How many dead children is it going to take before Israel and its Zionist supporters are satisfied? What is the number that needs to be met before governments in the West intervene? When will the United States and other countries stop selling weapons and funding the genocide of children? This is a serious question.

Because after 19 months of genocide, Israel has reportedly killed 17,400 children. Many more are buried under rubble and presumed dead, but not included in this running total of children killed.

Clearly, 17,400 is not enough dead children, since Israel continues to kill one child in Gaza every 45 minutes, an average of 30 children killed every day.

As a Jew, I am well aware that Israel has been systematically killing children for 77 years. This is not new. What is new is the world is watching children blown to literal pieces.

As of March 2, Israel has cut off all aid to Gaza. Israel has blocked food, water, and medicine from reaching the 2.3 million people in Gaza. “A million children in Gaza depend on humanitarian aid. Their lives are hanging in the balance,” said Juliette Touma, director of communications for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator said the halting of humanitarian aid amounts to “cruel collective punishment.”

The human beings under siege in Gaza are not starving; they are being deliberately starved. There is a very clear distinction between the two.

But apparently, it’s still not enough dead children. Israel broke the latest cease-fire agreement on March 18. The Gaza Health Ministry says 2,326 people, including 732 children, have been killed since that day when Israel shattered the truce. The overall death toll since the war broke out is at 52,418.

Again, how many dead children are enough?

Zionists answer that they want their hostages back. And yet Israel continues to break cease-fires and fails to agree to further “prisoner”-for-hostage swaps. Does anyone honestly believe that Israel’s intentions are to bring home the hostages? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently admitted that it’s not about the hostages, it’s about eliminating Hamas.

This is ethnic cleansing, pure and simple. The goal is to eliminate Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Jerusalem, the same goal Israel has had since 1948 during the Nakba, translated as the catastrophe, referring to the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multiethnic and multicultural society. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. To this day, a large portion of the Palestinian population remains refugees, living in camps.

As a Jew, I am well aware that Israel has been systematically killing children for 77 years. This is not new. What is new is the world is watching children blown to literal pieces, and having limbs torn off by United States missiles, while watching on their smartphones. They are watching schools and mosques being bombed. Hospitals. Bakeries. Journalists. NGOs providing food and aid.

Again, how many dead children is enough?

On March 4, 2025, Edward Heartney, a minister-counselor at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, remarked at the General Assembly that the Sustainable Development Goals “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty” and interests.

This rejection of the SDGs aligns with President Donald Trump’s retreat from multilateralism and overall dissatisfaction with the U.N. For example, the Trump administration has moved to pull the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Paris agreement on climate action, and the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, the administration has frozen foreign aid, initiated a global trade war, and failed to pay its U.N. dues as of May 2025.

How can we remodel institutions and programs to be less dependent on American funds while also ensuring the continual engagement of the United States as a leader?

Although intended to prioritize the United States, these developments threaten progress on the SDGs, with negative implications for the global fight against poverty.

What are the Sustainable Development Goals?

The SDGs are a collection of 17 goals set for achievement by 2030, subdivided into targets and indicators. They form the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all U.N. member states in 2015. They provide a blueprint to eradicate poverty and pursue inclusive and environmentally responsible economic development under conditions of peace and partnership.

Contrary to Heartney’s claims on sovereignty, the 2030 Agenda is voluntary and non-binding. They are a framework, not a prescription. In fact, the SDGs have not received nearly enough policy and financial support as evidenced by their lack of progress. Although there has been progress in some areas, only 17% of SDG targets are on track to be achieved according to the 2024 SDG report.

How, though, does the America First agenda impact global poverty? While many linkages can be draw, SDGs 3, 5, and 13 provide some examples.

SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being

SDG 3 covers a wide range of health issues. There are strong correlations between a country’s income status and its performance on some SDG 3 indicators. For example, 2019 data places the cause of death by communicable diseases and maternal, prenatal, and nutrition conditions in low-income countries at 47%, versus only 6% for high-income countries.

Poor health is not only a symptom of poverty. It can compound cycles of poverty through inhibiting disabilities, crippling medical expenditures, and premature death. Meanwhile, the significance of American support for good health across the developing world cannot be overstated, and actions such as freezing foreign aid and cutting the UNAIDS budget are projected to cause the deaths of more than 200,000 people from AIDS and tuberculosis alone by the end of 2025.

However, on the positive side, in South Africa—the country with the highest number of people with HIV-AIDS—the government has committed to provide support for HIV-AIDS treatment in 2025 from the National Treasury, aiming to become a more self-sufficient country.

SDG 5: Gender Equality

There are positive links between improving girls’ and women’s access to health services, education, and economic opportunities and the overall living standards of a country. Hence, SDG 5 aims to end discrimination against girls and women and empower them with equal means. However, the Trump administration’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy risks undermining work and advocacy for SDG 5. While this anti-DEI policy promotes merit-based systems and unity on its face, the administration is also using this campaign to target gender-related programs.

Additionally, by February 20, 2025, the freeze on humanitarian assistance resulted in more than 900,000 women per week being denied contraception around the world. Family planning activities were also not part of a limited waiver to the freeze, aligning with the administration’s overall anti-family planning policies. However, support for civil society organizations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and volunteerism, can help plug gaps. For example, 200 U.N. Volunteers recently worked with the WHO in the Republic of the Congo to raise awareness about HIV-AIDS and to challenge related stigma via a social media campaign.

SDG 13: Climate Action

The Trump administration’s rejection of the Paris agreement also aligns with support of an “overdue course correction on… climate ideology, which pervade the SDGs,” in the words of Heartney. The Paris agreement—the preeminent international treaty to combat climate change—is essential to SDG 13. Without the participation of the United States, which is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, the Paris agreement and SDG 13 are set to fail.

However, at this stage, climate action is not an “ideology” but a necessity, and the Green transition is not with its own economic opportunities that could advantage the United States.

Similar to the case of SDG 3, not only do low-income households experience the worst impacts of climate change, these impacts can compound poverty through property damage, income disruptions, displacement, and premature death. This further threatens progress on SDG 1.1 (extreme poverty), which has been one bright spot of success amid the ailing SDGs. For example, between 1990 and 2019, the prevalence of extreme poverty in developing Asia fell from 58% to 5%. Climate change, however, could push millions back into extreme poverty by 2030.

Fortunately, efforts like AMERICA IS ALL IN commit Americans to the Paris Agreement even as climate action is moving forward on other fronts. For example, Green bonds have seen rapid growth—rising from $40 billion in 2015 to more than $500 billion in 2023—with the United States being a top issuer in that period.

Looking Forward

In mid-July, New York will host the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), which will review five SDGs, including SDGs 3 and 5. The HLPF provides an opportunity to have important conversations about these issues, and to find solutions.

For example, although the SDGs need the participation of the United States, how can we remodel institutions and programs to be less dependent on American funds while also ensuring the continual engagement of the United States as a leader? The recently adopted Pact for the Future—while not without flaws—also offers an impetus for discussions on why multilateralism is retreating. Finally, it is important to continue leveraging the potential of SDG localization in light of insufficient national action and leadership.

When it comes to multilateral action, the Trump administration is about to prove that the United States is not, in fact, an indispensable nation.

In a disturbing advancement of the Project 2025 playbook for eradicating abortion, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using the release of a new pseudo-study as a pretense for the Food and Drug Administration to review mifepristone’s safety and efficacy. The use of this widely discredited self-published report is a clear political maneuver by the Trump administration and anti-abortion extremists to curb access to telehealth abortion and end access to mifepristone more widely, against the scientific evidence and the will of the American public.

I am a public health researcher and abortion access advocate and have been tracking access to the abortion pill since it was first approved in France in 1988. I feel confident that, regardless of the outcome of this illegitimate review, two things will remain true: Abortions pills will still be extremely safe, and abortion pills will still be available—everywhere.

Abortion pills are safe. Period. The fact that Secretary Kennedy has asked the FDA to reevaluate the medications based on a single, unpublished junk science report is absurd. We have mountains of data and decades of clinical experience documenting their safety, whether provided through an in-person visit at a clinic or, since 2020, via telehealth. The World Health Organization has also said that abortion pills are safe even when taken without medical supervision, also known as self-managed abortion. Data support the safety of all of these forms of access.

As activists and clinicians expand these new routes of access to abortion pills, we are providing an immediate, practical solution for people who need abortion access, and thereby reducing the harm that abortion bans create.

Abortion pills are everywhere. As courts and legislatures have been systematically blocking access to abortion across the country, clinicians and activists—myself included—have been setting up and illuminating innovative routes of access that reach people where they are with safe abortion access, including in states with restrictions. As a result of our collective efforts, abortion pills are now readily available by mail for $150 or less—and free for those who can’t afford any amount—in all 50 states, even states with bans. Access routes currently include telehealth from U.S. providers operating from states with laws that shield them from prosecution, international telehealth services that mail pills to the U.S., community networks that send pills by mail for free, and e-commerce vendors that mail pills to all states.

An organization I co-founded, Plan C, tracks these different services to learn about their offerings, including whether they do a medical screening, what type of pills they offer, and how much they cost. Our ongoing investigations—which include mystery shopping and laboratory testing to verify that the pills are real—document a rich ecosystem of abortion pill access. These are real services providing practical, affordable, medically-safe abortion access, even in states with bans. They are all discoverable online. We index and share this information through our Guide to Pills so that people can learn about this ecosystem, and those who are seeking abortions know that they still have options.

These routes of access, combined with the clinic-based care options that exist in states that still allow it, have been so successful in reaching people that there are now even more abortions occurring in the United States than prior to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Guttmacher, a leading abortion research organization, reports that clinician-provided abortions in the United States rose by more than 100,000 between 2020 and 2024, and that figure does not even include self-managed abortions or abortions facilitated by telehealth shield providers prescribing across state lines into states with bans. The Society of Family Planning also has been documenting abortion post-Roe and reports that these shield providers are serving approximately 10,000 people per month in states that totally or partially ban access to care.

As activists and clinicians expand these new routes of access to abortion pills, we are providing an immediate, practical solution for people who need abortion access, and thereby reducing the harm that abortion bans create, particularly for populations underserved by healthcare systems. We are also showing a new way forward for modern abortion access and laying the groundwork for eventual policy change (which will likely only be possible after our U.S. democracy is restored).

This scenario has already played out in other countries, with resulting improvements in abortion access. For instance, it was largely based on the experiences of patients in Ireland who received abortion pills by mail from Women on Web to safely terminate their pregnancies that parliament liberalized abortion access. In Mexico, the widespread grassroots sharing of information about how to use misoprostol—a widely available ulcer medication—for abortion, ultimately paved the way to policy reform, with abortion pills now officially registered in the country.

For decades, abortion pills have been so severely restricted by politics and overregulation that envisioning a radically different future in which the pills are universally available by mail—or even over the counter—is difficult for most. But this future is coming. Many would say it is largely already here. And, what is particularly notable, given the current FDA safety review based on fabricated claims about the “dangers” of abortion pills, is that these new, modern routes of access are possible precisely because abortion pills are so safe. They are safer than Tylenol, safer than Viagra, and research has demonstrated time and again that they are absolutely safe enough to put directly in the hands of the person who needs them.

It is graduation season. Years of relentless work, of late nights spent studying for exams that beat like a drum on our most anxious fears, days bent over desks and keyboards trying to gather up words and put together logical arguments built on existing literature. The world was spinning so fast because these students were spinning it with their dedication, focus, and care. And now they are about to graduate—a huge accomplishment that represents, for many, a celebration of all whose sacrifice made these degrees possible.

I teach at John Jay College, part of the City University of New York system. At my college, the majority of students are first-generation college students—the first ones in their families to access higher education. This access required immense sacrifice from many ancestors, parents, siblings, grandparents. When they walk across that stage to receive their diploma, they are not alone. Each person walking across that stage is followed by a parade of ancestors who glow in this immense, powerful accomplishment that celebrates all of their legacies.

For many of my immigrant students, as well as for me, these sacrifices often look like fleeing homes and lands, letting go of the ability to fully express ourselves as we learn a new language, stumbling through years of trying to articulate the depth of our feelings and the texture of our experiences while trying on words that fit awkwardly in our mouths and on our bodies.

We need to do a better job, including the media, in naming this harrowing attack on higher education as an attack on freedom itself.

The City University of New York stands as a beacon against this darkness. Founded in 1847 as the nation's first free public institution of higher education, CUNY's core mission has always been providing first-rate education to all students, regardless of background or financial means. This beacon represents the best of what America can be—a place where education illuminates paths forward for all people, not just those born into privilege.

My students at John Jay College honor these sacrifices with their brilliance and vision. Their degrees aren't just pieces of paper—they are vessels of transformation, tools of liberation forged through years of intellectual courage. According to U.S. News and World Report, John Jay ranks No. 6 nationwide for social mobility (with 6 of the top 10 colleges in that category being City University of New York schools), with 85% of students graduating with zero college debt. These aren't just statistics; they represent real lives being remade, real futures expanding beyond what was once thought possible. In the classroom, in our meetings and research, I witness their world-building every day. They bring vast experience, curiosity, and wisdom from all corners of the world, analyzing problems and creating solutions with remarkable insight that can only come from minds that have been both challenged and nurtured by rigorous education.

This is why it breaks my heart to have conversations with students this semester unlike any I've had before—conversations filled with pain and confusion about their place in our shared reality. When they entered college, they believed they were doing the right thing for their families, communities, and our collective future. But the narrative around higher education has shifted dramatically under the Trump presidency, casting their decisions in a harsh new light—a deliberate attempt to extinguish the very flame of opportunity that has guided generations toward better lives.

This narrative shift is most evident in discussions around student loans. The administration has taken an aggressive stance against anyone with student loans, treating education as a moral failing rather than an investment. These policies represent a direct assault on the founding promise of institutions like CUNY—that education should illuminate paths forward for all people, not just those born into privilege. The light that these institutions have cast for generations is now being deliberately dimmed by those who see education as a commodity rather than a right. During the Biden era, programs like the SAVE plan eased the financial burden of education on middle and lower-income Americans, allowing many of us to meet our financial obligations while paying back our loans. This plan was specifically designed to address racial inequities in student debt, recognizing that Black borrowers typically owe 95% of their original debt even after 20 years, and that Latino borrowers face higher default rates. The SAVE plan was projected to make 85% of community college borrowers debt-free within 10 years—directly benefiting the diverse student populations at institutions like CUNY. Now, the rhetoric has changed dramatically.

"American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies," declares Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insists that "if you take out a loan, you have to pay it back. It's very simple." This simplistic framing attempts to divide us, painting those who sought education as enemies of those who didn't, when in reality, both groups often come from the same middle and working-class backgrounds. Education doesn't make anyone morally superior or inferior—yet this administration aims to create such divisions, further harming those who experience financial precarity.

Even beyond this damaging narrative, my students are entering a world of deep uncertainty. The positions they hoped for—research assistants at institutions, staff at nonprofits—have been decimated by budget cuts instigated by billionaire Elon Musk. Meanwhile, universities themselves are failing students in profound ways.

Our students deserve a government that sees their pursuit of education as admirable, not criminal. They deserve universities that protect them, not betray them.

Some institutions, like Columbia, have abandoned their responsibility to protect students, turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with little concern for their welfare. In one harrowing account, ICE agents showed up at a Columbia student's apartment, demanding entry without a warrant. Ranjani Srinivasan avoided months—perhaps years—of unlawful detention only because her roommate knew their rights and refused to let agents in without proper documentation. Eventually, Ranjani left the country, her education and dreams interrupted by fear. And she is not alone—countless talented young people from around the world are now choosing not to come here because they cannot trust the United States with their visions and futures. They see the shadows of betrayal, and they're right to reconsider.

Other universities, like those in Ohio state, are dismantling critical programs and criminalizing certain perspectives, erasing entire histories from the classroom. These decisions are not representative of where the public is; for instance, in Ohio the bill banning diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts from the classroom was the most protested-against bill in Ohio history with roughly 1,500 people submitting statements in opposition to it passing and about 30 submitting statements in support. Academic freedom—what makes American universities powerful engines of transformation—is being systematically undermined, with universities complicit in this process. With the graduation season upon us, we are seeing the shape this complicity takes now. On May 14, New York University decided to withhold the diploma of their valedictorian for speaking truth to power—simply mentioning the atrocities taking place in Palestine. This act of courage is exactly what we should hope our students would do when witnessing injustice.

This attack on education is part of a broader assault on public institutions. When billionaires like Musk unravel our public services, they are revealing that this has nothing to do with government efficiency—instead, this too is about a fundamental attack on the infrastructure of democracy itself. This convergence of oligarchic wealth and authoritarian politics threatens not just our government services but our very capacity to exist as a democratic society. Our freedom to thrive—to access education, to expand our minds, to challenge ourselves, to grow beyond our circumstances—hangs in the balance as they attempt to dim the collective light we've worked generations to build.

We need to do a better job, including the media, in naming this harrowing attack on higher education as an attack on freedom itself. Education remains essential to democracy not just as a concept but as a lived practice. Public universities serve as beacons of social mobility in an increasingly unequal landscape. The pursuit of knowledge is not a crime but a fundamental right that must be defended in policy, in funding, and in our national conversation.

Our students deserve a government that sees their pursuit of education as admirable, not criminal. They deserve universities that protect them, not betray them. They deserve a future where their sacrifices and those of their families are honored, not mocked. And they deserve a society that recognizes our collective liberation depends on our commitment to education as a public good—one that we must fight to preserve through voting, through advocacy, and through refusing the narrative that education is merely a private commodity.

To all students who are graduating: I'm so proud of you. All of your ancestors are cheering you on, celebrating you because you really are their wildest dreams coming true. Keep on world-building, even amid everything falling apart. Pick up the pieces and imagine the worlds of collective liberation that you have practiced building in classrooms where you worked across difference, where you learned to turn toward each other rather than away. You won't be alone in this work; we'll be there, right by your side, organizing in solidarity across our differences, just as you've learned to do. The skills of dialogue, of challenging each other with care, of finding common ground while honoring our distinct experiences—these are exactly what we need to rebuild our democratic institutions. Your education has prepared you not just for careers, but for the crucial work of collective action that lies ahead.

It would be tempting to dismiss U.S. President Donald Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting Federal Emergency Management Agency director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:

The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Gov. [Greg] Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else.

But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.

For example, the administration announced earlier this month it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.

“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.

This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for The Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut:

The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992—$14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.

But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.

Or take last week’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,

The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023.

Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News Friday, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to… the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy (DOE) to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.

Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about 40%. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90% more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.

That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: It became increasingly clear this week that the Republican congressional majority is all too willing to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.

And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch toward spending on clean energy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97% were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that

Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork, and delays investment.

That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register last week: Their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: Either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.

So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: Do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.

I don’t know about you, but the news continues to stress me out. Trump administration officials are using any excuse they can think of to detain and deport people whose points of view—or whose very existence on U.S. soil—seem to threaten their agenda.

Deportations to El Salvador

In March, the U.S. government sent 238 men to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison where they no longer have contact with family members or lawyers, and where overcrowding and cruel practices like solitary confinement, or far worse, seem to be commonplace. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released few details about who the men were, but when pressed, DHS officials claimed that most of them were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.

However, documents obtained by journalists revealed that about 75% of the detainees—179 of them—had no criminal records. They had, in essence, been kidnapped. Among them was a young Venezuelan make-up artist who was in U.S. custody while awaiting a political asylum hearing. After he made a legal border crossing into this country, immigration officials determined that he was being targeted because he was gay and his political views. However, DHS officials claimed that the man’s crown tattoos meant he was a member of Tren de Agua. It mattered not at all that those crowns had his parents’ names underneath them, suggesting that his father and mother were his king and queen. As they have admitted, government officials are unable to substantiate why men like him were detained and deported without any legal process, though a spokeswoman for DHS claimed that many of them “are actually terrorists… They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land.

Among those now detained in El Salvador is much-publicized Maryland resident and construction worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had lived in the U.S. since fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador as a teenager. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and detained him while he was driving with his five-year-old son in the backseat of his car. Trump administration officials did finally concede that he had been detained and deported due to an “administrative error.” However, they later backtracked, claiming (without evidence) that he belonged to the violent criminal gang MS-13. The case rose to national prominence thanks to protest demonstrations and federal court orders for the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. (No such luck, of course!)

I can’t help wondering just how many other immigrants and refugees like him are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons (or perhaps those of other countries) without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention. And we can all keep wondering unless the Trump administration offers such deportees due process so that the legal system can vet their identities and the reasons for seizing and imprisoning them.

Asylum Seekers in Panama

These days, the horrors pile up so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them. It seems like ages ago, but only last February the administration sent 300 asylum seekers to Panama City under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows State Department officials to deport citizens of foreign countries whose presence they believe to be contrary to this country’s interests. After the Panamanian authorities locked the migrants in a hotel without access to their families or outsiders, they told them they had to return to their countries of origin.

Many of them feared for their lives if they did so. Among them was a young Cameroonian woman who had fled her country because the government there had imprisoned and tortured her for weeks after soldiers in her town accused her of membership in a separatist political group, and a mother and daughter who had fled Turkey for fear of imprisonment for participating in peaceful anti-government protests there.

When 70 of the asylum seekers refused the government’s order to return to their countries of origin, Panamanian officials sent them to a jungle camp where they lacked adequate food, clean water, or privacy of any sort. After an uproar from human rights activists, the detainees were finally released and left to find legal asylum elsewhere. Several told journalists that they were never even given the opportunity to apply for asylum upon entering the U.S., though American officials claimed—unlikely indeed!—that the migrants hadn’t told them that their lives were in danger.

Most difficult for me to stomach is the thought that those asylum seekers had fled to my country, assuming they would be protected by the rule of law and presumed innocent until proven guilty, not robbed of their freedom. At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land. And I would hope that whomever we spoke to would at least be willing to hear our stories before deciding to ship us elsewhere.

In their ordinariness, some photos I’ve seen of those deported immigrant families remind me of my own family. In one, for instance, a mother is stroking the face of her distraught young son who, rather than just having a bad day at school as mine might have, was stuck in a foreign city without his belongings, friends, or access to places to play. Many of us, especially military families like mine, know what it’s like to be stuck at a waystation without our possessions and the various contraptions (cooking equipment, kid-sized furniture, cleaning products) that make having a family comfortable. Now, imagine that scenario with no end in sight and no one who even speaks your language to help you out. Imagine parenting through that!

Of course, give the Trump administration some credit. It hasn’t opposed all migrants fleeing persecution. In fact, the president recently invited Afrikaners of South Africa, the White ethnic minority whose grandparents were the architects of that country’s apartheid system of racial segregation, to seek refugee status in the United States on the basis of supposed anti-White racial discrimination in their homeland. (At the same time, of course, Marco Rubio’s State Department tossed the Black South African ambassador out of this county!)

Detaining Student Activists and Expelling U.S. Citizens

As the State Department revokes the green cards of hundreds of students in the U.S. for exercising their first amendment rights, at least several—maybe more—have been detained indefinitely under the Immigration and Nationalities Act. Among them, pro-Palestinian student-activist Mahmoud Khalil is being held at a remote detention facility in Louisiana, separated from his family in New York City, where his son was recently born while Mahmoud was in captivity. The government is considering sending him back to Syria where he grew up in a refugee camp or to Algeria where he is still a citizen. The Trump administration wrote on social media that his is “the first arrest of many to come.”

Apparently, the administration is casting a very wide net as it detains and deports people. In early April, The Washington Post reported that the authorities had detained at least seven U.S. citizens, among them children, including a 10-year-old who was being rushed to a hospital when immigration officers detained her family and sent them to Mexico, where they remain in hiding. More recently, the administration deported several U.S. citizens, including three children, one of whom, a 4-year-old, had late-stage cancer and was sent off to Honduras without his medications. His mother was given no opportunity to consult with his father who remained in the U.S.

We need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights.

I could go on, including with the recent news that the Trump administration has asked wartime Ukraine to take in deportees and is now reportedly preparing to send migrants to Libya.

These people were all detained and deported without due process, no less being allowed to challenge their detention and deportation through the court system. Due process should afford anyone in this country, no matter their legal status, the right to know why they are being detained and adequate notice of their possible deportation, as well as access to legal counsel so that they could challenge government decisions about their future.

Apparently, for the leaders of this administration, mere words and images—crown tattoos on alleged Venezuelan gang members, students peacefully protesting, or even apparently simply having brown skin—trigger fear and the impulse to detain and deport.

The Legacies of America’s War on Terror

None of this is entirely new. During the first two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, our government normalized extrajudicial detention and deportation as part of its Global War on Terror under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that the government would “need to work the dark side” and “use any means at our disposal” to eradicate terror. According to a joint report by the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch, the U.S. extrajudicially moved at least 119 foreign Muslims who were considered terror suspects to “black sites” (secret CIA prisons) in foreign countries with more lax human rights standards, including Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, and Syria. There, those U.S. detainees underwent torture and mistreatment, including solitary confinement, electrocution, rape, sleep deprivation, and sometimes being hung upside down for hours at a time.

Even today, at Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba, where the U.S. government set up an offshore prison in January 2002, the government continues to hold 15 terror suspects from those years without the opportunity to challenge their status. And though that base has (as of yet at least) not come to house the thousands of migrants President Donald Trump initially imagined might be sent there, it has been one of the way stations through which the government has dispatched flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador via Honduras.

Though the U.S. did formally end its program of “extraordinary rendition” (that is, state-sponsored abductions), as the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch have suggested, such war on terror practices effectively “lowered the bar” for the way the U.S. and its allies would in the future treat all too many people.

A Way Forward?

And here we are in another nightmare moment. As historian Adam Hochschild has reminded us, America has indeed had “Trumpy”—maybe even “Trumpier”—moments in the past when the government empowered vigilantes to suppress peaceful dissent, censor media outlets, and imprison people for exercising their first amendment rights. Take the 1917 Espionage Act, which President Woodrow Wilson successfully lobbied for. It allowed prison terms of up to 20 years for anybody making “false reports” that might interfere with the government’s involvement in World War I or what were then considered “disloyal” or “abusive” statements about the U.S. government. In the years immediately following that law’s passage, dozens of peaceful Americans were sentenced to years of hard labor or detention in prisons.

During World War II, of course, the U.S. used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain tens of thousands of people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent for no other reason than their cultural heritage.

I cite such horrific examples not out of despair but from a strange sense of hopefulness. After all, in the end, this country did somehow manage to move past such horrors—even if, it seems, to turn to similar ones in the future. With that in mind, we must try to chart a better way forward today, so that you or I don’t end up behind bars, too. You’ve probably heard that President Trump is even talking about rebuilding and reopening Alcatraz, that infamous prison off the coast of San Francisco, a symbol of past mistreatment. (At least in his mind, Donald Trump’s archipelago of prisons is expanding fast.)

At a minimum, I think we need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights. And we need to acknowledge that the current administration is not simply an aberration but reflects past practices from periods in our history with which Americans were once comfortable. In other words, during certain eras, this country has proven to be all too Trumpy.

When I was a research fellow at Human Rights Watch, I was often asked to write press releases or short reports on violations of civil liberties in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Back then, however, I never imagined that I would witness my own government similarly depriving people of their rights to due process here in the United States—even though that was already happening at those all-American CIA “black sites” globally and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

If Americans don’t unite around basic principles like due process, equal application of the law, and open and fact-based debate and inquiry, count on one thing: We’re in for a rough three years and eight months—and probably longer.

At its deepest level, government is a moral force grounded in a moral view of the world.

It may not comport with morality as most of us view it; the Saudi oppression of women, the Russian violence against the queer community, and the Iranian brutal suppression of that nation’s democracy movement are all examples of things most Americans consider immoral.

But each is grounded in a particular moral worldview that those governments and their leaders have adopted.

While America has experienced many dark moral episodes throughout our history, we’ve always held or at least espoused a basic set of moral principles:

• That all people are born equal under the law; that power should flow up from the people rather than down from elected leaders;
• That a free press, free speech, and freedom from religion are essential to liberty; and
• That defending the basic rights of all people to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is the core function of a democratic republic.

Until now.

Republicans in the House of Representatives just inserted into their must-pass “Big, Beautiful” multi-trillion-dollar-tax-break-for-billionaires legislation a provision that would enable the president to designate any nonprofit—from Harvard to the American Civil Liberties Union to your local Democratic Party—a “terrorist-supporting organization” that then loses their tax-exempt status, effectively putting them out of business.

And who decides who gets that designation? The president. And he gets do to it in secret.

When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world.

This is exactly how both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first destroyed dissent and free speech in Russia and Hungary.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been pursuing this for a decade, from his trying to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization” to his attacks on our universities to his use of Stalin’s phrase “enemy of the people” to describe journalists and opinion writers like me.

One level above these core democratic principles—of free speech, the right to protest, and the power of the people in free and fair elections to change our leadership—are two major reformations that came about after major national upheavals.

The first was after the Civil War, when the nation (at least in principle) embraced the humanity and citizenship of nonwhite people with Reconstruction and the 13th through the 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The second was during the Republican Great Depression, when FDR rebooted our republic to become the supporter of last resort for the working class, producing the world’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class.

Now Trump, Elon Musk, and their cabal of right-wing billionaires are trying to dissolve virtually all of this, replacing it with the sort of “illiberal democracy” we see in Russia and Hungary, where there are still elections (but their outcome is pre-determined), still legal protections for the press and free speech (but only when that speech doesn’t challenge those in power), and only the wealthy can truly enjoy safety and security.

After the Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari governments each gave the Trump family massive gifts in the form of billion-dollar development and Trump hotel or golf course licensing deals, Trump made a speech in which he abandoned our 250-year history of advocating democracy around the world.

Of course, as mentioned, we’ve often failed at that mission in the past. Former President Ronald Reagan’s support for the death squads in Central America haunt our southern border to this day; former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s embrace of the Shah of Iran still rattles the Middle East; and former President Richard Nixon’s tolerance of Chinese brutality led us to, in the name of capitalism, help that nation’s communist leaders create the most powerful and medieval surveillance state in world history.

But these exceptions prove the rule: When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world. And it becomes even more destructive when this administration rejects American values as it embraces bribes from foreign dictators, harasses journalists, imprisons op-ed writers, and threatens judges.

This issue of morality in government has been at the core of our political debate for centuries. Then-President Harry Truman was explicit about it way back in 1952:

Now, I want to say something very important to you about this issue of morality in government.

I stand for honest government… To me, morality in government means more than a mere absence of wrongdoing. It means a government that is fair to all. I think it is just as immoral for the Congress to enact special tax favors into law as it is for a tax official to connive in a crooked tax return. It is just as immoral to use the lawmaking power of the government to enrich the few at the expense of the many, as it is to steal money from the public treasury. That is stealing money from the public treasury…

Legislation that favored the greed of monopoly and the trickery of Wall Street was a form of corruption that did the country four times as much harm as Teapot Dome ever did. Private selfish interests are always trying to corrupt the government in this way. Powerful financial groups are always trying to get favors for themselves.

Tragically, for both America and democracy around the world, this is not how Donald Trump was raised and does not comport with the GOP’s current worldview. Fred Trump built a real estate empire through racism, fraud, and deceit. He raised Donald to view every transaction as necessarily win-lose, every rule or regulation as something to get around, and every government official as somebody to be influenced with threats or money.

The GOP embraced a similar worldview with the Reagan Revolution as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes in his must-read Substack newsletter:

But starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, record levels of inequality, near-stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors became more important than good jobs with good wages. Corporate profits more important than the common good.

Greed is a type of moral stance. It’s not one that open, pluralistic, democratic societies embrace beyond their tolerance of regulated capitalism, but it is a position that expresses a certain type of morality, one most famously expounded by David Koch and Ayn Rand.

It’s inconsistent with the history of humanity itself, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living. From Margaret Mead pointing out how healed leg bones in hundred-thousand-year-old skeletons show that ancient societies cared for their wounded to the ways Native American tribes dealt with people who stole or hoarded even without the use of police or prisons, the triumph of greed has historically been the exception rather the rule.

When Donald Trump said, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” it was one of the few honest bits of self-appraisal he’s ever tendered. And it should have warned all of us.

Greed and hunger for power are, ultimately, anathema to our traditional American values.

And it’s high time we began to say so, and to teach our children the difference between a moral nation that protects its weakest citizens while promoting democracy around the world and an “illiberal democracy” like Russia, Hungary, and the vision of today’s GOP.

We’ve been better than this in the past, and it’s high time we return to those moral positions that truly made America great.

U.S. Representative Derrick Van Orden campaigned for his Wisconsin 3rd Congressional District seat stressing his intention to cut government costs by targeting waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee he had the opportunity to block the committee from, as instructed by the Trump Administration, cutting nearly $300 billion in spending from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These proposed cuts will take food from the tables of the poorest families in this country to pay for tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans as part of the Republican House Budget bill.

SNAP is a recurring target for Van Orden’s Republican Party. Van Orden has spoken as a defender of the program, even sharing his own story of his families reliance on SNAP benefits when he was a kid. He called the program “a hand up, not a hand out.” Yet last week, Derrick Van Orden, as he often does, made the wrong decision. Despite his insistence that he would defend the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, vital for so many low income families, he sided with the Trump administration to decimate a program that well over 40 million people rely on. These are people who, as Van Orden notes, just need a hand up.

Even as the president has grudgingly admitted that his tariffs will cause prices to rise, Van Orden conveniently failed to recall his gratitude for that “hand up” when he needed it. He could have done the right thing as a member of the Agriculture Committee by loudly and clearly stating that with rising food prices, cutting any funding from SNAP is morally wrong for those who depend on the program. It is also wrong for so many farmers who supply food for the program—about $30 billion wrong for those farmers and it’s wrong for the economy in general, as the Democrat members of the Ag Committee report that every $1 in SNAP funding puts $1.50 back into the economy.

To his credit, after pressure from constituents, Van Orden came out in opposition to the current plan to shift 25% of SNAP costs to state governments—this proposal would severely impact the poorest states, those with the most needy recipients, much harder than wealthier states. Van Orden instead proposed to focus on correcting “inefficiencies” within the SNAP program by tying the state’s share of SNAP payments to that state’s SNAP error rate.

However, these error rates or “inefficiencies” are false flags used by Van Orden and other Republicans to justify massive cuts. USDA policy changes counted the entire benefit amount as an error if there were any procedural mistakes, regardless of the household being eligible and receiving the correct benefits. SNAP already has a rigorous quality control system. Most over-payments are honest mistakes made by households or USDA, and quickly rectified. Hardly the massive fraud Republicans like Van Orden claim. Using these false numbers to justify massive cuts to a program thousands of Van Orden’s constituents rely on is deception, and will harm Wisconsin families.

There are families across Western Wisconsin in similar situations to that of Congressman Van Orden’s when he was a child; those who through no fault of their own need that hand up, just like he did. A $230 billion cut would decimate program services and put thousands of Wisconsinites into food insecurity. Any cuts to the program are direct cuts to the poorest families in our country.

It’s not just the recipients of SNAP that will be affected. Programs already cut by the Trump administration, cuts supported by Van Orden, have crippled family farms in Wisconsin. A program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program refused to pay nearly 300 small farms in Wisconsin after Trump cut funding for their already-committed grants. SNAP benefits are often used to pay for this fresh, local produce, and cutting these benefits would further slash the already meager incomes of Wisconsin’s farmers and deny low-income Wisconsinites a valuable source of nutritious food.

Congressman Van Orden has again raised the cup of Republican Kool-Aid and convinced himself that cutting $300 billion from needy families is a good option for funding tax cuts for those high-income Americans who already have too much. He remembers the times when his family was in need, but that was then, this is now, and he is part of the Republican cult of Trump. A brave legislator would break with the Republican policy to put more money in the pockets of the rich while children go hungry, but not Van Orden.

The Republican budget bill, in addition to cuts in SNAP also included cuts to other safety net programs like Medicaid, failed to pass the House Budget committee on Friday because some members felt it did not make the cuts deep enough, it was not cruel enough.

But the Budget Committee showed its true colors on Sunday and passed the bill after making it more cruel for the nation's poor. And make no mistake, the full Republican-controlled House will pass a Budget bill and it will be cruel as can be, with even deeper cuts to the safety net programs so many low-income folks depend on. Van Orden will have a chance to side with his constituents and help those needing “a hand up” or side with his Republican cronies and fund tax cuts for the rich who want another “hand out.”

What will he do? What will your representative do?

Followers of policy and political developments in Israel/Palestine must be struck by the degree to which the tactics employed are disconnected from desired ends and by how some leaders’ and movements’ obsession with their mistaken path distracts them while they dangerously march themselves and their followers off a cliff.

With specific attention to the tactics and behaviors of Hamas and Israel, three stories from different religious traditions come to mind. While not part of their sacred texts, the practical lessons of these tales are worthy of consideration.

First, there’s a wonderful old Buddhist tale that goes something like this:

One day a group of disciples approached the Buddha asking him to show them the way to the moon. The Buddha silently pointed to the moon.

Years later, the students were still studying the Buddha’s finger.

The simple lesson is to not become so obsessed with or distracted by what is supposed to help you find your way to a goal that you lose sight of the goal itself. It’s a matter of connecting and not confusing means and ends.

For example, in the beginning Hamas declared its objective to be ending the occupation, while Israel stated its objective as bringing peace and security to its people. Decades and many lives later, Hamas’ tactics and Israel’s wars have become ends in themselves, with the ultimate goals now forgotten—and no attention paid to whether the behaviors of Hamas or Israel are accomplishing anything other than moving once-sought-after goals farther away from realization.

Somewhat along the same line, there’s this old Hasidic tale:

A rabbi, who had finished his teaching in one town and was on his way to the next, realized that he wasn’t sure which way to go. As he left the town, he saw a small boy and asked him how to get to his next destination. The boy replied, “There’s a short way and that is to go through the woods. The town is on the other side. Or there’s the long way and that’s to go around the woods. But…”

Because it was getting late in the day, instead of waiting for the boy to finish, the rabbi became impatient, cut him off, and darted into the woods. Night fell and the rabbi became hopelessly lost. Emerging from the woods in the morning he found himself in the same place he had been the night before and the same boy playing in the same spot. He shouted at the boy, “Your directions were useless.”

The boy replied, “You didn’t let me finish. I was about to tell you that going into the woods was the short way, but because the woods are dense and it was getting dark, I was afraid you could get lost and so it would be the long way. But going around the woods, while the longer route, was ultimately the short way.”

Just knowing where you want to go or what you want to accomplish isn’t always enough. The tactics you use or the path you take matters. Just as being focused on the pointing finger will never get you to the moon, not paying attention to the practicality of the steps you must take to get from here to your goal also matters.

There must be a connection between your goal and your path—there’s no shortcut. When you end up substituting body counts, buildings destroyed, and anger and fear created for the original goals of ending the occupation or peace and security for your people, you’re lost in the woods and end up right where you started needing to begin again.

Finally, there’s this story from the Hindu tradition:

One day, four blind men came upon an elephant. They asked, “What is this?” One, holding the elephant’s tail announced, “I think it’s a rope.” Another putting his arms around the elephant’s leg said, “No, I think it’s a tree.” Still another feeling the elephant’s massive side, announced, “No, it’s definitely a very large smooth rock.” The fourth blind man, rubbing his hand along the elephant’s tusk announced, “It’s none of those things. It feels more like a long, curved weapon.”

The answer of course is that the elephant isn’t any single one of these. In a manner of speaking, it is all of them. In this regard, this tale is a variation on the old adage that warns of the danger of “missing the forest for the trees.”

When looking at a complex reality, it’s important not to become so obsessed with one aspect of the situation to the exclusion of the totality. Israel is especially guilty of this. From the foundation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, they had a myopic view of reality. They viewed the Nakba and the creation of a state as victories, but ignored the enmity they’d created in the process. They see only what they want to see. Having demolished Gaza, they are now turning their attention to forced evictions and increased land seizures in the West Bank. But all along, they miss the reality that the elephant isn’t just a tail or a leg. And so, while they ring up little victories, the anger they create only grows, with lethal consequences. In each age, the means they’ve employed have resulted in thousands of deaths—of their own people as well as their Palestinian victims. And the accumulation of this lethal myopia has only created more Palestinian and Arab anger. It has also resulted in greater insecurity and an ugly distortion in their political culture. The lesson: Focusing only on the tail or leg can get you trampled on or impaled.

The lessons from these three tales are clear: Tactics are not ends in themselves, but must lead to the desired goal. When they don’t, to avoid disaster, change is required.

Last Friday, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded. Moody’s, the ratings firm, announced that the U.S. government’s rising debt levels will grow further if the Trump Republican package of new tax cuts is enacted. This makes lending to the United States riskier.

(Moody’s is the third of three major credit-rating agencies to downgrade the credit rating of the United States.)

So-called “bond vigilantes” are being blamed. They’ve already been selling the U.S. government’s debt, as the Republican tax package moves through Congress. They’re expected to sell even more, driving long-term interest rates even higher to make up for the growing risk of holding U.S. debt.

Some right-wing Republicans in Congress have already used the Moody’s downgrade to justify deeper spending cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and other social programs that lower-income Americans depend on.

Just follow the money. The real cause is the growing political power of the super-rich and big corporations...

But, hello? There’s a far easier way to reduce the federal debt. Just end the Trump tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy and big corporations — and instead raise taxes on them.

I’m old enough to remember when America’s super-rich financed the government with their tax payments. Under President Dwight Eisenhower — hardly a left-wing radical — the highest marginal tax rate was 91 percent. (Even after all tax credits and deductions were figured in, the super-rich paid way over half their top marginal incomes in taxes.)

But increasingly — since the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump 1 tax cuts — tax rates on the super-rich have plummeted.

So instead of financing the government with their taxes, the super-rich have been financing the U.S. government by lending it money.

(You may have heard that America’s debt is held mainly by foreigners. Wrong. Over 70 percent of it is held by Americans — and most of them are wealthy.)

So, an ever-increasing portion of the taxes from the rest of us are dedicated to paying ever-increasing interest payments on the debt — going largely to the super-rich.

This means that when the debt of the United States is downgraded because Trump Republicans are planning another big tax cut mainly benefiting the rich and big corporations, most Americans could end up paying in three different ways:

(1) They’ll pay even more interest on the growing debt — to the super-rich.

(2) They’ll pay higher interest rates on all other long-term debt (as higher rates on Treasury bonds waft through the economy, they raise borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to auto loans).

(3) The debt crisis will give Republicans even more excuse to do what they’re always wanting to do: slash safety nets. So many Americans could lose benefits they rely on, such as Medicaid and food stamps.

The so-called “bond vigilantes” are easy scapegoats. They’re not the cause of this absurdity. Nor is the growing national debt. Just follow the money. The real cause is the growing political power of the super-rich and big corporations to lower their taxes at the expense of most Americans.

RICHARD ESKOW: In a recent column you asked, “What’s preventing a united front against the Trump regime?” You say, “America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime.” I get the “wrecking ball,” but why do we need a united front? What’s wrong with a multi-pronged approach from various groups and actors?

NORMAN SOLOMON: There’s a serious lack of coordination at the political level. The Democratic Party is a constellation of 50-plus state and other local parties, and there are many organizations which are—or should be—independent of the party.

To the extent there is any governing body, it's the Democratic National Committee. The DNC should provide leadership at times like these. But there’s still no leadership, several months into a second Trump regime that’s much worse than the first. There's energy to oppose, but it’s uncoordinated.

Rethinking the Left and the Party

ESKOW: Here’s a challenge. For too long, the American left looked to the Democratic Party for leadership and guidance instead of considering it an instrument that’s available to movements. I think a lot of people assume that “a united front” against Trump means making the left fall in line yet again behind the institutional party’s corporate, so-called “centrist” politicians.

SOLOMON: It’s dubious, and not very auspicious, to follow “leadership” that isn’t leading. I think your word “instrument” is an excellent one. The left should consider the Democratic Party a tool that not only can be used but, under this electoral system, must be used to stop the right and advance progressive causes. No other party can win federal elections and stop what has become a neo-fascist Republican Party.

Most of the people who serve as administrative or elected Democrats consider social movements subordinate to their electoral work. They see progressives—the grassroots activists, the ones with deep concerns, who do research, who communicate, who organize in local communities, who provide hope—as fuel for them to win elections.

That's backward. Campaigns and candidates should be subordinated to progressive social movements, not the other way around. That's how we win. Change doesn't come from the top. The great advances—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, antiwar, gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, reproductive freedom—came from people who weren’t held into check by the party apparatus. They came from the grassroots, the social movements.

Big Money, Big Problems

ESKOW: Progressives inside the party have told me how complicated it is to work within the party. Each state party has its own rules and its own representatives to the DNC, and there are also other appointed members and other centers of power. They’re up against complex machinery whenever they try to change anything.

Worse, the party allows dark money in its primaries and is heavily reliant on it in general elections. Party operatives—thousands of them, in think tanks and consulting firms and so on—depend on that money for their livelihood.

Kamala Harris raised more money than perhaps any candidate in history. I think that money actually hurt her. It dissuaded her from saying the things she needed to say to win, whether she meant them or not.

How can a popular front incorporate and influence a party that’s dominated by big donors? Isn't that the elephant in the room?

SOLOMON: Well, certainly the money is huge, but we want to be realistic without being defeatists. With the state supreme court election in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, Elon Musk literally tried to buy the election and failed. That was a victory against the tide of big money. But yes, money typically correlates with victory.

I attended the DNC’s so-called Unity Reform Commission meetings in 2017, when the power of the Bernie Sanders forces was at high ebb. The party’s centrists, corporatists, and militarists felt it necessary to give the left some seats on that commission. But they kept a voting majority, which they used to kill some important reforms for transparency and financial accountability.

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who was then the Clinton-aligned chair, helped defeat those proposals. And what happened to her? She became deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, then effectively ran Biden’s reelection campaign. And, after Biden belatedly pulled out and left chaos behind, suddenly Jen O’Malley Dillon was running the Harris campaign.

As you said, a lot of money was sloshing around. It’s hard to spend a billion dollars-plus in a few months and not have a lot of pockets being lined. Lots of it goes to consultants who broker deals, hire other consultants, and arrange TV advertising. They love advertising because it's easy and you don't have to relate to people. (Note: Many consultants are also paid a percentage of each ad buy.)

Meanwhile, we heard afterwards that African-American organizers in places like Philadelphia had been asking Where's our help? Where are our resources?—while TV stations in their states were filled with Harris ads.

That’s not to villainize Jen O’Malley Dillon. She's just an example. Certain people will always win. They’ll always make tons of money, no matter what happens on Election Day.

Would the Party Rather Lose Than Change?

ESKOW: Let me underscore that point about insiders. I think they would all prefer winning to losing. I don't know anyone who’d rather lose. But their incentives are misaligned. There are times when, consciously or not, they feel there are worse things than losing. Take Bernie Sanders, whose policies and fundraising model threatened the Democratic ecosystem that feeds them. In a choice between winning with Bernie or losing—even to Trump—they’d rather lose. Their incentives make losing preferable to turning the party over to unruly Sanders types like—well, like you.

SOLOMON: I think that's a fair point. Remember, when Bernie was at high ebb in primaries, a lot of traditional Democrats on Wall Street and elsewhere were quoted as saying if Sanders is the nominee they might go with Trump.

Imagining a “Popular Front”

ESKOW: Let's try to envision a popular— well, I call it a “popular front.” I don't think others use that term, but I think of the wartime alliance under FDR that included everyone on the left—including Communists, socialists, mainstream labor, radical labor, moderate Democrats—everyone. From the radical left to the center, people made common cause against fascism. I think there is common cause again. You can see it in the threats to the judicial system, to media independence, educational independence, and other pillars of civil democracy. Those pillars were already tattered, and many are already broken, but what remains is endangered.

How can the left build that alliance without either surrendering leadership on its ideas or being subsumed by the “Vote Blue, no matter who” rhetoric that always gives us the same failed party leadership?

SOLOMON: It's a challenge. To use a word that might seem jargony, we should take a dialectical approach. We should look at these contrary, sometimes seemingly contradictory realities and see them all. Fred Hampton was a great young leader of the Black Panther Party, murdered with the collusion of the FBI and Chicago police. There’s video of him saying that nothing is as important as stopping fascism because fascism is gonna stop us all. Malcolm X said that if somebody is holding a gun on you, your first job is to knock the gun out of the hand.

The right is holding a gun on you. There are neoliberals and there are outright fascists. Neoliberalism is a poison. It’s a political economy that makes the rich ever richer and immiserates everybody else, while destroying the environment and creating more and more militarism. But the fascists are holding a gun to our head.

We have an opportunity to creatively acknowledge that two truths exist simultaneously in 2025. We have a responsibility and imperative to join with others to defeat this fascistic group, which means forming a de facto united front with militarists and corporatists. And, at the same time, we need to fight militarists and corporatists.

So, there we are.

A Time for Left-Populism

ESKOW: This may be blue-sky thinking, but it occurs to me that the progressive movement can display leadership and vision in forming that front, at a time when those qualities seem to be lacking elsewhere. It could build a broad alliance while simultaneously attracting people to the left’s ideas and leadership. We wouldn’t try to subordinate people to our will in this alliance, as has been done to us in the past. Instead, in this admittedly optimistic scenario, some people will be attracted by the left’s vision and leadership.

SOLOMON: Absolutely. One of the recent dramatic examples is AOC and Bernie going to state after state, often in deep red districts, and getting huge turnouts. In 2016’s primary, Bernie went to the red state of West Virginia and carried every county against Hillary Clinton.

These examples undermine the mainstream media cliches about left and right because they’re about populism. It's about whether people who are upset and angry—and a lot of people in this country are—are encouraged to kick down or kick up.

The right wing—the fascists, the militarists, the super pseudo masculinists—they love to kick down. That's virtually their whole program: attacking immigrants, people of color, women, people who have been historically shafted. Progressives should kick up against the gazillionaires and the wealthy power brokers who hate democracy.

ESKOW: That kind of populism resonates. Expanding Social Security resonates. Healthcare for everyone resonates. It resonates among self-described conservatives, Republicans, whatever, as well as liberals and progressives. We could be saying to people, “They’re distracting you. It's not trans kids who are ripping you off and making your life so miserable. It's those guys over there.”

It’s been striking to see how passive the party was in the face of this year’s onslaught, and how passive so much of it continues to be. The right got off to a running (or crawling) start on demolishing what remains of democracy. And yet, we were flooded with Democratic operatives like James Carville, who openly use the phrase “playing possum” when describing how the party should respond. Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Leader of the House, said we can't do anything because we don't have the votes. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer helped pass Trump’s budget.

It felt like the party leadership had wiped its hands and walked away from the catastrophe it helped create. People who want to fight Trump will also have to fight this inertia—even though many of the party’s presumptive presidential candidates are distinguishing saying, no, no, I'm going to come out swinging. I'm going to be the candidate who comes out swinging against the right.

I always tell people that if they’re going to work in Democratic Party politics, they should heed the biblical injunction about the world: be in it, but not of it. And I think that activists should go where their inclinations and their talents lead them. They should follow the path that calls out to them.

Working Inside the Party

ESKOW: But if people are called to do Democratic Party activism, what exactly does that look like, given what they’re up against? What’s the mechanism of activist involvement?

SOLOMON: I think the right wing has in the last decades been much more attentive and attuned to the reality that everybody in Congress is elected from somewhere else, not DC. You wouldn't know that when you talk with a lot of the Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups there. Some people in that bubble think that's where the action is, where power is wielded. But, as you say—to the extent we have democracy and there are still some democratic structures as of now—the action is in the grassroots, in communities.

There are well over 1,000 different congressional offices. Members of the House have district offices. They are, in a nonviolent way, sitting ducks to be confronted. Voters are facing questions of life and death, whether it's healthcare or the genocidal war on Gaza that the U.S. continues to arm, or so many other concerns. We could be confronting these people in Congress when they don't do what they should be doing.

Those folks are not gods. They should be confronted. And there's often a dynamic on the left where, if Congressperson X does some things that we appreciate and a couple of things that we think are terrible, there's a tendency to say, “Well, I appreciate the good things. I don't want to be mean just because I differ on one or two things.”

The right wing rarely takes that tack. They go to the mat. They fight for exactly what they believe. That’s been successful for them—very successful.

We have the chance to really make an impact right now. But we’re often told, “Cool your jets. You don't want to be divisive.” Bernie got a lot of that. AOC gets a lot of that. We’re told, “You don't want to be like the Tea Party from the last decade.” And the astute response is, “Oh, yeah, what a disaster. The Tea Party took over the Republican Party. That must have been just a terrible tactical measure.”

It's a way of being told to sit down and do what you're told. The right doesn't do that—maybe because, ironically, they have less respect for authority figures. We don't need deference to leaders who don't provide leadership.

Can We All Just Get Along?

ESKOW: On the right, the nastiness is directed against what was the institutional party establishment. But a lot of centrist Democrats, leaders and supporters alike, seem to get angriest at the left for bringing up certain ideas. It’s like we’re just like spitting in the punch bowl, that it's wrong and rude and who the hell do you think you are? The left has the ideas, but I also think we have to deal with a kind of professional/managerial class culture that can be quite hostile.

It feels like we have to say, “No, we're actually your friends, because a) we can help you and b) in your hearts, you want these things too. Don't be annoyed. We’re not ‘indulging ourselves’ by speaking up. We're helping.”

I struggle with that all the time. And I wonder what your thoughts are.

SOLOMON: That’s the corrosive culture of thinking the people in charge know best. That culture includes a substantial proportion of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And it also happens because the financial and party pressures on elected officials are intense.

A few minutes ago I mentioned my admiration for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their anti-oligarchy tour. They've been great. But we should not erase the historical memory that, even after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate last summer and up until the day he withdrew from the race, Bernie Sanders was publicly adamant that Biden should stay in the race. AOC was adamant that Joe Biden should stay in the race.

That made no sense whatsoever. And as someone on the RootsAction team, that isn’t just hindsight. RootsAction launched the Don't Run Joe campaign at the end of 2022. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist or a political scientist to know that Joe Biden was incapable of running an effective campaign for reelection.

ESKOW: We also saw the Congressional Progressive Caucus leadership endorse Biden a year before the election, if I recall correctly.

SOLOMON: Oh, absolutely. The chair at the time, Pramila Jayapal, endorsed him two years ahead of the 2024 election day.

ESKOW: It’s also striking what wasn't said during those two years. We heard virtually nothing about Medicare for All, which went off the political radar. We didn't hear much about expanding Social Security. Joe Biden promised to expand it in the campaign and never said another word about it.

“Inside/Outside”

ESKOW: We could go on. But to me, and speaking of embracing contradictions, this speaks to the ongoing need for activists. Because here’s the ultimate irony for me about the phenomenon we've just described. Capitol Hill progressives, many of whom I respect, essentially replicated what party insiders did to them in 2015 and 2016 when they were told not to challenge Hillary Clinton.

SOLOMON: Good point.

ESKOW: It says to me we’ll always need outside activists pounding on the door, however annoying they may find us to be from time to time. It’s an “inside/outside” game.

SOLOMON: Jim Hightower said it's the agitator that gets the dirt out in the washing machine.

ESKOW: He also said there's nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Call for an Emergency DNC Meeting

ESKOW: Let’s close with this. RootsAction has been calling for an emergency meeting of the DNC to address the crisis of fascism, or what I would join you in calling neo-fascism. What's the thinking there and what's the status of that?

SOLOMON: I think of a quote from James Baldwin. He said that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it's faced. We're in an emergency, and we're getting very little from what amounts to the party’s governing body, the Democratic National Committee—even acknowledging that it is an emergency. There's pretty much a business-as-usual ambience, although the rhetoric is ramped up.

The DNC, which has 448 members, normally meets twice a year. If, in the midst of emergency year 2025, you remain committed to meeting only twice a year, you're conveying something very profound. You’re communicating that you're not operating in the real world of an emergency.

That's where we are right now. So, in partnership with Progressive Democrats of America, RootsAction has launched a petition (which people can find at RootsAction.org) urging the DNC to hold an emergency meeting. People can still sign it. And we know that the chair of the DNC, who has the power to call such a meeting, knows full well about this petition.

But right now it’s still business as usual. So, I think we need to ramp up these demands.

ESKOW: And meanwhile the party is at historic levels of unpopularity. You'd think that’s one emergency they would recognize.

SOLOMON: One would think so. The latest polling showed only 27 percent of voters had a favorable view of the Democratic Party. You would think that one or two alarm bells would go off. Maybe the “same old, same old” isn't going to do it anymore.

The above dialogue was adapted from a discussion on The Zero Hour podcast.

The last six months have been devastating for these United States. The government has kidnapped students, placing them in detention in states hundreds of miles away from their loved ones and schools. The government has openly questioned long-standing and hard-fought norms: the freedom of speech, the right to legal representation, and citizenship as a right of those of us born here. The government has handed over our most sacred information and resources to billionaires who became that way because the government invested in them and subsidized their fortunes. Now these same people want to pull up the ladder behind them, guaranteeing that nobody else can benefit from a government that supports its people.

I’ve been proud of my sector, philanthropy. We’ve approached this crisis front-footed and full-throated in our commitment to protect the freedom to give. It’s been a powerful testament that hundreds of my peers preemptively coordinated and called out our freedom to give, freedom of speech, and freedom to serve communities.

As we enter this next moment, when the boundaries that were once fixed are challenged not by proclamation or executive order, but through the allocation of our tax dollars, we have an opportunity to show that when we are part of movements that protect the most vulnerable among us, we protect ourselves. It is an invitation to remember that our government is not a natural representation of our best selves. Let’s be honest: The best parts of our government are a product of people, overwhelming the poorest and least powerful people, organizing against greed, exploitation, and exclusion. Free public education, Medicaid, and protection from racism and sexism are evidence of what government looks like when movements win for our most treasured resource: our people.

Our commitment to trust, discipline, and love is the best medicine for this moment. We need to transform spaces of dread into spaces where we can join together in solidarity to dream...

As we plan and resource efforts that focus on shielding our institutions from the upcoming budget reconciliation, I hope we remember this budget reconciliation fight is not simply an attack on philanthropy or the nonprofit sector. It is not simply a way to poke a thumb in our eye because we’ve supported community-based organizations that open their doors to all of us, community services providers that make housing and healthcare more affordable, and student groups that come together to fight genocide.

The current fight about our resources cannot be fought on their terms or with their words. Above and beyond increasing the tax rate on foundations, this budget reconciliation includes:

• Stripping $290 BILLION from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or, as it’s commonly called, “food stamps”), the largest cut in this program since its inception. SNAP provides millions of poor people with extra money to buy food to sustain their families. It is a lifeline to farmers and local businesses that provide this food. It is one way that our poor kids get fed at school.
• Cutting $715 BILLION from Medicaid, leaving millions of people uninsured and unable able access or afford critical health services. The forced labor requirements of this proposal alone create conditions where eligible recipients are forced off Medicaid or forced to make impossible choices between exploitation and care.

And let’s say these two lifesaving provisions are not front of mind for you or seem ancillary to your mission. There is this:

• The budget reconciliation includes a provision that gives the Executive Branch unprecedented power to strip nonprofits of their status without verification, an investigation, or due process. This administration has not signaled, but shouted its commitment to consolidate political power in the hands of billionaires, challenge hard-fought fundamental rights, and drastically alter those institutions that have long been the scaffolding of civil society in this nation, like nonprofit organizations. This would be a death nail to nonprofit organizations that educate community members about their rights, bring people together to demand dignity, and ensure we all understand that our government should protect and serve all of us, not just the most powerful.

There are a million metaphors describing the role of leaders at this moment; the most difficult for me to accept is the “oxygen mask guidance” used by airlines: protect yourself before you protect others. Philanthropy must do something different. Protect the most vulnerable among us who are being kidnapped, exploited, and starved by this administration. Come together with healthcare providers and labor unions fighting to protect Medicaid, food banks, and public schools working to protect SNAP, and legal service providers, like CUNY’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility, working to limit this administration’s overreach.

Our resolve to unite in this fight is the best antidote to these attacks. Our commitment to trust, discipline, and love is the best medicine for this moment. We need to transform spaces of dread into spaces where we can join together in solidarity to dream, build, and attend to the preservation and celebration of all life.

After mounting pressure, on April 17 U.S. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Kilmar Abrego García, 29, a Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 by the Trump administration. Abrego García was granted a rare opportunity to speak with someone outside of prison—in this case, a U.S. senator.

But Since Salvadoran authorities suspended some due process rights in March 2022, security forces have detained more than 85,000 people—often without warrants, access to legal counsel, or any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. My organization has interviewed dozens of people who have gone months or even years without being able to communicate with their loved ones in prison or access information about their whereabouts, the status of legal proceedings, or their well-being.

“Every week I went, and every week I left crying,” the mother of a 24-year-old domestic worker told us, about her visits to government offices to seek information. Her daughter was detained in April 2022, as she slept beside her 4-year-old daughter. Officers entered their home without a warrant, citing “presidential orders.” They took her first to a police station and then to the women’s prison.

When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years.

She was later charged with “unlawful association,” a vague offense frequently used to hold people detained in El Salvador. When her mother attempted to submit documents to show her daughter was not a gang member, including employment papers, a public defender told her they were “useless.” The public defender did not give her any answers, alleging, as she recalls, that “sharing information with families of detainees is prohibited.”

The mother has been forced to piece together information from multiple sources, including calls from people who said they had been detained with her daughter, and rumors in WhatsApp and Facebook groups created by relatives of people detained. She learned, for example, in September 2023, that her daughter had a hernia, causing her to vomit frequently. Sixteen months later, she learned that her daughter had been hospitalized briefly, for a medical checkup. She does not know what her health status is.

The relatives of a 61-year-old civil engineer, who was detained in June 2022, told us a similar story. He has multiple serious health conditions—including diabetes, glaucoma, neuropathy, hypertension, and other chronic illnesses. Yet his family does not know if he is receiving the medical attention he needs, including daily refrigerated insulin—something detainees in El Salvador rarely obtain.

He was detained at a police unit in San Salvador, then transferred in September 2023 to a prison. Since then, his family has only been able to see him once, very briefly, in June 2024. They saw him then from afar, handcuffed and escorted into a courtroom, where he appeared visibly weakened.

His lawyer has asked repeatedly that he be sent to house arrest to receive adequate medical treatment, to no avail.

This regime of extreme incommunicado detention has also allowed corruption to thrive. As the investigative news outlet El Faro recently exposed, many relatives have paid bribes to be able to exercise a basic right: to communicate with their detained loved ones.

Yet many, often from vulnerable neighborhoods in El Salvador, are unable to pay. Many told us that the most they can do is take a bag with basic items, such as food, medicine, and clothes, to prison. They spend a significant amount of their income and time to do so, often fearing that their relatives will never receive the goods.

Thanks to outside pressure, Abrego García was not only able to speak to a U.S. senator but also to be transferred out of the draconian Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), where thousands of the detainees are being held.

These positive steps are clearly insufficient: Abrego García should be sent back to the United States. But the basic rights Abrego has been denied in El Salvador—including to communicate with his family—are a stark reminder of the plight of thousands of Salvadorans who have seen their loved ones completely cut off from the outside world for months or even years.

When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years. A prison system cut off from the rest of the world where the lives of detainees remain in limbo and families are left in anguish, endlessly searching for answers.

“I wish I could be a bird and fly into the prison just to see how my daughter is,” one of their relatives said.

The sprawling tax and spending bill before the House of Representatives would cut more than $200 billion from food assistance, potentially affecting 4 million children and 7 million adults, while providing an estate tax cut costing roughly the same amount to a few thousand people who will leave behind more than $7 million to their heirs.

The bill would increase the estate tax exemption to $15 million for single people and $30 million for couples in 2026 and allow it to rise with inflation moving forward. In other words, a couple could leave $29.99 million to their heirs in 2026 without paying a cent of estate tax.

This would continue a decades-long effort to weaken a critical tool to prevent the hoarding of wealth from one generation to the next.

Less than a generation ago, the estate tax was much more robust, with an individual exemption of $675,000 in 2001. Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to an exemption of $1.2 million per individual today. Even so, the tax was paid by just a tiny fraction of Americans; just 2.14 percent of all estates were subject to the tax in 2001.

But since then, lawmakers have weakened the estate tax four times, most significantly via the 2017 Trump tax law. That law doubled the estate tax exemption, bringing it to about $14 million today ($28 million for couples). This would revert to roughly $7 million if the Trump tax provisions expire at the end of this year as scheduled.

As we explained in a 2023 report, these cuts have taken the tax to historic lows. The most recent data from the IRS, from 2019, show that just 0.08 percent of all deaths resulted in estate tax liability that year, when the estate tax had an exemption of $11.4 million per person.

People across the country, including many Republicans, are expressing concern about the breadth and depth of proposed cuts to food assistance, health care, and other public services that are part of the reconciliation package the House is currently moving forward. At the same time, overwhelming majorities of Americans think that wealth inequality is a problem that leaders need to solve.

Given this, the least that lawmakers can do is allow the estate tax to drop slightly back down in 2026 instead of cutting it for the wealthiest families yet again.

President Trump is requesting a record-high $1.01 trillion “defense” budget for FY 2026 while gutting federal agencies and social services that actually keep the country safe – things like clean air and water protection, Medicaid, child nutrition programs, the Department of Education, green energy, and so much more.

The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next nine countries combined despite the Pentagon being the only federal agency that has never passed a federal audit. The United States government alone operates more than 90% of the world’s foreign military bases, controls more than 42% of the world’s nuclear warheads, and dominates 43% of the global arms trade.

As the world’s largest arms dealer, the U.S. sells weapons to the majority of the world’s authoritarian governments and U.S.-made weapons are routinely implicated in human rights abuses - including facilitating Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, and fueling the brutal proxy war in Sudan.

Half of the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget will be handed over to corporations and lobbyists who profit from producing weapons that drive political repression, endless war, and climate collapse - including billionaires like Elon Musk. The budget also includes funding and authorization for domestic use of the military to facilitate mass deportations and detentions at an unprecedented scale.

While Pentagon contractors are set to receive record-high public subsidies, too many Americans are struggling to meet their basic needs. Despite being the richest country in the world, the U.S. has the lowest education and health outcomes and highest rate of child poverty among all economically advanced nations. Wealth inequality has never been higher - and three-quarters of the country are pessimistic about their children’s financial future.

There are no militarized solutions to the challenges facing American families and communities. More war and weapons makes us all less safe, not more. Instead of a record-high budget for war profiteers, what could federal spending do for families and communities?

A $1.01 trillion dollar investment could achieve ALL of the following:

• Hire 350,328 registered nurses to fill the national nursing shortage (cost: $44.5 billion); AND
• Insure and treat the one in five adults with opioid use disorder who have no health insurance (cost: $1.85 billion); AND
• Provide health insurance for all four million uninsured children in this country (cost: $11.5 billion); AND
• Provide affordable housing for all 3.9 million Americans who receive an eviction notice each year (cost: $37.5 billion) and all 653,000 Americans who experienced homelessness at last count - a record high (cost: $6.3 billion); AND
• Expand Head Start services to cover all 3 million children under the age of five who live in poverty (cost: $28 billion); AND
• Lift 1.5 million children out of poverty by making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable (cost: $30 billion); AND
• Hire 407,000 Elementary School Teachers to fill the national teacher shortage (cost: $39.5 billion); AND
• Provide four-year scholarships to all 3.9 million 2025 high school graduates (cost: $152 billion); AND
• Replace lead pipes nationwide for safer drinking water (cost: $47 billion); AND
• Build nationwide high-speed rail for faster, cleaner, and safer transportation (cost: $205 billion); AND
• Erase all medical debt, which currently burdens 20 million Americans, nearly 1 in 12 adults nationally (cost: $220 billion); AND
• Create 350,000 clean energy jobs (cost: $60.30 billion); AND
• Send all 127.4 million households in the U.S. a $1,000 check to help offset the current cost-of-living crisis (cost: $127.4 billion).

Solutions to the greatest challenges facing American families and communities are not only possible - they’re popular. A trillion dollar investment in ordinary Americans is not radical; it would effectively help prevent crime, improve security, and raise standards of living across the country. And it’s what most people actually want.

Poll after poll show Americans would rather have their tax dollars spent on public services than on Pentagon contractors, and would prefer policymakers prioritize spending on healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure—not the military. Pentagon spending consistently ranks below other major programs in terms of importance regarding federal investment. In addition, the majority of Americans disapprove of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” cuts to federal agencies and programs, believing they make the country more vulnerable. And most voters do not agree with the ham-fisted approach Trump is taking on immigration.

There is still time to fight back. The President’s trillion-dollar Pentagon request so far is just that: a request. Congress ultimately has the final say in deciding how federal money is allocated. There is bipartisan support for cutting waste, fraud, and abuse within the inflated military budget and a variety of proposals from across the political spectrum outlining how this can be achieved (see here, here, and here). As the FY 2026 budget process proceeds, it will be crucial to unite and strengthen interconnected movements fighting for government accountability and a livable future for people and the planet - not corporations who profit from the division and destruction of our communities and world.

As the risk of famine spreads across Gaza — and as shocking images of overcrowded soup lines stream from Gaza daily — an influential network of Israeli government defenders has emerged to tell you that none of this is happening at all.

The Free Press — a pro-Israel media outlet often sympathetic to the neoconservative worldview — published a highly circulated article last week from journalist Michael Ames titled, “The Gaza Famine Myth,” which purports to demonstrate that food security in Gaza has been far above the famine and crisis levels that international humanitarian organizations have observed since at least early 2024.

The Israeli blockade, which the Israeli government openly admits has restricted all aid from entering the strip since March 2, 2025, has once again pushed Gaza to the edge of famine, with U.N. reports warning of starvation levels far surpassing 2024’s severity.

But Israel and its supporters are downplaying the unanimous chorus of famine warnings from international monitors, alleging that accusations of an Israeli starvation campaign have been overstated, accusing journalists of systematically exaggerating the hunger crisis in Gaza.

“The Gaza Famine Myth” focuses on a single statement from President Biden’s USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who said in May 2024 that there was a famine in northern Gaza, based on data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

“There were serious problems with Power’s sensational testimony,” Ames writes. “Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza.”

Ames argues that Power and USAID did not have authority to declare a famine in Gaza because only the IPC can only issue that declaration based on its data. But the IPC itself saysthat it “does not ‘declare Famine’ or issue ‘Famine declarations,” but rather facilitates the analysis that allows governments, international/regional organizations and humanitarian agencies to issue more prominent statements or declarations.”

But it wasn’t just USAID declaring famine. Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Program, which distributes aid and monitors food security in Gaza, said in May, 2024 that there was a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and that it was “moving its way south.”

And in July, 2024, as Israel began to allow slightly more aid into the strip — though nowhere near the pre-war levels which were already to put the Palestinians “on a diet” — a group of U.N. experts declared that famine had spread throughout Gaza.

Each of these separate opinions reaffirmed USAID’s rationale for declaring a famine in northern Gaza and yet Ames never mentions them.

Despite these other famine declarations by reputable sources, Ames instead focuses only on the USAID statements and claims the IPC’s governing authority, the Famine Review Committee (FRC), had actually “rebuked” its analysis.

But the FRC did not “rebuke” the USAID analysis. It merely said it could not endorse USAID’s conclusions because the FRC lacked the access necessary to gather “essential up to date data on human well-being in Gaza.”

As U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick said on April 11, 2024, only three roads into Gaza were technically open — none consistently — and all in “very poor condition.” Visiting Kamal Adwan Hospital, he said “every single patient” in the children’s ward faced “life-threatening hunger.”

Ames does not address what the FRC said about its access limitations and instead claims the FRC report definitively debunks USAID’s famine statement — he points to a passage within the FRC report that criticizes USAID for discounting U.N. donations to bakeries and some private sector donations in its calculations of food insecurity to allege that, “north Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed,” and that “a famine had been averted.”

Ames derives his “10 times more food” claim by taking the highest end of the FRC’s estimate for bakery donations and private sector contributions during the month of April, 2024, a guess which the FRC discloses from the outset of the report it makes with limited evidence. But the idea that, through the exclusion of bakery donations and private sector contributions from its analysis, USAID had overestimated food insecurity in Gaza by such a wide margin is both intuitively implausible and directly contradicted by the reports of humanitarian organizations.

The World Food Program reported on April 19, 2024 that it had opened 3 bakeries in northern Gaza, “the only bakeries working in the north,” and “the first bakeries producing bread after more than 170 days.”

Oxfam reported in April based on IPC data that Palestinians in northern Gaza were “forced to survive on 245 calories a day.” WFP had documented how the Israeli blockade inflicted starvation conditions that approached famine levels in northern Gaza as early as January and February of that year.

Ames does not address any of this data. Instead, he suggests, mostly based on social media posts from an Israeli-British citizen who told Ames she is “not a journalist,” that Gaza is stocked with food.

There has been no evidence that any of these international humanitarian organizations exaggerated their food security data. Rather, there has been substantial evidence demonstrating that the number of Palestinians who have already died from starvation have been vastly undercounted.

Testimonies from healthcare professionals in Gaza support that conclusion. In October, a group of 99 American physicians, surgeons, nurses, and midwives who volunteered in the Gaza strip wrote an open letter to President Biden presenting even more evidence, using IPC data, that the human toll in Gaza was far higher than we understood.

“The scale of this starvation is not widely appreciated,” they wrote. “In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its complications in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children.”

Ames’ apparent goal — to suggest that famine in Gaza has been oversold to the public — is directly at odds with the reports and opinions of independent humanitarian groups, their aid workers on the ground, healthcare providers, and starving Palestinians in Gaza.

Additionally, Ames’ article comes as international aid groups — and Israelis themselves — warn of impending catastrophe unless Israel’s more than two month-long total siege is lifted. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that some Israeli military officials “have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks.”

Meanwhile, The U.N. declared that food stocks have already run out and that water access has become impossible. Last Thursday, Abdul Nasser Al-Ajrami, head of the Bakery Owners Association of Gaza, reported that “all bakeries have shut down due to a total lack of flour and fuel. Bread has run out completely, and half of Gaza’s homes have no flour left.”

The Free Press is determined to draw attention away from the human tragedy on the ground in Gaza by debating what is and what isn’t an officially declared famine. That is their right of course, but the rest of the world shouldn’t waste another minute on this nonsense when the real focus should be on saving civilian lives now.

The U.S. House of Representatives unveiled a sprawling piece of tax legislation earlier this week that would extend temporary tax changes enacted in 2017 and layer various kinds of tax cuts and increases on top. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy is currently working to analyze the bill with its microsimulation tax model and expects to report substantial new findings in the days ahead. In the meantime, there are insights to be gained from the wealth of information on revenue cost and distribution by income level published by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) analysis makes clear that the House tax plan would be regressive, meaning it would offer larger tax cuts as a share of income to high-income taxpayers than to either middle-class or working-class families. It also makes clear that most of the tax cuts would go to families with above-average incomes. Specifically, Figure 1 shows JCT’s finding that two-thirds of the tax cuts offered in 2027 would go to the top 20% of families, and 41% would flow to just the top 5% of families. Given that a large majority of Americans agree that high-income people pay too little in tax, paring back or eliminating the tax cuts flowing to the top offers a logical starting point for beginning to bring down the high cost of the bill.

Figure 1

Differences in the average tax cut provided to each group would be dramatic, with the cuts rising significantly alongside income, as seen in Figure 2. While working-class families (defined here loosely as the bottom 40% of earners) could expect an average tax cut of $361 in 2027, the nation’s highest-income families (defined as the top 0.1%) would receive an average tax cut of at least $255,670 in that year. In reality, the average tax cut for affluent families is likely to be somewhat larger than this, as the JCT’s distributional figures do not include the bill’s estate tax cuts benefiting people with multimillion-dollar estates.

These figures also do not include other potential costs to families likely to be included in the bill, such as deep cuts to Medicaid and food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that the bill would put the nation on a path toward a future where 13.7 million fewer people would have health coverage. Of that amount, 8.6 million would lose coverage as a direct result of provisions contained in the bill, especially those slashing Medicaid. Another 5.1 million would lose coverage because of the expiration of temporary enhancements to the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits which, contrary to what we have seen in past Congresses, this current Congress appears to have no interest in making room for in its legislation.

Figure 2

The JCT has also published extremely detailed estimates of the revenue impact of most provisions in the bill. Exploring those estimates yields additional insights into the bill’s most significant changes.

The JCT estimates are reported in a way that mirrors the sorting of the bill itself, which is understandable given the JCT’s role in this debate. Unfortunately, however, the bill’s organizational structure is far from intuitive, and that makes it difficult for observers to understand the overall effects of this legislation.

One of the more remarkable takeaways from the JCT’s revenue estimates is just how insignificant the tax provisions discussed most during the last presidential campaign—especially tax breaks for tips, overtime, car loan interest, and senior citizens—are in the broader context of this very large bill.

The section of the bill titled “Make Rural America and Main Street Grow Again,” for example, includes everything from cutting taxes on multinational corporations’ offshore profits to repealing an excise tax on indoor tanning services. Similarly, the section titled “Make America Win Again” includes provisions as varied as scrapping tax credits that help homeowners purchase more energy efficient furnaces, significantly raising taxes on nonprofit foundations and colleges, and eliminating taxes on firearm silencers.

By sorting the JCT’s revenue estimates into more intuitive categories, we can gain a better understanding of how the bill would reshape our tax code. As seen in Figure 3, the bill includes $7.7 trillion in gross tax cuts over the next decade, before considering various offsetting tax increases discussed below. It bears noting that this $7.7 trillion tax cut would be significantly higher if the many temporary provisions in the bill were to be extended, as many lawmakers certainly hope.

Figure 3.

The largest single item in the JCT’s revenue estimates is a reduction in tax rates, which disproportionately benefits high-income earners and plays an important role in the overall regressive tilt of the bill. Other significant regressive tax cuts include a watering down of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which was designed to ensure that high-income earners pay some minimum amount of tax, as well as a variety of business tax cuts and a substantial estate tax cut on the transfer of extraordinary amounts of wealth from one generation to the next.

Other notable tax cuts include an increased standard deduction and Child Tax Credit (CTC), though it is important to recognize that these cuts are largely offset by certain tax increases affecting broadly similar policies. As seen below in Figure 4, the single largest revenue-raiser in the bill is repeal of personal and dependent exemptions that, prior to 2018, served a purpose very similar to the higher CTC and standard deduction amounts available today. This fact is important to understanding why the bulk of the more progressive tax cuts in the bill are illusory, and why the overall bill tilts regressive despite the presence of these isolated progressive features. According to the JCT score, almost 90% of the tax cuts associated with increasing the standard deduction and the Child Tax Credit are offset by tax increases associated with repealing personal and dependent exemptions.

In total, the bill contains $3.9 trillion in gross tax increases over the next 10 years, which are sorted into broad categories in Figure 4. When combined with the $7.7 trillion in gross tax cuts shown above, the net tax cut amounts to $3.8 trillion over the coming decade.

Figure 4

Aside from repealing personal exemptions, the most important revenue-raisers in the bill are the repeal or reduction of a variety of tax provisions meant to help accelerate the nation’s transition to a green energy economy, the paring back of premium tax credits meant to help families afford health insurance, and the extension of caps on the amount of state and local tax (SALT) that taxpayers—especially those living in blue states with more robust income and property taxes—can write off on their federal tax forms. In fairness, some of the tax increase associated with SALT shown in Figure 4 can be thought of as an offset to the AMT cuts shown in Figure 3, as the AMT functioned partly as a limitation on SALT deductions.

One of the more remarkable takeaways from the JCT’s revenue estimates is just how insignificant the tax provisions discussed most during the last presidential campaign—especially tax breaks for tips, overtime, car loan interest, and senior citizens—are in the broader context of this very large bill. These core features of the Trump campaign’s platform, which continue to dominate much of the debate over taxes today, come at a total cost of $293 billion. While that amount is not trivial, it equals just 3.8% of the $7.7 trillion gross tax cut being offered under this bill. The tax cuts being offered to businesses, by contrast, are more than four times larger.

The low price tag attached to the highest-profile tax changes is partly due to their limited reach (most Americans do not receive tips or overtime pay, for instance), and partly due to the fact that the bill’s authors have chosen to place four year sunsets on each of these provisions. The temporary nature of these policies ostensibly targeted toward the working class, as well as others such as temporary enhancements to the Child Tax Credit and the standard deduction, stands in sharp contrast to the permanent nature of some of the bill’s less-discussed provisions such as its permanent cuts to the estate tax and so-called GILTI taxes on multinational corporations’ offshore profits.

As seen in Figure 5, the vast majority (85%) of the tax bill represents an extension of the temporary portions of the same tax cuts first enacted by Republicans on a temporary basis in 2017. Of the remainder, only a small sliver are the highest-profile items getting an outsized share of the attention in the current tax debate.

Figure 5

Fully unpacking a bill of this size is no easy endeavor, and there is no doubt that many new and important findings regarding its effects will continue to trickle out in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, however, the JCT’s work offers a powerful starting point. The JCT has done a tremendous service in producing a range of very high-quality information in a very short amount of time to help the public understand this complex and, as it turns out, highly regressive piece of tax legislation.

Dictator Donald Trump’s ego has gone global and dominates the news cycle. His domestic opponents are left with too little too late rebuttals and, again, are victims of his genius in diverting and distracting them and the media.

Take his “triumphant” trip to the wealthy Arab Nations in the Gulf. Their rulers flattered him 24/7 as the boss of the world while he flattered them in return for their business deals (some benefitting him and his family) and arms purchases. Trump enjoys being in charge. But he wasn’t.

Before, during, and after his trip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained his MASTER on the matters that count to the Israeli perpetrator of genocide. Trump said nothing serious about a cease-fire; nothing about opening the border to Gaza to thousands of waiting trucks (paid for by the U.S. taxpayer) carrying food, water, medicine, and other critical necessities for the starving, dying, besieged Palestinians in Gaza; nothing about the demands that Netanyahu lift his ban on American and other Israeli and foreign reporters going independently into Gaza.

The Democrats have failed to mobilize their voters into a powerful grassroots force or even encourage their partisans to do so on their own.

The media interpreted his skipping visiting Israel as a snub when it really was a clever way to avoid facing up to Netanyahu, especially for breaking the January cease-fire that Trump took credit for, and starting the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Trump took Netanyahu breaking “his truce” as an affront to his famous ego by cowardly shutting his mouth.

To further favor Netanyahu and his U.S. domestic Lobby, Trump told the new president of war-torn Syria to make peace with Israel and join the Abraham Accords, negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. At the same time, Israel is using American-made F-16s to bomb Syria (without provocation) hundreds of times while seizing more and more of powerless Syria’s territory!

Domestically, Trump every day boasts about MAGA as he is Wrecking America. Simultaneously, second thoughts are seeping into his MAGA crowd and among the “Amen” sycophants that make up the GOP in Congress. They’re starting to say, in so many words, “Hey, we didn’t vote for this or that.”

Now Trump, aside from his delusionary rhetoric, is playing a Zig Zag game which indicates he senses when he is going off the cliff. His polls are dropping slowly and will drop further when the tariff-induced prices start climbing and the economy signals the dreaded stagflation on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and its so-called leadership is still backing and filling, despite powerful demands at packed Town Meetings in their Districts for their members of Congress to be “comprehensively aggressive,” as one Democratic voter put it.

First, they need to consult the dictionary so that they can discover the words that fit Tyrant Trump and the poisonous tusks of Felon Musk. Political cowards have trouble using plain, strong language to depict Trump’s fascist dictatorship moving into police state seizures of innocent people for using their freedom of speech.

They can learn from some of their predecessors like underdog Harry Truman in his 1948 presidential race with poll-favored Thomas Dewey. Here is “Give ’em hell Harry” speaking to 90,000 farmers and their families in a field in Dexter, Iowa:

I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?… These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men… They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship… I’m not asking you just to vote for me. Vote for yourselves!

When Trump, in 2016, started using MAGA as his constant slogan, the Democratic Party paid a consultant to later come up with the yawn-inducing slogan: “Build Back Better.” Kamala Harris used “the opportunity economy” as her catchphrase instead of the electric rhetoric and kitchen table agenda of Bernie Sanders—still the most popular politician in America.

Trump gives the Democrats so many unexploited opportunities. Three examples:

First, the Dems have missed making a big deal out of Trump and Musk shielding the biggest sources of their alleged interest in “rooting out waste, fraud, and inefficiency” in the executive branch. They do not touch “corporate crime” ripping off Medicare, Medicaid, et al. for tens of billions of dollars yearly, or huge amounts of corporate subsidies, giveaways, brazen tax dodges, and the bloated, unauditable military budget that Trump wants to increase by $100 billion more than requested by the generals.

Second, he keeps shouting “impeach,” the judges who cross him. The Democrats should return the favor by filing Impeachment articles in the House against Trump (See: the 22 Impeachable Offenses). Instead the so-called Democratic Party leaders are clamping down on the tiny number of House Democrats who want to do just that.

Third, the Democrats have failed to mobilize their voters into a powerful grassroots force or even encourage their partisans to do so on their own, as did the “Tea Party” in 2009 against Barack Obama. (Call it the “Coffee Party” to waken the population—liberal and conservative working families—both strip-mined by the plutocrat-oligarch Dangerous Donald.)

Trump recently bloviated “I Run the Country and the World.” The “Coffee Party” masses can focus all their growing pain and suffering from Trumpism with the outcry he well understands: “YOU’RE FIRED.” (See my recent column: “YOU’RE FIRED!” –GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP.)

As the marches, rallies, and town meetings swell, the demand that Trump be fired will boost popular support for his Impeachment and removal from office, as happened with Richard Nixon in 1974 for far lesser transgressions. “Impossible,” you say? Not when the congressional Republicans see the polls and economic recession dragging their sagging political future for 2026 by continuing their allegiance to Trump.

Eight years ago, the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington became the symbol of influence peddling. Tourists giddily mingled with lobbyists and campaign donors. The cheapest cocktail went for $24. How quaint.

This term, Donald Trump Jr. announced that he is opening a private, members-only club in Georgetown called Executive Branch. Members of the Trump administration, CEOs, and tech executives are among those who have signed up. The membership fee is currently $500,000.

That is the context for the controversy now erupting over Qatar’s gift of a roughly $400 million airplane for use as the new Air Force One, a 747 that would be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library when he leaves office, potentially making it available for his personal use (although he denies he would use it). It’s outlandish on its own terms. And it is just the most visible part of a new ethos of self-dealing, with lines between public purpose and private enrichment not just blurred but erased.

Out of today’s scandals come tomorrow’s reforms.

Days before his return to office, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP, which immediately enriched him by an estimated billions of dollars (although the coin’s worth has since dropped). Since crypto is a purely speculative vehicle, this gave “investors” a chance to send funds straight to Trump, without disclosure or pretense. Sure enough, the United Arab Emirates, another country where he visited this week, gave him... sorry, “invested” $2 billion.

Trump’s family enterprise already owns a crypto mining company, World Liberty Financial, which benefits from his shift from skeptic to deregulator.

Then there are the transactions that all seem to end up with the first family being paid—starting with the $28 million paid by Amazon to First Lady Melania Trump for a documentary.

Now, let’s not romanticize a past golden age of government ethics. The White House saw the Crédit Mobilier scandal of the 1870s and Teapot Dome in the 1920s. Lyndon Johnson used the Federal Communications Commission to give preferential treatment to radio stations he owned. In more recent decades, presidents of both parties conducted a grueling schedule of nearly nonstop campaign fundraising. (My old boss Bill Clinton certainly got grief when party donors slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.) Hunter Biden was accused of peddling influence for personal gain before his father pardoned him on the way out of office.

What’s different here is that the funds are flowing not to a political party or campaign but to the officeholder as an individual. The transaction is direct, naked.

The founders were very concerned about an individual using the power of the presidency to enrich themselves and their family members. They focused sharply on the risks of corruption and were well aware of the myriad ways the system could be abused. And they were especially worried that foreign governments could influence American presidents.

At the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris feared the possibility of the president receiving foreign bribes: “One would think the King of England well secured against bribery. Yet Charles II was bribed by Louis XIV.” The founders wrote anti-corruption protections into our Constitution.

Article I of the Constitution forbids any officeholder from accepting any gift or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State” without congressional consent. It’s called the Foreign Emoluments Clause. At the Virginia ratifying convention for the Constitution, Edmund Randolph made clear how viscerally the framers recoiled from the possibility of foreign funds. He described “an accident, which actually happened, [which] operated in producing the restriction. A box was presented to our ambassador by the king of our allies. It was thought proper, in order to exclude corruption and foreign influence, to prohibit any one in office from receiving or holding any emoluments from foreign states.”

Trump said, “I would be a stupid person” to turn down the $400 million plane. But remember that the Emoluments Clause is in the part of the Constitution making clear Congress’s power—it’s not up to the president to decide.

In his first term, Maryland and the District of Columbia sued, alleging that Trump illegally profited from foreign and domestic officials who visited his hotel. We agreed. That case got tied up in court, and in 2021, the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed it since Trump was no longer president.

So what lessons can we learn from this, and what ironclad rules could prevent future presidents from profiting so brazenly from office?

To start, Congress should make clear it does not approve of this massive foreign gift to our president. More comprehensively, Congress could pass legislation to fully enforce the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause and remove the procedural hurdles that derailed lawsuits in Trump’s first term.

Then it would be time to recognize that we have relied on common sense or self-restraint from previous chief executives. The Brennan Center’s task force of Republican and Democratic former senior officials recommended that presidents be required to put their businesses and assets into a blind trust, a proposal that is part of the Protecting Our Democracy Act that fell to a filibuster in 2022.

Even those protections may be inadequate. Neither the founders nor later generations of lawmakers profited from meme coins.

Out of today’s scandals come tomorrow’s reforms. For now, all of our astonished outrage is a good start.

The National Day of Action is set for May 31, 2025, as a call to action in communities across the United States. The goal is to unite people locally and nationally to eliminate profit-based healthcare. This nonviolent campaign is a collective effort that aims to put National Single Payer on the national agenda. Everyone has a basic human right to healthcare.

This opinion piece shares research findings to advocate for a single-payer healthcare system. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. has by far the most expensive healthcare system, and yet the only one without universal coverage. It is fundamentally broken. The system is inequitable due to differences in insurance availability based on work status, income, and other factors. Individuals of different backgrounds don’t have the same level of access to quality healthcare services. Excess administrative costs for insurers and providers add to an estimate of $504 billion out of $1.1 trillion. The time that it takes providers to complete billing tasks can compromise patient-provider relationships and care delivery.

Employer-sponsored insurance plans are the mainstay of U.S. health insurance. More than 156 million Americans (workers and their families) are covered by job-based insurance. The plans can incur high costs for employees and their families. It also places a burden on employers, including premium payments, time spent managing insurance, and potential compromises to hiring and worker productivity. One study estimated annual transactions costs to companies of $21.6 billion. Time spent by employees dealing with insurance issues may constitute the “sludge” that reduces productivity.

“All my employees are friends of mine. It really pains me to see them not go to the doctor, especially for specialists.”

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco studied the consequences of the U.S. system of health insurance on employers. We conducted seven company case studies, with companies in various industries and of varying sizes. Companies were qualitatively and quantitatively explored for the burdens imposed on employers by providing health insurance to their workers and dependents. We interviewed company owners and managers. Below are summaries of the findings:

• All of the companies care about employee health and financial well-being. They strive to provide reliable health insurance, though employees often have other options (spousal coverage or Medicaid).

• Strategies vary widely in terms of types of coverage. Most companies reported substantial management time overseeing the insurance process. Several companies have utilized brokers or consultants for assistance.

• The two largest companies (both in the manufacturing industry) incurred unique costs related to being self-insured.

• Premium and other financial costs represented 4% to 27% of labor costs. The management cost component is up to 50% of the premium cost. Employee productivity lost to insurance activities was not significant. While there hasn’t been a significant impact on business operations, such as strategies to increase production to meet demand surges, it does affect hiring and can lead to significant costs.

Below are direct quotes from some of those interviews:

“Where [health insurance] really has an impact is who we can hire. The people who would want to work for us would want insurance and so that was always a big barrier to getting talent.”—Owner, Custom Gifts and Products company

“The cost of health insurance has limited, I mean that there’s a certain limit to my profit margin and particularly with other factors such as supply chain issues... I’m getting squeezed on a lot of different fronts, and if my health insurance didn’t go up 10% every year, I could pay people 10% more every year... They don’t want to give up their health insurance, but I think they know that it’s suppressing the wages that we can pay.”—Owner, Print and Design company

“All my employees are friends of mine. It really pains me to see them not go to the doctor, especially for specialists... And our specialist cost is very high... And for some of our employees, especially the warehouse employees, they’re not super high compensation.”—Owner, Aviation Distribution company

To conclude, job-based insurance poses health-related and financial burdens on company employers and employees. These burdens would disappear with the implementation of a national single-payer healthcare system.