I teach 12th-grade English at an urban high school in upstate New York. The poverty rate here is high. And violent crime is a common occurrence. When people ask what I’ve learned from doing this job for 18 years, I tell them I’ve come to see how hard it is to be a Black or brown person in America. And the president is making that even harder, which in turn makes my job as an urban educator harder.

February 6, on his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump posted a 62-second clip of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces imposed over the bodies of apes. As word of this got around school on Friday, multiple students of color came to me. They wanted to know—needed to know—if Trump’s “Truth” was real. I gave it to ‘em straight. Yes, the Commander-in-Chief had trafficked in one of the oldest, most-painful tropes against African Americans. These students weren’t angry. They were frustrated. They’d been stripped of their dignity by their own president. Friday was a very difficult day at my school.

Regarding the post, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, "Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

This Trumpian brand of race-baiting is nothing new. You might remember Trump’s opening salvo to the citizenry was Birtherism. To enter political life by asserting Barack Obama was born in Kenya, Trump signaled an alliance with those who despised Obama because of his skin color. Trump’s depraved conspiracy was meant to make us see Obama—a self-made, sophisticated Black man—as a savage, running around some mud-hut village in loin cloth and war paint. It wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a bullhorn.

In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump.

Do I think Trump hates Black people? No, I think Trump thrives on division, and racial division is a provocateur every time. I harken back to what then-VP Kamala Harris said about Trump on the debate stage in 2024, “It's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people."

Whether it’s race or some other subject, Trump never misses a chance to pit the electorate against itself. Anything from Rob Reiner to the Superbowl halftime show, it’s all fodder for a good fight. Our country has never been more divided. Don’t believe me? Scroll through Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), etc. The knives are out. The name calling is ugly. And it’s all about Trump. As long as Trump controls the bully pulpit, we have no hope for unity. He’ll never stop fanning the flames.

This, I suppose, is the Shakespearean flaw of a president (and a person) who must be the center of attention at all times, even if it’s manufactured attention. You might remember, in his pre-political life, Trump routinely planted stories about himself in the New York papers and tabloid magazines, using the alias John Barron to brag about “Trump’s” celebrity connections and romantic relationships.

Maybe Trump suffers from what columnist Maureen Dowd called “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” While I’m certain that’s true, or sort of true, Trump targets migrants, women, and his perceived opponents with equal cruelty. Trump’s ascension to the top of our federal government is akin to Biff Tannen winning Lorraine at the end of Back to the Future. “What’re you lookin’ at, butthead?” Who’d root for that? Apparently 77 million Americans would.

The thing about bullies, even powerful ones like Trump: Deep down, they’re cowards who lack accountability. A few hours after Ms. Leavitt claimed the public didn’t care about Trump’s post, the administration changed its story: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.” Pinning this on a make-pretend staffer? It simply doesn’t get more Biff Tannen than that.

John F. Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all ships,” meaning when something good happens to the system, everyone benefits. So what’s the net result of a president who tells lies, violates the law, uses the Oval Office to enrich himself and his family, orders the Justice Department to punish his enemies? Who “benefits” inside that system?

As a teacher of 12th graders, I wish we hadn’t heaped such a seismic amount of chaos upon the next generation. But I’m also optimistic. I believe these young people will guide our broken country out of the darkness, perhaps fueled by the dignity-stripping frustration they felt when they realized Trump’s “Truth” was real.

In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump. History will regard the Trump Era as malignantly divisive, and Trump as nothing but a two-bit bully. Bullies never win. They don’t know how to win.

Needless to say, if anyone else, from a CEO to a cashier, had posted the Obamas as apes on their social media, they’d be out of a job before breakfast.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump was asked if he’d apologize for his “racist” post. The president replied, "No, I didn't make a mistake."

US President Donald Trump has a long history of trashing athletes. So when he aimed his viciousness at US Olympians participating at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, perhaps it should not have been a surprise. The response from US athletes has been fierce and firm: They will not be intimidated by the petulant president.

When a journalist asked US freestyle skier Hunter Hess what it was like to represent the US in this particular political moment, Hess replied: “It’s a little hard. There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t. Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the US.” The Olympian added that he had “mixed feelings” about representing the US.

In response, Trump hopped on Truth Social to attack the athlete, mangling the US skier’s actual words along the way. “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his country in the current Winter Olympics,” Trump punched out with his chubby little posting thumbs. “If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it. Very hard to root for someone like this.”

Not only did Trump misrepresent what Hess conveyed, but he cued his MAGA ghouls and powerful supporters that it was time to unleash their vitriol. Right-wing boxer wannabe Jake Paul posted: “Wow pls shut the fuck up. From all true Americans. If you don’t want to represent this country go live somewhere else.” US Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) piled on, “Any person who goes to the Olympics to represent the United States and then says they don’t want to represent the United States should be immediately stripped of their Olympic uniform.”

The IOC just can’t seem to grasp the obvious reality that their thin veneer of institutional "neutrality" tends to benefit the already powerful at the expense of courageous upstarts.

To say this does not exactly embrace the goodwill that the Olympics are supposed to stand for is to make an enormous understatement. Trump wouldn’t recognize the Olympic spirit if it came up and kissed him on the cankle.

Meanwhile, Olympians have stood up in support of Hess and other athletes who are willing to embrace the political complexity of the moment. Chloe Kim, the superstar snowboarder from the United States, said, “It’s important in moments like these for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another with what’s going on.” She added, “I’m really proud to represent the United States. The US has given my family so much opportunity, but I also think we are allowed to voice our opinions on what’s going on.”

Eileen Gu, the two-time gold-medal-winning freestyle skier who herself experienced scorn and abuse when she decided to represent China, rather than the United States, at the 2022 Winter Olympics, said: “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

After winning a silver medal in cross-country skiing, Ben Ogden said, “I choose to believe that I live in a country where people can express their opinions without backlash.” He added: “Certainly not... without backlash from the president. And that was really disappointing to see, but I hope it doesn’t continue like that.” Fellow US cross-country skier Zak Ketterson also pushed back: “I think it’s pretty childish to come at somebody for exercising their free speech, right, and considering that side of the political spectrum always champions free speech, it’s a little, I think, surprising to see them so triggered.”

US curler Rich Ruohonen, who is also an attorney from Minnesota, leaned on the law, noting, “We have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of speech.” He added: “What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of grey. It’s clear.” This follows fellow Minnesotan Kelly Pannek, a member of the US women’s hockey team, who said she drew inspiration from activists in her home state: “I think people have been asking a lot of us what it’s like to represent our state and our country. I think what I’m most proud to represent is the tens of thousands of people that show up on some of the coldest days of the year to stand [at protests] and fight for what they believe in.”

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee has remained conspicuously quiet. Rather than standing up for Olympic athletes and their free speech rights, the self-proclaimed “supreme authority” of the games has sat silent.

When asked about Trump’s behavior at a Milan Cortina 2026 press conference, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, “I am not going to add to the discourse because I don’t think it’s very helpful to heat up any discourse like that.” So much for the IOC’s slogan “putting athletes first.” According to the IOC’s most recently available tax documents, Mr. Adams makes $528,615 in reportable compensation (and another $100,838 in additional compensation from the IOC and related organizations), but apparently that isn’t enough to inspire him to do his job right.

Perhaps the IOC is too busy clamping down on Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing a helmet commemorating athletes from his country who were killed in the war with Russia. Or maybe they are still admiring their handiwork from when they forced the Haitian delegation at the Milano Cortina Olympics to remove the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture—the former slave who led a revolution that created the world’s first Black republic in Haiti in 1804—from their uniforms, arguing that Louverture’s image violated Olympic rules barring political symbolism.

The IOC just can’t seem to grasp the obvious reality that their thin veneer of institutional "neutrality" tends to benefit the already powerful at the expense of courageous upstarts. In sitting silent in the face of Trump’s attacks on athletes, the IOC is facilitating the slide toward authoritarianism. With the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics on the horizon, it’s time for the IOC to wake up from its bumbling slumber.

Trump’s attacks on star US athletes is part of a larger pattern. After all, this was the grump who attacked Megan Rapinoe during the 2019 World Cup, tweeting, “Megan should never disrespect our Country, the White House, or our Flag, especially since so much has been done for her & the team.” Six years later, Trump is at it again. Rapinoe refused to back down. May these athletes continue to show the collective courage to do the same, to stand up to power.

For months, we have warned of a drive by President Donald Trump and his administration to undermine the 2026 election. It is unprecedented, outlandish. Now Trump himself is blaring his intent—and over the past week, the public issue has exploded. The fight for a free and fair vote is taking shape, especially after House Republicans on Wednesday night passed the euphemistically named SAVE Act.

Make no mistake: The SAVE Act would stop millions of American citizens from voting. It would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress. It is Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.

Effectively, the bill would require Americans to produce a passport or birth certificate to register and thus to vote. Brennan Center research shows that 21 million people lack ready access to these documents. Half of all Americans don’t have a passport, for example. and millions of married women who have changed their names might need to jump through extra hoops to vote.

With passage in the House (not for the first time), it will be up to senators to block it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared it “dead on arrival.” But this time around, a mobilized outside drive is pushing lawmakers to restrict voting. “It must be done or democracy is dead,” instructed Elon Musk. The SAVE Act will not expire quietly, surrounded by loved ones. It’s on all of us to stand up and speak out, once again.

Each time Trump declares that his goal is to “nationalize” the election—not for the greater good, but for his own political interests—the stakes become clearer.

And now we see how it fits into the broader strategy.

In recent days, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Republicans “nationalize” the elections on behalf of his political party. Each time his aides try to clean up his remarks, he doubles down. “A state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” he wrongly insisted.

Constitutionally, that’s upside-down land. The Constitution is unambiguous: States run elections. Presidents have no role.

Congress, appropriately, can enact national legislation. It should use that power to pass national standards to protect the freedom to vote, not restrict it.

Then there’s the appalling abuse of federal law enforcement. We still do not know why Kash Patel’s FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia nearly two weeks ago. A judge has ordered that the underlying legal papers, secret until now, be released. ProPublica reports the raid may be linked to agitation by a “conservative researcher” who has peddled discredited conspiracy theories.

Intelligence chief-gadfly Tulsi Gabbard showed up at the Atlanta raid. FOMO? Amid Justice Department ducking and a denial by Trump, Gabbard wrote to Congress that in fact the president ordered her to go even though her office plays no part in elections. Now it turns out that Gabbard last year obtained voting machines in Puerto Rico. And Trump’s allies in 2020 claimed that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, long dead, had masterminded a plot.

This is comic opera stuff. But it’s deadly serious, too—certainly for the public servants in Fulton County. It all aims to send a message to intimidate election officials around the country. If you preside over an election and we don’t like the result, we may come after you.

Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who served prison time for defying a congressional subpoena, declared on Tuesday, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.” When we see how politicized and aggressive immigration forces have become, that threat becomes more than a podcaster’s bombast.

Here, the law is clear: That would be a federal crime. My colleague Sean Morales-Doyle explains: “Can the president send troops or ICE agents to polling places? No—both federal and state laws explicitly prohibit the federal government from carrying out these implied threats.” It’s a federal crime to intimidate voters, too.

In coming months, if we see abuses of power like this, what can we all do to ensure that voters have their voice?

So far, we and others have staved off Trump’s worst impulses. After Trump signed an executive order last year purporting to unilaterally rewrite election rules, we sued the administration, and we won. And as the Trump administration continues to sue states for sensitive voter information, courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have reaffirmed states’ right to refuse.

State and local governments, too, must be ready to act to protect the polls.

And voters will need to know that, despite all the noise and drama, we can make sure the 2026 elections are free, fair, secure, and, yes, uneventful. It may require voting early or by mail, for example.

In an election year, voting rights advocates often ponder whether pointing to threats risks demobilizing citizens. At some point, warning about voter suppression can accidentally dampen participation.

Not this year, it seems. Each time Trump declares that his goal is to “nationalize” the election—not for the greater good, but for his own political interests—the stakes become clearer. When he wrongly insists American elections are “rigged,” as he did over the weekend, it’s more than bluster. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.

In 2026, the right to vote will demand a fight to vote.

On February 5, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: Humanity has long been living on borrowed time.

In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we’ve faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with thousands of omnicidal weapons, such fatalism—part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency—becomes a form of violence in its own right.

Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell observed decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as “crimes against the future.” And as Robert Jay Lifton once warned, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute “genocide in its terminal form,” a destruction so absolute as to render the Earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.

Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered naïve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It’s the height of naïveté to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.

Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us.

That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we’ve clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global nonproliferation regime aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.

A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed many of its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who has declared that he doesn’t “need international law,” has stripped away the fragile façade of a rules-based global order.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is still time to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it’s necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.

Every City Is Hiroshima

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological “progress” had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist Norman Cousins captured the zeitgeist when he wrote that “modern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute.” Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods, and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.

In the United States, of course, a majority of Americans greeted the initial reports of the atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities in a celebratory fashion, convinced that such unprecedented weapons would bring a swift, victorious end to a brutal war. For many, that relief was inseparable from a lingering desire for retribution. In announcing the first atomic attack, President Harry Truman himself declared that the Japanese “have been repaid many fold” for their strike on Pearl Harbor, which inaugurated the official American entry into World War II. Yet triumph quickly gave way to a more somber reckoning.

As the scale of devastation came into fuller view, the psychological fallout radiated far beyond Japan. The New York Herald Tribune captured a growing unease when it editorialized that “one forgets the effect on Japan or on the course of the war as one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling a little… it is as if we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all its possible consequences for any rejoicing over the immediate consequences of its employment.”

Some critics of the bombings would soon begin to frame their concerns in explicitly moral terms, posing the question: Who had we become? Historian Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that the attacks represented the culmination of a society unmoored from any ethical foundations and nothing short of “the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life.” Religious leaders voiced similar concern. The Christian Century magazine typically condemned the bombings as “a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of moral existence.”

As the apocalyptic imagination took hold, others turned to a more self-interested but no less urgent question: What will happen to us? Newspapers across the country began running stories on what a Hiroshima-sized bomb would do to their downtowns. Yet Philip Morrison, one of the few scientists to witness both the initial Trinity Test of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima after the bombing, warned that even such terrifying projections underestimated the danger.

Deaths in the hundreds of thousands were, he insisted, far too optimistic. “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.” And given the effect of radiation, those who made “remarkable escapes,” the “lucky” ones, would die all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who “died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages… of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.” Ultimately, he concluded, “If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together… there is only one sure future. The cities of men on Earth will perish.”

One World or None

Morrison wrote that account as part of a broader effort, led by former Manhattan Project scientists who had helped create the bomb, to alert the public to the newfound danger they themselves had helped unleash. That campaign culminated in the January 1946 book One World or None (and a short film). The scientists had largely come to believe that, if the public had their consciousness raised about the implications of the bomb, a task for which they felt uniquely responsible and equipped, then public opinion might shift in ways that could make policies capable of averting catastrophe politically possible.

Scientists like Niels Bohr began calling on their colleagues to face “the great task lying ahead,” while urging them to be “prepared to assist in any way… in bringing about an outcome of the present crisis of humanity worthy of the ideals for which science through the ages has stood.” Accepting such newfound social responsibility felt unavoidable, even if so many of those scientists wished to simply return to their prewar pursuits in the insulated university laboratories they once inhabited.

The opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people.

As physicist Joseph Rotblat observed, among the many forms of collateral damage inflicted by the bomb was the destruction of “the ivory towers in which scientists had been sheltering.” In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rupture propelled them into public life on an unprecedented scale. The once-firm boundary between science and politics began to blur as formerly quiet and aloof researchers spoke to the press, delivered public lectures, published widely circulated articles, and lobbied members of Congress in an effort to secure some control over atomic energy.

Among them was J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was created, who warned that, “if atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world… then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” a statement that left some officials perplexed. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who had known Oppenheimer as both the director of Los Alamos and someone who had directly sanctioned the bombings, recalled that “he seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent,” adding, “the guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

Yet the scientists pressed ahead in their frantic effort to avert future catastrophe by preventing a nuclear arms race. They insisted that there was no doubt the Soviet Union and other powers would acquire the weapon, that any hope of a prolonged atomic monopoly was delusional, and that espionage was incidental to such a reality, since the fundamental scientific principles needed to build an atomic bomb had been established by 1940. And with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the secret that a functioning bomb was possible was obviously out.

They argued that there would be no effective defense against a devastating atomic attack and that the US, as a highly urbanized society, was uniquely vulnerable to such “city killer” weapons. With vast, exposed coastlines, they warned that such a bomb, not yet capable of being delivered by a missile, could simply be smuggled into one of the nation’s ports and lie dormant there for years. For the scientists, the implications were unmistakable. The age of national sovereignty had ended. The world had become too dangerous for national chauvinism, which, if humanity were to survive, had to give way to a new architecture of international cooperation.

Teaching Us to Love the Bomb

Such activism had its intended effects. Many Americans became more fearful and wanted arms control. By late 1945, a majority of the public consistently supported some form of international control over such weaponry and the abolition of the manufacturing of them. And for a brief moment, such a possibility seemed within reach. The first resolution passed by the new United Nations in January 1946 called for exactly that. The publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima first as a full issue of the New Yorker and then as a book, with its intense portrayal of life and death in that Japanese city, further shifted public sentiment toward abolition.

Yet as such hopes crystallized at the United Nations, the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were already preparing for a future nuclear war. Washington continued to expand its stockpile of atomic weaponry, while Moscow accelerated its work creating such weaponry, detonating its initial atomic test four years after the world first met that terrifying new weapon. That Soviet test, followed by the Korean War, helped extinguish the early promise of an international response to such weaponry, a collapse aided by deliberate efforts in Washington to ensure that the United States grew its atomic arsenal.

In that effort, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson was coaxed out of retirement by President Truman’s advisers who urged him to write one final, “definitive” account defending the bombings to neutralize growing opposition. As Harvard president and government-aligned scientist James Conant explained to Stimson, officials in Washington feared that they were losing the ideological battle. They were particularly concerned that mounting anti-nuclear sentiment would prove persuasive “among the type of person that goes into teaching,” shaping a generation less inclined to regard their decision as morally legitimate.

Stimson’s article, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, helped cement the official narrative: that the bomb was a last resort rooted in military necessity that saved half a million American lives and required neither regret nor moral examination. In that way, the opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people. Instead, it sought to secure power through nuclear weapons, driven by a paranoid fear of Moscow that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What followed were decades of preemptive escalation, the continued spread of such weaponry globally, and, at its height, a global arsenal of more than 60,000 nuclear warheads by 1985.

Forty years later, in a world where nine countries—the US, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—already have nuclear weapons (more than 12,000 of them), there can be little doubt that, as things are now going, there will be both more countries and more weapons to come.

Such a global arms race must, however, be ended before it ends the human race. The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the “impossible.” Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us. Whether that happens in time is, of course, the question that now should confront everyone, everywhere, and one that history, if there is anyone around to write or to read it, will not excuse us for failing to answer.

On Wednesday, Washington, DC will witness two historic moments, both carrying the banner “peace.”

After 15 weeks, the 2,300-mile Walk for Peace, led by a group of Theravada Buddhist monks, will reach its conclusion at the National Mall. Meanwhile, just under two kilometers away at the White House, President Donald Trump will meet internationally wanted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the prospect of imminent military escalation in Iran and Gaza.

On Tuesday, February 10, both Netanyahu and monk and spiritual leader, Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara, invoked peace when explaining their respective journeys to the capital. Before boarded Wing of Zion, Israel’s state aircraft, Netanyahu told press, “I will present Trump with principles for negotiations with Iran that are important not only to Israel but to everyone who wants peace and security,” adding, “In my opinion, these are important principles for everyone who wants peace and security in the Middle East.” At the same hour in Washington, Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara addressed the thousands gathered outside the National Cathedral, offering a different vision: “We are not walking… to bring you any peace. Rather, we raise the awareness of peace so that you can unlock that box and free it, let peace bloom and flourish among all of us, throughout this nation and the world.”

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, will gather near the Lincoln Memorial to witness and honor the end of the monks’ spiritual trek from the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas. At least hundreds more, will gather to protest the arrival of Netanyahu.

For all that separates these events in character and intent, each carries a vision of humanity and America, a reflection of alternate futures for the country and the world.

The monks will walk from the Peace Monument near the Capitol down to the Memorial. It will likely be a continuation of the exchanges that have marked their journey: flowers, bows, clasped hands, and smiles. They arrive after bearing unusually cold winter months, following an ascetic tradition of eating just one meal per day and sleeping beneath trees.

Nearby, Trump and Netanyahu will be fortified away from protesters, protected by gates, barricades, drones, and agents, meeting in richly adorned rooms, exercising a power over the future of the Middle East that is both absolute and unpredictable. Netanyahu is reportedly expected to insist that to secure Phase II of the “ceasefire” Peace Plan that never was, Israel must escalate its ongoing genocidal attacks against the entirely displaced civilian population in Gaza. He is also anticipated to lobby for terms, particularly regarding ballistic missile programs, that could deliberately undermine a US-Iran deal—a predictable objective of the Israeli government.

Trump, who proclaims “peace through strength” as the White House doctrine, may be dangerously receptive to Netanyahu’s vision. Almost notoriously, he has sought to brand himself with peace—relentlessly chasing the Nobel Peace Prize, styling himself the self-proclaimed “peace president” at rallies, staging photo ops, making self-aggrandizing speeches, and founding the so-called Board of Peace, which he will soon celebrate at the newly renamed Donald Trump Institute of Peace in DC (formerly the US Institute of Peace). Peace has become a banner he claims, brands, and projects onto his political identity.

But while he may assert himself as the peace president, who has “ended eight wars,” he remains the president who in very recent months, has initiated sheer terror and chaos. He has kidnapped other Presidents, deployed the National Guard, and unleashed violent immigration agents on American cities; he has embraced systematic family separations of immigrants and migrants, celebrated patterned executions in the Caribbean, defunded healthcare and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for millions in favor of building out a military-grade Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget and a fantasy golden dome, wields tariffs and economic coercion as erratic weapons of global power, seeks to colonize and ethnically cleanse Gaza to fulfill his son-in-laws Rivera vision, escalates regime-change operations around the globe, and more recently has manufactured a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. He is also the once-close ally, confidant, and facilitator of Jeffrey Epstein, and, like Epstein, a sexual predator.

Here, in DC today, two very different notions of peace converge.

In the White House, some of the world’s most dangerous, most criminal, and cruel men convene with the fate of millions in their hands, scheming war and exercising it through greed, supremacist ideology, and a state apparatus that shields them from accountability. Their peace is loud, flashy, and enforced. It slaps itself on trophies and buildings. It holds ceremonies of the utmost excess. It is severed from justice and empathy. It requires death. It requires war. It is ever attached to “security.”

There is also a peace carried to mark the end of a long, deliberate walk across the city. This peace, marked on a white flag, is humble and steady, disciplined and tempered—peace as practice, not strategy, not spectacle, but ethic. A testament to humanity’s highest aspirations. People from across the country join it, of every origin, faith, and language, observing in reverence and quiet joy. They honor the hope and tradition the monks have devoted themselves to, a practice rooted in mindfulness, compassion, and self-restraint. Along the way, they may hear again what Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara has repeated throughout the journey: “Today is going to be my peaceful day.” For the last time, the monks offer those who witness the chance to share in this intentional presence.

For all that separates these events in character and intent, each carries a vision of humanity and America, a reflection of alternate futures for the country and the world. Today in the nation’s capital, history is being made—among those who claim power and peace, and those who live it.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University; her Wikipedia biography describes her as “a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.” With these credentials, she has written an opinion piece in the New York Times telling us that dictators and would-be dictators generally make their economies worse and lead a precarious existence. Their efforts often “backfire,” as she puts it.

While this theory might seem like comforting evidence that history “proves” that dictators will get their comeuppance, it is actually a counsel of passively sitting on our hands and waiting out the authoritarian leader: either to await his death, or hang on till he’s ousted from power by his own miscarrying plans. If history proves anything, it’s that patient optimism is not a virtue.

Ben-Ghiat's area of expertise is Benito Mussolini and the fascist era in Italy, and she uses him as an example of a dictator getting what’s coming to him. After surrounding himself with sycophants and employing consistently disastrous military strategies, Mussolini was deposed in 1943 by the Fascist Grand Council: “He spent his last years as the head of the Nazi puppet state the Republic of Salò, his phone tapped by the Germans. He was killed by anti-Fascist partisans in April 1945.”

His demise—being strung up like a side of beef at a Milan filling station—may have been poetic justice, but wasn’t the cost just a little too high? He ruled Italy for 21 years until he was deposed, and by the time of his death, much of the country was in ruins. Italian campaign veteran and Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin described the landscape as “ghostlike,” recalling walls standing in the moonlight surrounded by rubble, with empty, "single unblinking" windows looking out like eyes. That’s what tends to happen when a dictator’s plans backfire – he pulls the whole country down with him.

The author’s more contemporary example is Vladimir Putin. At the beginning of 2022, she says, Putin had it all, including gold toilet seats in his Crimean palace. But according to Ben-Ghiat, he invaded Ukraine to shore up his waning popularity, a move that did not work out as planned. The Russian dead have piled up, Russia has become more dependent on China, and the economy has sputtered under the burden of the war.

If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.

But so what? Putin has been in power for 25 years, and shows no sign of going anywhere soon. Perhaps some faction in the army or the FSB might “terminate him with extreme prejudice” (as the phrase in Apocalypse Now termed an assassination), because they would be the only ones with the firepower to do so, but I suspect Putin’s likely successors would not transform Russia into another Denmark. And Ben-Ghiat undermines her own thesis by reminding us that Donald Trump shows every sign of being willing to bail Putin out of his international difficulties.

Unfortunately, dictatorial systems tend to be more durable than she thinks. How many times in the last four decades have we heard that the Iranian regime is on the point of collapse? Even a usually savvy observer of international relations like Lawrence Freedman has flatly claimed “the regime is doomed.” Perhaps in the long run Freedman will be proved right, but the people in Iran have to live in the short run.

And sometimes the long run is very long. North Korea, possibly the most repressive regime on the planet, has been run as a family business by the Kim dynasty for 78 years. With a per capita GDP that is less than one-sixtieth (note: not one-sixth, one sixtieth!) of South Korea’s, it is the most spectacular example in the world of how dictatorships ruin economies. It also experiences periodic famines. Famine is the single biggest marker for the total failure of a governing system; historically, the one thing any regime wanted to avoid was bread riots in the big cities. Ask the shades of Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas about it.

Yet, if the regime is repressive enough, as North Korea’s is, it can use lack of food as a regime stabilizer. The army, the secret police, and the regime’s vocal supporters get food as a reward; access to enough calories to survive becomes the reward for loyalty. The rest, as in North Korea or China during the Great Leap Forward, can subsist on grass, wood shavings, and potato peels, and will be too physically debilitated to overthrow the system, even if a comprehensive system of surveillance and informers did not exist.

Donald Trump certainly does not have a hold on the United States like that of Kim Jong-un on North Korea, or Putin on Russia. But even in a “mild” dictatorship, the odds are high that living standards for the average person will decline, free speech will be stifled, and culture will stagnate into regime propaganda and kitsch. Social trust, already in steady decline in the United States since the 1960s, will crater to the levels of Somalia or Yemen.

Without social trust, the economy cannot be entrepreneurial and innovative (as opposed to crony-ridden and subsisting on government favoritism), and our civil society cannot be vibrant and voluntaristic with so many informers about. Art and intellectual activity will wither; our public universities, once the best in the world, will decline to the level of Bob Jones U. or Trump’s own fake university.

I believe that Ben-Ghiat fundamentally errs in emphasizing the dictator, rather than the political and social culture that allows a dictator to reach the top, and that can sustain him in power despite his disastrous mistakes. If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.

There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.

As in all dictatorships, Trump has a circle of elite supporters. Only in this case, the extent of their international influence is orders of magnitude greater than any previous group of oligarchs. Our American class of billionaires, deci-billionaires, and centi-billionaires dearly loves Trump for the fact that the bribes they render unto him are smaller than the taxes they would have to pay in normal circumstances.

As a bonus, the billionaires receive no-bid contracts; the return on their investment is so great that the public groveling they must periodically perform is well worth it. These malefactors of great wealth will stand like a praetorian guard to protect the privileges they have received under Trump. Any attempt to return America to a functioning representative democracy under the rule of law cannot succeed over the long term unless there is a firm reckoning with our billionaire class.

Finally, dictators must have at least some popular support. Trump’s opponents must contend with the uncomfortable fact that in three consecutive presidential elections, the number of Americans who voted for him grew each time. There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.

Ben-Ghiat is trafficking in platitudes by saying that dictators make decisions that are terrible for their countries. That is the nature of dictators and the sycophants who fawn over them; competent and moral people are systematically weeded out of the governmental apparatus and replaced by yes-men. As Hannah Arendt observed 75 years ago:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

None of this is to say that Trump and his goons cannot be levered out of power. But there is no basis for us to complacently wait for his mistakes to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of his supporters in a miraculous fashion. Making America a decent society will require a tough-mindedness and unflinching determination that Merrick Garland so conspicuously lacked when he had the chance. We must not fail the next chance.

Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments.

“You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,” she sobbed. “It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years. The blockade is suffocating us—especially single mothers,” she said crying into her hands “and no one is stopping these demons: Trump and Marco Rubio.”

We came to Holguín to deliver 2,500 pounds of lentils, thanks to fundraising by CODEPINK and the Cuban-American group Puentes de Amor. On our last trip, we brought 50-pound bags of powdered milk to the children’s hospital. With Trump now imposing a brutal, medieval siege on the island, this humanitarian aid is more critical than ever. But lentils and milk cannot power a country. What Cubans really need is oil.

There were no taxis at the airport. We hitchhiked into town on the truck that came to pick up the donations. The road was eerily empty. In the city, there were few gas-powered cars and no buses running, but the streets were full of bicycles, electric motorcycles, and three-wheeled electric vehicles used to transport people and goods. Most of the motorcycles—Chinese, Japanese, or Korean—are shipped in from Panama. With a price tag near $2,000, only those with family abroad sending remittances can afford them.

Production across the economy is grinding to a halt. Factories can’t function without electricity, and many skilled workers have given up their state jobs because wages are so low.

Thirty-five-year-old Javier Silva gazed longingly at a Yamaha parked on the street. “I could never buy one of those on my salary of 4,000 pesos a month,” he said. With inflation soaring, the dollar now fetches about 480 pesos, making his monthly income worth less than ten dollars.

Cubans don’t pay rent or have mortgages; they own their homes. And while healthcare has deteriorated badly in recent years because of shortages of medicines and equipment, it remains free–a system gasping but not abandoned.

The biggest expense is food. Markets are stocked, but prices are out of reach—especially for coveted items like pork, chicken, and milk. Even tomatoes are now unaffordable for many families.

Holguín was once known as the breadbasket of Cuba because of its rich agricultural land. That reputation took a severe hit this year when Hurricane Melissa tore through the province, destroying vast areas of crops. Replanting and repairing the damage without gasoline for tractors or electricity for irrigation is nearly impossible. Less food means higher prices.

Production across the economy is grinding to a halt. Factories can’t function without electricity, and many skilled workers have given up their state jobs because wages are so low. Jorge, whom I met selling bologna in the market, used to be an engineer at a state enterprise. Verónica, once a teacher, now sells sweets she bakes at home—when the power is on. Ironically, while Marco Rubio claims he wants to bring capitalism to Cuba, US sanctions are crushing the very private sector that most Cubans now depend on to survive.

I talked to people on the street who blame the Cuban government for the crisis and openly say they can’t wait for the fall of communism. Young people told me that their goal is to leave the island and live somewhere they can make a decent living. But I didn’t meet a single person who supported the blockade or a US invasion.

“This government is terrible,” said a thin man who changes money on the street—an illegal but tolerated activity. But when I showed him a photo of Marco Rubio, he didn’t hesitate. “That man is the devil. A self-serving, slimy politician who doesn’t give a damn about the Cuban people.”

Others put the blame squarely on the United States. They point to the dramatic improvement in their lives after Presidents Obama and Raúl Castro reached an agreement and Washington eased many sanctions in 2014–2016. “It was the same Cuban government we have now,” one man told me. “But when the US loosened the rope around our necks, we could breathe. If they just left us alone, we could find our own solutions.”

The only way Cubans are surviving this siege is because they help one another. They trade rice for coffee with neighbors. They improvise—no hay, pero se resuelve (we don’t have much, but we make it work). The government provides daily meals for the most vulnerable—the elderly, the disabled, mothers with no income—but each day it becomes harder as the state has less food to distribute and less fuel to cook with.

At one feeding center, an elderly volunteer told us he spends hours every day scavenging for firewood. He proudly showed us a chunk of a wooden pallet, nails and all. “This guarantees tomorrow’s meal,” he said—his face caught between pride and sorrow.

So how long can Cubans hold on as conditions worsen? And what is the endgame?

When I asked people where this is leading, they had no idea. Rubio wants regime change, but no one can explain how that would happen or who would replace the current government. Some speculate a deal could be struck with Trump. “Make Trump the minister of tourism,” a hotel clerk joked, only half joking. “Give him a hotel and a golf course—a Mar-a-Lago in Varadero—and maybe he’d leave us alone.”

Who will win this demonic game Trump and Rubio are playing with the lives of eleven million Cubans?

Ernesto, who fixes refrigerators when the power is on, places his bet on the Cuban people. “We’re rebels,” he told me. “We defeated Batista in 1959. We survived the Bay of Pigs. We endured the Special Period when the Soviet Union collapsed and we were left with nothing. We’ll survive this too.”

He summed it up with a line Cubans know by heart, from the great songwriter Silvio Rodríguez: El tiempo está a favor de los pequenos, de los desnudos, de los olvidados—"Time belongs to the small, the exposed, the forgotten."

In the long sweep of time, endurance outlasts domination.

On a February morning in 2026, the opening days of Black History Month, something unthinkable appeared on the official social media platform of the president of the United States: a video inserting the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama onto cartoon apes, set to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." It flashed at the end of a broader montage promoting 2020 election conspiracies and remained online for roughly 12 hours before deletion.

This was not a careless post. It tapped directly into a long, cruel lineage of racist caricature used to demean and dehumanize Black people. That this imagery came from the nation’s highest office demanded more than embarrassment, it demanded accountability. But what followed was predictable: dismissive deflection, minimization, and no consequences. The White House initially labeled criticism “fake outrage,” claimed it was “just a meme,” and then said it was “erroneously posted by a staffer.” No staffer has been named, and the president publicly declared no one would face repercussions. When pressed on an apology, he said he “didn’t make a mistake” because he had not seen the offensive portion.

Rhetoric cannot erase history. This episode, jarring as it was, is most meaningful as a mirror: It reflects a longstanding pattern of denial, obfuscation, and racialized harm that extends far beyond any single meme or social post.

Long before this video ever appeared, Donald Trump’s public life was intertwined with racial controversy. In 2011, he propelled himself into national headlines by demanding Barack Obama release his birth certificate, questioning whether the first Black president was even born in the United States. He called Obama a “foreign-born fraud,” despite clear evidence to the contrary. This birther campaign wasn’t a slip of judgment; it was a deliberate, sustained effort to delegitimize and diminish the first Black occupant of the White House—a strategy that inflamed racial distrust and energized nativist resentments across the country.

Trump’s repeated insistence that he is “not a racist” functions as a rhetorical shield. It resonates rhetorically but cannot wipe away decades of documented behavior, public statements, and the lived experiences of those harmed by policy and symbolism.

That pattern continued. In 2018, Trump reportedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and several African nations as “shithole countries,” expressing preference for immigrants from Norway. Such language dehumanizes entire nations and the predominantly non-white populations within them, shaping global perception and domestic attitudes alike.

The harm extends into domestic policy and public memory. In the late 1980s, during the Central Park Five case, Trump took out full‑page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers later exonerated by DNA evidence. Even after their innocence was proven, he publicly insisted on their guilt, reinforcing false narratives that fanned racial fear and distrust.

Long before he was in politics, his real estate company was sued by the US Department of Justice for discriminating against Black tenants, steering them away from apartments while offering vacancies to white applicants. The case was settled under a consent decree—but the episode underscores a pattern of exclusion that predates his political career.

Through all of this, denial has been central to the strategy. Trump routinely insists personal friendships with Black Americans prove he cannot be racist. But anecdotes do not outweigh outcomes. Leadership is not measured by denials or self‑serving narratives; it is measured by decisions, actions, and real consequences for communities.

Viewed in this light, the racist imagery that briefly appeared on the official feed is not a rogue error. It is consistent with an administration that has repeatedly deflected harm while avoiding responsibility. When damaging content appears and the response is to blame an unnamed staffer, with no transparency, no accountability, no corrective action, it signals at best a tolerance for racial insensitivity and at worst tacit acceptance of damaging narratives from the nation’s official channels.

Beyond symbolic offenses, the lived realities of millions reflect deeper injury. Immigration enforcement under the administration has subjected families from Latin America, Africa, and Asia to detention, deportation, and family separation, deterring entire communities—disproportionately people of color—from seeking healthcare, education, and legal protections. Threats to Medicare jeopardize access to care for Black, Latino, and Indigenous seniors already navigating health disparities, compounding generational inequities. Efforts to slash support for public education disproportionately affect students in underfunded schools—disproportionately Black, Latino, and Indigenous—by stripping Title I funding, free lunch programs, after‑school initiatives, and protections against discriminatory practices. Proposals to restrict the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) leave hundreds of thousands, again disproportionately people of color, struggling with food insecurity and impossible choices between rent, medicine, and nourishment.

These threads are not separate. Families impacted by immigration enforcement often rely on SNAP or local schools, all parts of a social fabric that, when weakened, frays most quickly at its most vulnerable edges.

Representation at the top matters, too. In the second Trump administration, only a handful of Black officials hold top leadership roles, including Scott Turner as Housing and Urban Development secretary and Lynne Patton in White House outreach. Most high‑level offices remain overwhelmingly white, signaling whose voices shape policy and whose perspectives are absent from critical debates.

Language and civic rituals shape how a nation understands justice, belonging, and whose histories are honored. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more than ceremony; it is a moral touchstone. Yet this year, the administration failed to recognize the holiday officially and removed it from the federal list of free pass days in national parks, a symbolic demotion that strips public access and diminishes public commemoration. Such action may seem bureaucratic, but it is telling: When national institutions downgrade the public recognition of a civil rights icon while championing narratives that demean Black leadership, the message is clear.

Trump’s repeated insistence that he is “not a racist” functions as a rhetorical shield. It resonates rhetorically but cannot wipe away decades of documented behavior, public statements, and the lived experiences of those harmed by policy and symbolism. True leadership is not measured by denials but by accountability and moral clarity.

The Obama video, the birther attacks, the attempts to delegitimize Black leadership, the Central Park Five advertisements, the housing discrimination lawsuit, and the “shithole country” comments are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern in which racialized harm is consistently dismissed, deflected, or minimized, even as policies continue to disproportionately affect communities of color.

Moral leadership demands more than words. It demands recognition of harm, centering those most affected in decision‑making, and ensuring that power and opportunity are equitably shared. On these measures, the administration’s pattern of deflection, denial, and exclusion is a failure, one that cannot be concealed behind memes, conspiracy theories, or personal relationships. For a nation still wrestling with the legacy of race, the cost of inaction is lived, generational, and real.

One year ago, the Trump administration launched an agenda putting polluting corporations over our health, lives, and future. This week marks the anniversary of the first-ever environmental justice executive order, and yet we are left in the wake of dozens of harmful orders from Trump rescinding that very order and more targeting environmental justice. Along with unprecedented health and environmental rollbacks, this administration is forcing our communities to bear the greatest costs. Now, local leadership is essential. Groundbreaking state and local laws are filling gaps, showing what is possible, and building momentum for what’s next.

While the federal government unlawfully claws back lifesaving investments such as billions of dollars of grants to clean up water, remove lead, and create clean energy jobs in disadvantaged communities, they’ve also attacked over 30 environmental protections, including undoing stronger soot pollution regulations, and gutted bedrock laws. These actions will cause environmental justice neighborhoods (communities of color and low income) to suffer major consequences, with even more toxic pollution and growing impacts of climate change—threatening jobs, families, and lives.

Seventy-eight million people of color live with dangerous air pollution, and, in 97% of US counties, Black people have the highest death rates from soot pollution. In 2025, 75% of the US population—255 million people—were exposed to “dangerous, life-threatening” heat. In NYC, Black people represent 50% of heat-related deaths, despite being only 25% of the population.

These outsize health harms are no accident. A history of redlining was followed by a disproportionate amount of pollution being dumped in communities of color's backyards. Cumulative impacts are the result. Put simply, cumulative impacts are the combination of many sources of pollution and pressures in an area creating a multiplying effect. Visit any community of color or low income overloaded with highways, industrial, or chemical facilities—like the South Bronx, Newark, or “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana—and you will experience the soot, smog, heat, toxic fumes, and smells that show what cumulative impacts really are. Cumulative impacts laws can be a solution by checking the amount of polluting facilities in an area before allowing more to be built, ending old loopholes for existing facilities, limiting new pollution, and more.

The time for reimagining and recommitting to our ambition to achieve environmental justice is now.

State laws can inform and complement the creation of federal laws like the Environmental Justice for All Act, introduced by the late Reps. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) in 2020. This act embodies input from communities from across the US, and has the promise of being reintroduced by a new generation of congressional champions, inspired by state progress.

We also need these laws to be backed by strong implementation. It is a key moment in New York as the Department of Environmental Conservation is developing rules to carry out the cumulative impacts law. In New Jersey, their Department of Environmental Protection is issuing its first permit decisions based on the cumulative impacts law. These decisions need to set a precedent to break with business as usual, while implementing the strongest conditions in accordance with the environmental justice law. In both cases, the process to put these laws into action must offer real protections and meaningfully include communities.

The time for reimagining and recommitting to our ambition to achieve environmental justice is now. State and local governments must step up in the face of federal attacks and maintain the momentum that environmental justice communities demand and deserve. In this moment, we need more state and local cumulative impact laws that hold the promise of a long-overdue vision of safe and healthy places to live, work, play, and pray.

For 13 minutes on the most-watched stage in American culture, Bad Bunny made the United States feel expansive, uncontained, Caribbean rhythm-centered, and alive with a sense of belonging that crossed borders without asking permission. As a Venezuelan-American, I felt chills from the very first second to the last. I was a child again, asleep across two chairs pushed together at a family party that refused to end, the music still playing, adults laughing loudly in the background, grandparents locked into a serious game of dominoes as if nothing outside that table mattered. I could feel the dancing in the living room, smell the food that took all day to make, remember that deep sense of togetherness you can’t explain or translate—you simply grow up inside it.

And then came Bad Bunny’s ending—loud, defiant, and unmistakably intentional. When he said, “God bless America,” naming Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, las Antillas, the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, it felt like calling family members into the room, reminding everyone that America has always been bigger than the version that those in power are comfortable with, and that it has always belonged to more people than it is willing to treat with dignity.

At that very same moment, offstage, untelevised, and unacknowledged, the US government was tightening the screws on Cuba. Under Donald Trump, US policy toward the island has moved from long-standing hostility into something closer to an open siege. Sanctions have been escalated, fuel deliberately cut off, and third countries threatened with tariffs and sanctions for daring to trade with Cuba. The consequences are immediate and devastating: rolling blackouts shutting down hospitals, universities forced to suspend classes, factories and farms unable to operate, and entire transportation systems paralyzed. The US fuel blockade has grounded flights, stopped buses from running, and forced ambulances to be rationed.

The US embargo on Cuba itself is illegal under international law and is condemned year after year by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Yet the United States continues to enforce it unilaterally, using its navy, its financial system, and its political power to prevent oil shipments from reaching Cuba, to intimidate shipping companies, and to punish any country that dares to trade. US pressure doesn’t stop at its own borders; it extends outward, telling the rest of the world who they are allowed to sell fuel to, who they are allowed to insure, and which economies must be starved into compliance. When ships are blocked, oil is cut off, and a civilian population is plunged into darkness, this is a blockade. And under international law, that is an act of war.

If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals.

Washington then claims humanitarian concern, offering small, tightly controlled aid packages while maintaining the very sanctions that created the emergency. The crisis is manufactured first, then weaponized as proof that Cuba is “failing.” Scarcity becomes both the method and the message. This is collective punishment, designed to exhaust a population into submission through hunger, darkness, and isolation.

We need to be honest: This is not just Trump. Trump is blunt, crude, and unapologetic, but he did not invent this. For decades, US administrations have treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a sphere to be managed, disciplined, or reordered, operating from the same assumption: that the United States has a providential right to decide who governs and who must be punished into compliance. But ask yourself, really sit with it, can you imagine the humiliation of entire nations being told, again and again, that their future will be decided elsewhere? Imagine living under the constant threat that your economy can be strangled, your leaders removed, your people starved simply for refusing obedience. Who gave the United States this right? Who decided that Latin America’s sovereignty was conditional?

Two centuries ago, Simón Bolívar warned that the United States seemed destined “to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” His vision was not domination but dignity: nations free to determine their own paths, bound by solidarity rather than submission. Nuestra América, the America of José Martí, Simón Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez, is land, people, language, and resistance that still exist and insist on sovereignty.

This is the choice in front of us. You can accept Trump’s America, the America that governs through sieges, blockades, sanctions, and humiliation, deciding from afar who may rule, who may eat, and who must be punished into submission. Or you can stand with Nuestra América, the America Martí and Bolívar imagined, and that Bad Bunny echoed when he held up a football, reading “Together we are America.” This is an America that refuses domination, that believes no nation is a backyard, and that insists the future of this hemisphere belongs to its peoples, not to an empire. There is no neutral ground between those two Americas.

This is why the moment demands more than applause. It demands that we look past the spectacle and confront the systems that decide who gets to thrive and who is forced to flee. A real Good Neighbor Policy would respect sovereignty, stop weaponizing hunger and instability, and recognize that dignity does not end at the US border. Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility. What comes next is on us. If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals. Because in the end, the message is simple and uncompromising: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

If this article moved you, don’t let it end here. Right now, US policy is manufacturing hunger in Cuba and then pretending to solve it with crumbs. We can choose a different path. Join CODEPINK’s call to feed Cuba during this man-made crisis by supporting efforts that respect dignity, sovereignty, and life itself. Take action now: https://www.codepink.org/wck

This past year, our communities were hit with skyrocketing power bills as electricity prices increased at double the rate of inflation. A new Sierra Club tool shows that, to make matters worse, utility companies in the US are planning a massive gas buildout, and it’s going to cost everyday American families even more.

The Sierra Club’s new gas plant tracker shows that utilities are planning to build 271 gigawatts of new gas power plant capacity at over 480 more expensive, polluting gas plants. This is over 40% more than all the coal capacity that is still online. This level of buildout would increase currently online gas power plant capacity by nearly 50% nationwide.

These companies have drastically increased their plans for new gas in the last few years, more than doubling planned gas power plants since the start of 2020.

This is a massive proposed buildout of new fossil fuel infrastructure that stretches across the country; new gas power plants are currently planned in 42 states. Texas has the most planned gas power plant capacity of any state followed by Georgia, Indiana, Virginia, Missouri, and Arizona.

Data center developers and utilities can stop this onslaught of plans for new gas power plants and rely on affordable, available clean energy options instead.

What do these states, spanning across the country, have in common? Data centers. All of these states face major data center proposals.

Gas power plants already provide more electricity for data center use than any other fuel, and that portion is predicted to grow without more renewable buildout. In 2024 in the US, new data center demand rivaled the amount of clean energy brought online. Data center demand is set to far exceed clean energy additions in 2025 through 2028.

Data center demand projections are still highly uncertain, meaning this level of demand may not materialize. Instead of carefully assessing this uncertainty, utilities have been too quick to propose ever more gas power plants, leaving customers on the hook to foot the bill.

Southern Company, which operates electric utilities primarily in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, has the most planned gas power plant capacity of any parent company—over 20 gigawatts. This planned gas buildout is directly tied to data center proposals; for example, in Georgia, Southern subsidiary Georgia Power is planning a historic buildout of new resources specifically to serve growing demand, which is driven by data centers. What does Georgia Power want to make up the majority of that buildout? New gas power plants.

If you’ve recently looked at your utility bill and wondered why your energy costs have skyrocketed, you’re not alone. In 2025, households on average paid nearly 10% more on their utility bills than in 2024, outpacing wage growth and overall inflation. These plans to add even more gas power plants will continue to drive up our bills.

When a utility company decides to build a new gas power plant, the money it takes to build and maintain it does not come from the utility’s CEO or the Big Tech companies who want more electricity; we pay for the gas power plant in our utility bills every month. The cost of building and maintaining gas power plants has significantly and persistently increased in the US, contributing to increased prices for customers across the country. In contrast, the cost of renewables continues to fall.

When our utility companies fail to build enough low-cost clean electricity and instead increase their reliance on expensive fossil fuel power plants—as many are doing in response to data center demand—electricity prices rise.

In Virginia, for example, Dominion Energy is planning to build a massive new gas power plant that will cost Virginians at least $8 billion by the utility’s own estimates over the lifetime of the plant; the gas power plant is part of a buildout that Dominion says is necessary due to data center growth. Dominion projects that residential electric bills will more than double over the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers’ growing energy needs.

In Missouri, Ameren wants to build multiple new gas power plants to serve data centers. A single one of those gas power plants is expected to cost $900 million up front, before taking into account the volatile cost of fuel and maintenance needed throughout the plant’s lifetime. The same story is playing out across the country.

We deserve better. Data center developers and utilities can stop this onslaught of plans for new gas power plants and rely on affordable, available clean energy options instead. With proper planning, both data center developers and utilities can be part of the solution. In the meantime, we’ll continue to track utilities’ plans for new gas power plants, and you can join us to push utilities and data center developers to make better, cheaper, healthier decisions.

Democrats want President Donald Trump to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement by following the rules that govern every other law enforcement agency in the country. But a particular sticking point has become the demand that ICE and Border Patrol officers stop wearing masks during enforcement operations.

It should be a “no-brainer.” But Republicans say it’s a “nonstarter.”

In fact, Republicans are so wedded to their objection that they’re willing to shut down other critical Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, US Coast Guard, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Ironically, blocking DHS’ appropriation would have a minimal impact on ICE because Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” provided ICE with $85 billion—making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency and more than twice that of the Justice Department, which includes the FBI.

The GOP’s Specious Argument

Republicans claim that unmasking ICE would endanger the officers because protesters might learn their identities, which would threaten the officers’ safety. It’s nonsense.

Local police officers don’t wear masks.

County sheriffs don’t wear masks.

Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty.

State troopers don’t wear masks.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents don’t wear masks.

FBI agents don’t wear masks.

When any of these officers and agents engage in law enforcement activities, the individuals they stop can demand identification and the officers must provide it. Confirming the officers’ identities assures that they are not imposters. And it assures a path to their potential accountability.

The GOP’s Real Reasons

History is filled with notorious examples of sinister mask wearers: Terrorists who execute hostages, robbers, thieves, kidnappers, home invaders, Ku Klux Klansmen, Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire’s storm troopers.

Add ICE and the Border Patrol to that roster of villains.

With masks, identification becomes more difficult, resulting in an obstacle to accountability. At the same time, the anonymity of a mask enhances a sense of power in the person who wears one. For victims, the result is enhanced fear.

Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty. But Republicans insist that ICE and Border Patrol officers wear masks as they spread terror throughout communities.

Doxing v. Death

Dressed for combat, ICE and Border Patrol officers roam the streets; generate protests; and respond with tear gas, smoke bombs, and deadly force. Since ICE began Trump’s crackdown, their bullets have struck at least 10 people—including four US citizens. They have killed three of them.

Meanwhile, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and other senior members of the administration pledge to “stand behind” the shooters, wrongly claim that the officers have “unqualified immunity” (they don’t), and falsely blame the victims as “domestic terrorists” (they weren’t).

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is concerned about doxing. Recently, Tillis asserted, “In today’s world, I could take a picture of you and I guarantee you within 12 hours, I will have facial recognition of you, and then I dox you. If you are in an active, potentially dangerous situation, I’ve got no problem with them putting a mask on.”

Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control.

Routinely, police officers and other law enforcement officials “are in active, potentially dangerous” situations too. But unlike ICE, those officers haven’t created those dangerous situations. And unlike ICE, they respond with deescalation strategies to defuse them.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “What I will tell you is the president is never going to waver in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and protecting the public safety of the American people and his ardent support of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol who, unfortunately, the Democrat Party has made a decision to demonize.”

Preventing ICE and Border Patrol officers from hiding their identities as they morph into Trump’s personal paramilitary force isn’t demonizing them. It’s recognizing their danger and requiring them to function like every other law enforcement officer in the country.

Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control. And it just might save lives.

This week, members of Congress are negotiating funding levels for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, after public opposition soared when federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

As of January 25, ICE held more than 70,000 people in detention, and claimed more than 352,000 deportations. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, and so far in 2026, at least eight people have died in the custody or at the hands of ICE and CBP, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE and CBP have targeted citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented people alike. They have targeted adults and children. ICE is now holding an average of 170 children in detention each day.

They can do all of this because ICE and CBP are flush with money from last year’s Big Ugly Bill that stripped health insurance and food assistance from Americans while padding the budgets of ICE, CBP, and the Pentagon. The bill provided $170 billion for the Trump-GOP mass deportation agenda and $156 billion for the Pentagon, to be available through September 2029. That includes nearly $75 billion for ICE and more than $58 billion for CBP.

The “regular” annual budgets for ICE and CBP totaled about $33 billion in FY 2025. If legislators funded ICE and CBP at those levels for the current year, combined with funding from the Big Bad Bill, the annual budgets for those agencies would total $64.9 billion (assuming the Big Bad Bill funds are spent equally over the 51 months they’re available). That amounts to a 92% increase over the previous highest funding level for the agencies, which was $33.8 billion in FY 2019; a 209% increase since FY 2024; and a 441% increase since the creation of ICE in FY 2002.

(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)

This doesn’t even include additional funding to support mass deportations through the Department of Defense and local law enforcement agencies.

The ICE and CBP budgets are soaring at the same time that funding for legal immigration through US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would get a 23% cut from FY 2024 to FY 2026. And the Big Bad Bill significantly increased fees across categories of legal immigration.

(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)

The message is clear: This regime is anti-immigrant. This was never about law enforcement, or else the legal paths to immigration would remain open. Instead, budgets for legal immigration are being cut while the Trump regime strips legal status from successive groups of formerly documented immigrants.

The danger is that large numbers of legislators in both parties appear likely to approve relatively even baseline funding levels for ICE and CBP with limited procedural safeguards, while leaving the Big Bad Bill funding intact. The deaths and violence in detention centers and on our streets mean that any additional funding for ICE and CBP will only enable more violence.

In the wee hours of Monday, January 19, US President Donald Trump sent a now-infamous text message to the prime minister of Denmark:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America... The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!

Trump’s brief, belligerent message (full text and analysis here) underscores a stark reality: One man is causing an acceleration of civilizational collapse.

Only hours later, at the annual gathering of world political and financial leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a general sense of fear and dread enveloped the proceedings. Even Trump’s half-hearted announcement that he wouldn’t use force to acquire Greenland couldn’t lift the gloom. The most memorable speech was that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who began by saying:

Today, I’ll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints... But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable...

Systems scientists have been warning for decades that the current growth-based world economic order is unsustainable, and that it will inevitably become smaller and more simplified during the remainder of the 21st century. This downsizing is likely to be messy and sometimes violent. Meanwhile, observers who focus on geopolitics have argued that the US, which built a global empire during the 20th century, is already showing signs of decline in several respects, and that China is poised to become the next global superpower, if only briefly (that is, until the viability of global superpowers is itself outworn).

What is surprising is that this unraveling of the old order is accelerating so suddenly—and doing so largely thanks to just one man. During the last couple of decades, experts on societal collapse discussed whether the “Great Unraveling” would be a slow erosion over decades or a fast disintegration over mere years. The latest evidence (including Trump’s Greenland text) tips the scales toward a faster collapse scenario.

Since this shift is being driven largely by Donald Trump, it’s natural to wonder whether international calm could be restored simply by shunting him aside. There is, after all, growing concern over Trump’s health. (His sleepiness during daytime, his slurred speech, and his frequent frustrated fumbling for the correct word—in his Davos speech he called Greenland “Iceland” four times—have raised questions about his fitness for the job). The US Constitution provides two methods for removing an unfit president: impeachment, and the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Few informed observers of the American political scene expect either of these remedies to be implemented soon. Even if they were, Trump’s actions in the past year have irrevocably undermined stability in the US and globally. If his second presidency were to end tomorrow, Trump likely will have had as decisive an influence on history as pivotal world leaders like Winston Churchill, FDR, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin.

In this article we’ll explore how and why the march toward collapse is hastening, and what this trend has to do with Trump’s failure to understand social power. We’ll also explore what individuals can do in response to increasing signs of societal instability.

Three Elements—and Three Tools—of Social Power

The conclusions about Trump and accelerating societal unraveling stated above are rooted in my studies of the nature of power (see my book Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival and its related limited-run podcast). Every large society, from ancient kingdoms to modern industrial empires, has had to master three elements of social power—i.e., the ability to get other people to do things. The essential problem for would-be leaders of large societies is to enlist the populace to fight wars, build pyramids (or other significant structures and institutions), and increase economic activity. But what motivates people? Typically, they respond to coercion, enticements, and persuasion. If these are the three elements of social power, then it follows that the three main tools of social power are weapons, money, and communication technologies. In the book I trace the development of these tools, and the social consequences of their progressive development and use.

In Power I also point out that there are two basic types of social power—vertical and horizontal. Vertical power is top-down, exercised through threats and punishments: “You must do this, or else,” or “If you do this, I’ll give you that.” Horizontal power is mutual and cooperative: “We can do this together”; it arises through inspiration and negotiation. Democracies tend to rely more on horizontal social power, and autocracies more on vertical power; but durable large societies seem to demand both.

When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast.

Trump seems reflexively to rely solely on vertical social power—the use of threats and bribes. With such means, he has taken control of the Republican Party, won the presidency twice, and dominated Congress to the point that it has become virtually inert. He has been successful largely because horizontal power relationships in the US have been under increasing strain during the last few decades for several reasons, notably fast-rising economic inequality. From one perspective, his achievements are remarkable. Trump seems to understand power better than any other leader on the national stage. But his understanding of power is one-dimensional.

Trump seems profoundly ignorant of, or indifferent to, horizontal power. He has squandered the goodwill of allies and needlessly created international enemies. Again, Carney at Davos:

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied—the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions: that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains... Call it what it is—a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

Even authoritarian nations, if they’re to outlive their leader, need buy-in from citizens and allies. Chinese citizens, for example, expect stability and predictability while rapid economic growth improves their economic prospects. They also know that they will face severe penalties if they speak out against the regime, and they (mostly) willingly comply. Americans, however, thanks to Trump’s poor understanding of power, can now expect much less stability and predictability amid economic stagnation or even reversal. And many will be increasingly unwilling to comply.

Vertical Power Alone Is Fragile

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper,

...[Y]ou can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.

Trump is not the first world leader to rely almost exclusively on vertical social power. History is replete with authoritarian regimes and tyrants. Here’s an excerpt from a 3,000-year-old cuneiform text from the Assyrian Empire:

I am Tiglath Pileser the powerful king, the supreme King of Lashanan; King of the four regions, King of all Kings, Lord of Lords, the supreme Monarch of all Monarchs, the illustrious chief who under the auspices of the Sun god, being armed with the scepter and girt with the girdle of power over mankind, rules over all the people of Bel; the mighty Prince whose praise is blazoned forth among the Kings...

Pileser sounds positively Trumpian.

But vertical social power, on its own, often tends to lead to revolution, coup d-état, assassination, or war. Some historical authoritarian dynasties lasted centuries (China offers several examples). However, the lifetime of many modern authoritarian regimes has been brief (for example, Pol Pot ruled Cambodia for only four years). Concentrating the power of the state in one man often makes the glue that holds the nation together more brittle. What does the future hold for Russia after Putin? Why is the post-Gaddafi regime in Libya so frail? Strongmen tend to leave power vacuums in their wake, along with weakened social institutions. The fall of a strongman doesn’t always make way for a vibrant democracy; more often, it leads to chaos and a string of other short-term strongmen. In the case of Trump, the strongman is already old and (in many observers’ opinions) infirm. He’s not overwhelmingly popular, and his likely successors are even less so. The inevitable end of Trump’s rule, whether it occurs in days or years, will leave the US far more polarized and unruly than it was in 2016 when he was first elected.

Internationally, the US system of alliances that was patiently built over seven decades has not adapted well to Trump’s style of threats and bullying. When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast. And that means global peril for both peace and trade. Trump is not a solely American problem.

Power Tools as Engines of Destruction

In Donald Trump’s hands, the perennial tools of power are becoming engines of destruction.

• Weapons and coercion: From the earliest kingdoms to today’s modern states, it is men with weapons who have conquered or defended territory and countered domestic unrest. Trump’s use of the military, and threats of its use, are not just turning away allies, but also presenting his officers with intractable moral and strategic problems. Meanwhile, he is deploying troops to US cities against the wishes of governors and mayors. The possible results are explored in an article by Claire Finkelstein ominously titled “We Ran High-Level US Civil War Simulations. Minnesota Is Exactly How They Start.” Finkelstein writes, “The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.”

• Money and enticements: All organized societies gather and exert social power through their control of currencies and trade. Early in his second term, Trump announced hefty tariffs on imports from nearly all nations. While he has waffled on the percentage amount of those tariffs, they are still in effect and having a chilling effect on global commerce. In April, in response to tariffs, Canadian prime minister Carney announced that the 80-year period of American economic leadership was over. The US dollar, which has been the world’s reserve currency since 1946, is now increasingly perceived as toxic. A stampede to ditch the dollar would impoverish all who are invested in it; instead, countries seem to be quietly exiting dollar-denominated holdings. The inevitable result will be a decline in the value of the dollar and in US living standards.

• Communication technologies and persuasion: From the invention of writing in ancient kingdoms to the spread of social media and AI deepfakes in the present, communications tools have been used to induce large numbers of people to think and behave in ways leaders (or “influencers”) want them to. Inspiration, threats, promises, and warnings motivate voting, fighting, and buying. Democracies typically value science and unfettered fact-based journalism. Autocracies usually spew propaganda. The Trump administration has been labeled a tabloid presidency by Timothy L. O’Brien, who worked with Trump for the 2006 biography, TrumpNation, and who compares the president’s leadership style to tabloid magazines like the Weekly World News, with its focus on “dubious,” “trashy,” and “lunatic” stories designed to “knock readers back on their heels.” The administration has attacked mainstream news outlets that have been critical of it, sometimes employing the government’s regulatory powers as a cudgel. Trump’s false claims are so frequent that professional fact-checkers are employed by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations solely to spot, count, and refute them. Meanwhile, through a combination of verbal threats and funding cuts, the Trump administration is assaulting science, medicine, culture, and education. For example, the administration no longer gathers or publishes information about climate change, including both raw data and scientific research.

What to Do?

As I explained at some length in a recent article (which includes lots of resources and advice), local action to build community resilience is the antidote to national and global unraveling. Notice the persistent bonds of horizontal power holding your community together and engage in activities that build social ties. Strengthen local institutions, from credit unions to food co-ops. Identify and participate in international networks of trust and mutual aid, such as the Global Democracy Coalition. And learn from people in other parts of the world who have lived through authoritarian takeovers or successfully opposed them.

Build community resilience wherever you are. My organization, Post Carbon Institute, has produced books, articles, reports, and podcasts—as well as webinars and an online course—to help, and there are other organizations working along complementary lines. Our friends at Shareable have developed a fantastic set of guides (Mutual Aid 101) for anyone interested in starting a mutual aid initiative in their own community.

Collapse is accelerating. So must our efforts to build personal and community resilience. Don’t cower in front of your screen. Get out and join with others in projects to make your town stronger and more socially and environmentally sustainable.

When Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage, he performed one of the most beautiful examples of refusal I have witnessed in a long time.

In a moment when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting mass raids in American cities designed as a spectacle for social media, when families are being torn apart and warehoused in cages in hastily constructed concentration camps, when President DonaldTrump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” Bad Bunny showed up as the embodiment of flourishing. Vibrant. Alive. Unapologetically present, resulting in the most watched Super Bowl halftime in history.

And that presence, those enormous ratings, and that contagious joy was too much for some white supremacists to bear. I do not recommend you waste your time on Trump's knockoff social media to understand his eugenic ideology. You know what he wrote without looking, and Fox News will parrot it for him anyways.

As a psychologist who studies the roots of my discipline in eugenics, I recognized immediately what made this performance so threatening, so necessary, so brilliant. While Bad Bunny was leaving us speechless at America's most-watched sporting event, he was refusing the fundamental premise of a resurgent eugenic ideology that has always been about one question: What should America look like?

Trump Is a Knockoff Eugenicist

The resemblance between our current moment and the height of the eugenics movement is striking, and it is very intentional. Donald Trump is driven by the same goals as those who shaped American policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics was a pseudoscientific movement aimed at "improving" the human population by deciding who was worthy of reproducing and who deserved to live in America. Through forced sterilizations (that famous Buck v Bell case that you may have heard about allowed for this), immigration restrictions, and pseudoscientific classifications, eugenicists worked to eliminate people they deemed genetically inferior, always targeting immigrants, people of color, the disabled, and the poor. The movement operated by equating non-white and certain immigrant groups with violence and insanity.

In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics.

In the 19th century, academic psychiatrists shamefully claimed that Black people were psychologically unfit for freedom. Medical journals described "drapetomania" as an alleged illness that caused enslaved African Americans to run away from their white masters. Another fabricated condition, "dysaesthesia aethiopica," was characterized as a form of madness manifest by "rascality" and "disrespect for the master's property," supposedly cured by "extensive whipping."

Today, we see carbon copies of this dehumanization. Trump shares videos depicting the Obamas as monkeys. His administration unconstitutionally deports our neighbors to Venezuela, treating human beings as disposable contaminants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stages photo ops at concentration camps, transforming sites of human suffering into backdrops for political theater.

Manufacturing Exclusion Through "Science"

My discipline of psychology, under the guise of rationality and objectivity, has been able to cause tremendous harm. This is the trick of eugenic projects: By cloaking racist ideology under the seemingly objective rubric of biological science, it becomes nearly impossible to discern or critique. Psychology created the institutional infrastructure that made them policy. IQ tests are one of these manufactured tricks. In 1912, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island became the first group to have these tests administered to them. And like today, different classes experienced different encounters with justice, as the Epstein Files make so palpable for us. Back in 1912, only those in steerage were subject to examination; those who could afford more posh accommodations were exempt. According to the supposed "scientific" results produced by psychologist Henry Goddard, over 80% of all Jewish, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and Russian immigrants were "feeble-minded defectives."

Carl Brigham, one of these eugenic psychologists, went on to develop the SAT. The direct line from eugenic IQ tests to college gatekeeping runs straight through to today. Current "merit-based immigration" proposals echo this same logic: using supposedly objective measures to determine who deserves to be American, who gets to stay, whose children get opportunities.

And these psychologists have frequently collaborated with the US government, including in recent decades when they helped the government devise the most effective torture methods, breaking many ethics codes along the way. Lewis Terman, a psychologist who worked on the Army intelligence tests in the early 20th century, bragged that the exam "enabled psychology to become a beacon of light in the eugenics movement" and was especially proud of how these tests could be used to reshape national policy on immigrants. Terman’s wish was unfortunately granted, and these eugenic legacies were braided into the fabric of American policy including immigration law, education, criminal justice, voting rights.

Deportation as Eugenic Self-Defense

Between 1875 and 1924, Congress entertained many immigration bills and if we study them we can see the strategies that are playing out today with more clarity as well. For instance in 1915, Assistant Attorney General LE Cofer was openly advocating deportations on eugenic grounds. Another legislation in 1917 allotted a five-year period for deportation of immigrants who were later found to be in "excludible classes." Deportations were considered by these eugenicists as self-defense. In 1928, Eugenical News listed as a priority "the deportation of all aliens illegally entered." They wrote: "The man whose introduction to American life comes through breaking the quota act is prima facie an undesirable."

The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.

This is sounding eerily familiar, isn't it? Listen to current administration officials. Trump. Pam Bondi. JD Vance. Karoline Leavitt. This exact rhetoric is being repeated today. Equating people from other countries with criminals is a basic eugenic principle. Today's "border crisis" framing, the claims that undocumented immigrants are inherently criminal, the mass deportation plans, these are old-school eugenic principles with a fresh coat of white paint.

In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics. Immigrants during the height of eugenics were viewed as interlopers; along with Black Americans, they were seen as less pure bodies polluting the well-being of the entire country. Psychologists and other supposed experts made these sentiments appear scientifically valid and politically viable by arming themselves with photographs, charts, statistics, and quantified statements.

The Great Replacement, Then and Now

The goal of these eugenicists was "bettering and protecting the white race," the same obsession we see in the Great Replacement Theory today. This is not fringe conspiracy anymore. In 2022, a white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, explicitly motivated by Great Replacement ideology. In 2019, another killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, targeting Latinx shoppers with the same beliefs. Tucker Carlson promotes this theory every chance he gets. Congressional Republicans now use this language openly, warning about "demographic replacement" and the need to preserve "Western civilization."

History has taught us that progress toward justice can be met with pushback, and the burden of this pushback is often heaviest on those who for various reasons have fewer resources to defend themselves. Eugenics never left us. It transmuted, it became absorbed into insidious institutions, into redlining, into the school system, into the carceral state. But there were also real movements toward justice, civil rights organizers, community activists, families, and advocates who fought for decades to untangle eugenic legacies from our policies and institutions. They won important victories. And it is precisely these gains that white supremacists cannot bear. When the status of their imagined racial hierarchy is questioned, when their power is genuinely threatened, they respond with violence and state power. The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.

Economic Scapegoating as Eugenic Strategy

Eugenicist Robert Ward, influential in getting the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, said with awful transparency: "We constantly speak of the need of more hands to do our labor. We forget that we are importing not hands alone but bodies also." Eugenicists repeatedly claimed to champion American workers while actually protecting white supremacy. It was never about labor, it was about bodies, about whose body was to be protected and whose body was to be disposable.

Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification.

Today's anti-immigrant rhetoric follows the same script. Trump campaigned on protecting working-class jobs from immigrant "invasion," despite no evidence of that happening. But his administration's actual policies tell a different story: Mass deportations intensify the already overwhelming labor shortage in the construction industry, creating labor shortages that hurt local economies as farms and business are forced to close. Meanwhile, the administration busts unions, enriches billionaire donors (under Trump billionaires have gotten $1.5 trillion richer in the past year) and himself, and imposes tariffs that drive up prices for working families.

Many voted for Trump because they desperately wanted someone to address economic inequity. Instead, they got eugenic scapegoating, blaming immigrants for problems caused by the wealthy and powerful. The claim is protecting American workers. The reality is a war on poor and working people of all backgrounds, while the rich face zero accountability for devastating our communities.

Bad Bunny's Counternarrative

Which brings us back to the Super Bowl halftime show. The great American sport. The NFL. And there, at the center of it all, was an unabashed celebration of the Americans who are very much the target of ICE's raids today.

Bad Bunny didn't offer a speech or a slogan. He offered his entire being. The visual references to Hurricane Maria were unmistakable, the storm that killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans while Trump threw paper towels and claimed they "want everything done for them." The ongoing refusal of statehood. The deliberate undercount of the death toll. This is eugenic neglect: the decision to let "undesirable" populations suffer and die because their lives are deemed less valuable.

The whole performance was dynamic, alive, vibrating with joy. It refused the fusion of whiteness and American identity that eugenics has always demanded. This is resistance through presence braided with brilliant critical analysis. Resistance through flourishing in his full humanity, in the full humanity of his community, on the biggest stage in America. Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification. Not just saying but doing. His presence was an embodiment of flourishing that the eugenic imagination cannot accommodate.

The only thing stronger than hate is love.

What This Moment Demands of Us

Understanding eugenics helps us understand the present. It reveals that what we're witnessing is not an aberration but a recurrence, a resurgence of an ideology with a long life, an ideology that has been picked up by many political agendas over the decades. Trump has never been original once his entire life.

In my studies, I look at who is considered criminal or immoral. It has always been the immigrant. The disabled. It has always been Black people and people of color. Studying eugenics teaches us that policies presented as common sense, as economic necessity, as protecting American workers, as maintaining order, they are often merely covers for racial elimination.

He showed up and said: This is America too.

Our communities cannot be eliminated. "Seguimos aquí"—we are still here—Bad Bunny ended the performance with those words. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio refused to be erased, refused to shrink, refused to disappear. Showing up with joy is indeed a form of power, and gorgeous, infectious resistance. While the administration builds concentration camps, rips apart families, and unleashes violence against communities exercising their constitutional rights, Bad Bunny danced, swaggered, made us all fall in love with freedom itself. He showed up and said: This is America too.

That kind of presence, that kind of refusal, that kind of joy, it's too much for the eugenicists to bear.

Let's do more of this, America.

Last week, the US government announced it would be sending $6 million in aid to Cuba, on top of the $3 million it sent in January after Hurricane Melissa. This aid package might appear contrary to the significant escalation of the 66-year-long US criminal blockade, which has expanded to an all-out fuel blockade since December, with attacks on Venezuela, but it is in fact a core tenet of it.

This maneuver seeks to exploit the US-manufactured energy and fuel crisis to bolster opposition groups, substantiate propaganda against the Cuban government and revolution, and force the island into total dependency and submission to the United States. This frankly genocidal strategy closely mirrors that of the US and Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” and the weaponization of starvation and aid for colonial and imperialist ends. In both Cuba and Gaza, this is a deliberate strategy by the US to make people suffer from its actions, then place blame on the governing authority to justify regime change.

In November of last year, the US first announced an aid package to Cuba in response to Hurricane Melissa. While the hurricane hit the east of the island with force, Cuba did not suffer mass casualties and crisis because of the people-first policies of the Cuban government, which continues to distribute resources and prevent casualties from natural disasters, despite US suffocation.

Hurricane Melissa killed over 54 people in Jamaica, at least 43 people in Haiti, four in the Dominican Republic, yet only one person in Cuba. The success of the Cuban government’s response is not only totally ignored by the US organizations, but also used to justify operations and propaganda. For instance, the Archdiocese of Miami said about its aid distribution: “Dozens were killed, mostly in Jamaica and Haiti, but Cuba’s weakening economic situation prompted action from a small group of donors.” Surely, when a country’s response to a natural disaster is to successfully evacuate 735,000 people, prevent a major death toll, and prioritize people’s survival, it is worthy of praise. Of course, this would be in total opposition to the US propaganda line that Cuba is a “failed state.”

In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the US in 2005, Cuba offered a medical brigade of 1,586 doctors and 37 tons of medical supplies. The US refused outright. The hurricane and lack of response led to the deaths of over 1,800 people, many due to a lack of medical assistance and supplies, some of which Cuba could have provided, and 1.5 million people were displaced—many have never returned. The US government was happy to let people die rather than to accept the unconditional help of a Cuban medical brigade, which underscores its willingness to sacrifice its own population to pursue its aggression against Cuba. The stark difference between the US and Cuba in responding to natural disasters is at its core the polarity between a war economy based on extraction and profit, and a peace economy based on solidarity and common well-being.

Siege on Cuba, Siege on Gaza

The same genocidal motivations for the US-Israeli siege on Gaza have been imposed to isolate and suffocate Cuba. The US has banned the entry of goods into Cuba, imposed a total blockade on oil, and increased sanctions, which cause billions of dollars in losses each year, which is impoverishing the country. While it suffocates the infrastructure of even and efficient food distribution in Cuba, the US aid is being given only to the Catholic Church and US-backed NGOs, specifically to bypass distribution through the state. This is eerily consistent with the US and Israel’s horrific and deadly “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).” In Gaza, they laid a total barbaric siege on Gaza, refused the entry of any goods and aid, and banned international aid groups in order to justify US mercenaries providing meager amounts of aid between firing bullets. The US and Israel massacred at least 2,603 people and wounded 19,034 more at GHF distribution points. There was absolutely no accountability for or action against these barbaric killing fields.

In both Palestine and Cuba, the US is overtly and brazenly violating the humanitarian principle of working with governments in affected countries. It is using the same propaganda lines to do so. For Cuba, the US says it is “bypassing regime interference, and ensuring transparency and accountability” and that the aid is “part of a broader effort to stand with the Cuban people as they seek a better future.” For Gaza, the US says it is “the only viable way to get aid into Gaza without empowering Hamas” and “is a results-focused alternative to a broken aid system.”

In both places, the US openly claims it is undermining governments and organizations that it claims “steal” the aid. This accusation is a confession. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) set on fire, burnt, and buried more than 1,000 trucks of aid in Gaza as Israel manufactured a famine that killed at least 10,000 people, and for which the United Nations described as the “failure of humanity itself.” An IOF reservist said he “accompanied aid convoys supplying a militia in Rafah” and Israeli security added “closed boxes with unknown contents” to justify lies that Hamas was weaponizing aid. Israel also funded and coordinated militia groups in Gaza to loot aid, and protected Israeli settlers looting and destroying aid from trucks. Not to mention the many videos of IOF soldiers gleefully and jeeringly consuming this food aid. All of these actions, with the brazen refusal to allow passage for thousands of aid trucks in Gaza, provided the conditions to justify the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and its killing fields.

Similarly, it is the United States that is stopping goods from entering Cuba. Since 1962, the US has imposed a blockade that bans all trade and economic activity with Cuba. This is banned outright in the US with severe consequences, and spans the entire world, as the US imposes secondary sanctions, tariffs, and other punitive measures against any country, organization, company, or individual that does not comply with its blockade. In recent weeks and months, this has been tightened further. No oil has entered Cuba since December, and the government has rolled out a plan to ration limited energy for only the most urgent uses, such as hospitals, schools, and food. Cuba can no longer fuel airplanes, which may halt all air travel. The US, on one hand, is threatening tariffs and sanctions on any country that tries to trade oil and goods with Cuba, and on the other, it is pushing propaganda that the country is not able to feed and provide energy for its people. In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.

Made in Israel and Miami

The aid is also political at its source. All supplies through the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” were from Israeli suppliers, directly creating profit for Israeli venture capitalists, tech investors, and other occupation personnel like Michael Eisenberg, Liran Tancman, and Yotam HaCohen. It also funneled public funds into private and shady mercenary companies, UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions. This strategy utilizes aid as a weapon of colonial regime-change efforts, with the US aiming to install its proxies firmly in power in Cuba and Palestine, in opposition to the interests and will of the people.

For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire.

The US aid supplies to Cuba originate in Miami, Florida, long known as the site of the most vocal and brazen pro-US, fascist sentiments in the Cuban diaspora. The aid is being distributed by the Catholic Church and Caritas, a US-funded NGO set up in 1991 during the ‘Special Period’ in Cuba, which has funded regime-change operations on the island. Catholic Relief Services, one of the three organizations in Caritas North America, receives over half of its funding ($1.5 billion) directly from the US government. The other organization involved is the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which was the architect of the covert CIA “Operation Pedro Pan,” where over 14,000 Cuban children were taken from their homes to the US in the years after the revolution. Also included on the board of the charity is Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, John Couriel. The headline $9 million figure of aid to Cuba is being absorbed by organizations like this. In fact, in 2024, over 72% of all US aid to Cuba went to US organizations. This must pose the urgent question of how much of this aid is a way to direct resources to opposition groups in Cuba under the guise of sending food.

Gathering Intelligence

The strategy of deploying aid also pertains to a significant element of covert surveillance and intelligence. At the end of January last year, the US deployed around 100 mercenaries, mostly former US Special Forces soldiers, to patrol Gaza and set up the deadly “aid hubs.” US soldiers shot and killed starving Palestinians seeking aid while cheering and ordering Domino’s Pizza. These sites were death traps, used to lure Palestinians into an area where they were surveiled and shot at. People risked their lives to receive a meager amount of aid that was often rotten. It has been revealed that a significant element of this operation was surveillance. A UG Solutions contractor revealed that American and Israeli soldier-spies are using facial recognition software “on top of real-time footage of distribution sites” from CCTV and aerial surveillance footage. This was beyond merely a method of massacre, but of surveillance through the proxy of “aid.” The US and Israel confirmed there was surveillance after specifically recruiting intelligence operatives.

Similarly, the State Department announced that US government officials have been “making sure that the regime does not take the assistance, divert it, try to politicize it.” They went on to explain that “we have been watching” and “speaking with everyday Cubans…understanding the challenges they have been facing, both in the wake of the hurricane and due to the broader humanitarian crisis in Cuba.” This is worrying, as it is clear the US is using this as an opportunity, in tandem with NGO networks, to collect intelligence and push pro-US propaganda and lies across the country under the guise of “aid.”

In both Cuba and Palestine, the United States is deploying its barbaric methods of producing mass suffering in order to bring about political and economic submission. The tactics being used in distributing aid in Cuba now are a softer model of the killing fields in Gaza that seek to force the entire population into submission and occupy the entirety of Palestine.

Beyond this playbook, it is important to recognize the historic connections between Palestine and Cuba, particularly as they resist the violence of the US empire that seeks to starve them into submission. Cuba was one of 13 countries to vote against the UN partition of Palestine in 1947; in the months after the triumph of the revolution, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro traveled to Gaza; they were one of the first to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964; they severed all ties with Israel in 1973; and labelled Israel’s action a genocide in 1979. Since 1982, Cuba has been providing education for Palestinian students in Cuba; it helped to get Palestine observer status at the United Nations in 2012; it supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice in 2024; and has been one of Palestine’s staunchest supporters diplomatically and materially.

This historic friendship and solidarity are what the United States fears. This is why it is hellbent on destroying the Cuban Revolution and its continued ability to provide for its people, while refusing to let US companies pillage and extract from the island and its inhabitants. For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire. The situation is urgent and requires action. Like Fidel Castro said to the UN in 1979: “If we do not resolve today’s injustices and inequalities peacefully and wisely, the future will be apocalyptic.”

Right now, Americans are rightly alarmed by profound assaults on our democracy. Less in the limelight, but of critical importance, is the substantial backsliding and ongoing procrastination on the climate crisis. While the broader anti-democracy movement and stalling climate policy are both being driven by a highly destructive Trump Administration, too little attention has been devoted to exploring their common roots. Indeed, these issues may seem, at the surface, to be unrelated, or so vast that they require their own solutions.

However, if we want to make progress on either front, we need to understand just how deeply our climate and democracy crises are connected. They not only share roots but also feed into each other.

One of the most impactful threads tying these crises together is the misuse of corporate-led lobbying, Super PAC donations, and dark money groups. The biggest aggressor here is the fossil fuel industry. In 2022, companies including Exxon Mobil and Shell spent $124.4 million on lobbying. In 2023, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, received nearly $1 million from oil and gas companies. Plus, organizations like Republican Attorney General Association (RAGA) and other political advocacy groups are funded largely by dark money and corporations. RAGA, for example, received nearly $6 million in donations from gas and oil companies from 2020-2024.

Likewise on the individual level, Kelcy Warren--whose company is behind the Dakota Access Pipeline--donated around $18 million across Trump’s three campaigns. CEO of one the country’s largest oil companies, Timothy Dunn shelled out $5 million to Trump-backed super PACS in 2024.

All this private influence overpowers the will of American voters. Over half of us want a shift to clean energy, with even young Republicans supporting investing in clean energy and funding states to address the climate crisis. Despite this clear consensus, little progress has been made because of our campaign finance laws.

Disinformation is another powerful shared root of our climate and democracy crises. It threatens our democracy: Fake news stories have had real political consequences in our elections. In 2024, for example, we saw how destructive narratives surrounding undocumented immigrants eating pets and receiving hurricane relief funds had real sway on voters.

When it comes to the climate crisis, the same issues persist. A meta-study conducted by the International Panel on the Information Environment found that corporations, conservative politicians, and even national governments have contributed to rampant climate misinformation. It's not news that Trump is a key contributor here, having “called climate science ‘a giant hoax’ and ‘bullshit.’” And, too, it’s well documented that oil companies such as Exxon Mobil have for decades deliberately “led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.”

Election and climate disinformation feed off of our declining trust in each other and institutions that serve the common good. A 2025 Partnership for Public Service survey found that only a third of Americans trust the federal government, for example.

We can see the cycle of disinformation and distrust play out among climate change skeptics. A Pew Research Center survey found that many feel apprehensive when faced with “alarmist” facts about the climate. Participants feel suspicious that climate change advocates have a secret agenda—a problem fueled by a lack of trust and disinformation which only further perpetuates the issue. But here’s the kicker: This dynamic has opened the door for fossil fuel companies to control narratives about the climate crisis.

Absent fact-checking tools and coupled with the unregulated rise of generative AI, mis/dis-information will continue to circulate online with significant impact on how people vote and understand of key issues including the climate crisis.

Addressing these deep issues—from money in politics to waning trust—takes work. But he stakes are high and the harm to communities are real, so we must tackle these roots.

It comes as no surprise that climate chaos disproportionately impacts marginalized communities including people of color, low-income communities, children, the elderly, and those who reside in coastal communities. An uneven distribution of resources needed to prepare for climate disasters and recover from them is also a key part of the problem.

It’s no coincidence that the populations most impacted by the climate crisis are the same communities that have been systemically disenfranchised in our democracy. Take the disenfranchisement of Black voters: laws preventing felons from voting are one of many tactics used to stifle the Black vote. Note our prison population is notably disproportionately Black due to decades of discriminatory mass incarceration practices including over policing. This systemic exclusion means that citizens—particularly the most impacted—are denied a voice on the very issues that most harm them.

Clearly the playing field is deeply uneven: Corporate powers wreak havoc on our communities all while undermining the democratic process through campaign financing and misinformation. Meanwhile, as Trump violently deploys ICE agents to wreak havoc in Minneapolis and beyond, he pillages the woods next door (note Congress’s revocation of a 20-year mining moratorium in Minnesota’s boundary waters this January).

There’s no denying that climate chaos and democracy are deeply interrelated. The task at hand is substantial, but by digging to these shared roots, we can form the broad coalitions and solidaristic networks of cross-issue advocates that we need to build a more just and democratic world for all.

News broke this week that President Donald Trump was conditioning approval of an infrastructure spending bill on renaming New York City’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport in his honor. It was unsurprising because there’s a disturbing pattern in Mr. Trump’s approach to governing that includes the glorification of the leader, the erasure of norms, the use of threats of retribution to stifle critics, and a reliance on “alternate facts” to keep the faithful in tow.

Because I am once again writing about President Trump, I know that some will accuse me of having what the president calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I confess to being obsessed with his incendiary speech, his behavior, and the movement he has inspired, precisely because of the danger they pose to American democracy.

During Mr. Trump’s first term we dreaded turning on the news each morning and learning about the threatening tweets he had posted overnight. But because there were guardrails in place—senior staff who would slow walk his demands or simply refuse to act on them, or Congress or the courts that served as a check on his behavior—most often the threats turned out to be hollow.

As has been noted, in his second term, because the guardrails are gone, the president has become emboldened to move beyond empty words to actions which his minions faithfully attempt to execute. As a result, we are entering uncharted waters in which an imperial presidency is testing the resilience of our system of “checks and balances.”

Entering the second year of his second term in office, the pattern is clear. He employs bullying tactics to get his way—with other individuals, institutions, or countries. He “floods the zone,” disorienting opponents by daily confronting them with a barrage of new challenges. And following lessons learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, he always attacks, never admits mistakes, and always claims victory.

In just the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has undertaken several deeply disturbing initiatives. Individually, each pose a problem, but when viewed collectively they suggest something far more ominous.

He ordered the FBI to seize the 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, presumably because he still believes he was cheated out of victory—even though the official who controlled the Georgia balloting in 2020 was a Republican. It is unprecedented for a president to take an action of this sort and to accompany it with a statement saying:

"Remember, the states are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes…They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

In this one statement, the president calls for violating the Constitution and the prerogative it gives states in running elections. And by equating himself with the federal government and saying that when he speaks, he does so on behalf of and for the good of the country, he is laying the groundwork for an imperial presidency.

The president also made what appears to be a spur of the moment decision to shutter the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He said that the reason for closing the Center was that the building was in such disrepair that it was a danger to patrons. However, given that just a few days before the announced closure, the White House had used this very same venue to host the premiere of the documentary about his wife “Melania,” insiders suggest another reason behind the abrupt decision to shutter the Center.

Unilaterally changing the name of the Center, removing its board, and adding his supporters as board members with himself as chair has made the once-revered institution partisan and toxic. It was losing members and donors, performers were cancelling, and it was bleeding money. Rather than admit defeat, the president shut it down.

One of the president’s earliest actions was to try to bring the nation’s most prestigious universities to heel. He did so by charging them with chronic antisemitism and using “diversity quotas” in hiring and admissions. Because these two issues resonate with his base, he was determined to win. He began by withholding federal grants until universities complied with his demands to rid their campuses of antisemitism (which meant ending protests against Israel) and make admissions and hiring blind. A number of smaller schools submitted to the threats, but Harvard held out. Finally, after a year or fruitless negotiations and threats, the story came out that the White House was backing down on its threat to fine Harvard. This suggestion of defeat so enraged the president that he both denied it and announced that instead of penalizing Harvard $200 million if they didn’t agree to his demands, he was raising Harvard’s penalty to $1 billion, an example of personal peeve becoming policy.

These recent actions by the president are part of a pattern that grows more pronounced each day. He makes decisions unilaterally without regard to the Constitution or established procedure. He acts to punish those who do not submit to his dictates. And he governs as if “L’État, c’est moi.” With the support of a compliant Congress and a base of true believers, right now this president appears to be untouchable. But should he push too far or should Republicans lose control of Congress in November, the tide could turn, leaving Mr. Trump’s effort to create an “Imperial Presidency” to die on the vine.

The decline of Keynesian economic theory in the 1970s marked a tipping point in the evolution of capitalism in the United States. Beginning with the Great Depression, Keynesian economic policy facilitated the expansion of social welfare programs to mitigate the social inequities of the nation's economic system. In the last quarter of the 20th century, however, rising political conservatism targeted public expenditures for social services. Cuts in education and health, including reductions in social welfare programs and the weakening of the social safety network for the poor, were then and continue today to be goals of political conservatives. Conservatives, furthermore, argue that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations promotes investment, economic growth and job creation; and that smaller government and less regulation of market forces distributes wealth the most equitably. These ideas are variously known as supply-side economics, neoliberal economics or simply “trickle-down theory.” Historically, though, trickle-down theory has failed to benefit American working families. In fact, during the course of the last several decades this market strategy has encouraged vast accumulation of private wealth and accelerated its concentration on both a national and global scale. Tragically, it has had deeply injurious social consequences. The societal crisis America finds itself in today relates directly to extreme concentration of wealth.

Absent effective public regulation of economic activities, government and law protect investors and corporations in their aggressive pursuit of wealth. The distribution of wealth in the U.S. is a primary indicator of who benefits most from the political and legal organization of American society. In the third quarter of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1% of Americans held 31.7% of all wealth while the bottom 50% held 2.5% (Federal Reserve 2025). That is the highest concentration of wealth in the post-WWII era (Economic Inequality), greater than almost any other developed country. Another indicator of the government's weak support for workers and their families is the federal minimum wage. It is $7.25/hour. At forty hours per week this represents a monthly income of $1160 and a yearly income of $13,920. In 2025, the federal poverty level for individuals was $15,650 and $32,150 for families of four (Poverty Level). These dismal figures show how dire wages are for many millions of Americans. In real terms (inflation-adjusted) the average wage of American workers peaked 48 years ago in 1978 (Wages Peaked).

If one takes a closer look at wealth concentration and the average American’s opportunity to accrue wealth since the 1970s and 1980s, it offers more evidence of how the last few decades of capitalism's development have denied workers a fair share of the tremendous wealth that has been generated. Indeed, a 2023 Rand Corporation analysis revealed that, since 1975, $79 trillion in wealth had been transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. (Massive Wealth Transfer ). This massive redistribution of wealth continues today. In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion in wealth was siphoned from working Americans to the richest Americans, enough to give every full-time worker in the bottom 90% a $32,000 raise for the year (2023 Wealth Transfer). When it comes to gaining wealth for the average working American, owning a home is the principal path. Home ownership, however, is completely out of reach for the poor and millions more in today's middle class find it unattainable. The median home price to annual income ratio was 5 in 2025. In other words, the median price of a home was equal to 5 years of salary. The ratio was 3.7 in 1985 when a median-price home was $82,800. Today a median-price home is $416,900. Not only is the distribution of wealth radically unequal, the pathway to increased wealth in home ownership has narrowed dramatically.

The political division and violence in America today stems in large measure from a political system whose policies have encouraged radical disparities in incomes and wealth.

These data amply illustrate the crisis poor and increasingly middle income people in the United States face. The poorest Americans, the bottom 20%, simply do not have enough money to meet their daily needs. Nearly a third of all households lives on less than $50,000 annual income (Household Income). In the richest country in the world 36.8 million Americans live in poverty (Poverty), including 9 million children without adequate access to food, shelter and healthcare (Children). At the same time, the more than 900 billionaires in the U.S. have a collective wealth of $6.9 trillion, their wealth increasing 18% in 2025 alone (Fortune). As reported in Forbes, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, now has wealth of $778 billion (Elon Musk). It would take the average American worker 16 million years to make that much (Extrapolated).

The US government simply has not done enough to ensure that the livelihoods of all Americans are protected in this new Gilded Age. In fact, the government actually provides 40% more benefits to the wealthy than to the impoverished. In his 2023 book Poverty, By America, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond draws attention to this fact. From recent government data “compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education,” Desmond calculates that the top 20% of income earners on average receives $35,363 in government benefits and individuals in the bottom 20% receive an average $25,733 (p. 99). This reality is a result of policies, policies that benefit wealthy Americans and corporations at the expense of working people. Public policy, in turn, is shaped by corporate lobbying and political contributions as well as professional research that supports goals of the wealthiest and most influential: smaller government, broad corporate deregulation, limited worker protections, and tax breaks favoring the wealthy over working Americans.

It has not always been this way. Between 1947 and 1979, the period when Keynesian economic theory and policies prevailed, “hourly wages grew 2.2 percent. From 1979 to the present, average growth in hourly wages fell to 0.7 percent per year, only one-third of the average rate in the earlier postwar period” (Economic Policy Institute). In the first three decades after WWII labor unions tripled weekly earnings of manufacturing workers across the nation. Collective bargaining gained “for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace” (Labor Unions). Significantly, one-third of workers (32.3% in 1959) were unionized in this post-war period (Bureau of Labor Statistics ). By 2024, the percentage of wage and salary workers in unions fell to 9.9 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Concentrated wealth, particularly corporate wealth, and government failure to protect workers dampened wages. Also, in the 1950s the statutory taxes on U.S.corporate and personal wealth were much higher, though the effective tax rate was considerably lower due to corporate tax loopholes and rich taxpayers recategorizing income as derived from investments (Tax Rates). The statutory corporate income tax was over 50 percent (Economic Policy Institute). Today it is 21 percent (Corporate Tax). While it is difficult to determine the percentage of taxes actually paid by wealthy individuals and corporations in the early post-war era, it is clear that the statutory personal and corporate income tax is lower today than it was 70 years ago. Of course, enforcement of steeply progressive taxation would make billions of dollars, even trillions, available to fund social programs that distribute income and wealth more fairly.

The pro-democracy citizenry must organize around a political vision that emphasizes several political projects: a just, progressive taxation system; a guaranteed household income; universal healthcare; quality public education; free preschool education; and scientific and technological initiatives for a sustainable economy.

A society riven by such income and wealth inequality is inherently unstable. The political division and violence in America today stems in large measure from a political system whose policies have encouraged radical disparities in incomes and wealth. The loss of 6.5 million manufacturing jobs since 1979 (1979 and 2025), for example, has been facilitated by trade agreements that enable corporations to chase the cheapest wages throughout the world. Runaway companies have gutted industrial towns without consequence, leaving behind poorer communities of people with limited resources to rebuild their lives and neighborhoods. The federal government, moreover, has done virtually nothing to force corporations to pay reparations for the social disintegration left in their wake. As the coastal regions and large metropolitan centers of the nation were generally integrated into the surging commerce of unbridled globalization, distant rural regions experienced economic stagnation and decline. It is little wonder that an authoritarian political figure that exploits these divisions has risen to the presidency of the United States.

In his seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty provides an analysis of capitalism in which he notes that “the history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political” (p. 20). Reduction of taxes that favors the wealthy is one political determination reflecting the unstemmed power of concentrated wealth. While this political maneuver undermines a primary income and wealth distributive mechanism (taxation system), it further restricts the resources for funding other re-distributive projects such as social welfare, public education and healthcare. Smaller government and privatization of public services are corollary results.

A principal dynamic factor in the process of wealth accumulation and concentration over the last several decades is the growth of profits as the economic growth rate has slowed down. Put another way, the wealthy are taking a larger and larger slice of diminishing income and wealth production. As the vast inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth deny the provision of basic living necessities to tens of millions and circumscribe opportunity for most Americans, social instability and political division and violence escalate. In response, an authoritarian regime consolidates its power around armed force to repress those protesting its anti-democratic policies. Its armed repression inevitably leads to bloodshed.

The pro-democracy citizenry must organize around a political vision that emphasizes several political projects: a just, progressive taxation system; a guaranteed household income; universal healthcare; quality public education; free preschool education; and scientific and technological initiatives for a sustainable economy. These political goals stand in stark contrast to an authoritarian regime that advances the interests of the one percent. They offer a view of the future that is constructive and inspirational, one that generates broad social justice and appeals to the vast majority of Americans.

I’ve been in Washington, DC for the past week battling the icy and snow piled sidewalks and streets, one week after the big snow and ice storm that immobilized the city for days.

While using the city’s buses and Metros, it was very apparent the most probable danger in DC is falling on sidewalk ice and at unshoveled bus stops.

The National Guard, the group that was brought into the city by President Trump for the soc=-called "protection" of the residents of the city, was doing nothing to protect its residents.

Of the thousands of National Guard personnel sent to Washington, every day at least 15 National Guard personnel in groups of three or four were at various corners around the Eastern Market Metro stop. These young men and women in uniform watched as residents slid, climbed over, and fell through piles of snow and ice.

Never did I see one of the young National Guard soldiers help the mothers with babies in strollers that were pushing through piles of snow to get onto a bus or help a person with a cane or walker.

I introduced myself as a retired US Army Reserve Colonel. I asked if their officers had told them not to help residents, something I would have hoped that each would have done out of uniform as pure courtesy toward others. The polite answer, “No ma’am, but that’s not our job. We are to protect you from criminals.”

Have you apprehended any criminals? “No ma’am, but we are always ready.”

Have you thought to ask if the National Guard could buy some shovels for you to help protect citizens from injury? “Yes, but no one has.”

A total of 2,188 National Guard troops have been assigned to the joint task force in Washington, DC, according to a government update reported by the Associated Press. Of those, there are 949 DC National Guard troops, as well as close to 1,200 troops from several outside states, with West Virginia having deployed 416 guardsmen.

So much for a good use of the National Guard deployment in Washington, DC.

If they're going to stay, I have a simple demand: put down the guns and pick up some shovels.