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— Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany. Putin called Trump this week (we wouldn’t have known except Russian media bragged about it) and apparently gave him his instructions; yesterday the Pentagon announced we’re pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany and putting massive tariffs on EU goods to further weaken NATO member nations. They’re toasting their success with champagne in the Kremlin and planning their strategy to take the Baltic states once the war against Ukraine is over.

— Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. Jeff Landry is one of the most corrupt governors in America, having been accused of accepting free flights and gifts, illegal use of campaign funds, and giving government jobs to top donors, among other things. Now he’s suspending the upcoming primaries (voting was already underway) so he and his cronies in the legislature can re-gerrymander the state to make sure the state will never again send a Black representative to Washington DC. Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias noted, “What is happening in Louisiana right now is both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall.” And this is just the beginning; with the six Republicans on the Court okaying new maps that shatter majority-Black districts, the Congressional Black Caucus is bracing for a major loss of members this fall and in 2028. John Roberts and his buddies on the Court claim that they’re not “seeing race” and that the problem of minority voters being victimized by Republican policies is long in the past; in fact it’s very, very real now and their and Landry’s actions prove it. Hypocrites and racist liars…

— The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires two things: If the United States has come under attack or an attack is imminent, the president may order an immediate commencement of war-making against the attacker; when that happens, he then has 60 days to try to resolve the situation, but after that must seek approval from Congress to continue kinetic action. Trump has already broken that law: Iran represented no immediate threat to the US at all but he bombed them anyway. And now, as Democrats are joining Republicans in pretending he didn’t commit that crime and so are asking for the 60-day request for war authorization from Congress, Whiskey Pete Hegseth told senators yesterday that because our military isn’t currently shooting or bombing, “the clock is paused” and they don’t need to go to Congress. The law requires a cessation of hostilities within 60 days, and if blockading the Strait of Hormuz isn’t a hostile action then apparently the next step is for the Pentagon to declare that gravity is optional and wars only count when someone bothers to keep score. Meanwhile, ICE murders American citizens and ignores the 4th and 5th Amendments, the DOJ ignores court orders, Trump criminally impounds funds Congress had appropriated for Blue states, and the entire regime is in open and blatant violation of the Epstein Transparency Act. Hopefully, Democrats will find their spines and voices and hold these criminals to account once they acquire the power to do so, and begin shadow hearings in the meantime to inform the American people of Trump’s and his people’s lawlessness.

— Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. Big AI have been buying off politicians across the country, often even getting tax deferrals and free land as they burden local electric and water resources, all to increase the profits of a handful of morbidly rich AI oligarchs. Residents in the areas the tech bro oligarchs are eyeing are getting active, although a few well-placed “contributions” and “tips” to politicians often frustrate their efforts. Maine’s legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on the centers last month by a wide margin but then Governor Janet Mills, apparently feathering her nest for her upcoming retirement, vetoed the legislation. In other states it’s less obviously corrupt, but people are genuinely freaked out as AI transforms not just the physical landscape of America but the employment landscape as well. In Michigan, The New York Times reports: “In towns across the state, suspicions are still rife, sometimes far-fetched. Residents in different towns expressed worries about effects on fertility. Others worried the centers could end up as military targets, pointing to Iran’s strikes on data center infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. People in Michigan also pointed to two contracts between a data center project in Saline Township and the state’s main electric utility that were so heavily redacted that the state’s attorney general is challenging them in court. A special fast-track process was used to bypass public hearings. Even the signatures are blacked out.” AI is here and not going away, and Moore’s Law suggests many of these monster data centers will soon be scaled back, perhaps even bursting the AI bubble that keeps driving the stock market regardless of the Iran conflict. Keep an eye on this; it’s going to change the world our kids are inheriting in ways that are still unclear.

— The Trump grift is multigenerational. Uday and Qusay…er…Don Jr and Eric just jumped into the defense contracting business, hooking up with three new drone companies. Suspiciously, the companies all are bidding for or just got massive multi-million-dollar contracts with the Pentagon, with more to come. Remember when Republicans screamed about Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy “cashing in on the presidency” by licensing his name to a brand of beer? Or when Republicans held endless hearings, press conferences, and years of Fox “News” reports about Biden’s son making $5 million for sitting on the board of an energy company? They were pikers. The Trump Crime Family is the most corrupt first family in American history and hopefully their reign will be short-lived when Democrats get the power of impeachment back.

— Democracy around the world is under assault by rightwingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. An estimated half of all the world’s democracies are under such an assault — including the United States — and Uganda is the most recent to go all in. President Yoweri Museveni says he wants to sign legislation that’s working its way through the Ugandan legislature that would criminalize opposition politicians, most types of reporting and opinion writing, and any group affiliated with foreign organizations. Russia, through diplomatic outreach and via their massive social media influence operations, has been pushing this sort of thing across the free world, and this bill is a virtual clone of Russian legislation that lets Putin imprison or even execute dissidents and reporters. And Trump, trying to help out his mentor and owner, has shut down Voice of America to make Putin’s job even easier.

— Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh went on his podcast and spewed a vitriolic tirade against Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, calling him “despicable,” a “bullshitter,” even throwing around accusations like “anti-Semitic,” and then said he wouldn’t support him even if it helps keep a Republican in power. This from Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party bomb-thrower who built his career on outrage, division, and some of the ugliest rhetoric of the last decade. And let’s not rewrite history here: this is a guy who helped normalize the very politics that damaged our democracy. Yet when he decided to rebrand himself, Democrats and progressives said fine, come on in, we believe in a big tent. We gave him grace; I’ve even invited him onto my program several times. And now? Now he turns that same scorched-earth, character-assassination playbook on a real progressive who’s actually connecting with voters on the number one issue in this country, affordability. That’s not principle, that’s hypocrisy dripping with arrogance. Walsh doesn’t want a “big tent,” he wants a tent where he gets to decide who’s worthy. And when someone comes along with a message that resonates with working people, he panics and goes for the jugular. It’s the same old Tea Party venom, just dressed up in a different jersey. You don’t strengthen democracy by trashing candidates fighting for economic justice, you weaken it. And if that’s where Joe Walsh is going to stand, then he hasn’t changed nearly as much as he wants people to believe and will not be welcome on my show again until he publicly apologizes to us and Graham Platner.

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Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.

Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.

The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.

Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’s establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.

That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:

“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”

And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a ten-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.

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It would make:
— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;
— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;
— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;
— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;
— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;
— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;
— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;
— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;
— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and
— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.

That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.

Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.

“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.

Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a platform that tried to tell working-class voters that things were basically fine, right before Donald Trump ran ads in the Rust Belt about NAFTA and how nobody in Washington gave a damn about them. The post-1992 neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t lose because it was too progressive: it lost because it kept refusing to be progressive at all.

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Meanwhile, look at what the Republicans have actually done with the power voters keep handing them. They’ve:
— Cut taxes on billionaires and corporations so dramatically that the national debt just officially crossed 100% of GDP, the highest peacetime level since the years right after World War II.
— Rigged elections through aggressive voter purges and partisan gerrymandering, with help from a Supreme Court that just this week further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
— Cheered on foreign wars, including the “magnificently stupid” current Iran war Platner himself has denounced, while running interference for the daily war crimes happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
— Allowed the Trump family to turn the presidency into a multi-billion-dollar grift machine of meme coins, crypto launches, stablecoins, and foreign payoffs while millions of Americans skip prescription doses to make rent.
— Kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009, and even went to this corrupt Supreme Court to kill Joe Biden’s student debt relief.
— Taken hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel industry while heat domes, hurricanes, and wildfires are killing thousands of Americans — most recently children in Texas —every single year.
— Taken millions more from the gun industry while terrified schoolkids hide under their desks.
— Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version that Jesus would’ve flipped tables over, while hustling for huckster televangelists, performatively demanding mandatory school prayer, Ten Commandments postings in every classroom, and Whiskey Pete pitching prayer every weekend in every barracks.
— Deployed armed, masked thugs to intimidate and murder American citizens while building a massive series of concentration camps across the country.

That’s the record American voters across the political spectrum need to know about, and Democrats should be shouting from the rafters. A wishy-washy Democrat saying “well, we’ll try, but we really don’t want to piss off the Republicans by impeaching Trump or Clarence Thomas” — like we saw in 2024 — is never again going to work.

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

The lesson for the DNC, DCCC, the DSCC, and every damn consultant who’s suggested running on an anodyne “don’t make waves” agenda without naming who’s screwing everyday Americans is clear: the New Affordability Agenda isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.

It tells voters exactly who’s stealing from them and offers concrete steps progressive candidates will fight to actually deliver. That’s the formula Bernie Sanders has been pushing for three decades (and did for 11 years weekly on my radio program), the formula AOC and Zohran Mamdani just rode to victory in New York, and the formula Platner just used to blow Janet Mills out of the water.

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So, reach out to your Democratic member of Congress and senators and tell them to sign onto the New Affordability Agenda. Tell them you want fighters, not neoliberal wusses.

If you’re in Maine, help Graham Platner finish the job and send Susan Collins home in November. And if you’re anywhere else, find the populist progressives in your state’s primary and back them, too, or sign up to run yourself.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

It’s now on the rest of us to follow their lead.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Change They Can’t Ignore”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …

“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

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For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

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As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

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Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.

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Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Tip-off!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?

It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what. Charles III said:

“The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

King Charles was essentially begging Congress to restrain Donald Trump’s imperial overreach, the most glaring example of which is his starting a war with Iran without congressional approval and in violation of both the US Constitution, the 1973 War Powers Act, and the Geneva Convention.

It’s a lesson America first lost touch with when President Harry Truman got us into the Korean War without Congressional authorization, was amplified by LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan in Granada, and has since led through a series of modern presidential actions straight to Trump joining Netanyahu to bomb Iran without Congress, provocation, or legal basis.

Both parties have been complicit in this, generally in support of their own presidents while questioning the actions of presidents of the other party, but the actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — and Obama’s failure to respond to them — most directly led to Trump’s excesses.

George W. Bush came into office wanting to start a war with Iraq as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004 and “have a successful presidency.” In 1999, when Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s “autobiography,” A Charge To Keep.

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“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. He told Baker that Bush said:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge asbestos bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. The company was facing possible bankruptcy.

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In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as Bush’s now-Vice President, Halliburton subsidiary KBR suddenly received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts that arguably rescued the company.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 for their own selfish purposes, the law and public good be damned.

— Bush was unpopular and seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; he wanted a war that would give him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

— Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today, adding a fortune to Cheney’s family’s holding of Halliburton stock.

Under Bush’s and Cheney’s command, American forces committed numerous war crimes — including torture, murder, slaughter of civilians including children, and kidnapping/rendering to “black sites” — that earned America universal condemnation. Our reputation was damaged, but, even worse, the precedent of an untouchable, unaccountable presidency was established.

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That could have been stopped by Congress, but the body failed; the crime was then compounded when Barack Obama came into office in January, 2009 with a 257-198 Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. They had real political power, but instead of holding these two liars and war criminals to account, President Obama said, when asked if he was going to prosecute them:

“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

When he and Democrats in Congress took that position — much like House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying this Sunday on Fox “News” that impeaching Trump is not a priority if they take power in this November’s election — they let Bush and Cheney off the hook and thus pretty much guaranteed that Trump would overreach and commit war crimes, as he has done.

After all, if Obama and congressional Democrats let Bush and Cheney get away with what everybody in America knew was a series of deadly lies that cost us both lives and treasure, why would Trump think that any Democrat would ever try to hold him accountable for the same thing?

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Which is exactly why it’s so important for Democrats to abandon appeasement and hold Trump accountable for his many crimes in office — from taking bribes and selling pardons to tearing down part of the White House to bombing Iran — if they regain the power of the subpoena and impeachment this fall.

Instead of telling Trump in advance that he’ll skate just like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney did, Jeffries and Schumer should be loudly proclaiming that there will be accountability.

This sort of behavior — by presidents of both parties — has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it destroys the world’s confidence in America as a moral force.

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Taking on Trump is also good politics.

A recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll found 55% of all voters support impeaching Trump, with especially strong backing among Democrats. One-in-five of Trump’s own voters want him impeached and at least 85 members of the House are on record for holding him accountable. A Quinnipiac University poll found that fully 95% of Democrats support prosecuting Trump on federal charges.

A hereditary king praising restraints on executive authority before the U.S. Congress was both historically ironic and politically elegant: King Charles III was reminding Congress not to tolerate a man trying to become the kind of ruler our Founders rejected. As he pointed out, free nations only survive as free when executive power is answerable to Congress, the people, and the law.

Democrats damn well better be paying attention.

At some point, this stops being just about Trump. It becomes about whether the United States still believes in accountability at all. Because if the answer to every abuse of power is still “nothing,” then the destruction of American democracy isn’t just continuing, it’s succeeding.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Ain’t Getting Stopped”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior.

Turns out, there’s a reason.

Yesterday on my nationally syndicated radio/TV/SiriusXM/YouTube program a fellow called to ask how long I’d been running my contest. It started more than 20 years ago, around the time I helped start Air America Radio. Here’s the question:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.

Meanwhile, since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.

Which raises the question: Why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years?

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As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the genesis of the situation goes back to 1974, when William F. Buckley’s millionaire brother and Senator James Buckley joined a lawsuit with former Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA, passed in the wake of the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals) limiting campaign contributions to $1000 from an individual and $50,000 for a candidate self-financing their campaign (as Buckley had done).

Buckley’s suit claimed the money he might want to put into a future campaign was his own and he should be able to use it however he wanted.

Just two years earlier, Nixon had put Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo, which was that era’s Project 2025) on the Supreme Court, and Powell got to working on his colleagues, resulting in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision. It echoed Powell’s Memo, saying that money spent on politics was the same thing as “free speech” and thus protected by the First Amendment, blowing up those nasty donation limits.

Two years later, Powell himself authored the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision that doubled-down on the “money is free speech” argument and extended it from humans to corporations as well.

The result was that the 1980 Reagan campaign was suddenly awash in oil industry money, because he’d promised to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s Solar Bank program that would have had America producing 20% of our electricity from solar by the year 2000.

When Clarence Thomas — then himself on the take from rightwing billionaires — became the Court’s deciding vote in Citizens United in 2010, the doors to functionally unlimited campaign and dark money contributions from both billionaires and corporations were blown open.

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Which explains the answers to other questions that often come up on my program:

Q. Why do Republicans fight free college and ending student debt when our experience with the GI Bill after WWII found that for every $1 we invest in educating people our nation got $7 in return, as well as making America the science leader of the late 20th century?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry, which makes billions in profits from student loans that are almost entirely risk-free because — thanks to legislation signed by George W. Bush — they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Q. Why do Republicans fight every effort to have a national healthcare system like every other democracy in the world has, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lengthen the average American lifespan, and cost us around half of what we pay for healthcare today?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry, which makes billions in profits from denying coverage to people, even though 78 million Americans have inadequate or no insurance and a national system would save the country an estimated half-billion dollars a year. As Wendell Potter notes, “In 2024, seven big insurers posted $71.3 billion in profits and paid their [seven] CEOs more than $146 million.”

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Q. Why do Republicans sabotage green programs designed to get America off our dependence on fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are destroying our atmosphere, our children’s future, and cause tens of thousands of cancers and millions of cases of asthma and other disease cases every year?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry, which makes billions in profits every year and recycles some of that back to the Party. In 2024 the world’s largest, most polluting companies recording an estimated $583 billion in profits, marking a 68% increase since 2019 in part because of their investment in buying American Republican politicians.

Q. Why do Republicans fight breaking up monopolies, even though the average American family pays around $5000 a year more for goods and services than do the citizens of most other democracies that don’t allow monopolies and oligopolies?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies, as I lay out in horrifying detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader). Every time a Democratic president tries to take on the monopolies — as Biden most recently did by hiring Lina Kahn to run the FTC — Republicans support lawsuits that postpone the breakups until a Republican president can fire the FTC head, install a corporate toady, and drop the case.

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Q. Why do Republicans fight letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, even though every other developed nation does it and Americans typically pay two to ten times more for the same medicines?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the party for decades. Big Pharma’s obscene profits depend on Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world, so Republicans consistently oppose any reforms that would let Medicare use its buying power to bring costs down.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose expanding Social Security benefits and protecting the program by lifting the payroll tax cap on billionaires, even though millions of seniors rely on it as their primary income and lifting the cap would make the program solvent for the next 75 years?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street, which has long dreamed of privatizing Social Security so giant investment firms can skim management fees from the trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund. Every dollar kept in the public Social Security system is a dollar the financial industry can’t turn into profit.

Q. Why do Republicans battle against universal paid family leave and paid sick leave, even though every other advanced democracy guarantees workers time to care for a newborn, a sick spouse, or themselves and paid sick leave helps prevent the spread of disease?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers who want labor as cheap and disposable as possible. Paid leave shifts a tiny share of corporate wealth back to workers, so the Chamber of Commerce and big business and its political allies pour millions into Republican coffers and campaigns to block it.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage, even though productivity has soared for decades while wages have stagnated and the corporate owners are richer than at any time in world history?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers whose profits depend on paying people less than a living wage. Keeping wages low forces us taxpayers to subsidize their workers through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing aid while their morbidly rich executives pocket the difference.

Q. Why do Republicans fight food assistance programs like SNAP and universal free school lunches, even though childhood hunger damages learning, health, and lifetime earning potential and research proves these programs are among the most efficient anti-poverty investments any government can make?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations that depend on keeping wages so low workers still need public help to feed their families. SNAP and school lunch programs expose the truth that millions of Americans are working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Rather than force employers to raise wages, Republicans would rather let children go hungry and blame the poor for being poor.

Q. Why do Republicans fight stronger gun safety laws supported by large majorities of Americans, even including things as anodyne as universal background checks and red-flag laws?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA, which make fortunes every time a new round of Republican-pushed fear drives firearm sales. Dead children in classrooms are the tragic collateral damage to this business model built on lies about the Second Amendment and political bribery.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose cracking down on tax havens and making billionaires pay what they owe, even though it would reduce deficits, pay down our national debt, and fund schools, roads, and healthcare?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that bankroll their campaigns. If you add up the tax cuts for the rich by Reagan, Bush, and Trump they equal more than our entire national debt of $38 trillion, meaning all that money — that we pay a trillion dollars a year in interest on that could instead fund a national healthcare system, free college, and an end to homelessness — was borrowed in our name by the GOP to give to the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos’ of the world.

Q. Why do Republicans so frequently use hate and fear — from Willy Horton to Trump’s anti-trans ads to hysteria about bathrooms — to win political campaigns, and why do billionaires and corporations fund such advertising?

A. Because such type of campaigning has such a powerful emotional load it causes people to forget how the GOP has been screwing them for the past half-century.

Thus, we discover that the mystery of modern Republican politics isn’t really a mystery at all.

When a party consistently blocks cheaper medicine, better wages, paid leave, affordable college, clean energy, antitrust enforcement, and healthcare that works, it’s not because those ideas are unpopular or unworkable: it’s because they threaten the obscene profits of the industries and the billionaires writing the checks.

Until we overturn these obscene, corrupt SCOTUS rulings, get big money out of politics, and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors, the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Don’t Hear You!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.

Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.

The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)

Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

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Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.

Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.

Billionaire Peter Theil famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”

There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.

Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.

The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.

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While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.

I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.

That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.

Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.

Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.

And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.

You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.

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None of this deals with the problem of rightwing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.

But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.

Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting rightwing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “The Hate-Industrial-Complex Marches On”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. And what we can do about it today.

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Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces... Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.

Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.

She was thirty-seven years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.

Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.

I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.

Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.

Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.

And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”

This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.

Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.

And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.

The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”

This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.

Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.

Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.

Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”

The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Build Over There”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for:

— Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the bribes he took from billionaires,
— Replacing Chuck Schumer as leader of Senate Democrats with a “fighter,”
— Investigating and prosecuting Trump regime officials and underlings who’ve been involved in illegal actions like bombing unarmed boats in the Caribbean,
— Prosecuting ICE thugs who’ve assaulted, terrorized, or killed people and smashed into cars and homes without warrants,
— Going after corruption in the Trump White House, including among the Trump family, the Cabinet, and Trump himself,
— Promoting aggressive new social safety net programs to restore America’s middle class and take on the Epstein class, including a wealth tax on those with more than $1 billion, and
— A national healthcare system modeled on Medicare-for-All.

One cable host mused out loud yesterday that these positions may help the 41-year-old progressive win the primary against septuagenarian moderate Governor Janet Mills, “but can that really win a general election?” This “don’t be Bernie or like AOC” is the great fear and marching anthem of the mainstream media and the Democratic consultant class.

When Trump broke both US and international law joining Israel in bombing Iran without any provocation (and while they were making very real concessions during their negotiations) and in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t call for the president to be prosecuted, turned over to the Hague, or even impeached.

Instead, he said, “Congress must be fully and immediately briefed.” Yeah, that’ll teach them!

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump a liar and the bombing a “major failure” and “Operation Epic Blunder,” but beyond strongly worded press releases also hasn’t called for actual consequences for Trump, Hegseth, or anybody else in the chain of command committing these war crimes.

But consider how it would have played out if Obama or Biden had begun bombing a foreign country with no justification; Republicans would have started impeachment hearings before the second wave of bombs and Fox “News” would be braying for criminal prosecution.

Tragically, the conventional wisdom across the chattering class and within leadership of the institutional Democratic Party seems to be, “Don’t make big promises or real threats, don’t be Bernie or AOC.”

The problem with this strategy is that most Americans now want a modern-day Bernie or AOC, and multiple elections (and Platner’s polling) prove it, but the DNC and “mainstream” Democrats aren’t listening and don’t want to go after rich people.

It wasn’t always this way: there was a time when Democrats boldly promoted programs that literally built the world’s first over-50%-of-the-population middle class, and weren’t afraid to take names and kick ass.

Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed America with his New Deal programs, including legalizing unions, Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, ending child labor, Federal emergency relief (FERA), the FDIC, SEC, FCC, TVA, NLRB, FHA and Fannie Mae, and the National Archives (among others).

He also took on the Epstein Class of his day, establishing a top 90% income tax rate and proclaiming that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans:

“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the fatcats of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for years.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust:

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

President Lyndon Johnson similarly added to the middle class, while keeping the top income tax rate at a fierce 74% on individuals and 50% on corporations. His Great Society programs included Medicare, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Title I aid to low-income-district schools, Pell Grants, Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Agencies/Community Services Block Grants, VISTA, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ending racial quotas on immigration, Food Stamps, HUD, NEA, NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS).

And he and President Kennedy weren’t afraid to go after malefactors in the government itself. As Lamar Waldron and I document in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, Kennedy was the first president in a half-century to take on the Mafia, including its control over FBI Director Hoover; it ultimately cost him his life. LBJ similarly frequently went after big business and corrupt deals between what he called corporate or wealthy “special interests” and Republican politicians.

Had LBJ not blundered (and lied) on the Vietnam War, he may well be remembered as one of our greatest presidents; when it comes to the middle class, he and FDR were singular in their advocacy of programs that lifted working class people from poverty into relative comfort.

And Americans loved those programs, both FDR’s and LBJ’s; to this day, they’re among the most popular in the country’s history.

Progressive politics and policies are once again popular in America, as the foggy bubble of Reagan’s trickle-down economics has burst, leaving us with a $38 trillion hangover and a middle class that’s been wiped out, shrinking from 65% of us when Reagan was elected to 43% of us today (and now requiring two incomes instead of just one).

Polling of Democratic voters who simply failed to show up for Kamala Harris in 2024, handing the election to Trump, found that they failed to vote because they believed Democrats were ignoring “poverty and inequality” and they wanted an explicit “economic message of taxing the wealthy to invest in infrastructure and jobs” that the Harris campaign failed to deliver.

These no-show voters, the pollsters heard, wanted to “hear a story about systemic change; instead, they heard a series of misaligned policy points that failed to connect. Put bluntly, voters felt that Democrats weren’t fighting for people like them or taking on big corporations who profit from price gouging and rich people who don’t pay what they owe in taxes.”

They also discovered that:

“The politicians these voters like most are Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … as leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge the system.”

Polling consistently shows a huge majority of Americans favor a national healthcare system, free college, widespread unionization, doubling the federal minimum wage, and want politicians who advocate “cracking down on tax cheats,” “putting a stop to price gouging” and “getting people the health care they need.”

Graham Platner’s “shocking” call to actually investigate and prosecute the many corrupt people and open criminals in the Trump administration — including Trump himself and his rapacious kids — is widely popular across a purple state; combine it with bold progressive policies and it’s a winning nationwide formula for 2026 and 2028.

Democrats need to fire their neoliberal advisors left over from the Clinton and Obama years, take a law-and-order posture against the corruption of Trump and his GOP lickspittles, and put forward FDR- and LBJ-like transformational programs to restore America’s middle class and our status as an example for the world.

Anything less merely guarantees — like the lukewarm messages of 2024 did — more Republican victories, more tax breaks for billionaires, and more people living in tents while what’s left of our liberties vanish behind the barbed wire of Trump’s and Miller’s “detention facilities.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “Build It Again!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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Trump is making insane proclamations about Iran again today, sabotaging efforts at peace by his unqualified, incompetent negotiating team. He’s lying to his supporters about obvious things like the price of gasoline. He’s not sleeping, up all night shouting in all-caps at anybody who will listen and, during the day, literally screaming at his aides.

His former-heroin-addicted brainworm-infected head of Human Services who has absolutely no training or experience in medicine or public health is destroying America’s public health. His wrestling billionaire head of education is shutting down the US Education Department.

His violent, alcoholic, unfaithful head of the Defense Department keeps violating the Constitution as well as both domestic and international laws about warfare. His wholly captured Department of Justice — now run by his personal lawyer — is demanding voting information from swing state after swing state and refuses to say why.

And the Republicans on the Supreme Court, the New York Times just told us, have invented a “shadow docket” to amplify the power of Trump and his billionaires while ignoring stare decisis and the Constitution itself.

There’s a question I keep coming back to as I read news like this seemingly each and every day of this bizarre reality show: what if this isn’t just “Trump chaos”?

What if it’s all part of a deep and evil plan? What if Trump’s billionaire “Epstein Class” donors really believe they can “plate their sin with gold and remain forever hurtless,” to paraphrase Shakespeare, and eventually, when the bill comes due, walk away and blame it all on Trump?

After all, they may be thinking, he’s 80 this year. Demographic tables suggest he won’t be around that long. JD Vance is certainly thinking about it.

Turns out there might be something to that little conspiracy theory:

Singapore’s Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan put it plainly last month when he told Reuters that the 80-year era of American-underwritten global peace and prosperity is “simply over.”

The rules-based international order built on the UN Charter, NATO, multilateralism, and the principle of sovereign equality — the very order that turned Singapore from a country with a per-capita GDP of $500 in 1965 into one touching $90,000 per family today — has ended, he said.

Not because it failed, but because the country that helped make it possible — America — has, in Balakrishnan’s careful diplomatic language, become “a revisionist power” under Trump and his rightwing billionaire-corrupted GOP.

In other words, Donald Trump isn’t just abandoning the world order America built after World War II: he’s actively replacing it with something else, something designed by and for autocrats and billionaires, and he’s doing it in close collaboration with some of the richest men and the most brutal dictators on the planet.

As a horrified world watched, Trump aligned himself (and thus America) with an international axis of oligarchs and corrupt strongmen that includes Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, North Korea’s Kim, and China’s Xi Jinping, among other lessers.

And because Trump is the president of the United States, that alignment doesn’t just represent his personal changes and loyalty on the world stage. It means America itself has been enlisted in the project of dismantling democratic governance across the planet.

Follow the benefits and the project gets very clear very, very fast.

According to the Washington Post, Trump launched the strikes on Iran at the urging of MBS and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran posed no imminent threat to America, and wouldn’t for at least another decade.

But Netanyahu has been trying to get an American president to attack Iran for decades and failed every time, until finally both Trump and Jared decided they wanted more billions from Saudi Arabia, who wanted us to strike Iran, too.

Why would Trump do what every other past American president has refused to do? It might have something to do with the Saudi Public Investment Fund controlled by MBS investing $2 billion in the private equity firm of his son-in-law Jared Kushner before the war started, and that Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the Saudi government since 2021, according to a bipartisan Senate and House report released March 19th. He’s also in the process of rustling up another five or $6 billion from the region.

And the New York Times reported that Saudi dictator MBS saw an “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East with himself in charge, and he has been actively pushing Trump to do his dirty work and use American troops to seize Iran’s energy infrastructure and drive out the Iranian government entirely. He’s even reportedly assured Trump the spike in oil prices will be temporary, a claim most economists flatly reject and is now absurd given that the Straight Hormuz is shut.

Meanwhile, the Iran war has been a windfall for Trump‘s partner, Vladimir Putin, who’d previously been in deep trouble. Despite reports that Russia has been aiding Iran in killing American soldiers, the Trump regime dropped sanctions on Russian oil already at sea, pouring as much as $10 billion a month into Putin’s desperately cash-strapped war-ravaged economy.

Even more shocking, Trump reposted Russian propaganda slashing Ukraine, and four pro-Putin Russian lawmakers were hosted by Republicans in Washington for their first visit since they’d become pariahs because of Russia’s brutal, bloody full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

On Ukraine, the picture is equally damning. According to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, Trump’s toadies told Ukraine that we won’t guarantee that country’s security unless Ukraine surrenders its own land in Donbas to Russia, which is precisely what Putin launched the war to seize.

That’s the same region that was at the center of the 2016 scandal, when Russian operatives told Trump’s then-campaign manager and former Putin agent Paul Manafort that Russia would help Trump’s presidential campaign if he’d look the other way on Putin’s ambitions in the region.

Now Trump is poised to deliver it. The Washington Post reports Whisky Pete’s Pentagon is diverting weapons meant for Ukraine to the Middle East, and has already told Congress it plans to redirect at least $750 million in NATO-provided Ukraine funding to restock American weapons burned through in Iran instead.

This is what Trump’s — and the other corrupt, morbidly rich autocratic world leaders — New World Order looks like as it’s being assembled in real time, and it’s a new world being ordered primarily to serve the interests of the world’s morbidly rich.

I’ve been writing about and warning about the billionaire capture of American democracy for years. This isn’t a theory anymore. And it’s not a particularly well-hidden conspiracy. Much of it is right out in the open, in fact.

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, just ~100 billionaire families poured a record-breaking $2.6 billion into the 2024 federal elections, representing one of every six dollars spent altogether.

That’s a 160-fold increase in billionaire political spending since the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision in 2010. Trump himself received over $450 million from ~150 billionaire families, according to the same analysis, three times what Kamala Harris received.

Elon Musk alone spent over $278 million to put Trump back into the White House and get himself an opportunity to reshape our government in a way that stopped investigations into his companies and instead directed billions in government contracts to them.

And now those ~150 families have their 13 fellow billionaires sitting inside Trump’s cabinet, the richest cabinet in American history, with our first billionaire president overseeing the systematic dismantling of every institution that once protected ordinary people from the predations of obscene wealth.

It’s not complicated once you see it as a whole.

Trump isn’t just cozying up to Putin and the others out of personal admiration or some inexplicable ideological affinity, though those both often appear to be real enough.

He, Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are all engaged in the same project that the lickspittles in his administration seem to have signed onto: replacing the democratic, rules-based world order — in which governments are accountable to their citizens and wealth is constrained by law — with a brutal and oligarchic one, in which massive wealth answers to nothing and no one, media is captured, and rulers brook no opposition.

A world where billionaires can park their money anywhere, buy any government, terrify the general population, and only rarely worry about some pesky democratic election changing the rules on them.

Our Founders explicitly worried out loud about exactly this. They structured the Constitution specifically to prevent a president from, for example, making war for private gain or at the behest of foreign powers. They gave Congress the sole power to declare war precisely because they wanted the American people to weigh in on and debate whether to dedicate their children’s lives and their money to a conflict.

Trump didn’t just bypass that; he bragged about destroying it. At a Republican fundraising dinner, he openly acknowledged that he wasn’t calling his unauthorized bombing of Iran leading to the deaths of 13 American service members a “war” because, as he put it, “you are supposed to get approval [for a war].” That’s a confession, not a gaffe.

The cost of this unauthorized, billionaire-fueled autocrat-promoted military adventure is now at least $1 billion a day and thousands of lives, with the administration reportedly planning to ask Congress for $200 billion more and the automatic draft beginning this December. That’s the same Republican-controlled Congress that just slashed money for Medicaid, education, food assistance, and heating fuel for poor families.

And it’s not like Americans support his war-mongering. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 32%, and just 25% of Americans are happy with how he’s handling the cost of living.

The hopeful news is that America’s beaten the rightwing oligarchs before. FDR called them “economic royalists” and built a nationwide movement powerful enough to take them on and push them out of politics. America broke up the robber barons in the Progressive Era. We can do it again.

But first we have to call this what it is: not a difference of political opinion, not a culture war distraction, but a deliberate, well-funded, internationally coordinated assault bent on destroying American (and, ultimately, worldwide) democracy itself.

The billionaires and ideologues behind this aren’t confused. They know exactly what they’re tearing down and what kind of oligarchy they’re trying to build up to replace our democracy. The crisis is whether enough of us see it clearly enough to stop them before their project is complete.

Spread the word. Share the story. Call your members of Congress today — you can find their contact information here — and demand they use their constitutional authority to stop Trump’s unauthorized war being fought at the behest of foreign autocrats and domestic billionaires.

Demand they tax the rich appropriately, reclaim the power the founders carefully and intentionally gave them, get dark money out of politics, and begin to restore the American government that Trump and Musk so viciously destroyed.

Democracy can’t defend itself. That’s our job.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Democracy can’t defend itself; that’s our job”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:

“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.

“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”

“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdani ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.

“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)

“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.

But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.

In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.

I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.

The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturning the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.

Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing Clarence Thomas’s recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”

That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.

This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.

We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.

There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.

It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”

And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.

Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.

Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.

The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Chip Roy makes McCarthy Blush”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations, and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.

This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump’s Way”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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Yesterday, I came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.

In just the past 48 hours I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.

This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.

For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.

As listener Steve pointed out to me recently, Republicans love to say we should run government “like a business.” But what business would take their most well-trained, competent employees and fire them because they’d been there more than a few years? It’s nuts.

But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.

Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them) but in reality they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:

First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.

Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.

With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.

Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.

Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.

Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.

This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.

Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.  

As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:

“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…

“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”

While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.

Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.

This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.

Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992.  Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.

In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.

In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.

What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?

Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.

Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.

Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.

Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.

The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.

And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.

Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.

States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:

“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.

“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”

A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:

“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…

“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.” 

The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:
— “Take away power from voters,”
— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”
— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”
— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and
— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”

As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.

For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).

So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.

Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Term Limits Won’t Drain the Swamp”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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Dear Marjorie Taylor Greene,

Thank you for standing up against unnecessary war, advocating for Epstein’s victims, and for defending the spiritual side of Christianity against Trump’s recent blasphemy.

Our mutual friend Congressman Ro Khanna (who you worked with on the Epstein legislation) reached out to you a few months ago about dropping by on my radio/TV program to have a friendly conversation; I haven’t heard back, but figured I’d reach out this way to suggest some things we could discuss.

You’re one of the few high-profile Republicans who’s not only disagreed with Trump on policy but has also clearly seen through his con-man façade of competence and, frankly, sanity. Well done! But let’s go a bit farther and talk policy, including a few areas where we may even agree…

Healthcare

America spends about twice as much as any other developed country in the world on healthcare, yet we have a lower lifespan and poorer outcomes than any other similar nation. We spend about $14,885 per person per year, while the average among other developed countries is about $5,967 (according to the OECD). Even Mexico, President Sheinbaum announced this week, will have comprehensive free national healthcare (including drugs) within 2 years.

Some of your Republican colleagues will say our poor outcomes are because we have “too many Black people” (referencing Prudential’s Frederick Hoffman’s old “genetically inferior Blacks” story that dominated healthcare and insurance policy in the 1910-1965 era covered in detail in my book on the Hidden History of American Healthcare). I’ve had several conservatives reference that old canard when they’ve come on my show. But that’s just a racist myth, and the proof is that these numbers hold for poor whites, too; just look at the numbers in overwhelmingly white West Virginia, for example.

As a conservative, I’d guess you’d be outraged by the billions of our healthcare dollars that are being shoveled into the money bins of the insurance and hospital giants. Your colleague Senator Rick Scott, for example, ran a hospital chain convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in American history at the time and walked away from it with hundreds of millions in his money bin; it financed his run for governor and senator from Florida. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the first CEO of United Healthcare, left with over $1.5 billion from his gig (although he had to return a few hundred million to avoid going to jail for fraud).

The Medicare Advantage scam is costing Americans billions a year and that profit all goes directly to the stockholders and executives of massive insurance companies. And now Trump is inserting for-profit insurance companies into real Medicare in 6 states as an “experiment” and Dr. Oz is talking about replacing real Medicare with Advantage plans as the default when people turn 65. Millions of dollars are going into the pockets of politicians of both parties (but mostly Republicans) who support this fleecing of the American people.

If America just did what every other developed country in the world has done, we’d preserve a fortune and save an estimated 68,000 lives and a half-trillion-dollars a year. And, as any EU citizen can tell you, the service will be better! That seems like something a conservative could get behind?

Education

America is the only country in the developed world where a person goes deeply into debt to get an education; an advanced degree can create a debt that takes decades to pay off, and is preventing young people from getting married, buying a home, starting a family, and discouraging would-be entrepreneurs like yourself from starting a small business.

When we gave returning GIs from WWII free college, almost 8 million young men and women not only got free tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room, board, and books like about half of Europe’s countries do today. And the result — the return on our government’s investment in those 8 million educations — was substantial.

The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune:

“[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.”

When people have an education, they not only raise the competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.

In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.

In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.

In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon and reshaped science.

Wouldn’t any rational conservative agree with former Republican President Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon that that’s a good deal for America? I realize the big banks who make billions in profits from all that student debt regularly pour millions into the coffers of your Republican colleagues, but shouldn’t America’s interest and and that of hard-working Americans come first?

Taxes

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class and could get and stay there with a single paycheck. Today it’s only 43 percent of us who qualify for that, and, to add insult to injury, it takes two paychecks to get there. In large part that’s because of Republican “trickle down” economics.

When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate on the morbidly rich was 74% and corporations 50%. That encouraged wealthy people to make tax-deductible donations to charity and stop taking money out of their companies after the first three million or so a year (in today’s dollars) when the top rates began to kick in. Billionaires weren’t even a thing, mostly, at the time; now we have a guy who’s about to become a trillionaire.

CEOs and senior managers often lived in the same neighborhoods as their workers, although their homes were a bit spiffier. Just look at old sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s and you’ll see what I mean. It also encouraged companies to invest their surplus money into R&D, new products and expansion, and better wages and benefits for their workers (all tax-deductions that helped them avoid paying corporate income taxes). Today, instead, since Reagan legalized stock buybacks (it used to be a felony called “stock price manipulation”), CEO’s recycle their companies’ money into buybacks to artificially inflate the value of the stock and thus their bonuses.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, the total national debt was about $800 billion — less than one trillion dollars — and had been going down every year since the end of WWII. If you add up the total value of Reagan tax cuts, the GW Bush tax cuts, and both sets of Trump tax cuts — all heavily weighted toward the obscenely rich — you’ll discover that the number is well north of the current $38 trillion of our national debt.

In other words, under those three Republican presidents America borrowed — in your name, my name, and our kids’ and grandkids’ names — $38 trillion and handed it all to the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos of our country so these “Masters of the Universe” could compete to see who could build the largest mega-yacht, shoot themselves highest into outer space on penis-shaped rockets, or build the most elaborately outfitted doomsday bunker.

If we went back to the tax rates we had when Reagan came into office, working class people would see a major tax break, the morbidly rich would have to again pay their fair share, and corporations would once again be incentivized to innovate their products and pay their employees enough to revive the middle class.

Wouldn’t a reasonable conservative think that’s a good deal for America? Eisenhower and Nixon certainly did; even Republican President Jerry Ford agreed and kept the top tax rate at 90%.

There are multiple other issues we could discuss and probably agree on. They include the benefits of:

— Building out public transportation like China, Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe have done;
— Cleaning up our air and water to save lives and slow down these increasingly deadly weather disasters (you do believe in science, right?);
— Protecting our public lands from greedy fossil fuel billionaires;
— Passing Republican James Langford’s immigration legislation to get undocumented people out of the country without brutality while cleaning up our immigration mess going forward;
— Getting off our addiction to fossil fuels and the Middle East;
— And even the “small government” idea of letting queer people and non-Christians simply live their lives in peace and quiet.

We can discuss these things or any issue you’d like; you can also talk directly to my listeners and viewers all across the country. Every week members of Congress come on my show for a full hour to take calls from listeners; you’re welcome to do the same, too, if you’d like. Bernie Sanders did that every week for 11 years. Ro Khanna is one of my regulars and has been for years; he can tell you all about it.

Hoping to hear from you,

—Thom Hartmann

Louise’s Daily Song: “Dear Marjorie Taylor Greene”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.

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Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in last weekend’s Hungarian elections because he ran a Navalny-style playbook, calling Orbán’s and his billionaire buddies’ capture of the media and most other aspects of Hungarian life a “state capture system” grounded in good old-fashioned corruption.

From Orban’s son-in-law pulling a Jared and using his government position to become one of the richest men in the country, to his billionaire cronies buying up the media like the billionaire Ellisons are doing here now, corruption was Magyar’s singular through-line message. And it worked, producing an overwhelming turnout and undeniable victory.

It will work here, too!

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch: “Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to the billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $38 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $38 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— The wholesale gutting of the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget and staffing so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can evade taxes with near-impunity, shifting the burden onto working people.
— The systematic sabotage and privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-connected corporations can profit off services that used to be part of the commons and kick some of that money back to the GOP.
— The explosion of dark money after Citizens United, allowing billionaires and corporate fronts to secretly pour unlimited cash into elections with zero accountability.
— The weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules while threatening outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises, accelerating consolidation so a handful of right-leaning billionaires dominate what Americans see and hear.
— Red-state-level voter suppression laws — strict ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced polling access — that entrench GOP power by making it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to participate.
— The Republican refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for years, a policy written by and for Big Pharma that forces Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— The systematic dismantling of campaign finance enforcement, turning the Federal Election Commission into a deadlocked, do-nothing body incapable of policing even blatant violations.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— The quiet rewriting of environmental and labor rules to favor polluting industries, often by GOP appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal judiciary with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges, often vetted by groups like the Federalist Society, ensuring decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weaken labor and consumer protections, and shield the GOP’s corruption from any sort of meaningful accountability.

Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”

It worked, even though it was an outrageous lie. Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M. “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of “stolen public money.”

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption. As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past decade, Republican politicians are entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on their lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

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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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— 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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