There’s a line in the U.S. Constitution so simple it shouldn’t require interpretation. Article I, Section 8: Congress has the power to declare war. Not the President. Congress. The Founders were explicit about this. James Madison called it “the most sacred of all” constitutional provisions — the one safeguard against a single person dragging a republic into bloodshed.

On February 28, 2026, at approxiomately 1:15 am ET, the United States began bombing Iran. No declaration of war. No congressional vote. No single national security incident was cited as the basis for the attack—Trump instead recounted 47 years of U.S.–Iran tensions, beginning with the 1979 hostage crisis, as justification. The bombs fell anyway.

What happened next is the part that should disturb you more than the war itself.

Congress had a choice. It had the tool — the War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over Nixon’s veto precisely to prevent this kind of unilateral military adventurism. The law is unambiguous: the president may not enter U.S. troops into hostilities without express congressional authorization, regardless of a conflict’s scale or duration. The 60-day clock started ticking the moment the first bomb dropped. Congress could have acted.

It didn’t. When Senators Kaine and Paul introduced a War Powers Resolution on March 1, the Senate voted it down 53–47. Then they voted it down again. And again. By mid-April, the Senate had rejected Democratic efforts to force an end to U.S. military involvement in Iran four separate times, voting largely along party lines.

Four votes. Four failures. This is not a story about Trump breaking the law. It’s a story about Congress watching him do it and choosing, repeatedly, to look away.

The War Powers Resolution was supposed to be the fix for exactly this situation. Widely considered a measure for preventing “future Vietnams,” it was nonetheless generally resisted or ignored by subsequent presidents, many of whom regarded it as an unconstitutional usurpation of their executive authority.

Every president since Nixon has treated it as optional; Clinton in Kosovo, Obama in Libya, and now Trump in Iran. The pattern is so consistent it barely registers as news anymore. But what has changed, and what makes Operation Epic Fury different, is the scale.

This is markedly different in scope, scale, and objective from the more limited US attack on Iran of June 2025 which targeted senior leadership, military infrastructure, and nuclear capabilities. This is a war by any honest definition. The administration just refuses to call it one.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News: “This is not a war against Iran,” the same view held by most modern presidents and their lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel. If you call it something else—a “police action,” a “limited engagement,” or a “kinetic military operation”—you never have to ask permission. Truman did it in Korea. Nixon did it in Cambodia. The euphemisms change; the evasion doesn’t.

But here’s the thing about this particular evasion. Congress isn’t powerless here it’s passive. The appropriations power alone gives lawmakers the ability to cut off funding for any military operation they find objectionable.

The annual National Defense Authorization Act process, combined with supplemental appropriations, provides multiple leverage points. Republican leadership isn’t using any of them. They’re not even seriously trying. Speaker Johnson called the War Powers Resolution vote “a terrible, dangerous idea” that would “empower our enemies.” That’s not a constitutional argument. That’s cover.

And the Democrats? They’ve forced the votes, yes. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) has been relentless. But Kaine himself acknowledged that the renewed effort was unlikely to go anywhere, but said it’s important for members of Congress to go on record. "Going on record." That’s what it’s come to—symbolic gestures in the face of a $200 billion war that nobody voted for.

The costs are real. The war has already cost at least $12 billion, and the Pentagon has asked the White House to approve a $200 billion supplemental request to Congress to fund the conflict. The Strait of Hormuz closed. Global oil markets lurched. Economic shocks have rippled outward, with the costs falling on ordinary Americans while those who profit from endless war count their returns. Children were killed at a school in Minab. The 60-day deadline has come and gone.

The War Powers Resolution was built for this moment. It was written by legislators who had watched Vietnam consume a generation because no one in Congress had the spine to call a war a war. “After Nixon, it’s gone on from one president to the next , they believe they can use military force against one country after another,” says Louis Fisher, who served for 35 years as senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service.

Fifty years later, the lesson has not been learned. The resolution that was supposed to restore congressional war powers has instead become a ritual. A series of doomed votes that let lawmakers signal opposition without actually exercising it.

There is one question that cuts through all of it. Sen. Kaine asked it directly on the Senate floor: “If you don’t have the guts to vote yes or no on a war vote, how dare you send our sons and daughters into war where they risk their lives?”

No one answered him. That silence is the real story.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution wasn’t just a law. It was a promise that the United States would never again stumble into a catastrophic military conflict without the consent of the people’s elected representatives. Operation Epic Fury has broken that promise to the American people once again. Congress has the power to keep it. Right now, it is choosing not to.

That choice has a cost. Someone should start paying it.

I’m a 77-year-old shrimper from the Texas Gulf Coast, and the AI revolution has reached my town. Early this year, Dow Chemical announced global cuts to 4,500 jobs as it moves toward artificial intelligence. News of the layoffs tore through our rural community of Seadrift–where some of the thousand people work at the local Dow facility–with the devastation of a hurricane. Replacing workers with robots might be Dow’s latest blow, but this toxic industry has wronged my hometown of Seadrift for 70 years.

I recently completed a 30-day hunger strike on the public property (ditch) outside of Dow Chemical, during which time the sheriff actually arrested me while I was attempting to deliver my letter of demands to a company representative here in my hometown.

For decades, Dow has illegally dumped plastic and chemical waste into the local bays and waterways, which have sustained this fishing community for more than 170 years. Now, the company wants government approval for a new permit that would legalize plastic pollution at the Seadrift plant, and allow the construction of experimental nuclear reactors to power it.

As a native Seadrifter, I say: No.

Industry promised us prosperity, but we lost our economy and our heritage.

Dow is planning massive job cuts right now, despite collecting $177 million in bank finance since 2019—which is more funding than any other petrochemical company currently expanding in the US, according to a new report, "Toxic Finance."

What lasting good have these toxic pollution factories ever done for this community?

My family made a living on the water for four generations, and I’ve been a shrimper all my life. I remember when Union Carbide (now Dow) and Formosa Plastics came to our communities with glossy pamphlets and slick presentations. Our elected officials made a devil’s bargain, and “a little pollution” turned into billions of plastic pellets and tons of chemicals in our water.

When the local bays got sick, the communities started dying with it. First, as in Formosa Plastic’s case, industry bought out the ranchers; then an elementary school; and finally, through a class action suit, bought out citizens and now own their homes. Local businesses have been boarded up throughout the county. As a young woman, I worked at Froggy’s fish house; now, it’s a concrete slab. Four more were bulldozed. A hundred boats used to launch from our docks at the start of shrimp season; today, we’re lucky if we have five. Industry promised us prosperity, but we lost our economy and our heritage. As the old saying goes, our downtown died by a thousand cuts.

I always knew it was a raw deal, but at least some of us got steady jobs… at least for a little while. Now, Dow can’t even deliver on that meager promise. Instead, Dow joins the likes of Amazon, UPS, and dozens of other multinational corporations looking to replace American workers with artificial intelligence.

Nobody from Dow has even responded to me after 30 days of fasting and living in a tent outside of their facility, despite acknowledging receipt of my demand letter to Dow's CEO. To be clear, I will not rest until this company:

• Commits to zero discharge of plastic pellets, powder, and flakes from its Seadrift facility and incorporates that commitment into its operating permit; and
• Cancels all plans to build nuclear reactors at the site and withdraws its construction permit application from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

On a bright note, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has confirmed that a public meeting about Dow’s proposed changes to the water discharge permit will be held at some unspecified time in the future… and so, the fight continues!

Believe me, dear folks, people still have power. I sued Formosa Plastics and won the largest citizen lawsuit settlement under the Clean Water Act in US history—$50 million plus additional fines because the company can’t stop polluting the bay—all of which has gone into a public trust designed to restore the fishing communities, the bays, and the local environment.

Our trust funded a cooperative of 250 fisherfolk working together to revitalize our seafood industry, which now has its own office, a processing plant, and a 60-acre oyster farm that will grow to become the largest in the Gulf. We are building a new and sustainable economy on our terms.

This is what Dow wants to take away from us. I refuse.

Will you join me in fighting back against corporate greed?

Last month, 8 million people marched in the largest single-day protests in US history for "No Kings 3." More than 3,000 rallies were held across the country in a “record-breaking” display of opposition that an estimated 1 in 50 people participated in.

To translate that march into a movement, the fight to have your voice be counted is one working people have to take up every single day. The warehouse worker getting a Sunday night text saying they need to be in tomorrow even though she requested that day off for her daughter's physical therapy. The tenant whose rent jumps $200 with no explanation.

For working people, those fights start at work, in their neighborhoods, and at the polls. To have a successful pro-democracy movement in the United States, we must recognize working people's struggles as central to stopping authoritarianism, not separate from it.

I'm the founding executive director of Organized Power In Numbers (OPIN). Before that, I helped lead the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and organized car wash workers in Los Angeles. Lofty speeches about democratic norms don't move working people. Winning does. Fighting for power at work, increasing the minimum wage, lowering utility bills, and providing free healthcare are the same as fighting for democracy.

Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.

Signing a union card is often where working people who have been systematically disenfranchised first experience democratic power. They vote on contracts, elect leaders, and make collective decisions. Winning stable schedules, workplace protections against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, or living wages teaches people that power doesn't only belong to employers and landlords. It can belong to them.

In LA, I helped organize car wash workers, mostly undocumented. No overtime, no breaks, and bosses stole wages constantly. At one shop, the owner refused to let workers use the bathroom, telling them to urinate in a drainage grate instead.

After years of organizing, hundreds of car wash workers won a union contract with bathroom breaks and better wages. They built a network where workers understood their rights. When one shop faced retaliation, workers from other sites showed up.

However, not all workplace organizing automatically builds that larger sense of power. Some unions negotiate good contracts and go quiet when ICE raids their members' neighborhoods, when states close polling places, or when Black women lose 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Focusing only on workplace interests without connecting to the bigger fight against authoritarianism leaves those union members isolated and feeling powerless.

When President Donald Trump tells workers they’re poorer because immigrants took their jobs and no bold labor movement responds, the resentment goes toward scapegoats instead of the billionaires responsible. That’s how authoritarianism grows.

To win against fascism, candidates, campaigns, and movements will have to connect with and run on the agendas that matter to working people.

At OPIN, we've reached more than 27 million poor and working-class people in the Sunbelt over the last six years. Through thousands of organizing conversations, the common thread was that housing costs, groceries, and utility bills keep them up at night. We organize our campaigns around what workers need: clear pathways to dignified jobs and stronger communities, not lectures about civic duty.

That’s not just good organizing strategy. History shows that authoritarianism is stopped when labor and democracy are bound together. Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.

Countering the power of bosses and landlords builds a base of people who won’t accept it from the White House either.

That’s the force that can beat fascism. And it’s the same force that showed up on March 28 for No Kings 3.

Now we need those movements to merge, for more of us to move, to take risks collectively, for all of our well-being.

Labor can’t advance while ignoring the assault on democracy. And the pro-democracy movement can’t ask working people to defend abstract principles while they’re still fighting for a voice of their own. We need higher wages, stable schedules, and a voice on the job alongside the solidarity and political power to beat authoritarianism.

That’s why labor and community organizations are planning for a day of action on May 1 around taxing the rich, protesting ICE and illegal wars, and expanding democracy, all together. It's the only way to win.

The United States Constitution provides two paths for removing a sitting president from office: impeachment and the procedures outlined in the 25th Amendment. Both approaches are being raised again, and with increasing fervor, as ways to bring an early end to Donald Trump’s second term of chaos, incompetence, and corruption. Both are clearly warranted, but structural hurdles built into both render them legally infeasible.

Instead of looking for a magic bullet in the Constitution to bring Trump down, progressives and anti-Trumpers should concentrate on building a lasting, broad-based, and genuine pro-democracy movement. Impeachment hearings and calls for invoking the 25th can play a role in that process, but only an ancillary one.

Here’s why.

Impeachment

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers of unbridled one-man rule. Along with removing the yoke of King George III, they sought to prevent the rise of homegrown tyrants driven by ambition, greed, and vanity.

In a rational country with leaders committed to the rule of law, the resolution would swiftly lead to Trump’s demise. But we are not that country today.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after prolonged debate about the extent of presidential powers and whether the new federal charter should include a provision authorizing the impeachment and removal of the president, the delegates adopted the now-famous clause inscribed in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution that provides, “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

To strike a balance between a strong chief executive and what the antifederalists dreaded would eventually devolve into monarchy, they created a two-step process for impeachment. As set forth in Article I of the Constitution, the House of Representatives holds the sole power of impeachment, akin to a grand jury’s authority to return an indictment against a criminal defendant. A simple majority vote is all that is needed to accuse federal officers of committing an impeachable act and send their cases to the Senate, which is given the sole power to try cases of impeachment. In the upper chamber, however, a two-thirds vote (67 senators today if all are present) is needed to sustain a guilty verdict and remove a defendant from office.

As it was designed to do, the two-thirds requirement has drastically curtailed the frequency and impact of impeachment. Including Trump, only 21 federal officials have been impeached in our history. Fifteen were judges, two were Cabinet members, and one was a senator. The other three were presidents—Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Trump in 2019 and 2021. All were acquitted by the Senate. To date, there have only been eight impeachment convictions, all handed down against federal judges.

Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon for his abuse of power, ruthlessness, paranoia, and relentless pursuit of revenge against real and imaginary enemies. Both men have also been accused of believing in the “madman theory” of the presidency—the idea that if the president appears to be temperamentally extreme and unhinged, he will be seen as willing to do anything, no matter how vile or illegal, to impose his will.

But the conventional thinking that Trump will eventually suffer Nixon’s fate has been proven wrong. The Republican Party of the 1970s was tethered to constitutional governance. Today’s GOP has degenerated into a neofascist political cult. Trump has given the party control of all three branches of government, and he has given party leaders permission to be the most authoritarian versions of themselves. The party did not abandon Trump even when presented with overwhelming evidence in his second impeachment trial that he had incited the January 6 insurrection. There is no reason to believe it will abandon him now.

Still, hope springs eternal. On April 6, Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut introduced a resolution to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Drafted by Ralph Nader and constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, the resolution consists of 13 articles that charge Trump with, among other derelictions, violating Congress’ war powers by unconstitutionally initiating wars as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria, and Gaza; militarizing domestic law enforcement with deployments of the National Guard; and using Immigration and Customs Enforcement to racially profile citizens and suspected immigrants.

In a rational country with leaders committed to the rule of law, the resolution would swiftly lead to Trump’s demise. But we are not that country today.

The 25th Amendment

Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment was drafted in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to clarify the law of succession when the president becomes disabled. According to the first paragraph of Section 4 of the amendment:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

As Trump continues to unravel, invoking Allah in threats to obliterate Iranian civilization and attacking the pope as too liberal and weak on crime, calls to invoke Section 4 have accelerated. But Section 4 is an even weaker remedy than impeachment.

The second and final paragraph of Section 4 instructs that the president can attempt to override a declaration of disability by notifying the Senate and House leadership that no such disability exists. Thereafter, the vice president, with the support of either a majority of the Cabinet or “the other body” of the first paragraph, can contest the president’s override. To resolve the conflict and place the vice president in charge, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress—not just the Senate—is required to confirm that the president is, in fact, “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

The procedures outlined in Section 4 have never been invoked, and it strains credulity to think they will be used against Trump as long as JD Vance is the vice president and the Cabinet is staffed by sycophants and grifters who routinely pledge their loyalty to their dear leader.

This is not to say that agitating for impeachment or calling for Trump’s removal on 25th Amendment grounds is pointless. But we should not view the avenues for forcing Trump’s early exit as ends in themselves. Rather, they are best seen as organizing tools that can be useful in drawing Americans into a broad-based movement to restore democracy. In Hungary last week, 16 years of authoritarian rule ended with the defeat of Viktor Orbán. It can and must happen here.

Nestled in the Catskill Mountains of Sullivan County, New York, Liberty is a village of some 10,000 inhabitants, two hours west of New York City. Last year PepsiCo shuttered its Frito-Lay snack factory, laying off nearly 300 workers. “I don’t know how our town survives this,” a Town Board member remarked. “It’s a bad situation.” The biggest employer now, after the school district, is a chicken farm on the outskirts with a largely immigrant workforce that Immigration and Custom Enforcement sporadically targets.

On May 1—International Workers’ Day—Sullivan County residents will rally in Liberty, joining nationwide actions as part of the May Day Strong coalition. Why will we be on the streets? It’s simple. Most of us are workers—some unionized, most not; some well paid, most not; some small businesspeople or “independent contractors” and others employees; some retired, some still at it even in our 70s. Whatever our situation, it’s clear that Trump 2.0 is the most anti-worker and pro-oligarch administration in living memory.

Consider this:

• It issued an executive order terminating union collective bargaining agreements for 1 million federal employees.
• It implemented hiring freezes and encouraged resignations, along with mass firings of probationary employees.
• It reinstated Schedule F, which reclassifies civil servants in policy roles, stripping them of job protections and making it easier to fire them for political reasons.
• It fired National Labor Relations Board officials, replacing them with pro-regime hacks who will back employers in contract disputes.
• It promotes state-level so-called "Right to Work" laws and supports a national "Right to Work" law. Together with the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, these measures undermine unions’ organizing and finances.
• It gutted OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), endangering workers, especially in high-risk industries like logging and lumber, farming, meatpacking, warehouses, and commercial fishing.
• In the name of rolling back regulation, it rescinded safety rules in construction, mining, chemical, and other sectors, which will increase injuries and fatalities and the disease burden of nearby communities.
• It radically reduced workplace safety and wage violation enforcement. The bosses can now get away with almost anything.
• President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) proposed removing minimum wage and overtime protections for an estimated 3.7 million home-care workers.
• It issued rules to make it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, stripping them of benefits and minimum wage guarantees.
• It rescinded a 2024 rule that protected migrant farm workers from retaliation for reporting safety violations.
• Its threats and mass deportations have created volatility in labor-intensive sectors, such as construction, agriculture, hospitality, and eldercare, which disrupts supply chains, produces labor shortages, and leads to worse outcomes for US-born workers.
• The administration revoked Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
• It has undermined the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, potentially impacting 2.8 million workers.
• It threatened to veto the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, which would allow employers to interfere with union elections.
• It slashed federal grant programs that fight child labor and slave labor abroad.
• It requested $1.5 trillion for the Defense Department—a 42% increase—while holding Social Security flat and cutting Medicare and Medicaid personnel.
• It eliminated Community Service Block Grants, the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program, and Senior Employment Services, which provide older people with food assistance, home heating, and job opportunities.
• It proposed a rule that would encourage the addition of dodgy high-risk “alternative” assets—such as private equity, private credit, and crypto—to employer-run 401(k) retirement plans and that would protect management against worker lawsuits.
• The Trump 2.0 administration jacked up the cost of living with unprecedented tariffs and massive deficit spending to fund its tax cuts for the rich, as well as unpopular wars, huge cuts to cheap renewable energy programs, and giveaways to the AI and crypto sectors that sent petroleum and electricity prices soaring.

Over one-third of Sullivan County residents now have “utility debt” to New York State Electric and Gas, an electric company owned by a Spanish multinational corporation that is raking in profits from our skyrocketing bills. This utility debt is often on top of housing debt, medical debt, education debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and small business debt.

Many people in our region are struggling and economically increasingly precarious. Much of the rest of our country is in similar straits, especially but not only in rural areas. Blood collection centers are moving into middle-class neighborhoods, as even relatively well-off Americans now resort to selling their plasma to make ends meet.

May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you.

The Trump 2.0 administration is so anti-worker that its Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, faces formal complaints of creating a “hostile work environment” at the DOL, making subordinates run personal errands and do chores like cleaning out closets in her home, and retaliating against staffers for cooperating with an investigation, including claims of sexual harassment of DOL employees by her husband.

May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you. It dates to the 1880s, when US workers—many of them immigrants—struggled for an eight-hour workday; a five-day workweek; and an end to dangerous, grueling working conditions. May Day also honors the memory of the labor organizers who died at the hands of the Chicago Police in 1886 and the four who were framed up and sentenced to death by hanging in the aftermath of that violence.

We remember—and we see what’s going on today. Enough is enough. May Day will be a nationwide day of collective action. We’ll be rallying in Liberty.

On April 10, Pope Leo XIV posted on Twitter-X: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”

The Pope’s condemnation of war drew the ire of the self-proclaimed “Peace President” and his allies. On Truth Social, President Donald Trump described the Pope as “Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” At a Turning Point USA event, Vice President JD Vance remarked, “When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) was likewise “taken a little bit aback.” He told reporters: “It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the just war doctrine.”

Yet just war is precisely the Pope’s point. As Bishop James Massa, the chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, said in a statement:

For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war. A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword "in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2308). That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: "He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war."

Ultimately, this appeal to Just War Theory by Vance and Johnson is a desperate retort from a historically sinful administration. To date, Trump has authorized military strikes in 10 countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran. Currently, the Pentagon is reportedly preparing for military action against Cuba—a nation that Trump has repeatedly threatened to “take.” This invasion would come months after the Trump administration imposed a total oil blockade that is causing widespread suffering and starvation there. No interpretation of Just War Theory would ever justify such rampant and senseless violence.

Just War Theory

Modern versions of Just War Theory are split into three components: first, jus ad bellum, or the conditions under which a nation may justifiably wage war. This includes: (i) a just cause (e.g., self-defense, protecting the innocent), (ii) war must be a last resort, (iii) right intention (i.e., the war must be conducted for the sake of justice—not self-interest or personal gain), and (iv) declared by a proper authority.

The violence and suffering that the US and Israel have caused can never be undone. Yet, we can and must hold the responsible parties accountable.

The second component is: jus in bello, or how a just war is waged. This includes: (i) distinguishing between civilians and combatants and (ii) proportionality (i.e., deploying the minimum amount of violence necessary to achieve one’s goal—no matter how righteous the cause, excessive destruction is unjust).

Finally, the third component is: jus post bellum, or how nations ought to act once the fighting has stopped, including during a ceasefire. This includes: (i) not punishing civilians, (ii) respecting the rights and traditions of the defeated, (iii) not exploiting the defeated nation, and (iv) rehabilitating the aggressor to avoid future violence.

Trump’s wars consistently fail these criteria. Consider the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Jus Ad Bellum

Trump alleges that this war was necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. However, he had previously alleged that Operation Midnight Hammer had “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.” There is no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, had ambitions to develop nuclear arms, or that they posed an immediate threat to the US. There is no just cause here.

This war was also not a last resort. Not only was Iran negotiating with the US, but they also made major concessions to the Trump administration regarding their nuclear program. Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was mediating these talks, said, “I have seen a lot of flexibility on both sides, and I believe it’s really a matter of just keeping at it, keeping negotiating to get that to that finishing line.” Trump, however, unilaterally decided to stop these productive talks based on a “feeling”—not necessity.

The Trump administration has provided several, often conflicting, reasons for this war. Notably, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed that he has “longed” for this war “for 40 years.” President Trump has repeatedly insisted that, “If it were up to me, I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.” This is, after all, what he did in Venezuela after kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro. As Trump put it, after (rightfully) not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace.” His actions in Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere reflect this. They are not guided by the pursuit of justice or peace, but rather personal and financial gain.

As for proper authority, the Constitution is clear: Congress alone has the power “to declare War.” No congressional approval means no just war.

Jus In Bello

On the very first day of the war, the US struck a girl’s elementary school killing more than 175 people. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reports that at least 1,900 people have been killed and 20,000 injured in Iran since the start of US-Israeli attacks. On March 9, Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian reported that 52 health centers, 18 emergency service locations, and 15 ambulances had been damaged or destroyed. US-Israeli strikes also “completely destroyed” a synagogue in Tehran and at least 30 universities have been impacted. Trump has even gone as far as to threaten, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Clearly, no distinction between civilians and combatants is being observed.

In clear violation of international law, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pledges “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” On March 2, he remarked: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives.” There will be “no apologies, no hesitation” for “we are not defenders anymore. We are warriors, trained to kill the enemy and break their will.” By his own admission, Trump is likewise “not at all concerned about war crimes.” The point here is clear: Excessive violence is this administration’s first resort.

Jus Post Bellum

At the time of this writing, the US and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire. After the first round of talks, Vance, who was heading the US delegation, said Iran chose “not to accept our terms.” He remarks, “The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Vance’s wording makes clear that the US is not negotiating with Iran as equals. This is unsurprising. Throughout this conflict, Trump has repeatedly referred to Iran’s leaders as “lunatics” and “crazy bastards.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described them as “lunatics,” “insane,” and “religious zealots.” This lack of respect for the Iranian people will only serve to further tensions and make a lasting peace less possible.

Indeed, the US initially sought to escalate hostilities during this ceasefire by imposing its own blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose here was clear: By blocking their oil exports, the US was hoping to coerce Iran into submission. Because of sanctions, the Iranian economy is already fragile—a blockade could have major financial and humanitarian consequences. Even during a ceasefire, the Trump administration’s first instinct is to cause collective suffering.

As part of the Lebanon ceasefire, Iran has agreed to open the Strait; however, Trump has declared that the American blockade on Iranian ships and ports “will remain in full force.”

Ultimately, this is not a war of self-defense. It is not a preemptive war against a legitimate threat. It is a war of glory and conquest. It is a war of sin.

The violence and suffering that the US and Israel have caused can never be undone. Yet, we can and must hold the responsible parties accountable. Trump, Netanyahu, and everyone in their administrations who enabled this war must be brought to justice. They have shown themselves time and time again to lack the moral character necessary to lead a nation. Justice likewise demands that reparations be made. While no compensation can ever make up for the loss of innocent life, Iran must be provided with the tools and resources necessary to rebuild their nation.

On April 16, Pope Leo XIV remarked, “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.” Once again, the Pope is right—we must never stop striving toward building a more peaceful and just world. A world where people are elevated, not buried under rubble; a world where children grow up safe and sound without fear of “Epstein’s Fury”; a world where love, compassion, and respect for others trumps war, death, and destruction.

In 2026, the US health care system is more costly, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in its history.

Last month, a survey released by the West Health-Gallup Center found that an estimated 28 million Americans (roughly 11%) had skipped meals to afford health care expenses in the last year. “Ambulance deserts” – where emergency services take over 25 minutes to arrive – are rapidly forming across the country, affecting millions of people. With the announcement last year of cuts to Medicaid and the federal government’s failure to extend ACA subsidies, the future looks especially bleak.

At the same time, we’ve seen huge increases in profits for insurance companies and hospitals. Greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits have brought American health care to the breaking point. This is a man-made natural disaster.

The US system is an outlier on the world stage in a number of important ways. For one, we’re the only developed country that doesn’t provide universal health care. Every one of our peer nations has some form of basic coverage for all citizens – the U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia… We’re the only ones that decided to leave a significant percentage of the population (generally around 8%) without any coverage whatsoever.

American health care is also, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita health care costs of other wealthy nations, yet some of the worst outcomes. We consistently under-perform in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and deaths from treatable diseases.

According to a study conducted in 2020 by Yale epidemiologists for the medical journal The Lancet, a universal health care system in the US would prevent around 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. These are people who die from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. If they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive.

Mexico, another country where coverage has historically been less-than-total, announced last week that they will be implementing a universal health service designed to guarantee access to health care for the entire population. As Mexico moves forward with its initiative, it may provide a model for how the US can repair our dysfunctional, fragmented system. Mexico’s decree unifies three fragmented public systems (IMSS, ISSSTE, IMSS-Bienestar, taking a patchwork model and consolidating it into one program to prevent unnecessary duplication of costs. Hopefully, we can learn from both their successes and their mistakes.

America also has a patchwork model, combining elements of several different approaches to health care. For working people under 65, we have employer-provided private insurance. For veterans and military personnel, we have the V.A. (Veteran Affairs). For the over-65 population and people with certain disabilities, we have Medicare. For people below the poverty line, we have Medicaid. And for those without any health insurance at all, we have out-of-pocket payments. Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. A unified system is the best tool for cost control. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.

A majority of Americans favor a universal health care system. This would increase equality of access, bring down costs and help to resolve one of the greatest inequities in American life, something which separates us from the rest of the developed world and which has increasingly become unsustainable in recent years. If the status quo is maintained, health care costs will continue to rise, patients will continue to avoid care because they can’t afford it and for-profit companies will continue to find ways to pass the costs on to patients, even if it bankrupts or kills them.

Editor's note: The following remarks were delivered during an emergency press conference in New Haven, Connecticut on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 in response to recent comments and actions by President Donald J. Trump.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” —Exodus 20:3

“All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless.” —Isaiah 44:9

“Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.” —Acts 17:29

“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in Spirit and in truth.” —John 4:24

There are times that compel people of faith to speak, servants of Jesus to speak, proclaimers of the gospel to speak and engage in truth-telling and forms public exorcism rooted in deep radical love with the hope of repentance and a commitment to faithful witness—without fear of what any man or woman administration can do to us.

Two weeks ago the Moral Monday movement held Moral Monday gatherings in Washington, DC, 16 states, and Canada to denounce this war and the President’s declaration that if another country didn’t do what he said, he would “reign” down Hell on them and wipe out their entire civilization.

Why has he been talking about “reigning” down hell? Why does he write "reign," not "rain"? What authority is he claiming to serve?

Why was he so threatened by Easter that he had to try to make it about him?

Why is the Pope teaching what Jesus and the church have always taught getting under his skin? The religious nationalist movement for so long has been saying he is an imperfect instrument being “used by God.” But he’s not satisfied with that. He wants to be God.

The AI image of him as Jesus is so bad that some of his own people have called it blasphemy. So now he’s trying to walk it back and say he thought it was a portrayal of him as a doctor.

This is exposing the madness that we’ve seen in policy. He wants to be some kind of God like messianic figure—to decide who lives and who dies; who gets citizenship and who doesn’t; which parts of the Constitution still matter and whose rights have to be respected.

Just 10 days ago, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, Trump told Russell Vought, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, "Don't send any money for day care, because the United States can't take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of day care. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars.”

And then during Holy Week, he went to the Supreme Court to seemingly intimidate them to support undoing birthright citizenship for babies.

Not only is war unholy, but when any human or president acts in word and deed as though they can determine who lives and who dies—who has citizenship and who can "reign" down hell and wipe out an entire civilization—assuming God-like authority, represents a war on divinity.

We live in a nation that has declared some things are inalienable, endowed by our Creator. And for people of faith, even if the nation didn’t say it, we believe and know that some things are only God’s authority, and to violate them is sin because the gospel of Jesus says so.

This AI pic represents idolatry—a false image offered for us to bow down to, and it is blasphemy and heresy and an affront to Jesus Christ. To do it represents a kind of demonic madness, no matter who would do it—Democrat or Republican. To equate Jesus with a person, a flag, bombs and war planes—and to say that’s what heals us and saves us: this is sin and attempts to exalt a person above God. It is a dangerous war on divinity that is a turn from the God of the gospels, the truths of the gospel.

This is why Pope Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the gospel.”

And he said this even after the reports of the Trump administration calling the ambassador of the Vatican to the Pentagon earlier this year.

I’m not Catholic, but as a bishop in the Lord’s church, in this moment, Pope Leo is my pope.

As much as Pope Francis was, as I had the opportunity to respond to his encyclical on the environment and address the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences as addressed the moral issue of poverty and people’s movements around the world.

But we must be careful in this moment to act as though this is the first moral and spiritual violation by Trump and religious nationalism. His embrace of a Messianic-type role has been pushed by the delusion of Franklin Graham and others.

When he allows people in his administration to say empathy is the cause of the decline of Western civilization.

These are deep, sinful contradictions of the gospel which says a nation will be judged by how it treats the least of these.

His constant demeaning of other nations and cultures and his constant claim that no one ever did anything as great and wonderful as him before him—the constant self-congratulation and adoration—is idolatry that, when unchecked, has led to where we are now.

Some of the church must repent of far too much silence in the public square confronting these thing public sins and idolatries and other policies with the truths of the gospel and our response to this image and his ridiculous attacks on the Pope cannot be one off.

This must be a moment of entering the public square with the truths of the gospel, with love, the truth of the prophets, and the courage to say we are not afraid of this administration or any, and we won’t be silent any more. We must lift a clear call that this nation and any nation in its words, deeds, and policies must work to have good news for the poor, healing of the broken hearted, deliverance to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and a declaration of acceptance to all who have been marginalized if we even hope to be pleasing to God.

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. This is why when we as people of faith enter into the public space, we do so not with partisan facts and focus, but with the truths of the gospel.

This is why we have been here in New Haven. More than 400 public theologians are returning to their communities later today with a renewed sense that we have a responsibility to help the nation make this choice and build a movement that can take back our government and insist that it serve all the people.

Seventy-five years ago, my father and I gazed down from the stands at Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. I was thrilled by the sight of two heroes of my time, but Dad was not impressed. He had seen Babe Ruth.

I think about that now, in a time desperate for such symbolic representatives of our better selves, which we once derived from sports figures like Mickey, Joe, and the Babe. They distracted us from pain and poverty. They gave us hope. I wonder if the answer to “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—that line from Simon and Garfunkel’s famed song “Mrs. Robinson”—is the same as to so many other wrenching questions these days: Donald Trump.

Consider the following: Until he wore himself (and his welcome) out with such excess, he was indeed superb at commanding attention and winning ugly. He was, in short, a loud, vulgar, greedy, self-absorbed cock of the walk who came to epitomize a new gilded age of power and irresponsibility. And yet, he also somehow came to represent citizens who felt oppressed and disdained by the new elite.

No, you’ve got it wrong. I’m not thinking about Donald Trump (not yet anyway). I’m describing Babe Ruth, the first of the Top Jock role models who captured the spirit of an American age. For the next hundred years, the Babe’s spawn strutted through America’s arenas until they petered out in basketball star Michael Jordan’s commercialism. Jordan was, like the rest of them, the best at what he did, while also embodying the zeitgeist of his time with a “greed is good” mantra exemplified by his notorious “Republicans buy sneakers, too” line (which he may never have said seriously).

Now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition.

From Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, with the likes of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Dale Earnhardt, and Tiger Woods (among others) in between, Americans have regularly, if sometimes controversially, used sports figures to represent their aspirations.

Anointing Donald Trump as our current Top Jock figure is neither an attempt to curry favor—do you think I want to be the Minister of Sport?—nor an attempt to denigrate the position. It’s just an effort to better understand why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who.

Where Did the Top Jocks Go?

This effort of mine started to take shape when I suddenly realized that, for the first time (in my memory) since childhood, America now seems to have no Top Jock, no celebrity athlete whose talent and personality captures our moment. Those who might be considered—LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams—somehow seem to lack the sort of charisma Donald Trump does indeed have to reach beyond their hardcore fans to the rest of us.

After almost 70 years of following sports and writing about it professionally, I recently realized that I couldn’t recall another time when I wouldn’t have been able to name an already agreed-upon Top Jock, or at least propose half a dozen candidates. So, what’s up? In this fragmented Trumpian moment of ours, is sports finally losing its hold on us? Have we been losing our love for jocks for the first time in my memory? After all, highly accomplished athletes like Pete Rose and Barry Bonds are now being denied Hall of Fame plaques on moral grounds, while high school and college athletes are becoming teenage millionaires thanks to new laws regarding their ownership of their own images.

It seemed like an appropriate moment for summing up.

Having spent the past 20 years as TomDispatch‘s Jock Culture correspondent, I felt the need for a reckoning. What had I learned from the 50 essays I’d written so far? Was there any kind of personal touchdown I could point to? Had I truly caught the relationship between sports and the larger society—how they do or don’t reflect, direct, or motivate each other? Can I still face the issue of trans athletes or what rules there might be for which kinds of non-athletic transgressions should keep players out of sports halls of fame, or even explain how pro football and basketball have now essentially become Black sports? Must I keep analyzing the symbolism of games rather than just enjoying them? Can I feel comfortable in a world where brain trauma is treated as a reasonable cost of violent entertainment (much as school shootings are a permissible price for gun love)?

And, yes, I came to wonder just where Joe DiMaggio had gone and whether some other charismatic avatar of a fanatical cult might, in fact, have replaced him and all those other jock idols?

More than politicians (even Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy) or entertainers (Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, or the Beatles), sports figures—maybe because of the shooting star nature of their professional lives—had long been designated the avatars of American culture. And that was true even if, with the rarest of exceptions (perhaps Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali), they left little of lasting spiritual value or impact.

And now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition. I suspect that he—or at least the world he represents—is the reason why we have no real sporting heroes anymore. After all, he sucks all the air out of all arenas, while providing an ongoing reality show that seems to fill our days and nights, superseding sports in every way imaginable.

Donald Trump eternally demands to be the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time—while distinctly turning our world into a Trumpian sports event.

Suggesting a Theory

I was surprised to find that, in most of the 50 essays I’d written for TomDispatch, whether they were purportedly about baseball, NASCAR, or the Super Bowl, there was always at least a passing reference to Donald Trump and, in all too many cases, he was the leading character. That led me to wonder whether such a reality just represented this particular writer’s obsession or had Trump truly enveloped our collective consciousness?

And, I wondered as well: Was this inevitable? According to AI, when I tried to use it recently, I’ve described Jock Culture as helping to ingrain “the national psyche… with exclusivity, sexism, homophobia, and winning at any cost… a danger to the common good,” while I evidently predicted that “society will become a darker, more despotic place if it continues unchecked.”

There’s no question that the United States has become a significantly darker, more despotic place since, on January 17, 2017, just-about-to-be-president Donald Trump first appeared in a Jock Culture column of mine (the 17th, if you’re keeping count). The headline was “Football Is Trump Ball Lite” and heralded an authentic call for democracy from an unlikely place, the most Trumpish of sports.

As I wrote then:

Pro football actually helped prepare us for the new president’s upset victory by normalizing a basic tenet of jock culture: Anyone not on the team is an enemy, the Other. And it’s open season on opponents, the fans of opponents, critics, and women (unless they’re cheerleaders or moms). Trash talking is the lingua franca of this Trumpian moment, bullying the default tactic.

Yet pro football has also provided us with the single most vivid image of current American resistance to racism. Last summer, before a pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem as a symbol of his refusal "to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color."

The outcome, however, would prove shocking. Trump, who entered the Oval Office three days after that column of mine appeared, won two of his three matches, while Kaepernick never played again after that 2016-2017 season.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been shocked, though. Maybe the predictors never got the odds right. Maybe they didn’t understand what we wanted from our sports idols—or what their limits were. How about this: Consider the relative paucity of sports figures in the Epstein Files, especially compared to groups like academics, financiers, politicians, and even comedians. Jeffrey Epstein pursued people who could be useful to him as enablers, investors, connectors, or victims. Woody Allen was high on the list, but there was no Lebron James or Tom Brady (although Brady’s long-time owner, billionaire Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots, certainly made the cut).

Was it because celebrity athletes have no need of being set up with playthings or because Epstein didn’t believe they had the kind of clout that could benefit his power network?

Among the more recognizable names that did crop up on his sporting roster, however, were Casey Wasserman, the president of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and several fellow NFL owners alongside the 84-year-old Kraft, who apparently solicited advice from Epstein while facing a 2019 charge for soliciting prostitution. (He beat the rap.)

Another NFL owner in the lineup was Steve Tisch, the 76-year-old part owner of football’s New York Giants. As a Hollywood producer with credits like Forrest Gump and Risky Business, you might think he could have collected playmates on his own. In 2013, however, Epstein emailed Tisch, “I can invite the (Russian) …to meet if you like.” Tisch quickly replied, “Is she fun?”

A few weeks later, concerning a (name redacted) woman, Tisch asked, “Is my present in NYC?” After Epstein replied, “Yes,” Tisch asked, “Can I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?”

Epstein then wrote him: “I am happy to have you as a new but …shared interest friend.”

Trump, of course, was the sports figure—he owned a professional football team in the 1980s—whose mentions in the Epstein Files were most eagerly anticipated. His name, in fact, does come up thousands of times, although so far involving nothing of the existentially horrifying nature that his enemies had been waiting for and his allies presumably fearing.

Commander in Cheat

Trump’s standing in the sports world has never seemed particularly high. Even golfers tend to roll their eyes and agree with Rick Reilly, who wrote his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, about the way the president used to bully and whine his way across the greens.

Trump was spectacularly unsuccessful in his attempts to buy a National Football League team. In the 1980s, he tried to bulldoze his way into the sport as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the new United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring to avoid competition with the NFL.

Trump was a leader in the USFL’s lawsuit to force a merger with the NFL, which resulted in a pyrrhic victory—his side won the case, but the awarded damages came to $3.76 (and no, that is not a typo!). It sounded like a typical tale of Trump buffoonery.

As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”

Trump declared himself a fan of college football (an attempt to show disdain for the pros who had rejected him) and suffered further rejection from various championship teams who rebuffed his invitations to the White House.

Still, his administration clearly does what it wants when it comes to sports. In selling the war against Iran, for instance, it ran a series of video montages juxtaposing military bomb strikes and hard college and pro football hits. One such hit was a punishing block thrown in 2012 by Nebraska receiver Kenny Bell against a Wisconsin defensive back. Bell, a former NFL player as well, told The Washington Post that he was “disgusted” by the montage. “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with images like that.”

Other athletes decried the usage on moral grounds, but there was no immediate complaint from the NFL itself, which is usually quick to protest any infringement of its copyrighted material. Was that supposed repository of our toughest athletes spooked by Trump? Was he, in fact, the Top Jock after all?

“This White House is vindictive and bullying,” commented Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School. “So, if you’re the NFL, why tempt its wrath?”

Why would they even want to? After all, aren’t they on the same Top Jock team?

As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”

And we will know just where.

For over a year, firing President Donald Trump via Impeachment in Congress has been a taboo subject for the so-called Democratic leadership—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Recently, their grip on their flock is unravelling. (See: RootsAction’s petition “Tell Democrats in Congress to Insist That Schumer and Jeffries Step Aside.”)

Jeffries is a repetitive “one-note Charley”—“House Democrats are going to focus on making life more affordable for the American people.” Speak for yourself, Hakeem. The majority of House Democrats are for Impeachment in part because Trump’s war, wage, price, and tariff policies define UNAFFORDABILITY and, in part, because he is driven by a dangerously unstable, violent personality whose accusations against his critics “as deranged and demented” can be more precisely applied to his megalomanic state of mind that worsens by the week.

Calls for impeachment or removal by the 25th Amendment are coming from not just “…partisans on the left, late-night comics, or mental health professionals… It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats, and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among onetime allies of the president,” reports The New York Times’ formidable White House reporter Peter Baker.

Some of this resurgence has been provoked recently by Tyrant Trump himself—the Jesus episode, the epithets about Pope Leo, threats to wiping out Iran’s 5,000-year civilization, and many more unhinged vituperatives and chronic lying about serious matters of state on his misnamed Truth Social.

Trump, of course, just keeps doubling down with his clenched-jawed rage, strengthening the case against himself.

A majority of Americans polled want him impeached. A corporate lawyer-dominated Bar Association of the New York City Bar last month issued a detailed report concluding with the demand that Trump be immediately impeached. (See report: 'The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power.")

Trump, of course, just keeps doubling down with his clenched-jawed rage, strengthening the case against himself. His impulsive ego-rage is off the charts. He falsely boasts that he has ended nine wars with a 10th coming in Lebanon—a war he backed and provided Israel with weapons without conditioning their use in the mass war crimes Israel commits daily.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the White House physician requesting an evaluation of Trump, indicating that he is exhibiting symptoms “consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and that he has become “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening.” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, is planning a briefing for House Democrats on Impeachment and the 25th Amendment. Close allies expect him to schedule a “shadow hearing” in the House on these subjects, with prominent witnesses and growing mass media interest.

Kathleen Parker, a long-time centrist columnist for The Washington Post, ended her April 9, 2026 piece with the conclusion that “Donald Trump is a danger to the world and should be stopped by any legal means.”

It was Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) who first stepped forward after Trump started illegally bombing Iran last summer, right in the middle of negotiations with Iranian officials, and filed a resolution to impeach Trump for his “direct violation of the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution in his military attack on Iran without congressional authorization.”

This month, moderate Congressman John Larson (D-Conn.) filed 13 articles of Impeachment and plans to send a “Dear Colleague” sign-on letter once the House returns next week from one of its many recesses. Last week, the first organized civic symposium in a House of Representatives committee room—"Expert Legal Symposium on Impeachment and the Meaning of “Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors”—was held. C-SPAN covered this event, which will serve to encourage more organized citizens around the country to demand their cautious representatives call for Trump’s impeachment.

Annie Karni, the congressional correspondent for The New York Times, reported (April 10, 2026) Democrats saying “their phone lines were being flooded with phone calls to do something—anything—to try to stop Mr. Trump from pursuing his deeply unpopular war with Iran.”

This drive for presidential accountability stems from the 15 months of Trump wrecking America, weakening America, endangering America and its people. (See nader.org for previous columns and many feature articles from the mainstream press.)

The congressional switchboard for your demands is 202-224-3121.

During the election, Donald Trump boasted about lowering taxes for working Americans with his “no tax on tips” plan. This tax season, millions of Americans found out it was a scam.

You have to earn money for tax cuts to affect you. A tax deduction only helps if you owe taxes—and most tipped workers earn so little that they barely do. Two-thirds of tipped workers will not even earn enough to benefit. Zero minus zero is still zero. The vast majority of these tax cuts go to the wealthiest taxpayers.

For the workers this policy was supposed to help, the results are already clear.

Take Sherie Cummings, who has poured drinks on the Las Vegas Strip for 20 years. Sherie and her husband, also a bartender, earned $60,000 in tips last year. They expected the full deduction the president promised. They got $25,000 of it. The cap.

Thirteen million tipped workers do not need a tax deduction. They need a raise.

For private jet buyers, the same law delivered something different. Full write-offs on aircraft worth $5 to $10 million. And that write-off is permanent. The tips deduction expires in 2028. The Tax Policy Center projects that 60% of the savings from this law will flow to the top fifth of households—those earning more than $217,000 a year. The wealthiest will save millions. Sherie Cummings is putting her refund into savings because she is afraid of what comes next.

For working people, the real problem was never the tax code. It is wages. The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 an hour since 1991. It was locked there permanently in 1996 by the National Restaurant Association—what we call “the other NRA.” They spent $2.9 million on federal lobbying in 2020 alone to make sure it stayed there. Which is why tipped workers earn a median income of $15,198 a year. Thirty-seven percent of the national median. Which is why they rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of other workers. And because workers depend on tips from customers to survive, they put up with what no one should have to. Seventy-one percent of women in the industry report sexual harassment. In subminimum wage states, the rate is double what it is in states that require a full minimum wage with tips on top.

Seven states already require a full minimum wage with tips on top: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, Alaska. It is called One Fair Wage. The restaurant lobby warns that tips would disappear, that restaurants would close, that jobs would vanish. These are scare tactics. The seven states prove them wrong. Tips are the same or higher. Restaurant employment grows faster. Small business growth rates match or beat subminimum wage states.

And restaurant workers have organized and fought for years and won One Fair Wage in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Michigan. The restaurant lobby has fought to block and roll back these wins—in Michigan, they are still trying. But workers keep going. And even where implementation is partial, the numbers are in. DC set an all-time restaurant employment record. Tips grew. Chicago saw more than 850 new restaurant licenses and the fastest pay growth in the country.

Cutting taxes on some tips for some workers is not a solution. Raising wages—and ending the subminimum wage—is. That is why more than 100 labor, community, and civil rights organizations have come together as the Living Wage For All coalition. The fight: Raise the minimum wage to meet the cost of living and end all subminimum wages. In every state. For every worker. Campaigns are active in eight states. Workers have already won. And they will keep winning.

Thirteen million tipped workers do not need a tax deduction. They need a raise. Every shift. Every paycheck. Every year.

It's not just your rising bills for groceries and healthcare. For many Americans, the affordability crisis is now showing up in skyrocketing costs to keep their homes insured, as communities are battered by worsening weather disasters fueled by climate change.

Our states and our constituents are feeling this directly. Hawai’i is picking up the pieces after several weeks of historic flooding, which caused more than $1 billion in damage and led to widespread evacuations. These costs are sure to increase home insurance rates that have already spiked by as much as 50% since August 2023, when out of control wildfires—worsened by climate change-driven drought conditions—devastated Maui.

In California, communities are still trying to recover from wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January 2025. These fires stand as the most expensive wildfires in world history—causing more than $65 billion in damage, much of which is being passed onto the public through rising insurance premiums.

Although New York’s insurance market is not yet seeing the levels of climate-driven distress seen in other parts of the country, the average homeowner is paying $1,000 more for coverage in the years since Hurricane Ida—supercharged by warming oceans—caused over $9 billion in flooding damage. And the frequency of highly destructive storms is growing fast.

If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?

The average American homeowner isn’t responsible for this climate chaos; why are they the ones picking up the tab for the billions of dollars of damage it leaves in its wake? We and a growing number of lawmakers are proposing a better model: ensuring that the companies that helped drive this crisis help pay their fair share of the ensuing damage.

Large multinational oil and gas giants knew as far back as the 1970s that their dirty fossil fuel products would make weather disasters more destructive, but spent the ensuing decades lying to the public about their contribution to the problem. The real world harms of their deception is becoming increasingly clear, but they’re paying nearly none of the financial consequences.

That’s why we’re working to build a fairer system in our states—one that could be a model for the rest of the country. One that protects people from perpetually rising home insurance premiums by holding Big Oil accountable for their contribution to weather disasters that are a core driver of the affordability crisis in this country.

Our legislation would empower state attorneys general to bring civil actions against the largest oil and gas companies after major climate-driven disasters. Revenue recovered through legal action would be used to reimburse people dealing with higher rates, stabilize “insurer of last resort” programs, and reimburse homeowners facing rising premiums. At a time when housing affordability is already under strain, the growing instability in home insurance markets is making it even harder for families to buy, keep, and protect their homes.

The stakes couldn’t be higher—for individuals, not to mention the broader American housing market. Uninsurable properties are often unsellable properties, as mortgage lenders generally require that home buyers secure insurance.

Last year, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the US Senate Banking Committee that in “10 or 15 years there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage” due to climate change. That ominous prediction seems overly conservative given that realtors in California and Colorado are already reporting pending home sales falling through due to climate risk.

Even as extreme weather becomes more common, more and more Americans are risking financial ruin and going without a safety net altogether. A recent poll in California found that a shocking 1 in 5 California homeowners don’t have insurance, with rising costs the most often cited reason.

Holding polluters accountable for their contribution to a weather disaster isn’t a radical idea. Insurance companies already routinely take utilities to court—and win large settlements—when unmaintained power lines ignite wildfires. If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?

The status quo of worsening disasters, perpetual insurance premium increases, and more uninsured families is clearly untenable. But it’s likely to persist until Big Oil companies pay their fair share for the weather chaos they knowingly brought about. It’s time for the fossil fuel giants driving the home insurance crisis to shoulder the growing financial burden, not everyday Americans.

Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.

Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.

This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.

A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.

I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure

In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: "But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party."

Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.

What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?

The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.

That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit's ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.

People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.

That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.

The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.

The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.

A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.

The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?

II. The Record Leaves Your Hands

The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.

Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.

Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel's direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.

Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.

People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.

On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users' privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.

The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user's control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.

Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.

Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI's broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.

That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.

Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.

III. The State Has Already Built the Routes

On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos." The word "silo" sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is "eliminating."

Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.

Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.

Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.

That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security's use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.

A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.

The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson's case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.

Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.

Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.

Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?

IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page

The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.

Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence." Read that title carefully. "Domestic terrorism" is one phrase. "Organized political violence" is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word "terrorism."

The FBI's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget's own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader "investigate, prosecute, and disrupt" frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.

Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.

Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.

That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.

These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.

Kash Patel's name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.

V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly

In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.

The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.

The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.

The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.

Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.

The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.

Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.

What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.

VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step

That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.

Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.

By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.

Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.

That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.

That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.

The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.

The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies have long been considered one of the strongest lobbies in Washington, exercising outsized influence, especially on US policies toward Israel and the Middle East. Recently, its purported muscle has come under question, and votes in Congress the last two days show why, or at least that there is a stark partisan divide.

For all the hundreds of millions of dollars AIPAC and its allies have given to Democrats, they got exactly 14 votes from Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate over the last two days on four key votes regarding the war on Iran and US weapons transfers to Israel, which computes to a paltry bang for the buck.

The votes were on Iran War Powers Resolutions in both Houses of Congress to oppose the Trump Administration’s deeply unpopular, reckless participation in the war on Iran, and on two resolutions to stop US Caterpillar bulldozers, used to demolish Palestinian homes, and 12,000 half-ton bombs, used by Israel against Palestinians, Iranians and Lebanese. All these votes (three in the Senate, one in the House) failed along closely divided, nearly total partisan lines, so one might consider the votes a win for AIPAC, Netanyahu, and President Trump.

But let’s do the math on these votes and AIPAC’s return on investment with Democratic Members of Congress. AIPAC had a possible total of 355 Congressional votes cast it could have gotten—47 Senate Democrats, times the three Senate votes, for a total of 141 possible votes, on War Powers, bulldozers and bombs, and 214 Democrats in the House on the Iran War Powers Resolution vote, for a grand total of 355 possible Democratic votes. It got 14 votes, for a batting average of 0.039, or just under 4% of possible votes if you prefer. Here are the Democratic members who voted AIPAC’s way, to allow Trump to continue the war, and to ship weapons to Israel:

Senate War Powers Resolution—one vote, Sen. John Fetterman (PA)

House War Powers Resolution—one vote, Rep. Jared Golden (ME)

Senate Joint Resolutions of Disapproval—12 votes (seven on bulldozers, four on bombs)—Sens. Chuck Schumer (NY), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Chris Coons (DE), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Fetterman again (twice), Katherine Cortez Masto (NV), Jacky Rosen (NV), Gary Peters (MI), Jack Reed (RI), Mark Warner (VA), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).

That’s it, 14 votes, cast by eleven senators (with Fetterman three times) and one member of the House. Schumer, in particular, once again showed how out of touch he is as Minority Leader, prompting this video from US Rep. Ro Khanna, a leader of pro-peace forces in Congress, calling on Schumer to step down.

For Americans seeking a more peaceful foreign policy, and to avoid domestic and global economic shocks caused by senseless wars, AIPAC and the “pro-Israel lobby” becoming more or less isolated in one party would be a welcome development.

The poster child for AIPAC’s lousy votes per dollar spent, and he is easy to pick on, is US Rep. Wesley Bell (D-MO). AIPAC and co. bought him his seat (according to the websiteTrack AIPAC, for about $17 million) to oust Cori Bush because she dared to author the House Gaza ceasefire resolution. Yet Bell voted right the correct way on the War Powers Resolution. AIPAC must be very disappointed in him. And, it should be noted, Cori Bush may well get her seat back from Bell in the upcoming midterm election.

None of this is to say AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby should be considered a toothless paper tiger. Its grip on the Republican Party, which voted almost entirely to continue the war and keep sending weapons to Israel, is vice-like. Only two Republicans, US Rep Thomas Massie and Senator Rand Paul, both from Kentucky, voted in favor of the Iran War Powers Resolutions, and no Republican senator, including Paul, voted to stop the bombs and bulldozers to Israel.

According to Federal Election Commission records, AIPAC and its Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent nearly $127 million in the 2023-2024 election cycle, a good chunk of it in Democratic primaries to oust progressives critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza (former Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s primary in New York was another high profile race, in addition to Cori Bush’s, with AIPAC spending $9 million to defeat Bowman).

Looking ahead to 2028, all of the Democratic Senators who are allegedly thinking of running for president (Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen) voted for the Iran War Powers Resolution and the resolutions to prohibit the weapons transfers to Israel. Booker, Gallego, and Kelly had voted against prior Joint Resolutions of Disapproval on weapons transfers to Israel brought forward by Sanders, so it certainly could be asserted they want to get right with the Democratic voter base. And they should. Exit polls showed a key reason Kamala Harris lost in battleground states in 2024 was her refusal to break from former President Biden’s embrace of Israel, either as Vice President or as the Democratic standard bearer.

Unquestioned support for Israel used to be axiomatic in Washington, but it no longer is. AIPAC and its allies may soon find themselves limited to the work of swaying Republicans, as polls indicate even core conservative demographics shifting away from their unwavering support for Israel by double digits. And nobody should expect AIPAC to taper their financial interference over Democrats either. A recent brag video asserts AIPAC is the top donor to African American, Latino and Asian American Members of Congress, mostly Democrats.

For Americans seeking a more peaceful foreign policy, and to avoid domestic and global economic shocks caused by senseless wars, AIPAC and the “pro-Israel lobby” becoming more or less isolated in one party would be a welcome development. The upcoming mid-term elections should tell us a lot about who has more power, AIPAC or the American voters.

War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it’s been there from the beginning.

After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World’s indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823, proclaiming the country’s exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial rape of Africa by America’s planter and merchant elites.

And by the turn of the twentieth century, Washington had announced its “Open Door” policy, meaning it intended to compete for access to the world’s markets while joining the European race for colonies. It proceeded to do so by brutally taking over the Philippines in 1899, while the U.S. armed forces would make regular incursions into countries in Central America to protect the holdings of American corporations and banks. And the story that began there has never ended with bloody chapters written in Guatemala, Vietnam, most recently Iran, and all too many other places.

As the dispossession of indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans suggest, the “homeland” (itself an imperial locution) has long been deeply implicated in the imperial project. Indeed, various forms of repressive military and police measures used abroad were first tested out against labor, Black, immigrant, and native insurgents. Rebellious immigrant workers in the nineteenth century were compared to “Indian savages” as local police and federal militia treated them with equal savagery. White supremacist ideology, nurtured at home, would then be exported to the global south to justify U.S. domination there. In fact, this country’s vaunted economic prosperity for so much of the last century was premised on its exploitative access to the resources of the global south, as well as its post-World War II hegemony over Western Europe.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome.

Today, Donald Trump’s government exercises a reign of terror over our immigrant brothers and sisters, millions of whom are here because their homelands were economically despoiled by this country’s business and financial powerhouses. Homegrown resistance to our imperial adventures abroad has always been met by government repression, the stripping away of democratic rights, and the creation of a surveillance state.

In the Beginning

The United States was always conceived as an imperial project, its DNA infected from the outset.

The earliest settlers were simultaneously colonial subjects of the British and other European empires, and themselves colonizers exercising their dominion over indigenous populations. Native Americans — agrarian communities, hunting and trading tribes, seafaring and fishing societies — were systematically stripped of their lands, resources, and ways of life (not to speak of their actual lives) by the newly arrived settler colonials.

Sometimes their undoing was left to the silent workings of the marketplace. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the fur trade catered to the appetites of the world’s aristocracy — in Russia, China, and across Europe. Native American fur-trapping and trading societies entered into commercial relations with fur merchants like John Jacob Astor, the country’s first millionaire. But the terms of trade were always profoundly unequal and eventually undermined the viability of those fur-trapping communities.

Often enough, however, the colonizers resorted to far less “pacific” kinds of actions: military force, legal legerdemain, illegal land seizures, and even bio-warfare, as European-borne diseases nearly wiped out whole indigenous populations. The social murder of those peoples went on through the nineteenth century, from “the Trail of Tears” (the forced removal of the “five civilized tribes” from Georgia in 1830 on the orders of President Andrew Jackson) to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Imagine the United States minus that historic erasure.

There’s no way, since the very geographic borders we take for granted would be utterly different. Much of this country’s most fertile land, crucial water resources, mineral-rich deposits, as well as the industries that grew up around them using buffalo hides for conveyer belts and horses to pull street-cars (not to speak of the oil wells that made certain Americans so rich drilling in territory that once had been part of the Comanche empire) would have remained outside the “homeland.” Where would America the Great have been then?

Less tangibly, but perhaps more essentially, without that emotional elixir, the sense of racial superiority that still poisons our collective bloodstream and helps justify our imperial brutality abroad, that sense of being perpetually at war with savages — President Trump only recently called Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags,”— who knows what this country might have been.

Slavery and Manifest Destiny

Of course, slave labor disfigured the homeland for centuries, thanks initially to the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the imperial powers of Europe and eventually the United States. Shipowners, merchants, bankers, slave brokers, and planters, backed by the authority of the Constitution, grew extraordinarily wealthy by kidnapping and plundering African peoples.

Wealth accumulated in the slave trade or thanks to slavery found its way into industrial development, especially of the textile industries that powered the earliest stages of this country’s industrial revolution. We may fancy the notion that such a revolution was homegrown, a manifestation of a kind of native inventiveness, but factoring in the imperial assault on Africa makes the homeland’s vaunted industrial miracle seem less miraculous.

Territorial acquisition is often a hallmark of the imperial quest. And so it was in the case of this country’s expansion into the southwest and west, sometimes by purchasing land, but all too often by war. In fact, the seizure of a vast region that today stretches from Texas to California — sometimes referred to as the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) — was actually an invasion driven by the appetites of the slave owners of the American South for fresh lands to cultivate. Indeed, the most avaricious leaders of the Southern planter class wanted to take parts of Central America to extend the reach of the slave economy, as one imperial adventure whetted the appetite for another.

The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” the rubric deployed by American politicians to explain away their predatory behavior as something fated to be, remains part of an inbred American hubris. We, of course, make war and destroy only for the most idealistic motives: to save democracy, uplift the poor, hunt down demonic rulers, or bring the blessings of the American way of life to the benighted.

Exacerbated as well through the experience of conquest was a racialized ideology already deeply embedded in the country’s psyche. If, today, Donald Trump’s America is infected with an aversion to Latinos (not to mention African Americans), or immigrants of any non-White kind, look to the American imperial experience for its source. Earlier exercises in racism, including lynchings and church burnings in the Jim Crow South, became dress rehearsals for assaults on Muslims in our own moment of Trumpian paranoia.

Imperialism Without Colonies

Looked at from this vantage point, the American story turns out to be a serial exercise in imperial ambition. And yet, compared to its European competitors, the United States had precious few actual colonies.

True, after the Spanish-American War of 1898, it did run Cuba for a time, while establishing an unofficial protectorate over the Philippines (after waging a horrific counterinsurgency war there against a guerrilla independence movement). During that conflict U.S. forces mastered techniques — the establishment of concentration camps, for example — that they would deploy later against similar anti-colonial movements, particularly in Vietnam in the twentieth century.

Of course, the U.S. military also occupied various Central American nations — the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, among other places — during the opening decades of the twentieth century, taking control of their government finances and so ensuring that they paid debts owed to American banks. That was the original version of what came to be known as “gunboat diplomacy” and is now being revisited. (Think of the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife by the Trump administration.)

At the beginning of the previous century, Secretary of State John Hay developed a different approach to establishing American imperial hegemony, something less haphazard than those semi-colonial one-offs. In 1899, he announced an “Open Door” policy which, on the face of it, seemed eminently fair. The United States claimed that it sought equal access to markets, particularly China’s, that had previously been carved into exclusive zones by the great European powers.

Opening that door eventually led to American global economic dominance, not counting the part of the world controlled for about 75 years by the Soviet Union (in parts of which China is now dominant). U.S. economic preeminence after World War II, backstopped by the world’s most powerful military machine, proved irresistible, while functionally Europe became something like an American colonial possession under the auspices of the Marshall Plan and NATO. That door, in other words, was opened wider than Hays had ever imagined.

Mind you, his imperial perspective was trained not only on the outside world but on the homeland as well. By the turn of the twentieth century, this country’s business and political elites were worried that the domestic market for America’s huge industrial and agricultural output was fast approaching exhaustion. Periodic and severe depressions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century seemed like evidence of that.

What was needed, key Washington strategists came to believe, was an “open door” for U.S. commodities and capital investment globally. Such a policy would, they believed, not only ensure American prosperity but also dampen the chronic class warfare between the haves and have-nots that had raged in this country throughout the Gilded Age, threatening the viability of American capitalism.

From the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, many people believed that the United States had entered a “second civil war,” as the titans of industry (sometimes backed by the country’s armed forces) faced off against the mass strikes of working people and farmers trying to survive the ravages of a capitalist economy. Ever since then, this country would have been inconceivable without its various versions of “open door” imperialism to buoy up the home front and pacify the natives — that is, us.

Acting the role of the hegemon, while lucrative, is also expensive. Public money still pours into sustaining and enlarging the warfare state to ward off all challenges to American supremacy. (The Pentagon only recently, for instance, asked for another $200 billion for its war in Iran.) It does so at the expense of social welfare programs, while starving investment in productive activities like the development of alternative forms of energy and new infrastructure, housing, and rapid transit that would improve life for everyone.

At times, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the warfare state has engendered full-blown domestic economic crises. Vietnam led to punishing years of hyper-inflation followed by years of economic stagnation. Moreover, such war expenditures nearly collapsed the world’s financial system in 1968.

Today, we may be beginning to experience something similar as the global economy teeters on the edge of collapse thanks to Trump’s war on Iran.

Democracy and Imperialism

From the beginning, however, there was resistance to the homeland’s imperialism. Native peoples waged war. Slaves revolted. Mexicans became anti-imperialists. Abolitionists took on the slavocracy. The Spanish-American War elicited opposition from middle-class folk and public figures like Mark Twain. During World War I, thousands of anti-war radicals had their organizations raided and their newspapers shut down by government decree, while some were imprisoned and some deported. Similarly, government repression sought to quell the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, culminating in the killing of four Kent State students in 1970.

Democracy and civil liberties, thought to make up the essence of the homeland’s civic religion, can’t survive the imperial drive. Today, violations of the most basic rights to free speech, privacy, a fair trial, and the right to vote are appalling and commonplace. Immigrants, often here because they couldn’t survive the ravages of American capitalism in their homelands, are treated like outlaws. The most basic constitutional requirement — the exclusive right of Congress to declare war — is ignored with impunity (and had been long before Trump took over). The imperial state, the surveillance state, and the authoritarian state are hollowing out what’s left of the democratic state.

Imperialism does massive and fatal damage abroad. The wars in Gaza and Iran are the latest bloodbaths for all to see. Less visible are the wages of imperialism at home. An equation might clarify the historical record: The Imperium = land, labor, resources, power, and wealth. The Homeland = cultural brutalization, dispossession, fear, misogyny, racism, repression, slavery, tyranny, and war.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome. Conjoined in his person is the perfect amalgam of America’s imperial history of aggressive aggrandizement and the ubermensch cruelty that history has instilled in the American psyche.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Let’s listen again to these viral words, as they hover over the planet . . . as they hover over, good God, the future. Finally, finally, the time has come for every last one of us to release the question these words force on us, from the privacy, from the cynicism, of our hearts, and collectively scream it until it begins to orbit Planet Earth: How do we transcend war?

The words, of course, are those of Donald Trump, U.S. president and perhaps the most powerful and troubled human being on the planet, whose finger has access to the “nuclear button.” The words are part of several social media posts he let loose last week, as his pointless war on Iran continued spiraling out of control. Iran was fighting back. It closed the Strait of Hormuz, creating financial chaos around the world.

This was his post on Easter Sunday (April 5): “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Yes, I know, almost everyone has read these posts, mostly in shock and outrage, but I plunk them into this column in order to keep them connected to the enormous question they open. On Monday he wrote:

“Their infrastructure could be taken out in one night. I’m telling you, no bridges, no power plants. I’m considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil.”

And on Tuesday he announced that Iran’s entire civilization would die that night. This sounded, of course, like a lunatic threat to nuke the country, possibly triggering God-knows-what. Maybe nuclear retaliation – from China? Who knows? And no, he didn’t carry out that threat last week. Iran still exists, the war goes on, the Strait of Hormuz is now double-blockaded. But Trump shared with the world the utter lunacy that possesses him. And he still has the power to launch a nuclear war.

Maybe this won’t happen. Maybe this war will end. Maybe we’ll survive the Trump presidency. But maybe we won’t! Trump has made the treacherous insanity of the global political structure as clear as it has ever been. Mutually Assured Destruction (a.k.a., MADness)– as long as you don’t nuke me, I won’t nuke you – is absolutely flawed. Nuclear weapons won’t go away. And humanity’s future is not secure, certainly not as long as waging war and dominating (killing) “the enemy” remains at the core of global politics.

But Trump is the most obvious threat of the moment, and recently, four psychiatric experts along with public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs sent a letter to the leaders of Congress (both Republican and Democrat) warning them that the president has crossed a psychological threshold and is exhibiting in his behavior what is called “the Dark Triad” of personality traits: Machiavellianism (lack of empathy), narcissism (self-absorption) and psychopathy (anti-social behavior). The letter urges Congress to reclaim its constitutional authority over the waging of war and look into the evocation of the 25th Amendment, which could remove the president from office.

But even if this actually happens, it only addresses part of the planet’s nuclear endangerment. As Jonathan Grannoff and Steven Hendrix wrote recently at Foreign Policy in Focus:

“Whether or not the ceasefire with Iran holds, and whether or not Iran keeps its uranium stockpile and enrichment program, one thing is clear: nuclear dangers are growing.”

For instance, they note: “The war in Iran has made nuclear proliferation more likely, not less. Clearly, if Iran had nuclear weapons, it would not have been attacked. That’s a powerful object lesson for other countries in why they might want to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

And who knows how many countries, especially Third World countries, may suddenly start considering the value of having a nuclear arsenal? When you actually possess some nukes, the big countries will leave you alone. The Iran war has almost certainly opened up this awareness, adding further irony to its alleged goal of keeping us safe.

“This is beyond farcical and dangerously misguided,” Grannoff and Hendrix write. “It is strategic amnesia at best, sleepwalking into Armageddon at worst. . . .

“The problem is not just who possesses them; it’s the inherent complexity and fragility of nuclear systems themselves. The greatest danger may not be irrational leaders or unstable regimes, but compressed decision timelines, imperfect information, technological vulnerabilities, and the ever-present risk of human error in all nuclear systems.”

And nuclear weapons, as I say, are not going away. Even if they did, humanity is still capable of inflicting endless harm on its enemies and, indeed, on people who are simply in the way. So what has to go away – what we have to evolve beyond – is war itself. By no means am I saying this simplistically. Conflict, disagreement, rage, hatred will always be with us, but they can be addressed, indeed, healed – certainly at the personal level. Conflict resolution is a learning process for all sides. It’s definitely a creative process.

When we go to war, people’s deaths become abstractions. This is what allows war to remain embedded in global politics, with, of course, the help of the mainstream media. And thus we remain locked in the inevitability of war. Trump, in his psychopathic honesty, is shattering that inevitability; even America’s military is backing away from him.

Perhaps the “peace president” has created a starting point . . . for transcending war.

What does Big Ag have to do with the Strait of Hormuz? A lot, actually, when you consider that almost every so-called efficiency that industrial agriculture relies on to operate flows through this waterway. And now it is closed, threatening global food security.

And what is the primary source of the problem? Our reliance on fossil fuels.

What do fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics have in common?

First of all, each is a leg of the stool that makes up the rickety foundation of our global agrifood system.

Plastics are involved in every stage of our food and farming systems from soil to spoon: plastic polymers are used in some mulches, agrichemical containers are generally made of plastics, harvest crates and produce packages are often plastic, most processed foods are packaged in plastic or plastic-lined containers, and single-use plastics are still widely used in plates, bowls, cups, straws, napkins, and utensils.

In the 1960s, the world used between 60 and 70 million tonnes of fertilizer (synthetic nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, plus organic nitrogen) per year. But that usage has steadily risen ever since: in 2023 we used nearly 183 million tonnes of fertilizer. This rise can be attributed in part to the rising needs of a growing global population, but it is more indicative of our over-reliance on fertilizers as a way to combat the increasing effects of climate change. This season, farmers are already reporting untenable increases in fertilizer prices.

Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is.

Pesticides are the other side of the agrichemical input coin. Fertilizers and pesticides go hand-in-hand, when it comes to global agrifood systems. The foundation of industrialized farming is monocropping (growing a single crop over and over on the same piece of land). The problem with monocropping is that it is extremely input intensive because monocropped land is more vulnerable to pest and disease pressure. And over time, this vulnerability increases, requiring more and more pesticides as tolerance builds. This creates a vicious cycle called the Pesticide Treadmill that is hard for farmers to escape without support.

But, critically, synthetic plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides are all derivatives of fossil fuels, mass quantities of which must be funneled through one waterway before becoming various inputs and components of our centralized, industrialized agrifood system. Rather than curbing our use of climate-harming fossil fuel-derived plastics, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, our agrifood systems use more and more each year, exacerbating the problem and further locking us into a fragile food system.

A Strait Chokepoint

According to the Congressional Research Service, over a quarter of the world’s supply of oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz, impacting farmers’ ability to get seeds in the ground and food to tables. Additionally, 20% of natural gas transits the Strait, which is a component of many agrichemical inputs. But, byproducts of oil and gas production also pass through the Strait, including helium which is used in semiconductor manufacturing (semiconductors like silicon are necessary for all modern technology), and urea, which is one of the most commonly used synthetic fertilizers. Over a third of the world’s urea must pass through the Strait.

In short, global agrifood systems rely intrinsically on fossil fuels and their byproducts to function, and when supply lines are disrupted, even briefly, the domino effects could be catastrophic. This article is not meant to be a metaphor, but an urgent warning and a window to our way out.

The most important—and maddening—thing to know is that our agrifood systems need not rely so heavily on fossil fuels and their byproducts to feed the world’s people.

Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is. As countries around the world issue energy conservation mandates and brace for worsening inflation and supply chain instability, we should consider how agroecological farming practices could not only make our agrifood systems safer by reducing exposures of harmful pesticides and curb climate change, but also make the systems that feed us more resilient by decentralizing them, improving resilience to climate change-induced drought, floods, and pest pressures, and extricating them out from under the thumb of fossil fuel corporations.

Corporate greed has optimized humanity to the brink of mass starvation. But the principles of agroecology center food sovereignty (the opposite of corporate control), labor justice, and land stewardship.

Food systems grounded in agroecology are ones in which:

1. All people have access to healthy, safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.
2. Farmers and agricultural workers work with the land to protect, restore, and sustain natural resources and ecosystems.
3. Agriculture utilizes ecological management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improving adaptation and resilience to climate change.
4. Synthetic chemical inputs are reduced or eliminated whenever possible.
5. The production, sharing, commerce, and consumption of food is built on an economy which prioritizes thriving communities, resilient local markets, and worker rights.
6. Diverse cultures, identities, and knowledge systems are embraced along with equitable forms of social organization.
7. Power in food and farming systems is redistributed; shifting away from transnational corporations so that the rights of food producers, farm workers, and agricultural communities are centered.

These principles are not far fetched; they’re economically viable solutions that are being practiced successfully around the world already. Systemic shifts toward global agrifood systems that prioritize the principles of agroecology could help us to solve the triple planetary crises of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

It’s a catastrophe on the way to becoming a cataclysm.

Trump is rapidly going stark-raving mad. He’s a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.

Earlier this week he lashed out at The New York Times after its chief White House correspondent questioned his mental health and stability and pointed to his “erratic behavior and extreme comments.”

“HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY?” Trump posted in CAPITAL LETTERS about the Times, inadvertently echoing the famous words of Joseph Welch when standing up to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Trump went on to take issue with the Times’s coverage of his war in Iran rather than his mental state, as if to prove the Times’s point.

He keeps saying he’s “won” the war with Iran, although he’s never said what “winning” means. At one moment his goal is to free Iran’s people. At another, it’s to end Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. At another, to destroy Iran’s missiles. At another, to achieve “regime change.” At another, to open the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before Trump started his war). At another, he says he’ll know the U.S. military operation in Iran is over when he feels it "[in] my bones.”

We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?

He can’t even stay on the same subject for more than a few minutes. In the middle of a high-level Cabinet meeting about the war, he spends five minutes talking about his preference for Sharpie pens. He interrupts another Iran war update to praise the White House drapes.

He threatens that if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he says America doesn’t need the strait reopened. Then he says: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He calls the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the Pope wants peace. He posts an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus, then says he was only depicting himself as a physician.

He won’t give up on his illegal and dangerous (for the economy) criminal investigation of Fed Chief Jerome Powell, claiming it’s not just about Powell’s renovations at the Fed but also a “probe on incompetence,” adding he’ll fire Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term as chair ends.

He claims that the United States “needs” Greenland. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says whales are being killed by windmills. He claims that he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. He says the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. He goes on an eight-minute ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. He boasts of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia.

After Robert Mueller’s death, he says, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” He blames the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle on “the anger [Rob Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” After Joe Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump says, “I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9, that’s a long time” (there is no Stage 9 cancer).

He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental condition posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.

In 2021, members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump’s lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.

During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then went into the stratosphere of his bonkers mind:

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

It’s no longer possible to overlook his conspiracy-obsessed paranoia, his uncontrolled rage, his emotional volatility, his delusional claims, his vengeful rantings, his foul-mouthed posturing, his increasing detachment from reality.

Yet his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice. His billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. The media tries to “sanewash” his growing incoherence.

But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilization is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” A White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says “he’s clearly not well.”

The public is catching on. Fully 61 percent of Americans think he’s become more erratic with age, while just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” (down from 54 percent in 2023).

For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we face the reality: The most powerful man in the world does not have the mental capacity to do the job. Donald Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly unhinged.

We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?

Don’t wait. Impeach him now.

Twenty-two years ago this week, I published an article in this space, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam?” It proved prescient, for the Iraq War was, inevitably, lost. Part of the reason—and this was the burden of that article—was that the US hadn’t learned the obvious lessons from Vietnam, the first war America had ever lost. Nor has it, since.

Because of that, Iran, too, will prove another Vietnam: not the first or even the second or third war America ever lost, but certainly the most consequential. It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself. It’s worthwhile understanding why this has happened.

The contexts for Vietnam and Iran are different, but they bear haunting similarities; situations the US couldn’t stay out of, but conflicts it couldn’t win, either. That is the working definition of “quagmire.”

Vietnam became a US challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War. India had joined the Soviet camp when it gained independence, in 1947. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War ended in 1953 but was only fought to a draw. The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The US was clearly losing the Cold War, at least in Asia.

By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.

In the middle of all that, Vietnam declared that it wanted to detach from the US orbit and align itself with the Soviet Union. If successful, it would be a model to the scores of other nations in Africa and Asia that were then fighting Western imperial powers to become free, themselves, from centuries of colonial bondage.

Where it ended, nobody could tell. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw dominos falling from Vietnam through Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, all the way to the Persian Gulf and the world’s greatest supply of oil. It had to be stopped.

Because of this, there was no way the US could stay out of Vietnam. But neither would it ever be able to win. Why?

Ho Chi Minh had approached Harry Truman in 1946 asking for US help in ejecting the French who had occupied his country as a colony since 1870. Truman not only didn’t help Vietnam, he sided with the French. That was the “original sin” that made it impossible for the US to ever “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, and, therefore, to ever win the war.

Iran: fraught with the seeds of defeat

The stage, today, is no longer the Cold War but the global transition to multipolarity. The Global South wants to end the unipolar era of US dominance and replace it with a more equitable, peaceful, collaborative, sovereignty-respecting global order. The US doesn’t want that. It wants to retain its position as global hegemon. But it is faltering, badly.

It lost its war in Iraq. It lost its war in Afghanistan. It isn’t announced, yet, but it has lost its war against Russia, through its proxy, Ukraine. The US destroyed incalculable moral stature through its lusty, broad-spectrum support of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It’s hard to fathom more rapid, self-inflicted imperial damage.

As for its economy, the US is actuarily bankrupt. It deindustrialized in the 1980s and 1990s, moving its manufacturing base to low-cost countries. That forced it to have to borrow $38 trillion in the past 45 years (almost $1 trillion a year). It will never be repaid. If foreign countries do not help fund the US’ $2-odd trillion per year budget deficit (in a good year), the lights will go out. That’s not hysteria. It’s accounting.

Meanwhile, China has blown by the US, lifting more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time, than has any country, ever. It became the largest economy in the world, in 2014. China dominates the planet in all manner of manufacturing, trading, exports, and development assistance to other countries. It is the global economic powerhouse of the 2020s that the US was in the 1950s.

The US strategy to deal with this epic, decades-long decline is to try to seize control of the world’s oil and use that control to extort wealth from all the other countries of the world, especially China. It is pure banditry masquerading as muscular strategy.

That’s what the destruction of Libya and Iraq were all about. It’s what the attack, via Ukraine, against Russia was about. It’s what the piracy of seizing Venezuela’s oil was about. It’s what this illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran is about. Control the oil. The US doesn’t have a Plan B to regain its privileged perch atop the global order. It has to try to make this strategy work.

But, as was the case in Vietnam, the US will not be able to win, here, either. The reasons are eerily similar.

In 1953 (the same time the US was helping the French fight the Vietnamese), the US staged a coup d’etat against Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. It installed a brutal dictator, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In 1980, in retaliation for Iranians taking back control of their own government, the US had its local proxy, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, attack Iran. The Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988 and killed an estimated 500,000 Iranians. Since then, the US has imposed a harsh regimen of sanctions against Iran designed to foster domestic discontent and undermine the Iranian state.

So, just as it had done to the 35 million Vietnamese, the US has unified 93 million Iranians into a visceral, unshakable compact against it. That unification was solidified when, in February, President Donald Trump tried to decapitate the Iranian leadership. That gambit backfired, spectacularly, unifying the county even more.

So, that’s the context. As was the case with Vietnam, the US can’t afford to stay out. But it won’t be able to win, either. Again, that is the definition of “quagmire,” the essential, fateful trap of the US in Vietnam.

What about strategy?

In both wars, the US relied on overwhelming force to bring the enemy to submission. In Vietnam, it dropped 12,000,000 TONS of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped in all theaters in all of World War II, combined. Did it work? Obviously not.

The US lost the war, including 58,000 soldiers killed and another 300,000 wounded. It spent $450 billion, or $3 trillion in today’s dollars. It wrecked its economy, inflicted traumatic civic pain on itself, and grievously damaged its reputation in the world.

Against such overwhelming force, Vietnam’s strategy was enervation: Stay alive and sap the foe of its will to fight. Knowing the superiority of US fire power, the North Vietnamese army avoided direct conflicts. It fought opportunistically, when odds favored it, and melted away when necessary, to preserve men, ammunition, and weapons. Did this work? Obviously, it did.

Even though the US inflicted 9 casualties for each 1 it incurred, it couldn’t sustain those losses in its war-fighting context. As more and more boys came home in body bags, the American people demanded the war be ended. The Vietnamese watched this seething, swelling discontent and waited the Americans out. Ho Chi Minh commented, “Eventually, the Americans will tire of their losses and will have to go home.” He was right.

Iran’s strategy reflects many learnings from Vietnam, mainly the learning of resilience. It knew it could not match US firepower. It had to do only two things. It had to survive a withering first attack. And it had to have deep enough resources to deliver a devastating counterattack. It has done this, brilliantly.

Within 48 hours of the US first strike, Iran took out almost all US radar installations in the Persian Gulf, leaving the US largely sightless. Then, it waited while the US fired off thousands of offensive missiles and defensive interceptors, gravely depleting its finite inventories. Then, it began its counterattack.

It decimated more than a dozen US bases in the Persian Gulf, including the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, the largest air base in the Middle East. Al Udeid is and was the headquarters of the US’ Combined Air Operations Center, which manages US air assets from North Africa to South Asia.

It dealt extensive damage to the Manama Naval Base in Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet responsible for naval activities in that part of the world. It has destroyed more than 40 US aircraft and billions of dollars worth of other military assets. It drove the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the largest military ship ever built, from the field of battle.

With both the US and Israel having fired a huge share of their existing stocks of missiles in the expectation of a quick decapitation, they are left gravely exposed. Iran has declared “missile dominance” over Israel, easily choosing the time, place, and nature of the attacks it now freely rains down.

Similarly for the US in the Persian Gulf. Its open-aired military assets with radars destroyed are becoming defenseless against sustained fusillades of Iranian drones and missiles. The US has proven unable to protect its Gulf allies—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—against Iranian attacks. Hundreds of billions of dollars of their economic assets have been destroyed, recompense for their providing staging areas for US attacks on Iran.

This is why Iran is not intimidated by Trump’s or Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth’s childish, simian-like chest beating about “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” By the way, it was Curtis LeMay, head of the US Air Force in Vietnam, who, in response to North Vietnam’s resilience, issued the original threat to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Who won that face-off?

The tactic of asymmetric warfare

In Vietnam, the Viet Cong had infiltrated US operations, from military bases and fuel depots to armories, staging yards, and more. A single mole—one individual—so placed, could tip off the enemy about US forces’ planned activities, exposing potentially thousands of soldiers to ambush and death. The asymmetry of such effect is almost impossible to register, or counter. It’s a major reason Vietnam won the war, defeating “the greatest military power the world had ever known.”

In Iran, the asymmetry lies with its control of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. It needs only threaten to attack ships and all shipping is stopped. With little more than a feint, a bluff, a head fake, it has inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on the world through higher oil prices.

Most of the world blames that on the US, since the Strait was open before the war, and Iran had announced it would close the Strait if it was attacked, which the US did, unprovoked. At virtually no cost to itself, Iran can inflict hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, which falls to the discredit of the US in the eyes of the world. That is asymmetry exponentiated. Iran has played it masterfully.

A final word about Vietnam and Iran’s allies.

Vietnam’s allies were the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China. In Iran, they are Russia and China. The difference is that in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China were nowhere close to being able to challenge US power. In the early 1960s, they even became adversaries, making them still less effective in standing up to US aggression.

Today, Russia has shed its inefficient communist past and crushed US weapons, its proxy, and strategy in Ukraine. China, too, abandoned communism and has crushed US manufacturing, technology, and commerce throughout the world. The two now work more closely than ever to provide a new, non-US-centric paradigm for global organization, one that honors civilizational differences, respects national sovereignty, and promotes collaborative frameworks for national development. Most of the world is lining up behind it.

Where does all this leave us?

The context, strategy, tactics, and alliances in the war all weigh heavily against the US, just as they did in Vietnam. That’s why the US has not achieved any of its objectives. It hasn’t achieved regime change. It hasn’t seized the enriched uranium. It hasn’t deterred Iran from enriching more uranium, nor going for a nuclear weapon. It hasn’t stopped the missile and drone attacks. It hasn’t opened the Strait. It hasn’t undercut Iran’s support of its regional allies: Hezbollah; the Houthis; the Islamic Resistance in Iraq; etc. These things matter, greatly. Here’s why.

The most important public goods a global leader must provide to earn its legitimacy in the eyes of the world are peace, respect for the rule of law, and an economic environment that makes possible prosperity for all. With its nakedly illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, the US has delivered exactly the opposite: the hottest war in decades, piracy as policy, and a global economic environment that, through higher oil prices, reliably syphons wealth and, therefore, prosperity from every country in the world.

By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.

Russia and China, on the other hand, however imperfectly, form an able and ready replacement for the US as the organizing locus of the global community. The world sees the destruction attendant on the US hegemonic model: economic extortion, resource banditry, military thuggery, and diplomatic blackmail. Nobody wants it anymore. Even US allies are distancing themselves from it.

Iran will prove the catalytic event where US primacy in the world was taken down, where it was defeated militarily, broken economically, isolated diplomatically, and humiliated strategically. Had it better learned from its errors in Vietnam, instead of repeating them, again, and again, and again, it might have enjoyed a more graceful, self-directed descent. That is the fatal cost of arrogance, immaturity, and stupidity.

A ceasefire in Lebanon was announced on Thursday by US President Donald Trump, but its reality tells a very different story. The ceasefire was not the product of American diplomacy, nor Israeli strategic calculation. It was imposed—largely as a result of sustained Iranian pressure.

Washington, Tel Aviv, and their allies—including some within Lebanon itself—will continue to deny this reality. Acknowledging Iran’s role would mean admitting that a historic precedent has been set: for the first time, forces opposing the United States and Israel have succeeded in imposing conditions on both.

This is not a minor development. It is a strategic rupture. But it is not the only fundamental shift now underway: Israel’s very approach to war and diplomacy is itself changing.

After failing to secure victory through overwhelming violence, Israel is increasingly relying on coercive diplomacy to impose political outcomes.

Over the past two to three decades, this Israeli strategy has become unmistakably clear: achieving through diplomacy what it has failed to impose on the battlefield.

'Diplomacy' as War

Israeli ‘diplomacy’ does not conform to the conventional meaning of the term. It is not negotiation between equals, nor a genuine pursuit of peace. Rather, it is diplomacy fused with violence: assassinations, sieges, blockades, political coercion, and the systematic manipulation of internal divisions within opposing societies. It is diplomacy as an extension of war by other means.

Likewise, Israel’s conception of the ‘battlefield’ is fundamentally different. The deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not incidental, nor merely ‘collateral damage’; it is central to the strategy itself.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza. Following the ongoing genocide, vast swathes of Gaza have been reduced to rubble, with estimates indicating that around 90 percent of the whole of Gaza has been destroyed. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, women and children consistently account for roughly 70 percent of all of Gaza’s casualties.

This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction of a civilian population, an act of genocide that is designed to force mass displacement and remake the political and demographic reality in Israel’s favor.

The same logic extends beyond Gaza. It shapes Israel’s wars in Lebanon against Hezbollah and its broader confrontation with Iran.

The United States, Israel’s principal ally, has historically operated within a similar paradigm. From Vietnam to Iraq, civilian populations, infrastructure, and even the environment itself have borne the brunt of American warfare.

A Faltering Model

It is often argued that Israel turned to 'diplomacy' following its forced withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 under resistance pressure. While this moment was pivotal, it was not the beginning.

Earlier precedents exist. The First Intifada (1987–1993) demonstrated that a sustained popular uprising could not be crushed through brute force alone. Despite Israel’s extensive repression, the revolt endured.

It was in this context that the Oslo Accords emerged—not as a genuine peace process, but as a strategic lifeline. Through Oslo, Israel achieved politically what it could not impose militarily: the pacification of the uprising, the institutionalization of Palestinian political fragmentation, and the transformation of the Palestinian Authority into a mechanism for internal control.

Meanwhile, settlement expansion accelerated, and Israel reaped the global legitimacy of appearing as a ‘peace-seeking’ state.

Yet the last two decades have exposed the limits of this model.

From Lebanon in 2006 to repeated wars on Gaza (2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and the ongoing genocide since 2023), Israel has failed to secure decisive strategic victories. Its ongoing confrontations with Hezbollah and Iran further underscore this failure.

Not only has Israel been unable to achieve its stated military objectives, but it has also failed to translate overwhelming firepower—even genocide—into lasting political gains.

Some interpret this as a shift toward perpetual war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But this reading is incomplete.

Perpetual War?

Netanyahu understands that these wars cannot be sustained indefinitely. Yet ending them without victory would carry even greater consequences: the collapse of Israel’s deterrence doctrine and, potentially, the unraveling of its broader project of regional dominance.

This dilemma strikes at the heart of Zionist ideology, particularly Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s concept of the ‘Iron Wall’—the belief that overwhelming, unrelenting force would eventually compel indigenous resistance to surrender.

Today, that premise is being tested—and found wanting.

Netanyahu has repeatedly framed current wars as existential, comparable in significance to 1948—the war that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba and the establishment of Israel.

Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable: mass displacement, civilian terror, systematic destruction, and unwavering Western backing—once from Britain, now from the United States.

But there is a critical difference: The 1948 war led to the creation of Israel; the current wars are about its survival as an exclusivist settler colonial project.

And herein lies the paradox: the longer these wars continue, the more they expose Israel’s inability to secure decisive outcomes. Yet ending them without victory risks a historic defeat—not only for Netanyahu, but for the ideological foundations of the Israeli state itself.

Israeli society appears to recognize the stakes. Polls throughout 2024 and 2025 have shown overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for continued military campaigns in Gaza and confrontations with Iran and Lebanon.

Public discourse frames this support in terms of ‘security’ and ‘deterrence’. But the underlying reality is deeper: a collective recognition that the long-standing project of military supremacy is faltering.

Having failed to subdue Gaza despite the genocide, Israel is now attempting to achieve through diplomatic maneuvering what it could not secure through war. Proposals for international oversight, stabilization forces, and externally imposed governance structures are all variations of this approach.

But these efforts are unlikely to succeed.

Gaza is no longer isolated. The regional dimension of the conflict has expanded, linking Lebanon, Iran, and other actors into a broader, interconnected front.

Balance is Shifting

In Lebanon, Israel has been repeatedly forced toward ceasefire arrangements not out of choice, but because it failed to defeat Hezbollah or break the will of the Lebanese people.

This dynamic extends to Iran. Following the joint aggression on Iran starting February 28, both the United States and Israel were compelled to accept de-escalation frameworks after failing to achieve rapid or decisive outcomes.

The expectation that Iran could be quickly destabilized—replicating the models of Iraq or Libya—proved illusory. Instead, the confrontation revealed the limits of military escalation and forced a return to negotiations.

This is the essence of Israel’s current predicament.

Diplomacy, in this model, is not an alternative to war—it is a pause within it. A temporary tool used to regroup before the next phase of confrontation.

But in Israel’s case, this aggressive 'diplomacy' is increasingly becoming the only available tool, precisely because its military strategy has failed to deliver victory.

Lebanon was meant to be the exception—a theater where Israel could isolate and defeat Hezbollah. Instead, it became further evidence of strategic failure.

Efforts to separate the fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran—have collapsed. Iran has explicitly linked its diplomatic engagement to developments on other fronts, forcing Israel into a broader strategic entanglement it cannot control.

This marks a profound shift.

The foundational pillars of Israeli strategy—overwhelming force, fragmentation of adversaries, narrative control, and political engineering—are no longer functioning as they once did.

Yet Netanyahu continues to project victory, declaring success at regular intervals, invoking deterrence, and framing ongoing wars as strategic achievements.

But these narratives ring hollow.

The reality, increasingly evident to observers across the region and beyond, is that the balance is finally shifting.

For the first time in decades, the trajectory of history is no longer bending in Israel’s favor.