The rapid fire destruction initiated by President Trump, Elon Musk, and MAGA Republicans has overwhelmed Americans, with many scrambling to respond to one shock after another. Which was, of course, the point. The “flood the zone” strategy worked, for a while, leaving us alternating between fear and exhaustion.

But waiting for the lawsuits to stop the worst illegal moves or for disasters to expand to the point of collapse are losing strategies. Likewise, focusing exclusively on the failures of Trump administration policies leaves us feeling powerless and isolated.

What we need is a path forward.

Here’s one idea, discussed by North Carolina Democrat Rep. Wiley Nickel and historian and author Timothy Snyder: a shadow cabinet. The idea comes from other parliamentary democracies especially in Europe. In these systems, the opposition party establishes an alternative cabinet with specific portfolios that mirror those of the ruling government. These shadow ministers serve two crucial functions: they critique current policies while offering constructive alternatives.

Imagine having a shadow Attorney General who could provide journalists with informed counterpoints to administration claims while also creating a secure channel for alarmed federal employees to share concerns and leaks. Imagine a Secretary of Interior who could speak to the enduring value of American forests and parklands and why they should be protected.

What we need is to restore our sense of collective agency — to set a people’s agenda for the future and choose our own leaders.

A shadow cabinet would show us what it would mean to have a government of public servants who put the well being of American families ahead of the further enrichment of billionaires. During this time of overwhelm, when our physiological resources are limited by the impulse to “fight or flight,” this process could refocus us on our rights as citizens of this nation to have a government that works for us.

I propose one crucial variation on the approach proposed by Nickel and Snyder. The cabinet should not be appointed by the Democratic Party establishment — instead, we should embrace a truly democratic (small d) selection process. The Democratic Party establishment has failed to rise to the challenges of the times on many fronts, and many have felt alienated or left out.

Moreover, we need to recover our voices after the failed primary season of 2024 in which the nominations of Pres. Joe Biden followed by Vice President Kamala Harris were forgone conclusions. If Party leaders once again tell us who our leaders should be, alienation and cynicism would grow instead of engagement.

What we need is to restore our sense of collective agency — to set a people’s agenda for the future and choose our own leaders. So let’s create a grassroots process to debate priorities, hear from potential shadow cabinet candidates, and make selections collectively. We could consider a few key cabinet posts at a time. Caucuses at the local level could elect representatives to take community priorities and nominations for shadow secretaries to a national gathering for final selection.

This approach would be newsworthy, energizing, and shift our focus from mere opposition to creative problem-solving, visionary imagination, power-building, and community empowerment.

We could do this in locations across the country led by non-MAGA organizations that have large memberships and local chapters, for example The Working Families Party, Indivisible, the Women's March, Black Lives Matter, and Democratic Socialists of America come to mind, alongside local Democratic Party districts.

Americans are seeking genuine solutions to their everyday challenges, not ideological litmus tests. The questions we should be asking center on values and on practical approaches to improving the lives of current and future generations.

Our shadow cabinet members would serve as forward-looking spokespersons with the legitimacy of having been chosen through an inclusive process. They could effectively articulate alternative visions while also forming a deep bench of potential candidates for future elections.

Importantly, the democratic process itself would be enlivening. It would shift us away from the stale red-vs blue argument that too often miss the point. Is advocating for healthy lifestyles inherently conservative now that RFK Jr. is in office? Is supporting peace in Ukraine a right-wing position? Are immigration enforcement policies exclusively Republican when Democratic administrations have also implemented deportations?

Americans are seeking genuine solutions to their everyday challenges, not ideological litmus tests. The questions we should be asking center on values and on practical approaches to improving the lives of current and future generations.

This caucus process would provide valuable practice in democratic deliberation about real issues that are affecting our lives in local communities throughout the country. And it would expand our political imagination beyond the limitations imposed by establishment thinking, potentially embracing such popular proposals as Medicare for All.

No one is better equipped to define our national priorities and develop solutions than the American people themselves, engaged in pragmatic local conversations focused on constructive action. A democratic shadow cabinet offers a way to channel our energy toward building the future we want. By reclaiming our democratic voice through this process, we can begin building our vision and our power, re-engaging in our communities, and doing the essential work of renewal.

For decades, the federal government has played a crucial role in ensuring that every child—regardless of disability, income, or background—has access to a quality education. That role isn’t just administrative; it’s a safeguard against discrimination, neglect, and the systemic failures that have historically left the most vulnerable students behind. Now, with the recent push to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, that safeguard is under attack.

As an education attorney, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when schools fail to meet their legal obligations—and who suffers most when oversight disappears. No group stands to lose more than the 7.3 million children with disabilities who depend on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for basic educational access. Without federal enforcement, that right isn’t just at risk—it could vanish overnight.

And the harm won’t stop there. Weakening the Department of Education means weakening the very mechanisms designed to prevent discrimination and protect students from systemic inequities. It means fewer safeguards, fewer resources, and fewer options for the millions of students who already face the greatest barriers to educational opportunity. The brunt of these cuts will fall hardest on Black and brown students, students with disabilities, English learners, LGBTQIA+ students, and low-income families—communities that have long relied on federal oversight as a necessary check against discrimination and neglect.

Without federal enforcement of the IDEA’s key provisions, Grace’s school district may well elect to discontinue her therapy sessions with impunity, leaving her unable to make progress much like her typically achieving peers.

The numbers tell the story. In Fiscal Year 2024, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) received a record-breaking 22,687 complaints—an 18% increase from the previous high of 19,201 complaints in FY 2023. The vast majority, year after year, involve allegations of disability discrimination. If anything, this surge in complaints underscores the urgent need for stronger civil rights enforcement in schools—not a retreat from it. Stripping away the department’s oversight would not only silence these complaints, but leave the most vulnerable students with nowhere to turn.

Consider Grace (a pseudonym), a bright, eight-year-old girl living in a small Massachusetts farming town. Born with cerebral palsy, Grace depends on physical therapy to navigate her school environment, and occupational therapy to master everyday tasks, like writing and eating independently. Through the provisions set forth in the IDEA, Grace’s family secured access to these vital services at her local public school—services they, like most families, would otherwise be unable to afford out of pocket.

Without federal enforcement of the IDEA’s key provisions, Grace’s school district may well elect to discontinue her therapy sessions with impunity, leaving her unable to make progress much like her typically achieving peers. Her parents, already stretched thin, would have no recourse. For Grace, and for millions of families across the country, what’s at stake isn’t just a matter of policy—it’s the ability to build a future on fair and equal ground for all.

The Lessons of History: Why Federal Oversight Matters

To grasp the significance of the U.S. Department of Education, we need only look to the past. Its oversight, enforcement, and technical assistance functions are not bureaucratic formalities—they are the guardrails that ensure students’ rights are more than just words on paper. Well before the enactment of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), students with disabilities faced not only educational exclusion, but also deep-seated social marginalization.

As I’ve written elsewhere, throughout the 19th century, children with disabilities were largely seen as a private concern—a “private trouble” rather than a public responsibility. But as the early 20th century ushered in compulsory school attendance laws, this exclusionary paradigm began to shift. For the first time, children who had long been dismissed as “seemingly uneducable” were legally required to enroll in public schools, disrupting the longstanding pattern of social and educational isolation.

Yet, attendance did not guarantee access to meaningful education. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, the neglect and ableist hostility that had defined the prior century took on new forms within the nation’s public schools. Rather than providing necessary supports, many schools systematically segregated students with disabilities into poorly resourced and stigmatized classrooms.

The White House Committee on Special Classes condemned these environments as little more than dumping grounds for students with specialized needs. In response, parents and community advocates “lobbied aggressively to root out [the] entrenched discrimination” pervading public schools. Still, by the 1971-72 school year—just three years before IDEA’s passage—the scale of educational exclusion remained staggering: Seven states were educating fewer than 20% of their known children with disabilities, and in 19 states, fewer than a third. Only 17 states had even reached the halfway mark.

Without federal protections guaranteeing a right to education, disability rights activists fought to bring students with disabilities into standard educational environments. Drawing inspiration from Brown v. Board of Education, they argued that segregated special education classrooms, much like racially segregated schools, resulted in unequal and inferior educational experiences. Their efforts helped lay the groundwork for constitutional protections that, particularly at the district court level, affirmed the right of students with disabilities to receive a public education.

This federal intervention wasn’t about bureaucracy—it was about necessity. And yet, today, some lawmakers are pushing to strip away the very enforcement and oversight protections that helped bring an end to that era of exclusion and ableism.

The Bipartisan Stakes of Dismantling the Department of Education

Disability knows no boundaries. It cuts across race, class, geography, and political affiliation. It is an equalizer in its unpredictability, shaping lives in urban centers, suburban neighborhoods, and rural farming towns alike. Yet in the very communities where support for President Donald Trump was strongest, families may not realize how deeply this proposal could undermine their children’s futures.

Rural schools already operate under immense strain—stretched budgets, fewer specialized teachers, and the challenges of geographic isolation. For students with disabilities, these hurdles are even higher. Federal funding under the IDEA is a lifeline, covering nearly 15% of special education costs nationwide, amounting to billions in critical federal aid.

Dismantling the Department of Education isn’t just a bureaucratic maneuver—it’s a fundamental betrayal of the promise that every child deserves a fair chance at an education.

States like Nebraska, Indiana, and South Dakota—all of which invest disproportionately less in their rural school districts—depend on these federal dollars to meet even the most basic obligations to students like Grace. Yet in Nebraska, where the funding gap between rural and urban schools is widest, Trump won approximately 60% of the vote in the last presidential election.

For many rural families, these stakes aren’t theoretical. Losing federal protections could mean losing access to the nearest specialist—often hours away—or having nowhere at all to turn when their child needs critical services.

Block Grants: A Recipe for Inequity

As the push to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education gains momentum, leaders in Republican-led states are renewing calls to shift federal education funding to block grants—a move that would only deepen the crisis. While touted as a way to give states more flexibility, block grants come with fewer guardrails, making it easier for states to divert funds away from the students who need them most.

If enacted, this shift would further weaken federal oversight, making it far more difficult to enforce “maintenance of effort” (MOE) provisions, which ensure states uphold their own education spending. In a more decentralized system, the risk isn’t just mismanagement—it’s an abdication of responsibility, leaving vulnerable students at the mercy of shifting political priorities and budget shortfalls.

Consider Medicaid block grants as an analog and cautionary tale. States that received Medicaid waivers under block grant-style flexibility often shifted funds away from vulnerable populations to cover budget deficits. For example, in Tennessee, the state redirected Medicaid dollars meant for underserved communities to plug holes in unrelated health system budgets. Without federal oversight, similar reallocations of special education funding are not only possible, but likely.

Without these safeguards, history could repeat itself—not as a distant memory, but as a lived reality for millions of students. The lack of federal accountability would make it nearly impossible for families to challenge these decisions, leaving rural families, already underserved, at an even greater disadvantage.

A Call to Action: Protecting the Future for All Children

Dismantling the Department of Education isn’t just a bureaucratic maneuver—it’s a fundamental betrayal of the promise that every child deserves a fair chance at an education. The impact won’t be abstract. It will be felt in classrooms and kitchen-table conversations, in the quiet struggles of families left without recourse, and in the futures of children who will be denied the support they need to thrive.

This isn’t about politics; it’s about priorities. Federal oversight exists because history has shown what happens when states are left to decide, on their own, whose education matters. Without these protections, vulnerable students will once again be pushed to the margins, their futures dictated not by potential but by geography, circumstance, and political whim.

The question before us is simple: Do we honor our commitment to all children, or do we turn back the clock on decades of progress? For Grace, for her classmates, and for the generations to come, the answer must be clear. We must act—not out of partisanship, but out of principle. The future of our children, and of our country, depends on it.

Yesterday, the U.S. House passed legislation to fund the government through September 30 and thereby avert a shutdown at the end of this week.

The measure now goes to the Senate, where Democrats must decide whether to support it and thereby hand President Donald Trump and Elon Musk a blank check to continue their assault on the federal government.

The House bill would keep last year’s spending levels largely flat but would increase spending for the military by $6 billion and cut more than $1 billion from the District of Columbia’s budget.

Today’s real choice is between a continuing resolution that gives Trump and Musk free rein to decide what government services they want to continue and what services they want to shut down—or demanding that Trump and Musk stop usurping the power of Congress, as a condition for keeping the government funded.

In normal times, I recommend that Democrats vote for continuing budget resolutions because Democrats support the vital services that the government provides to the American people—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans services, education, the Food and Drug Administration, environmental protection, and much else.

In normal times, Democrats want to keep the government open.

In normal times, Democrats would be wrong to vote against a continuing resolution that caused the government to shut down.

But these are not normal times.

The president of the United States and the richest person in the world are already shutting the government down. They have effectively closed USAID and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. They have sent half the personnel of the Department of Education packing. They are eliminating Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing high levels of pollution facing poor communities.

They are usurping from Congress the power of the purse—the power to decide what services are to be funded and received by the American people—and are arrogating that power to themselves.

In 1996, when I was in then-President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, we opposed Newt Gingrich’s budget bullying. We also understood that Gingrich’s demands would seriously cripple the federal government. So Bill Clinton refused to go along with Gingrich’s budget resolution, and the government was shuttered for four long painful weeks..

Today’s situation is far worse. Trump and Musk aren’t just making demands that would cripple the federal government. They are directly crippling the federal government.

Why should any member of Congress vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund government services that are no longer continuing?

Why should any member of Congress vote to give Trump and Musk a trillion dollars and then let them decide how to spend it—or not spend it?

Why should Congress give Trump and Musk a blank check to continue their pillage?

The real choice congressional Democrats face today is not between a continuing resolution that allows the government to function normally or a government shutdown. Under Trump and Musk, the government is not functioning normally. It is not continuing. It is already shutting down.

Today’s real choice is between a continuing resolution that gives Trump and Musk free rein to decide what government services they want to continue and what services they want to shut down—or demanding that Trump and Musk stop usurping the power of Congress, as a condition for keeping the government funded.

Trump, Musk, and the rest of their regime have made it clear that they don’t care what Congress or the courts say. They are acting unconstitutionally. They are actively destroying our system of government.

The spineless Republicans will not say this publicly. So Democrats must—and Democrats must insist on budget language that holds Trump and Musk accountable.

The House’s Republican-drafted budget resolution isn’t contingent on Trump observing existing laws. It does not instruct the president to stop Musk from riding roughshod over the federal government. It doesn’t tell the president and his cabinet to spend the money Congress intended to be spent.

Members of Trump’s team are already saying that if a continuing resolution is passed they will not observe laws that Congress has enacted and will not spend funds that Congress has authorized and appropriated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, says that even if the State Department is fully funded, he will void 83% of the contracts authorized for USAID.

Senate Democrats are needed to obtain 60 votes needed to pass the House’s continuing budget resolution through the Senate. But there is no point in Democrats voting to fund the government only to let Trump and Musk do whatever they see fit with those funds.

Senate Democrats have an opportunity to stop Trump and Musk from their illegal and unconstitutional shutting of the government. Democrats should say they’ll vote for the continuing budget resolution to keep the government going only if Trump agrees to abide by the law and keep the government going—fully funding the services that Congress intends to be fully funded and stop the pillaging.

If Democrats set out this condition clearly but Trump won’t agree, the consequences will be on Trump and the Republicans. They run the government now. They are the ones who are engaging in, or are complicit in, the wanton destruction now taking place.

This is an opportunity for the public to learn what Trump and Musk are doing, and why it’s illegal and unconstitutional.

In 1996, when Bill Clinton refused to go along with Newt Gingrich’s plan to cripple the federal government, causing the government to shut down for a month, Clinton wasn’t blamed. Gingrich was blamed.

If you live in a state with a Democratic senator, please phone them right now and tell them not to vote for the continuing resolution that gives Trump and Musk free rein to continue shutting the government. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. A switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request.

“America, this republic, this democracy in which we are, is a living thing which cannot be contemplated or categorized, like the image of a thing I can make . . . . It is not and never will be perfect because the standard of perfection does not apply here. Dissent belongs to this living matter as much as consent does. The limitations on dissent are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and no one else. If you ‘try to make America more American’ . . . you can only destroy it. Your methods, finally, are the justified methods of the police, and only the police.” —Hannah Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” Commonweal (March 20, 1953).

Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish immigrant, wrote the above words at the high point of McCarthyism in 1950’s America. It took courage for her to publish these words. For, as her biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, reports: “The attorney general of the democracy in which she was living had made a speech three days earlier in which he announced that 10,000 citizens were being investigated for denaturalization and 12,000 aliens for deportation as ‘subversives.”

Indeed Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blucher, was a former communist who was especially vulnerable to the threats of the Attorney General, Albert Brownell. As Blucher himself had written in a letter to Arendt about Brownell’s revival of the harsh McCarran-Walters Act: “The acceptance without opposition of the dreadful new immigration bill has demoralized the best people here, so much so that the forces of the Left, which never really were put in motion, are stunned . . . It seems that one can now deprive someone of citizenship with a simple denunciation . . . And how soon these ‘Born American’ people could become a Master Race.”

That was then, and this is now.

Last weekend, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia University graduate student, living in campus housing, who has been one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. Mahmoud is a Palestinian who was born in Syria, who has been in the U.S. on a student visa, is currently holding a green card, and is married to a U.S. citizen. There is no evidence that he has ever engaged in a violent act. He was apparently arrested in accordance with the Trump Executive Order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” signed on January 29, 2025, and also in connection with the recently announced State Department “catch and revoke” policy, which employs AI tools to locate, detain, and deport international students considered to be pro-Palestinian and thus, by definition, “anti-Semitic.”

This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism. It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly acknowledged the action, announcing that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” [It must be noted that a U.S. federal judge has just ordered a temporary halt to Mahmoud’s deportation. But it must be noted only parenthetically, because the halt is only temporary, and Mahmoud remains in ICE custody, and if there is any domain where the Trump administration can be relied upon to stick to its metaphorical—and actual—guns, it is this one.]

The arrest of Khalil is a major escalation in a “New Campus McCarthyism” that has beset U.S. higher education for at least the past two years. It follows hard on the Trump administration’s cancellation of over $400 million in Columbia University grants and contracts, and preceded by one day Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Education has sent letters to 60 universities “under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”

At the same time, what we are now experiencing is more than an attack on academic freedom and university autonomy. It is nothing less than a wholesale assault on constitutional democracy itself, by an authoritarian administration determined to “Make America Great Again,” the Constitution, and democracy, be damned. The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a blatant attack on the civil liberties without which there can be no meaningful democracy for anyone. As columnist Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “This is The Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”

That this arrest and the policy behind it is being justified by this administration–with its Nazi-saluting “DOGE” head and neo-Nazi supporting Vice President and “fine people on both sides” President–as a defense of Jews is beyond cynical. And that many Jewish leaders apparently support this arrest is simply deplorable. For Trump clearly has no real interest in either Jews or Arabs, and is quite content to disrespect the former while trolling the latter, as he did on Elon Musk’s X, posting “Shalom, Mahmoud” above a caption that read: “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.” Trump followed up with an even more threatening Truth Social post:

We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.

But even more ominous was a statement Trump posted last week:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism.

It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period. Foreign “agitators,” American “agitators,” it makes no difference.

And while it involves the Education Department’s financial intimidation and punishment of universities, it also involves the coercive power of the federal government—through Homeland Security, Justice, and even Defense—to arrest those among us, regardless of their citizenship status, who engage in “anti-American” behavior as defined by Donald Trump, in other words, those who oppose what Trump is doing.

This should surprise no one. For Trump promised exactly this, in pretty much every speech he gave on the 2023-24 campaign trail, but never more directly that in his too-easily forgotten 2023 Veteran’s Day Speech:

We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. . . the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.

Trump is now doing what he promised. And all too many Americans are either excited that he is doing so or merely blasé about their president’s proud decision to literally take a torch to the U.S. Constitution.

Martin Niemöller’s famous saying has been quoted so many times that it is a veritable cliché. All the same, the sentiment it expressed is as true now as it ever was, and it is especially appropriate to note that it is featured on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The arrest of Khalil Mahmoud is an offense to every citizen of the United States, and it sets a precedent that endangers us all.

Trump is turning the United States into a police state.

Are the tattered and tarnished instrumentalities of democracy still at our disposal sufficient to prevent him from succeeding? And if we do not exercise them now, how much longer will they even persist?

Our dark time is getting darker by the day.

Nine of the world’s 10 wealthiest billionaires now call the United States home. The remaining one? He lives in France. And that one—Bernard Arnault, the 76-year-old who owns just about half the world’s largest maker of luxury goods—is now feeling some heat.

What has Arnault and his fellow French deep pockets beginning to sweat? Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth.

“The tax impunity of billionaires,” the measure’s prime sponsor, the Ecologist Party’s Eva Sas, exulted last month, “is over.”

The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.

Sas had good reason for exulting. In the French National Assembly debate over whether to start levying a 2% annual tax on wealth over 100 million euros—the equivalent of $108 million—the leader of the chamber’s hands-off-our-rich lawmakers introduced 26 amendments designed to undercut this landmark tax-the-rich initiative. All 26 of these amendments failed.

But France’s 4,000 or so deep pockets worth over 100 million euros—the nation’s richest 0.01%—don’t have to open up their checkbooks just quite yet. The French Senate’s right-wing-majority has no intention of backing the National Assembly’s new levy, and, even if the Senate did, France’s highest court would most likely dismiss the measure.

French president Emmanuel Macron, for his part, has spent most of the last decade cutting corporate tax rates and axing taxes on investment assets. And his budget minister has blasted last month’s National Assembly tax-the-rich move as both “confiscatory and ineffective.”

None of this opposition, believes the French economist who inspired the National Assembly’s new tax move, should give us cause to doubt that move’s significance. The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.

What makes the National Assembly’s tax legislation even more significant? That tax-the-rich vote has come at a time when the most powerful nation on Earth—the United States—is moving in the exact opposite direction. The new Trump administration, with the help of the world’s single richest individual, is now busily hollowing out the tax-the-rich capacity of the Internal Revenue Service.

President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had actually made some serious moves to enhance that IRS capacity, hiring—before he left office—thousands of new tax staffers. But those new hires, notes a ProPublica analysis, have now started going through Elon Musk’s “DOGE” meat grinder.

Team Trump’s ultimate goal at the tax agency? To use layoffs, attrition, and buyouts to cut the overall IRS workforce “by as much as half,” The Associated Press reports. A reduction in force that severe, charges former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, would render the IRS “dysfunctional.”

The prime target of the ongoing IRS cutbacks: the agency’s Large Business and International office, the IRS division that specializes in auditing America’s highest-income individuals and the companies they run.

On average, researchers have concluded over recent years, every dollar the IRS spends auditing America’s richest ends up returning as much as $12 in new tax revenue. The current gutting of the agency’s most skilled staffers, tax analysts have told ProPublica, “will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.”

Moves to “hamstring the IRS,” sums up former IRS Commissioner Koskinen, amount to “just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

Donald Trump, agrees the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Amy Hanauer, “is waging economic war on the vast majority of Americans, pushing to further slash taxes on the wealthiest and corporations, while sapping the public services that keep our communities strong.”

Public services like Social Security. Elon Musk has lately taken to deriding America’s most beloved federal program as a “Ponzi scheme,” and the Social Security Administration’s new leadership team, suitably inspired, has just announced plans to trim some 7,000 jobs from an agency “already at a 50-year staffing low.”

A vicious economic squeeze on America’s seniors. A massive tax-time giveaway for America’s richest. How can we start reversing those sorts of inequality-inducing dynamics? The veteran retirement analyst Teresa Ghilarducci has one fascinating suggestion.

Any individual’s annual earnings over $176,100 will this year, Ghilarducci points out, face not a dime of Social Security tax. A CEO making millions of dollars a year will pay no more in Social Security tax than a civil engineer making a mere $176,100.

If lawmakers removed that arbitrary $176,100 Social Security tax cap and subjected more categories of income—like capital gains—to Social Security tax, Ghilarducci reflects, we could ensure Social Security’s viability for decades to come and even make giant strides to totally ending poverty among all Social Security recipients.

And if we had just merely eliminated the Social Security tax cap on annual earnings in 2023, the most recent stats show, America’s 229 top earners would have paid more into Social Security that year than the 77% of American workers who took home under $57,000.

We could also apply Ghilarducci’s zesty tax-the-rich spirit to the broader global economy, as the inspiration behind France’s recent tax-the-rich moves, the economist Gabriel Zucman, has just observed in a piece that cleverly suggests “tariffs for oligarchs.’

The fortunes of our super rich, Zucman reminds us, “depend on access to global markets,” a reality that could leave these rich vulnerable at tax time. Nations subject to Trump’s new tariffs, he goes on to explain, could retaliate by taking an imaginative approach to taxing Corporate America’s super rich.

“In other words,” Zucman notes, “if Tesla wants to sell cars in Canada and Mexico, Elon Musk—Tesla’s primary shareholder—should be required to pay taxes in those jurisdictions.”

Taking that approach “could trigger a virtuous cycle.” The super rich would soon find relocating either their firms or their fortunes to low-tax jurisdictions a pointless endeavor. Any savings they might reap from such moves would get offset by the higher taxes they would owe in nations with major markets.

The current economic “race to the bottom,” Zucman quips, could essentially become “a race to the top” that “neutralizes tax competition, fights inequality, and protects our planet.”

Lawmakers in France have just shown they’re willing to start racing in that top-oriented direction. May their inspiration spread.

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In this episode of “The TMI Show,” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dive into the arrest of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, as he faces an ICC warrant for crimes against humanity tied to his brutal “war on drugs.” Joined by Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, president of the Philippines Association for Chinese Studies and a research fellow at Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress, the discussion unpacks the seismic political implications for the Philippines and the U.S.

Within the Philippines, Duterte’s arrest marks a stunning reversal for a once-dominant figure whose family allied with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to secure power in 2022. The arrest highlights the unraveling Duterte-Marcos pact, as well as Sara Duterte’s recent impeachment as vice president and the escalating feud between the pro-China Dutertes and pro-U.S. Marcoses. This power struggle could destabilize Manila’s political landscape, especially with midterm elections looming, testing Marcos’s grip and exposing fissures in a nation still grappling with Duterte’s legacy of extrajudicial killings.

For the U.S., the episode explores a geopolitical tightrope. Duterte’s downfall shifts Philippine foreign policy away from China-friendly ties toward a U.S.-aligned Marcos administration. With expanded U.S. military access via the EDCA, this arrest could solidify Washington’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, countering Beijing’s regional sway. Yet, it risks inflaming Duterte’s base. Let’s decode a pivotal moment in global politics.

The post TMI Show Ep 95: “Rodrigo Duterte’s Arrest – Political Implications for Philippines & U.S.” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his police-state goons are trying to frighten people who dare even come close to people protesting his or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. This is how dictators intimidate citizens, how freedom dies, and is a clear violation of our Constitution.

And, in all probability, this is just the beginning of what historians will someday define as a very ugly episode in American history.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian green card-holder who graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs with a master’s degree and is married to an American who’s now eight-months pregnant, was seized from his New York residence over the weekend and transported to a barbarous detention facility in Louisiana.

Will students—groaning under the weight of more than a trillion dollars in debt—find the courage to take to the streets like my generation did almost 60 years ago?

He had previously worked for the British Embassy in Beirut, where he’d earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at the Lebanese American University. A legal permanent resident of the United States, he has not been accused of breaking any law.

The day before his seizure, he’d appealed directly to Katrina Armstrong, interim president of Columbia University, according to reporting at Zeteo, writing on March 7, the day before he was snatched away from his family and transported over a thousand miles away:

Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation.

Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. I have outlined the wider context below, yet Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat.

I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—which applies to every “person” in the United States, not just U.S. citizens—is unambiguous:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (emphasis added)

As Ann Coulter—yes, that Ann Coulter—wrote on Xitter:

There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?

Speaking of that, first President George Washington noted:

If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.

Benjamin Franklin was equally explicit:

Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government: When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.

But Donald Trump was having none of it; speech with which he disagrees is to be brutally punished:

“ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University,” the president bragged on his Nazi-infested social media site. “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Khalil’s “crime” appears to have been his taking on the role of a high-profile negotiator between protesting students and the university, trying to achieve a peaceful resolution of the anti-Gaza-bombing students’ complaints.

As The New York Times reported:

Mr. Khalil’s arrest drew outrage from students and faculty at the university. Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, described him as brave, yet mild-mannered and gentle—a “consummate diplomat” who worked to find middle ground between protesters and school administrators.
Mr. Howley, who has known Mr. Khalil for about a year, having met him after Mr. Khalil began speaking out in campus protests, said he was frustrated by depictions of Mr. Khalil as a dangerous person.

“This is someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue,” he said. “This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things. So it’s really disturbing to see that kind of misrepresentation of him.”

Dictatorial regimes around the world have a long history of opposing peaceful protest, particularly by students. Young people in Russia who speak out against President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion and ongoing bombing campaign against civilians in Ukraine, for example, are frequently imprisoned for multiple years in barbaric gulags.

This is because student protests have a long history of successfully producing profound social and political change. It’s unlikely, for example, that the Vietnam War would have resolved when and the way it did without the student protests Louise and I participated in during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Student protests have, for example, a long and storied history including:

• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) protests against segregated lunch counters in the South that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1965;
• The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley (1964-65), led by Mario Savio, which inspired student movements across the nation;
• Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement, which sparked youth protests across the world;
• The Soweto Uprising of 1976 saw thousands of Black South African students protest against apartheid; the brutal response drew international attention, bolstering the global anti-apartheid movement;
• The Iranian Student Revolution of 1979, which led to the Shah fleeing the country;
• The 1989 student-led Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, which led to a peaceful transition to democracy in that nation; and
• The student-led Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014 which, although it was eventually sadistically crushed, helped awaken the world to the brutality of the Chinese Communist regime.

Even former President Richard Nixon, wannabe fascist that he was, didn’t consider arresting and deporting students for speaking out, although former President Ronald Reagan’s far more subtle solution was to end free college and thus raise the stakes for student protestors who could lose scholarships or get thrown out of school saddled with massive debt and no degree.

Trump decided to up the ante even further with this action against Khalil, hoping it gets wide publicity to cow any other students who may consider protesting any policies of his; it’s extremely unlikely this type of action will be limited to protests against what Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Amnesty International have called Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing on the West Bank: He doesn’t want students in America protesting in any way at any time.

As a result, we stand on the edge of the fulfillment of Washington’s and Franklin’s explicit warnings of a possible dystopian future.

Will students—groaning under the weight of more than a trillion dollars in debt—find the courage to take to the streets like my generation did almost 60 years ago?

Will Trump next go after student protestors who are American citizens?

Will any elected Republicans find their spine, courage, or principles to defy his takedown of the work our Founders fought and died for?

As they say in the radio business, stay tuned…

“Flights to Guantánamo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland.”

With those words the U.S. government announced the fate awaiting “criminal aliens” in its custody.

On a military base in El Paso, Texas, masked men in combat fatigues paraded a group of young Venezuelan immigrants, their hands cuffed and their ankles shackled, in front of the cameras, before loading them onto a waiting Air Force C-17, which was to deliver its human cargo to Naval Station Guantánamo Bay overnight.

This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Once there, they were to be incarcerated in the infamous Camp 6, held incommunicado in the same cells where al Qaeda suspects were once held in indefinite detention, and guarded by the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Meanwhile, a tent city, which could ultimately house as many as 30,000 detainees, rises around the prison.

Though most of those immigrants have since been returned to Venezuela, the Pentagon has pledged to continue using the base for the “temporary detention of illegal aliens who are pending return.”

Back on the mainland, the Department of Defense (DOD) is deploying thousands of troops to “seal the borders”; the Department of Justice (DOJ) is deputizing its agents to round up undocumented immigrants; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is mobilizing to meet its daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests, armed with target lists, surveillance technology, and “less-lethal” weapons; and immigration detention facilities are to be built on military bases across the country.

And that’s not all either. Entire families are set to be detained, and the grim family-separation policy of the first Trump administration revived. Humanitarian parole is to be revoked, refugees rejected, and asylum-seekers returned. And cities, counties, and states that dare to defy the deportation regime are to be punished.

The machinery of mass deportation has been set in motion in a nightmarish fashion. It is meant to be impossible to stop—or at least to appear that way. Still, history teaches us that such a machine, like any other, can be brought to a halt, if only we understand how the apparatus actually works.

Here, then, is a simple, step-by-step guide to how the Trump administration plans to build the machinery necessary to “complete the largest deportation operation in American history.”

1. Declare a State of Emergency

“Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders,” Trump pledged in his Inaugural Address. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.”

That “revolution” in immigration enforcement did indeed begin with a barrage of such orders, many lifted directly from the Project 2025 playbook.

First among them was the declaration of a state of emergency in this country’s borderlands. According to the National Emergencies Act of 1976, this allows the military to be called up for domestic duties, whether to the southern border, Guantánamo Bay, or anywhere else the president sees fit.

2. Equate Immigration With an “Invasion”

“I have determined that the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion,” reads another order signed on January 20, citing Article IV of the Constitution.

“Accordingly,” the order continues, “I hereby suspend the physical entry of any alien engaged in the invasion.” It goes on to authorize operations to “repel, repatriate, or remove” noncitizens.

This is the logical conclusion of years of far-right propaganda about a “Third World,” “Hispanic,” or “alien” “invasion” of the United States, which, over time, has spread from the stuff of 8chan manifestos to the preambles of presidential proclamations.

3. Expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The architecture of ICE is slated to expand to levels not seen since its founding in 2003.

The agency reportedly made more than 14,000 arrests in the first three weeks of Trump’s second term. With it still supposedly failing to meet its quotas, however, officials want to double the size of the force.

Now, Senate Republicans are proposing no less than $175 billion in new spending on immigration enforcement, while the House GOP is looking to fund that spending spree with billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and other essential social services.

4. Draft the Department of Justice

ICE is no longer to bear its burden alone. Since Trump’s inauguration, the DOJ, including the U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), have been pressed into the service of the deportation machine.

The FBI, for instance, has been tasked with finding “identifying information and/or biometric data relating to noncitizens located illegally in the US”—data that will fuel the detention-to-deportation pipeline.

“We’ve got special agents, intelligence analysts, and more, supporting DHS [Department of Homeland Security] teams across the country,” said then-Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, “from New York and Chicago to El Paso, Newark, and Denver.”

5. Deputize Local Law Enforcement

ICE has also partnered with local police departments, county sheriff’s offices, and departments of correction through a program known as 287(g) to “identify and remove incarcerated criminal aliens” before they can be freed.

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has typically promised to reopen an ICE office on Rikers Island, purportedly as part of a quid pro quo with the Trump administration.

And in February, Florida became the first state to sign a statewide 287(g) agreement, which would train officers of the Florida Highway Patrol and State Guard to “interrogate any suspected alien or person believed to be an alien.”

6. Criminalize all Immigrants as “Criminal Aliens”

When White House Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt was asked how many of those arrested since January 20 had a criminal record and how many were “just in the country illegally,” she replied, “All of them. Because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore, they are criminals.”

Tellingly, fewer than half of the 8,200 people arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration had criminal convictions of any kind. And of the approximately 4,400 detained in the first two weeks of February, more than 1,800 had never been charged with a crime.

7. Hunt for “Criminal Aliens” Everywhere

“Police, open the door! Policía, abra la puerta!”

Those words echoed across a Denver apartment complex, as ICE agents with long guns backed by BearCat tactical vehicles went door-to-door, asking residents for identification. Twenty-nine members of the Cedar Run community were rounded up in one go.

But ICE and its partners are not just hunting for undocumented immigrants in their homes. Thanks to a rule change instituted by DHS, federal agents are also pursuing their prey in locations previously deemed too “sensitive” for immigration enforcement purposes like schools, hospitals, courtrooms, and churches (though a federal judge in Maryland has already forbidden the Trump administration from carrying out such actions in certain houses of worship).

8. Collect Biometric Data

Another of Trump’s executive orders announced his intention to reauthorize the DOJ and DHS to collect DNA samples from all detained “non-United States persons.”

This DNA collection program is just one part of a vast surveillance apparatus that has been built up over the years, which now requires vast troves of biometric and biographic data to be collected, stored, and analyzed.

Increasingly, that task has fallen to for-profit firms. Since 2020, the federal government has spent an estimated $7.8 billion on such surveillance technologies, including a $96 million contract with Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm Palantir.

9. Put Immigrants in Prisons

The most recent data shows that America’s immigrant detention centers are already over capacity, with 41,500 beds and 43,759 inmates. ICE is now seeking to more than triple that capacity.

Trump pledged, on Day One, that he would allocate “all legally available resources” to immigrant detention, evidently including America’s prisons. In February, the Federal Bureau of Prisons took in the first ICE detainees at facilities in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

The policy also embraces military bases. The Northern Command is currently “providing facilities at Buckley Space Force Base… to enable [ICE] to stage and process criminal aliens within the US.”

10. Privatize Immigrant Detention

More than 90% of such detainees are already overseen by private contractors. Now, ICE is planning to warehouse thousands more by leasing mobile structures from a shipping container company.

And a new plan, floated by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, would sell the government “outside assistance” in the form of privatized “processing camps,” along with a “small army” of private citizens with the power to arrest and detain immigrants.

For the prison industry, the deportation drive has proven to be a profitable enterprise indeed. “This is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” said CoreCivic’s CEO on a recent call with investors.

11. Bring Back Family Detention

During the first Trump administration, America was haunted by the specter of immigrant children in cages. Now, the architect of the president’s “zero-tolerance” policy and recently appointed “border czar” Tom Homan plans to revive family detention on a whole new scale.

Family detention centers, according to the Detention Watch Network, have a “well-documented history of negligence and abuse.” Despite that sordid history, ICE is reportedly readying a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) for “detention facilities intended specifically for families.”

At the same time, the administration is making it harder for sponsors of immigrant children to free them from detention.

12. Send Asylum-Seekers to Other Countries

The deportation machine is no longer simply an American enterprise. It is now an international affair, with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama already taking in thousands of “third-country deportees.”

“We have offered the USA the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” says El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose prisons are rife with human rights violations.

In Panama, hundreds of deportees of Central and East Asian origin were recently locked in a hotel, then relocated to a makeshift camp in the middle of the jungle. “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” according to one eyewitness.

13. Designate Gangs as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”

One of the president’s most egregious orders asserts that alleged gang affiliations are sufficient to warrant a “terrorist” designation.

Declaring it “time for America to wage war on the cartels,” Trump has specifically targeted Mexican, Central American, and Venezuelan nationals suspected of having ties to the drug cartels, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), or the Tren de Aragua gang, seeking their “expedited removal” or their “total elimination.”

The same order signals the president’s intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law dating to 1798, which would subject “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile” nation to being “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed, as alien enemies.”

14. Deport International Students and Workers Who Protest U.S. Policy

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” So warned the statement accompanying the president’s January 29 executive order, which singled out supposedly “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals” in higher education for “removal.”

Authorities have evidently already begun implementing that order, with reports of Arab students facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine protests. Over the weekend, ICE agents showed up at the door of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University whose green card had reportedly been revoked by the Trump administration. While in government custody, Khalil was disappeared for several days.

“I’ve seen enough,” says Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “to know that targeting is happening.”

15. Freeze Refugee Admissions

“Refugee arrivals to the United States have been suspended until further notice.” That was the message on January 21 from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, now under the leadership of a senior ICE official. With a stroke of the pen, President Trump has frozen America’s Refugee Admissions Program.

In so doing, he has left at least 10,000 refugees in legal limbo, while abandoning hundreds of thousands more to their fates in places like Afghanistan, the Congo, and Myanmar.

Ultimately, the president would make one exception to the rule—for white South Africans. An executive order signed on February 7 would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees” as a protected class.

16. Terminate Temporary Protected Status

Under the new administration’s policies, hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans, among others, are set to lose their Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a form of humanitarian parole that permitted asylum-seekers from those countries to continue living and working in the U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced an “administrative pause” on all pending parole requests, while DHS, claiming parole is a right “to which no alien is entitled,” has authorized its agents to strip immigrants of such protections.

ICE agents have already started making arrests of TPS holders in Texas.

17. Undermine the Principle of Birthright Citizenship

Of all the president’s orders, the most consequential for citizens is the one that would rescind birthright citizenship, which would deny the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to “persons born or naturalized in the U.S.”

In practice, it would mean stripping citizenship rights from children born here to mothers who are “unlawfully present” or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.”

For now, the order has been blocked by a Seattle judge’s injunction, but it will undoubtedly fall to the Supreme Court to decide its fate (and the fate of the Constitution of which it’s a part).

18. Investigate Citizens Who Would Defend Immigrant Rights

As it happens, immigrants and their American-born children are not the only ones in the crosshairs. Federal agents are now actively soliciting bids for “internet-based threat risk mitigation and monitoring services” in order to surveil suspected political enemies on social media.

That initiative is part of what could become a coast-to-coast crackdown. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has, ominously enough, launched a “formal investigation” into a local radio station, the San Francisco-based KCBS 740 AM, for reporting on the whereabouts of ICE agents.

And only recently, Tom Homan, designated the “border czar” by President Trump, invited the Department of Justice to investigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), reportedly in retaliation for a “Know Your Rights” training session held under the auspices of her office.

19. Punish “Sanctuary” cities, Counties, and States

On Day One of the president’s second term, the White House announced that it was going on the warpath against “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where local laws place limits on the involvement of law enforcement in the business of immigration.

Since then, the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group within the Office of the Associate Attorney General has been engaged in an all-out lawfare campaign against cities, counties, and states suspected of being insufficiently cooperative.

And on February 19, Trump signed yet another executive order cutting off federal funding for such jurisdictions, so that “federal payments to States and localities do not, by design or effect, abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies.”

20. Manipulate the Truth

All the while, the deportation machine’s defenders have been seriously manipulating the truth.

First, ICE has turned images of inmates in captivity into a televised spectacle, with federal agents bringing film crews and TV celebrities with them for ride-alongs, even as they covered up evidence of their more controversial tactics.

Second, the agency has attempted to make itself look better by rewriting history and gaming the Google algorithm by manipulating the timestamps on thousands of press releases from the first Trump administration.

Finally, ICE has scrubbed all mention of the foreign nationals held in Guantanamo from its public communications. For days on end, 177 detainees effectively disappeared.

This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

In the end, however, such an apparatus has a potentially fatal flaw. In order to function effectively, millions and millions of people must be willing to go along with it.

The moment too many Americans cease to cooperate, that machinery will begin to break down in a serious fashion.

In the aftermath of U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last Friday, a number of United States lawmakers, world leaders, and political commentators have expressed outrage at their defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as their victim-blaming rhetoric toward Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian resistance effort.

Their stance, however, is not unique: For decades, the United States has held similar positions regarding military conquests and occupations by Morocco and Israel.

The critical response to Trump’s willingness to allow Russia to annex parts of Ukraine has centered on the dangerous precedent of allowing a country to hold onto lands seized by military force. Former President Joe Biden, citing the “rules-based international order,” repeatedly noted the illegitimacy of any nation unilaterally changing international boundaries and expanding territories by force during his presidency. But in practice, the United States has not only tolerated similar illegal irredentism by allied governments, but has formally supported them.

In certain respects, Trump’s support for Russia’s war and occupation creates an opportunity for those who believe that Palestinians, Syrians, and Western Saharans have as much right to resist foreign conquest as Ukrainians to advocate for the self-determination of all occupied peoples.

Trump’s insistence that it was in fact the Ukrainians who started the war with Russia, and that the fighting would end if they simply gave up, echoes the long-standing position of both U.S. political parties toward Palestine. And every presidential administration since 1993 has insisted that the Palestinian Authority allow Israel to annex large swathes of the West Bank territory seized in the 1967 war as part of any potential peace agreement, and has then blamed the Palestinians for their alleged failure to compromise.

During the first Trump administration, the U.S. also became the first and only country to formally recognize Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights—which had been condemned and declared “null and void” by the United Nations Security Council—as part of Israel, in a decision that Biden later upheld. In the past few months, Israel has seized additional Syrian territory and has vowed to remain there, and has maintained occupation forces in southern Lebanon in defiance of its cease-fire agreement.

Similarly, in 2020, the United States became the first country to formally recognize Morocco’s annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara, a full member state of the African Union, in defiance of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice in 1975. Biden upheld that decision as well.

During the Biden administration, these endorsements of illegal annexations by Israel and Morocco hurt the U.S.’s credibility in marshaling support for Ukraine, particularly among the Global South. At the United Nations, the U.S. was repeatedly called out over its support for Morocco and Israel’s takeovers by critics who argued that the U.S. opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine out of geopolitical interests rather than principle, in a move they called hypocritical. Now, the U.S. is showing consistent support for territorial conquests, including those of Russia.

Opposition to ongoing U.S. military support for Ukraine is not limited to Kremlin apologists, however. Pacifists, neorealist international relations experts, and others have argued that while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unjustified, the prospect of extending a potentially unwinnable war of attrition in the hopes of recovering the 19% of Ukrainian territory under Russian control is simply not worth the human and financial costs. The likely possibility of additional casualties in the tens of thousands—and the risk, however remote, of nuclear exchange—has led even some of the most bitter critics of Russia’s actions to call for a negotiated settlement.

The strongest argument against such a compromise is that it would reward Russia’s aggression and tempt Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in further territorial expansion, endangering the Baltic Republics and other areas once controlled by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. However, given how the U.S. has formally recognized illegal annexations of territories seized by force by Morocco and Israel, allowing Russia's illegal expansionism to remain in place, at least temporarily, would not establish a precedent: The precedent has already been set. And like Russia, Israel and Morocco have expressed expansionist ambitions beyond their current occupied territories as well.

In any case, Trump’s opposition to supporting Ukraine is neither pacifist nor utilitarian. He is supporting Putin and blaming Ukraine for the war. He is siding with an authoritarian aggressor against a democracy fighting for its very survival. The backlash against Trump’s support for Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory is therefore quite appropriate.

The denial of agency to the Ukrainians, including the false charge that the 2014 Maidan uprising was a U.S. coup and that Ukrainians are simply fighting a proxy war rather than defending their nation from a foreign invasion, runs parallel to claims that Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian resistance to the Israeli occupations is a proxy war on behalf of Iran and that the Western Sahara struggle against the Moroccan occupation is a proxy war on behalf of Algeria. No one under foreign military occupation needs to be forced by a foreign power to defend their homeland.

In addition to his consistent support for the occupying forces of Israel, Morocco, and now Russia, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire for the United States to become an occupying power in its own right, as exemplified by his plan to forcibly relocate all remaining Palestinians in Gaza and annex it as U.S. territory. Similarly, his recent threats to seize Greenland, Panama, and even Canada harken back to the U.S. expansionism of the late-19th century.

In certain respects, Trump’s support for Russia’s war and occupation creates an opportunity for those who believe that Palestinians, Syrians, and Western Saharans have as much right to resist foreign conquest as Ukrainians to advocate for the self-determination of all occupied peoples. To allow any of these illegal occupations to become permanent puts the entire post-World War II international legal order in jeopardy and seriously threatens international peace and security. Uniting the international community to force an end to these occupations, preferably through nonviolent means, is imperative. The “rules-based international order” must be upheld regardless of the geopolitical orientation of the parties involved.

In America’s legal system, both sides to a dispute are entitled to counsel. President Donald Trump rejects that premise because he prefers a one-sided battle that he is more likely to win.

To that end, he is using his special ability to combine vindictiveness with strategy. Wielding the power of the presidency, he is penalizing the attorneys who represent his opponents. Even more troubling, other lawyers are helping him undermine the foundation of our justice system.

Throughout his campaign, candidate Trump railed against his supposed “enemies.” In addition to prosecutors who pressed charges and judges who presided over cases against him, he promised “retribution” against private-sector lawyers who had represented his political adversaries. As president, he’s keeping that promise.

President Trump is not a lawyer, but he did swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Who will hold him to that promise?

The president’s first attack came in early February when he revoked the security clearances of Mark Zaid and Norm Eisen—outspoken Trump critics. For decades, Mr. Zaid has represented whistleblowers in Republican and Democratic administrations, including the whistleblower at the center of President Trump’s first impeachment. Mr. Eisen helped House Democrats develop the articles of impeachment. Because the president “flooded the zone” with tariffs, terminations, and tantrums, those suspensions received little news coverage.

His second blow landed on February 25, 2025, when he issued an executive order suspending the security clearances of all attorneys and employees at Covington & Burling—a premier 1,300-attorney global law firm representing former special counsel Jack Smith. During the campaign, he had threatened Smith repeatedly with deportation and worse. Smith retained Covington, which represented him pro bono before he resigned as special counsel. The firm is still his defense counsel.

The executive order prevents Smith’s attorneys from accessing important government materials and makes defending him more challenging. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a warning to other attorneys contemplating the representation of anyone the president does not like.

The third attack occurred with the executive order of March 6. He suspended the security clearances of individuals at Perkins Coie—a global law firm of more than 1,200 attorneys worldwide. Among other penalties, the president instructed the heads of all federal agencies to limit Perkins employees’ access to federal government buildings.

At their core, the executive orders are a transparent effort to intimidate other attorneys who represent the president’s adversaries. For example, his stated justifications for the Perkins suspension are nonsensical. He complains about work that two partners at the firm, Marc Elias and Michael Sussman, did on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016. But both lawyers left Perkins years ago. Trump’s order also criticizes the firm’s involvement in successful challenges to voter restriction laws in Republican-controlled states. And he even includes the firm’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a reason for its suspension.

The presidential assault on the lawyers and law firms representing his litigation adversaries is an attack on the very foundation of the legal system. The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL)—an elite body of litigation attorneys—responded immediately to his executive orders:

Lawyers throughout the country should unite in condemning these actions in the strongest possible terms.

The White House’s retaliating against a law firm merely because it represented a client against whom the Executive Branch has a grievance, threatens the bedrock principles of our system of justice. Under those principles, everyone is entitled to legal representation. In criminal matters, that right is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.

The ACTL’s statement outlined the broader consequences of the president’s assault:

Lawyers cannot be denied access to the courts nor should their advocacy be throttled merely because the government disagrees with the positions asserted or because litigants seek to enjoin Executive actions that may violate statutory and constitutional rights of a free people. When government retaliation is grounded in efforts to punish lawyers for the parties that they represent or the positions that they assert, our system of justice is undermined.

Likewise, speaking for the entire profession, the American Bar Association declared, “These government actions deny clients access to justice and betray our fundamental values.”

To become a licensed member of the bar, every attorney swears an oath to uphold the Constitution. Every attorney is bound by rules of ethical conduct requiring them to support the rule of law. Every attorney has an obligation to enhance public confidence in the legal system. Yet attorneys drafted, reviewed, and approved the executive orders that are undermining the bedrock principles of our justice system.

President Trump is not a lawyer, but he did swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Who will hold him to that promise? Asking for a friend of democracy.

As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.

Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.

Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.

Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.

First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.

Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.

Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report were temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.

Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.

The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.

To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.

The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.

Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.

If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.

Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.

It should be possible, when evaluating a foreign conflict, to determine that the best course of action is not to intervene. However, in the binary political scheme around the Russia Ukraine war, supporters of Ukraine insist that everyone who is skeptical of Ukraine and its authoritarian regime is de facto a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Why doesn’t the same logic apply to other wars raging around the world?

The post Zero Sum appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The United States is a country with a long history of violence and oppression against poor people, women and minorities. And by extension, with authoritarianism. The fact that the Trump presidency poses today a fundamental threat to democracy and social progress is not an unprecedented phenomenon in U.S. history. There have been many other U.S. presidents with anti-democratic approaches while a strong case can be made that minority rule has been the rule rather than the exception in the governing of the nation.

Indeed, for the most part, oligarchy has always had the upper hand in U.S. politics and the economy. After all, this is a nation that was founded on settler colonialism and the elimination of the native and relied on slavery as an engine of economic growth while it never managed to get rid of its racist roots. By the same token, resistance by enslaved people and struggles for emancipation and movements fighting for civil and social rights have also shaped the course of U.S. history. But history is not a linear progression. Every time social progress was made, the forces of reaction plotted to turn back the clock. This is the most obvious underlying intent of the Trump phenomenon and of the far-right movements and parties surging all over the world, now with the support of the world’s richest person, Trump’s Nazi-buddy Elon Musk.

At this point, the key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism? In the U.S., defending democratic values and the rights of people from Trump’s neo-fascist politics, especially with the return of white supremacy to mainstream politics, a philosophy of resistance and rebellion needs to operate mainly outside the confines of the liberal political establishment. It is crystal clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of fighting Trump. The sight of Congressional Democrats to Trump’s joint address to Congress holding pathetic little signs and appearing in pink as signs of protest should speak volumes of the devastating failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of Trumpism, let alone of coming up now with a fight back strategy against the Führer.

The key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism?

It is obvious that a new style of political action is needed in the United States today. The balance of de jure power has shifted dramatically toward an elite characterized by the fusion of wealth and power in the political system that plain resistance alone is not enough. What is needed, even beyond anti-fascism strategies and tactics, is the adoption of new ways to democracy and citizenship.

Indeed, anti-fascist organizing is only useful if it carries within it a vision of a post-capitalist alternative order since fascism has always been a reaction to capitalist crises. After all, fascism does not oppose the logic or the principles of capitalism. In fact, fascism has always been a particular way of “managing capitalism,” as the late Marxist theoretician Samir Amin correctly pointed out.

First, in the fight against fascism, the concept of democracy needs to be reimagined beyond elections and identified, in turn, with self-government and bold ideas to restructure the economy. The Democratic Party of the past 30 years has shown that it is simply incapable of undertaking this mission as it is itself a byproduct of a system in which the few set the terms under which the economy and society operate at large. The notion that a few progressive elected officials can tilt the party to the left in a radical way is a democratic fantasy.

The left needs to make a clean break with the mindset of political compromise that characterizes the Democratic Party.

We need economic democracy—institutions, organizations and practices that break away from the destructive and oligarchical tendencies of the current system and are geared in turn towards meeting workers’ needs, who are the backbone of the economy. Economic democracy starts with dismantling corporate power and extends to nearly every part of the economy—from the workplace to housing and from health to education. Public ownership is key to the idea of economic democracy as a way of transforming economic practices. Hence, we’re talking about forging a radical economic democracy project that can challenge the economic rationality of capital and private appropriation of labor, land and nature.

Working with the liberal political establishment to accomplish this mission is yet another democratic fantasy. In fact, progressives keen not only on anti-Trump resistance but also willing to embrace a postcapitalist alternative to oligarchy should make their voices heard in every way possible by letting their elected representatives know that while they despise the Republican Party for what it stands for and what it is doing to the country under Trump-Musk, they do not trust the Democrats when it comes to fighting back and making the right choices for a more humane and just socio-economic order. They should let them know that democracy is much more than elections and surely not about serving special interests. It is about giving political power to ordinary citizens.

Likewise, the project of economic democracy mandates the reconceptualization of citizenship. The notion of confrontational citizenship is of particular import in these dark times as it emphasizes that political change is the result of confrontation, not of compromise. Al Green, a democratic congressman from Texas, practiced confrontational citizenship as an elected official with his outburst during Trump’s speech to Congress. For that, he was forcefully removed from the House Chamber while his Democratic colleagues opted to display “civility” toward the Führer. Eventually, Rep. Green was censured by his colleagues for his lack of "civility," with 10 Democrats joining all Republicans.

Democracy is much more than elections and surely not about serving special interests. It is about giving political power to ordinary citizens.

One does not fight fascism with props as a form of protest. Or unjust wars and invasions by releasing doves. Practicing civility towards fascism is like signing one’s own death. One confronts fascism head-on and based on solidarity and from a position of strength. Yes, confronting fascism requires also courage and not concerns with whether someone’s name is going to end up on a list of “radical leftists” by some reactionary watchdog.

In sum, a transformative vision for a world beyond capitalism should be an integral component of the fight against Trump’s policies. The left needs to make a clean break with the mindset of political compromise that characterizes the Democratic Party. The rise of Trumpism was based not simply on lies and propaganda but on the strategic use of the politics of confrontation and by capturing what was actually happening on the ground. In this context, reimaging democracy and reinventing citizenship could be powerful tools in the fight against Trump’s assault on civil society and his vision of a dog-eat-dog world.

      Echoing other analysts, New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “What happened in the Oval Office on Friday…was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.”

      The public display in the Oval Office was unprecedented and bizarre. “But there’s nothing unique about an American president disrespecting and distancing himself from a close European ally suffering a brutal invasion and years-long occupation during ‘a major war in Europe.’”

      My senior thesis advisor at Columbia University, where I was a history major, was Robert O. Paxton, a leading expert on European fascism and the collaborationist government of Vichy France. Paxton suggested that I explore America’s plans to treat France after D-Day not as a liberated country but as a defeated enemy, receiving the same status (“Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories,” or AMGOT) as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

What I uncovered from my research at the FDR Presidential Library and the National Archives was an obscure and fascinating episode in the history of World War II.

      There are startling parallels between the way that President Trump dressed down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt showered General Charles De Gaulle of France with contempt and opprobrium.

      Roosevelt had long believed that France was unstable and unreliable. France’s quick defeat in six weeks in 1940, followed by its signing an armistice with Germany, territorial partition and establishment of a collaborationist puppet state in the southern spa city of Vichy confirmed his worst views of the country as weak and louche. After the war, FDR decided, the U.S. would seize France’s vast colonial empire. France would certainly not revert to its prewar status as a “great power.”

      Representing the opposing view was General De Gaulle, who rejected entreaties to join Vichy. Instead, he fled to London after the fall of France. There he formed the Free French and took to BBC radio to urge Frenchmen to join him in England with a view toward someday reconquering their homeland alongside the Allies. Conservative, a devout Catholic and fiercely nationalistic, De Gaulle dedicated himself to restoring France’s greatness and wiping away the humiliation of defeat and collaboration. De Gaulle toured and raised funds across the United States, where he was popular with the press and a public sympathetic to French suffering under Nazi and Vichy rule.

      A clash between these two personalities was inevitable.

      Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an ingrate and illegitimate colonialist who didn’t deserve support. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who admired De Gaulle’s patriotism and whose government provided material support to the Free French, vainly tried to steer a middle course, asking Roosevelt to recognize the Free French as a government in exile and De Gaulle as de facto head of state after liberation. Instead, the Roosevelt Administration maintained full diplomatic relations with the Vichy regime until Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval severed them in late 1942.

If not De Gaulle, Churchill asked, who would govern France after the Germans were vanquished? FDR didn’t have an answer. But he knew who he didn’t support. Perhaps like Trump vis-à-vis Zelensky, Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an arrogant pipsqueak without portfolio. It didn’t help that, far from playing the obeisant supplicant, an imperious De Gaulle was constantly making demands for information, money and weapons. Churchill found him amusing­—”[De Gaulle] had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance”—but Roosevelt couldn’t stand him. “De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France,” FDR’s son Elliot recalled him saying. “I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more.”

And, in another echo of Trump, Roosevelt obsessed over De Gaulle’s democratic bona fides. Who had elected this annoyingly prideful man, this dictator-in-training? No one.

Matters came to a head in late 1943 and early 1944, when the Allies were preparing for the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944. By then, Roosevelt had more withering contempt for De Gaulle than ever. De Gaulle had launched several freelance military operations against French colonies that had fallen under Vichy control, including Syria, Senegal and a pair of tiny islands adjacent to Canada’s maritime provinces, without bothering to consult with both of his Allied patrons (who would have refused permission).

Despite Churchill’s entreaties, Roosevelt was livid. He was determined to impose harsh AMGOT terms on France. As Le Monde Diplomatique reported in 2003, “AMGOT would have abolished [France’s] national sovereignty, including its right to issue currency.”

General Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of D-Day planning, expected France to resume its top-tier status as an economic and military power after the war. Moreover, he believed that Roosevelt’s stubbornness was blinding him to the fact that there was no practical alternative to installing De Gaulle and the Free French as the first postwar French government. The only other option was a communist takeover. The Free French could provide intelligence about the landing site and order the Resistance to attack and distract German forces behind enemy lines. A frustrated Ike slipped classified invasion plans to the Free French and promised them he would sabotage Roosevelt’s AMGOT plans.

The heroic assault on Omaha Beach is seared in our national memory as a straightforward, noble liberation of a beleaguered European ally. Behind the scenes, however, things were complicated.

In the same way that Trump hopes the U.S. will be compensated for the American investment in the defense of Ukraine with that country’s mineral wealth, Roosevelt wanted France to pay the U.S. for its own liberation. FDR ordered the U.S. Mint to print and distribute sheaves of English-language “flag-ticket francs” to Allied troops sent to Normandy. French shopkeepers who accepted them would be directed to look to the postwar French government, not the United States, to back them. When De Gaulle found out about the scheme, he declaimed the Allied scrip as fausse monnaie (fake money) and advised his radio listeners not to accept them.

Ignoring Roosevelt, Eisenhower embedded Free French forces into Operation Overlord. In the days following the June 6th landing, a wild scrum ensued as rival governments competed to seize mairies in each Norman village and city that fell under Allied control. AMGOT military governors were ordered to subject the populace to martial law; Vichy mayors refused to leave; Free French mayors declared themselves the lawful Provisional Government of the Republic of France; and, in some cases, communists and socialists hoping for a revolution shouted at one another and came to blows in local government offices.

 In at least one instance, rival mayors and their forces occupied different floors in the same building and sporadically exchanged gunfire in stairwells. Allied forces under orders from Eisenhower persuaded the non-Free French wannabes to yield. AMGOT’s harsh plans for France were ignored and never put into effect.

By July, FDR was resigned to the facts on the ground. Newspapers reported that De Gaulle and his Free French were popular and greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever they appeared. The conflict between the United States and its European ally was papered over by the liberation of Paris on August 25th, where De Gaulle famously stood tall the next day as bullets presumably fired by a residual Nazi sniper nearly struck him and everyone around him hit the ground. Finally, in October, the U.S. government formally recognized De Gaulle as president of the provisional government pending elections.

Anti-Americanism in France was partly fueled by this episode, which was well-known in postwar France thanks in part to Gaullists’ lingering resentments.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump’s attitude toward a beleaguered European ally, it was not unprecedented.

The post When Presidents Clashed with Allies: Trump, Zelensky, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle in Historical Context appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Ted Rall and Robby West take the helm for Manila Chan, diving headfirst into ICE’s stunning crackdown on pro-Palestine advocates! Today, they’re unpacking two jaw-dropping cases: the March 8 arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University grad student and protest leader, and the March 9 detention of a British cartoonist at the Canadian border. With President Trump proclaiming Khalil’s arrest as “the first of many” on Truth Social, this episode promises a no-holds-barred look at the escalating clash between free speech and immigration enforcement.

Khalil, a green card holder, was nabbed at his Columbia apartment by ICE agents claiming a State Department order to revoke his status, citing vague “Hamas-aligned activities.” Just a day later, a British cartoonist—visiting as a tourist—was stopped at the border, with ICE disappearing her into its gulags. Trump’s January executive order targeting “Hamas sympathizers” on campuses and his $400 million funding cut to Columbia set the stage, and now ICE is flexing its muscle.

Ted and Robby break it all down: the 300,000-signature petition for Khalil’s release, Columbia’s weak response to ICE campus access, and Trump’s vow to purge “pro-terrorist” voices.

We’ll explore the ripple effects—will this silence dissent or ignite more resistance? With Ted’s sharp wit and Robby’s incisive takes, this episode is your front-row seat to a defining moment in the battle for expression and immigrant rights. When ICE comes knocking, “The TMI Show” answers back!

The post TMI Show Ep 94: “ICE Unleashed: Pro-Palestine Voices in the Crosshairs” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

During his marathon, fact-free speech to Congress last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration plans to address the growing incidence of childhood cancer.

“Since 1975, rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40%,” Trump said. “Reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new presidential commission to make America healthy again, chaired by our new Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. …Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

As usual, Trump got the statistic wrong. In fact, childhood cancer rates increased 33% since 1975, according to a study published in the journal PLOS One in January (and verified by the American Cancer Society), and the uptick in cases can be at least partly attributed to improved detection technology.

What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much.

That said, the PLOS One study did find that some childhood cancers—notably leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, liver tumors, and gonadal tumors—are on the rise, so by all means, the federal government should do more to try to reduce them.

But at the same time Trump is pledging to reverse childhood cancer rates and “get toxins out of our environment,” he and his attack doge Elon Musk are gutting federal health agencies to help pay for huge tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich.

Indiscriminate Cuts Across the Board

All of the agencies that protect public health are on the chopping block.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, his administration illegally fired some 5,200 employees at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including nearly 1,300 staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly a tenth of the agency’s workforce.

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the new administrator, Lee Zeldin, is threatening a budget cut of at least 65%. That would leave the agency with an annual budget of about $3.2 billion, less than a third of its budget in fiscal year (FY) 1970—the year it began—in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. Such a meager budget would destroy the agency, exactly what the fossil fuel industry-funded Republican Party has been wanting to do for years.

The Trump administration is also trying to ax a key portion of National Institutes of Health (NIH) biomedical research funding, which would undermine any effort to curtail childhood cancer—not to mention research on other deadly diseases.

On February 7, it announced it will cut an estimated $4 billion from NIH grants by capping funding for “indirect” overhead costs that cover such expenses as facilities, electric utilities, and administrative and janitorial services at 15%, half the current average rate. About $26 billion of NIH’s $35 billion in FY2023 grants that went to more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions covered direct costs—researchers and laboratories. The balance—$9 billion—paid for overhead.

Experts warn that without adequate overhead support, researchers would not be able to do their work.

Three days after the administration announced its intention to cut the NIH budget, five medical associations and 22 states filed lawsuits challenging the plan. Later that day, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted a temporary restraining order. She followed up on March 5, the day after Trump’s speech to Congress, by filing a preliminary injunction that put the cuts on hold while the lawsuits proceed. “The risk of harm to research institutions and beyond,” Kelley wrote in a 76-page order, “is immediate, devastating, and irreparable.”

It’s 2017 all Over Again (With a Major Difference)

Trump’s zeal to hobble federal medical and scientific research should not come as a surprise. To a great extent, his current budget-chopping campaign reflects the FY2018 budget he proposed in May 2017. That radical proposal called for shrinking the budgets of NIH by 18%; EPA by 31%, the Food and Drug Administration by 31%, and the CDC by 17%, which would have been its lowest budget since 1997. It also called for hacking $610 billion from Medicaid over the following decade on top of an $880-billion cut a Republican healthcare plan advocated.

That budget was dead on arrival, despite the fact that Republicans controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate, albeit by only a 51 to 49 margin. Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, then-chair of the House spending subcommittee that funds NIH, told Scientific American that he did not expect Congress to support Trump’s proposed cuts. Other legislators from both sides of the aisle also rejected the president’s NIH budget proposal. (Nevertheless, Trump’s previous administration did a lot of damage by eliminating or weakening over 100 environmental safeguards.)

Today, Republicans have the White House and slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Unlike 2017, however, congressional Republicans are in lockstep with Trump, and thus far have been cheering him and Musk on from the sidelines as they dismantle the federal government.

What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much. It’s been widely reported that Kennedy has been telling children and adults in Texas to try Vitamin A, cod liver oil, and other dubious treatments if they get measles instead of urging them to get vaccinated, so one could only imagine what he would recommend that parents give their children to protect them from cancer. Aloe? Emu oil? Kombucha? All of the above?

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO, and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual cease-fire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark, and Poland took small parts in the invasion; Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list; and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, U.S. President Donald Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its general secretary and Soviet premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms buildup, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala, and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Barack Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the United Nations Security Council. France, Germany, and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany, and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With then-U.S. President Joe Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder, “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq War. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies—European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now the E.U.’s foreign policy chief—have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation, and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms-control treaties, nuclear disarmament, and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia, and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Mark Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands power. He is not playing chess; he is playing a reckless game of Jenga with the foundational components that actually made America great. With each ill-conceived move, he pulls out another critical block from our national structure, destabilizing the entire edifice while claiming to strengthen it. His vision for American greatness is anchored in a historically dishonest version of the Gilded Age—a period he explicitly admires, when he believes "we were at our richest." It's no coincidence that this era represented the apex of white supremacist control following Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised Black Americans were systematically stripped of their voting rights and democratic participation.

"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country," Trump has declared, revealing his nostalgia for an America where oligarchs accumulated vast wealth while the masses struggled in poverty, where women couldn't vote, and where Jim Crow laws ensured white supremacy remained intact.

This conception of power is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. In Trump's worldview, might is measured solely through domination: tariffs, walls, military threats, economic leverage, and the unchecked authority of the executive branch. His fantasies about seizing Panama or purchasing Greenland reveal a colonial mindset where sovereign nations exist merely as potential American acquisitions—trophies for his ego and extensions of a twisted imperial vision. This approach not only reflects a backward 19th-century understanding of power but abandons the very sources of American influence that have made us a genuine global leader for generations.

True Power Lies in Innovation and Academic Freedom

While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence. For the first time in modern history, China has edged past the United States in producing the most frequently cited scientific papers—a critical measure of research impact and intellectual leadership. Research tells us what is true, research shapes reality, and research determines which voices hold authority. The United States for decades led in research and therefore was positioned to determine truth and shape worlds. This position of power is now being deliberately eroded as Trump attacks universities, academic freedom—a necessity for innovation and discovery—and withdraws vital funding.

History demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

The power of the United States has never stemmed primarily from military might or economic leverage; it has flowed from our leadership in knowledge creation. Researchers worldwide have looked to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance. The articles published in American journals have become foundational concepts within disciplines, allowing the U.S. to lead in virtually every intellectual field. When federal agencies generate data and analyses that become the global standard, America exercises an influence far more profound than any military operation could achieve.

When Trump attacks universities that dare to uphold academic freedom, cutting their federal funding and threatening scholars with deportation, he isn't demonstrating strength—he's surrendering intellectual authority. The recent arrest of Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder detained by ICE "in support of President Trump's executive orders"—reveals how quickly academic freedom can collapse under authoritarian pressure. This is not projection of power; it is its destruction. Trump is making the United States powerless and weak.

America's Power has Come from Welcoming the Persecuted

Trump's vision of American greatness is narrowly nativist, focused on exclusion and ideas of racial purity that have ties to eugenic projects that have historically ended in atrocities like the Holocaust. Yet history demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

When Hitler's Nazi regime drove Jewish academics and intellectuals from Europe in the 1930s, America's willingness to welcome these refugees transformed our scientific and cultural landscape. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and countless others fled persecution and found new homes in American universities and laboratories. Their contributions to the Manhattan Project and beyond revolutionized physics, mathematics, and engineering—laying the groundwork for America's technological supremacy in the latter half of the 20th century.

True power comes not from building walls and criminalizing free speech but from recognizing talent regardless of origin or wealth. Trump's methodical dismantling of immigration pathways and his demonization of foreigners don't make America stronger—they deprive us of the next generation of brilliant minds who might otherwise choose our universities, our laboratories, our companies, and our communities. Our greatest resource has never been the oligarchs who were invited to buy a "gold card" but the persecuted who found that this country welcomed them and supported their work.

The Gilded Age's True Legacy

Trump's romanticization of the Gilded Age is an admission of his true aim: the systematic dismantling of American democracy in service of white supremacy—a defining feature of those years he aims to recreate through his brutal agenda attacking diversity initiatives, public service workers, universities, and fundamental human rights.

Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 former Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. Though these efforts couldn't explicitly mention race, they introduced ostensibly neutral poll taxes, property requirements, and complex literacy tests designed to prevent Black citizens from accessing the ballot box. In South Carolina, these measures reduced Black voter turnout from 96% in 1876 to just 11% in 1898. Across the South, Black turnout plummeted from 61% in 1880 to a mere 2% by 1912.

This is a legacy of the Gilded Age—a retreat from democratic principles that locked in white supremacy for nearly a century. The era Trump celebrates as America's peak was precisely when our democracy was most severely compromised.

The Choice Before Us

Trump's conception of power represents a devastating miscalculation. By fixating on the trappings of 19th-century dominance—tariffs, military posturing, white supremacy and misogyny, and oligarchic wealth—he surrenders the very sources of influence that have made America genuinely powerful: our intellectual leadership, academic freedom, diverse talent pool, democratic institutions, and moral authority.

The question isn't whether Trump makes America powerful—it's whether his understanding of power belongs in a modern world. When he severs relationships with allies, seeing cooperation as "weakness," he doesn't demonstrate strength but reveals a profound failure to understand how international influence operates in the 21st century.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility.

When he dismantles the Department of Education and undermines scientific research, he isn't eliminating waste—he's surrendering our most significant competitive advantage. How do we measure the loss of a great mind who might have contributed to our understanding of climate science, identified cures for devastating diseases, or developed technologies to preserve our democratic systems? The cost of his destruction is beyond measurement.

Trump is indeed making America powerless even in ways that he should be able to understand through his myopic worldview—after all, he is making America bow to the richest man on earth and embracing dictators who destroy democracy. But he is abandoning the very sources of American power that have made us exceptional: our commitment to knowledge, our embrace of talent regardless of origin, our democratic institutions, and our capacity for moral leadership. The world could once rely on the United States, that is no more.

The gilded America he envisions—where oligarchs extract immense wealth from land and labor, where white supremacy reigns unchallenged, and where democratic participation is systematically suppressed—isn't a vision of American strength. It's a return to a time when our nation's power was narrowly concentrated among the few at the expense of the many. That is no power. That is a monarchy. That is death to democracy.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility. By abandoning these principles, Trump isn't making America great again—he's making America powerless in the ways that truly matter.

On March 4, 2025, President Donald Trump gave a speech to a joint session of Congress. Although this speech may be labeled by some as a State of the Union address, it is actually not a State of the Union address because those are delivered by a president in January or February after they’ve completed their first year in office.

Of course, a president is free to speak in front of Congress anytime he or she wants to, but I think a fake State of the Union address that is filled with lies spewed out by a man who was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, whose company has been found guilty of fraud, who ran a fraudulent university that defrauded its students, who filed numerous fraudulent lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and who orchestrated a multi-state fraudulent elector scheme to stop the 2020 election certification, is very on brand.

It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them.

Donald Trump tells lies like a fish swims through the water, but some of his most egregious lies are related to immigration and immigrants. Perhaps his most notorious and dehumanizing lie about immigrants was about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. However, his speech to Congress on March 4 contained numerous lies about immigration that are worth debunking. I cannot possibly write about all of the lies contained in his speech, but I want to highlight the ones that stood out to me, and that I can help provide important context on.

Immigration Lie No. 1: Lowest Number of Border Crossings

Within minutes of starting his speech, Trump shot out the following lie: “Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border, and I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country, and what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded, ever. They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” This is actually multiple lies tied together to push a false narrative, which again, is very on brand.

First, the military was already deployed to the border by former President Joe Biden in 2023. It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them. Second, the Border Patrol was already at the border, because that’s their entire mission. His lie makes it seem like the Border Patrol wasn’t there before, but that he, in his infinite wisdom, sent them to the border and now they are stopping people from crossing. Third, the U.S. is not being invaded at the southern border. An invasion implies a foreign army or some other militant group, but we know that the people who come to the border are increasingly families and other desperate people seeking help, many of whom are fleeing from the effects of decades of right-wing U.S. policy. Characterizing these people as invaders is not only extremely loathsome, but it is just plain incorrect, and it serves the greater narrative that Trump is pushing that we are under attack.

Remember, the purpose of framing migration at the southern border as an “invasion” is to build support for himself and his brutal, militarized immigration policies that will cause suffering to a vulnerable group of people who need help, as well as enriching his private prison corporate campaign donors and increasing the power of the federal police state, which he will almost certainly use for nefarious purposes.

If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it.

Fourth, Trump claims that as a result of his actions, “illegal border crossings” dropped to the “lowest ever recorded” in February 2025. Of course, he doesn’t cite to a specific number, so it’s impossible to know what exactly he is referring to when he makes this claim. The best guess is that he is referencing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s February 2025 border “encounter” numbers, which haven’t even come out yet. Because the number hasn’t been released, we can’t definitively fact check him, but there are months from the past that already have lower numbers than what’s been reported by news agencies for February 2025. However, the bigger issue is that Trump is conflating “border crossings” with border apprehensions. This is an important distinction. The number of arrests decreasing doesn’t mean that fewer people tried to cross the border illegally: it just means fewer people were caught.

It’s also important to understand that many of the illegal crossings were people crossing the border and then immediately turning themselves in so they could claim asylum. If we had a well-functioning immigration system, there would be a way for people to come to the border, claim asylum, do their credible fear screening, get a background check, and then be legally paroled into the country to pursue their asylum claim. This is what the CBP One app was designed to facilitate, but it was woefully inadequate. Instead, the only practical way for most people to claim asylum was to cross illegally and then turn themselves in. The status quo before Trump was already a failure in our immigration system, caused by a lack of funding and the right-wing policy that treats asylum-seekers like an invading army.

To make matters worse, one of Trump’s first executive actions after the inauguration was to cancel the CBP One app, and completely suspend asylum at the border. Suspending asylum is not only illegal, but it will cause people to cross the border and disappear into the interior instead of crossing the border and turning themselves in to start the asylum process. Trump is pointing to the lower number of arrests and lying to you by saying that illegal crossings are down, when in reality, he has likely just pushed more of them into the shadows.

The best way to reduce illegal border crossings is to: 1) give people pathways to come to the U.S. legally; and 2) stop the right-wing policies that disrupt living conditions in the countries to the south of us that cause people to flee and seek refuge in the U.S. Trump wants to push the narrative that immigrants are invaders and the best way to stop them from crossing the border is with walls and militaristic border policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Immigration Lie No. 2: Insane Asylums

The next immigration lie from Trump is that under the Biden administration, there were “…hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, and virtually all of them, including murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions and insane asylums, were released into our country.” I’m not going to spend much time on this, but this is false. He previously said it was millions of people, so he can’t even get his story straight, but this has been debunked numerous times. This is one of his favorite immigration lies, and I am sure he will keep repeating it for the foreseeable future.

Immigration Lie No. 3: Gold Card

Trump briefly touched on the so-called “gold card” he had announced recently. “With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the Gold Card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated.” He says they have developed this “in great detail” but there is actually no detail as to how this would work. It appears that he is saying that people would be able to buy permanent residency by paying $5 million dollars, but that would have to be enacted by Congress because the president cannot create new green card categories. Also, there is already an EB-5 investor green card, that actually requires investment in a U.S. business and creation of jobs, whereas the “gold card” apparently doesn’t actually require that any U.S. jobs be created. He is lying to the American public by implying that rich people will create jobs in the U.S. if we allow them to just buy their way into the country.

Remember when they called former President Barack Obama a tyrant because he tried to help Dreamers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)? DACA is well within the purview of presidential authority because it is simply prosecutorial discretion coupled with employment authorization. I wonder if the GOP will make the same critique if Trump illegally creates a new category of permanent residency that he admits will allow Russian oligarchs to effectively buy U.S. citizenship. He also said of the gold card holders, “They won’t have to pay tax from where they came, the money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that.” Since he doesn’t have the authority to suspend tax laws in the home countries of these people, this is clearly a lie, or possibly just incoherent rambling.

Immigration Lie No. 4: 21 Million People Poured into the U.S.

Trump claimed that, “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States.” Not only does this use dehumanizing language, likening people fleeing from desperate situations to some kind of flood, but it’s completely incorrect. The narrative that the Democrats should counter with is that immigration is a good thing, but right-wing policies create illegal immigration by pushing people out of their home countries and denying them a legal way to come to the U.S.

Immigration Lie No.5: The Dangerous Immigrant

Trump’s last major immigration lie was the “immigrants are dangerous” narrative that he has been poisoning American discourse with for nearly a decade. He pushed this lie by making a spectacle out of the deaths of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray and cynically using their families as political props. This exploitative appeal to emotion is meant to obscure the basic fact that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens are the primary smugglers of fentanyl into the U.S. through ports of entry. Statistically speaking, if you were walking down the street and there was a U.S. citizen walking toward you from one direction and an undocumented immigrant walking toward you from the other direction, you’d be safer if you walked toward the undocumented immigrant.

To bring it full circle, the ultimate irony is that Donald Trump is himself a convicted felon. If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it. He would have you believe that immigrants are a threat to public safety, while he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to his Covid-19 mismanagement, responsible for freezing USAID funding that will lead to thousands of deaths around the world, and many more.

Every single thing that Trump says about immigrants should be scrutinized and not taken at face value because there is a good chance it is a lie or misleading. They say that every Republican accusation is a confession. We should all keep that in mind the next time Trump tries to fearmonger about immigrants.

Not even two months in office and President Donald Trump has slashed U.S. climate partnerships and aid to developing countries, notably from USAID. Expected? Yes. International anomaly? No.

Last November's COP29 conference on climate finance showed the widespread vapidity of global action. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, revealed 1,200 notifications went out about significant gas leaks over the past two years to governments and businesses around the world. Only 1% responded. The U.N. acknowledged "capacity issues, technical barriers, and a lack of accountability," but failed to acknowledge another contributing factor. People are fundamentally not incentivized to care—because the climate crisis is consistently poorly communicated.

Publications like The New York Times typically report climate change like this: "Emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year." The U.N. Emissions Gap report's front page has this seething call to action: "Limit global warming to 1.5°C, struggle to adapt to 2°C, or face catastrophic consequences at 2.6°C and beyond." The media skews toward this numerical doom-and-gloom for two main reasons: One, journalists are often taught people pay attention to negative information. Two, scientists are often taught numbers speak for themselves. Logically then, numbers with negative consequences should make people care…

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people.

No. As someone with training in data journalism and storytelling, I advise considering the underlying psychology. In 2023, a Pew Research Center survey revealed 7 in 10 Americans feel "sad about what is happening to the Earth" after seeing climate change in the news. Despite that negative frame, only about 4 in 10 Americans feel "optimistic we can address climate change" when they see news on the topic. And only about 1 in 10 Americans feel activism is "extremely or very effective at getting elected officials to act on the issue." Sadness, fear, and anxiety don't often translate to motivation.

"Climate change" and "greenhouse gases" are simply too abstract. When former U.S. President Joe Biden said climate change is an "existential threat to all of us," it felt like a hypothetical issue. When the media reduces climate change to facts and numbers—to "emissions" and "gigatons" and "degrees Celsius"—it feels like a psychologically distant entity devoid of humanity and ineligible for our care.

How then should we communicate? Maybe the solution is emphasizing the negative consequences on human beings… showing images of wildfires destroying communities and people suffering from drought. Nonprofits, for example, traditionally use negative imagery of emaciated children, often Black and brown, to get donors' attention. And many studies show this "poverty porn" works. After Haiti was severely damaged by an earthquake in 2010, for example, the negative images of victims was criticized by the media. But it led to the second biggest success in the organization's fundraising history.

Destroyed Houses during Haiti's Earthquake in 2010. (Photo: ECHO/Raphaël Brigandi via Flickr).

These conclusions, however, lack nuance and ethics. Negative imagery may inspire pity and a donation out of guilt in the short-term. But it can lead to decreased care in the long-term. By portraying people in an undignified light, as "others" in need of "saving," we fetishize their suffering and infantilize their agency. Research demonstrates we attribute less respect and less agency to those in helpless, suffering outgroups, and are less likely to back policies that support them.

If negative data, "poverty porn," and "disaster porn" all aren't the answer, what then is? In my TEDx talk on data communication, I emphasize how emotion guides our decision-making. Research has found people gave the most money to charity after hearing simple stories that start with sadness and end on hope. Yes, negative frames do grab attention and elicit sympathy. But evidence of success emotionally inspires us to act.

Consider the U.N.'s 1% response rate to gas leak notifications. According to the executive director, "We are quite literally talking about screwing bolts tighter in some cases." Our current approach can't even get governments to screw in a bolt. If we want global leaders to keep their COP29 promise of $300 billion in annual funding for developing countries (which the U.S. certainly isn't helping with anymore), we desperately need to pivot.

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people. How will decreasing your abstract methane emissions lead to better health for human beings? How will donating trillions to some abstract goal of "1.5°C" benefit people in your local community that you personally care about? If we want the climate crisis to be seen as not just an "existential" environmental problem, but a horrifically human one happening right now close to home, we need to stop sharing negative stats and start telling hopeful stories. Especially with staunch resistance from a second Trump administration, we need to communicate the climate crisis in a much more human and much more ethical way if we are to inspire global action.