to go through this again.

Stock up on masks and essentials. Hand sanitizer and things like Vitamin D and Zinc that support the immune system. Consider what’s necessary to work from home.

And those Democratic governors who take science seriously should begin pandemic preparations for their states.

None of this necessitates panic; this time the government will be able to produce a flu vaccine much faster (once the virus finally mutates and stabilizes) than the yearlong wait we experienced in 2020 (assuming Kennedy and Makary don’t screw things up). We’d never before produced a vaccine against a coronavirus; flu vaccines have been produced worldwide since 1945.

As the old saying goes, forewarned is forearmed.

NOW READ: The one thing stopping Trump

Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?

Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.

Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.

And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.

In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.

The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:

“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”

Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”

Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.

My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.

That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.

As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.

Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.

Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.

As the headline on Fox Business notes:

“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”

Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.

While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”

This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.

While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.

Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.

Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.

There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.

The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).

In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.

Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.

As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:

“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.
“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”

All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.

A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.

Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.

I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.

In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.

NOW READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?

I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?

If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.

So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.

Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.

Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.

And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.

Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.

Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.

Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.

So, what’s really going on here?

Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?

Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?

That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?

That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?

That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?

That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.

This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press he believed it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified.

It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:

“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …
“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.
“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”

Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.

Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our seniormost intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

President Biden told the nation, “American democracy is under attack … [by the] former president of the United States…”

I wrote about this years ago when Trump was trying to overthrow our government, and it’s time to talk again about what an American authoritarian government would look like. Because over the next two months we may — depending on how Americans react to the changes in our form of government Trump has planned — very rapidly slide into a form of fascism much like the old Confederacy in the 1840-1860 era.

Like the old Confederacy, it could feature political violence and threats of violence, rigged elections, and single-party rule combined with a corrupt oligarchy that finances the politicians.

And, like the old Confederacy, it could try to destroy the historic democracy of the United States of America, only this time in 2025 and the three following years.

The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

ALSO READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

It’s critical to lay out what a fascist America would look like now, because this is what’s being envisioned right now by many in the Republican Party, and it might come to pass in the course of the next year or two.

Republicans don’t talk about it out loud very much, unlike Nixon’s man G. Gordon Liddy, who used to embrace fascism back in the day when he signed memos using Hitler’s SS symbol. But there is a model here and MAGA Republicans do have something in mind.

What could it be? What would it look like? How will it most likely come about?

First, and essential to American fascism, Republicans envision a strong-man Dear Leader who will hold power for as long as he (it’s almost always a “he”) chooses, with the transition to the next Dear Leader determined by The Dear Leader himself.

This has been the primary characteristic of every fascistic government to emerge in the 7000-year written history of the modern world.

When Trump was running for re-election in 2020, at rallies in both Nevada and Wisconsin, he came right out and said that not only would he win that election but that he’d also be re-elected again in 2024 and 2028. He was dead serious, and brought up running again in 2028 just this week.

Sure, our constitution says a president can only serve two terms: so did the Russian constitution, until Putin got it amended. Trump is apparently planning the same, and his followers are — if the response at the rallies when he “joked” about it is any indicator — ecstatic at the prospect.

That single strongman Leader, and his hand-selected toadies at every secondary or tertiary level of government, is the key to understanding everything else that happens when a country flips from democracy to oligarchy and then to fascism.

For example, in a fascist state the way that you as an average citizen ensure your own advancement and economic, personal, and political security is by sucking up to that one man (albeit often through one of his factotums). You either become an acolyte/follower or you find yourself on the outside looking in.

If you think this sounds extreme, just look at today’s GOP, which has become the prototype for how these MAGA Republicans will reinvent the United States now that they’ve gained power.

Liz Cheney spoke against Trump, and the Wyoming GOP expelled her and Trump supported a primary challenger. Five Republicans who voted to impeach Trump faced such a backlash that they decided to retire at the end of their terms: Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, John Katko, Mitt Romney, and Fred Upton.

Republican freshman Congressman Chris Jacobs, representing a district including parts of Buffalo, NY, was forced to withdraw from 2022’s primary (and, thus, he retired from the House) because after the Buffalo massacre he spoke against Trump’s and his party’s embrace of assault weapons.

Not only is fealty to Dear Leader required for political advancement in a fascist state, it’s also a requirement for individual economic advancement. Employers eager for state contracts or Dear Leader’s endorsements of their products or services demote or fire those insufficiently loyal to him.

Psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee was fired from Yale University for tweeting that Trump was mentally ill. Schoolteacher Leah Kinyon was fired from her job for saying that “I hate Donald Trump. … He is a sexual predator. He’s a literal moron.” Juli Brisker was fired from her job with government contractor Akima for giving Trump’s motorcade the finger.

Rebekah Jones was fired by Ron DeSantis for telling the truth about his covering up Florida Covid statistics. Florida’s Orange County Health Director Dr. Raul Pino was removed for encouraging his staff to get vaccinated.

When companies defy Dear Leader they are brutally punished, as DeSantis did to Disney and the Tampa Bay Rays. Soon companies don’t even try to stand up to The Leader, including media companies. The Washington Post and the LA Times both, for example, decided this year to simply “obey in advance.”

This past weekend, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Largo to kiss Trump’s royal ass, probably at the insistence of network executives since Trump has threatened the very existence of MSNBC.

Trump than ran to Fox “News” to ridicule the pair, saying they, “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books’” and that “it’s too bad that it [Joe & Mika’s ass-kissing] wasn’t done long ago.” He added: “I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile.”

In that, he’s certainly right. Expect more media stars and network executives to do in-person or online versions of the same, just as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg already have. And expect guests and hosts on MSNBC, CNN, etc. to stop using the “fascism” word to describe Trump, his actions, and his people.

They think it’ll mollify Trump; instead it’ll empower him to become even more brutal, just as we saw in Florida when DeSantis signed legislation giving him the authority to “hold accountable” college professors, reviewing their politics every five years so those who aren’t totally on board with his agenda can lose tenure and be fired. The headline at Salon says it all:

“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state: Universities may lose funding if staff and students’ beliefs do not satisfy Florida’s GOP-run legislature.”

You end up doing things on Dear Leader’s behalf, whether you’re an elected official in his party, working at a private corporation, or engaged in the nonprofit sector like teaching at a university or medical center.

Defying or challenging Dear Leader brings opprobrium; supporting Dear Leader is the path to career advancement. The first Trump White House and DeSantis Governor’s Office are filled with examples.

Everything is done for Dear Leader because Dear Leader is the state. The state and Dear Leader have become one.

If you challenge Dear Leader, you’re challenging the state, and that’s treason.As Marjorie Taylor Greene said of speaker Pelosi:

“She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law, representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government — and it’s a crime punishable by death”.

Similarly, Trump now openly proclaims that he intends to use the power of the state against Jack Smith and others who tried to hold him to account for the crimes he has committed.

Whatever Dear Leader says becomes the law. This is called “rule by decree” and it’s where every fascist in history has ended up.

The power to rule by decree goes back to the days of kings and is also embedded in our laws about the president’s emergency powers. Trump came close to invoking it with an “emergency declaration” when he lost the election. General Flynn begged him to do it and “temporarily suspend the Constitution.”

Next year he won’t be so restrained and he will have surrounded himself in advance with people like Flynn who will make it happen.

Yet, while it will change how power is distributed in our government, things will still look much the same to average people.

As a fascistic Trump rises to power again in the United States, there will still be all the trappings of democracy.

The House and Senate, state houses and governors, bureaucracies and political systems will remain intact. Everything looks normal on the surface.

But when you peel off the top layer, you discover that all of those people in all of those offices, whether elected or bureaucratic, are serving only one principle and one person and that is Dear Leader.

Be they governors, secretaries of state, United States senators, members of the US House, state representatives, or even a part-time guy working at a polling place in Michigan, they might get a call at any time from Dear Leader demanding that they do something for him, whether it’s legal or not.

There will still be opposition parties and political candidacies in a Republican fascist America, although if any of them seriously challenges Dear Leader or shows the ability to disrupt the status quo, they’ll be discovered to have a secret drug problem or porn habit, or get imprisoned for corruption, tax evasion, or other made-up charges.

Nobody will really notice, though. People will just shrug their shoulders and assume another crook got caught. The swamp is being cleaned up. Just look at Hunter Biden facing years in prison for checking a box on a gun purchase form that an estimated 20 million other Americans checked, and paying his taxes late like other millions of Americans. Selective prosecutions become the norm.

The prosperity of the company you work for depends in part on how well it supports the politics of Dear Leader.

Dear Leader helps a few dozen oligarchs he knows are loyal to him seize control of the nation’s major industries, and every smaller company in each of those industries must directly or indirectly answer to that oligarch.

Those who fail to are bought out, shut down, or simply cannot find customers or supplies because nobody will do business with them.

The industry where this is most visible at first is the media.

Some media organizations will be absorbed by the government itself, as Putin has done in Russia; others will be bought out and run by the Leader’s oligarch buddies, as is the case today in Hungary and Turkey (among others).

Soon opposition voices vanish from all but the most obscure media, and those few opposing voices that are tolerated are pointed to by Dear Leader as proof the nation is still an open democracy.

Jews and people of color may find a rougher time maintaining a job or staying safe from vigilantes, abuse, and discrimination but most whites will be just fine, particularly white men. The majority of Americans, so long as they pay attention to football instead of politics, will tell you nothing much has changed.

There will still be Christmas parties, although people celebrating Hanukkah or Muslims praying may want to pull the shades closed.

Hate crimes and murders by vigilante groups will start happening with such frequency that the media doesn’t bother to report them anymore.

Within a few years a little bit of every business activity in the country ends up in Dear Leader’s pocket. And Dear Leader uses that revenue to enrich himself, his inner circle, and those who are part of his military entourage, his private military.

That’s right: Dear Leader’s private military.

It’d be put together like what Ron DeSantis organized in Florida, a state-sanctioned militia that answers only to Dear Leader, in this case DeSantis. Trump tried the same, flying 700+ Customs and Border Protection and other federal officers into Portland in 2020 where they hit the streets without identification on their uniforms to beat and kidnap people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

When the private militia is created at the federal level it’ll become a substantial national military force with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under Dear Leader’s direct command. Hitler’s was called the SS and answered only to The Fürher himself. Mussolini had his, as do Putin, Erdoğan, el-Sisi, bin Salman, and others today.

Citing “national security” and the need to “deport criminal immigrants,” Dear Leader’s private militia will have an undisclosed and therefore vast budget. Outside of times it’s called on to intimidate people or make a public display of power, it’ll largely operate in secret.

Its members won’t have to obey the law because, as agents of Dear Leader who’s above the law, they are, too. If they have to kill somebody, there will be no investigation unless it’s to cover up the crime. If they need to make somebody disappear, that person disappears. At first it’ll be done by stochastic terrorism: lone wolf actors not directly connected to Dear Leader but answering his general call to punish political evildoers. As well as by Dear Leader’s private secret police.

Just ask Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence, who both narrowly escaped being murdered on January 6th.

Dear Leader’s oligarch buddies and their media machine, along with his well-indoctrinated followers, promote a law-and-order crime ideology that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.

This is how the kind of government Donald Trump promises he will establish in America has played out, over and over again, across the world and throughout history. If Trump can bring the Senate to heel with his outrageous Cabinet nominations, you’ll know it’s fully here, now.

In our own time we’ve seen it in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Cuba, Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries around the world less well known for the democratic nature of the government.

It may call itself left-wing or right-wing, but what really matters is that all power and authority rests with Dear Leader. Stalin was every bit the fascist that Hitler and Mussolini were; his fascism just had a different face and brand.

As “future dystopian” as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It’s “normal.”

Once established it’s almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of Dear Leader or an actual revolution. Just ask any Russian. Or the women in Iran today.

Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, including the hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after the time that it’s happened?

After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world’s most stable democracies into fascism.

An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing what happened once The Leader seized power:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

Did the German people realize they’d abandoned democracy? That they would soon become international pariahs? The college professor Mayer interviewed answered:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.
“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.
“And one day it is over his head.”

Is it possible this could happen in America? That all these “small steps” would one day lead to a dictatorial form of government that has so cowed the people, the politicians, and even the business community and media that it can’t be challenged?

Doesn’t the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy? Don’t the people pour into the streets?

Mayer’s professor gave us the answer:

“You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
“You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure.

In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans and Fox “News“ pundits, former President Obama came right out and said it:

“You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we’ve seen societies where that happens.”

Yes, the former President of the United States was invoked Nazi Germany seven years ago while Donald Trump was President, adding:

“Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity.
“And then,” President Obama said, “60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.”

The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism.

Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times and Madeline Albright’s book and from legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And now the President of the United States makes a prime-time address to the nation, warning Americans that fascism is at our door. It gets only a passing mention in the news.

But, still, how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by The Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?

Back to Mayer’s German friend in 1954:

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

Next year and in 2026 many of us will no longer be able to know if our voices, our attempts to vote, will actually decide who leads our nation.

Many of us will show up at the polls in two years to discover we are no longer registered to vote. Many of our mail-in ballots will be “challenged” by Republican vote observers and we won’t learn about it until after the election is long over.

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you can be purged from the voting rolls on a whim. In the majority of US states Republicans can take over electoral precincts, install their people (as we just learned they are doing right now) and run them under whatever rules they want.

Already in some states when the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on their people, for example, you go to jail if you bring them water. If you make a mistake on your voting registration or ballot, or help another person register to vote, they can send you to prison for five years or more.

Somehow, of the many people from both parties who are busted for this, it seems only the Democrats end up going to jail. Particularly Black Democrats.

And yet everything seems “normal.” As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when Dear Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.
“Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why our democracy has been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.

Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling rightwing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”), the media bending its collective knee to Trump, are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.

And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer: “Frankly, I do not know.”

That was 1954; this is 2024. We now know.

We know how the poisonous hate that animates fascism seeps into a society because we saw it ourselves during the first 4 years of the Trump administration and throughout the past year’s campaign.

We’re watching it in Red states across the country as MAGA Republicans replace honorable Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: if just five Republicans had not refused to go along with Trump we would have been thrown into this fascist dystopia four years earlier.

We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped. And now that we do know, we can’t escape the moral obligation to resist with everything we have.

ALSO READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to “dark money” SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don’t list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

And none of that covers the additional billions in “free media” Trump got from FOX “News,” rightwing hate radio, and Musk apparently altering the Xitter algorithm to favor messages friendly to himself and/or Trump while suppressing anti-Trump or pro-Harris posts.

This is extraordinarily bad for average Americans: With billionaires calling the shots in the upcoming Trump administration we can expect more pollution, fewer consumer protections, a war on unions, a frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage, bigger subsidies and grants to billionaires’ companies (from the fossil fuel industry to defense and SpaceX), lower taxes on the morbidly rich, and cuts to social services and entitlement programs.

But far more concerning is the simple reality that oligarchies are merely transitional forms of government, as I mentioned on Ali Velshi’s show Sunday morning and wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan embraced neoliberalism (free trade, gut unions, low taxes on the morbidly rich) the top .01% have pillaged the American working class, essentially stealing over $50 trillion over the past 43 years and using that money to buy megayachts, penis-shaped rockets, European chateaus, private jets, and to fill their money bins.

So far, Republicans have been able to largely distract Americans from this naked theft by tossing out red herrings; blaming the ills of America on immigrants, big-city Black people, teachers, and the queer community. But there’s a limit to how long you can gaslight people; eventually working-class Americans figure out what’s going on and who’s behind their falling behind previous generations.

When that happens, oligarchies begin to tremble, something that’s been gradually happening for several decades. People protest, what’s left of union movements stand up, and progressive political parties begin to get a significant toehold on the national debate. The success of Bernie Sanders in his presidential efforts is an example of the leading edge of this dissatisfaction and dawning realization by average citizens of an early indicator that we were approaching this cusp.

Once protest against the oligarchs buying politicians and manipulating government reaches a critical mass, the oligarchy is faced with a terrible but necessary choice.

They can allow democracy to proceed and end up being voted out of power (as happened in Brazil when Bolsonaro was thrown out), sometimes even facing jail themselves (as happened here in 2020, although Merrick Garland dragged his feet for two long years).

Or the kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and “the enemy within,” using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements.

This latter path was the one Vladimir Putin chose as Russia moved from democracy to oligarchy and then to outright dictatorship. Speak up and go directly to jail, if you’re not killed outright like Alexi Navalny was. It’s also the path Viktor Orbán, the man many Republicans claim is their role model, has taken in Hungary.

And, if the rhetoric coming from Trump and his acolytes is translated into action starting in January, that is the path America will soon take.

Numerous Americans have been warning about this ever since Trump’s first term in office (and some, including me, for decades before).

Reagan began the destruction of the middle class (which has gone from two-thirds of us in 1981 when he came into office to 43% of us having that wealth today), Bush and Cheney used 9/11 to expand presidential authority, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court granted king-like powers to Trump, and now the wannabee Mussolini is echoing traditional fascist rhetoric about women, minorities, the press, and his political opposition.

Soon, millions of Americans will be confronted with a choice. Will they, like “good Germans,” Russians, Chinese, and Hungarians did, abandon politics and go back to sports, music, and keeping their heads down? Or will they — like millions in Brazil, Chile, and Ukraine — stand up, protest, join the Democratic Party (while it’s still legal) and form a real resistance to an oligarchy that appears bent on morphing itself into America’s first raw tyranny?

In particular, it appears we’re approaching a time when Democratic state governors will need our support in their efforts to resist Trump’s fascist impulses. And, as our mainstream media continues to act like Trump is merely business-as-usual, help sustain independent media that engages in radical truth telling (there are many on Substack: check out my recommendations).

And it’s not too late for America to return to democracy; the next election of great import will be in two years and we all need to prepare.

Those who have faced the violence of state oppression have told us about the importance of times like this.

Elie Wiesel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” and Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

We still have the power to make the choice to resist, awaken others, and organize. Seize it, before it’s gone.

NOW READ: Trump's 'first buddy' is in deep you-know-what

— I’ll be on C-SPAN this Sunday morning at 9:15 am ET (6:15 am PT) to discuss the election, the direction of the country and taking questions. It should be interesting; be sure to tune in!

— Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy? Donald Trump only got about a million more votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala Harris appears to have received somewhere between 6 and 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did that year. For the over two decades that I’ve been writing and on the radio and TV, I’ve argued that when Bill Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 (and Obama maintained that position) the Democratic Party had taken a fatal turn to the right. I’ve written two books that cover it, in part, as well: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream. It appears that millions of voters essentially said, “I’m not going to vote for that nutcase Trump, but Harris isn’t speaking to the explosion in my cost-of-living expenses so to hell with her, too.” Joe Biden campaigned with Bernie Sanders and won; Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and repeatedly said she wanted to give Republicans “a seat at the table,” which may well have been a fatal error. She thought she could pick up moderate Republicans, but there’s apparently not such a thing anymore since Fox “News” and the massive rightwing media ecosystem has come to dominate the American news and opinion landscape.

Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Sherrod Brown, and many other longtime Democrats have been pointing to this pre-1992 truth: if the Democratic Party is to win, it has to go back to its FDR/LBJ roots and become the party of the bottom 90 percent, instead of embracing those with a college education, movie and rock stars, and progressive billionaires like Mark Cuban. God bless them all, but Dems really need to reinvent themselves as the blue-collar party and repudiate much of the Clinton/Obama agenda of low taxes, free trade, and private/public partnerships (like Obamacare).

Amazingly, even The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks agrees, writing: “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. [This is actually an untrue GOP talking point.] … As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.” Amen. Finally, check out this troubling article from data scientist Stephen Spoonamore raising questions about manipulation of vote totals in the swing states in a way that doesn’t appear in the non-swing states. I’m agnostic on this for the moment, but it’s worth reading; he’ll be on my program Monday.

— In an authoritarian regime it’s important to cow and control the news, and here we go. Kash Patel, widely rumored to be Trump’s main pick for FBI director, has a message for reporters and opinion writers who insist on continuing to call Trump a fascist or otherwise slander/defame him and his followers: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you... Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

According to The Columbia Journalism Review, Trump has already sued The New York Times (naming reporters Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner) and Penguin Random House (one of my publishers) and CBS’s 60 Minutes show for $10 billion each.

As I predicted, he appears to be following the Putin/Orbán strategy of bankrupting media outlets and reporters (rather than using cops and billy-clubs), presumably both to cow others into submission and to make the media properties available to be purchased by his allies (sort of like what just happened with The Onion buying Infowars out of bankruptcy).

Steve Bannon added his thoughts, essentially threatening or warning the journalists at MSNBC: “Weissman, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers, MSNBC. Preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts. Preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. Mom and dad, ‘You know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up.”

This is a dangerous time for anybody writing about politics. Orbán and Putin even go after random citizens who criticize them on social media; will Trump go that far? And will progressives shut up in the face of this kind of intimidation? Stay tuned…

— Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. Jessica Valenti tells the story at Abortion, Every Day on Substack about the Republican lawmakers in Texas (and around the country) who are trying to pass legislation that would imprison people who put up websites that can be viewed in Texas (including hers) with information on abortion. They argue that abortion information is not free speech protected by the Constitution. I’d add that if the Comstock Act is enforced by the new Attorney General (as JD Vance has demanded) next year, all sorts of information about abortion will become criminalized, in addition to the devices and drugs that can be used for both abortion and birth control.

— Sarah Hurst’s Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. I’ll let you click on it and read it yourself; it’s all about her repeated embraces of Russia and Putin. Which makes some people wonder out loud why Trump would push such objectionable candidates; surely the Senate will protect us from such people, right?

But if Trump really wants to pull a Hitler and seize absolute control of the nation within a matter of a few months, his first move would be to either negotiate or force a recess of the Senate and simply “recess appoint” all of his cabinet nominees. No hearings, no tough questions, no FBI or other background checks, no Democratic politicians’ input. He has this authority under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution: if there’s a disagreement between John Thune and Mike Johnson about when to adjourn, “...and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the president] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

They could agree to disagree; that way they could both evade responsibility. On the other hand, if Thune simply gives in to Trump’s recent demand for recess appointments (as he told reporters yesterday he was considering), Thune can simply adjourn the Senate, something that hasn’t happened in decades; Trump can then simply do his own recess appointments (it could be done in a single hour) under the Constitution’s provision: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” or he could just appoint them as “acting“ officials.

He did that during the last year of his presidency, and went way beyond the legal time limit for several; he flagrantly broke the law last time with over 15 cabinet members and Republicans were unwilling to call him on it, although he never started that way. This will be our first clue that the nation is no longer a constitutional republic with anything resembling checks and balances, but has become an oligarchic dictatorship like Hungary.

— Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán’s and Putin’s road to power? M. Gessen, an expert on authoritarianism, writes in The New York Times: “When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an ‘autocratic breakthrough,’ changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again. It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image. … Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, tried to warn Americans about this and a lot more, labeling Trump a fascist. … It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition.”

The article is definitely worth a read, chilling as it is. Gessen even gets into the role of Project 2025 in facilitating the transformation of our American form of government into one with a single strongman president at its pinnacle. This does not bode well for America.

— Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. The Washington Post is reporting: “A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packed a ‘go bag’ with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee. A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration. And a former U.S. official who signed a notorious October 2020 letter suggesting that emails purportedly taken from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could be part of a ‘Russian information operation’is seeking a passport from a European country, uncertain about whether the getaway will prove necessary but concluding, ‘You don’t want to have to scramble.’”

Reports (like this one from the Post) suggest that Trump has an “enemies list” of at least 600 people, much like Nixon’s, and he intends to go after everybody on the list on day one. Will he, like Nixon, just harass people with IRS audits? It seems more likely based on his own words that he’ll launch criminal and civil actions to jail or bankrupt his perceived enemies and those who have written or said things that have offended him.

Along those same lines, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “justice” against health officials: “Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people. He lied, and many, many people died. … People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I’m pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen.”

Washington, DC is very, very much on edge right now; I got a call Friday morning at 5:30 in the morning from the CEO of a major DC-based progressive media outlet who’d just gotten off the phone with a Clinton colleague; both are considering leaving the country. This is getting real very, very fast.

— Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people?Millions of people signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance policies over the past three years because of hefty subsidies contained in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Those subsidies expire at the end of this year, and Republicans are signaling that they won’t be renewed, meaning that premiums could go from $200 a month to as much as $2400 a month. Meanwhile, Project 2025 has called for private corporate Medicare Advantage plans to become the default option for people turning 65 and signing up for Medicare. Once a critical threshold is hit (currently more than half of seniors are on the Advantage plans) it’ll be fairly easy for a Republican congress and president to end legacy Medicare; once that happens, Advantage plans, no longer having competition from real Medicare, will almost certainly become more expensive and offer less coverage.

Meanwhile, Raw Story is reporting: “Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told reporters earlier this week that the GOP is looking to use the filibuster-evading reconciliation process to pursue cuts to ‘mandatory programs’—a category that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” Republicans have been talking about this since the ReaganRevolution, but never actually tried (other than Reagan raising the retirement age from 65 to 67). Get ready.

— State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. Oklahoma’s Channel 4 (KFOR) TV News reports: “Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters emailed leaders in Oklahoma school districts on Thursday telling them they would be required to play their students and parents a video showing Walters blaming the ‘radical left’ and ‘woke teachers unions’ for ‘attacking’ religious liberty, then inviting students to join him as he prays for President-elect Donald Trump.” Walters also reportedly purchased five hundred Trump Bibles for Oklahoma schools. Welcome to the Brave New World. Compounding a religious grift with a financial one; breathtaking.

Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out.

He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.

They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president.

They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.

In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:

“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, Hamilton told us, the people would ferret out such a con man or traitor and Congress and the Supreme Court would put a brake on such a man even if he were to slip past the voters and the Electoral College:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress.

He wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”

He even bragged in Federalist 71 that presidents would be of such high character that they could easily avoid being seduced “by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.”

He also believed that good elected officials in Congress, dependent on the voters for their own political futures, would serve as a check against a corrupt president bent on exploiting his position for his own enrichment, the demands of special interest groups (like billionaires), or the interests of a hostile foreign government:

“But however inclined we might be to insist upon an unbounded complaisance in the Executive [President] to the inclinations of the people, we can with no propriety contend for a like complaisance to the humors of the legislature.”

Turns out, Hamilton was wrong. His nightmare scenario tracks back to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, starting with Lewis Powell authoring the 1978 Bellotti decision that says money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It reached its fetid bottom with John Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ Citizens United blowing up almost all campaign contribution limits.

Without billionaire-controlled media (including billionaire-owned social media) and billions spent to carpet-bomb America with extraordinarily deceptive advertising, Donald Trump would never have had a chance.

By the late 19th century, we realized Hamilton was mistaken and put up guardrails to prevent this.

The Communications Act of 1934 established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and gave it authority to regulate “broadcasting in the public interest.” It also established the Equal Time Rule, requiring broadcast stations to give major candidates for public office roughly equal exposure to the public.

In 1941, the FCC introduced the first specific limits on media ownership with its “Report on Chain Broadcasting,” which restricted ownership of multiple radio stations. In 1946, the FCC established the “duopoly” rule, prohibiting ownership of more than one television station in a market. No Fox or Sinclair, in other words, would be allowed a national footprint to corrupt our democratic system.

In 1949, the FCC formally adopted the Fairness Doctrine as a rule, and in 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to codify the Fairness Doctrine into law. Specifically, they rewrote Section 315(a) to read:

"A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance."

The 1975 newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule prohibited ownership of both a daily newspaper and a full-power broadcast station in the same market.

Similarly, we once had hard and fast rules against billionaires and giant corporations corrupting our political process.

After the Industrial Revolution of the late 1880s brought mind-boggling levels of wealth to a small number of men, those Robber Barons predictably reached out for control of the politicians, state and federal, who might regulate their behavior.

In response, states and the US Congress began passing serious laws to limit the corrupting power of money in politics.

In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said:

“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” (emphasis added)

The penalty included a substantial fine, up to five years in prison for individual executives and even the company’s lawyers, and the death sentence of the corporation itself being forbidden from doing business.

Two years later, efforts to control bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation from making “money contributions in connection with any election to any [federal] political office.”

By 1925, the Tillman Act had been incorporated into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, further limiting money in politics, and in 1938 we got the Hatch Act which limited contributions to $5000 per candidate and $3 million per party.

As a result, for most of the 20th century prior to the Reagan Revolution, politicians did what the citizens wanted. We got Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, food and housing support, new public schools, the right to unionize, high-quality education, nearly free college, nonprofit hospitals and health insurance companies, and tightly regulated banks.

Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals we got another bunch of laws to regulate money in politics, including the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, and the 1974 creation of the Federal Elections Commission, which then promulgated rules further limiting “dark money” and other forms of political bribery.

That all began to end, however, when Richard Nixon swung the Supreme Court hard to the right with his appointment of Lewis Powell in 1972, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. This laid the foundation for the Reagan Revolution and today’s massive corruption across the GOP.

By 1978, Powell had authored the case of First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti, which blew up nearly all of those laws.

In 2010 five corrupt Republican appointees on the Court finished the perversion of American politics with their Citizens United decision, overturning hundreds of state and federal laws dating back more than a century.

Thus, big money now runs the show, and, to paraphrase Lord Acton, big money corrupts absolutely.

As FDR famously said, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

It’s gotten so bad since Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote on Citizens United that legislation Americans clearly want can’t even get a debate in the House or Senate when they’re controlled by Republicans on issues including:

— Reducing or ending student debt
— Free or low-cost college
— Dental, hearing and eyeglasses for seniors on Medicare
— Raising the cap on Social Security so it’s solvent for the next 75 years
— Getting the Post Office into postal banking for low-income people
— Stopping global warming
— Making pharmaceuticals affordable
— Medicare for all
— Taxing the rich
— Cutting back on fossil fuel emissions
— Breaking up the big monopolies to restore competition and lower prices

All of these positions, when polled as a single policy point rather than through a partisan frame, are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. None can get into law because billionaires or corporations have paid off enough politicians to stop them.

This corruption of the “rules of the game” by the Supreme Court has, in turn, attracted criminally disposed sociopaths into government at all levels, from state legislatures to the US Congress. It’s so bad that we can’t even stop members of Congress from trading stocks on insider information.

This is America becoming a Mafia State; with Trump and the corrupt toadies he’s inserting into our government, we’re all now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare.

It’ll be at least two years before we can do anything about it at the voting booth, but now is the time to get mobilized and start planning.

Show up for your local Democratic Party meeting and volunteer; precinct committee persons can have an amazing impact on the direction of the Party. Join a group like Indivisible. Become an evangelist for democracy. Support independent media and share newsletters and websites with everybody you know.

Now is not the time to check out or run away and hide. Get active: Tag, you’re it!

The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line.

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone.

Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in “moral” ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge.

Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax.

NOW READ: The truth bomb too many Democrats need to hear

But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.

As Smith had intimated in Theory, unregulated capitalism would always produce the outcome Charles Dickens later wrote about in the 19th century: A top 1% that owns about 80% of the nation’s wealth, a middle 3%-5% professional class (doctors, lawyers, small business owners), and around 95% of the people representing a desperate working class living in abject poverty.

(In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class; his company was so small it had only one single employee, Bob Cratchit, who represented the bottom 95%. The 1% don’t even show up in most of Dickens’ stories.)

FDR, though, with help from Francis Perkins, his wife Eleanor, and economist John Maynard Keynes thought he could tame capitalism and the capitalists themselves (he accusingly called them the “Economic Royalists”) and set out with his New Deal programs — legalizing unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, government subsidies for the working poor, etc. — to create a vast American middle class.

This was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party, and the middle class was its great accomplishment; by the time Reagan took office about two-thirds of us were in that group with a single paycheck earning enough to buy a house, a car, take an annual vacation, put the kids through school, and retire with dignity.

Reagan broke with FDR’s policies that he’d once supported (in exchange for the promise of riches and a career from his second wife’s father), and took a meataxe to the New Deal. He busted unions, cut the top income tax bracket from 74% to 25%, and embraced free trade, allowing American manufacturing companies to go offshore in search of cheaper labor.

The result is that only 43% of us are in the middle class today. Adding insult to injury, it takes two full-time workers to get where a single paycheck could in 1980.

This was the beginning of the downfall of today’s Democratic Party, which has been buffeted by the twin winds of Reagan’s neoliberalism from the right and so-called “woke” identity politics on the left.

Trump and his Republican buddies cynically attacked Democrats for their embrace of Reagan’s policies, claiming that the shrinking of the middle class was because Black people and women were competing with white men for all those good jobs and Hispanics were diluting the labor market. At the same time, they argued, Democrats had gone too far in embracing marginalized minorities, particularly (in this election) the Trans community.

Ironically, Kamala Harris never once mentioned the Trans community while campaigning over the past three months, but Trump and the GOP relentlessly beat her over the head with a Willie Horton-like ad about giving free surgeries to Trans immigrants in prison. In this regard, the group using identity politics for political purposes was the Republican Party.

But the biggest lesson of this election is that class has supplanted race and other identity markers as the issue that motivated voters. Working class people in or aspiring to the middle class — including Hispanics, young white men, and to a smaller extent African American men — rejected economic policy (like Harris laid out) and racial, gender, or age cohort identity in exchange for the promise of good jobs and lower prices.

Sure, there was still a lot of identity politics at work: Trump’s anti-Trans ads are the best example, along with his relentless insistence that our nation’s immigrant population are mostly murderers, rapists, and thieves. And it may have been decisive on the margins.

But at its core, what we’re seeing in America is a realignment around class (its own form of identity politics). The middle class and its aspirants that had been supporters of the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now in the pocket of Republicans.

Part of this is the result of a massive, 40-year-long propaganda effort by billionaire-built media empires including talk radio (also in Spanish), three rightwing TV networks, Sinclair radio and TV, social media, and tending-right newspapers. Part is because in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires owning politicians and overwhelming elections with the “free speech” of their money.

But most substantially, as Bernie Sanders pointed out last week, it’s the result of the timeless class struggle between working people and what the GOP calls “the elites” (college-educated, upper-income professionals). The former broke big for Trump, the latter for Harris. And millions of minorities, particularly Hispanic men, rejected identity politics for the GOP’s class struggle pitch.

This dynamic is almost identical to the class struggle that brought FDR into power in 1933 and got him elected four times to the presidency, except that the party labels are now — hopefully temporarily — reversed.

The challenge for Democrats is to engage in their own class warfare, particularly since a good chunk of the Party (like the so-called “Problem Solvers Caucus”) are still on the take from big corporations and billionaires.

In this, the Congressional Progressive Caucus can be a great force to reclaim working people, rejecting both Reaganism’s hold on the Democratic Party (both Clinton and Obama embraced neoliberalism, and Biden’s rejection of it is largely unknown) and the notion that voters will always respond to race and gender rather than class.

If Democrats are to regain the working class as a solid and permanent constituency (which they owned from the 1930s to the 1990s), in other words, they must amplify Biden’s and Harris’ fights for higher taxes on billionaires and lower taxes on working people, universal healthcare and free college, reasonably priced housing, raising the federal minimum wage, protecting the right to organize, increase Social Security, and turn billionaires and greedy CEOs into an identifiable group voters can rightfully loathe. Attacking Republicans on the Supreme Court and their Citizens United decision is also vital.

As Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear wrote for The New York Times yesterday:

“I won re-election 12 months ago by five points in a state that Donald Trump just carried by 30 points. … The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer.“

This doesn’t mean Democrats have to abandon allies representing racial, religious, and gender minorities as some are suggesting; that would be both a betrayal and political suicide.

But it’s way past time for a significant recalibration, particularly at the grassroots/working class level. As Pete Davis writes in The Nation:

“Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the [Democratic] party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.
“When you go to Democrats.org, clicking ‘Take Action’ does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is ‘DONATE,’ not ‘JOIN.’”

Thus, as Trump rolls out his cabinet and policies — which will primarily benefit the morbidly rich and giant predatory corporations — Democrats must pound on the class warfare aspect of what the GOP is really up to.

The Democratic Party has done it before and held power for half a century; they need to do it again. With gusto!

NOW READ: The truth bomb too many Democrats need to hear

When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he’d merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term’s personally profitable crony capitalism.

While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he’s just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours) within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.

Taking down the free press in Germany and imprisoning dissidents and journalists only took Hitler three months, about the same as Mussolini and Pinochet.

America’s rightwing oligarchs are apparently ready for the fun to begin: Elon Musk tweeted last week that it’ll soon be time to use the force of law and the Department of Justice to prosecute the people at The Center for Countering Digital Hate who’ve been relentless in outing Nazis on Xitter. (Musk just lost a lawsuit to them.)

But even though they moved quickly, Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and Duterte didn’t start with journalists; they started with the most marginalized and least powerful people in their nations. For Hitler it was trans people he went after within his first two weeks; for Duterte it was drug addicts.

Pinochet and Mussolini arrested vulnerable working class supporters of their opposition political parties who dared show up in the streets to demonstrate against them.

So, who’s the weakest here in America? While Trump campaigned against trans people (just like Hitler had in 1933), it looks like he has another group in mind for his first genticide.

Trump has his sights on undocumented Black and Hispanic migrants to begin the state-sponsored violence and inure the American public to what will eventually come for many more of us.

Get ready for midnight door-knocks by men with guns starting in January. Particularly if you or anybody in your extended family has a last name that ends with a vowel or a z, or even if you simply have black hair and brown eyes.

Trump and Thomas Homan are on the case.

Homan notoriously ran ICE during the last Trump administration and is often considered, along with Stephen Miller, as the father of Trump’s brutal child separation policy that traumatized so many thousands of young families and has left about 1,000 youngsters trafficked into pop-up “Christian” adoption services missing to this day.

Alone. Frightened. Not knowing where their parents are or if they’ll ever see them again.

Homan also helped write part of the immigration policies for Project 2025. And famously bragged to CBS that if he found families with “illegal” members in this country, he’d simply deport the entire family, US citizens or not.

When asked by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Homan barely took a breath before asserting, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

America has done this before, and the results were ugly.

In the 1920s, Republican President Herbert Hoover initiated a nationwide roundup and deportation of people of mostly Mexican ancestry. Police and border agents simply went house-to-house in Hispanic neighborhoods from Arizona to Alaska, often kicking in doors and dragging out people who couldn’t immediately prove their citizenship. As many as 2 million people with Hispanic last names were arrested.

As a result, an estimated 40% to 60% of the people arrested, detained, and deported were actually US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. Because they were deported without proof of citizenship (often because of home births without hospital records), however, they were never able to return to the US.

During WWII, American employers encouraged Mexicans to come to the US to fill jobs vacated by US citizens who’d been drafted and sent off to war.

After the war, President Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback and essentially replicated Hoover’s program; an estimated 300,000 to 1.1 million people were similarly dragged from their homes. Nobody is certain how many were US citizens, but estimates range from 30% to as many as 60%.

Again, because they weren’t able to instantly prove citizenship when the police arrived at their homes, they had no way to get back into the US once they were dumped in Mexico.

If Trump’s leading candidate for Attorney General, Mike Davis, assumes that role he’ll almost certainly back up Holman’s efforts, even if millions of US citizens are seized, imprisoned, and deported. He’s the guy, after all, who just tweeted:

“Fuck unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump.” And “Here’s my current mood: I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)”

The fact that Trump and the people around him are giddy about going after Hispanics and other Black and Brown immigrants from “shithole countries” answers the question everybody is asking about how brutal his second administration could become.

It’s going to be rough. Get ready.

Stephen Miller has already said he’s gleefully going to try to undo the citizenship of naturalized US citizens (presumably not the Norwegians, though) so he can throw them into the concentration camps along with the “illegals”:

And if you you’re a natural born citizen with an Hispanic last name or live anywhere near Hispanics and have black hair and brown eyes, be sure to get your proof of citizenship ready and carry it with you at all times, even when you sleep.

And the rest of us? No dictator in history has ever started a violent inquisition attacking the weakest in society — and they all begin there — without soon extending his terror against every person he thought opposed him or who represented a challenge to his power.

The smug media idiots who’ve been sanewashing Trump for years will either roll over (as has already begun) or end up in jail themselves. Along with many of us on Substack and in the progressive press.

As JD Vance recently said, implying the thought and speech police will soon be coming for Trump’s critics:

“You cannot lie, take your position of public trust, and lie to the American people for political purposes. It’s disgraceful. And people have to suffer consequences for it.”

Welcome to Trump’s version of hell. And welcome to the resistance.

All is not lost. Yet.

— Blue state governors and other officials are working to “Trump proof” their states and agencies. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are seeing record sign-ups, donations are flowing into groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and progressive newsletters like this one are seeing unprecedented levels of new subscribers and supporters. The resistance is energized.

— Trump doesn’t have as big a mandate as the media is promoting: If a mere 155,000 people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (out of a total 12,943,827 votes cast in those three states) had shifted their votes from R to D, Kamala Harris would be our incoming president. It’s true that voters shifted to the right in virtually every race in America, but that should be seen not as a defeat but as an opportunity — much like the one Republicans faced in 1976 and 2008 — for Democrats to reboot the party and reengage in the battle, the subject of this article.

— America was birthed in resistance; we have a long tradition of fighting oppression and, to the extent Trump and his billionaire allies plan to crush “the left,” they will face fierce opposition (which has already begun).

— We know what largely drove Trump’s win. As political scientist Rachel Bitecofer writes over at her brilliant Substack newsletter The Cycle, Republicans “successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you.” We can do something about that, particularly since the suggestion that Democrats don’t care for average working people is a vicious lie.

That said, the Democratic Party must come to the realization that is now dawning across Europe that the old Blair/Macron/Clinton neoliberal consensus (low taxes, free trade, open borders, weak unions) is dead. That if its reverse, progressive populism, isn’t embraced by center-left parties, rightwing populism and oligarchy will fill that void with a vengeance (like they’re seeing across Europe — and we just saw here in last week’s election).

What Americans said in last week’s election was, “We want real change, and want to know that it’s happening.” Clearly, that’s not what they saw or believed.

Democrats must, in other words, go where the people are and promote new policies loudly. It’s time to espouse progressive populist positions across the Party with a fervor bordering on the passion with which Christian nationalists have lifted up the GOP and handed them victory this year.

Those should include three major policy bites:

Bring our jobs home. I laid out the strategy to do this using measured and intelligent tariffs and other trade barriers on September 17th here in an article titled Why Trump Is Wrong & Alexander Hamilton Was Right About Tariffs.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing — kept on this continent by the force of tariffs and other trade barriers — were at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: if a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with US labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs.

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus).

Sam Walton opened his first WalMart in 1962 with the slogan, “100% Made In The USA” (that was also the title of his autobiography). That all changed in the 1990s when Bill Clinton embraced the neoliberal trade deals Reagan and Bush Sr. had written; today it’s nearly impossible to find anything made in the US in a WalMart. That has to change, and every American knows it.

If Democrats fight Trump on tariffs like they did during this campaign, they’re cutting their own throats. Has Rana Foroohar wrote in today’s Financial Times:

“Unprovoked by her opponent, she raised the issue of tariffs as a “Trump tax”. …
“Let’s focus instead on how voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have heard that comment. They would not have focused on the word inflation. They would have focused on the word tariff. And by decrying tariffs in that way, Harris would have immediately been interpreted as coming from the usual neoliberal economic camp that sold working people in manufacturing (and indeed, many services) down the river over the past two decades.”

Tariffs can work for Democrats; they just have to do (and promote) them more intelligently than Trump has so far.

Fix immigration. I laid out a strategy to do this back on March 17, 2021 here on Hartmann Report in an article titled The Main Driver Of Immigrants & Refugees is the Republican Party Itself.

Prior to the Reagan era, getting a job in manufacturing, construction, or meat-packing was a surefire ticket to the middle class. Today those industries (along with multiple others) are dominated by low-wage often-undocumented immigrant labor.

The main thing that prevented American workers from competing with undocumented immigrant labor was the power unions once had over hiring decisions. When Reagan came into office, roughly one-in-three workers belonged to a union, and another third worked for employers who mimicked union standards as they’d set the wage, benefit, and standards-of-employment floor.

When Reagan gutted America’s unions, that first line of defense collapsed; today only one-in-twenty private sector workers are in a union. Business cheered, and Republicans were just fine with a flood of immigrants starting in the 1980s as it provided them with a steady stream of employees willing to work for low wages.

Anticipating this, Congress built into Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) provisions for employer sanctions and fines for hiring undocumented workers; businesses quickly figured out how to game the system, though, and the penalties have only rarely been enforced by any of the last six business-friendly neoliberal administrations.

This is why, as I wrote on April 25 in an article titled Southern Autoworkers aren’t Listening to the GOP’s BS Any More, Democrats should have embraced Card Check (as promised) during the Clinton and Obama administrations — and still can.

We also need to enforce the sanctions in the IRCA, although first those sanctions and penalties need to be given teeth and enforced rigorously. Mitt Romney was right on this when he said:

“If people are not able to have a card, and have through an E-Verify system determine that they are here illegally, then they’re going to find they can’t get work here. And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.”

Instead of ridiculing him, Democrats and the then-Obama administration should have seized the opportunity to embrace this reform that’s already in place in every other developed country in the world.

End homelessness and the crime associated with it. This hits the lived experience of almost every American family, as I wrote on November 9, 2023 here on Hartmann Report in an article titled Democrats Can Win by Confronting Crime.

Cherelle Parker became the first woman elected mayor of Philadelphia in 2023, in part because of her tough-on-crime positions. She’s a progressive Democrat and beat five other Democrats in the primary (including one endorsed by both Bernie and AOC) before cruising to victory.

Her platform was straightforward and almost sounds like Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s: hire 300 more police officers, fix broken streetlights, remove graffiti, fix up dilapidated buildings, and empower the new police on the street to stop pedestrians they believe may be committing a crime.

“At the time” she first made those proposals, her website notes, “many in the city, including some of those running for mayor now, were convinced that a plan that calls for more police would be political suicide. But she did not take cues from the loudest voices calling to defund the police, instead talking to and listening to people in communities across the city and taking action.”

Unlike with Giuliani, her hiring more police didn’t mean hiring more racist cops and tolerating racially motivated search-and-frisk. This can be done intelligently, and numerous other countries provide us with examples of that. Excessive sentencing like we saw brought forward by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s doesn’t reduce crime and actually makes social problems worse.

Confronting crime at the street level does, however, cause people to become more supportive of enforcing laws — even minor laws — that then reduces crime overall.

I know four people (two in my family) who’ve had five cars and two bicycles stolen in the past two years: in each case, the police said they lacked the resources to try to find either the vehicles or the thieves.

I saw a man stealing a car near my office a few months ago and called 911 (here in Portland they’re referred to as “Homeless Ubers”: people steal cars and then abandon them when they get to their destination). The phone was still ringing five minutes later as he drove off and I hung up, disgusted.

The Portland police wouldn’t have had the resources to do anything about it anyway: they’re stretched so thin they can barely enforce traffic laws. When somebody tried to break into our house and we had a picture of that person, the Portland Police Department ignored our report.

Much of this crime is rooted in homelessness: In addition to intelligently cracking down on crime, Democrats must take a stand against the giant Wall Street hedge funds and banks — and foreign investors — who’ve purchased millions of American single-family homes and either flipped them into high-priced rentals or left them vacant as investments.

We have 15 million vacant homes but only a million or so homeless people, and — as I detailed here on April 22 in an article titled Why Homelessness Stalks America Like the Grim Reaper — Democrats should take a cue from parts of Canada and other nations that have outlawed or tightly regulated corporate and foreign ownership of single-family homes.

Other areas where Democrats can make significant gains among working class people of all races are:

— Paid sick leave and low-cost child care (I wrote about this on September 18, 2023 in an article titled The American Dream Demands Paid Sick Leave & Low-Cost Child Care). It won on ballot initiatives in three Red states this year.
— Free and affordable college (Forgiving Student Debt Isn’t Giving a Gift — It’s Righting a Wrong on June 17, 2022).
— Affordable healthcare as a right of citizenship (Why Is America the Only Developed Nation With No Right To Healthcare? June 17, 2021).
— Taking on the billionaires with reasonable taxation (What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent? June 2, 2023).
— Build and support a Democratic-leaning openly progressive media infrastructure (Radio Silence: How Progressives Lost the Airwaves September 30).

But, as Bernie Sanders has been repeating like a mantra for three decades, the sweet spot for progressive populism will always be what FDR won four terms as president on: good American jobs for American workers, affordable housing, and low crime.

G-d willing, there will be another election in two years and every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — are up for reelection. While gearing up to oppose Trump’s most obscene policies, Democrats also need to begin fine-tuning their pitch now.

We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wanting to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.

What happened?

Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump’s embrace of fascism and the future of our democracy. And abortion.

Pretty much all of us thought that. As did most of the news media and pundits.

But now that the exit polls and research are largely in, we’re finding, instead, that the election was all about who’d be best able to “blow up the system.”

By “the system,” voters didn’t mean democracy (although we may get the end of that); they meant the neoliberal system that Ronald Reagan introduced to replace FDR’s New Deal policies in 1981, which was subsequently embraced by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

In other words, they said, “We want the jobs like we had before Reagan’s neoliberalism, when one person could support a household.”

If that word intimidates or confuses you (as it does most Americans), here it is broken down: Neoliberalism (as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America) combines free trade, low taxes, and an end to the power of unions. Neoliberals typically also embrace open borders, as in the world’s most complete neoliberal experiment that’s called the European Union (which is also in trouble now).

The result of Reagan’s version of neoliberalism has been that good jobs (over 20 million of them) and even entire factories (over 15,000 of them) moved to low-wage countries, unions were destroyed, and wealth exploded at the top while the middle class shrank into near poverty.

In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were the first two candidates for either of the two major parties to call for an end to neoliberalism. Americans were enchanted by both.

It’s why people from Joe Rogan to Howard Stern were endorsing Bernie Sanders, and blue-collar workers across the country were taking Trump seriously.

Bernie’s call to end neoliberalism was complete: End the offshoring and bring jobs back, pass Card Check to reinvigorate unions, and raise taxes on the morbidly rich and profitable corporations.

Trump’s call was only partial; while he embraced bringing our jobs and factories back to America, he wanted to keep the neoliberal “reforms” of low taxes on billionaires and an end to union representation. (He went so far as to publicly congratulate Elon Musk on his union-busting/union-preventing activities.)

Sadly, the elders of the Democratic Party had already decided that Hillary Clinton was going to inherit her husband’s neoliberal dynasty so, when voters were confronted with Clinton’s defense of neoliberalism versus Trump’s partial attack on it, they chose the latter. Something’s better than nothing, they seemed to think.

And Trump gave it a shot during his first term, throwing up tariffs in such an incoherent and uninformed way that he provoked an unnecessary trade war with China that cost America hundreds of billions. But at least, voters thought this year, he gave it a shot. Maybe he’ll do better this time around.

Working class people of all races (particularly men) know that neoliberalism sent our jobs overseas, made rich people fantastically rich, and destroyed our unions. Few associate it with Reagan, though, as those policies didn’t really start to bite until the Clinton years.

Still, even not knowing when or where it all started, they hated it. And, we just learned with the outcome of this presidential election, it turns out that voters will tolerate the chance that their kids will get shot, their insurance companies will rip them off, and their government will imprison dissenters in exchange for the promise of the well-paying jobs that come with ending neoliberalism.

Back in 2010, I published a book to guide Democrats through policies that could win the 2012 election. Rebooting The American Dream was a book about how to end neoliberalism (although I never used that wonky word) that Bernie Sanders famously read on the floor of the Senate during his eight-hour filibuster of the Bush tax cuts, and got me an invitation to discuss economics in the Obama White House.

The first two chapters are titled Bring My Job Home and Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts, followed by calls for an end to corporate union-busting, free college, Medicare for All, reversing Citizens United, immediate action to stop global warming, an end to predatory foreign policy (Iraq, etc.), genuine immigration reform, an end to corporate personhood, and more widespread employee-owned companies.

Bernie had been a guest on my radio program for an hour every Friday, taking and answering questions from listeners, for a full six years at that time (he ended up doing it for eleven years) and we shared a public disgust for Reagan’s — and then Clinton’s and Bush’s — embrace of neoliberalism.

For the 21 years that I’ve been doing my daily radio program I’ve been arguing that illegal immigration hurts working class people (just ask anybody in the construction industry); that we should bring our factories back home and the fastest way to do that is to return to a gradual and rational tariff-based system; and that we need to raise taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations above 50 percent like other developed nations to cap great wealth and incentivize companies to invest in R&D and their employees.

That call has been largely ignored until the last four years.

In a true American political tragedy, Clinton and Obama were so enthralled by neoliberalism they couldn’t even get around to passing Card Check to bring back unions (although both promised to), much less ending job offshoring or meaningfully raising taxes on the morbidly rich.

Those steps would have taken us back to the era when the majority of American workers could buy a home and a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and retire with dignity on a single paycheck. The era, in other words, that Trump constantly points to, only this time we’d be able to do it without the racial segregation and gay-bashing.

The great irony here is that Joe Biden has been the first president since Jimmy Carter to reject neoliberalism and embrace Bernie’s and FDR’s New Deal system of government and Keynesian economics:
— He’s kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place and added a bunch of his own.
— He raised taxes on corporations and billionaires significantly.
— He tightened up the border and wanted to sign a major reform of our immigration system.
— He was the first president in history to walk a picket line.

President Biden, in other words, made a real and sincere effort to roll back neoliberalism, and would have done a lot more had Republicans not seized the House two years ago.

He is the true anti-establishment guy, taking an axe to Reagan’s, Bush’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s embrace of the policies that have impoverished much of the American middle class.

The problem was that nobody knew Biden had so explicitly repudiated neoliberalism and taken such extraordinary and successful steps forward that, even in the face of a massive interest rate increase by the Fed, we did not have a recession. Our economy is doing better than any president’s economy since John Kennedy's.

If Biden had just stepped out of the White House every day to let the press know what he was doing — like Trump did for four years (but with lies and BS) — and Kamala Harris had explicitly confirmed that she, too, wanted to end neoliberalism, the exit polls tell us today she would have won in a sweep.

But Harris and her team assumed that the message of rescuing democracy from fascism — an abstraction that most American voters don’t even understand — and protecting the right to abortion would beat Trump.

And they ridiculed Trump’s push for tariffs — even though Biden has embraced them — as a “middle class sales tax” when most people living in the Rust Belt know exactly what tariffs are and how they work to bring factories back home. Hell, we studied them in fifth grade civics when I was in elementary school growing up in Michigan.

As a result, voters went to the polls and voted to rescind abortion bans while simultaneously filling in the circle for Trump, thinking he’d bring back the prosperity that neoliberal economic policies stole from them.

As Damon Linker noted at his Notes from the Middleground Substack (reprinted in today’s New York Times), commenting on how Harris’ embrace of Liz Cheney was a dud:

“Reaganism is now well and truly dead, with no substantial base in either party.”

Similarly, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote this morning after quoting Bernie Sanders’ comment that Democrats had lost the working class and citing Trump’s most successful ad that says “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”:

“Tuesday night strongly reaffirmed that Democrats are no longer the party of the working class. … It would be a big error for Democrats to write off America’s working classes as hidebound know-nothings. Nor should they dismiss the tens of millions of lower income households that voted for Trump as economically illiterate.”

This decisive vote for Trump tells us this is truly one of those “hinge points” of history that I’ve written about over the years.

And the double irony today is that the billionaires who support Trump want more neoliberalism; they want to keep the tax cuts, deregulation, and to keep the unions out of their companies while retaining their offshore manufacturing facilities. But nobody ever told the American public in a way they could hear that that’s what most of Trump‘s billionaire supporters are all about.

Instead, Trump ran on faux populism, saying he’d use tariffs to bring jobs home while cutting taxes on tips and Social Security. To paraphrase James Carville, Trump’s pitch was, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

This is why two days ago Bernie came right out and said it:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison (also a regular guest on my program) reacted with outrage, tweeting on Xitter:

“This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country. From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Sadly, Harrison’s message that Biden repudiated neoliberalism isn’t shared by all Democrats, and was barely even mentioned by the Harris campaign. Even significant numbers of Black and Hispanic men were willing to embrace a demagogue who openly hates them in the hope of getting good manufacturing employment that beats inflation.

It’s not enough to just do a good job at governing; you must make sure everybody knows about it. Deep down in their bones. Every day. Month after month, year after year. In that, Biden, Harris, and Harrison all failed, while Trump performed like an Olympic athlete.

If Democrats want a chance to return to power in America, they must — like President Joe Biden largely did — completely repudiate neoliberalism and openly re-embrace FDR’s system, promising to bring our jobs back home, limit illegal immigration, reestablish union power, and raise taxes on the rich.

And make damn sure everybody in America knows it!

Only then can Democrats regain enough of a base across working-class America to credibly campaign on more “esoteric” issues like protecting democracy, tackling climate change, expanding healthcare and education, boosting housing support, and embracing equal opportunity for all.

Democrats must recognize how the winds have changed in America, do the work, spread the word, and let America know what they stand for. If they do, it could be a new day for this country.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Lewis Powell Jr. laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.

As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:

“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.

Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.

It’s no coincidence.

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.

No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.

It’s why they are still functioning democracies.

The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.

Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich.

And so will I.

America’s billionaires would love to have a recession, particularly a really severe one.

In a recent “town hall,” billionaire Elon Musk acknowledged what 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists across the country have predicted: If Trump is elected and he and Elon undertake their project to gut government spending, it will provoke a severe recession.

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Most Republican voters aren’t taking his embrace of a recession or a short-term depression like George W. Bush brought us seriously.

“Why would the Republicans,” they’re asking, “who generally represent the interests of corporations and the rich above all else, risk crashing the stock market and economy where those very same wealthy people have their money invested?”

The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how things work for the morbidly rich.

They are, uniquely, in a position to profit from the same economic downturns that wipe out average working people or those who’ve put their money into 401Ks invested in the market or certain stocks.

This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.

My (late) friend Gloria Swanson once told me over dinner in her apartment how her former manager and lover Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market, bailed out as the market began its slide and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. But once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, she said, he bought stock with a vengeance.

“Cash is king” was the phrase of the day, and Kennedy was well stocked in cash (he even bought a movie studio). By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation.

J. Paul Getty’s favorite phrase was, “Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.” It’s something you can only do at scale if you’re fabulously rich to begin with.

The afternoon of the Great Crash — October’s Black Tuesday under Republican President Hoover in 1929 — Getty skipped his parents’ golden wedding anniversary to head to Wall Street where he began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies that were in trouble.

“It is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing,” Getty later wrote. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.

Flash forward to the modern era.

When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.

While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as a buying opportunity.

Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, for example, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

Once again the market collapsed, this time under Republican Trump, and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food.

But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world's 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

Billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by a full 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion was safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters.

And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boys Musk and Trump, along with their bought-off Republicans in Congress, are working hard to bring to pass with threats of massive federal spending cuts.

— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, which are typically desperate smaller businesses.

— Billionaires and massive companies retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.

— And corporate power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.

But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).

During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals, selling their houses for a song, and cutting pills in half.

Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: According to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken almost four years for working people to get back on track.

Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.

The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.

The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.

Now, they want to do it again. And Musk is gleefully proclaiming his willingness to pull it off.

So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t celebrate billionaires Trump and Musk dragging America into a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.

They and their billionaire buddies have almost nothing to lose and a new and even larger fortune to gain.

— Don’t despair! I’ve been saying for months that I believe this election is going to be a blowout for both Harris and Democrats generally, although the $6 billion or so and efforts in kind that rightwing billionaires, Israel, Putin, and Musk have thrown in on behalf of Trump and the GOP will make it a challenge. Particularly in the Senate. Yesterday’s stats from Pennsylvania’s early voting, however, are encouraging: Of the 1.62 million ballots returned, roughly 918,000 came from registered Democrats, 530,000 from registered Republicans, and 178,000 came from independents. Those numbers — realizing this is initial data and Republicans are more likely to show up on or closer to election day — are pretty impressive! And they don’t begin to measure the Republican-registered women who are crossing over to vote for Harris and other Democrats. After surveys showed that many women didn’t realize their vote is secret and can never be revealed to their husbands, the Harris campaign has released an ad pointing just that out; it’s infuriating Republican men and the male commentators at Fox “News,” including Jesse Watters who says that if his current wife did this it would be “disloyal,” (like when she and he had an affair while he was married to his first wife). None of this positive news should cause any of us to take a breath and slow down: we need to get every voter out there to the polls and keep up the pressure. But I continue to be very optimistic that I won’t be entering one of Trump’s concentration camps this next year…

— Last year Trump wanted General Milley put in front of a firing squad; now he’s saying that should happen to Liz Cheney. Do you still think he’s joking? At an event moderated by frozen fish heir Tucker Swanson Carlson, Trump said of former Congresswoman Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.” This is an explicit death threat, a violation of federal law 18 U.S. Code § 373: Solicitation to commit a crime of violence. Where’s Merrick Garland when you need him? Hiding in the White House bunker?

— Crazy alert! Tucker says a demon attacked him while he was in bed with his wife and four dogs. While skeptical Republicans are trying to blame one of the dogs in the bed for the bloody claw marks Tuckums is telling us all about, I’m far more inclined to believe it was his wife, who’s probably voting for Kamala and knows her vote is secret…

— Europe’s Greens ask professional grifter Jill Stein to pull out of US election to prevent a Trump victory. Noting that the American Green Party is not affiliated with the rest of the world’s Greens (but instead has become a giant scam), the Green Parties of Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Belgium, Spain, Poland and Ukraine issued a joint statement saying: “We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House. Right now, the race for the White House is too close for comfort. We call on Jill Stein to withdraw from the race, and endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency of the United States.” Stein, of course, will do no such thing, even though she’s polling around 1 to 1.4 percent across all the battleground states. Instead, she’s happy to continue benefiting from rightwing billionaire money promoting her candidacy in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. America really needs to get rid of the damn Electoral College and bring in instant runoff voting so a real Green Party can emerge here.

— Texas Republicans Ted Cruz, Ken Paxton, and Greg Abbott just put another notch in their manly-man belts: An 18-year-old Texas woman died after being turned away from two hospitals for her miscarriage complications. This is the second Texas woman we know these men (and the six rightwing Catholics on the Supreme Court) murdered. As ProPublica wrote: “Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to ‘confirm fetal demise,’ a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were ‘blue and dusky.’ Her organs began failing. Hours later, she was dead.” Cruz, Paxton, and Abbott appear quite proud of themselves; this is the second dead Texas woman we know about, not to mention the 30,000-plus rape victims they’ve forced to carry their rapists’ babies to term and the thousands of women who’ll be scarred for life by their high-risk pregnancies. Meanwhile, in South Carolina Republicans are cheering the 22-day imprisonment of Amari Marsh, 23, a Black woman who miscarried before she even realized she was pregnant. Police arrested her and charged her with homicide, claiming that she didn’t do enough to prevent her miscarriage — which, again, happened before she even realized she was pregnant. When she got out of jail after more than three weeks, Marsh said, “When I was initially arrested, I thought it was a joke. I genuinely thought it was a joke because I had never been in trouble in my life. As I was sitting there, I couldn’t do nothing but cry.” John Roberts, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Donald Trump are all so very, very proud of themselves. Just ask them.

— WTF? Our National Archives are removing displays and information about MLK, Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, unions, birth control, and the American internment of Japanese during WWII because it may upset Republican legislators. When US Archivist Colleen Shogan was grilled by the Senate during her confirmation, neofascist Josh Hawley called her a Democratic “extremist” and warned her that he and other Republicans “would be watching closely for signs that she was pulling the independent agency to the left.” Looks like this effort to “work the refs” is succeeding. Most recently, a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced by a picture of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, pictures of the camps where we interred Japanese-ancestry US citizens were taken down, references to the coal industry causing environmental hazards were removed, and Shogan “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” They even removed a picture of Republican President Jerry Ford’s wife Betty because she was wearing an Equal Rights Amendment button, and in the display of “patents that changed the world” the birth control pill was replaced with the bump stock that turns semi-automatic weapons into functionally fully-automatic machine guns. This “obeying fascists in advance” is beyond the pale, and hopefully now that it’s getting some publicity Shogan will reconsider bowing to the GOP’s white supremacist base.

— Georgia official warns of Russian interference in this year’s election. Over on Elon Musk’s cesspool Xitter, a Russian-produced phony video purports to show Black Haitian immigrants showing off multiple fake IDs and claiming they voted in multiple Georgia counties on multiple occasions. It’s gone completely viral among rightwingers with a apparent big push from Xitter’s secret algorithm. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger,” and he’s purged over a million voters from Georgia’s rolls so far) called a press conference to say: “Earlier today, our office became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia ID's claiming to have voted multiple times. This is false, and is an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen this election. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election.” The feds have since confirmed it is from Russia. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is saying the quiet part out loud, echoing the sentiments of the racists who make up the base of the GOP. Speaking of the Black Haitian immigrants working legally in Springfield, Ohio, the former senior Trump aide said: “It’s not their fault. They live back 200 years ago. They just shouldn’t have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of small town America. That’s ridiculous. Or big town America, for that matter.” Meanwhile, Rudy’s refusing to cooperate with efforts to transfer his assets to the two Black Georgia poll workers he defamed, even though he’s been ordered to do so by a court. This isn’t going to end well for New York’s former mayor.

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

31 October 2025

Leavenworth, Kansas

Dear Louise,

It’s been almost a year since the last time I saw you, as they were arresting me on the “designated enemy within” sedition charge that’s kept me in this prison. If the underground network here succeeds, you should get this letter within a few weeks; it’s the third I’ve written you that got out of the prison, but I understand the first two couriers were busted for carrying contraband mail and are now in prison themselves.

The day after President Trump was re-elected (when Speaker Johnson and then the Supreme Court recognized the disputed ballots in five states and threw the election to the House of Representatives), you’ll recall, he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests. They tell me Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland are in here, too, although I haven’t seen them; apparently the “high value” former administration officials are locked down in a separate wing.

I’ve been following the news as best I can, and it appears that the initial news reports from January detailing the thousands of people killed and injured by police and the Army in the nationwide demonstrations have largely vanished. One of the guards who has access to the web says all the stories have been scrubbed since Trump put Elon Musk in charge of the internet: it’s as if it never happened.

Part of that is probably because of the updated and retroactive Alien and Sedition Act Congress passed in Trump’s first week, and their “Truth Act” rolling back the Supreme Court’s Times v Sullivan ruling so public officials including the president can now sue for libel.

Following Viktor Orbán’s script from Hungary, Trump and several of his senior officials launched both civil and criminal prosecutions for things reporters and commentators had previously said about them, resulting in over a thousand reporters and several dozen publications being run into jail or bankruptcy.

Others — like me, Mary Trump, Heather Cox Richardson, Dean Obeidallah, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joy Reid, and Timothy Snyder — were charged with “impugning the character of officials of the United States” and are sitting in federal prison right now. I guess we knew it was coming.

All those lawsuits and criminal charges destroyed the value of most media operations; it was a great opportunity for Trump’s billionaire friends to buy up most of America’s media just like Orbán’s buddies did a decade ago in Hungary. NBC, MSNBC, and The New York Times are now owned by the Murdoch family; CNN and CBS both went to Elon Musk; and ABC is now the property of Steve Bannon, who — like when Elon Musk bought Twitter with Saudi money — was bought from Disney with Middle Eastern oil money in a deal organized by Secretary of State Jared Kushner.

It was just a few years ago when Orbán spoke at CPAC in Texas and proposed — to a standing ovation — that Republicans should change the libel laws to put “liberals” in the media out of business: they were clearly paying attention. Now, just like in Hungary, China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, all of the media spends all their time praising the wisdom and accomplishments of President Trump and Vice President Vance.

Now that Environment Czar Ron DeSantis has outlawed any news reporting on climate change that “may cast aspersions on the critical fossil fuel industry,” I’m not hearing much about deaths from wildfires, floods, drought, etc., although I’m guessing the situation has been getting worse? I suppose the good news for me and my fellow incarcerated reporters, writers, and politicians is that the prison here in Leavenworth, Kansas has easily survived several tornadoes and derechos: the climate crisis seems far away.

I hear Attorney General Stephen Miller has been busy arresting women all across the country. I remember in July of 2023 when 19 Republican attorneys general demanded private medical records of all women in their states who’d gotten abortions; now that the Supreme Court has ruled in their favor, I’m hearing the three largest private prison companies each got multi-billion-dollar contracts to build new prisons for those women who continue protesting by possessing birth control or wearing the outlawed “pussy” hats.

As Speaker Johnson said, echoing Trump’s logic in tearing children from their parents at the Southern border (now he just shoots them), “If we don’t jail a few of these women persisting in getting abortions, nobody will take us seriously.” And, of course, there are many more women being arrested for illegally possessing birth control pills and IUDs now that they’ve both been declared abortifacients and thus illegal. I understand the protests have largely gone underground since the new Sedition Act forbids public demonstrations and Defense Secretary Michael Flynn’s soldiers are using live ammo?

Next week is election day for the 2025 off-years, although at least 48 million fewer people will be voting since the Democratic Party was declared a criminally seditious organization under the Patriot Act and everybody who’d been registered as a Democrat lost their right to vote for ten years or until they’d successfully completed a re-education course. Another brilliant idea from Putin and Orbán, although President John Adams had nearly done the same thing in 1798.

Talking with other prisoners here, the most common thing I’m hearing is how surprised everybody was at how quickly General Flynn had been at deploying the military when crowds began showing up on inauguration day after Trump issued those blanket pardons to himself and the January 6th rioters.

He was able to use the military — with live ammunition — to “keep the peace,” of course, because Trump, following Project 2025, had “decapitated” the leadership of both the Civil Service and our military, replacing the nation’s top officers with those who’d passed his loyalty test so he wouldn’t be frustrated again by “socialists” like General Mark Milley (who’s now in a cell just down the block from me).

I hope you’re doing okay financially, since they seized all our savings. I understand your Social Security payment has dropped about 25 percent since JPMorgan took over the program? At least for now you can ignore paying taxes on the money, since Congress defunded the IRS.

And I’m hoping you were able to find a decent Medicare Advantage program, now that they’ve shut down traditional Medicare altogether? My cellmate tells me that now that the Advantage programs are the only game in town, they’ve begun charging over twelve thousand dollars a year for them — about the same as regular health insurance — and they’re getting even more aggressive at denying payment for claims. Please keep eating well and exercising: you need to stay healthy, since they no longer cover pre-existing conditions.

How are our grandkids? I know Texas and Florida shut down all their public schools just before the new school year started, giving the money instead to churches so every child can have a religious education, but haven’t heard that Oregon has yet gone down that road. I hear rumors the Trump administration is going to put into place a nationwide voucher system now that the Supreme Court has ruled that America is, in fact, a “Christian nation” and every child is entitled to a “Christian education.”

I was so saddened to hear that when Trump, Speaker Johnson, and Majority Leader Josh Hawley cut off all US aid to Ukraine that country’s government collapsed, and the Russians slaughtered hundreds of thousands suspected of collaborating with the Zelenskyy administration. When Russian forces entered Poland, I fully expected a NATO response, but I hear that since Trump pulled us out of NATO the European members are afraid to antagonize Putin. Now that parts of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are gone, and the Finnish border was breached, it’s going to be tough going for democratic Europe.

Republicans in Congress appear, from what I hear, quite happy with the new US alignment with Russia and rejection of our former European alliances (except Hungary).

At least Taiwan won’t be a flashpoint for a war now that Secretary of State Kushner and his wife have negotiated a peace between them and China. I understand it’s modeled after the Hong Kong transition, which has many in Taiwan worried, but the Chinese forces backed up by the US fleet in the region — and North Korea’s new treaty with the US — seem to be keeping unrest there to a minimum.

Are ICE and the Border Patrol still using live ammunition to enforce the border? The story I heard through the grapevine here was that after about a week of the Rio Grande running red with blood, most asylum seekers abandoned their efforts and are staying in Mexico. Secretary Kushner brought in Saudi officials to explain to Congress how they’ve been using live ammunition to protect their borders for years, killing people regularly, and that it’s “good target practice” to keep our troops’ training in tip-top shape.

And have any of our friends been rounded up in the mass detentions? I’ve heard that they’re still kicking in doors looking for people who can’t prove their citizenship when its demanded. I hope you’ve kept your passport up-to-date; at least your name sounds European and you’re white.

While those of us convicted under the 2024 updates to the libel and sedition laws and the new “enemy within” provisions of the updated Patriot Act are considered “enemy combatants” and thus not entitled to constitutional protections and things like mail privileges, I hear they may let us have one zoom call with family on Christmas (now that it’s a “mandatory holiday”). The week after next is our 54th wedding anniversary; I miss you, and hope you get this note before our Christmas call!

Sending you, our kids, and our grandkids all my love…

— Thom

Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper’s planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn’t mess with their business interests should he be elected.

“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”

What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.

Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.

It wasn’t always this way.

— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Wealth.

— Joe Kennedy was a bank president at 25 and a millionaire by 30; he and his wife Rose pounded into their children the idea that, because of their great wealth, they had an absolute obligation to serve their nation and its people, particularly those most in need. From that simple childhood instruction came Joe Jr., who died when his plane was shot down during WWII, and the political careers of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy.

— Foundations established by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller families have all done great good in America (until Timothy Mellon disgraced his family by giving millions to Trump), and self-made billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made funding good works central to their lives by giving away most of their fortunes.

But that noble old concept is now lost on most among the current crop of billionaires and multimillionaires. Instead of devoting themselves and their fortunes to bettering our nation, so many are instead promoting climate change denial, funding politicians who promise them tax cuts, and spearheading efforts to strip America of its social safety net and public education system.

Changing attitudes toward wealth and success have been a hallmark of the post-Reagan “greed is good” era. When the Libertarian Party was started in the 1950s by the real estate lobby to provide a front to fight against rent control and low-income rent subsidies, it — along with Ayn Rand’s writings — provided the morbidly rich with a convenient excuse for greed.

If everybody acted with maximum greed at all times, they argued, all of that greed would power society toward a new utopian era. It was demonstrably a lie, but provided a great excuse for extremely wealthy individuals to back away from the philanthropy that helps America and its people, replacing those efforts by funding think tanks and politicians who champion more tax loopholes, deregulation, and voter suppression.

As John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

These billionaires have also supported sycophantic scholars and media stars willing to promote the idea that they didn’t get rich because of luck or coming from wealthy families, but, rather because of their rare and extraordinary talent and brilliance.

To this bizarre end, at least one of today’s billionaires who came to America from South Africa seems committed to impregnating as many white women as possible to spread his good genes.

As the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has widened, we’ve experienced less social connection and empathy between economic classes.

America also now has the greatest income inequality in the developed world. The morbidly rich have largely separated themselves from the rest of us, traveling on private jets through private airports that don’t even check security, vacationing on their massive private yachts with Supreme Court justices, and living in gated compounds with round-the-clock security and live-in butlers, cooks, and nannies.

Another thing that may be causing so many of America’s billionaires to abandon philanthropic efforts to help the country that made them rich is the globalization of wealth.

Because many now run business empires that span the globe, they feel less tied to any particular local community or even to the United States. Others, wanting to continue to do business with authoritarian regimes, simply avoid doing anything here that might be seen as supportive of democracy or even of America.

Reagan’s massive income tax cuts, lowering the top bracket from 70 percent down into the twenties, give another strong incentive to obscenely wealthy individuals to hang onto every penny. When you’re no longer looking at high tax rates, you no longer need the tax breaks that come with charitable good works.

Finally, between the decline of social expectations of generosity and the fetishizing of capitalism, some billionaires are now embracing what they call “philanthrocapitalism.” Pushing everything from private prisons to private schools to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, they argue that the so-called “free market” will solve all social problems.

We thus need to create a cultural shift that reframes wealth not just as a privilege, but as a responsibility to contribute positively to society, bringing back the notion of noblesse oblige. This requires a multi-faceted approach involving education, incentives, and a redefinition of social norms.

We should teach the concept of noblesse oblige in our elementary schools, both to inculcate future individuals who may rise to great wealth and to give our people the ability to spot and shame those rich people who ignore their obligations to society.

Social recognition is another way to amplify noblesse oblige by publicly acknowledging and celebrating wealthy individuals and families whose generosity has had real and positive impact.

We also need to return to the tax incentives for philanthropy by returning to a top tax bracket well north of 50 percent which can be reduced through charitable contributions. Similarly, corporations should be both socially pushed and financially incentivized to consider their broader social impact.

Finally, let’s encourage and reward those filmmakers and television producers who embrace social issues like Frank Capra did with It’s a Wonderful Life.

We occasionally get a taste of this with movies like the Dark Knight series, where wealthy Bruce Wayne becomes Batman to help his city and its people, but more movies and TV shows with a message of social conscience and noblesse oblige could have a real impact on the generation coming up now.

The rich, as Jesus noted obliquely when speaking of the poor, will always be with us. But there are ways we as a society can encourage them to be less destructive of the public good. We should take them.

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

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

I cancelled my Washington Post subscription Friday evening. Jeff Bezos, Mister “Democracy Dies In Darkness” (the Post’s slogan on their masthead), by blocking his editorial staff from endorsing Harris chose darkness over his nation’s future, and I can’t support that.

The big mistake John D. Rockefeller made back in the day — that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear committed to not repeating — was not buying a media outlet like a newspaper. Had John D. had that sort of a vehicle to mold public opinion, American history may be very different.

By 1880, Rockefeller’s Ohio-based company controlled over 90 percent of the nation’s oil, owned 4000 miles of pipelines, and employed over 100,000 people. As Rockefeller’s oil empire got larger and larger, eating alive hundreds of smaller operations, ruthlessly driving up prices, destroying his competitors, and throwing workers out of a job, public outrage grew.

In 1887, Ohio sued him, arguing that he was operating in ways that were detrimental to the state and its citizens and businesses; in 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court ordered his company dissolved. As I lay out in detail in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People,” this led Rockefeller to move Standard Oil to New Jersey after that state changed its corporation laws to allow for his monopolistic behavior.

Which brought in the federal government; in 1890, Ohio Senator John Sherman introduced and saw passed into law the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which provided not just fines but jail sentences against people like Rockefeller who were committed to destroying competition and owning entire markets. The law was flawed with a few loopholes and ambiguities, so it was amended in 1914 with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

Nonetheless, in 1906 progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt’s administration filed an antitrust action against Rockefeller that went to the Supreme Court in 1911 during the administration of progressive Republican President William Howard Taft. The behemoth was broken up into 34 separate companies, an action that, like the breakup of AT&T by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, led to an explosion of competition in the marketplace and a dramatic increase in shareholder value.

But back to Jeff Bezos and his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post.

It was reporters and editors for the hundreds of independent newspapers during the First Gilded Age (1880-1900) era that led the crusades against Rockefeller and his fellow monopolists. Investigative journalism was all the rage then, and it fed public demand for a return to competition and the de-throning of that age’s oligarchs.

The vast majority of workers were struggling and they worked for a very small 10 percent of the population who controlled most of the nation’s wealth (a situation we’re at again).

The result was constant strife, strikes, and the murder of labor leaders; entire towns were in arms (and sometimes ablaze) with labor conflict. The “problem of labor”was the number one issue of the day. As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

There was a broad consensus across American society that those “Robber Barons” were feathering their own nests at the expense of the American public, hurting both working class people and small businesses. The Supreme Court endorsed breaking up Standard Oil in 1911, and even broke up the Associated Press in 1944.

The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control a mere 5 percent of the shoe market.

Back in the ’60s every mall and downtown in America was filled with small, locally-owned businesses; there might be a Sears to anchor the shopping center or a retail part of town, but most shops, restaurants, and hotels were family-owned.

But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and on and on. In virtually every industry, a handful of massive companies control 80 percent or more of the market.

The Biden administration is the first to seriously try enforcement of the nation’s anti-trust laws since Carter broke up AT&T, going after Google and blocking mergers in multiple industries. It’s led a bunch of American billionaires to demand that the Federal Trade Commission’s head, Lina Kahn, be fired.

Kahn and her FTC went after Bezos last year, suing Amazon for running a monopoly that price-gouges customers and blocks out competition. The trial is scheduled for 2026 if Kahn keeps her job; a Trump administration would fire her immediately, and pressure from major corporate donors and billionaires is building on Harris to do the same.

Bezos also must remember well when he got on the wrong side of then-President Trump because of the Post’s coverage of the orange oligarch’s lies and crimes; Trump, in a fit of pique, awarded a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing to Microsoft, shocking analysts across the industry.

Bezos is also working for his Blue Origin spaceship company to get more billions in NASA and Pentagon contracts. He and his companies also own billions in Google and AirBNB stock as well as owning outright almost a hundred other companies.

Might be a good time to own one of the two most influential newspapers in America, eh?

Similarly, billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, in addition to apparently taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, is fighting numerous government efforts to regulate his companies (which exist in large part because Obama bailed out Tesla in 2010 with $465 million, and NASA is now pouring hundreds of millions into SpaceX):

— Tesla is fighting the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over union-related issues, with Musk taking a lawsuit to the Supreme Court alleging government protections of unions are unconstitutional.
— SpaceX is battling the NLRB over employee firings.
— The SEC is investigating Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and his “funding secured” tweets about taking Tesla private.
— The FTC is investigating X’s compliance with a $150 million privacy settlement.
— The Federal Communications Commission recently denied SpaceX’s Starlink a $886 million rural broadband award.
— The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment.
— The FAA is in conflict with SpaceX over launch licensing and environmental reviews.
— The EPA has fined SpaceX for water-related violations.
— The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened multiple investigations into Tesla’s vehicle safety and Autopilot system.
— SpaceX faces scrutiny over its environmental impact at its Texas launch site.

To avoid the Rockefeller mistake, Musk — with the apparent help of two Russian oligarchs and the leader of Saudi Arabia — purchased Twitter, the online digital equivalent of our nation’s largest newspaper.

And he’s now using it to try to get Trump and Republicans into office, presumably so they can gut the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and any other regulator that might take him on to protect workers, the public, and the national interest.

We took on the superrich with success during the First Gilded Age, and our enforcement of antitrust laws lasted all the way to 1983, when Reagan blocked them, leading to the “merger mania” of the 1980s and bringing us today’s oligarchic business empires across multiple industries.

Now that we’re in America’s Second Gilded Age — with today’s billionaires vastly richer than Rockefeller’s wildest dreams — we confront a similar crossroads to that of previous generations.

Is it okay, for example, for billionaires to own media properties they can use to manipulate politics and government agencies to amplify their other business interests? Or that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our morbidly rich plutocrats can own judges and politicians? Most Americans would probably say “No” to both.

At some point, America is going to have to confront its oligarch problem. And the sooner the better, if we don’t want darkness to entirely subsume our democracy.

The Hartmann Report, this little newsletter that Louise and I started in our living room and our old friend and business partner Nigel helps us administer, hits 100,000 daily readers this weekend. Over 90% of our growth has come about as the result of word-of-mouth; people sharing this newsletter with their friends, relatives, and coworkers. We are so honored to have your trust in our research and hard work, and really appreciate your sharing my articles with others. Thank you!

— The Massive Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans. Trump and Vance are promising to deport 15 million people from America, a massive undertaking that will require a major departure from our traditions and laws providing for due process. “You go to the red state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard.’ We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,” notorious racist and Trump ally Stephen Miller said recently. Those soldiers — not police officers — would then “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Melissa Gira Grant wrote a brilliant piece about this obscenity for The New Republic that’s well worth a read, and it’s vital to remember that Trump is setting up something that appears inspired by Hitler’s early pogroms of the Jews. What will you do and say when they knock on your door — particularly if you have a last name that sounds Hispanic — and demand to see your citizenship papers? This is the world these bizarre men want to plunge us into, and, tragically, half the country appears to be just fine with it. What the hell has happened to our nation? I lay most of the blame at the feet of the billionaires like Murdoch, etc., who’ve been funding rightwing hate media for decades.

— One of the reasons our media so rarely reports on the obscene things that Trump says at his rallies is that they are terrified of his followers. A woman reporter showed up at a Trump rally and was assaulted by the fascists in attendance, as reported by the International Women’s Media Foundation. The Trump-cult followers surrounding her screamed, “I hope you’re murdered,” “I hope you’re dismembered,” and “I hope someone rapes you before they murder you,” along with other hateful epithets. This is typical of fascist movements: violence is always just a thin-scratch layer under the surface. Now it appears that billionaires including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong have been intimidated by Trump (or are desperately sucking up to him) and so are preventing their newspapers from making an endorsement in this year’s presidential race. (I just canceled my Washington Post subscription.) It took Adolf Hitler less than three months to cow and then largely shut down the media in Germany after he acquired power in January, 1933, although most newspapers had surrendered to him before then and voluntarily stopped reporting negative stories. Reporters were interred in Dachau as early as March of that same year, along with progressive politicians and editorial writers who’d dared criticize him in the past. Trump and his people trying to revisit this history is not the sign of a healthy republic; this is a bright red flashing warning about a country sliding into autocracy, as I described in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Now that the MAGA movement has become a full-blown fascist movement, the question is: What will the GOP do with it after the election? Particularly if Trump loses? You can leave your comments here.

— Rightwing billionaire Elon Musk and his colleagues apparently believe they now have the Supreme Court votes necessary to overturn the 1935 Wagner Act that legalized labor unions. When Musk “interviewed” Trump on Xitter, the two joked about how impressed Trump was with Musk’s unwillingness to allow unions in any of his companies. “I love it,” Trump told his fellow oligarch. “You’re the greatest ... I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone ... Every one of you is gone.’” Musk chuckled at that one, so Trump followed up by discussing putting Musk in charge of a government “efficiency” body that could lead the charge to bust the last of America’s unions among government workers: “You are the greatest! You would be very good [on the proposed commission]. Oh, you would love it.” Musk has filed a lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (which enforces unions’ right to exist) claiming the entire agency is unconstitutional; a Trumpy federal judge has already agreed, temporarily blocking the agency’s ability to enforce the law, as the case now heads toward the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Republicans and the billionaires who own them have been on a jeremiad against the ability of unions to exist ever since American workers first earned the right to organize in 1935. Will Musk and his Republican buddies succeed in finally gutting the last income protection the middle class has against greedy billionaires? Stay tuned.

— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail. They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’” They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”

— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…

— Crazy Alert! Can anything get weirder than this? Tucker Carlson’s creepy “daddy speech” is stunning. Goddess only knows what happened to frozen-fish-stick heir Tucker Swanson Carlson in his childhood, but whatever it was, it’s showing. Earlier this week he introduced Trump at a rally with a sweet little speech about the former president’s future role overseeing our country and “spanking” all those uppity girls and women who’ve dared defy the Republican Party’s demand for more pregnancies and less talkback: “There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, dad comes home and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed! He’s not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you, not it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’” Honest, that’s what he said. And the crowd’s response wasn’t the shocked silence a rational person would expect; instead, when Trump appeared after this introduction, they started chanting, “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!” Where do they find these people? And how can anybody vote to put them in charge of our country?

— Even Crazier Alert! Famous MAGA pastor says American women are “pigs with gold nose rings,” wants to overturn the 19th Amendment right of women to vote, and says women who accuse men of rape but can’t absolutely prove it should be put to death. Say what?! Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is a rising star in the GOP, and recently had some interesting things to say about American women. First, he claimed they’re far too pampered: “Pigs with gold nose rings.” Then he claimed it’s time to overturn the 19th Amendment and revoke women’s right to vote because that’s “the Christian thing to do.” Finally, to top it all off, the GOP’s top Christian guru argued women who claim rape but can’t prove it should be publicly executed to put an end to the Me Too movement. “If you perjure yourself by bearing false witness accusing somebody else,” the minister told his followers, “whatever the penalty would have been for that person had they been found guilty, then that penalty should fall on your head for falsely accusing them. … If that were to occur and the just penalties were to be enforced, you, the false accuser, is now put to death. And that’s a public death. It’s a public sentence, publicly carried out, then the citizens of these United States of America, you know what they would do? #MeToo would end real fast. False accusing, playing the victim when you’re actually not; you know how to end that real fast? All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied.” This guy isn’t an outlier; this is the direction the entire GOP has been going for years, and now, with Trump and Vance within a hair’s breadth of seizing the federal government, they feel empowered to be open and public about their positions. What would Jesus say? Nothing like Joel Webbon’s spouting off, I can guarantee you that…

Increasingly, MAGA Republicans associated with Trump are convinced he is going to lose the election. But they have a backup plan to put him in the White House no matter what. And that plan even has a second backup plan of its own.

The three states most likely to swing the election in the Electoral College this year are Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And, just by coincidence of course, Republicans in those state passed laws in 2020 guaranteeing election day chaos around their vote counting this November 5th.

Trump and the GOP know there’s no way he’s going to win the national popular vote; the last Republican initially elected to the White House with a majority of America’s voters was George HW Bush in 1988. Republicans just aren’t that popular with the American people.

Poppy Bush’s son George lost in 2000 by a half-million votes, but got five Republicans on the Supreme Court (including two appointed by Daddy) to block the recount in Florida that would have shown that Al Gore won the state and thus that year’s election.

Like Bush, Trump lost the election in 2016 by three million votes. But in five swing states — focused on by Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein — he was able to eke out a tiny Electoral College win. And then everybody forgot he had lost by 3 million votes. Tip your hat to our media.

This year, Republicans are again counting on the Electoral College (and Jill Stein, Putin, and Elon Musk) as their first line of defense, focusing billions of dollars on a handful of swing states with ads that range from deceptive to outright lies. It’s all backed up by a massive Russian effort on social media.

If it looks like that’s going to fail, however, their primary Plan B is to replicate their 2000 strategy of messing with the vote at the local level, and using the chaos from that to get the election in front of their Republican friends in the Supreme Court. To that end, they’re preparing a variety of lawsuits (check out Marc Elias’ site, Democracy Docket) in swing states.

As Joyce Vance noted today at her excellent Civil Discourse Substack newsletter:

“This cycle, Republicans are filing so many meritless cases that it’s fair to wonder if their goal isn’t to win legitimate cases at all. Those cases are useful as a way to try and convince voters, in advance of the election, that the system is rigged against Trump.”

Their biggest weapon in this fight for both public perception and legal standing, however, won’t initially appear in a courtroom. Instead, it’ll be played out in the the the media immediately after election day, as the result of farsighted 2020 efforts by Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Anticipating just this scenario, Republicans in those three states — when they controlled them in 2020 — passed sweeping election laws preventing any mail-in ballots from being counted until Election Day, guaranteeing that election workers would be overwhelmed and the results will be delayed.

Democrats took over Michigan and in 2023 amended the law so ballots can be processed before Election Day, thwarting their plans there. But Democrats don’t and haven’t taken back the legislatures of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, so the GOP’s laws stand: Mail-in ballots can’t be counted until election day in those states.

Republicans did this for a very simple reason.

Ever since Operation Eagle Eye and the election of 1964, Republicans have used the canard of “voter fraud” to throw people off the voting rolls, challenge signatures on mail-in ballots from Democratic areas, and generally make it harder to vote. Over the last 30 years, it’s become the main way they’ve stayed in power in about a third of the United States (particularly Florida, Georgia, and Texas).

Their strategy is based on a simple foundation: They’ve spent the past decade convincing their voters to cast their ballots in person on election day rather than in advance by mail, so when election day rolls around they know the initial results will favor the Republican candidate.

Then the mail-in Democratic votes come in hours, sometimes days, later.

This period — when it appears that Trump has won because the Harris mail-in votes haven’t yet been counted — is the sweet spot Trump is already signaling he’ll take advantage of. As NBC News reported this week after asking a former Trump advisor if such a scenario — Trump claiming victory the evening of the election before the final count is known — was probable this November 5th:

“‘100%,’ a former Trump adviser said when asked what the person thought the odds were that the former president would prematurely say he won. ‘Duh! Is the pope Catholic? There are few things in politics I would ever say you could make a firm bet on. That is one of those.’
“An early declaration of victory could be facilitated by what’s known as a ‘red mirage.’ That happens when Republicans appear to have a lead on election night because in-person votes are generally counted quickly — but that lead could disappear in the days after Nov. 5 as absentee and early voting ballots are counted.
“In 2020, Trump quickly proclaimed victory on election night, even though he ultimately ended up losing to Joe Biden.”

Between the “red mirage” scenario and the multiple challenges local Republican election volunteers will launch against voters themselves, GOP strategists hope to create enough confusion that it’ll provide a smokescreen for their six Republican allies on the Supreme Court to rule that — because of “election irregularities” — the election should be handed to Trump or thrown to the House of Representatives, per the 12th Amendment.

Under that scenario, each state’s House delegation has one single vote for president (the Senate is not involved under the 12th Amendment), and right now there are 26 state delegations controlled by Republicans. That vote will be taken by the next Congress, not this one, but Democrats have little hope of flipping any House delegations, so chances are that Trump would win the presidency by a 26-24 vote of House delegations.

As Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti recently wrote for The New York Times:

“The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump. …
“Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”

Justin Rosario notes, over at The Banter Newsletter, that this is explicitly at the core of the challenges the GOP has planned to inflict on our media and legal systems for the days and possibly weeks after November 5th:

“All Republicans who actually pay attention to how ballots are counted are aware of this. Every single one of them will still say it’s a sign of fraud that we will not have results on election night.
“This is an integral part of the coming coup and we all need to be aware of it.”

Many in the GOP see this election as a life-or-death moment for the Party. That’s why they’re willing to lie, cheat, and offer favors to billionaires and foreign dictators just to get Trump into the White House.

The GOP hasn’t won the White House by majority vote, as mentioned, since 1988. And the two Republican presidents prior to Bush Sr., Nixon and Reagan, both chose to engage in naked treason — Nixon blowing up LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal, and Reagan paying off the Iranians to hold the US hostages, respectively — to gain the White House.

Republican leaders and the billionaires who own them know that if they lose this election in a blowout, it might be years, or (like in the 1930-1980 era, decades) before they can again climb to power, particularly if the Harris administration is successful in rebuilding the American middle class that’s been gutted so badly by Reaganomics.

They’re desperate, and, as anybody who’s ever cornered a rat knows, desperate also means dangerous: anything goes. The days immediately following November 5th will probably be insane.

The Harris campaign says they’re aware of this, as is Marc Elias. The rest of America needs to know the scheme, too. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and one key to the GOP pulling this scam off will be public opinion.

We can’t let them have that advantage.

Pass it along.