America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.

This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.

In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.

We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.

The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.

In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.

States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.

All of that is now under threat.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.

On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.

The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.

None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.

Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.

We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.

American voters want an end to the war in Gaza and for President Donald Trump to withhold U.S. aid, if necessary, to pressure Israel to end it.

During last year’s campaign, Trump promised big changes in U.S. Middle East policy. He said that the Gaza war never would have happened had he been president; promised he would end it; boasted it was his pressure that forced Israel to accept a cease-fire; and then, as president, proposed the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza to make way for a Riviera-like resort. Just before the 2024 election, we polled U.S. voters and found overall support for ending the war and using U.S. aid to Israel as leverage to press them to end the occupation of Palestinian lands and end the war in Gaza. This was true for strong majorities of Democrats, with some Republicans also agreeing.

We are now more than three months into President Trump’s second term, and Israel has ended the cease-fire, renewed its bombing campaign, instituted anew the mass forced “relocation” of civilians, and reimposed the blockade of food and medicine to the Palestinian population in Gaza.

While substantial majorities of Democratic voters and Independents have long parted ways with Israel over the Gaza war and the occupation, Republicans and their evangelical Christian base are now also losing patience with Israeli policies.

Last week, in a new poll we repeated these same 2024 questions. The overall results were about the same, but with one significant difference. Three months into his term in office, not just Democrats but President Trump’s own Republican voter base also want him to take a tougher stance to pressure Israel to change its behaviors.

This was one of the key findings in the poll released April 30 by the Arab American Institute Foundation. The foundation commissioned John Zogby Strategies to poll 1,000 American voters to assess their attitudes toward the Trump administration’s policies toward Israel’s war in Gaza.

What comes through quite clearly is that between November 2024 and April 2025 the overall responses did not change significantly. What has changed is that Israel is losing favor with Republicans, who now want President Trump to take a stronger stance to rein in Israel’s behaviors. This, however, does not translate into a lack of GOP voters’ support for the president’s domestic policies on allegations of antisemitism, crackdown on universities, and deportation of students involved in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests.

Here are the findings:

The poll finds that voters’ sympathy for Israel remains somewhat higher than for Palestinians. But by a significant 46% to 30% margin, American voters feel that U.S. Middle East policy is too one-sided in favor of Israel, with 39% of Republicans agreeing and 37% disagreeing. This represents a substantial shift from 2024 when only 33% of Republicans agreed that policy was too pro-Israel against 43% who said it was not.

By a 2 to 1 margin, American voters also agree that President Trump should “apply greater pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian lands and allow Palestinians to create an independent state of their own.” While this agree-disagree ratio largely tracks last year’s results, the major difference in this year’s findings is the substantial increase in Republicans who agree that the president should apply such pressure on Israel. In 2024, the agree-disagree split for Republicans was 37% to 40%. Now 49% agree that greater pressure should be applied as opposed to only 29% who disagree.

When asked whether the U.S. should always provide unrestricted aid to Israel or should restrict such aid if Israel “continues to operate in a way which puts civilian lives at risk in Gaza and Lebanon,” this year's overall results were essentially the same as last year’s. Twenty-three percent (23%) are in favor of unrestricted aid, while 53% are opposed.

A plurality of American voters also agree with the decisions of the International Court of Justice finding that Israel’s war in Gaza is tantamount to genocide and the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.

The bottom line in these initial results is that while Americans remain sympathetic to Israel, they continue to be opposed to Israeli policies and want the president, whether a Democrat or a Republican, to use U.S. aid as leverage to change Israel’s actions. And importantly, now a plurality of GOP voters, including those who self-identify as “born again Christians,” also want the president for whom they voted to crack down on Israel’s policies of bombing civilians and occupying Palestinian lands.

The responses, however, are different when it comes to measuring voters’ assessment of President Trump’s handling of the domestic fallout of the war in Gaza. Pluralities disagree with the administration’s decisions to deport student visa holders for their involvement in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests (saying that they “are antisemitic and pose a threat to the foreign policy of the United States”) or to cut funding from several universities charging that they have not agreed to demands that they do more to fight allegations of antisemitism. But there is a deep partisan split on these issues, with Democrats and Independent voters overwhelmingly opposed to the administration’s actions, and Republicans (including voters who are “born again”) strongly supportive of President Trump’s policies.

What comes through in all of these results is that while substantial majorities of Democratic voters and Independents have long parted ways with Israel over the Gaza war and the occupation, Republicans and their evangelical Christian base are now also losing patience with Israeli policies. What we don’t know is whether their change in attitude is due to greater frustration with Israeli behavior or whether it is that, with a Republican now in the White House, Israel is seen as making the job of the president more difficult. In either case, what the poll makes clear is that if President Trump has the will to act to rein in Israel, he will have substantial support from both parties to do so.

If you hit a wall with a sledgehammer with enough force there is a good chance you can eventually bring it down. If there is water behind that wall, that sledgehammer does nothing to stem the tide. You can flail away, but, at best, all you will become is tired and wet.

At worst? You drown.

Journalism and political opponents are still using the sledgehammer of facts, reason and logic, thinking that this will weaken, crack, and eventually destroy the dangerous political movement we are seeing in the U.S.

The problem? Trumpism-MAGA isn’t the wall. It’s the water.

You can’t defeat antidemocratic water by hitting it, but you can keep it back by building robust barriers in the form of laws, regulations, and rights.

The belief that a sustained appeal to facts, reason, and ethics was sufficient to undermine antidemocratic forces of the type led by U.S. President Donald Trump was charmingly romantic. It illustrated a commitment to the journalistic ideals of holding power to account, and the notion that politicians and their supporters would have enough shame and dignity to take responsibility for lies and corruption.

But it was, more importantly, dangerously naïve and irresponsible. It was precisely the belief that Trump could be treated like any other politician, and MAGA like any other political movement, that led media in the U.S. (and abroad) to mainstream and sanitize what was very clearly not a normal politician nor a normal political movement.

No matter how many times Trump’s lies, corruption, or incompetence were exposed during his first term, he maintained his popularly among Republican politicians and core voters. There was the clear sense that the hammering not only didn’t hurt Trump, it made him stronger. The liquidity of MAGA seemed obvious, yet journalism and political opponents continued to hammer away as if he were a solid. former President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 seemed to offer proof that the hammering had actually worked. The façade had cracked, and MAGA was crumbling. The old order of walls had been restored.

But the radicalization of the Republican Party became even more apparent under Biden, and the 2024 election created not a tide of anti-democracy, but a tsunami. Rational arguments, fact-checking, and the forced “neutrality” of “both sides” journalism are now being drowned in the waves, currents, and whirlpools of half-truth, disinformation, and bullshit. MAGA flows and morphs daily.

Make no mistake, it’s important that journalism fact-checks things like Trump’s tariff percentages or Vice President JD Vance’s claims about freedom in Europe versus the United States. Citizens need to know the truth, and journalism must provide it. But we can no longer assume that exposing lies or debunking numbers is sufficient in the defense of U.S. democracy, because there will be no consequences.

So, if the institutions of journalism and politics operate on behalf of citizens in the service of democracy—and that is what both institutions claim to do on a regular basis—what is the response to a liquid threat?

Liquids cannot be fractured or broken by force, but they can be contained. They can dry up. For journalism, that could involve things like making a “Democracy” section of a newspaper in the same way that we have Sports, Culture, Travel, or Technology. To explain more regularly and in greater detail how laws work, and provide examples of how they can both protect and harm citizens. To cover more local politics. To give grassroots political or social movements the same volume of coverage given to the release of a new iPhone or an Elon Musk tweet. To not engage in “both sides” reporting when one side is attempting to undermine democracy (journalism has no obligation to amplify antidemocratic forces). To cover the power of media itself as a news story.

These things—understanding the law, understanding how democracy works, understanding how policy works, understanding citizen engagement, understanding rights, understanding media power, understanding the role of money in politics—help to stem the flow by creating dams. They encourage the idea that there are elements of democratic society that need to be protected. You can’t defeat antidemocratic water by hitting it, but you can keep it back by building robust barriers in the form of laws, regulations, and rights. Behind that barrier, exposed to the warmth and light of day, the liquid may evaporate over time. The first step in that building process, however, is awareness and understanding.

Journalism matters now more than ever. It just needs to distinguish between solid and liquid.

April 30, 2025 President Donald Trump The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20500 Re: Resignation-Legions of Impeachable Offenses Dear Mr. President: President Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, to avoid certain impeachment, conviction, and removal from office for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and disobeying a congressional subpoena. The resignation…

Trump and his billionaire toadies like Howard Lutnik and Scott Bessent are peddling a dangerous lie to working-class Americans. They’re strutting around claiming their tariffs will bring back “good paying jobs” with “great benefits,” while actively undermining the very thing that made manufacturing jobs valuable to working people in the first place: unions.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s really happening: Without strong unions, bringing manufacturing back to America will simply create more sweatshop opportunities where desperate workers earn between $7.25 and $15 an hour with zero benefits and zero security.

The only reason manufacturing jobs like my father had at a tool-and-die shop in the 1960s paid well enough to catapult a single-wage-earner family into the middle class was because they had a union — the Machinists’ Union, in my dad’s case — fighting relentlessly for their rights and dignity.

My father’s union job meant we owned a modest home, had reliable healthcare, and could attend college without crushing debt. The manufacturing jobs Trump promises? Starvation wages without healthcare while corporate profits soar and executives buy their third megayacht.

The proof of their deception is written all over their actions: They’re already reconfiguring the Labor Department into an anti-worker weapon designed to crush any further unionization in America.

Don’t be fooled for one second: the GOP’s plan to resurrect American manufacturing while continuing their war on unions is nothing but a cynical ploy to create an army of desperate, low-wage workers with no power to demand their fair share.

Joe Biden was also working to revive American manufacturing — with actual success — but he made it absolutely clear that companies benefiting from his Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act should welcome unions in exchange for government support.

Trump and his GOP enablers want the opposite: docile workers grateful for poverty wages.

While Republicans babble endlessly about “job creators,” they fundamentally misunderstand — or deliberately obscure — how a nation’s true wealth is actually generated.

It’s not through Wall Street speculation or billionaire tax breaks. It’s through making things of value; the exact activity their donor class has eagerly shipped overseas for decades while pocketing the difference.

There’s a profound economic reason to bring manufacturing home that Adam Smith laid out in 1776 and Alexander Hamilton amplified in 1791 when he presented his vision for turning America into a manufacturing powerhouse. It’s the fundamental principle behind Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations” that I explain in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

A tree limb lying on the forest floor has zero economic value. But apply human labor by whittling it into an axe handle, and you’ve created something valuable. That “added value” — the result of applying human (or machine) labor to raw materials — is wealth added to the nation, often lasting for generations if the product endures. Axes made in the 17th century are still being sold in America; manufacturing can produce wealth that truly lasts generations.

Manufacturing, in other words, is the only true way a country becomes wealthier. It’s why China transformed from the impoverished nation I witnessed firsthand when I lived and studied there in 1986 to the economic juggernaut it is today. It’s why Japan and South Korea emerged from the devastation of war to become industrial powerhouses within decades.

This is not generally true, by the way, of a service economy, the system that Reagan and Clinton told us would give us “clean jobs” as America abandoned manufacturing in the 1980-2000s era.

If I give you a $50 haircut and you give me a $50 massage — a service economy — we’ve merely shuffled money around while the nation’s overall wealth remains unchanged. But build a factory producing solar panels, and you’ve created something from raw materials that generates power for decades: that’s real wealth that didn’t exist before.

Republicans used to understand this basic economic principle before they sold their souls to Wall Street speculators and foreign dictators who shower them with “investments.”

Service-only economies don’t generate wealth; they just recirculate existing money. This fundamental truth is the strongest argument for rebuilding American manufacturing capacity, yet it’s one that economists and political commentators almost never mention. Trump certainly doesn’t grasp it — or care — as he hawks Chinese-made MAGA hats while pretending to champion American workers.

It’s not “Making America Great Again” — it’s making America into exactly what their corporate donors have always wanted: a docile workforce with no voice, no protections, and nowhere else to go.

The hypocrisy is staggering. This is the same Donald Trump whose branded clothing lines were manufactured in China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. The same Republican Party that pushed “free trade” deals for decades that gutted American manufacturing communities. Now they’re suddenly tariff champions? Please.

So yes, let’s use thoughtfully designed tariffs and other trade policies to bring manufacturing back to our shores. Let Congress debate and pass these measures with 3- to 10-year phase-in periods so manufacturers can plan their transition to American production without the chaos of Trump changing his mind every time some foreign dictator slips another million into his back pocket.

But don’t be fooled for one second: the GOP’s plan to resurrect American manufacturing while continuing their war on unions is nothing but a cynical ploy to create an army of desperate, low-wage workers with no power to demand their fair share.

It’s not “Making America Great Again” — it’s making America into exactly what their corporate donors have always wanted: a docile workforce with no voice, no protections, and nowhere else to go.

We need manufacturing AND unions. Anything less is just another con job from the party that’s perfected the art of getting working class Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

Think resisting authoritarianism is too big of a lift? Think again. This spring, while the U.S. resistance movement may not be in full bloom, it is blossoming.

The “3.5 percent rule”—identified by political scientist Erica Chenoweth—should be on the lips of every American anxious about the Trump administration’s headlong drive to replace our democracy with authoritarianism. After studying more than 300 nonviolent resistance campaigns, Chenoweth and colleagues’ research revealed a startling truth: when just 3.5 percent of a population engages in sustained, strategic civil resistance, authoritarian regimes fall.

Think about it. Not 50 percent. Not 30 percent. Just 3.5 percent. The message is clear: when enough people turn out—repeatedly and nonviolently—democracy wins.

When people commit to showing up—demonstrating creatively and persistently—history is on our side. That should give hope to anyone worried about our nation’s future. It will be hard; the road will be muddy and rough. But, as Frederick Douglass reminds us: “Power concedes nothing without a struggle. Never has; never will.”

What’s needed now is not despair, but determination. Not hand-wringing, but hand-raising. Where I live, it’s one in every 28 standing up consistently and courageously as agents of change, transforming darkness into light. What is it where you live?

In western Massachusetts where I live, the combined population of Hampshire and Franklin counties is 232,000. Based on the 3.5 percent rule, that’s 8,000 people—not just activists and organizers—but everyday folks: teachers and health care workers; farmers and students; parents and grandparents. That’s 8,000 out of 232,000. One out of every 28. Doable.

Hardy Merriman, another vital voice in the study of civil resistance, reminds us it’s about more than rallies, marches, and highway overpass standouts. Civil resistance succeeds when it’s strategic, visible, and persistent—petitioning, striking, boycotting, creatively refusing to comply with unjust policies. It’s everyday people stepping into their power. That power is far greater than those trying to consolidate it.

Nonviolence trainer, activist, and writer Rivera Sun, whose YA novels address peace-building, highlights the “imagination” side of movements—that we must not only resist but also build the world we want to live in.

That dual work of resisting and reimagining democracy is already happening across America. Still unsure? Go on YouTube and watch Republican congressmembers' disastrous town halls. Then, check out Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular rallies in red districts.

Here’s a sampling of communities around the country, including their political leanings:

Valdosta, GA (pop. 32,000): 3.5 percent = 1,120. Conservative/MAGA-supportive

Los Alamos, NM (pop. 35,000): 3.5 percent = 1,225. Moderate/purple-leaning

Santa Fe, NM (pop. 88,000): 3.5 percent = 3,080. Liberal/active resistance

Eau Claire, WI (pop. 70,000): 3.5 percent = 2,450. Moderate/purple

Charlottesville, VA (pop. 44,000): 3.5 percent = 1,540. Liberal/active resistance

Portland, ME (pop. 68,000): 3.5 percent = 2,380. The city strongly resists Trump policies and supports democratic norms. Maine’s unflappable Gov. Janet Mills has become an inspiration to the resistance movement, forcefully speaking out against Mr. Trump.

The movement is growing. Will Republicans join?

Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski recently voiced what many of her GOP colleagues fear to say out loud: standing up to Trump risks personal and political backlash. Her admission highlights a chilling truth: many elected Republicans are too afraid to uphold democracy. If they won’t stand up, it’s up to us to step up.

History backs us. Resistance movements have succeeded in Chile, East Germany, and Serbia, to name a few. When ordinary people refuse to be ruled by illegitimate power, the seemingly impossible becomes inevitable. We’re fortunate that Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist, Filipino-American Maria Ressa, is a mentor to the U.S. movement, drawing on her still fresh experience standing up to authoritarianism in the Philippines.

The implications for the nation are profound. We’re a country of 330 million, so 3.5 percent equals 11.5 million people. That’s the number we need to side with democracy over authoritarianism. That’s not fantasy. It’s strategy. In many, many communities—well beyond western Massachusetts—it’s growing. Person by person; town by town.

From the hills of New England to college towns in Virginia; from the red-leaning plains to liberal cities by the sea, Americans are pushing back. The movement to defend democracy is pulsing with vitality. We are not helpless. We are not powerless. We are the nonviolent peace force we’ve been waiting for.

What’s needed now is not despair, but determination. Not hand-wringing, but hand-raising. Where I live, it’s one in every 28 standing up consistently and courageously as agents of change, transforming darkness into light. What is it where you live?

We’re growing our numbers. We’re refining our strategy. We’re exercising our moral imagination.

History is calling. Let’s answer.

Words matter. When the media points out Trump’s “potential conflicts of interest,” as it has in recent days when describing Trump’s growing crypto enterprise, it doesn’t come close to telling the public what’s really going on — unprecedented paybacks and self-dealing by the president of the United States, using his office to make billions.

The correct word is corruption.

Trump holds a private dinner at the White House for major speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency, earning him and his allies $900,000 in trading fees in just under two days. One senator calls this “the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done.”

He’s doing other things as brazen if not more brazenly corrupt.

He collects a cut of sales from a cryptocurrency marketed with his likeness.

He promotes Teslas on the White House driveway on behalf of a multibillionaire who spent a quarter of a billion backing him during the 2024 election.

He posts news-making announcements on Truth Social, the company in which he and his family own a significant stake. Truth Social thereby becomes the world’s semi-official means of knowing Trump’s thinking and policies.

Trump frequently mentions in his phone calls with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he’d like the signature British Open golf tournament returned to Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland (its home before Trump’s January 6, 2021, attempted coup). Trump’s team asked the British PM again during his recent visit to the White House.

To describe these as “potential conflicts of interest” misses the point. A “potential conflict of interest” sounds like an unfortunate situation in which it’s possible that Trump might choose his own personal interest over the nation’s. Stated this way, the problem is the conflict.

But Trump isn’t conflicted. He repeatedly chooses his (and his family’s) interests over the nation’s. He is using the authority and trappings of the presidency of the United States to make money for himself and his family. And in his second term, this corruption is more flagrant than it was in the first.

Some legal scholars say “corruption” occurs only after a court so rules. But this isn’t the common-sense definition, and the critical venue for restraining Trump is the court of public opinion. When Trump collects on a favor or engages in a quid pro quo deal for himself or his family — which he’s doing more and more often — the transactions are corrupt.

Trump’s venture into crypto has increased his family’s wealth by an estimated $2.9 billion in the last six months, according to a new report.

This estimate was made before the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, announced that its so-called “stablecoin” — with Trump’s likeness all over it — will be used by the United Arab Emirates to make a $2 billion business deal with Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. The deal will generate hundreds of millions of dollars more for the Trump family.

We’re not talking about a “potential conflict of interest.” The Trump family is making a boatload of money off a venture backed by a foreign government. Hello? The U.S. Constitution's Emoluments Clause, Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, bars a president from receiving any compensation or other emolument from a foreign government.

The deal also formally links the Trump family business to Binance — a company that’s been under U.S. government oversight since 2023, when it admitted to violating federal money-laundering laws.

Meanwhile, Trump is instructing the government to ease up on regulating crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission is ending its crypto fraud investigations. The Justice Department is terminating its enforcement actions against crypto.

A potential conflict of interest? Please. This is corruption, plain and simple.

Eric Trump, who officially runs the family business, has just announced plans for a Trump-branded hotel and tower in Dubai, part of the U.A.E.

The Trump family is also developing a luxury hotel and golf course complex in the Middle East nation of Oman, on land owned by the government of Oman. Oman also plays an important role in the Middle East, often serving as a middleman between the United States and Iran.

This project and three others are dependent on a Saudi-based real estate company with close ties to the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia has a long list of pressing matters before the United States, including requests to buy F-35 fighter jets and gain access to nuclear power technology.

In two weeks, when Trump travels to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. to meet with their heads of government and that of Oman, is this a “state visit” or a business trip? Obviously, it’s both — which underscores the self-dealing.

There’s no “potential conflict of interest” here. It’s pure corruption.

Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. His self-dealing makes Warren G. Harding’s look like a child shoplifting candy.

Why isn’t the media calling this what it is? Americans deserve to know.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents grab college students and migrants from American city streets, igniting fury over reckless tactics. Plainclothes agents, lacking uniforms or visible badges, use unmarked vehicles to detain people like a Tufts student in Massachusetts and a Columbia graduate in New York, often targeting visa holders tied to protests. Fears are rising that unclear identity risks deadly mix-ups. Some warn that a detainee, mistaking agents for thugs, might claim Second Amendment self-defense, sparking violence. Communities demand clarity as tensions climb. With over 32,000 arrests since January 2025, debate rages: lawful action or wild overreach? The nation braces for what looms in this heated clash.

What IS the Left? What should we fight for? How can we rebuild outside of the Democrats? Order my latest book “WHAT’S LEFT” here at Rall.com. It comes autographed to the person of your choice, and I’ll deliver it anywhere. Cost including shipping is $29.95 in the USA.

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UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said Friday that “Malnutrition is … on the rise. More than 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year.”

At least 10 NGO aid kitchens have closed in recent weeks for lack of food, and 25 UN bakeries haven’t been operational for a month. The Israeli military has for two months been committing a war crime in preventing shipments of food from entering Gaza.

Meanwhile, a medical source in Gaza told the Anadolu Agency that on Saturday, a child “died from malnutrition and dehydration at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City.” Gaza medical authorities have documented 57 deaths from malnutrition in Gaza during the current conflict.

UNICEF says that over 75% of households in Gaza have reported declining access to water. Russell explained that many families with children have to choose between drinking, bathing and cooking.

Because of the lack of clean water, Russell explained, “acute watery diarrhea … now accounts for 1 in every 4 cases of disease recorded in Gaza. Most of these cases are among children under five, for whom it is life-threatening.”

UNICEF’s Russell said, “For two months, children in the Gaza Strip have faced relentless bombardments while being deprived of essential goods, services and lifesaving care. With each passing day of the aid blockade, they face the growing risk of starvation, illness and death – nothing can justify this.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its weekly report on Gaza on Wednesday that “On 25 April, the World Food Programme (WPF) reported that its food stocks in Gaza have been depleted, as the agency delivered its last remaining supplies to kitchens preparing hot meals. WFP additionally highlighted the impact of deteriorating nutrition on vulnerable groups, including children under five, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and the elderly, warning that the situation has again reached ‘a breaking point.’”

OCHA added that “Between 18 March and 27 April, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) recorded 259 attacks on residential buildings and 99 on IDP tents. Most of the attacks resulted in fatalities, including of women and children. Among the strikes on IDP tents, 40 reportedly took place in Al Mawasi area, in Khan Younis, where the Israeli army repeatedly directed civilians to seek refuge.”

Over 400 Palestinians seem to be being killed each week by Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the vast majority women and children. Thousands have been wounded in the two months since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu breached the January ceasefire.

OCHA writes, “On 27 April, at about 20:10, 13 Palestinians, including a woman and her six children, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential building was hit in southern Khan Younis. On 28 April, at about 00:30, 10 Palestinians, including at least three children, were reportedly killed and others, including a seven-year-old girl, were injured when a residential building was hit in Al Fakhoura area, west of Jabalya refugee camp, in North Gaza. On 28 April, at about 00:30, 10 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential building was hit in Al Karmah area in northwestern Gaza city.”

Israeli forces have been firing on Palestinian fishing boats, as fishermen desperately attempt to bring in some protein for their families.

In March, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, targeting the Smithsonian Institution and its museums—including the National Museum of African American History and Culture—for promoting “divisive narratives.” In doing so, Trump continues a pattern of erasing federal websites about notable African Americans and undermining institutions that honor our full national story.

Trump’s campaign echoes other recent efforts to whitewash the past. For example, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month, and recognized Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday—one of several Southern states that continue to honor the Confederacy. These endeavors are part of a coordinated attempt to revise the Confederacy’s racist history and diminish the impact of slavery in the Civil War.

Last month, reports emerged of historic artifacts being removed from the African American History Museum. In response, civil rights leaders have formed a coalition and will hold a “Freedom to Learn” campaign and march at the museum. They know what I do: that the GOP’s coordinated efforts to whitewash the past cannot erase the truth we carry within us.

I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA.

As an African American originally from Memphis, Tennessee, I learned about our nation’s complicated history from a young age. I grew up in the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, where my parents were born under the yoke of Jim Crow segregation, and where cotton was king during slavery.

Some of that history I learned in school. Most of it came from my family who lived that history. They taught me not just to remember, but to bear witness.

Even the physical landscape of the South helped tell the story: Confederate monuments, parks, and highways named after Confederate generals. I saw the Confederate flag and “Riding with Forrest” bumper stickers, referencing Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. They were everyday reminders of the brutal history of slavery that refused to stay buried.

I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA. That’s why the GOP’s campaign to rewrite history will fail.

Recently, I visited D.C. with my 73-year-old mother. I was there to give a talk about my book, which examines how race and immigration status have affected access to healthcare. We visited the African American History Museum and Culture on a Monday. The line stretched outside, as it often does. Since opening in 2016, it has welcomed more than 12 million visitors—Black, white, young, old—each one seeking a fuller understanding of our shared past.

I had visited the museum before. But Trump’s latest threat made me want to return—and to bring my mom. As a child, she picked cotton and endured taunts from white kids as she and her siblings walked to their segregated school. She didn’t need the museum to validate her story. But it did. It also validated mine.

Inside, I stood with her in front of exhibits honoring W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells. Their legacy helped shape my career. As a sociologist, I teach about many of the historic events covered in the museum’s exhibits, which don’t shy away from the ugly contradictions of America’s founding ideals. Instead, they make them plain.

Etched inside the building is a quote from founding museum director Lonnie Bunch III: “[T]here is nothing more powerful… than a nation steeped in its history. And there are few things as noble as honoring our ancestors by remembering.”

That’s what this new wave of revisionism seeks to stop: truthful remembrance. But history doesn’t disappear when you shut down a website, threaten a museum’s funding, or remove museum exhibits. Despite banning books, stifling academic freedom, and targeting scapegoated groups that culminated in the genocide of European Jews, we still know about the Holocaust. Why? Because survivors carried that truth forward.

As we left the museum, another African American family was entering. The father asked me, half jokingly, “Have they changed anything in the museum yet?”

“No,” I said, “but that’s exactly why we came—before he [Trump] can.”

We smiled in shared acknowledgment. That exchange shows why the GOP’s efforts to erase the truth are sparking the opposite effect: a renewed urgency to preserve it.

Regardless of what happens to the museum or Confederate Memorial Day commemorations, that unfiltered history lives in us. In the words of James Baldwin, also etched on the museum’s walls: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it… history is literally present in all that we do.”

Almost everyone I know loathes U.S. President Donald Trump—and I don’t even live in the U.S. (I am Australian) They see him as a disaster for America and the world. Some denounce him at social gatherings, confident that no one will disagree. I do disagree—in a way—but I have realized that it is impossible to talk people out of their loathing.

Trump’s achievement was to demolish the political status quo. It was failing before Trump and had been for decades. Trump finished it off, although many within the system still don’t see it. Trump is an intensification—perhaps inevitable, perhaps necessary—of a decline in American society that deserves much greater attention. This decline represents the “deep politics” behind Trump’s success. And it is this politics I want to discuss: not the man, or his policies, but the deeper story behind his emergence and domination of U.S. politics.

Let me be clear about this. I want to transcend the furious debate about Trump and his administration. I am not denying the dangers and risks his election creates. But I want to examine something else that is almost wholly overlooked in the debate: the chance he provides to reassess the capacity of the U.S. political system to respond effectively to the foundational challenges it confronts. Destroying the status quo does not mean Trump himself will provide the answers America needs. More likely, his contribution will be to create the opportunity for others to do this.

Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

An international survey, published early last year, revealed starkly the political mood Trump tapped into, and the Democrats ignored. It found almost two-thirds of Americans believed the country was “in decline” and their society was “broken.” “Trump captures the prevailing zeitgeist as the champion of a broken country,” the report says. “Biden, in contrast, is the quintessential establishment candidate. Which worldview will prevail?” Well, now we know. The Democrats should be ashamed that they were seen as the establishment in today’s fraught world.

They ran a shockingly weak campaign, offering in former President Joe Biden an ailing, old man. What’s worse, they tried to deceive the voters by hiding his cognitive decline, and then replaced him too late with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was tied to Biden’s policies. If Harris had won the election, America would have maintained the status quo, its business-as-usual politics.

What were they thinking? How did they fail to see what was happening? No wonder there are reports of “a civil war” within the party. The many thousands who have attended the “Fighting Oligarchy” political rallies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is on the more radical wing of the Democrats, suggest the party is being stirred into more effective action.

The world—and the West in particular—is mired in crises it refuses to acknowledge, at least at the political level. I see this because my work concerns human progress, well-being and futures. To me, politics and the mainstream news media are locked in mutually reinforcing cultures that maintain the status quo, largely ignoring—or at least underestimating—our predicament. Politics may claim to be addressing the crises, but it is not. It took Trump to expose the pretence.

Trump’s First Term: a Missed Opportunity

I wrote in 2022 about the social and political antecedents of Trump’s first term as president. I said that the liberal media and Democrats, instead of seeking to understand what was troubling America and lay behind his victory, spent four years trying to remove him from office.

Trump’s relationship with the liberal media became one of mutual loathing and goading; it was hugely destructive. In showing such contempt for Trump, the liberal media also derided his base, deepening the national division they accused Trump himself of provoking. Politics and the media “zeroed in” on him when they should have also “drawn back” to consider the larger social context.

I said at the time liberal commentary took as a benchmark, a frame of reference, the old political status quo. It was as if they had forgotten the legitimate grievances that took Trump into office, and believed the task was to restore politics to what it had been before his election, even though everything had changed and needed to change. Much of the coverage implied that there was little wrong with the U.S. that removing Trump would not fix.

The liberal media embraced Joe Biden’s election victory with sighs of relief over his centrist policies and a return to political normalcy. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” The Guardian proclaimed. But the story did not end with Trump’s eviction from the White House. The liberal media’s celebration of Biden’s victory was another aspect of their failure to understand how profoundly things were changing.

Nothing had been settled, I warned. And so it proved.

Environmental writer and activist Joanna Macy expressed the opportunity succinctly at the time: Trump’s election was “a very painful waking up” she said; if Hillary Clinton had won, “we would have stayed asleep.” This was a relatively common view among environmental and leftist commentators around the time of the election. They saw Trump’s victory as exposing the failings of the entire U.S. political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda. And they were scathing of the Democrats, notably Clinton and former President Barack Obama, for their complicity and collaboration with this agenda.

It looks today like America has been given a second opportunity to “wake up.” Can the Democrats do this? Can they build on the Sanders-AOC rallies?

2024—a Second Chance to “Wake up”

Trump’s resounding election victory should not have surprised us. He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people and to acknowledge their unease about their lives. This unease goes deeper than the issues that the election campaign focused on, such as the economy, immigration, or reproductive rights. These may be what politicians and commentators believe matters most. Even voters may say these are the things that mattered to them. But this is, at least in part, because this is what pollsters, strategists, journalists, and politicians talk and ask about. They set the parameters of debate, which is framed in these terms. But I don’t believe people’s lives, the quality of their lives, can be captured so easily.

In my 2022 essay, I argued there were other ways of thinking about America and the challenges it faced. It was an attempt to consider what was happening from a different perspective. What I sought to articulate then, and seek to do again now, is the need to close the widening gap between a scientific view of the world and the prevailing political one, between a view that demands a transformation in our way of life if we are to meet the challenges we face, and an essentially business-as-usual politics.

Political debate needs to focus on this gap, on opening up the potential for radical changes in political priorities.

America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be.

My interest is in why so many Americans voted for Trump, regardless of his character and perhaps even his policies. My analysis falls well outside mainstream media opinion in that it has to do with the entirety of the American way of life, not specific issues—economic, social or environmental. Thus, it goes beyond the domain of policy to embrace questions of vision and narrative. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

This deeper context also explains the widespread mistrust, frustration, and disillusionment with institutions, especially government, with their specific purposes and inevitable inertia. And it explains how Trump sidestepped this hostility. Most political leaders are “organization people” chosen by their parties to represent their politics. Trump is not a party man; he chose his party, conquered it, and remade it to fit his vision of America.

I said in 2022 that a deep and dangerous divide existed in liberal democracies between people’s concerns about their lives, their country, and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism were too constrained and limiting to face up to our predicament. Those working within these cultures can’t see it, or if they can see it, they can’t imagine what it takes to address it.

My story drew on people’s profound disquiet about life in America and the existential challenges America faced, both physical and social. This condition was also true, to differing degrees, of other liberal democracies and beyond. I presented a lot of evidence of this. For example, a 2015 study I co-authored investigated the perceived probability of future threats to humanity in four Western nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Across the four countries, over a half (54%, U.S. 57%) of people rated the risk of “our way of life ending” within the next 100 years at 50% or greater. Three quarters (79%, U.S.75%) agreed that “we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world.”

We had to place the fundamental frameworks of how we understand the world at the center of political debate, I said. The interconnected risks facing humanity could not be solved by focusing only on the discrete, specific issues that characterized and defined today’s politics, however legitimate the concerns were in themselves. Trump offered, however negatively, at least a small chance of triggering systemic change.

Existential Risks

Decades of political action (or inaction) have failed to meet the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and other environmental problems; declining population health and well-being; growing technological anarchy where we lose or cede control of new technologies like AI; the growth of corporate political power and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands; the risk of spreading warfare, including nuclear war; and the emergence of a multipolar world in which America is losing its dominance.

These and other challenges pose a risk of societal and even civilizational collapse, as I have discussed in recent writing; the collapse may already have begun. America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be. This includes politically.

Several reports published in the past two years have highlighted the human predicament. An international team of scientists has provided a detailed outline of planetary resilience by mapping out all nine boundary processes that define a safe operating space for humanity. Human activity affects the Earth’s climate and ecosystems more than ever, which risks the stability of the entire planet. For the first time, all nine planetary boundaries have been assessed, six have now been crossed. These include climate, biosphere integrity, land systems, freshwater, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus).

Progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.”

“This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell, as pressure on the planet increases and vital boundaries are being breached. We don’t know how long we can keep transgressing these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm,” says co-author Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden.

Member nations of the United Nations adopted in 2015 a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, to be met by 2030. The goals aimed to end poverty, improve health and education, and reduce inequality—while tackling climate change and preserving our oceans and forests. An assessment in 2023, the halfway point, found that the world was not on track to achieve any of the 17 goals.

A major review, “Earth at Risk,” published in 2024, says human development has ushered in an era of converging crises: climate change, ecological destruction, disease, pollution, and socioeconomic inequality. The review synthesizes the breadth of these interwoven emergencies and underscores the urgent need for comprehensive, integrated action. “The imperative is clear: To navigate away from this precipice, we must collectively harness political will, economic resources, and societal values to steer toward a future where human progress does not come at the cost of ecological integrity and social equity,” the review states.

This scientific understanding helps to explain survey findings of public attitudes. For example, the study cited earlier of 28 countries across the globe by polling company Ipsos, conducted in late 2023 and published early in 2024, is especially revealing. It explains better than all the political polling the mood behind Trump’s success (a mood not confined to the U.S.).

The survey found across the 28 countries, 58% (59% in the U.S.) believed their country was “in decline,” 57% (U.S. 65%) that society was “broken,” and 67% (U.S. 66%) believed “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.” Two-thirds (67%, U.S. 60%) believed the main divide in their society was between “‘ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite.” A similar number (63%, U.S. 66%) said their country needed “a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.”

The Ipsos survey highlights the appeal to populism as a response. But it is wrong—or at least incomplete—to focus, as liberal commentary has, on populism as an illegitimate or bogus political stance. We also need to explore, as I do here, the validity of people’s perceptions about their countries.

Much has been spoken and written about Trump’s billionaire backers. But more billionaires backed Harris than they did Trump; they did very well under the Democrats. Sanders (who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats) said in a recent CNN interview: “In the Democratic Party, you've got a party that is heavily dominated by the billionaire class, run by consultants who are way out of touch with reality… the Democratic Party has virtually no grassroots support.”

I wrote in my 2024 essay about the powerful influence of neoliberalism, a variation of capitalism that has captured government in the interests of those with money and power. Many of the problems we face began or escalated with the neoliberal ascendancy that began in the West in the 1980s.

Given the scale and urgency of our situation, I said, we needed to use every (nonviolent) means—legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation—to reduce, even eliminate, the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations, which held so much sway over democracy, government, and our lives, and so often acted against our common interests. This must become the focus of political debate and action.

Transcending today’s turmoil

Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly said in 2018 that the opposition was not the Democrats, but the media. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” This is what is happening, much more so now than during Trump’s first term. And it isn’t just the Trump camp. Both the liberal- and right-wing media are wallowing in the muck—in conflict, contradiction, conjecture, speculation and, yes, nonsense and trivia—that makes up much of the public debate about Trump. Part of my Trump watching is via MSN (a Microsoft portal), which scans many news sites, both on the left and right. Trump’s every move and utterance is scrutinized, praised, or condemned; positions have become more entrenched and closed. America seems to be caught in a vortex of mass insanity, with Trump at its center.

What Trump does in his second term depends not only on him, but also on how the people, Congress, the media, and others respond. This response must be different from the way they reacted to his first term. It should accept the legitimacy of the deep-seated unease and anger that swept him into office, however flawed his policy responses might be.

In crushing the political status quo, Trump has broken the center left and center right’s hold on power. He has championed the far-right; in doing that, he has also created opportunities for the left. Specifically, progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.” Or to quote the poet William Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Political debate in the U.S. has become unanchored, untethered, from a shared story, a common cultural understanding of reality, as the Western narrative of progress becomes increasingly contested, and the American Dream fades. The current debate is so awful that it has become further evidence of a country in decline, a society that is broken. It may already be too late to change this situation, but America must keep trying. Out of the chaos of the times, something better might yet emerge.

Nonprofits and advocacy groups are in the midst of a mounting crisis: Social media giants are growing more chaotic, untrustworthy, and dangerous.

Just consider what’s happened in the past few weeks. Without warning, explanation, or human review, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Presbyterian Outlook—a progressive, well-established news outlet for the Presbyterian Church. The outlet noted that it had thoughtfully invested in the platform to expand its reach, but would not return given the possibility of another abrupt cancellation.

Then, weeks later, X—which has been plagued by reports of increasing misinformation and amplifying far-right accounts—was hit with cybersecurity attacks that downed the platform.

Just as social media platforms revolutionized our world decades ago—we are in the midst of another pivotal technology movement.

And Meta recently announced that it would draw from X’s technology to employ “Community Notes” on its platforms—which are purportedly meant to fill in the gaps left after the company fired its fact-checking team. Experts have warned that such a system could easily be exploited by groups motivated by their own interests.

These events are just the latest in a growing pile of evidence that organizations and advocates can’t count on social media giants like they once did. They’re fueling misinformation, inflammatory perspectives, and partisan divisions—all in the name of profits.

To continue to be effective in our increasingly digital world, organizations will need to adjust to this new landscape.

Unquestionably, charting the path forward is challenging. Many organizations and advocates have spent years investing in and building profiles on established media platforms. These groups depend on this technology to share their messaging, organize, provide educational tools, fundraise, and more. It’s difficult to shift all these resources.

Other organizations have yet to build up a robust digital presence, but don’t know where to begin, especially in today’s chaotic climate.

Wherever nonprofits and advocates fall on this spectrum, they can and should invest in technology. Here’s how they can be most effective.

First, organizations must recognize that—just as social media platforms revolutionized our world decades ago—we are in the midst of another pivotal technology movement. Given all the upheaval in today’s landscape, organizations must ensure they can reach their audiences in a multitude of ways, without relying on a single platform.

As such, they should build out opportunities for subscription-based data creation. That means reinvesting in collecting more traditional contact methods—like emails and phone numbers. It also means investing in technologies that allow them to share their messages without censorship from outside sources. Blogs and newsletter platforms can be powerful tools to communicate with audiences and provide rich discourse free from external interference.

Protected digital communities—which are only open to certain groups or are invitation-based—can also help strengthen connections between an organization’s supporters. We’re starting to employ this strategy at the Technology, Innovation, and Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL), which is housed at Union Theological Seminary. Right now, we’re working with a cohort of faith and social justice leaders to deploy new technology to advance their missions.

We’ve recommended a platform called Mighty Networks, which uses AI to help creators build and manage online communities. Two of our fellows are using this service to support Black clergywomen through education and practical application, focusing on mental health awareness and balance. Another pair of fellows is aiming to use the platform to deliver digitally-based educational programming and sustain a community of care professionals committed to improving access to spiritually integrated, trauma-informed care.

Make no mistake: Nonprofits and advocacy organizations need a digital presence to be effective. But they’ll have to adjust to shield themselves from the chaos and malice of social media giants.

U.S. President Donald Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation,” including legal filings for improper purposes and statements that are not based on evidence.

Bondi should start with the White House attorneys who drafted Trump’s executive orders targeting Big Law firms—and her Justice Department lawyers trying to defend them.

Did Real Lawyers Write These Orders?

Cloaked in empty rhetoric about “conduct detrimental to critical American interests,” retribution is at the core of Trump’s edicts.

For example, the only detailed rationale for Trump’s Jenner & Block order was the firm’s association with Andrew Weissmann, who returned to the firm in 2020 after completing his work for Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the Trump-Russia investigation. Other than the Weissmann diatribe, Trump’s order merely recited vague and unsupported assertions about alleged “partisan ‘lawfare,’” “abuse of its pro bono practice,” and “racial discrimination.”

But on that basis, Trump directed all federal agencies to: 1) limit the entire firm’s engagement with federal employees; 2) limit the entire firm’s access to federal buildings; 3) suspend the entire firm’s security clearances; 4) terminate the firm’s government contracts; and 5) require all government contractors to disclose any business that they do with Jenner—with an eye toward terminating those contracts as well.

Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits.

Four law firms have challenged Trump’s similar orders. In stark language, four separate federal courts have granted immediate relief:

• “Disturbing”

• “It sends little chills down my spine.”

• “It threatens to significantly undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all people to access justice.”

• “There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.”

• “The framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power.”

In three recent hearings, Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Lawson—Bondi’s longtime Florida colleague and Trump loyalist—struggled to answer judges’ basic questions about the orders targeting Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block:

• Do law firms have to make deals with Trump to avoid executive orders?

• “I can’t speak to that.”

• Are the deals in writing?

• “I have not been privy to this.”

• Has Trump achieved $1 billion in deals yet?

• “I do not know.”

When Lawson argued that Trump could target Jenner because it “discriminates against its employees based on race,” U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, snapped back, “Give me a break.”

In fairness to Lawson, Trump and his White House attorneys who wrote the orders hadn’t given him much to work with.

Jenner: A Case Study

Take a closer look at Jenner’s claims, followed by selected highlights of the government’s 37-page response:

The First Amendment:

• Prohibits retaliatory actions for protected speech and viewpoint discrimination;

• Bars government interference with a client’s right to associate; and

• Prevents the government from imposing unconstitutional conditions on access to government services and benefits.

The government says that Trump was just exercising his free speech rights. It asserts that Jenner’s lawsuit “carries with it a dangerous risk of muzzling the Executive.” The government also argues that Jenner’s speech is not protected insofar as it “consists of employment practices involving racial discrimination [favoring women and minorities].”

The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee a litigant the unfettered right to the effective assistance of counsel of his or her choice.

The government says that: 1) clients (not law firms) have to assert such claims; 2) any impact of barring Jenner from federal buildings or its clients from federal contracts is speculative; and 3) Trump’s order does not violate those rights in any event.

Due Process is required before the government can deprive a person of liberty or property interests. It requires notice of the claims, clarity about their meaning, and the opportunity to be heard before the deprivation occurs. None of that occurred. The resulting harm, including damage to the firm’s reputation, was immediate and ongoing.

The government says that: 1) the order is sufficiently clear; 2) it has not yet harmed the firm; and 3) the firm will receive any required notice before the order actually injures it.

Equal Protection requires the government to treat similarly-situated entities similarly or, at a minimum, have a rational basis for failing to do so.

The government insists that Jenner is not being singled out for unfair treatment.

The Constitution’s Separation of Powers prohibits Trump from acting as accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. But he wore all of those hats in his executive order.

The government says that Trump’s order is an appropriate exercise of presidential power.

Attention All Trump Lawyers: It’s Time for a Gut Check

Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits. Upon admission to the bar, every attorney swears an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and to uphold the rule of law. A code of professional ethics requires any legal argument to be “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument” for changing it. Attorneys must ensure that their statements about facts are “reasonably based” on evidentiary support.

Trump’s retaliatory orders seek to intimidate lawyers and law firms into submission and thereby undermine the legal system. His own conduct refutes his lawyers’ contrary arguments. As other firms have capitulated, pledged “political neutrality,” and collectively committed to provide almost $1 billion in free legal services to Trump-designated causes, his executive orders’ stated concerns about those firms’ “conduct detrimental to critical American interests” miraculously disappeared.

Trump even boasted, “And I agree they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell—they give me a lot of money, considering.”

In one of the many amicus briefs supporting Jenner’s challenge, more than 800 law firms—including Deputy Associate Attorney General Lawson’s former firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips—urged that Trump’s executive order “should be permanently enjoined as a violation of core First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment guarantees, as well as bedrock separation-of-powers principles.”

“But something even more fundamental is at stake… [Trump’s] Orders pose a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.”

I don’t know what Trump’s lawyers see when they look into a mirror. But I know this: History will not be kind to them.

My wife Janet and I started keeping chickens 14 years ago; we currently have four. Since we eat eggs, we figured we should take some responsibility for how those eggs come to us (I went vegetarian at age 20 once I realized the cruelty and suffering involved in producing the hamburgers I devoured). We wanted to see whether we could obtain eggs ethically and in a way that gave us more connection with our food. And, as bird lovers, we wanted to get to know some hens.

Lately, with egg prices soaring, there’s widespread interest in keeping chickens as a way of saving money. That was not our purpose, and raising hens hasn’t lowered our food bills—though they do give us plenty of lovely eggs. We invested in a secure chicken house and a covered run big enough to give our girls space to scratch and dust-bathe when it’s raining (on most days, we let them roam everywhere in our backyard except the vegetable garden, which they would happily destroy if they could). We feed them the best organic chicken feed. And we take them to the vet if required (one of our sweetest hens ever, Silvie, needed a hernia operation, a significant expense; that happened a year ago, and she’s fine now). We haven’t tried to calculate how much each egg costs us, but it’s more than a pittance.

There’s both good and sad to report from our years of living with hens. But we’re still at it and still learning.

What Motivates a Chicken?

One of the biggest payoffs of our hen hobby is the experience of living with alien creatures. Chickens aren’t much like dogs or cats. Birds have brains that are organized differently from mammalian brains, and birds see colors we can’t register. Chickens communicate vocally with about 25 different calls, screams, whines, cackles, purrs, and clucks. Janet and I spend a lot of time trying to understand what our hens are thinking and feeling, and we’ve learned a little about what motivates them.

Food is certainly at or near the top of the list. Chickens display extraordinary enthusiasm for food and are vigorously competitive whenever any treat is on offer. Their motto: Eat fast and ask questions later.

Reproduction sometimes takes top priority in the hen brain. We don’t keep roosters, since we live within city limits and an ordinance forbids them. Nevertheless, we have outlaw neighbors with roosters, and we are reminded daily that the male of the Gallus gallus domesticus species can indeed make a lot of noise. Roosters are required for fertile eggs, but in the absence of males, hens lay anyway. Some of our hens go broody occasionally, spending a couple of weeks sitting in their nest trying to incubate eggs that aren’t there, because we’ve collected them and put them in our refrigerator. Broody hens need special care, as they tend not to eat enough to keep themselves healthy. The hens often squat for us, as they would for a rooster wishing to copulate; when they do, we give them a backrub to partially fulfill their instinctive need—and to take advantage of a receptive moment when we can pet them or pick them up.

In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives.

Curiosity may be proverbially associated with cats, but we’ve found that chickens are perpetually inquisitive. They spend a large portion of each day exploring every corner of our yard, scratching in the dirt and digging holes. What’s down there? Who knows what might turn up?

Cleanliness requires effort. Sometimes chickens and other birds roll around in the dust as a way of discouraging mites and other pests (spa day!); afterward they shake their feathers in satisfaction. Feather maintenance is always a priority, and time must be devoted daily to preening. The versatile and sensitive beak must be cleaned occasionally by carefully wiping it on a hard surface (or our pants). Chickens and humans have very different ideas about cleanliness, but hens do care about it in their own way.

Affection might not be the strongest chicken motivator, but it certainly deserves to be listed. At first, we thought our chickens’ seeming enjoyment of human cuddles was merely a clever way of begging for more food treats. But long-term observation has shown us that some hens are just as affectionate as any dog or cat, and that food is not a strategic goal of cuddles. One of our hens, Lulu (more about her below) demands at least one cuddling session every day, and will sit in your lap for half an hour or more, soaking up love and offering all the hugs she can give, considering that she has wings rather than arms. Silvie is a cuddler too, but less demanding in that regard than Lulu. The hens’ affection for one another is a little more complicated, as we’re about to see.

Stella: avian elegance, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)

The Politics of Hens

Chickens are highly social creatures and instinctively establish a pecking order: One hen occasionally pecks others on the back of the head (often when everyone is eating) to show her dominance.

Lulu is at the top of the social ladder, and she’s a big, loud, confident hen. Friends have asked us whether chickens have individual personalities; the best answer is an introduction to Lulu. She is bossy around the other hens and demanding toward us. If she wants treats or cuddles, she lets us know by screaming—sometimes for minutes at a time—and, unfortunately, she’s as loud as any rooster. Being the top hen comes with perks, but duties as well. It’s up to Lulu to keep social order, watch for danger, and manage relations with the humans.

Stella and Sparrow—of rare designer breeds, while Lulu and Silvie are Orpingtons—are smaller, lower in the order, and relatively quieter and more skittish. Whenever Lulu is close by, they must be wary of a peck. But they’re not constantly bullied and seem to be happy, well-adjusted hens. They know the order and get their needs met within it. Sparrow is a cute comedian, always evoking chuckles from us humans. Stella is a self-reliant, industrious, elegant loner; she’s the smallest of our hens and has a scratchy voice but lays big pastel green eggs.

Some of our clearest insights into chicken social behavior come at dusk, as the hens enter their house and choose a spot on the perch. Who gets to sleep where, and next to whom? The lineup is different every night, and each night there are several tense minutes of jockeying. Sparrow seems to love snuggling up against big, fluffy Lulu, despite the prospect of a peck. Stella likes ascending the henhouse ladder last, and, though low in the hierarchy, usually gets her choice of sleeping spot. Always-agreeable Silvie (our vet called her “a very personable chicken”) just takes whatever space is available.

The whole gang: Stella, Lulu (front, naturally), Silvie, and Sparrow, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)

Generous Teachers

I’ve been astounded to learn the degree to which chicken evolution has been hijacked by humans. Genes matter, and for thousands of years people have been wittingly or unwittingly selecting chickens for humanly desirable traits.

Often, chickens pay a price. Humans want eggs; so, they breed hens that lay up to 300 of them a year—an astonishing feat. Laying an egg is no small matter. It literally takes a lot out of you. While wild relatives of the domestic chicken can live 20 years, most commercial hens live short lives, often (when they’re not killed for meat) perishing after 2 to 5 years. And while they’re pumping out those eggs, they can easily suffer from nutritional deficiencies and bone problems.

People have also bred chickens for size, feather and egg color, and behavior (I’ll refrain from discussing the commercial chicken meat industry, which has its own breeding priorities). Indeed, breeding has created more extreme varieties of chicken than of any other animal species except Canis lupus familiaris (dog). All our most affectionate hens have been Orpingtons of one sort or another: no accident, as most Orpingtons tend to be friendly.

Is it right for one species to interfere so much with the evolution of another? Not many humans seem interested in entertaining the question. One could conclude that chickens have benefitted from their relationship with people: Gallus gallus is by far the most numerous bird species (there are nearly 30 billion of them). So, humans have contributed to chickens’ evolutionary success. But that success depends entirely on chickens’ continued utility to a capricious ape whose overall activities are wrecking the biosphere. My advice: If you love feathered creatures, keeping chickens can teach you a lot about them, but you’ll do far more for this broad class of animals by creating or restoring habitat for wild birds.

In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives. Chickens are smart, emotional animals. They can decimate local insect populations, but they are resilient and courageous. They deserve our respect.

Oh, did I mention the poop? There’s lots of it. Everywhere. Every day. It’s good for the compost pile and the garden.

Recommended reading:

Andrew Lawler, Why the Chicken Crossed the World

Sy Montgomery, What the Chicken Knows

Melissa Coughey, How to Speak Chicken

Theodore Xenophon Barber, The Human Nature of Birds

Gail Damerow, Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens

Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book

Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles

Joseph Barber, The Chicken: A Natural History

Clea Danaan, The Way of the Hen: Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens

www.backyardchickens.com

https://the-chicken-chick.com

https://welcometochickenlandia.com

I’m trying to determine whether it would be viable to do public appearances in support of my new book, a manifesto that carefully explains what the Left is, what it should fight for, and how radical demands are realistic.

On the one hand, early sales are promising, and there would be value in holding discussions about how the real Left outside the Democrats can rebuild.

On the other hand, travel is expensive so it’s only worthwhile if there is a host–bookstore, community group, library, university–to sponsor and to promote an event.

If you’re interested, and you have connections to such a host, please contact me: Rall.com/contact.

What IS the Left? What should we fight for? How can we rebuild outside of the Democrats? Order my latest book “WHAT’S LEFT” here at Rall.com. It comes autographed to the person of your choice, and I’ll deliver it anywhere. Cost including shipping is $29.95 in the USA.

The post “What’s Left” Book Tour? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title) – “deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, “The Apprentice,” while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people – red state and blue state – “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a human must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first ‘presentation of self’ on January 20th was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 Inspector Generals mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILLING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated Congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health/safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, “ Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people, families and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental and community necessities – many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, giveaways and with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts, take over more of the public lands, and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destruction against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide/slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder/starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by the Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85 percent, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title)—“deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, The Apprentice, while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people—red state and blue state—“YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a Human, must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first “presentation of self” on January 20 was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute, or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 inspectors general mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence, and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry, and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health and safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people, families, and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental, and community necessities—many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, and giveaways; with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts; take over more of the public lands; and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases, and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destructions against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food, and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder and starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population, and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by The Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85%, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild, and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

U.S. President Donald Trump has turned a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that spans three states on the southern border into a “military installation” to “address the emergency” he previously declared over unlawful immigration and drug trafficking. Trump’s memo authorizing this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally bars federal armed forces from conducting domestic law enforcement. The apparent plan is to let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people who cross the border unlawfully.

This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms. Moreover, it continues a pattern of the president stretching his emergency powers past their limits to usurp the role of Congress and bypass legal rights. He has misused a law meant to address economic emergencies to set tariffs on every country in the world. He declared a fake “energy emergency” to promote fossil fuel production. And he dusted off a centuries-old wartime authority to deport Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights violations.

As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.

The Posse Comitatus Act and the Military Purpose Doctrine

Last week, the military announced that soldiers deployed on the New Mexico-Mexico border will have “enhanced authorities” because they are on land that has now been designated part of Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a military installation located more than 100 miles away. The new authorities include the power to “temporarily detain trespassers” on the “military installation” and “conduct cursory searches of trespassers... to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DOD) property.”

Searching and apprehending migrants would ordinarily run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from directly participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so is expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The law stems from an Anglo-American tradition, centuries older than the Constitution, of restraining military interference in civilian affairs. It serves as a critical check on presidential power and a vital safeguard for both personal liberty and democracy.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation.

Nonetheless, several exceptions exist. The most significant is the Insurrection Act—a law that Trump floated using to address unlawful migration (although for now, his secretaries of defense and homeland security are reportedly recommending against such a move). In authorizing soldiers to conduct apprehensions and detentions on lands that have been newly designated as a “military installation,” the president is relying on a lesser-known loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine.”

The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement. A textbook example is the circumstance in which a person has driven drunk onto a military base. Soldiers may legally detain the intruder until civilian law enforcement arrives to take them into custody. This does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act because the primary purpose of the military’s activity is not to enforce the laws against driving while impaired, but to maintain order on the base and protect military assets and personnel.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation. Federal troops thus have a legitimate military reason, the argument goes, to apprehend, search, and detain migrants without violating the Posse Comitatus Act and without the president needing to invoke the Insurrection Act at all.

Evaluating the Legality of the Order

Using the military purpose doctrine to justify direct military involvement in immigration enforcement is a transparent ruse to evade the Posse Comitatus Act without congressional authorization. The doctrine is meant to apply only in cases where any law enforcement benefit is purely incidental. Here, the situation is the opposite.

The nominal justification for apprehending and detaining migrants who cross the border is protecting the installation. But the installation itself was created to apprehend and detain migrants, as well as to secure their removal. In the memo, this is described as “sealing the border” and “repelling the invasion” at the border. No matter how the Trump administration frames those activities, however, they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental”—they are the reason for creating the installation. And apprehending migrants who “trespass” on the installation is the primary way in which this law enforcement mission will be furthered.

If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

This use of the military is fundamentally different from the border deployments that have occurred in recent presidential administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. The military’s role until now has been limited to logistical support, such as assisting border agents with surveillance, infrastructure construction, and transportation. Providing such support does not constitute direct participation in law enforcement, so it does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Having soldiers perform core law enforcement duties like apprehending or detaining people, however, steps over the legal boundary.

The move also skirts a separate statute requiring congressional approval of any Pentagon takeover of more than 5,000 acres of federal lands except “in time of war or national emergency.” Here, in order to transfer control of land from the Interior Department, Trump is relying on a declaration of national emergency he issued on January 20 to address the “invasion” at the southern border, in which he asserted that “our southern border is overrun.” But on March 2, Trump triumphantly posted on social media that “the Invasion of our Country is OVER,” adding that in the preceding month, “very few people came.” His administration continues to tout the fact that unlawful border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from March confirms a 95% decline in monthly unauthorized crossings.

Leaving aside the question of whether an emergency, properly defined, existed on January 20 (it didn’t), the Trump administration has made a powerful case that there is no emergency now. Trump should be revoking the emergency declaration, not relying on it to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense.

Why It Matters

Aside from legal concerns, there are practical reasons why the U.S. armed forces shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law. Federal troops are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they’re generally not trained for domestic law enforcement. Asking them to do law enforcement’s job creates risks to migrants, U.S. citizens who may inadvertently trespass on federal lands at the border, and the soldiers themselves. And it pulls our armed forces away from their core mission of protecting the United States from foreign adversaries at a time when the military is already stretched thin.

Using the military for border enforcement is also a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.

Trump’s misuse of emergency powers similarly has larger implications. Emergency declarations unlock enhanced powers contained in 150 different provisions of law. Many of these are far more potent than the ability to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense. They include the authority to take over or shut down communications facilities, freeze Americans’ assets, and control domestic transportation. If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

The Role of the Courts and Congress

Unfortunately, the president’s abuses could be difficult to check. The Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute, and those who violate it may be prosecuted. But it’s unclear whether violations may serve as a basis for migrants to challenge their detention. As for Trump’s misuse of emergency powers, courts generally are reluctant to probe a president’s decision that an emergency exists (although in this case, the administration’s own statements might be sufficient to overcome the presumption of deference). And as the law currently stands, it is very difficult for Congress to terminate a national emergency declaration or undo actions that presidents take using their emergency powers.

These challenges highlight the urgent need for Congress to establish meaningful checks on the use of emergency powers and domestic deployment authorities. Last year, legislation that would have made it much easier for Congress to terminate emergency declarations passed out of committees in the House and Senate with near-unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Similar legislation was introduced in January by Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The Brennan Center has also proposed several key changes to the Posse Comitatus Act that would close the loopholes that threaten to swallow the law.

It may not be possible to pass these reforms soon, but the fight against executive overreach is not just a short-term one. Understanding the ways in which Trump’s actions threaten the rule of law today can help build support for enacting reforms in the future.

It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.

U.S. President Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven’t escaped the threats.

You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to The New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they’ll fall out of their sockets.)

It’s probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they’re under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it’s still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.

Bad News

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he’s back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What’s new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.

Even before Trump won the election, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn’t followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper’s opinion section on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper’s editorial board and instituted AI-generated “political ratings” for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.

I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of The Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he’s been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby, and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.

It doesn’t help that other large media companies have recently capitulated to lawsuits that Trump, as one of his hobbies, filed or threatened to file. Last December, ABC News settled a defamation suit involving star anchor George Stephanopoulos’s description of Trump’s sexual abuse trial with an apology and $15 million for a Trump-related foundation. In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from 2021 over the company’s suspension of Trump’s social-media accounts in the wake of the January 6 assault on the Capitol. It agreed to pay him $25 million and, coincidentally (of course), tossed out all its DEI initiatives. Recently, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to mediation for a lawsuit Trump brought over editorial decisions made when “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Kamala Harris. (He later upped his demand to a whopping $20 billion in damages.) In all three cases, Trump’s legal claims were widely seen as weak, yet the companies chose not to test them in court.

Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump wasn’t satisfied with such groveling. He never will be. (He recently renewed pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS News’s license.) His need to dominate, which makes your average control freak look weak-kneed, keeps him demanding ever more obeisance. Take, for instance, his response to The Associated Press’ policy of continuing to call the body of water he renamed the “Gulf of America,” the “Gulf of Mexico.” He promptly banned AP reporters from covering most of his official events. Even after AP won a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds and the judge in the case, a Trump appointee no less, ordered the White House to lift all restrictions on the news agency, an AP reporter and photographer were still barred from a White House news conference on the very day the court order was to take effect.

AP, a 178-year-old cooperative, with four billion readers daily in nearly 100 countries, could afford to take the federal government to court. Many smaller news outlets can’t.

More Bad News

However much Donald Trump may overestimate his abilities, he is a pro at playing the media. His instinct, talent, skill—I don’t know exactly what to call it—is to read the room remarkably accurately, and his rooms are increasingly restricted to his boosters. He’s spent decades both courting and denigrating the press, all the while honing his innate sense of what makes news. You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

This is not for lack of trying. Back when newspapers delivered the news once or twice a day, reporters “worked a story,” filling in details to make it as complete as possible by deadline. Now, with our 24/7 news cycle, digitized news media, and myriad distractions, when news drops, reporters put up a quick placeholder—a few sentences on a website or live blog—and then add to it continually as the story and their understanding of it develop. The result is news dolloped out in bite-sized bits, digestible but seldom filling. Meanwhile, news outlets suffer from a journalistic version of FOMO (fear of missing out on a scoop), which can lead to their chasing dubious stories with sometimes unsettling consequences, as when multiple news outlets picked up a false report on X about Trump’s tariffs, which sent the stock market soaring and then erasing $2.4 trillion in value within half an hour.

Trump thrives in just such a context by carelessly creating chaos and a continuous loop of contradictory headlines. His former aide Steve Bannon seemed amused when he suggested in 2018 that the way to drive the media crazy was “to flood the zone with shit.” It’s a practice the humor-deficient Trump has ardently embraced.

Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better.

For a prime example, you need look no further than the staged unveiling of his tariff policies. Like a carnival barker calling out, “Step right up, ladies and gents, for the greatest tariff show on Earth!,” he teased for months about the tariffs to come, christening April 2 as “Liberation Day” and promising to divulge what they were then. That day dawned and percentages determined by a formula about as sophisticated as something scribbled on the back of an envelope were revealed to much fanfare and wall-to-wall press coverage. A few days later, some of the tariffs were imposed. A few days after that, many of them were paused, then some withdrawn, others left pending or threatened, and on (and on) it goes. With the policy changing by the hour, so did the rationales for it, leaving the media endlessly scurrying to catch up.

As the world economy tanked in response, news stories dutifully noted the justifications du jour, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s appraisal that it took “great courage” for Trump to “stay the course” as long as he did. (Most of the reciprocal tariffs lasted about 12 hours.) But the general tone of the reporting shifted, as if the media suddenly sensed that they could finally say out loud that the wannabe emperor had no clue. So I guess it is “the economy, stupid” (to cite President Bill Clinton’s aide James Carville), not civil liberties, healthcare, job security, historical accuracy, or any of the other basics, which I stupidly thought might tip the balance in reporting.

Some Good News

Tempting as it may be, the media can’t ignore what a president says. It’s unprofessional to abet the public’s ignorance. It’s also dangerous to democracy. An ill-informed populace is easily manipulated and, in regions without a local news source—in 2024, there were 206 “news deserts” in the United States, encompassing almost 55 million Americans—it’s hard to maintain a sense of community or organize to challenge bad governance. Still, amid all the chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration, the media are not defenseless. His endless efforts to undermine them attest to their continuing power and importance. Being of a practical turn of mind, I’ve culled some ideas for how to use that power from several sources and added a few of my own to come up with seven-and-a-half propositions for good journalism in the Age of Donald J. Trump.

1. Get the Story Right

If you think about it, the only thing journalists have going for them is that people believe them. Without that, their usefulness ceases to exist. So, it’s important (particularly in the Age of Trump) that they call out lies and flimflam in clear, accurate, precise, straightforward language, including in headlines. For example, Trump’s desire to turn Gaza into a golf course is ethnic cleansing, not a “plan to rebuild” Gaza, and tariffs are “import taxes,” not an incentive to reindustrialize America. It’s necessary also to keep repeating the truth in the face of lies: Immigrants, for instance, are considerably less likely to be imprisoned for crimes than U.S.-born people (though you certainly wouldn’t know that from listening to Trump and crew), and pulling funding from universities is as much about curbing antisemitism as Covid was about clearing our sinuses.

2. Supply Significance, Context, Proportion, and Consequences

Key tasks for reporters and analysts are to separate the substantial from the silly, the consequential from the sensational, and random musings from faits accomplis, then to report the hell out of the real issues, keep them prominent within the churn of news cycles, and explain why they matter. A place to begin is by giving less attention to Trump’s executive orders—aptly defined by a law professor as “just press releases with nicer stationery”—and more attention to the effects of his policies that get enacted. And while his ruminations may bear noting, they could appear, not in headlines, but on, say, page 11 (or its online equivalent), which is where The Boston Globe relegated its report of the local 100,000-strong Hands Off! protest.

3. Heed Framing

News stories are a snapshot of a specific, often fleeting moment during which reporters decide what to include, what to leave out, and what to emphasize. The problem arises when conventional thinking and herd instinct solidify those choices as the only choices. There may be just two dominant American political parties, for instance, but there are other political forces at work in the country and we’d all benefit if they weren’t covered primarily as nuisances or threats. And while gyrations of the stock market matter, they matter less to most people than gyrations in their rents or mortgages, grocery bills, or prospects for retirement.

4. Resist Euphemisms, Circumlocutions, and Normalizing the Abnormal

The term “sanewashing”—reporting Trump’s loony pronouncements as if they were lucid thoughts or comments—hasn’t been popping up much since the 2024 presidential campaign ended. It’s been replaced by the tendency of mainstream journalism to reinforce the status quo, as when the CEO of CNN instructed his staff to omit mention of Trump’s felonies and his two impeachments in their inauguration coverage. Or maybe it’s been folded into the journalistic task of trying to make sense of events—what The Atlantic‘s editor Jeffrey Goldberg called a “bias toward coherence”—which presented the schoolyard taunts about tariffs slung between Trump advisors Elon Musk and Peter Navarro as if they were serious policy discussions.

5. Lead With Empathy

They’re called news stories for a reason. As cheap as tug-the-heartstrings journalism can be, readers, listeners, and viewers pay attention to stories about people, especially when they’re like them. So, while USAID staff getting locked out of their offices by Elon Musk’s DOGE may not resonate with many Americans, parents whose kids are locked out of daycare because its funding was cut by Musk, a billionaire father of perhaps more children than he can keep track of, probably will.

6. Control the Message

Here’s the central messaging thing about Trump: He’s remarkably skilled at lassoing any discussion, any topic he brings up, and holding onto it. That means the media, whose relationship with politicians should be inherently adversarial, all too often starts out on the defensive if it tries to hold him accountable for his words and deeds. Of course, he never apologizes, never takes responsibility for anything, never rules anything out, and never admits to error or failure. Instead, when he says something outlandish and gets called on it, he doubles down and dispatches his minions to repeat and embellish it. The media then amplify and discuss it, as if it were actual governance, rather than gibberish, whim, or theatrics. Which means that we get stories about what Trump said and then stories about the stories about what he said, and on and on until he comes up with a new distraction.

7. Be Creative, Adventuresome, and Strategic, and Always, Always Stick up for Each Other

This is hardly the first time the press has faced government hostility, and the American news media have struggled for years to overcome skepticism and win over tough audiences. Trade publications, podcasts, newsletters, and other independent and niche outlets fill some gaps and help engage not-so-obvious audiences, but standing up to power can be a very lonely task. In a time when even Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski admits to being scared, self-censorship can seem like an all too appealing choice. So it’s essential for other journalists to unite to resist unfair restrictions on any journalist, as even Newsmax and Fox News did against Trump’s treatment of AP. Journalists can also highlight the courage of their colleagues to let them know they’re not alone.

Of course, just about all of the above costs money, so my final nudge is not to journalists but to those of us who value good journalism. Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better. For all the deserved criticism of the American media, they remain one of the strongest pillars propping up what’s left of democracy in a time that’s been anything but good for the First Amendment. We can’t afford to let them topple.

The Trump administration’s partial budget plan released Friday is just its latest repudiation of the Trump campaign’s promises to help people struggling at the margins of the economy—an economy that President Donald Trump’s misguided tariff policies are threatening to tank.

This partial budget does not discuss the president’s intended tax breaks—tilted to the well off—or policies he will include (like those he supports as part of the reconciliation bill) to take food assistance and health coverage away from people who need them to meet their basic needs and to make college more expensive. The full budget will come later. But while the administration’s partial plan is limited to the part of the budget that Congress funds through the annual appropriations process, its proposal to cut that funding by nearly one-quarter is plenty bad enough, harming people, communities, and the economy.

During the campaign, President Trump said, “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But his budget proposes a devastating cut to rental assistance—which makes rent affordable for 10 million people—reducing funding by $27 billion below the amount provided in 2025 across five programs. This would cause millions of people to lose assistance they need to pay the rent each month, placing them at risk of eviction and homelessness.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy.

These cuts would likely grow even deeper over time, since the budget would also consolidate multiple rental assistance programs into to a block grant that would be more vulnerable to cuts in the future. The budget also would impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance (apparently except for seniors and people with disabilities), a policy that would abruptly evict or end assistance for many low-paid workers and others who aren’t able to afford market rents after that period.

In addition, the budget proposes severe cuts to other housing programs, such as sharply reducing funding for housing and other services for people experiencing homelessness, cutting housing resources for Indigenous people, and eliminating funding for local agencies protecting people from housing discrimination and other fair housing violations, and block grants that fund affordable housing and community development at the local level.

The president also said “your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline—all can be cut down in half,” but this budget eliminates LIHEAP, the program that helps low-income households afford to heat and cool their homes; reduces availability of the most affordable sources of energy—solar and wind—by cutting efforts to bring these sources online and make them available in low-income communities; and cuts programs that reduce energy waste.

As the President’s ill-conceived trade policies threaten to tip the country into a recession later this year, the budget disinvests from key sources of long-run economic growth. The budget cuts the National Science Foundation (NSF) by more than half and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by about 40%. This is short-sighted: NSF and NIH funding supports foundational research that spurs innovation, leading to greater economic growth. The private sector will not support this work because there is no financial incentive to do so.

The budget also disinvests from America’s future workers, cutting $4.5 billion from K-12 education despite the Trump campaign’s statement that “we are going to keep spending our money” on education.

Most fundamentally, the budget fails to propose a serious agenda for the U.S. economy or for people who haven’t been included enough in the country’s overall prosperity. The budget presents no agenda for addressing housing or childcare affordability, improving educational outcomes for those our education system doesn’t serve well, maintaining and strengthening innovation, or broadening opportunity.

And today’s funding request again breaks President Trump’s repeated promises to protect Social Security, including “Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.” On paper, the administration provides the same amount of funding next year as this year, but this is not enough to keep up with inflation, fixed expenses, and growing demand as the number of Social Security recipients grows as the population ages. The administration has already pushed out 7,000 Social Security Administration staff despite having the money to pay them, and it has already made it harder for seniors and people with disabilities to get the Social Security benefits they’ve earned. This is not what Congress intended when it passed this year’s budget.

The administration is claiming these massive cuts are necessary under the guise of fiscal responsibility, but the proposed $2.5 billion cut to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding—primarily for tax enforcement—reveals that any commitment to fiscal responsibility is limited. Funding for IRS enforcement pays for itself multiple times over: It provides the staff and technology to catch wealthy tax cheats and encourage everyone to pay the taxes they legally owe.

The administration justifies many cuts by saying that states are better positioned to cover the costs of various public services and infrastructure needs. This ignores the federal government’s important role in ensuring adequate investment nationwide, including in states and communities that face more economic challenges. The problems would be compounded by potentially large cost shifts in Medicaid and SNAP being considered in Congress. States would face even greater challenges—and the impacts on people and communities would grow—in a recession when state revenues fall but they still have to balance their budgets.

The president’s budget counts on funding in the emerging tax and budget bill for immigration enforcement. With that, it continues to prioritize a mass deportation apparatus that has gone too far already by disappearing people without due process and ending lawful immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people.

Since taking office, the Trump administration, often acting through DOGE, has unilaterally frozen congressionally approved funding, implemented large-scale staffing reductions that are harming public services, and threatened the security of people’s personal information. Having frozen funding in contradiction to enacted funding laws, the president’s budget now asks Congress to codify and continue these unilateral cuts next year, including through the proposed cuts to NIH, NSF, and the Department of Education. Codifying these cuts would make congressional supporters accomplices in this administration’s endeavor to make government less effective in finding cures for diseases, maintaining American technological leadership, and getting a good education.

The president’s harmful agenda goes well beyond what was released today. The president and his congressional allies are moving forward on a budget and tax bill that deeply cuts health coverage through Medicaid, food assistance through SNAP, and college aid to partially pay for expensive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy.

At the same time, the president’s chaotic, indiscriminate, and steep tariffs have sharply increased the risk of recession, which could lead to a rise in unemployment and the number of people who need help to afford the basics, just as those supports are slated for cuts.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy—and plan a better course for the country.