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Sunday night, on Orthodox Easter, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site an AI image of himself as Jesus, healing a man who looked suspiciously like Jeffrey Epstein as a woman who looked a lot like a young Ghislaine Maxwell looked on, with a horned demon overhead. Here’s the image annotated by the fine folks at Democratic Underground:

As Trump’s original image got reposted (along with a cleaned up version where the demon at the top no longer has horns) and spread across social media — followed by his trash-talking the Pope — the comments lit up with a steady stream of people offering their “proofs” that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the Earth. That he’s a literal and iniquitous thaumaturge. The proverbial Real McCoy devil.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted the image with the horns, saying:

“It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

Mandy Arthur, a Christian influencer with a huge online following, similarly tweeted:

“God, we might have made a mistake and [accidentally] elected the Antichrist. Send help.”

But is it even possible? It’s a fascinating question, whether put literally or metaphorically.

Asking the question literally requires a belief in the actual reality of a Son-of-God Christ figure and of an Antichrist opponent of nearly equal but opposite power.  This sort of thing fills the Bible, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first consider the question from the secular perspective, which argues these two terms represent, at their core, metaphors for the embodiment of good and evil.

In this context, then, a more accurate question is: “Is Donald Trump evil, and thus an antichrist?”

In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke in the plural when he predicted “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” After warning that grifters and con artists (in secular terms) would try to exploit His followers, He said, “by their fruits ye shall know them.”

Trump’s “fruits” are pretty obvious: 

• More than twenty women have accused him of rape and sexual assault, including some who were 13 and 14 at the time of the attack. Two separate juries both ruled that he raped E. Jean Carroll. 

• Hundreds of contractors, customers, and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family.

• Throughout his first term, he lied over 30,000 times and continues to lie daily.

• He pits Americans against each other by race, religion, and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule.

• He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encouraged state violence at a speech to chiefs of police; he encouraged an assault on members of the press and routinely denigrates female reporters.

• He tried to overthrow and end our democracy, which some believe was divinely inspired (Jefferson referred to “Nature’s God” in the Declaration).

• He embraces depraved, ungodly murderers, kleptocrats, and “strongman” rulers while ridiculing western democracies and their elected leaders.

• He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO, and the Iran JCPOA.

• He reaches out to Jesus’s followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence, and hatred.

• As an object of admiration and a role model, he’s replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations.

• He delights in the killing of anti-ICE protestors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages.

• He tried to end Americans’ access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare subsidies, privatizing Medicare, and gutting Medicaid.

• He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed four police officers, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

• He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world except Peru.

• There is literally not a single one of the Ten Commandments that he hasn’t broken (love God, don’t make graven images, honor God’s name, keep the Sabbath, don’t kill people, honor marriage, don’t covet or steal other’s property, and tell the truth; he even failed to “honor your parents” when he allegedly ripped off his father’s estate).

• He threatened to commit genocide on a scale never seen in human history.

• He and “Whiskey Pete” have celebrated the murder of over 100 people in small boats in the Caribbean without any due process or legal basis.

• He has his entire administration work to cover up crimes committed by multiple wealthy and powerful men against underage girls.

The main reason many Christians freak out about an antichrist is that following him will get you banned from heaven or even cast into hell. But what did Jesus — the guy Trump’s white evangelical followers claim as their savior — say was necessary to get into heaven?

Back in 1998 I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at his invitation; one of his personal secretaries had read one of my books. He gave Louise and me a private tour of many non-public parts of the Vatican and, the next day, we sat through an open-air concert with Pope John Paul II and about 30 VIPs, including the leader of Germany’s Bundestag, for more than an hour, surrounded by the splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace on the rim of an extinct volcano overlooking lake Albano.

When we spoke privately after the concert, His Holiness’s forceful comments about the work we all must do invoked Jesus’ words in Matthew 25. It’s an amazing 2,000 year-old story that tells us everything we need to know about today’s “Christian” politics:

Jesus’ disciples had gathered around him in a private and intimate setting.

Finally, they thought, they could ask him, straight up, the question that had been haunting them, particularly now that the Roman authorities were starting to talk about punishing or even executing them: How they could be sure to hang out with Him in the afterlife?

Jesus told them that on judgment day He’d be sitting on His throne separating the sheep from the goats “as a shepherd divideth.”

The nations of “sheep” would go with Him to heaven, the “goats” to hell.

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me food,” he told his disciples he would say to the sheep. “I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

At this point, His disciples — who had never, ever seen Jesus hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, or naked — freaked out. Whoa! they shouted. We’re screwed!

“When saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee?” they asked, panicked. “Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”

“Verily I say unto you,” Jesus replied, reassuring them, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly tells His disciples what acts they must perform, in their entirety, to get into heaven.

Feed the hungry, care for refugees, house and clothe the homeless, heal the sick, have compassion on those in prison.

That’s it.

And it’s a list that is quite literally the opposite of everything that Donald Trump advocates, stands for, and has done in his careers, both business and political.

While biblical scholars are split about who the actual “Beast” was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a then-politically-necessary cloaking of the identity of Roman Emperor Nero, who was actively murdering Christians. 

It was clearly a political figure, who represented the antithesis of the values and works Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25, a leader whose actions unleashed:

“…a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

After Trump put up the picture of himself as Jesus, people from dozens of nations offered their own proofs of Trump being the Beast or the Antichrist, posting across multiple social media platforms:

• “MAGA” means “magic” or “sorcerer” in Latin and multiple other languages

• His grandfather’s name when he emigrated to America to start a whorehouse in the Pacific Northwest was “Drumpf,” which he changed to Trump. John in German is “Johann.” Therefore, his “actual” name is Donald Johann Drumpf — each name having six letters (666). (Weirdly, the same is true of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the guy who laid the foundation for MAGA.)

• He illegally armed the Saudis for their merciless bombing war against Yemen which had five million people facing famine as the Saudi military blocked food arrivals.

• His family owned 666 Fifth Avenue.

• He fooled millions of evangelical followers of Jesus into following him instead, just as the Beast is supposed to do.

• He put his own red-hat MAGA mark on their foreheads.

• He consorts with “whores” and “criminals.”

• Isaac Newton calculated that Jesus was crucified on a blood moon, and some argue he predicted the antichrist would be born on one; Trump was born on a blood moon.

It was a fascinating moment picked up by media across the world, and I was surprised by how many people — like Marjorie Taylor Greene — were actually religiously freaked out about Trump.

But for me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does. In my humble opinion, he’s already revealed himself as an Antichrist, both as a disciple of the “Father of Lies,” and through his anti-Christ-type policies.

As Pope Leo XIV today tells us, a man’s “fruits” show us all we need to know about who he really is.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Is Trump the Antichrist?”

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Saturday’s back-to-back headlines on The Washington Post were: “‘They Have Chosen Not To Accept Our Terms,’ Vance Says” and “U.S. Intelligence Shows China Taking A More Active Role In Iran War.” They echo headlines from a century ago that reported on the early days of what quickly became World War I.

In 2021, China and Iran became military allies, signing a “broad strategic partnership encompassing economic, diplomatic, and security dimensions.” Russia signed a similar comprehensive military/security agreement with Iran in January of last year. The three countries are now military allies and formally assisting each other. Hold that thought.

Then, yesterday morning, America’s resident madman Donald Trump announced on his Nazi-infested social media site that the United States Navy will illegally blockade the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which twenty percent of the world’s oil used to flow every day — threatening to intercept “every vessel in International Waters” that’s paid a toll to Iran.

The US blockade of the Strait begins the hour that I publish this article, 10 AM ET on Monday, April 13th.

That means all the shipping of oil for China and drones for Russia will be intercepted by the US. We’re now blocking the war and energy supplies of nations that have nuclear weapons and whose military assets are already in the region. And it came just hours after the peace talks in Islamabad — led by three American grifters with absolutely no diplomatic experience — had predictably collapsed.

What happens next will depend entirely on whether anyone in this administration has ever seriously studied what happened the last time a similar cascade of great-power commitments, cornered leaders, and military miscalculations all converged at once.

A hundred and twelve years ago this summer, a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots in Sarajevo, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary.

What followed was a deadly catastrophe, because every major European power had spent the previous forty years putting together mutual defense treaties with other major European powers.

(In the 1908 Bosnian Crisis Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia, land that Serbia claimed; the Serbs were humiliated and furious. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 left Serbia stronger and more willing to reach out to the Slavic people still living under Austria-Hungarian rule, particularly those in Bosnia, further enraging the Austria-Hungarians.)

Everybody was armed to the teeth and, frankly, paranoid about everybody else. So, when Franz Ferdinand’s assassination gave Austria-Hungary an excuse to punish it’s longtime enemy Serbia, those treaties clicked into place like the tumblers of a massive combination lock and the doors of hell swung open onto the most catastrophic war the world had, at that time, ever seen.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia, bound by pan-Slavic solidarity and treaty, mobilized. Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary and seeing the Russian mobilization, declared war on Russia. The Franco-Russian alliance dragged France in.

Once the fighting started, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan required invading France through neutral Belgium, which triggered Britain’s 1839 treaty obligation to protect Belgian neutrality.

Within six weeks of two pistol shots in Sarajevo, virtually every major power in Europe was engaged in a brutal war that escalated with the inevitability and power of a landslide. The leaders who set the whole machine in motion genuinely believed they could control the escalation, but they were terribly and tragically wrong. The interlocking agreements and past hostilities simply took over, and seventeen million people died.

I’ve been thinking about Sarajevo a lot this week, because what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now follows the same terrifying script, except that this time, the European, Middle Eastern, and Asian powers that are being pulled toward what could easily become World War III all have nuclear weapons.

Here’s how we got here:

Benjamin Netanyahu made six trips to the White House in the year before the war began, each time pressing Trump and his old family friend Jared Kushner with the argument that Iran was ripe for regime change, that the mullahs were one good strike away from falling, and that history was calling.

What the New York Times’ reporting now makes clear — and what Trump’s own CIA director and secretary of state reportedly called “farcical” and “bullshit” in private — is that Netanyahu had an overwhelming personal reason to want this war: he’s been fighting a fraud, bribery, and breach-of-trust criminal trial that could put him in prison if he’s convicted.

Wars are good for embattled leaders: they can generate emergency status and even pause court proceedings. And when this war started on February 28th, Netanyahu’s trial did indeed grind to a halt under Israel’s wartime court emergency rules, which had to be repeatedly extended. The trial is only now, this week, resuming. (Trump, to help his fellow authoritarian, has been publicly pressuring Israel’s president to pardon Netanyahu, telling him to do it “today” and calling him a “disgrace” for hesitating.)

So Trump (himself facing a crisis from the Epstein documents and accusations of raping a 13-year-old girl) and “Whiskey Pete” Kegseth (who simply loves war) launched a bloody confrontation in which one of the key decision-makers’ primary motivation — at least on the Israeli side — was to keep himself out of prison.

And forty-four days later, the man who should be in the defendant’s chair is instead flying into southern Lebanon to pose with troops (his popularity is now sky-high in Israel because of the war) while the United States Navy blockades one of the most consequential waterways on the planet.

Yesterday, Trump posted to his failing social media site a declaration that may end up being seen, in retrospect, much like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. He proclaimed that the Navy will begin “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.”

That last sentence is the one that could rock the planet, because, as the independent National Security Desk analysis makes clear, Trump’s phrase “every vessel in International Waters” is a global directive. It means the U.S. Navy now officially claims the legal right to board, search, and seize foreign ships anywhere on the world’s oceans as well as the ships of any nation trying to pass through the Strait.

Under international maritime law, that’s called “piracy.” And here’s the other parallel to the tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia back in the day: roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports that transit the Strait — that Trump just said he will “blockade” — are Chinese-owned or Chinese-connected vessels.

— China already has a Type 055 cruiser, a Type 052D destroyer, and a massive surveillance ship sitting right there in the region, in the Gulf of Oman.
— Chinese satellites have been providing real-time targeting intelligence to Iran throughout this war.
— Russia has been running electronic warfare systems that, according to pre-war assessments, degrade American radar and communications by as much as 80 percent.
— Iran’s military has been successful in killing over a dozen American troops and wounding hundreds — and downing multiple US military aircraft — because of targeting information Putin’s reportedly been giving them.

These are active military contributions to the Iranian war effort right now.

So what happens when a U.S. destroyer orders a Chinese-flagged tanker to heave to in the Strait of Hormuz and a Chinese warship sails between them? Trump has to choose between backing down — and watching the blockade collapse — or firing on the naval vessel of a country with roughly 400 nuclear warheads.

And this isn’t a purely hypothetical scenario. China and its leader Xi Jinping have made it abundantly clear that maintaining an uninterrupted energy supply through the Strait is one of its core national interests; it won’t simply steam away.

On the Russian side, Vladimir Putin is also not a man who responds with moderation to being cornered. And he’s already in deep trouble in his own country, as well as on his back foot in Ukraine.

The Atlantic Council and RAND have both documented that Putin’s domestic position is more stressed than at any point since his brutal and criminal Ukraine invasion began. Russia today faces runaway military spending consuming eight percent of GDP, skyrocketing inflation, fuel shortages, and a society that polls show has grown deeply tired of the war in Ukraine.

Analysts at the Royal United Services Institute have concluded that Putin literally cannot afford to be seen accepting strategic defeat, because the entire justification of his authoritarian model rests on his promise to “restore Russian greatness” (Make Russia Great Again). If he fails, he may not survive. Not just politically, but physically; Russia has a long, ancient history of dealing harshly with failed leaders.

Thus, a cornered, domestically vulnerable Putin with 6,000 nuclear weapons who is already actively helping Iran kill Americans isn’t a guy who backs down gracefully. He’s a leader who escalates.

And to compound things, yesterday one of the most important parts of the worldwide autocratic network Putin’s been building for decades (including his support for Trump’s election and re-election) collapsed.

In Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has spent sixteen years building the model of “illiberal democracy” that Trump, Vance, and the Heritage Foundation have openly cited as their template, voters turned out in the highest numbers since the fall of communism — a stunning 78 percent — and handed a decisive victory to opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza party.

Vice President Vance was just there last week, rallying with Orbán, promising Trump’s “economic might” to help out Hungary (which is suffering under years of corruption and looting by Orbán’s oligarch buddies) if Fidesz held on. Today, that ally is soon to be gone (Magyar takes over in May). The worldwide autocrat network, which is now largely led by Putin, Trump, Orbán, and Netanyahu, is beginning to fracture at its European edge.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned.

In 1914, it took six weeks until the dogs of all-out-war were fully unleashed. This time, we’re already forty-three days in, and we have destroyers parked in a mined strait that China needs to stay alive economically and Russia would love to see humiliate the United States and Europe.

Louise and I have traveled the world extensively; I’ve stood in the World War I cemeteries of France and Belgium, with row after row of white crosses stretching to the horizon, and been stunned by the fact that every one of those young men died in a war that the people who started it genuinely believed they could control.

The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

The time to speak up is right now, before the tumblers click into place. Call your senators and representative (you can reach them through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121) and tell them to support the Democrats’ War Powers Resolution that could stop Trump from going even farther down this treacherous, deadly, possibly-planet-destroying road.

Congress must reassert its constitutional war-making authority: under our Constitution, no president gets to blockade an international waterway with a social media post, and the American people didn’t vote for a nuclear confrontation with China and Russia over Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial. Trump must be impeached now.

And make sure you’re registered to vote and that everyone you know is registered, because the November 2026 midterms are the most direct democratic check we still have on where this is all heading. Check your registration at Vote.gov.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Did Trump Just Light a Fuse?”

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Milton Friedman

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America.

He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980).[xli]

Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.

When, in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, President Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was merely echoing Friedman.[xlii]

Twenty years earlier, Friedman had watched John F. Kennedy give his inaugural address and cringed when Kennedy hit his most memorable high point.

“In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”[xliii]

Kennedy’s speech sent Friedman into such a paroxysm of fury that he opened his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom by attacking it on page one.

“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address,” Friedman writes in the opening paragraph of his book, “President Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’

“Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.”[xliv]

Friedman’s devotee Margaret Thatcher famously told Women’s Own magazine in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”[xlv]

She got it from Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, whose next sentence after his anti-Kennedy rant was: “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”

If it sounds like they’re both echoing Jefferson in saying that a government should only function by “the consent of the governed,”[xlvi] they very much are not.

If the “governed” want a social safety net, for example, or want Social Security, a national health care system, or unemployment insurance then, both Friedman, Thatcher and today’s American Republican Party argue, that is something they should be denied because it will lead to communism (Mises/Friedman) or Naziism (Hayek).

Neoliberalism, instead, explicitly demands a “free market” system where all social needs are met by the magical marketplace and the morbidly rich who control it rather than by people banding together and taxing themselves to provide such benefits through government. No matter what percentage of the population likes those “free” things, they all lead, neoliberals will tell you, to bondage.

As Friedman wrote in the paragraph following his anti-Kennedy rant, “The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.”

Even the most kinds of basic government regulation that most people want will destroy “freedom,” Friedman argued, saying, for example, that even licensing doctors to practice medicine is a step too far.

In his chapter on Occupational Licensure, Friedman writes, “The medical profession is one in which practice of the profession has for a long time been restricted to people with licenses. Offhand, the question, ‘Ought we to let incompetent physicians practice?’ seems to admit of only a negative answer. But I want to urge that second thought may give pause.”

He then goes on to rant about how licensure isn’t about protecting the public but about greedy elites trying to keep “free people” from doing whatever they want while keeping the income for doctors high. This applies, Friedman says, for everything from plumbers’ unions to the AMA.

“The American Medical Association is perhaps the strongest trade union in the United States,” he writes. “The essence of the power of a trade union is its power to restrict the number who may engage in a particular occupation. This restriction may be exercised indirectly by being able to enforce a wage rate higher than would otherwise prevail. If such a wage rate can be enforced, it will reduce the number of people who can get jobs and thus indirectly the number of people pursuing the occupation. … the American Medical Association is in this position.”[xlvii]

And if there’s anything that Milton Friedman wanted to destroy it was trade unions and the government regulation that made it possible for them to legally withstand often-violent assaults from employers.

Along those same lines, in 1946 Friedman got into (metaphorical) bed with Herbert Nelson, “the chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the nation” and a co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which invented the Libertarian Party as a political rationale to deregulate the real estate industry. [xlviii]

No fan of actual government, at least as understood by most Americans, Nelson famously said, “I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”[xlix]

Friedman co-wrote a booklet for Nelson’s FEE trashing the idea of rent controls titled Roofs and Ceilings. FEE had amassed a multi-million-dollar war chest, according to author Mark Ames, and while the amount Friedman was paid for his work (the FEE ordered a half-million copies printed) has never been disclosed, it represented Friedman’s entrée into the world of big business, which embraced him with vigor.

Friedman jumped right into the fray on behalf of big business, repeatedly arguing that when a corporation put social responsibility over profits it was engaged in the most wicked form of socialism. Regardless of the harm to the environment, workers, society or even democracy, any legal thing a corporation did to increase its profits was necessary to prevent collectivist communism from emerging in America.

As he wrote for the New York Times in 1970:

“[T]he doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collective doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.’”[l]

Friedman also believed that because most citizens of developed countries liked their governments regulating things that affected their safety and providing them with a larger social safety net, it’s necessary to either use natural disasters or create crises to bring about the unpopular imposition of neoliberalism. As he wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom:

“There is an enormous inertia – the tyranny of the status quo – in private and especially government arrangements. Only a crisis – actual or perceived – ​produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Thus was born what author Naomi Klein famously termed “The Shock Doctrine,” the title of her seminal and bestselling 2007 book,[li] laying out how giant corporations took advantage of a wide spectrum of crises, natural and man-made, to eliminate the socially protective functions of government and replace them with neoliberal rule by the rich and the corporate.

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— Is Trump privatizing Medicare? George W. Bush and his Republicans in Congress (with help from a few on-the-take Democrats) rolled out a privatized alternative to Medicare in 2005; it’s called Medicare Advantage. Now Trump and Dr. Oz appear prepared to begin the process or replacing real Medicare with the private, for-profit system. Their strategy is to automatically sign people up for Medicare Advantage when they turn 65 as the default, rather than real Medicare.As Congressman Mark Pocan said, “Medicare Advantage is private, for-profit insurance that overcharges American taxpayers by billions every year and regularly denies seniors the care they need. Making Medicare Advantage the default option hurts patients and taxpayers, but it will make insurance execs a lot of money.” Billions of dollars in profit every year, in fact, since people on Medicare Advantage are routinely denied care or payment for care already provided. And, while these insurance industry leeches pass some of that profit back to GOP lawmakers as bribes gifts, tips, and campaign contributions, we the taxpayers pick up the bill. For a deep dive on this corrupt system, click here.

— The economy is falling apart as Stagflation looms on the horizon. For years, Bibi Netanyahu has been trying to find an American president stupid enough to attack Iran on Israel’s behalf. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden all said, “No!” but in his second term Trump appears to have lost what little judgement and reasoning abilities he may have once had. Now the same dynamic that created inflation and stagnated the economy in the 1970s when the Arab oil producers cut off our supply has reappeared because Iran succeeded in cutting off tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation last month came in at .9% for March, a mind-boggling number, particularly when you annualize it by multiplying it by 12 months (and that’s assuming the price of oil and gas don’t go up any farther). Fertilizer from the Gulf is jacking up prices for farmers as we go into planting season, and threatens inflation here, but could cause actual famine in poorer parts of the world. Helium from the Gulf necessary to run MRI machines and make precision microchips is running low. And the economy is slowing down, with many predicting disaster if the AI bubble pops this year. The Fed has two mandates written into the law that created it: control inflation and keep down unemployment. When inflation goes up, they increase interest rates to cool the economy; when unemployment goes up they lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. But when both are happening at the same time, they’re stuck in a terrible bind with no good way out…but with stopping inflation becoming the Prime Directive. That means interest rate increases may be on the horizon, which could really hurt. Buckle up: this could get ugly.

— The GOP’s white male supremacist project rolls along at the Pentagon. Now that notorious white christian nationalist “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth has purged the senior ranks of our military, the Joint Chiefs are all white men. According to The New York Times, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, said, “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events,” helping accelerate the purges. In the military, though, white men are actually outnumbered by the combination of women (20%) and people of color (43%). Hegseth, nonetheless, told an audience of several hundred military people, “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’” At what point will the white people who’ve voted majority Republican in every presidential race since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act realize that diversity actually is strength and stop supporting these open racists?

— Trump has promised to pardon the people who’ve committed crimes for him in the White House, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. Reporter Josh Dawsey writes, “In one conversation with advisers in the dining room next to the Oval Office last year, Trump said he would host a news conference and announce mass pardons before he left office, some of the people said. The people said they weren’t aware of specific pardons being offered to specific people for specific acts.” This has a ring of truth to it — it’s just an echo with what he did for the people who tried to overthrow our government on January 6th — and the WSJ is backing up their reporting. The pardon power is explicit in the Constitution, and has no qualifications or limitations except for impeachment. Which is why it’s so urgent to impeach him as soon as possible.

— Carlos Hernandez, 36, is the father of a two-year-old daughter and works rehabbing houses that have been damaged in fires; ICE thugs pumped 6 bullets into his body, including one into his face. He survived, but is hospitalized. ICE is claiming he tried to “weaponize” his car, a common lie they tell (see: Renee Good), and refusing to name the agents who shot him. They also now claim he’s a member of a notorious gang, which he, his attorney, and his family deny. Another day, another ICE outrage. How many brutal incidents and murders is it going to take to get this rogue agency shut down or at least to start operating under the rule of law and the Constitution?

— When will the other Melania shoe drop? The great mystery this week, at least across cable news and social media, is why Melania Trump would go on TV from the White House and pull a Richard Nixon “I am not a crook” for no apparent reason. That didn’t work out well for Nixon, and it’s unlikely her demand that “The false smears about me … must stop” will do anything other than fuel more speculation and a faster circulation of her nudie pictures and photos of her with Jeffrey Epstein. Speculations about what provoked her run from a woman close to her threatening to “expose” her “pedophile husband,” to the possibility a new book is about to come out claiming Melania and Epstein were once involved, to weird theories that Trump asked her to do it (he claims he didn’t even know she was going to, but he constantly lies) to distract from the Iran debacle. Something very, very weird is going on with this couple (if you could call two people who live and sleep separately a couple). But then, if you were married to Trump, wouldn’t you be a bit on the edge, too?

— Speaking of which, the attorney for the woman who says Trump forced her to give him a blow job when she was 13 years old and she bit his penis, leading to him beating her up, is now demanding that the president testify under oath. Nobody’s holding their breath, but maybe this is what Trump saw coming that made him think invading Iran would be a good idea? Or what caused Melania to assert her independence this week with her bizarre White House press appearance? It’s always difficult to meaningfully speculate about the motivations and behaviors of a psychopathic sexual predator, but, nonetheless, these victims deserve their day in court.

— Best News of the Week: New polling estimates show Trump is underwater (below 50%) in the districts or states of 135 current Republican members of the House and Senate. I’ll just leave that on there for you to savor… ;)

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Donald Trump used to have Michael Cohen to make his threats for him (after Roy Cohn died and could no longer serve Trump and the New York Mafia families). When journalist Tim Mak, then working for the Daily Beast, was producing an article about Trump’s first wife, Ivana, saying he “raped” her when he was angry because his hair plugs she recommended didn’t turn out well, Cohen called Mak and said:

“So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. Do you understand me? Don’t think you can hide behind your pen because it’s not going to happen. …

“I’m more than happy to discuss it with your attorney and with your legal counsel because motherfucker you’re going to need it. And it’s going to be my absolute pleasure to serve you with a 500 million-dollar lawsuit, like … I did to Univision. …

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. So, I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

It’s apparently one of many such communications. He famously threatened Fordham University that if they ever released Donald’s grades, “we will hold your institution liable to the fullest extent of the law including damages and criminality.”

G-d only knows how many of the thousands of women and small businesspeople who sued or threatened to sue Trump for stiffing or otherwise screwing them got a similar treatment; it’s probably in the thousands, since we know he’s been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits, according to a USA Today analysis.

Cohen ended up on the receiving end of Trump’s bile when he planned to publish his own book about their time together and was thrown into a notorious New York jail; he’s since turned on his former employer.

So, now Trump makes the mob-style threats himself. Only instead of, “I’m going to mess up you and your family,” it’s now, “A whole civilization will die tonight.”

Bullying is fundamental to Trump’s style. It’s how his psychopath father raised him. It’s how he treats reporters, calling them “piggy” and “stupid” and “low intellect.” It’s what he did to Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy — the victim of Trump’s mentor and fellow bully Putin — in front of a horrified world.

Remember when Trump bragged that he’d told a NATO leader he‘d “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to European countries?

Or when he told a meeting of police chiefs:

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon… you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, please don’t be too nice. … Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head… I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”

And now he’s going after his own followers who are turning against his Iran decision. Some of them were even still trying to hang onto him outside of that one issue, but his attack yesterday against Megan Kelly, Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson, etc., was extraordinarily vicious.

Not to mention the insanity of publishing a snuff video, as he did yesterday. Yes, the President of the United States published a video on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site of a woman being murdered.

When he was a small-time New York real estate developer and incompetent businessman with a long string of failed companies, his inability to do anything other than bluster and bully didn’t matter much to the world.

But now this same guy commands the most powerful military on the planet and has successfully emulated Putin and Saddam by surrounding himself exclusively with lickspittles and toadies who’re so terrified of his ire that they’ll wear shoes that don’t fit and slather him with unctuous, drooling praise in humiliating public meetings.

The danger that represents — both to America and the world — is that his default mode of threatening and intimidating to get what he wants has left him without anybody who’ll tell him, “No,” explain reality to him, or restrain his worst impulses.

It wasn’t this way during his first term. When Trump was outraged about the Black Lives Matter protesters, he asked his former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Fortunately for America in 2020, Esper was able to talk Trump down.

Similarly, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley talked Trump out of his suggestion that the military should be mobilized against the protesters to “crack their skulls,” “beat the fuck out of them” and “shoot them in the leg or maybe the foot.”

There’s no Mark Esper or Mark Milley in the White House today, and there won’t be come election day.

When Trump backed down on his threat to vaporize 90 million people it was almost certainly the price of gas and the collapsing stock market that constrained him, not a humanitarian impulse or the wise advice of an experienced diplomat in the White House. There are none anymore.

This is the classic story I told in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy about what happens when a leadership style built on threats, intimidation, and loyalty doesn’t stay personal but gets genuine power. The same tactics used against journalists, critics, and small businesses begin to shape how the government itself operates, both internally and with other countries.

When the systems designed to constrain power — checks, transparency, dissent — start to give way, the risk isn’t just political: it’s systemic.

And the stakes — the future — don’t just involve America, but democracy and global stability itself. This man could, you can say without exaggeration, trip off World War III, and we and our children may not survive it.

That’s why it’s so urgent that Congress impeach Trump and remove him from office now. Let your elected officials know. The phone number for the congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Tread Lightly”

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Trump’s thought police may already have your name in their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around 300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes, but, rather, for people who they think may commit crimes in the future. Thought and opinion crimes.

Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:

— Purge government institutions of professionals and replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear Leader they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutzstaffel, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)

But key to their entire identity and supporting their base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the nation that they must be suppressed.

If you’re a Democrat or lean that direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or Tradwives.

But that was just the beginning.

Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.

The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening Center.”

And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s” unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who are queer or otherwise support the queer community.

One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever, even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and operating within the DOJ and FBI.

And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes:

“Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”

Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutzstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me.

America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them.

Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.

The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.

Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless: sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Has the Department of Thought Crimes Arrived?”

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Well, 8 PM ET came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.

Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW yesterday, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.

In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.

The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).

He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.

You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthiness underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.

And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.

His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.

There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.

His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.

His cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea but also to slather him with praise and adoration.

Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.

When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.

Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:

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

That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.

The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.

Putin’s bloody, vicious attack on Ukraine is now justified; if America can threaten it, why are you criticizing Russia? And when Xi decides to take Taiwan, who will dare stand up to him when he threatens nuclear annihilation? Not to mention the dozens of tinpot dictators who now feel similarly liberated.

And the bonus for Trump is that nobody’s talking about his allegedly raping 13-year-olds, his sons getting into the defense contractor gravy train, his bitcoin and selling-pardon grifts, his destroying the White House’s East Wing, his hanging his picture all over DC like he’s Saddam, his inflation, the price of gas, his hanging Putin’s picture in the White House along with our past presidents, or any of the other daily obscenities and indignities his regime visits upon us.

Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.

His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).

He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the little girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.

But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.

We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as over 85 lawmakers have already publicly called for.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump’s Reality Show America”

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Trump is tearing America apart with his threats against Iran and comment that domestically, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” He’s also succeeded in intentionally pitting Americans of different races, religions, and across the rural/urban divide against each other.

As Michael Corthell noted on the Essay X² Substack:

“There was a time when Americans expected political leadership to involve sobriety, judgment, and at least a passing acquaintance with reality. That time now feels like one of those lost civilizations historians whisper about, somewhere between Atlantis and the Republican Party of 1956.”

While it’s worked to the advantage of the GOP, the fossil fuel and private prison industries, and the billionaire class for four decades or more, it’s extraordinarily dangerous to our nation and our children’s future.

That’s because a society can’t function when its people don’t have faith in its institutions, and it’s even more of a challenge for a democracy, a form of government which only exists “by the consent of the governed.” When people lose faith in their nation’s institutions, the result is both social and political chaos much like America is experiencing right now.

I saw this over and over again when doing international relief work back in the 1980s and 1990s: in failed and failing states, people not only distrusted their governments, but were openly disdainful of them and their elected and bureaucratic officials.

Out of that distrust grew a plethora of conspiracy theories that tried to explain why things got so bad, and those often led to political violence (I saw this in Haiti and Colombia), authoritarian takeover (I witnessed this working in Russia) and, in two cases where I worked (Sudan and Uganda), actual civil wars.

America is now going through something similar. For example, prior to Reagan’s presidency, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” Pew found in 2024 that 85% of Americans said most elected officials “don’t care” what people like them think, and only 4% said the political system is working “extremely” or “very” well.

That’s absolutely unsustainable without radical change.

We’re also experiencing a crisis of confidence in America internationally, as nations that were formerly allies across the planet are now openly questioning whether they can ever again trust us after all the betrayals, trash-talking, and Putin-fluffing coming from Trump and his lickspittles.

Tariffs, destroying USAID, and silencing The Voice of America have devastated our soft power and credibility around the world, moving dozens of countries away from us and toward mostly China and Russia.

All of which raises the question: How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess?

Three factors that burst onto the scene in a big way in the 1960s led us to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which brought us to today’s crisis.

— The first was the invention of neoliberalism in the 1940s, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
— This was followed by the creation of the Libertarian Party a few decades later as a lobbying vehicle against rent control by the real estate lobby.
— And, finally, in the 1980s a handful of fossil fuel billionaires jumping into politics to fund think tanks, media, and politicians who’d preach the doctrine that, as Reagan famously said, ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Prior to these interventions, the New Deal consensus had brought Americans together around the idea that the purpose of government was, to quote the Constitution’s Preamble:

“[T]o form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Neoliberals, Libertarians, and rightwing petrobillionaires like David Koch (who ran for VP in 1980 on a ticket of shutting down pretty much all domestic spending, presaging Trump’s recent rant that the only legitimate function of government is to run the military) all began the refrain that government is essentially evil, because they all objected to paying taxes to “promote the general Welfare,” or losing profits to regulations that prevented harms to workers and average Americans.

An army of sycophants and spokesmen was mobilized from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to the “stars” of Fox “News” and its imitators. Soon, the word spread. As Limbaugh used to joke, social programs were actually evil because:

“What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he’ll never get up!”

Men with wealth beyond the imaginings of Midas were telling average white working Americans that it wasn’t the GOP’s tax cuts and Republicans’ destruction of unions that crushed them, but brown-skinned immigrants, women, and Black people who wanted to “steal” their jobs, invade their homes, and rape their daughters.

The foundation of Trump’s 2024 campaign was the ad repeated on loop asserting that Kamala Harris wanted government to pay for trans surgery for people in prison. Don’t think about being robbed by billionaires; there are queer people out there who just want to live their own lives!

By the end of the George W. Bush presidency (and his and Cheney’s lies that led us into bloody quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq), most Americans had decided they couldn’t believe or trust our government. Then Trump came along and, presumably on Putin’s orders, told the world that we couldn’t be trusted internationally, either.

Just like with domestic politics, our nation can’t effectively function internationally if other nations also don’t have faith in our institutions. The Reagan Revolution, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party have destroyed both our faith and the world’s faith in the institutions of America and thus put our democracy at serious peril.

Part of that peril is that Donald Trump is now threatening to turn America into an “illiberal democracy” police state with rigged elections like Russia and Hungary. And it’s Americans’ cynicism that is his main weapon.

As John Mac Ghlionn wrote this week for The Hill about how hard a serious recession could hit Americans:

“The cultural confidence that once carried societies through genuine hardship – the belief that sacrifice was worth something, that tomorrow warranted patience – has faded into a nihilism that is difficult to condemn in people who arrived at it honestly.

“A society that still believes in endurance can survive contraction. A society built entirely on consumption faces a harder test.”

The solution is straightforward, and it appears we’re moving quickly in that direction, just like we did in 1932 as we woke up and chose to move out of the Republican Great Depression.

First, Americans must realize that these nihilistic ideologies promoted by billionaires and massive, monopolistic corporations are grounded in lies. We’re not a society of selfish individual consumers driven primarily by greed; we’ve historically been here for each other, and that’s why our government was first formed. It worked best during the 1933-1981 New Deal era, when the Middle Class went from around 10% of us up to around two-thirds of us. And it was crippled by the Reagan Revolution, which has cut it down to around 43% of us.

Second, the Democratic Party needs to re-embrace the social and economic goals of the New Deal and Great Society that brought us Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, free and cheap college, etc., etc. Put “we, the people” first and again restrain the toxic impulses of billionaires and corporations through appropriate taxation and regulation.

And third, we must repudiated the GOP’s corrupt ideology at the polls this fall and bring into office a new generation of FDR-style progressives who are committed to undoing Reagan’s, Bush’s, Musk’s and Trump’s damage and rebuilding American institutions so they’ll once again work for the average family.

It may seem like a big lift, but more and more Americans are waking up to the Great Grift billionaires and their Republican toadies have been running on us for the past half-century. A new America is possible!

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Louise’s Daily Song: “The Collapse of Trust”

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On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a rant that has shocked the world, threatening multiple war crimes with a level of obscenity that no Republican would have tolerated from President Obama or any other Democrat:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

The Iranian response was to call his language “vile”:

“Iran’s steadfastness and resistance have driven Trump to the brink of madness.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an opinion most of the world now agrees with, tweeting:

He has gone insane, and all of you (the administration) are complicit.”

She also added:

“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshiping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.”

All of which raises the question: What the hell is going on here?

When Donald Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin wanted to cement absolute power in Russia, he and Yeltsen authorized a terror attack against an apartment complex in Moscow that would be blamed on Chechen “terrorists.” It was Russia’s 9/11 event, and signaled the end of that nation’s brief experiment in democracy.

Timothy Snyder, the world-renowned scholar of fascism, argued this past week that Trump and Hegseth may be planning something similar for America, using the war with Iran that they lurched us into as its foundation, and a false-flag “terror event” within the US to trigger a legal state of emergency to corrupt our coming elections.

If this is their plan, it could also explain the seemingly-inexplicable decapitation of the JAG corps (which advises officers on the legality of orders), and the recent removal of about twenty of our most senior military leaders who were uniquely in a position to stop Trump and Hegseth from staging a military coup they could use to stop or severely interfere with the November election.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump has attempted a coup against our American form of democracy; that’s exactly what he was trying to pull off on January 6th. With that attempt he was able to get the military to stand down for hours; this time he could mobilize it against the people he has now already officially designated as enemies of America in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.

It authorizes the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Protestant Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Evangelical-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, Miller, or Hegseth?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents — or the Army — kicking in our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared eight months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

I mentioned it in a Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Putin-style police state here in America.

I was wrong.

In a second bombshell report, Klippenstein obtained and published a copy of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russian-KGB/FSB-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

And now, he reports this week, the FBI is actively in the process of setting up the architecture necessary to essentially become America’s KGB, what he calls “the FBI’s new Political Pre-Crime Center” looking for and rooting out dissidents and critics of the Trump regime.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of average Americans’ possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest Trump’s cabal or oppose their actions.

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In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS/FBI can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the Trump regime. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will be that your phone gets warm and battery life seems to have dropped as it’s pumping out to ICE your data and everything the camera and microphone in it pick up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he called the people who protested his policies “domestic terrorists” and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to the lawlessness ICE has been engaged in and Bondi ordered the FBI to begin.

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With every passing day, Trump and his lickspittles grow more desperate that they’ll be held to account for their criminal activities and war profiteering if the November elections go the way they’re looking today.

Forty of Nixon’s senior officials, including his Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison. Trump and his toadies realize they’re looking at the same thing if they lose their grip on power.

And now that the war is also going badly for Trump, and he’s decompensating right in front of our eyes with his obscene “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, You Crazy Bastards!” Easter rant, comes the very real possibility that after getting nearly $90 billion for ICE and proposing an astonishing half-trillion-dollar increase in the Pentagon’s budget, he’s doing it all to buy in advance the military’s willingness to go along with a second coup attempt against America.

An ICE officer can now make $200,000 a year, enough to ensure complete loyalty to his or her paymaster in DC, Donald Trump. If Trump’s purges of the military and request for additional funds are designed to do the same thing in the armed forces so that, like in Chile during Pinochet’s day, they’ll happily turn their guns on those who hold “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views,” we need to get ready.

That means spreading the alarm far and wide, as Snyder recommends in his excellent Substack newsletter.

Share the news of this threat with everybody you know, post to social media, reach out to your politicians to tell them in advance not to knee-jerk-react to a 9/11- or Moscow Apartments-type of terrorist event between now and the November elections.

And tell elected officials to cut funding to Trump’s ICE, stop his illegal war, and to begin immediate impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump and His Coup”

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Epilogue

Trump isn’t the first Republican president to have seized the White House by fraud. In fact, the historical pattern is far more disturbing: every Republican president since Eisenhower has either directly stolen the presidency or inherited their position from someone who did.

Nixon started this treasonous tradition in 1968. While President Johnson was desperately working to end the Vietnam War, Nixon secretly sent envoys to persuade South Vietnamese leaders to boycott peace talks, promising them better terms after his election. Johnson discovered this sabotage when the FBI brought him the wiretaps; he confronted Nixon directly, calling it what it was: “This is treason.”1 Nixon’s scheme worked, however, prolonging the war that killed an additional 22,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. And Johnson took this crime to his grave; his library didn’t release the tapes for decades.

The pattern continued with Reagan in the election of 1980. As recently confirmed by former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes, Reagan’s campaign struck a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to keep fifty-two American hostages captive until after the election, deliberately sabotaging President Carter’s negotiations for their release.2 The hostages were freed the very minute Reagan was sworn in, and his administration later secretly sold weapons to Iran (leading to the Iran-Contra scandal), thus keeping his corrupt bargain.

George H. W. Bush leveraged Reagan’s illegitimate presidency to get into the White House himself, and then used Attorney General Bill Barr to shut down the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning six key figures before they could implicate him.3

The Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 by halting Florida’s recount, despite Gore winning the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots. A later investigation by major newspapers confirmed Gore would have won Florida under any fair counting standard.4 And let’s not forget that Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged at least 57,000 mostly Black voters from the rolls just months before the election that was “decided” by fewer than 600 votes.5

Trump continued this tradition in 2016, benefiting from voter suppression orchestrated by Republican secretaries of state and Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program that purged millions of legitimate voters—mostly people of color—from the rolls.6 He also benefited from Russian interference through social media manipulation, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.7

Finally, Trump’s payment to silence Stormy Daniels—the crime that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg successfully prosecuted, leading to Trump’s thirty-four felony convictions for election fraud—was crucial to keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat after the “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal. Without those illegal payoffs violating campaign finance laws and keeping the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories under wraps, Trump almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize the White House for far too long. Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a destructive precedent of presidential immunity that has echoed through decades, leading to packed courts, unnecessary wars, massive tax cuts for billionaires, and the gutting of America’s middle class.

And now it’s been amplified by six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that Trump can commit crimes while in office with relative impunity, an immunity that he’s apparently reveling in.

It’s time to break this pattern and finally hold at least one (convicted) criminal Republican president accountable.

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— Sure is starting to smell like Vietnam… If you’re not old enough to remember the early days of the Vietnam war, ask somebody who was; the bravado, the bullshit coming from the SecDef, the president who’s afraid of being criticized as “weak” by “conservatives” if he doesn’t “win the war,” and the skepticism of the American people are all echoing so loudly it’s impossible to miss. Whiskey Pete, the wife-abusing alcoholic Fox “News” B-lister Trump put in charge of our military because he “looked strong” is proving to be every bit as incompetent and disastrous as the guy who appointed him. The most unqualified and frankly disastrous leader of our military in history — openly bragging about committing war crimes while trash-talking the Geneva Convention with his insane riffs about about “no quarter” and “no woke rules of engagement” — just purged the top ranks of our military again. He just canned Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, four-star general David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain. Nobody’s sure exactly why (or if the timing of Bondi’s firing was designed to distract us from this) but speculation largely falls to two explanations. First, these are competent professional military men who most likely told Whiskey Pete and Trump the truth about what a disaster attacking Iran would be, and how it would be illegal to do it without congressional authorization, so they had to be removed. As Senator Chris Murphy noted, “It’s likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly.” Only toadies, lickspittles, and sycophants allowed here. The other possibility is that they objected to Petey inserting himself into the promotion process explicitly to stop women and Black men from rising into the most senior ranks. Or both. Whatever it is, following on his gutting the JAG corps (which advises officers about what are and are not war crimes) and his previous attacks on Blacks and women, this is the lowest point for our military in my lifetime, and probably yours, too.

— Who was General George, who Whiskey Pete just fired? General Randy A. George enlisted in the Army in 1982, fought his way into West Point, and then spent a career in the active duty infantry from platoon leader in the 101st Airborne in Desert Storm to multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanding battalions, brigades, a division, and I Corps before becoming the 41st Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Along the way he earned a Bronze Star with three oak leaf clusters, a Purple Heart, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, and a senior parachutist badge with a combat jump; the résumé of someone who has led from the front and bled with his soldiers. Whiskey Pete, on the other hand, essentially bankrupted two small veterans charities that he was supposed to be running while he was busy getting drunk and cheating on his wife.

— Is the Supreme Court about to become even more bizarre and corrupt than it already is? Speculation is rife in DC that Sam Alito and possibly Clarence Thomas — the two most extreme neo-fascists and on-the-take betrayers of the rule of law — are planning to retire this summer, giving Trump the opportunity to turn the Court into a 5-4 Trump-appointed majority. Alito has apparently penned a book, which some see as a sign he’s paving the way for his departure. Since Mango Mussolini is furious right now with his own appointees because they didn’t appear to roll over for his Birthright Citizenship scam attempt, odds are anybody he puts forward will be even more extreme than anybody currently there. Aileen Cannon, anyone? Or Matthew Kacsmaryk? The former helped Trump avoid prosecution in Florida for stealing and disseminating Top Secret documents essential to national security, and the latter tried to outlaw abortion pills nationwide. And there’s always John Eastman, even though he’s already been disbarred; with Trump, anything is possible. Get ready.

— Gas prices got you down? A new report by Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee finds that just during the first month of Trump’s criminal war against Iran American drivers paid fully $8.4 billion more at the pump for gas than they would have had the war not driven up the price of oil. While he’s borrowed over $7 trillion in our names and given it to his billionaire buddies as tax cuts and run up our national debt higher and faster than any president in American history, Trump appears determined to drain every last cent he and his greedy buddies in the fossil fuel industry can get from average working people. He took billions from us in tariffs, and now they’re screwing us on the price of gas and diesel, since their costs haven’t gone up a penny but they’re sure happy to use the war as an excuse to jack up prices. This after killing off the VA program that kept over 10,000 veterans in their homes (with another 90,000 facing foreclosure in the coming month or two), gutting food aid, decimating Medicaid, and telling us all this past week that he really doesn’t have the time and America doesn’t have the budget for Medicare. When billionaires first declared war on the American working class with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, most people just thought it was a labor dispute with the air traffic controllers and an “adjustment” to tax rates; now the naked attack the morbidly rich have spearheaded against our middle class is impossible to ignore.

— JD Vance (or whatever his name is this week) is now in charge of Project Screw Blue States. Trump named him the “fraud czar” yesterday and told him to go after Democratic-run states, specifically “California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, and New York.” In an announcement unconsciously rich with irony and double entendre, Trump began the announcement on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site with this line for the ages: “Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

— Is Vance now the Vice President of Hungary? JD Vance flies to Budapest April 7th and 8th, four days before Hungary’s election. His mission is clear: boost Trump ally and fellow neofascist Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party is trailing in the polls for the first time in sixteen years. Trump has already endorsed Orbán on social media, calling him a “truly strong and powerful leader.” Secretary of State Rubio visited Budapest in February. Now Vance goes in for the close. Political analysts say the American intervention won’t shift the outcome since Hungarians are focused on kitchen-table issues. But the principle matters. For generations, American presidents stayed out of foreign elections. Orbán has gutted Hungary’s democratic institutions, had his friendly oligarchs take over all of the nation’s media (just like Putin did in Russian), packed the courts with sniveling toadies, and earned repeated EU sanctions for acting like a dictator and throwing in with Putin (he’s currently blocking EU loans to Ukraine). When the United States campaigns for a foreign autocrat, we’re not spreading democracy. We’re exporting its opposite.

— The West is drying up and Republicans who take money from the fossil fuel industry are trying to ignore it. Scientists are sounding a full alarm about a snowpack collapse across the American West unlike anything in the historical record. The Great Basin is at just 16 percent of average snowpack. The lower Colorado River basin, which supplies water to more than 40 million people, is at 10 percent. The Rio Grande is at 8 percent. During a California survey Wednesday, officials found zero measurable snow at a Sierra Nevada site where they’d normally stand knee-deep in snowpack. March 2026 was the warmest March on record, and that heat wiped out snowpack that should have lasted well into summer. Salt Lake City is already urging water conservation. Colorado and Wyoming are moving toward outdoor watering bans. Wildfire season is arriving weeks early. As one climatologist put it, the changes we’ve set in motion are going to be catastrophic. The West is running out of water and time.

— Trump has released his budget and wants $500 billion more for the military to pay for his war against Iran. He proposes to fund it by cutting:

• $510 million - Grants for farmers and agricultural research

• $82 million - Loans for rural small businesses (Fully eliminated)

• $61 million - Support for farmers and food markets (Fully eliminated)

• $240 million - School meals and food education for children abroad (Fully eliminated)

• $659 million - Community building grants

• $47 million - Support for minority-owned businesses (Fully eliminated)

• $449 million - Economic development grants for communities

• $1.6 billion - Weather forecasting, fisheries, and coastal protection (NOAA)

• $993 million - Scientific research and technology standards

• $150 million - Support for American exports and trade

• $2.2 billion - Broadband and internet access programs

• $8.5 billion - Funding for public schools

• $1.5 billion - Vocational training and adult education (Fully eliminated)

• $2.7 billion - College access and higher education support

• $15.2 billion - Roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects

• $1.1 billion - Home energy efficiency and clean energy programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.1 billion - Scientific research funding

• $386 million - Environmental cleanup programs

• $150 million - Cutting-edge clean energy research

• $4 billion - Help paying home heating and cooling bills for low-income families (Fully eliminated)

• $768 million - Refugee resettlement assistance

• $819 million - Care and shelter for migrant children

• $775 million - Local anti-poverty programs (Fully eliminated)

• $5 billion - Public health programs, mental health services, and disease prevention

• $5 billion - Medical research (NIH)

• $129 million - Healthcare quality and safety research

• $356 million - Emergency preparedness and disaster response

• $1.3 billion - FEMA community disaster preparedness grants

• $707 million - Cybersecurity protection for critical infrastructure

• $52 million - Airport and transportation security

• $40 million - Protection against chemical and biological weapons threats

• $53 million - Funding for homeland security operations

• $3.3 billion - Community development block grants for local neighborhoods (Fully eliminated)

• $1.3 billion - Affordable housing construction grants (Fully eliminated)

• $393 million - Programs to reduce homelessness

• $529 million - Housing assistance for people living with HIV/AIDS (Fully eliminated)

• $489 million - Housing and services for Native American communities

• $50 million - Grants to help communities build more housing (Fully eliminated)

• $60 million - Enforcement of fair housing and anti-discrimination laws

• $58 million - Homebuyer and renter counseling services (Fully eliminated)

• $45 million - Renewable energy development programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.7 billion - Grants for local law enforcement and public safety

• $20 million - Civil rights mediation and legal access programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.6 billion - Job training for at-risk youth (Fully eliminated)

• $395 million - Jobs program for low-income seniors (Fully eliminated)

• $234 million - Worker safety and labor protection programs

• $101 million - Enforcement of equal pay and workplace anti-discrimination laws

• $46 million - Programs to combat child labor and forced labor abroad

• $2 billion - International humanitarian aid

• $1.2 billion - Food aid for hungry families abroad (Fully eliminated)

• $4.3 billion - Global health and disease prevention programs

• $2.7 billion - Funding for the United Nations and international partnerships

• $642 million - International economic and treasury programs

• $315 million - Democracy and anti-corruption programs abroad

• $486 million - Grants for public transit projects

• $4.2 billion - Electric vehicle charging infrastructure

• $372 million - Airline service for rural and small communities

• $145 million - Grants for sustainable and equitable infrastructure

• $204 million - Loans and investment for underserved communities

• $1.4 billion - IRS taxpayer services and enforcement

• $100 million - Air pollution monitoring and reduction programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1 billion - EPA grants to states for environmental protection

• $2.5 billion - Clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure funds

• $90 million - Grants to reduce diesel pollution (Fully eliminated)

• $3.4 billion - NASA space and earth science research

• $297 million - NASA technology innovation programs

• $1.1 billion - International Space Station operations

• $143 million - STEM education programs

• $309 million - Small business development and entrepreneurship programs

• $170 million - Small Business Administration operations

• $158 million - Loans for small businesses

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