Anyone who remembered Donald Trump's first-term as president knew what to expect.

So it's no surprise to them that virtually every day brings a new outrage, another crisis and unabated turmoil. If you're a federal employee or a private firm worker with a government contract, no matter how competent, you worry that come tomorrow you won't have a job to support your family.

If you're on Social Security or Medicare you fret opening your emails. If you're a farmer who invested money in a Department of Agriculture program, you may be out of luck. If you're a parent with a child in special education or a dependent with a disability you worry about losing any government assistance.

You might say that on Nov. 5, 2024, we asked for all this and now we must live with it.

Come this Tuesday, though, Wisconsin has a chance to send a message to those causing all the angst and pain that is visiting the American people.

Perhaps it's hard to understand how a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin could send that message. But Donald Trump himself and his co-president Elon Musk have made that easy. They're in effect betting the farm on candidate Brad Schimel to triumph over Susan Crawford and send the message that voters actually like the chaos that the Trump-Musk tag team has brought to America.

Waukesha County Judge Schimel has gleefully invited them to participate. He has gone out of his way to demonstrate how closely he's linked to the MAGA crowd. Last Halloween he dressed in a Trump costume. Earlier this month he posed for a photo in front of a towering inflatable balloon of Trump at a GOP dinner.

Trump reciprocated with a full-throated endorsement of Schimel's candidacy, an unprecedented involvement of a sitting president in a state court race that's presumably nonpartisan.

“All Voters who believe in Common Sense should GET OUT TO VOTE EARLY for Brad Schimel,” Trump posted on his social media site. “By turning out and VOTING EARLY, you will be helping to Uphold the Rule of Law, Protect our Incredible Police, Secure our Beloved Constitution, Safeguard our Inalienable Rights, and PRESERVE LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.”

Not to mention, of course, banning a woman's choice, making sure the anti-union Act 10 of his friend Scott Walker remains on the books and squelching future attempts to eliminate the gerrymanders of the state's political boundaries.

Meanwhile, the world's richest man is pumping millions into the Wisconsin court race, just like he did in last fall's presidential race. He believes that extravagant campaign spending to buy overly vicious attack ads works. Just this past week, a new set of ads focused on fomenting fear of transgender men in women's locker rooms.

As far as Musk is concerned, this Wisconsin court race is the perfect place to prove his thesis that money and outlandish attack ads work. He used the same tactics against Kamala Harris last fall.

They work, unless, of course, Wisconsin voters say otherwise.

Donald Trump has already put America's richest people in charge of dismantling the U.S. government, exacting supposed savings from programs that mostly benefit those most in need to help extend the tax cuts for the rich that are expiring later this year.

Thwarting this duo's brazen attempt to use Wisconsin to sanction their methods would go a long way to signal the people's disgust — and maybe, just maybe, wake up some Republicans.

When the Israeli Knesset passed its 2025 budget this past week, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu breathed a sigh of relief. Had the budget not been approved by March 31, the Knesset would have been automatically disbanded, and new elections would have been called. Polls indicate that Netanyahu and his coalition would have decisively lost.

What saved Netanyahu was his renewed war in Gaza.

The negotiations over a ceasefire in Gaza had resulted in the desertion of one of his coalition partners and the alienation of some members of his own party, putting his government at risk. Once the ceasefire was announced, Netanyahu’s problems grew. His trial on charges of corruption and abuse of his office was once again centerstage as were his Trump-like theatrics in response to the grilling he received from the prosecutors. Also plaguing Netanyahu were reports of his government’s failures emanating from the ongoing investigation into the October 7th Hamas attack.

With his coalition hemorrhaging and his personal position weakening, renewing the war in Gaza provided Netanyahu with a way out. His coalition was restored. His budget was passed. He had a distraction from his trial. His cabinet approved his decision to remove the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency who was faulting him for the October 7th attack. And he was in a position to once again advance his legislative efforts to “reform” what he views as the obstacles presented by Israel’s pesky judiciary.

Further compounding Netanyahu’s dilemma were the expectations created once the implementation of the ceasefire agreement began. The world witnessed the powerfully moving scenes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trekking northward to return to their demolished homes and communities in the north of Gaza. Compassion grew for Palestinians as did revulsion for the gratuitous devastation wrought by Israel’s bombardments.

There were other factors that weighed heavily on Netanyahu in this period.

Hamas, as expected, overplayed their hand with disgraceful scenes of bravado during each of the hostage releases. Most likely done out of a need to demonstrate control, their behavior was stupid and provocative, especially in the face of the enormity of the suffering endured by their people. One might reasonably ask Hamas’ leadership, “How many times can you foolishly kick the hornets’ nest before you understand the consequences of your actions?”

Gaza’s Palestinians, who our polling establishes have long had unfavorable views toward Hamas, are now demonstrating their anger at both Israel and Hamas. But the last thing Netanyahu wants is an alternative Palestinian leadership in Gaza, as that would threaten his continuation of the conflict and his rule.

The ceasefire agreement of January 19th included three phases, with the second and third phases ultimately leading to an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an end to the war. As the negotiations themselves had already cost Netanyahu coalition partners, he promised his allies that he would never allow the process to get to phase two. As a result, early in the implementation of phase one, Netanyahu began seeking an escape, claiming that Hamas was violating the terms of the agreement and pressing unacceptable demands that he sought to add to the first phase.

Then came the Arab peace plan to end the conflict. The plan, which would fulfill phase three of the ceasefire agreement, called for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the positioning of an Arab/international peacekeeping force, the establishment of Palestinian governance linked to the Palestinian Authority, and a plan to reconstruct Gaza. This Arab plan has won broad international support and, if adopted, would have spelled the end of Netanyahu’s reign in Israel.

In the face of all these challenges, Netanyahu felt compelled to break the ceasefire. The renewed campaign has been a ruthless continuation of genocide. For one month now, Israel has withheld entry of all aid and medical personnel from the north of Gaza, implementing what was once termed “the General’s plan” of starving the Palestinians in that area, forcing them to leave. The Israelis have also continued their bombing campaign, taking the lives of hundreds. They have retaken areas of Gaza, promising to annex them to Israel, and are exploring plans to forcibly evict Palestinians from Gaza to both sabotage any effort to allow for Palestinian governance and facilitate Israel’s conquest and annexation of more of Gaza’s land.

While Netanyahu claims that his goal is the elimination of Hamas, the evidence is clear that his real intention is to save himself and his government—and in this he has had a willing accomplice. The Trump administration has supported Israel’s trashing the very ceasefire agreement Trump once boasted as his personal diplomatic victory.

And so here we are, a little over two months after the announced ceasefire and Palestinians are once again victims of slaughter and mass starvation. Instead of being an agreement that would lead to an end of the conflict, the ceasefire, as I feared, turned out to be nothing more than a pause or a cruel ruse that was sacrificed on the altar of Netanyahu’s political survival.

There are no good guys to this story, only Palestinian victims. As tens of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating in opposition to Netanyahu because he is risking the lives of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, it is time for Arabs to unite in defense of the Palestinian people and their own peace plan to end the genocide.

An education group makes plans to hold a workshop for its community on antisemitism from a framework of collective liberation; publicity goes out; and, before you know it, a right-wing organization (that has never actually seen the curriculum) is determined to get it cancelled. The firestorm is so intense that it’s hard to imagine that it’s about one workshop. The workshop in discussion is one we offer and facilitate at PARCEO, a resource and education center that works with a range of institutions to strengthen their work for justice. The scenario is one we have encountered on multiple occasions.

The accusations hurled at the workshop, its organizers, and those endorsing it: “I knew it would be antisemitic once I saw the word ‘collective.’” “The facilitators are pro-Palestine.” “The organization believes that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic.” “They are antisemites.” “They are antisemites.” “They are antisemites.”

To reiterate: The workshop being offered is on antisemitism! The topics cover what antisemitism is—historically and currently—and how it manifests in the U.S. today. Sections are included on Christian hegemony; on white nationalist antisemitism; on tropes and stereotypes; on conspiracy theories; on philosemitism. The voices of Jewish historians, educators, and scholars, along with many others, are integrated throughout the curriculum.

So what is actually going on? What, in fact, are the reasons there is so much venom and energy devoted to making sure these workshops don’t happen? Four interconnected reasons seem to be at play.

The first reason: In addition to a robust discussion of what antisemitism is, the curriculum also includes what antisemitism is not, distinguishing between antisemitism and criticism of, or opposition to, Israel or Zionism. Those wanting to shut down the curriculum reject any such distinction.

The workshop is attacked because it focuses on challenging antisemitism from a “collective liberation” framework. It seems just the name of the workshop is threatening.

This section of the workshop illustrates the ways that false charges of antisemitism are wielded to penalize and silence those standing with the Palestinian movement for justice. One example of how this plays out is through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—in which 7 of its 11 examples of antisemitism are about criticism of Israel, not antisemitism. The IHRA definition is the gold standard of antisemitism definitions for these detractors.

Author Antony Lerman, in “Whatever Happened to Antisemitism,” couldn’t be clearer about the danger of these false definitions: “By falsely conflating anti-Zionism—a form of legitimate political discourse and belief—and antisemitism—a form of ethno-racial hostility and hatred—and calling it “new antisemitism” and codifying it in the form of the “IHRA working definition of antisemitism, antisemitism has been redefined to be what it is not.” He adds: “The conflation is false because, first, the root concept of ‘new antisemitism,’ that Israel is the ‘collective Jews’ among the nations, is a myth—a state cannot have the attributes of a human being. Second, it is a heretical corruption of Judaism because it entails an idolatrous deification and workshop of the state…”

The workshop points to other ways these false conflations are employed to further a particular agenda. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a recently released right wing national strategy document, lays out a plan to supposedly combat antisemitism in the US. But by characterizing critics of Israel as “a global Hamas Support Network,” it’s clear its real aim is to destroy the Palestinian movement for justice and restrict activism against US policy more broadly.

Another example highlighted in the workshop is how, under the guise of fighting antisemitism, specifically on college campuses, Zionist groups (like those trying to get the workshop cancelled) are using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to suppress pro-Palestine advocacy. Just a bit of background: Title VI, which prohibits discrimination in educational institutions, authorizes the Department of Education to investigate charges of antisemitism. That authority was expanded in 2019 when President Trump issued Executive Order 13899 directing that the DOE, in protecting against antisemitism, "consider" the IHRA definition. As a result, DOE investigations of antisemitism now include not only the classic examples of anti-Jewish bigotry, but anti-Israel protest as well. And President Trump ramped this up even more with his recent Executive Order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” that directs all agencies charged with enforcing Title VI to report to him within 60 days about what they are doing to address antisemitism. As if to underline his concern with protest that is critical of Israel, the Order refers specifically to complaints of antisemitism following “October 7, 2023.” So, again, we can see the ways that criticism of Israel and actual antisemitism become indistinguishable.

The second “problem” of the curriculum, for those opposing it, is that it rejects the essentialist view of antisemitism that is so central to many mainstream and right-wing Jewish organizations. This perspective understands antisemitism as eternal and never-ending. According to the eternalist perspective, antisemitism can’t be stopped and Jews are always under threat–it is “us” versus “them.”

A different perspective—which is the one adhered to in the workshops—understands antisemitism as historically contextual, emerging in different historical periods for different reasons and in relation to other forms of oppression. In other words, when understanding antisemitism and Jewish experience, context is critical.

These different understandings impact whether we see—and respond to—antisemitism in isolation (eternalist view) or, rather, in relationship to the societies and to other struggles against oppression. As Professor Barry Trachtenberg points out, “If one accepts antisemitism to be eternal, and not a consequence of social or historical factors, then it is a fact of life that will forever push Jewish people into defensive postures. It will make us more nationalist, more reactionary, more militaristic, and more closed off from the rest of the world.” We see this perspective in living color today as a number of Zionist organizations have unequivocally supported Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, (wildly!) positioning Israel as a victim and lamenting that nobody cares about the Jews (“us” versus “them”).

Next, the workshop is attacked because it focuses on challenging antisemitism from a “collective liberation” framework. It seems just the name of the workshop is threatening.

Challenging antisemitism necessitates a commitment to challenging all forms of racism and injustice.

The workshop’s emphasis on collective liberation reflects a deep commitment to the ways our different communities can act in solidarity with one another, as so many are. As we think more deeply about solidarities and what that tangibly looks like, we know that such injustices as Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-Palestinian racism, and antisemitism must not be viewed as oppositional or isolated struggles, but, rather, the success in challenging each of these injustices requires a vision that is holistic and interconnected.

Those opposing the workshop believe that a collective liberation framework minimizes, even makes a mockery of, antisemitism. This perspective is rooted in the belief that antisemitism is exceptional, that is, it is separate from, and unrelated to, other struggles for justice. In fact, the concept of “collective liberation,” in their view, is yet another example of antisemitism.

We challenge this exceptionalism in our workshop with an excerpt from Professor Alana Lentin: “As I write in Why Race Still Matters (2020), the elevation of antisemitism as the racism above all racisms, and the contention that any discussion of the Shoah alongside other genocides renders it banal, constrains solidarity between Jews and other racialised people, thwarting a fuller understanding of race as a colonial mechanism and a technology of power for the maintenance of white supremacy.”

A framework rooted in collective liberation is essential in the fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism. After the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Rabbi Brant Rosen, reflecting on the sacred power of solidarities, said “Yes, among the many important takeaways from this terrible, tragic moment is the simple truth that we must never underestimate the sacred power of solidarity. Moments such as these must remind all targeted minorities that we are always stronger when we resist together.”

The amount of effort spent trying to get a simple workshop cancelled would just seem absurd if it weren’t so destructive and didn’t reflect a much deeper commitment by those opposing it to defend Israel's genocide, to attack anyone who speaks out as an antisemite, and to insure that those voices are not heard.

Finally, those trying to shut down the workshop are outraged that it is being facilitated by individuals who support justice for the Palestinian people. In the view of the workshop’s detractors, those facilitating the workshop (who, in fact, support Palestinian justice) are thereby automatically excluded from any authority to teach about antisemitism (and, even worse, proves that they are antisemites). What they are in fact saying is that if you care about anti-Palestinian racism, then you can’t care about antisemitism.

We turn that view on its head and say clearly that challenging antisemitism necessitates a commitment to challenging all forms of racism and injustice. And we know that solidarity, as articulated by community leader Sister Aisha Al Adawiya means: “Standing up for each other in a real authentic way. No cameras rolling. Just the human spirit calling on us to say, ‘This is not right and I have to say something’.”

The amount of effort spent trying to get a simple workshop cancelled would just seem absurd if it weren’t so destructive and didn’t reflect a much deeper commitment by those opposing it to defend Israel's genocide, to attack anyone who speaks out as an antisemite, and to insure that those voices are not heard. We know the attempts to silence and penalize those protesting across the country have tremendous repercussions; students, faculty, and other activists are being doxxed and punished, losing their jobs, being denied financial packages, and, more recently, facing threats of deportation—and all in the name of fighting antisemitism.

But the voices demanding justice will continue to reverberate and strengthen day by day despite these desperate attempts to shut them down.

In this episode of The TMI Show, hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dive into a controversial topic shaking up social media and the political sphere. Peter Coffin, co-director of the Center for Political Innovation (CPI), faced a recent suspension from the Bluesky social media platform after voicing criticism over a surge of vandalism targeting Tesla vehicles nationwide. They explore the incident that sparked Coffin’s ban, the broader implications for free speech online, and the rising tensions surrounding Tesla vandalism in the United States. Ted Rall, a syndicated political cartoonist, and Manila Chan, a seasoned journalist, bring their signature insight to this timely discussion. Catch it on YouTube and Rumble for an unfiltered take on this unfolding story.

The post TMI Show Ep 107: “Banned For NonViolence” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable cause...

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets ... This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.

Once you start looking, the signs of an American recession are everywhere.

The second-hand market is heating up, a classic pre-recession indicator. People are unloading luxury goods. Second-hand clothes apps, such as RealReal, Depop and Grailed, are filling up with designer handbags and sneakers bought during the la-la economy of the pandemic. This always happens before a crash.

You might remember that eBay boomed before the 2008 recession. People panic-sold designer handbags faster than you could say Anglo Promissory Note. Splurges always lead to sell-offs.

It looks like 2025 will be the year the pandemic chickens come home to roost. When the plague hit five years ago this week, governments closed down our economies and rather than impoverish workers who were forced to stay home, national treasuries opened the fiscal and monetary spigots. Government spending soared and interest rates were cut to negative territory. About $15 trillion (€13.85 trillion) of fiscal/monetary sweeties were doled out by the world’s richest governments to protect their stay-at-home electorates. (The governments had no choice; a great depression would have accompanied the plague.)

Investment and speculation took off in a splurge of credit, consumption and debt. As sure as night follows day, the credit cycle rolls and we are about to pay a terrible price for the emergency economics of Covid-19.

In tune with our always-on age, the coming American recession will be live-streamed on Instagram. Every small change in consumer confidence and business sentiment will be videoed, shared, commented on and thus amplified. We are witnessing the TikTok-isation of the business cycle, meaning the economic cycle – previously a slow-moving, deliberate phenomenon – will pick up pace, becoming fitful and immediate.

In the past, it took people time to realise that the economic backdrop was changing. Today, with social media and a US president who behaves more like a near-bankrupt day trader than a long-term investor, our collective time horizons have been slashed from years to months, weeks to minutes. The impact of a slowing economy on investment and spending will be almost instantaneous.

The latest signs from the American heartland are not encouraging. The average voter’s confidence about their economic prospects is falling quicker than at almost any other time on record. The litany of surveys pointing to recession, or more accurately a Trump-cession, not to mention the sell-off in American stock markets, suggests we are on the cusp of something enormous. The incoherence of Trump economics – with its on-and-off tariffs – is making already indebted consumers and businesses even more anxious.

Punters across all income brackets are panicking and consumer confidence is collapsing, although it is richer workers who are most worried. This probably reflects the fact that middle-class Americans are heavily invested in the stock markets, which are back to where they were in September and falling farther. Since Trump was inaugurated, the percentage of voters who are worried about their job has shot up from 30 per cent to close to 80 per cent of all those surveyed. The number of consumers worried that businesses might close has spiked up to the highest level since records began in the middle of the 1980-81 recession.

People’s confidence about where their income will be in a year has plummeted to the lowest level since 2009, right after the Great Crash. Worse still, the average American is now more worried about inflation than at any time since the beginning of the pandemic, when prices shot up because of the shutdown of industry.

This combination of a rapidly weakening economy and fear of inflation points to an old enemy not seen since the 1970s: stagflation, where unemployment and inflation rise together. In such an environment, prices rise at the same time as incomes fall. The main trigger is the broad electorate’s understanding that tariffs are a tax on spending that will raise the price of goods for working Americans.

What is going on in corporate America, the part of the economy that was supposed to be boosted by Trump? Earnings are an important leading indicator, as profit squeezes foreshadow lay-offs and investment cuts. Corporate profits surged in 2021 but have now entered a slower growth phase. By the third quarter of 2024, US corporate profits fell 0.4 per cent quarter-on-quarter, the first decline in years. By late 2024, year-on-year profit growth was 5.9 per cent, down from more than 20 per cent in 2023 – this is a huge slowdown in margins.

All the while the nonsense that is Trump’s economic plan continues to be “sane-washed” by many writers and commentators as if there is some brilliant economic rabbit about to be pulled out of a hat by the sages of Mar-a-Lago. Declaring a trade war on your four biggest trading partners – Canada, Europe, China and Mexico – will simply push up American prices, robbing US consumers.

Tariffs are a way of taking something away from somebody. Trade allows better, cheaper products to come in from abroad, putting manners on local crony businesses. Tariffs protect second-rate local businesses, allowing them to sponge off consumers, flogging second-rate goods when punters could be buying superior imported stuff. In the end, tariffs take from buyers and give money to yellow-pack local sellers who can’t compete in the international market. There’s a reason that low tariffs, which have been reduced continuously in the past 50 years, corresponded with the greatest expansion of the global economy ever seen.

Protectionism is a sign of weakness, not strength. Americans are not being “ripped off”; in fact, they are being enriched by having access to better, cheaper, superior products made by more productive people. Rather than being the beginning of a great new era of American prowess, tariffs are a sign of insecurity and fear, marking the end of the great American century that began after the end of the first World War.

The fascinating thing is that the average “Joe Six Pack” American appreciates this; otherwise, why is he so fearful about the future?

Trump rode into office vowing to secure the border, yet ICE’s deportation of criminals crawls at a snail’s pace. Fewer deportations have occurred since January 20 than during the same period in his first term. Instead, armed ICE agents are absurdly chasing college students like Mahmoud Khalil, kidnapped from Columbia for protesting Israel’s Gaza war, which has killed over 50,000 since 2023. Yunseo Chung, another junior, remains at large. In 2025’s first 50 days, ICE prioritizes campus activists over cartels. Border security? More like political theater.

The post ICE Targets College Students Over Criminals appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Democratic politicians have begun trying to vent voters’ anger at their opponents by calling them names. Minnesota Gov. and former vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz recently called DOGE head Elon Musk a “South African nepo baby,” presenting him as an entitled foreigner. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett attracted attention by calling Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.”

This name-calling may feel good for Democrats, but it just repeats the mistake of the recent past. Democrats lost the 2024 election due to their inordinate focus on President Donald Trump’s personal flaws, controversial statements, and criminal record as well as by offering a vague, bland policy agenda. What is needed now is a focus on policies—not personalities—though name-calling may still be a key tool, if they do it right.

Rather than focusing on the personal, Democrats should be using labels like “Pro-Cancer,” “Job-Killers,” “Anti-Constitution,” and “Healthcare-Cutters” to tar congressional Republicans. These may sound harsh, even outlandish. But they are true, highlighting in only a few words how Trump and Musk’s actions (and congressional acquiescence to them) will harm Americans in ways that matter to them.

The main objective right now should be not only hitting hard, but hitting smart—and saddling Republicans in Congress with the worst effects of Trump’s agenda using concise, aggressive terminology.

Only through a wave of sharp, crisp, and memorable verbal attacks on all Republicans to raise awareness of the most unpopular ill effects of Trump policies can Democrats force them to either distance themselves from the president or fully own his agenda. Think of the effectiveness of the Republican phrase “death panels,” a slanderous label used to describe the Affordable Care Act that helped contribute to the Democrats’ big loss in the 2010 midterms only two years after former President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory. Unlike “death panels,” labels like “Pro-Cancer,” “Anti-Constitution,” and “Job-Killers” have the benefit of being true.

Any Republican politician who has not vocally opposed Trump’s massive, multi-billion dollar National Institutes of Health cuts to institutions researching treatments for cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses should be label as “Pro-Cancer.” It is not unfair, it is a fact—if you are a politician weakening researchers’ ability to find cures and treatments for cancer, you are on the wrong side of the war against cancer. Opponents of Trump could theoretically form a broad base of opposition by forming local groups with names like “Cancer Survivors Against Cuts” to pressure Republicans in Congress to stand up and protect these funds. Even if the effort fails, as it likely will, these labels might prove potent against Republicans in 2026. This national issue can easily be framed locally given that every state has universities facing major cuts, and in many states and congressional districts, these universities and their health networks are among the top employers.

On that note, Democrats should be labeling Republicans as job killers, and not only because of the tens of thousands of federal workers Musk’s DOGE has fired, or because of the many jobs lost amid hiring freezes at universities (affecting whole university towns) and by businesses facing tariff uncertainty. Democrats can connect Musk’s interest in AI and self-driving cars to the fact that he and others in the Trump orbit, despite their ostensible opposition to job outsourcing, are more than happy to use technology to kill jobs. Job-killing congressional Republicans should be tied as closely as possible to Musk and anything unpopular about his business empire simply because of all they do to enable him.

To borrow a phrase used recently by Jamelle Bouie to characterize Trump’s policies, all Republican enablers of Trumpism should be considered “Anti-Constitutional” for supporting an assault on the separation of powers. Similarly, repeatedly calling congressional Republicans “Healthcare-Cutters” would call attention to the massive Medicaid cuts in next year’s budget and how they will affect regular people, which many Americans—including some who rely on Medicaid—seem to be unaware of amid these busy news cycles.

This name-calling may strike some as rude or radical. But being rude never seemed to hurt the Republicans, and right now, the danger for Democrats isn’t looking radical—it is looking weak. Moderates, and even some conservative voters, will have more respect for Democrats who are not feeble and can confidently call out Republican policies that will harm their lives. If they want to present themselves as more moderate, Democrats can frame themselves as “Anti-Recession Activists” and “Constitution Supporters.”

Many Democrats are refraining from going on the offensive, instead apparently waiting until enough conservative voters suffer from the economic pains of Trump’s policies. But the country cannot afford to wait. The main objective right now should be not only hitting hard, but hitting smart—and saddling Republicans in Congress with the worst effects of Trump’s agenda using concise, aggressive terminology. Democrats—liberals, progressives, moderates—are fighting for their way of life. It is time to act like it.

For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).

The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.

Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.

All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.

If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.

Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.

Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard.

I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.

The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.

Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.

The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.

The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.

There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both right and left.

When the right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.

When the left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.

Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.

That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.

In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that right and left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.

That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.

Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.

I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.

Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.

The most gaping loophole in our tax law? The tax-free compounding of gains on investments.

This classic loophole enables the two most lucrative inequality-driving income tax avoidance strategies. The first, buy-borrow-die, allows wealthy Americans to avoid income tax entirely on even billions in investment gains.

These wealthy need only hold on to their appreciated assets until death. What if they need cash before then? They merely borrow against the appreciated assets, typically at very low interest rates.

Are rich Americans, including billionaires, truly unable to pay tax on their investment gains before they sell the assets yielding those gains? Wanna buy a bridge?

The second avoidance strategy, buy-hold for decades-sell, lets wealthy investors pay a super low effective annual tax rate on investments that appreciate at high rates over long periods of time. These investors typically experience decades of compounding gains without taxation.

The effective tax rates involved in this second strategy won’t reach buy-borrow-die’s zero tax, but may in some cases get as low as a 4% effective annual rate. A 4% effective annual tax rate would have an investment with a pre-tax growth rate of 20% per year enjoying an after-tax growth rate of 19.2% per year.

Congressional apologists for the ultra-rich on both sides of the aisle regularly claim that their wealthy patrons should be entitled to endless tax-free compounding of investment gains. Without this tax-free compounding, the argument goes, our richest wouldn’t have the “wherewithal to pay” tax on their investment gains before their assets get sold. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) invoked this tired canard at a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Funny how these same apologists for our richest don’t have much sympathy for ordinary Americans who lack the “wherewithal” to pay for medical care, adequate housing, and other necessities. Average wage earners, under current law, can’t even wait until year-end to pay Uncle Sam their taxes. Those taxes come out of each paycheck, wherewithal to pay or not.

Are rich Americans, including billionaires, truly unable to pay tax on their investment gains before they sell the assets yielding those gains? Wanna buy a bridge?

Let’s start with the easiest case: a publicly traded investment that can be sold in smaller units, an investment in stocks, for instance. Say Rich, a wealthy investor, buys 1 million shares of Nvidia at $100 per share, and those shares, by year’s end, increase in value to $120 per share.

Our investor Rich now has a $20 million gain. If that annual gain faced a 25% tax rate, Rich would have a $5 million tax liability. To raise the cash to pay that tax, Rich could sell off 41,667 of his shares, leaving him with 958,333 shares, now worth just under $115 million.

That doesn’t seem very painful.

Now, let’s say Rich didn’t want to sell any shares. He could instead just borrow $5 million against the shares to pay the tax.

Or what if Rich had bought a parcel of land instead of Nvidia shares and, for whatever reason, having him borrow to pay tax on his annual investment gains didn’t turn out to be feasible?

Still no problem for Rich. For gains on illiquid assets, Rich could defer the payment of tax until he sold the assets, but the tax could be computed as if it accrued annually. How might this work? Say, for example, that Rich’s $100 million parcel of land grew at an annual rate of 10% for 20 years, at which point he sold it at its appreciated value of $672,749,995.

Had Rich paid tax at 25% on his gain each year, his rate of return would have been 7.5% per year, and after 20 years his investment would be worth $424,785,110.

The $247,964,885 difference between his sale price and the value of his investment with its actual rate of return reduced by the tax paid would be his tax liability upon sale. Payment of that amount would leave Rich with the same sum, $424,785,110, had he been able to sell a small share of his parcel each year, to pay the tax on his investment gain.

Put another way, Rich would be left with the same amount using this tax computation as he would if he sold his parcel each year, paid tax on the gain, and reinvested the remaining proceeds in another parcel.

And if Rich died before selling his parcel? His income tax could be determined for the year of his death in the same fashion as if he’d sold the parcel for its fair market value at the time of his death. Or, in the alternative, his inheritors could step into his shoes and pay the same tax when they sold the parcel as Rich would have had he survived and sold it at that time.

The bottom line: If we closed the tax-free compounding of investment gains loophole, some situations might exist where the immediate payment of tax on investment gains could pose a problem. But we can address those situations by deferring payment of the tax until investments get sold and accounting for the tax-free compounding in the determination of the tax.

These problematic situations, in other words, don’t justify leaving a gaping loophole in place.

So the obstacle to shutting down buy-borrow-die and buy-hold for decades-sell has absolutely nothing to do with ultra-rich investors lacking the wherewithal to pay taxes. That obstacle remains the politicians in Washington, D.C. who lack the wherewithal to summon the courage to make our rich pay the taxes they owe our nation.

George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework.

According to Packer, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson's theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic President Donald Trump's perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. "Without missing a beat" they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of 1984.

As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had "made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history." In his view the U.S. descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the U.S. embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the U.S. military juggernaut the Department of Defense—an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.

The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.

Packer's calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.

I worry that many mainstream liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula—liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the U.S. largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction, and—notably—eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation, and skewed wealth.

We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values—a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.

By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer's revisionist assessment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy:

He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.

I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio—a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn't believe in it), gun control (he doesn't believe in it), and abortion (he doesn't believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer's view, makes him a "passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism." Apparently, Rubio's enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer's assessment.

Rubio's constricted body language during the Trump-Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crisis. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement, as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.

Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump's henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump's alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. U.S. politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can't be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that U.S. politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.

I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution.

Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin, and two-thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packer's view, America's public approval for arming Ukraine "might be America's last best hope." This misses the larger issue—how did the U.S. become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?

The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers, lose nothing if the U.S. shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the U.S. public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.

The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.

A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of former President Joe Biden, or even former President Barack Obama (if it were even possible to do so—it isn't), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety—a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to "dead zones of the imagination."

Graeber noted that:

…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them.

A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump's shtick. I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time—taking inspiration from David Graeber—for recreation and reimagining.

During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico—and by implication Puerto Ricans—as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry.

Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and white nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump and Donalds over the incident, for Black MAGA supporters, the episode was simply put in the memory hole.

They were muted as well when Trump and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance spread racist falsehoods about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They seemed to be the only people in the country who didn’t hear what everyone else had heard—a fabrication of stunning proportions.

Trump and MAGA’s White Nationalist Rampage

The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era. Now that he’s president again, their voices are being quelled as his white-power, autocratic government takes shape.

The president has spent almost every day of his second term in office so far raging against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); issuing executive orders of a white nationalist flavor; attacking a federal workforce that’s disproportionately people of color; and making it clear that rolling back civil rights and Black social and education advances is one of his top priorities. Nearly every move of his has involved nods to racist themes and aims. That includes his effort to defy the Constitution and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, his mass firings and funding freezes while he vanishes DEI programs across the federal government, his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants (of color), and even his take on the wildfires in Los Angeles and the Washington area airplane-helicopter disaster.

Trump thinks of his racialized and racist perspective on such events as “common sense.” Consider that a shield for his bias against and antipathy to science and evidence, as well as his visceral inability to see Black people and other people of color in any position of authority and expertise outside of sports and entertainment.

Racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.

His vitriol against the world’s most marginalized and poor has led him to try to completely shut the door on illegal (and even legal) immigration—with a single exception. Recently, he spread his arms and opened America’s visa gates to Afrikaners, the whites whom he (along with Elon Musk) has determined are an oppressed minority in South Africa. Falsely claiming that their lands have been seized by the South African government and that they face genocide, in an executive order he called them “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” He also wrote on social media, “Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk, Trump’s co-president, who traffics in racist themes about race and intelligence online, is South African apartheid-era born.

It must be strongly emphasized that Trump’s executive order and his multiple social posts on the subject are not only blatant lies but align with the work of South African and American white supremacists who have falsely charged that a “genocide” is indeed occurring there. And speaking of white supremacists, add to that list his decision to release the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (with, of course, Trump’s blessing and encouragement). With the stroke of a pen, he absolved violent and white nationalist criminals who had carried signs supporting the Holocaust and yelled racist epithets at Black Capitol police officers.

His war against Black agency has been happily joined by his MAGA allies in Congress. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), for example, threatened to cut off millions of dollars in aid to the District of Columbia unless Mayor Muriel Bowser removed street art that read “Black Lives Matter” and renamed the area adjacent to it (previously known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) Liberty Plaza. Clyde claimed that the art was a “divisive slogan.” It went unmentioned that, if he genuinely wanted to get rid of divisive racial symbols, he could start at home. According to the Equal Justice Institute, Clyde’s state of Georgia is host to “more than 160 monuments honoring the Confederacy.”

Silence Is Not Golden

All of this is part of Trump’s lawless and corrupt war on democracy and the strategic divisiveness that is both his brand and his currency. The convicted-felon-in-chief’s usurpation of power has been as shameless as it is brazen, as he attempts to impose a government that could be characterized as racially authoritarian. In fact, racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.

And what has been the response of Black Republican members of Congress to such behavior? Where is the pushback from his (once upon a time) only Black cabinet member, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson? Has there been any reaction from Snoop Dogg, Nelly, or other pro-Trump rappers who claim affinity with the Black grassroots? The answer, of course, is not a peep. Most have run for cover, pretending that Trump is not who he has always been: a serial racist attempting to reshape the nation into a far-right, anti-democratic, white, Christian nationalist stronghold.

Some of his prominent Black acolytes have, in fact, gone on the record opposing “equity” and DEI in general. Byron Donalds, for example, says he has issues with “equity” because it puts a person’s demographic ahead of his “actual qualifications.” It should be noted that, during the 2024 campaign, Donalds, whom Trump was then supposedly considering as a vice-presidential candidate, stated that the Jim Crow segregation era hadn’t actually been so bad because “the Black family was together” and “Black people voted conservatively.”

But qualifications or even competency are not really the issue. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Donald Trump does not care about merit.” It couldn’t be plainer or simpler than that. In late February, with the encouragement and full support of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown Jr. from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is little doubt that Trump got rid of him because he was Black and had been outspoken on issues of race and inclusion. Hegseth accused him of having a “woke agenda.” Brown, a four-star general, is to be replaced by Dan Caine, who, you undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn, is white and a three-star general.

On the rare occasions when Black MAGA denizens have actually addressed the president’s pathological drive to resegregate the country, it has been to protect him and his policies from criticism. The Black Conservative Federation (BCF), for example, issued a statement, riven with White House talking points, defending Trump’s (probably illegal) federal funding freeze, even as it was being condemned broadly by so many, including some of his Republican allies. Echoing Trump, it stated without evidence that the freeze would do no harm to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and Social Security while ignoring the massive negative impact it was going to have on Head Start, Medicaid, and other programs. To the BCF’s embarrassment, the president was forced to rescind the order 48 hours after it was issued.

Their one-sided loyalty to Trump knows no bounds. Last year, BCF created and presented him with the “Champion of Black America” award at their gala. And that was no joke. He gleefully accepted the award while making awkward racial remarks to the mostly white crowd. The BCF also held an inauguration event for him with tickets ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000 dollars, which, according to the group, was soon sold out.

The BCF declared on its Facebook page that it is proud to celebrate Black History Month (BHM) and encourages everyone to “celebrate the rich tapestry of contributions made by African Americans throughout history.” Yet there was not one word addressing the cancellation of BHM events at numerous departments across the federal government following the orders of the nation’s white-supremacist-in-chief to quash DEI and any programs that seemed related to it. The Defense Department issued a memo declaring “identity months dead,” while the Transportation Department gleefully announced that it “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.”

Far-right political scientist and Trump booster Carol Swain, best known for the Islamophobic rant that forced her to leave her tenured position at Vanderbilt University, wrote a mumble-jumble article hailing his attack on DEI. Although like some other Black conservatives she benefited from affirmative action, she now wants to pretend that DEI is an evil distortion of civil rights. She advocates for the neutral language of “nondiscrimination,” “equal opportunity,” and “integration,” suggesting that they are acceptable conservative values unlike “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” She seems pathetically unaware that Trump has no love for civil rights, voting rights, or affirmative action.

Out of Touch with the Black Majority

It must be noted that Black MAGA is overwhelmingly out of sync with the Black community in general. In large numbers, African Americans support DEI, affirmative action, and other hard-won programs that provide opportunities historically denied thanks to racial prejudice and discrimination. Black opposition to Trump is not just due to the racist slander and bile he now aims at people of color, but also to a well-documented history of bigotry. His long record of housing discrimination and advocacy for voting suppression flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, signature victories for the civil rights and Black power movements that Trump and his Black supporters now disparage.

Trump garnered only single-digit support from Blacks in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Despite an effort to scam Black voters with Trump-created Black groups and false claims of surging Black support, he won only 6% of the Black vote in 2016 and 8% in 2020.

Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion.

In the 2024 election, Trump won between 13% and 16% of the Black vote. This was a rise from, but not a great leap above, that 8% (documented by the Pew Research Center) in his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden.

More recent data shows Trump rapidly losing whatever Black support he had. A YouGov and the Economist poll in February found that only 24% of Black Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far, while about 69% disapproved. In that poll, white approval was 57% and Hispanic approval 40%.

Denied a Role in Trump’s New Administration

In the new Trump administration, Black Republicans have essentially no perch from which to speak out (even if they wanted to). Trump has one African American in his cabinet, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, as was true with Ben Carson in his first term. Both were ghettoized at HUD. And Turner has recently bent the knee and essentially surrendered HUD to Elon Musk’s rampaging “Department” of Government Efficiency. Turner, in fact, even formed a DOGE Task Force that will certainly lead to staff cuts at HUD (but no guarantee whatsoever of any savings). In the meantime, HUD canceled $4 million in DEI contracts.

Trump also nominated former football star and disastrous Senate candidate Herschel Walker to be ambassador to the Bahamas. Walker, who had to be chaperoned to interviews during his 2020 Senate campaign by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others due to his striking inability to make it through an interview without numerous gaffes, has no qualifications whatsoever to be an ambassador.

While some of Trump’s Black supporters have grumbled privately about being ostracized and marginalized, they dare not speak out publicly or demonstrate anything less than 100% fealty. And they are hardly the only Blacks suffering job losses because of Trump.

His goal to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers will have an immediate impact on the economic and social health of the Black community. After all, African Americans constitute a disproportionate number of federal workers, a key area of employment that helped build the Black middle class. While African Americans constitute about 12.5% of the population, they are about 19% of the federal workforce. And being central to DEI, they are essentially guaranteed to be first on the chopping black.

Yet Black MAGA gathered for a Trump-led Black History Month celebration at the White House, clearly unphased by the irony of such a grim Saturday Night Live-style moment. Like his previous BHM events, it was, of course, mostly about Trump. Some of his favorite old and new Black sycophants were there, including far-right Christian activist and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., Alveda King; golfer Tiger Woods (rumored to be dating Trump’s ex-daughter-in-law); HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.); and Trump youth organizer C.J. Pearson.

In an interview, Pearson stated that “President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.” Pearson was making this claim while, across the federal government, departments and agencies were canceling Black History Month celebrations and “identity” events.

As the crowd drank wine and ate snacks, neither Trump nor any of the attendees mentioned the elephant in the room: the president’s savage anti-DEI campaign.

Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion. And count on one thing, as is likely to be true of so many other aspects of Donald Trump’s policies: Their capitulation will not age well.

Israel has resumed its aerial bombardment of Gaza. The latest cease-fire, which lasted two months and led to the release of 33 Israeli hostages and 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, never made it out of its first stage. The Israeli government has now adopted a strategy of inflicting overwhelming violence until Hamas capitulates by releasing the remaining hostages.

Ukraine and Russia have accepted a limited cease-fire. Both sides have agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure, but neither has actually adhered to this condition. U.S. President Donald Trump, who coaxed both sides toward this cease-fire, is reportedly furious. This week, Moscow and Kyiv agreed to extend this partial cease-fire to the Black Sea, though here, too, they don’t seem in a rush to stop their attacks. No serious analysts, including those in Russia, expect this cease-fire to hold.

A United Nations-brokered truce in Yemen lasted nearly six months in 2024 before fighting in the country between the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government started up again in the fall. The Trump administration has recently escalated air strikes against the Houthis in response to their revived efforts to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea.

Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker.

Last year, a cease-fire in Syria came to an end when rebels, with the go-ahead from Turkey, caught government troops by surprise when they seized Aleppo and kept going. A little more than a week later, they were in control of the capital of Damascus and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was on his way to Moscow.

Cease-fires have come and gone in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, the DRC and Rwanda called for a cease-fire in the eastern part of the country. An astonishing 700,000 people have been displaced by fighting just since January. The record of truces in this war-torn country does not give much hope for this latest initiative.

In other countries, the mutual hostility between the warring parties has been so intense that cease-fires don’t even get a chance to take hold. Sudan, split in two by government forces and the rebel Rapid Support Forces, has so far resisted international calls for immediate humanitarian pauses in the violence.

Cease-fires don’t always fail. Libya hasn’t seen any major violation of the cease-fire signed in 2020. But it’s the only success of the three cease-fires that the Borgen Project cited in October 2022 as evidence of a more peaceful world. The civil war in Sudan resumed in April 2023. Later that year, Azerbaijan broke a cease-fire to defeat Armenia and seize control of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker. The truth is, cease-fires are usually just empty promises, regardless of how smart, powerful, or delusional the mediator-in-chief happens to be.

What makes some cease-fires endure even as so many others disappear into the fire of renewed hostilities?

Why Cease-Fires Die

When he responded to Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “We are in favor of it but there are nuances.”

Those “nuances” were sticking points as sharp as a saber. Putin wants the world to recognize his illegal seizure of four Ukrainian provinces over which he doesn’t even have full control. He wants all foreign military assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine to end. NATO membership for Ukraine must be off the table. Oh, and he also wants the world to lift sanctions against his country.

Putin believes that he has an advantage on the battlefield and, with Trump as president, at the negotiating table as well. There is some truth to Putin’s perception. Russia has more soldiers and resources at its disposal than does Ukraine, and Trump is the most pro-Russian president that the United States has ever produced. Putin also knows that the celebrated dealmaker is actually a naïf who pays little attention to details and has been taken to the cleaners in the past, most notably by the Taliban in its 2020 deal with the United States.

But Russia, too, has reached certain limits in its capacity to recruit soldiers and produce the armaments to continue its occupation of Ukraine. Mutual exhaustion is one of the best signs of a cease-fire that can endure. That was certainly the case with the two Koreas in 1953 after two years of relatively little territorial movement by either side.

But both parties to the conflict have to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that they have sunk into a quagmire. Putin, by contrast, thinks that he can prevail. He wants not only those four provinces but the entirety of what he calls “Novorossiya,” which includes all of Ukraine’s southern coast, which would render the country land-locked. Putin also wants elections that can replace Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a more malleable leader.

Any cease-fire that doesn’t lead to Putin achieving these ultimate goals is a cease-fire that Russia is unlikely to uphold.

A power-besotted aggressor who believes that he—and isn’t it always a he?—has an asymmetric advantage over his opponent is one of the leading reasons why it’s difficult to stop wars. Cease-fires for these aggressors are only pauses to regroup or to win international approval or to lull opponents into complacency.

That applies to Benjamin Netanyahu as well. Israel and Hamas have been locked in a conflict over Gaza for more than two decades. On October 7, the much weaker Hamas launched a brutal surprise attack on Israeli territory that killed more than 1,000 people and produced 250 hostages, which the Palestinian group figured it could use as bargaining chips. Instead of negotiating, the Netanyahu government launched its own brutal response, which has left 50,000 dead in Gaza.

Like Putin, Netanyahu has maximalist ambitions and an uncompromising attitude. He wants to destroy Hamas. He also wants to destroy the capacity of Gaza to serve as a part of some future Palestinian state. He doesn’t really care about the hostages that Hamas is holding. The Israeli leader is so determined to prove that Hamas is using Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians alike as human shields that he’ll sacrifice them both in his bid to annihilate Hamas and, of course, maintain his own political position. To add grievous insult to catastrophic injury, he’ll then accuse the Palestinian group of human rights abuses after the fact.

A huge number of Israelis are fed up. This last weekend, 100,000 turned out to protest in the major cities.

Getting to Peace

Most cease-fires fail, often spectacularly so. “Of the 105 failed cease-fires, 84% were followed by an offensive within an average of just 13 days,” reports Patrick Burke in his study of cease-fires in 25 wars from 1947 to 2016. According to a study by Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi, 80% of cease-fires fail.

Mutual exhaustion on the battlefield is certainly one factor behind a successful cease-fire. But what can mediators do when one or both sides believe that they can still achieve a complete victory, as Croatia did with Operation Storm in 1995 and Azerbaijan accomplished more recently?

Trump’s approach is to strong-arm the weaker party. He cut off military aid to Ukraine, trash-talked its leader, and forced the country to accept a partial cease-fire. With the latest deal on the Black Sea, he is dangerously close to agreeing to lift some restrictions on Russian exports without approval from Ukraine or the European Union. Such a cease-fire is not likely to last or to lead to a second stage.

Putin is no doubt watching Netanyahu, taking careful notes, and identifying lessons to learn:

• Lesson one: Break previous agreement
• Lesson two: Flatter Trump
• Lesson three: Apply maximum firepower
• Lesson four: Ignore international opinion

From a conflict resolution point of view, a more successful approach would be to identify the underlying reasons for the dispute—competition for resources, historical grudges, cultural differences—and find ways of nudging the parties toward addressing those root causes nonviolently. But this approach assumes a certain power balance among the combatants.

It’s hard to imagine Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin being very interested in such a process. They don’t believe in talk therapy. They believe in power moves.

Where one side has an obvious advantage, an outside force could try to level the playing field. That requires arm-twisting not the weaker party but the stronger one. That’s what the United States did to get Serbia to the table and sign the Dayton Accords to end the war in Bosnia.

Ah, but didn’t the West follow just such a strategy with Russia during the current conflict? All the sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine and resolutions at the U.N. only made Putin fight harder. These punitive actions were taken to help Ukraine repel the invaders and uphold the principles of international law. In other words, the international community has had a stake in the conflict, since Russia didn’t just seize Ukrainian territory, it defied a collective global norm.

With Israel, of course, the Biden administration did little or nothing to restrain Netanyahu. The Trump administration has only encouraged the Israeli leader. Trump’s scenario of a Gaza resort with no Palestinians, however ridiculous it sounds, served notice that the United States would be okay with a genocidal push of all Palestinians from their land.

So, perhaps in some contexts, cease-fires are just bound to fail.

But don’t despair. Remember that 80% failure rate from Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi? Believe it or not, these researchers were actually encouraged by the results of their analysis of data from 196 conflicts between 1975 to 2011.

“What we found was that the best predictor that any one cease-fire agreement will be successful—and by successful I mean: not followed by renewed conflict or violence—… is how many failed peace agreements came before,” Jason Quinn noted. He pointed to the ultimate successes in ending wars in Nepal and Colombia as important examples.

Wars are hard to end. Exhibit A: The Hundred Years War. It makes sense that cease-fires are bound to fail and fail and fail and fail and fail until one day, they produce a lasting peace. Skilled mediators, a power move or two, mutual exhaustion on the battlefiel and at the negotiating table: These can all eventually lead to success.

But one thing is for sure. Trump’s unholy affection for both Putin and Netanyahu will produce only the worst kind of cease-fire, the kind that the strong use as a prelude to their final push to eliminate the weak.

The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, beginning with 6,700 layoffs. Their stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.

Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers that make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.

Musk and President Donald Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.

The real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations.

So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.

Gutting the IRS will hurt the middle class by reducing the taxes billionaires and corporations pay for our public services. It passes the bill to working class taxpayers to cover veteran’s services, infrastructure, national parks, and defense.

When it comes to taxes, the wealthy aren’t like you or me. Most wage earners have our state and federal taxes withheld from our monthly paychecks. Ninety percent of taxpayers use the simple standard deduction filing and hope we get a refund.

But billionaires and multimillionaires are different. Their income comes mostly from investments and assets—which they can hide. They hire experts from the “wealth defense industry”—an armada of tax lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers—to minimize their taxes and maximize inheritances for their fortunate children.

They deploy anonymous shell companies, complex trusts, and bank accounts in tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and South Dakota to aid their clients in minimizing taxes—tools not available to ordinary taxpayers. According to the Tax Justice Network, over $21 trillion is now hidden in tax havens like these.

A 2021 exposé by ProPublica found that more than half of the 100 wealthiest U.S. billionaires use a complex trust system to avoid estate taxes, which at the current level only kicks in for people with wealth over $13.99 million.

This aggressive tax dodging by the superrich has resulted in an enormous “tax gap” between what they owe and what’s collected. For the last few years, this gap is estimated at $700 billion a year—almost the size of the Pentagon budget.

Working and middle class taxpayers will pick up the slack, or see their services cut. Most likely some of this gap will be added to the $36 trillion national debt, requiring us to pay on an installment plan.

In previous decades, the IRS had the expertise to keep up with the schemes that billionaires and transnational corporations use to dodge their taxes. But over the last two decades, their capacity to catch wealthy crooks and grifters has been decimated by cuts.

Things started to turn around again in 2021, when Congress voted to invest in enforcement. And already, the investment was starting to pay off. A year ago, the IRS announced they’d recovered $482 million from millionaires who hadn’t paid their debts.

Trump and Musk are now reversing these modest gains.

As the agency people love to hate, the IRS was an easy target for Trump’s anti-government attacks. But the real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations. With an understaffed IRS, their tax shell games can operate without scrutiny—something seven previous IRS commissioners from both parties recently spoke out against.

We may not agree about everything in the federal budget, but most people agree the wealthy should pay their fair share of whatever expenses we share. And it’s hard to catch the criminals if you remove all the cops on the beat.

The billionaires will be popping their champagne bottles. Even with the higher tariffs on European bubbly, they can afford the best.

If a worker consistently and completely fails at a job, he or she should not receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a pat on the back. Sooner or later, that worker should receive a termination notice.

This is especially true of workers who engage in unethical behavior on the job. Almost any worker who violates office rules, defrauds their employer, or hurts their customers risks not only termination, but potential lawsuits and criminal charges.

Yet a small sector of workers in our nation do not face such consequences for such mistakes or misconduct on the job. Some people, no matter how badly they fail at their job or how many disasters they create on their job, can keep their positions or even move on to even better jobs.

Who are these special people who can “fail up” again and again?

Outgoing White House officials.

No matter how disastrously they perform in office, departing White House officials from any administration can usually find cushy new jobs at lobbying outfits, hedge funds, media outlets, or major colleges and universities.

To be very clear, McGurk and Sullivan were not civil servants carrying out orders. They were political appointees who developed, advocated, and executed disastrous, deadly and illegal decisions.

For the latest example of this pattern, look no further than where two of the most prominent and disastrous foreign policy officials from the Biden administration just landed.

President Biden's former National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, and his former National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East, Brett McGurk, left the White House when the Trump administration took over in January. Since then, both Sullivan and McGurk have obtained prestigious positions at some of America's most respected universities.

Without any hint of irony, the Harvard Kennedy School recently appointed Mr. Sullivan to serve as its first-ever "Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order." He has also just been appointed a Senior Fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.

Meanwhile, Mr. McGurk joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the end of last month as a senior fellow (he also, predictably, joined a hedge fund).

In a moral and rational society, neither Mr. Sullivan or Mr. McGurk would be able to land such jobs after leaving behind a trail of death and destruction stretching halfway around the world.

Take Mr. Sullivan. He personally spent months presiding over planning for the U.S. military's phased troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Remember how well that ended? Vietnam-like images of U.S. diplomats scrambling to evacuate the Embassy. Panicking Afghans overwhelming U.S. military bases and falling off of airplanes. The killing of 13 American soldiers and hundreds of Afghans at Abbey Gate.

The Pentagon, which often reported to President Biden through Mr. Sullivan, capped the Afghan withdrawal disaster off by launching a drone strike on a supposed ISIS car bomber who turned out to be a well-known humanitarian aid worker returning home to his family. The attack killed 10 civilians, including children who were outside and visible to drone operators when they fired on them. Under Mr. Sullivan's leadership, no one faced any accountability for this war crime.

In a moral and rational society, neither Mr. Sullivan or Mr. McGurk would be able to land such jobs after leaving behind a trail of death and destruction stretching halfway around the world.

Both Mr. Sullivan and Mr. McGurk also played critical roles in ensuring U.S. financial, military and diplomatic support for the Israeli government's war crimes against the people of Gaza.

When asked in 2023 if Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure in Gaza constituted a war crime, Sullivan attributed such reports to the “fog of war.”

In November 2023, when the Israeli government was carrying out the defense minister’s pledge to block all food, fuel, water to everyone in Gaza because they were fighting “human animals,” Mr. McGurk endorsed the illegal collective punishment of an entire civilian population by saying that if all the hostages were released, humanitarian aid would be allowed in.

According to reporting by The Atlantic, Mr. McGurk would push back against colleagues concerned by civilian casualties in Gaza by “invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration,” an operation that cost the lives of 9,000 Iraqi civilians.

During a May 2024 press briefing, Mr. Sullivan denied that what was going on in Gaza was a genocide, and in 2025 he went on to preposterously say that President Biden’s policies saved lives in Gaza.

In addition to their rhetorical support for war crimes in Gaza, Sullivan and McGurk helped develop and execute the policy that led to massive arms shipments to the Netanyahu government.

In April 2024, the Biden administration approved a shipment of $17 billion in unconditional military aid to the Israeli government. The administration also approved a shipment of over $20 million worth of fighter jets and other military equipment in August 2024. In one of their final acts, the administration approved an $8 billion dollar arms deal with Israel in January 2025.

By overseeing arms shipments to the Israeli government long after it was well-established that American weapons had been used in the commission of war crimes by Israeli forces, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. McGurk brazenly violated federal laws, including the Leahy Law, Section 6201, and Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act.

To be very clear, McGurk and Sullivan were not civil servants carrying out orders. They were political appointees who developed, advocated, and executed disastrous, deadly and illegal decisions.

Harvard and the University of New Hampshire’s decisions to reward McGurk and Sullivan with prestigious appointments represent the worst example of failing up. The appointments also show a callous, arguably racist disregard for the countless Palestinian Americans whose family members were victims of the White House’s policies.

Everyone knows that if these two officials had enabled the slaughter of 40,000 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans instead of 40,000 mostly Muslim people of color, Harvard and UNH would never hire them.

Starting with Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, it's time for White House officials to face the same treatment that most other Americans would face for sparking disasters on the job.

Every March, we celebrate Women’s History Month—a time to honor the trailblazers who fought for our rights and recognize how far we have come. But it is also a time to take stock of the battles we’re still fighting, and one of the most urgent is the fight for abortion care.

Abortion access isn’t just about healthcare; it’s about power, equality, and dignity. It’s about recognizing that pregnant people should have the same autonomy, agency, and opportunities as anyone else. Yet, time and time again, legislation is used as a weapon to strip us of our rights, rendering us invisible in the eyes of those who hold power.

When abortion rights are restricted, the effects ripple far beyond the individual. The economic consequences are devastating. Studies have shown that being denied an abortion drastically increases the likelihood of a person living in poverty. The landmark Turnaway Study found that people who were unable to access an abortion were four times more likely to experience financial insecurity, struggle with housing instability, and be trapped in cycles of domestic violence.

In a system where half the population can be denied life-saving medical care, how can we claim to value equality?

This is not just a coincidence—it’s by design. Anti-abortion legislation is not about “life”; it’s about control. It’s about keeping people, especially women and those who can become pregnant, economically vulnerable and dependent. It’s about ensuring that the structures of power remain unchallenged, forcing people to carry pregnancies they cannot afford while denying them the resources to escape poverty.

The hypocrisy is staggering. Many of the same politicians who push for abortion bans are the ones gutting social safety nets—cutting funding for childcare, slashing paid family leave, refusing to raise the minimum wage, and the list goes on. They claim to care about “life” while making it impossible for parents to provide for their children. This is not pro-life; it is anti-equality.

The United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and the numbers are even more alarming for Black and Indigenous people, who die at three to four times the rate of their white counterparts during childbirth. When states restrict abortion access, they force more people into dangerous pregnancies, increasing these mortality rates even further.

The recent surge of abortion bans and restrictions has created a healthcare crisis. Patients experiencing pregnancy complications—such as miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies—are being turned away from hospitals or left to suffer until their lives are at imminent risk. Doctors fear prosecution for providing necessary care, and pregnant people are treated as legal liabilities rather than human beings.

In a system where half the population can be denied life-saving medical care, how can we claim to value equality?

Women’s History Month exists because, for centuries, women’s contributions were erased, dismissed, or outright stolen. Today, we see that same erasure in real-time when lawmakers craft policies that disregard the needs and realities of half the population.

Look at how abortion laws are written—by men who will never face the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, let alone a dangerous one. Look at how reproductive healthcare is treated as an afterthought, even though it is central to economic stability, personal freedom, and public health.

Every time a law is passed that strips away abortion access, it is another message that we do not matter. That our health, our futures, our choices are secondary. That we are expected to sacrifice our bodies and our well-being to maintain a system that was never built for us in the first place.

This isn’t just an attack on reproductive rights; it’s an attack on gender equality itself.

Abortion access is not a fringe issue—it is fundamental to equality. If we want a world where women and pregnant people are not just tolerated but truly valued, we must fight for policies that recognize our full humanity.

That means protecting abortion access at every level—through legislation, through the courts, through elections, and through supporting each other. It means funding organizations that help people get the care they need, regardless of where they live—organizations like WRRAP. It means holding politicians accountable and refusing to let them silence us.

Women’s History Month is a reminder that progress is not given—it is won. The right to vote, the right to work, the right to own property, the right to make decisions about our own bodies—none of these rights were freely handed to us. They were fought for, tooth and nail, by those who refused to be invisible.

Now, it is our turn. The battle for abortion justice is the battle for equality itself, and we cannot afford to lose.

This op-ed was distributed by American Forum.

It’s a tale as old as American liberalism: Say the right thing—but only when it’s safe, and only after the damage is done.

Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had a choice to draw the line and stand up to a Republican-led budget that proposed slashing essential services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Section 8 housing assistance. Instead, after publicly criticizing the bill, he reversed course in under 24 hours and urged Democrats to pass it—calling it the “best path forward to avoid a shutdown.”

This is what establishment leadership looks like: performative urgency wrapped in political safety.The families who rely on SNAP and Section 8 aren’t breathing easier because D.C. stayed open. They’re still wondering how to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

Schumer and Newsom want to be seen as steady hands.The country doesn’t need politicians who manage decline gracefully. They need leaders who disrupt the status quo to protect the people it was never built to serve.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to deny support to trans athletes. On the first episode of his new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, he said it was “deeply unfair” for trans women to compete in women’s sports—framing that echoed right-wing rhetoric used to push anti-trans legislation.

And he didn’t say it to a neutral audience—he said it to Charlie Kirk, a far-right extremist who has spent years spreading anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation and promoting voter suppression through Turning Point USA.

Newsom invited him on as his first guest in an effort to appear “bipartisan.” That move alone signals more than a desire to reach across the aisle—it signals whose approval he’s seeking.

This wasn’t a spontaneous exchange—it was a calculated move, and a political wink to the center-right, packaged as “balance.” And it came from the same man who once signed a bill making California a sanctuary state for trans youth. That contrast gave right-wing media a fresh soundbite.

Even Rep.Sarah McBride (D-Del.)—the first openly trans member of Congress—recently urged Democrats to make room for people with “honest questions” about trans inclusion in sports. But those questions aren’t neutral. They’re part of a long, strategic assault on trans people’s dignity.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11), one of the few who consistently shows up for trans communities, called it out immediately: “Trans people are under attack. They need support, not betrayal.”

In March 2024, Schumer gave a speech condemning Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and calling for elections in Israel—after more than 30,000 Palestinians were already dead. The speech was safe, and the policy—uninterrupted U.S. military aid—remained unchanged.

This is what performative politics looks like in action: too late, too safe, and too empty.

We’re told these are “tough choices.” But they’re only tough if your priority is your career. When Democrats lose ground, they often shift to the center—abandoning bold policies and the people who need them most.

But history shows that doesn’t win back power—it loses trust. As American Affairs Journal outlines, the party’s retreat to centrism—from welfare reform in the 90s to recent budget deals—has consistently weakened its own base while signaling to Republicans that cruelty works.

I know the cost of centrist politics because I lived it. In the 90s, Democrats embraced welfare reform and tough-on-crime laws to look “tough” and “moderate.”

That turn helped criminalize poverty. I was convicted of welfare fraud. I wasn’t gaming the system; I was surviving it. Whole communities were punished in the name of bipartisanship. So when Democrats today praise “moderation,” I hear echoes of policies that nearly erased me.

If you’re poor, trans, undocumented, disabled, or Palestinian—these choices don’t look tough. They look familiar.

And they cause harm. When people with power echo right-wing talking points, they legitimize them. They embolden bills that restrict bodily autonomy, gut benefits, and criminalize survival. They signal that marginalized people—their lives and dignity—are negotiable.

Schumer and Newsom want to be seen as steady hands.The country doesn’t need politicians who manage decline gracefully. They need leaders who disrupt the status quo to protect the people it was never built to serve.

So where are the leaders?

Not the ones who speak up after it’s politically safe. Not the ones who adjust their stances based on polling data, shifting with the wind instead of standing for something. Where are the ones who lead from the front?

Real leadership is not polished. It’s the woman clearing her record. It’s the trans activist running mutual aid while dodging attacks. It’s the undocumented student organizing for housing justice with no promise of safety.

And it is me, a formerly incarcerated queer Black woman who went back to college in her 50s. Who found her voice not in press rooms but in courtrooms, classrooms, and community spaces. Who survived systems designed to erase her and came back fighting for others still trapped inside them.

Real change doesn’t trickle down—it rises up. From organizing, solidarity, and movements that center the people most impacted and most ignored.

Real leaders are not waiting on permission. They are building with the people already creating justice—one expungement, one coalition, one unapologetic truth at a time.

By Ralph Nader March 28, 2025 The vast undercount of Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza is regularly reported as 50,000. The actual toll from violent military action and the indirect deaths (stemming from infectious disease, epidemics, untreated chronic illness, untreated serious wounds, and starvation) is well over 400,000 and growing by the day. No crowded enclave…

A senior consultant in Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation used to teach progressive leaders that there is a necessary difference between the values and functions of public vs. private relationships. In private life, relationships are ends in themselves. For public actors, relationships are appropriately more instrumental and transactional. Self-sacrifice is normal in personal relationships, while self-interest guides public action. For political leaders, personal gratification should take a backseat to public service. Of course, there is often a blurring of these boundaries, but, in general, when these domains overlap too much, the consequences are usually disastrous. We see in Donald Trump an extreme example of what happens when someone in public is unable to have any guard rails between the pressures of his or her private psychology and public actions.

In Donald Trump’s world, the political is always personal. Barriers between the two worlds, the sort of censorship and self-restraint that effective leaders are obligated to exercise in public life, have completely collapsed. Instead, Trump’s policies are suffused with his personal and private needs, defenses, and insecurities. His tariff policies seek to punish Canada for being “nasty” and resistant to his bizarre agenda of making Canada our 51st state. He wants to hobble Ukraine because Zelensky was disrespectful to him. With Musk’s help, he spins and distorts reality in order to punish the “deep state” that he feels sought to undermine him. He notoriously goes to extreme lengths to try to punish his prior and current political enemies, targeting lawyers and journalists and threatening to ‘primary’ disloyal legislators. His ignorance about policy reflects the fact that he recklessly acts on private impulses and not thoughtful reflection. He lies compulsively and continually, and always in the service of bombastic claims of perfection and self-exoneration. He frees criminals and criminalizes dissent, not out of high-minded principles and commitment to the public interest but out of base impulses involving his personal narcissistic needs and vulnerabilities.

Obviously, public figures and leaders are human beings with personal psychologies that invariably influence their public political actions. Effective leaders, however, learn to subordinate or at least sublimate personal psychological conflicts in the interests of being politically strategic, negotiating compromises, and focusing on desirable political outcomes that serve a broader good. No one is saying that politicians leave their egos at the door, but, instead, the best ones seek to restrain these egos in order to achieve their political goals.

Trump is the opposite. He acts (out) entirely on the basis of personal animus and internal conflicts and then, only retroactively, spins a tale that paints his words and actions as principled or visionary. He will act on a small-minded personal impulse like humiliating Zelensky in the Oval Office, but then argue that what was clearly an idiosyncratic personal response was really part of his efforts to single-handedly solve the Ukraine/Russian war and ensure world peace. He feels slighted by other world leaders and trash talks them in public, implying that his derogatory language and claims are really part of his efforts to make America great again and to promote a high minded “America First” agenda without a hint of awareness that the real psychic motivation behind his actions involve making Trump “great” and “first.”

The characteristics that drive Trump to constantly leak his personal issues into his public political postures, the real reasons he simply cannot keep the seamier sides of his personality from flooding his actions as President, all stem from the precise nature of his psychological makeup. Trump’s psychology is hiding in plain sight. He is driven to avoid or refute any situation, any moment, in which he might potentially feel or be seen as at a disadvantage, inadequate, inferior, or otherwise a failure. He lives in dire fear of such feelings and instinctively, automatically, and desperately has to go out of his way to communicate the opposite. We don’t have to be Freud to know this. We see it every day in Trump’s constant clownish boasting and self-aggrandizing arrogance.

Everyone is so used to Trump’s compulsive sense of grievance and defensive arrogance that it no longer seems to be the impairment that it actually is. No one blinks an eye when he makes remarks, barely concealed within his word salad, about “having the best words,” being “the best President for black people since Abraham Lincoln,” or knowing more about taxes, the military, climate change—well, pretty much everything—than the world’s experts. Even when the conservative Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal had the temerity to remark that the positive business sentiment seen months before the election had shifted in response to Trump’s tariffs, Trump couldn’t tolerate the implied criticism and fired back with this tweet: “The Globalist Wall Street Journal has no idea what they are doing or saying,” he declared. “They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of ‘screwing the United States of America. Their (WSJ!) thinking is antiquated and weak, and very bad for the USA. But have no fear, we will WIN on everything!!!”

My point here is that Trump has no choice, no freedom at all, to edit or censor remarks like these because the psychic threats they seek to mitigate—feelings of shame, inferiority and/or failure—are so threatening to him that they leave him no room at all to be cautious, modest, or to seek common ground. While all politicians, like all people, bring their personal psychologies into their public work lives, Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action. Unfortunately the fact that these conflicts are playing out publicly in the head of the most powerful person in the world threatens economic and political stability worldwide. WE can only hope that there are still some adults in the room that can restrain him.

Bob McChesney, who died on Tuesday at the age of 72, first introduced himself to me almost 30 years ago, on the set of a public television news program in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob was a distinguished University of Wisconsin professor who was gaining an international reputation for his groundbreaking analysis of the threat to democracy posed by corporate control of media. Raising his arguments in books, speeches, and frequent C-Span appearances, he was well on his way to becoming one of the great public intellectuals of his time. I was a young newspaper editor who had earned a slim measure of recognition for my advocacy on behalf of investigative journalism and press freedom.

The program was framed as a debate about the future of journalism. Bob was positioned as the doomsayer, warning about how media consolidation was killing journalism. I was expected to counter that the future was actually bright. As it turned out, neither of us wanted to follow the script. Instead of arguing, we both agreed that profit-obsessed corporations were destroying American journalism, and that this destruction would pose an ever more serious threat to American democracy.

It wasn’t a particularly satisfying exchange for our hosts that evening, but it was the beginning of a collaboration that would span three decades. Bob and I cowrote half a dozen books and dozens of articles, joined Bill Moyers for a series of PBS interviews that would examine threats to journalism and democracy, and did our best, with more allies than we could have imagined in those early days, to stir up a reform movement that recognized the crisis and endeavored to set the stage for media that serves people rather than corporate bottom lines.

Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force. His research and his insatiable curiosity helped him to see the future more clearly than any scholar of his generation, with such precision that Moyers would compare him to both Tom Paine and Paul Revere. As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.

Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force.

Bob took the “public” part of “public intellectual” seriously. You knew he wanted to swing into action when he’d say, “We need to put our heads together…” That was his call to write another book, organize another national conference on media reform, or rally another movement to defend the speak-truth-to-power journalism that the founders of the American experiment understood as the only sure footing for representative democracy.

Bob kept issuing the call, even as a series of health challenges slowed him down. He was still doing so a few days before his death following a year-long fight with cancer. His was a life fulfilled in the best sense of the word. He died a happy man, holding the hand of his beloved wife, Inger Stole, and reflecting on time spent with his daughters, Amy and Lucy.

Our last conversations recalled friends and colleagues who had answered his calls to save journalism and renew our democracy: Craig Aaron, Victor Pickard, Josh Silver, Kimberly Longey, Russell Newman, Derek Turner, Ben Scott, Joe Torres, Tim Karr, Matt Wood, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Michael Copps, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and too many others to name. Bob loved scholarship, loved activism, and loved collaborating with people who made connections between the two—sharing writing credits with former students at UW-Madison and later at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with unions of media workers and, perhaps above all, strategizing with the team at Free Press, the media reform group he co-founded in 2003 to advocate for diversity in ownership, robust pubic media, net neutrality and always, always, democracy. Bob was frustrated by the oligarchical overreach now on display in the Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk—a development he had predicted with eerie accuracy. Yet he remained undaunted to the end, still spinning out fresh ideas for upending corporate control of media, getting Big Money out of politics, and ushering in a new era of freewheeling debate and popular democracy.

That was the essence of Robert Waterman McChesney. He was a globally respected communications scholar who was wholly welcome in the halls of academia, yet he was never satisfied working within an ivory tower. He was a rigorous researcher into the worst abuse of corporate and political establishments. Yet he refused to surrender his faith in the ability of people-powered movements to upend monarchs and oligarchs and, in the words of Tom Paine, “begin the world over again.”

Bob regarded Paine—the immigrant pamphleteer who rallied the people of his adopted country to dismiss King George III and the colonial enterprise, and who spent the rest of his life demanding that this new United States live up to the egalitarian promise of liberty and justice for all—as the essential founder of the American project. Like Paine, Bob believed that with information and encouragement, grassroots activists could carry Paine’s legacy forward into the 21st century. Countless people heeded his call.

“Bob McChesney was a brilliant scholar whose ideas and insights reached far beyond the classroom. He opened the eyes of a generation of academics, journalists, politicians, and activists—including mine—to how media structures and policies shape our broader politics and possibilities,” explained Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press. “While McChesney spent much of his career charting the problems of the media and the critical junctures that created our current crises, he believed fundamentally in the public’s ability to solve those problems and build a media system that serves people’s needs and sustains democracy. His ideas were bold and transformative, and he had little patience for tinkering around the edges. Rather than fighting over Washington’s narrow vision of what was possible, he always said—and Bob loved a good sports metaphor—that we needed to throw the puck down to the other end of the ice.”

Bob examined the relationship between media and democracy with scholarly seriousness. Yet he coupled that seriousness with a penchant not just for sports metaphors and references to rock-and-roll songs but spot-on cinematic analogies, which invited Americans to recognize the crisis. Speaking to Moyers about how America’s media policies were forged behind closed doors in Washington, by lobbyists and politicians, Bob succintly defined that process: “Pure corruption. This is really where Big Money crowds everything else out. The way to understand how policymakers make media in this country [is to watch] a great movie: The Godfather: Part II. There’s a scene early in the movie where all the American gangsters are on top of a hotel roof in Havana. It’s a classic scene featuring Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone. They’ve got a cake being wheeled out to them. And Hyman Roth is cutting up slices of the cake. The cake’s got the outline of Cuba on it, and they’re giving each gangster a slice of Cuba. And while he’s doing this, Hyman Roth’s [talking about how they can work with government to carve up Cuba in ways that make them all rich]. That’s how media policy is made in the United States.”

The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius. He wanted to upend the money power and tip the balance toward systems that would empower working-class people—as opposed to billionaires—to shape the future of media: with strategies for giving citizens democracy vouchers that they could use to support independent media, and a host of other remedies. Like his friend Bernie Sanders, Bob believed it essential to have a media free enough from corporate influence to speak truth to economic and political power, boldly critique the excesses of capitalism, and raise the alarm against creeping oligarchy.

The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius.

This was the premise that underpinned an academic career that saw Bob author or co-author almost 30 books—including the groundbreaking Rich Media, Poor Democracy, his 1999 manifesto on how the decay of journalism would lead to a collapse of democratic norms, and 2013’s Digital Disconnect, his essential assessment of the danger of allowing Silicon Valley billionaires to define online communications. Many of the same themes ran through examinations of the shuttering of newspapers by corporate conglomerates that left communities as news deserts, of the destructive influence of political advertising on the national discourse, and of the failure of political and media elites to bring citizens into debates about automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Noam Chomsky, whose own work on the media’s manufacturing of consent had profoundly influenced Bob’s scholarship (along with that of Ben Bagdikian, the journalist who wrote The Media Democracy), became Bob’s most ardent champion. “Robert McChesney’s work has been of extraordinary importance,” explained Chomsky. “It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights.”

Bob’s research—and the books, lectures and activism that extended from it—earned him Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize, the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Newspaper Guild’s Herbert Block Freedom Award (for “having done more for press freedom than anyone”), and the International Communications Association’s C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. It also gained him a hearing from thoughtful members of Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. Even if they did not always follow his advice, progressive officials recognized the wisdom of his analysis and incorporated it into their work. That’s one of the reasons why, in 2009, Utne Reader named Bob as one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world.” Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, simply referred to Bob as “the conscience of the media in America.”

Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…”

Lewis wrote those words the better part of two decades ago. Bob remained that conscience, even as “media deserts” spread their arid path across America, as disinformation and misinformation overwhelmed the Internet, as propagandistic advertising warped our politics and as democratic expectations were undermined. It was all as he had predicted. But he was not inclined toward “I told you so” rejoinders.

Rather, Bob kept the faith that popular movements would push back against the decay, and the chaos, just as they had in the Progressive Era, the New Deal years, and the 1960s. “You’ve got to look in the mirror and understand that, if you act like change for the better is impossible, you guarantee it will be impossible,” he would say. “That’s the one decision each individual faces.”

Bob looked in that mirror confidently and courageously throughout a life of scholarship and activism. Some of our last conversations were about the huge crowds Bernie Sanders was attracting for his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and the thousands of Americans who have been showing up to challenge Republican members of Congress at town hall meetings. Just like Tom Paine, Bob saw fresh hope in the people who were rising up and demanding a future defined by their humanity, as opposed to corporate power. This might, he suggested, be the opening for a new surge in activism for journalism and democracy, a surge that might “begin the world over again.”

Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…” In other words, let’s make a plan. Let’s do something. That was his charge to those of us who cherished Bob McChesney’s mission and his spirit. We honor him best by accepting it.