Thom Hartmann

Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator.

Here's what ICE is really doing in Minneapolis — and it's not enforcing the law

This week, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Nicole Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”

Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?

Well over a decade ago, the very Anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.

This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

At that time, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Barack Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bullshit premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.

Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”

Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.

That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.

No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.

Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.

Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling CNN's Jake Tapper:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.

When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.

Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.

For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.

This is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:

“[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.”

ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.

This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.

It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.

It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.

It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.

Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:

“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)

That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”

Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.

After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.

This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.

That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.

This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s damn well high time that it stop.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

It's not just ICE actions — Trump's words also point to a deeply sinister truth

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. On Tuesday, Rogan said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on Oct. 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on Sept. 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
Abraham Lincoln said our Founders created “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
FDR simply used the name of our nation on Dec. 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220-plus years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction.

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.

“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” As Malcolm Nance noted: “This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMEN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”
The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base:

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. …

“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964 were all Klansmen, and that’s where Donald Trump Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Ronald Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?

“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out.

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out.

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Here's the mounting evidence that shows Trump knows his end is near

They’re doubling down because they know their time is limited.

Their attempt to turn America into a Russia-like police state is suddenly failing, and a reckoning is coming. Donald Trump and his lickspittles look at the horizon and see mushroom clouds rising against a red sky, suggesting their season of power and brutality is about to turn on them.

As Mike Brock notes over at his excellent Notes from the Circus newsletter:

“The United States is experiencing the greatest political emergency since the Civil War. Right now.”

Sunday, masked ICE goons were going house-to-house in Minneapolis kicking in doors without search or no-knock warrants in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, federal law, state law, and local law. When a woman — a US citizen — whose home was being invaded and was trying to protect her children from the assault asked the secret police who’d just destroyed her front door to show her a warrant, they shot her with a Taser and zapped her with tens of thousands of volts of electricity.

Just before that, they’d shot Renee Nicole Good three times in the face for telling another ICE goon named Jonathan Ross that she wasn’t mad at him but was just going to drive away. Trump regime officials blanketed the airwaves over the weekend claiming Good was a “domestic terrorist” and they can kill anybody they want, whenever and wherever they want, as long as they say those two magic words. Now the DOJ is refusing to investigate the murder, causing four resignations in the Department.

Yesterday in Minneapolis, ICE goons stopped a man who was trying to drive to his home, causing the goons searching his neighborhood for brown-skinned people to think he was following them. They stopped him, confronted him, and demanded to know, “Did you not learn from what just happened?” in clear reference to Good’s murder, suggesting he could be next.

That was followed by a US citizen Hispanic couple being stopped by ICE in Minneapolis and, when the husband refused to show them ID because he’s a citizen and they had no warrant that named him and he’d not committed any crime or traffic offense, two ICE SUVs rammed his small car, disabling it, then fired tear gas at him when he got out of his vehicle.

They then snatched a US Marine veteran out of her car, beat her, laughed at her pain and screams, and told her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”

Incredible @statuscoupnews.bsky.social interview with Skye, who says she’s a Marine Corps vet and appears to have just been released from Whipple. She says she was trapped by ICE, yanked out of her car and stomped on. 1/2

[image or embed]
— Gillian Brockell (@gbrockell.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 9:46 PM

This is all criminal activity. As Malcolm Nance writes at his brilliant Special Intelligence newsletter:

“Minneapolis is quickly becoming the Boston Commons of a possible 2nd American Revolution, a peaceful one where we use people power to hit the streets.”

Calling the ICE surge an “unlawful federal invasion” that is “terrorizing Minnesotans,” Attorney General Keith Ellison (a regular guest on my show) unveiled a lawsuit against DHS and said simply, “This has to stop.” He added:

“The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota. People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted.”

Obviously, these are not the actions of a legitimate administration that is following the law and the Constitution. But more importantly, these are also not the actions of an administration that believes what they’re doing is right.

Trump, Kristi Noem, et al are freaking out right now, desperately hoping they can provoke somebody, anybody, to take a shot at or run over an ICE goon and create a martyr to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, which arguably could legalize much of this very behavior.

Hopefully, people will stay calm and not give them that excuse. But even if somebody does do something rash and stupid, America will see right through the pretext. Trump won’t get the validation or credibility that he so craves and believes he needs to survive politically.

Trump also knows his economy is falling apart. If you subtract the elder-care jobs that are being created by roughly 10,000 boomers a day aging into retirement, we’ve lost jobs every month since April 2nd when Trump declared his “Liberation Day” tariffs, with manufacturing being hit particularly hard (lost over 100,000 jobs) because of the increased tariff cost of raw materials. Fully two-thirds of Americans believe we’re now on the edge of — if not already fully in the midst of — a serious recession.

This has provoked Trump to the desperate move of threatening Fed Chairman Jerome Powell with prison if he won’t loosen interest rates, a move that would stimulate the economy over the short term (in time for the 2026 elections) but cause devastating inflation down the road. Powell, like Minnesota, isn’t taking it laying down, however. He called out Trump in a shockingly blunt (for a Fed chair) video.

On top of this, Trump is twisting in the wind around Venezuela and Greenland, the two foreign policy stunts he’s trying to pull to distract us from the chance that he was funneling young women and girls from Mar-a-Lago — and perhaps his teenage talent agency and Miss Teen beauty pageant — to his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are in full cover-up mode, but it’s not working.

In the past week Trump’s lost two big votes in Congress, one on Affordable Care Act subsidy extensions and the other a procedural vote in the Senate setting up a bill that will limit his war powers. He’s threatened each of the “turncoats” with primary challenges and will probably follow through, but he’s sounding increasingly desperate.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), the former Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a biweekly guest on my radio/TV program for years, pointed out last week that he knows of multiple Republicans who will be turning on Trump once they’ve made it through their primaries and he can no longer threaten them. They’re increasingly sick of him, his petty grievances, his gaudy gold geegaws, and his pro-Putin and world-destabilizing rhetoric.

The earliest 2026 congressional primaries are scheduled for March 3, and the last regular primaries are currently set for mid‑September, with June being the busiest month, so sometime mid-summer you can expect that Trump will lose a significant amount of the power he currently holds. And nobody is taking JD Vance (or whatever name he’s using by then) all that seriously as an heir apparent; the man is completely lacking in relatability and charisma.

None of this means that we’re home safe. Trump and his rightwing billionaire funders are still openly opposed to democracy, red state governors are actively purging people in their blue cities from the voting rolls with the approval of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and billionaire-owned and -run media operations from CBS to Fox to Sinclair daily sing his praises.

But there’s also an active and growing resistance across media, in local communities, and emerging within both parties. Even as Facebook and Twitter censor anti-Trump posts and armies of trolls and bots attack Democrats and progressives, average working-class people are waking up hard and fast from coast to coast.

History tells us that when dictators or, in this case, wannabe dictators find themselves backed into a corner they tend to lash out furiously, knowing things won’t turn out well for them if they can’t pull off a last-minute victory.

Trump is haunted by the fact that 69 of Richard Nixon’s closest associates (including two Cabinet members) were indicted for going along with his lawlessness, 48 were convicted, and 40 went to prison including his Attorney General, White House Chief of Staff, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, White House Counsel, Special Counsel to the President, Deputy Director of the Committee to Re‑elect the President, and Secretary of Commerce.

While Bondi, Noem, Patel, Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, and others involved directly in Trump's crimes and coverups are probably confident they’ll get away with it all because Trump will pardon them, that’s not a sure bet and they’re all still vulnerable to imprisonment on state charges even if they do get pardoned. And, of course, there’s no doubt whatsoever that if Trump getting off scott-free means he has to throw them under the bus that he’ll do it, as he has done with almost every other aide throughout his life.

Given the stakes, then, it’s reasonable to expect that the whole bunch of them, Trump’s entire criminal enterprise, will be working with him to produce a Hail Mary of some sort to prevent Democrats from taking power this fall and office next winter. The Insurrection Act is a good bet, but they’re going to need a credible excuse, which may be why they’re going so far out of their way to antagonize the good citizens of Minneapolis.

But I don’t believe it’ll work; even his sycophants on the Supreme Court seem to be tiring of his toddler-like tantrums and repeated violations of US and international law.

In summary, we need to redouble our resistance and our vigilance as we enter these critical days and months. These are, as Thomas Paine noted, “the times that try men’s souls.”

But also, to quote Paine’s appendix to Common Sense:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. … The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This deeply damaged psychopath is now Trump's role model

This past week, Donald Trump demanded that the Pentagon produce an invasion plan for Greenland, an action that would have world-changing consequences to the benefit of Vladimir Putin and the detriment of Europe, democracy, and America. He followed that by suggesting that Marco Rubio should be the next president of Cuba, the same way Putin had promised his generals and oligarchs that they could have Ukraine.

Step-by-step it appears that Trump is trying to turn America into Russia. We saw the latest and most gruesome example this weekend as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — who shot her puppy in the face and bragged about it — went on national TV to defend Jonathan Ross shooting Nicole Good in the face, then calling her a “f------ bitch.”

What’s becoming increasingly clear to Americans — which is why so many millions were in the streets this weekend — is that Trump is trying to use ICE as his own private version of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a secret, unchallengeable police force loyal to him rather than the law, whose job is to terrify and pacify the population so they won’t object to having their pockets picked and their freedom taken.

And his threats against Greenland are designed to break up NATO, fulfilling Putin’s deepest desire, which could ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Atlantic alliance and eventually to the military domination of Europe by Russia.

Both Putin and Trump appear to want the thorn in their sides of the example of a democratic Europe to fail, thus making the world safe for looter-mentality strongman autocracies.

I used to think that Trump always did whatever Putin told him to, during both his administrations and even before, because Putin was blackmailing him or dangling billion-dollar Trump Hotel Moscow opportunities in front of him.

While both of those options are still pretty likely, increasingly I’m seeing that Trump is doing what Putin suggests because he wants to be like Putin. And he wants America to be like Russia.

These two men are deeply damaged psychopaths who never matured emotionally because of the psychological trauma of their childhoods.

They think alike, as do most dictators in history, men who feel fundamentally insecure and get their feeling of safety by dominating others. Abusers who were abused and now inflict abuse.

As a result, they both delight in killing people via their militaries.
They get high by terrorizing people with their secret police and militias.
They both hate and fear a free and open press and any sort of legislative or judicial power that may constrain them.
They both have corruptly made billions from their political positions, both use public monies to shower wealth and opportunity on their friends, and both wield the police and judicial powers of their nations to punish their enemies. Trump’s most recent is Fed chair Jerome Powell.

Other dictators throughout history have shared these same characteristics. Hitler was an abused, unwanted child, much like Trump and Putin. Saddam Hussein, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco were all the victims of violent alcoholic fathers who beat them and their mothers, growing up in severely dysfunctional families.

Historian Brian Junkermeier notes that, “Stalin’s father was so violent, that on more than one occasion, he physically abused Stalin to the point where he would have blood in his urine for several days.”

All of these men grew up to be abusers, not just of their family members but of their entire nations.

Most Americans, not being psychopaths who survived cruel childhoods, don’t understand and can’t identify with these impulses. But it’s a safe bet that many of the people who’re enthusiastically answering the ICE recruiting call to “reclaim our nation” from Black and brown people and democracy-loving liberals also share Trump’s and Putin’s propensity for violence.

After all, it wasn’t until Renee Nicole Good told Jonathan Ross that she wasn’t mad with him and was leaving — a statement that she was in control and was leaving her abuser, the exact moment when most abusive husbands who kill their wives take that final step — that he fired three times into her head and called her a “fuckin’ bitch.”

It’s a classic abuser’s move, particularly against women.

Meanwhile, a handful of emotionally stunted rightwing billionaires who are democracy-skeptical are right there with Trump, using their financial power to promote autocracy and oligarchy. Many have had their worldview twisted by the power their own wealth gives them.

Robert Caro once noted:

“Power doesn’t corrupt. Power reveals. When a man is climbing, when he needs votes, when he needs allies, he is careful. When he has power, he no longer needs to be careful — and then you see who he really is.”

In that, he’s echoing Lord Acton’s famous 1887 observation:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Trump, the billionaires he surrounds himself with (13 in his cabinet, over a hundred others as major donors), and the police-state toadies like Miller, Noem, Vance, Homan, Patel, Bavino, etc are — based on observable behaviors and statements — almost universally opposed to democracy.

They’re trying to normalize turning America into an oligarchy with the First Family making billions in their first dozen months and their secret police openly killing people in the street and then blaming their victims on national television.

The danger with this is that oligarchy, as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, is a transitional form of government that rarely lasts more than a generation or two. It’s so unstable because when the people realize the oligarchs are ripping them off and essentially stealing the nation’s wealth for themselves, they tend to rise up and loudly object.

That’s what we’re seeing with the No Kings and other protests here in America.

Average Americans know that when modern GOP-driven Reaganomics started in 1981 fully two-thirds of us had a good, middle-class life with a single paycheck but today it takes two paychecks to barely reach that level, which is why the middle class has collapsed down to fewer than half of us.
They know that the top 1% has extracted more than $50 trillion from working class people over the past 44 years via Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and the destruction of the union movement.
They know that when Reagan came into office a home cost three times the average salary and today it’s ten times a single salary (or five times a two-income household’s income).
They know their parents went to college for free or cheap and they’re now indebted for half or more of their lives.
They know that healthcare and health insurance used to be affordable when hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofits, and are now a massive trillion-dollar annual wealth-extraction scheme that’s making people like Rick Scott and Dollar Bill McGuire richer than the pharaohs.

So, when the morbidly rich seize power and rip off the working class, history shows that people rise up against the new oligarchy, leaving Trump and his billionaires with two choices.

They can, like they did in the face of FDR’s overwhelming popularity and success with the New Deal, simply retire from politics and just go back to making money and running their businesses (1933-1981).
Or they can, like they did in Russia two decades ago (and are doing today in numerous other countries including Iran and Venezuela), come down on the protestors with an iron fist, a steel-heeled boot (to paraphrase Grover Cleveland), led by state power and a brutal secret police and intelligence force.

Trump and the hard-right billionaires who made him president appear to be betting option number two will work out for them as well as it did for Putin.

It’s up to us and the politicians we’ve elected to represent us to make sure they don’t succeed and our nation returns to the rule of law.

History tells us how this moment will end if We the People hesitate.

Autocrats like Trump don’t stop because they suddenly find a conscience; they stop when institutions push back, when laws are enforced by judges and the military refuse illegal orders, and when ordinary people refuse to be intimidated into silence.

Russia didn’t fall into tyranny overnight. It slid there step by step, excuse by excuse, “reasonable step away from law and order” by reasonable step, until the police and military were no longer servants of the law but enforcers of loyalty, and regime-aligned billionaires became untouchable partners in plunder.

America is standing at that same fork in the road right now.

Either we insist — loudly, relentlessly, and electorally — that no president is above the law, that no secret police may operate without accountability, that no billionaire may buy immunity, and that democracy is not optional…or we allow fear, exhaustion, and cynicism to finish the job Trump has begun.

This is quite literally a battle over whether the United States remains a democratic constitutional republic or becomes another cautionary tale taught to future generations who inevitably and naïvely ask how a free people could have let it happen.

The choice is still ours, at least for the moment. But history makes one thing clear: once the jackboot is fully laced, it rarely comes off without blood.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This chilling Trump confession means he must be impeached

Democrats should be loudly calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump now, run on it in November, and then, when they take the House, actually do it.

Because what he’s is doing right now is not “norm-breaking,” or “provocative rhetoric,” or even the oft-quoted “Trump being Trump.” It’s an open assertion of unchecked power, limited — in his own words — only by his own “personal morality.”

His shocking interview in the New York Times was decisive. That isn’t how a president speaks in a constitutional republic. Instead, it’s a classic example of how a strongman, a wannabe Mussolini or Putin, speaks as he tries to reinvent the nation so the law becomes optional when it comes to him, his flunkies, and his billionaire buddies.

When asked if there were any limits on his power, he told the Times’ reporters, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He added, “I don’t need international law.”

And he’s acting it out in real time, creating his own private, unaccountable, masked army (or death squad) that’s actively terrorizing American citizens and being used to punish the cities and states of any politicians who dare stand up to him or call him out.

Not to mention his petty revenges: last week, he cut off billions in childcare and other low-income funding to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York in direct violation of the law and the Constitution because those states’ leaders had the temerity to defy him.

The Founders saw this coming. They obsessed over it, and relentlessly warned us future generations about it. And they built a solution for it into the Constitution they drafted in the summer and fall of 1787: impeachment.

James Madison, in Federalist 47, cautioned that the greatest danger to liberty wouldn’t come from a foreign invasion, but, instead, from a president who turned the powers of government into instruments of personal will:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Alexander Hamilton, no radical by any stretch, wrote that impeachable offenses are those which “proceed from the misconduct of public men” and injure society itself. He hoped, in Federalist 68, that no man with “[t]alents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would ever reach the White House, but that’s exactly what we’re now watching in real time.

And, no, impeachment is not some “unprecedented Democratic overreach.” Republicans have demanded impeachment of Democratic presidents for nearly a century, and tried multiple times, most recently just two years ago.

Republican legislators screamed about impeaching Franklin D. Roosevelt over his threat to pack the Supreme Court if they didn’t stop knocking down his New Deal programs.
They floated impeachment of Harry Truman for going into Korea without a formal declaration of war.
They threatened both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with impeachment over the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and the War in Vietnam.
They introduced impeachment resolutions against Jimmy Carter over the Panama Canal treaty.
They campaigned openly to impeach Barack Obama over his “dictatorial” executive orders and the “communist” Affordable Care Act.

The idea that impeachment is too “divisive” to even discuss now is a naked lie, and a very convenient one for authoritarian Republicans. What’s different today isn’t the tool of impeachment; it’s the target.

Trump has now made explicit what Richard Nixon tried to pull off but failed: that his presidency exists above the law and he can freely ignore both domestic and international law. Nixon at least had the decency to mutter it privately, once even telling David Frost that, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump has put it into public policy.

When a president claims the law doesn’t restrain him, as Trump has done — when he treats Congress’ approval as if it were optional, federal judges as if they were political enemies, treaties as inconveniences that can be gotten around or even ignored, and war powers as personal prerogatives — impeachment stops being political theater and becomes a constitutional necessity.

While I vehemently disagree with Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires, gutting USAID and other agencies, and inflammatory rhetoric (among dozens of other things), this is not about policy disagreements.

It’s explicitly about his unilaterally making war without congressional authorization, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, dangling pardons and financial opportunities for his allies but the law as vengeance for his critics, and the obscenity of his mass pardons for the criminals who attacked our Capitol on January 6th.

It’s about, in other words, a president who’s told us all, bluntly, that legality and government power — including the power to execute a woman who was just driving home after dropping off her child at school — flows from his own definition of “morality,” his “own mind,” and no other source, the American Constitution be damned.

He’s asserting the “morality” of a man convicted of fraud, adjudicated a rapist, repeatedly accused of sexual assault, who gleefully takes bribes of gold, Trump hotels, and jet planes and rewards the bribers with tariff reductions, American weapons, and other benefits.

This is how Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán transformed Russia and Hungary from democracies into strongman single-party autocracies, and Trump is eagerly following their examples (and apparently taking their regular advice).

Here’s an example of what articles of impeachment could read like, a version that could be read into the Congressional Record tomorrow:

Articles of Impeachment Against Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

Article I — Abuse of Power and Usurpation of Congressional War Authority

In his conduct as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of his office by initiating and directing acts of war without authorization from Congress, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

President Trump ordered and executed military actions against the sovereign nation of Venezuela, including strikes within its capital and the seizure of its head of state, without a declaration of war or statutory authorization from Congress. In doing so, he substituted his personal judgment and the desires of his donors in the fossil fuel industry for the constitutional role of the legislative branch, nullifying Congress’s exclusive authority to decide when the nation enters hostilities.

Such conduct is not a policy disagreement but a direct assault on the separation of powers. The Framers vested the war-making power in Congress precisely to prevent unilateral, impulsive, or self-interested uses of military force by a single individual.

Wherefore, President Trump has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government and has committed an abuse of power warranting impeachment and removal from office.

Article II — Contempt for the Rule of Law and Constitutional Limits on Executive Power

Donald J. Trump has asserted that his authority as President is constrained only by his “own morality,” explicitly rejecting the binding force of domestic law, treaty obligations, and international legal norms ratified by the United States.

By publicly declaring that neither Congress, the courts, nor the law meaningfully constrain his actions, President Trump has advanced a theory of executive power fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution. Treaties ratified by the Senate are, under Article VI, the supreme Law of the Land.

A President who claims legality flows from personal judgment rather than law announces an intent to govern as a sovereign, not as a constitutional officer.

This conduct constitutes a profound breach of the President’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Article III — Corrupt Use of the Justice System for Political Retaliation

Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of the presidency by directing or encouraging the use of federal law enforcement and prosecutorial authority to target political opponents for retaliation and intimidation.

The President has publicly demanded investigations and prosecutions of political adversaries while signaling protection for allies. Such conduct weaponizes the justice system and undermines equal justice under law.

This pattern of conduct constitutes an abuse of power and a violation of the public trust.

Article IV — Subversion of Democratic Institutions and Checks and Balances

Donald J. Trump has engaged in a sustained campaign to undermine the independence of the judiciary, the authority of Congress, and the legitimacy of constitutional constraints on executive power.

By encouraging attacks on judges, disregarding statutory limits imposed by Congress, and treating oversight as illegitimate, the President has sought to weaken the institutions designed to restrain executive excess.

Such conduct represents a betrayal of constitutional responsibility.

Article V — Abuse of the Pardon Power to Undermine Accountability for an Attack on the Constitution

Donald J. Trump has abused the pardon power by issuing broad clemency to individuals who participated in or supported the January 6, 2001 attack on the United States Capitol.

While the pardon power is substantial, it was never intended to erase accountability for a violent assault on Congress itself. This use of the pardon power undermines deterrence, encourages future political violence, and weakens constitutional governance.

Conclusion

In all of this, Donald J. Trump has demonstrated that he will place personal authority above constitutional duty, power above law, and loyalty to himself above loyalty to the Republic.

Wherefore, Donald J. Trump warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

Then comes the part Democrats keep flinching from: begin a loud and public campaign for impeachment. After all, just this week he told Republicans that his biggest fear if the GOP loses control of the House is that he’ll be impeached for a third time.

On Thursday afternoon, I got one of Trump’s daily fundraising emails. This one didn’t ask if I’d yet made a donation to get my name on the list for my “tariff rebate check” like others this week and last but, instead, said (and the bold type is also bold in his email):

“Dems plan for 2026 is simple but disturbing to EVERY MAGA Republican:
1. Flip the House
2. Flip the Senate
3. IMPEACH PRESIDENT TRUMP
4. Kill the MAGA agenda permanently”

He’s not just talking about impeachment; he’s fundraising on it! Democrats, frankly, should do the same.

I realize that a conviction will never pass the current Senate (although we may be surprised if he keeps doing and saying truly crazy and offensive things), but it’s important to get this into the public dialogue and prepare the ground for next year.

That’s why Democrats must tell voters now exactly what they intend to do with power if they win it this coming November (or before, if the GOP loses any more House members).

And they need to stop pretending that through some weird magic our democracy can be preserved by silence, caution, or simply hoping that this convicted felon will suddenly discover restraint or cave to a judge’s demand.

There is a real possibility, by the way, that today a handful of Republicans in the House could decide that preserving Congress’ war powers, the power and independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law matters more than protecting one aging politician. After all, yesterday five Republicans in the Senate voted against Trump on his Venezuela oil-stealing campaign and nine in the House voted against him on healthcare. It happened with Nixon, and it can happen again.

But it won’t happen if Democrats continue to treat impeachment like a dirty word instead of a constitutional obligation.

Yes, it’ll piss off Trump’s base and rightwing media will go nuts. But his base is already filled with rage and rightwing media will do what they do no matter what, impeachment or not. Democrats need to stop cowering.

So let’s say what needs to be said without euphemism or apology:

Democrats should introduce articles of impeachment now, run on them this November, and then actually do it.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This disgraceful Trump White House lie is a signpost to darker assaults

The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website this week, purporting to tell the history of the January 6 insurrection attempt. It opens with bulls--- like this (which, interestingly, appears to be 100 percent AI-generated):

“The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump — despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.

“In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power. This gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy.”

The most dangerous lies a government can tell aren’t about how tax cuts will create prosperity or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although those were bad. When a malicious, corrupt government wants to truly break down trust in a society to more easily seize and manipulate it politically and loot it economically, it inevitably tells lies about the past.

Because once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support.

That’s what makes the Trump administration’s new official White House website about January 6th so chilling. This isn’t spin or selective memory: it’s an industrial-scale, government-run attempt to erase the memory of a violent insurrection and replace it with a fantasy narrative where Donald Trump and the attackers were the heroes, the police and Mike Pence were the villains, and Joe Biden simply winning the election was the real crime.

The site claims that January 6 was marked by “minimal violence”; that the rioters who smashed doors and windows, smeared feces on the walls, urinated on carpets and papers on Democratic members’ desks, contributed to the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others were “peaceful”; and that the police officers trying to prevent the mob from greater violence weren’t brutally assaulted but instead “allowed” the “protesters” into the Capitol.

The White House claims the police “aggressively” fired “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions. Video evidence shows officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building — actions that facilitated entry — while simultaneously deploying violent force against others. These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”

One section even argues that the real injustice wasn’t the beating of officers with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and fists, but that Trump’s violent supporters were later prosecuted at all.

Another section claims that the January 6th defendants were victims of “political persecution,” while the police officers who defended the Capitol were the aggressors.

These are simple, blatant lies, something we’ve grown to expect from Trump and his people but are shocking, nonetheless.

More than 140 police officers were injured so severely that day that they were hospitalized. We watched officers crushed in doors, dragged down stairs, tased into heart attacks, beaten, eyes gouged out, and left bleeding on the ground. We heard their screams live on television.

Multiple courts reviewed thousands of hours of video and multiple juries sent hundreds of Trump’s thugs to prison. Multiple judges — many appointed by Republicans — called January 6th an “attempted coup” and an attack on America’s constitutional order.

And now our government itself — today in the hands of a billionaire wannabe dictator and his lickspittles because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let billionaires buy an election — is trying to tell Americans none of it was real.

History would like to have a word with us about this despicable attempt at revisionist propaganda.

In Nazi Germany, the regime’s most important lies weren’t about economics or foreign policy; they were about violence. Nazi street thugs were recast as patriots while the victims of their violence, including socialists, gays, immigrants, and Jews, were reframed as the provocateurs.

When the Nazi state lied about who committed violence and why, it taught its citizens that paramilitary force is legitimate when used by the “right” people.

In the Soviet Union, people didn’t necessarily believe the government’s lies, but that didn’t prevent the USSR’s dictatorship from holding power. Instead, it produced something worse: mass cynicism.

A common joke in Russia about the two major newspapers — Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”) — was “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestia there is no truth.” (В ‘Правде’ нет известий, а в ‘Известиях’ нет правды.) When citizens assume the government is lying all the time, truth stops mattering, participation becomes mere theater or social climbing, and power becomes untouchable and, thus, increasingly brutal.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the goal of constant lying during the Nazi era wasn’t persuasion about the rightness of Hitler’s pronouncements, laws, and flunkies but widespread public disorientation.

When people can no longer tell fact from fiction, she pointed out, they stop resisting and retreat into a sort of semi-tribal existence. Loyalty to “your” particular tribe replaces the rule of law.

And that’s exactly what this lie-filled January 6th website is doing.

By declaring that Trump’s mob was innocent and the American criminal justice system is corrupt, it sends a clear message: violence in service of Trump will be forgiven, even celebrated, going forward into the future.

This is an old tactic that dictators have used since the days of Ancient Rome. Putin today has motorcycle gangs called the Night Wolves, for example, who terrorize “liberals” and gays in Russia with impunity. It’s not hard to imagine the militia members in America who’re now being recruited by ICE being turned loose on the rest of us in a similar way once the “immigration emergency” is “resolved.”

The police who defend democracy, these White House lies tell would-be vigilantes, will be abandoned by the very government that employs them, while the courts that are the historic arbiters of the law will be smeared and ignored. Elections that should reflect the will of the people will instead be treated as optional suggestions rather than binding decisions.

We’ve seen this movie before in America, too. After the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” mythology rewrote an armed rebellion to preserve slavery into a noble struggle for “heritage.” That lie didn’t heal the country, but instead justified the rise of the Klan and a century of racial terror, voter suppression, and political violence that endures to this day.

These official lies about January 6th are laying the groundwork for the same kind of future for those of us who may oppose the Trump regime and its successors.

This isn’t just about salving Donald Trump’s fragile, 10-year-old ego. It’s also a setup to condition the public to accept the next time Republicans lose an election and respond with violent attacks.

The message isn’t subtle: if January 6th was “peaceful,” then January 6th is within the new norm and can — or even should — happen again. If police were the villains, then police can be ignored next time. If courts are corrupt, then their verdicts don’t count when they’re inconvenient to these new American fascists.

A democratic republic can survive policy mistakes and bad presidents; G-d knows we’ve had our share of both. What it can’t survive, though, is a government that looks straight into the camera and tells its people that violence didn’t happen when everyone watched it live.

In other words, this depraved new website isn’t just a lie: it’s an invitation.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

We were warned Trump's abuse of power would prove lethal

When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of Trump’s ICE goons Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.

As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood” — as in “Do Good” — to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.

When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.

Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.

Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.

Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.

In Essay #6, in 1772, Dogood wrote:

“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.”

Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.

Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.

And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.

For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.

James Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system — splitting the government into three co-equal parts — that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).

Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that yesterday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.

To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. … [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”

Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she/Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.

This isn’t an uniquely American problem: it’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: when state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz noted, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.

Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.

If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.

Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.

There is a remedy for the madness of King Donald — are we too cowardly to use it?

When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they’ll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump.

Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.

That memory of Ludwig and his architectural obsessions has been haunting me lately, and it’s frankly astonishing that more people in the media aren’t asking the same question I’m bringing up here (and people are constantly calling into my radio/TV show about): “Is Trump losing his sanity?”

I’m not talking about his well-documented lifelong narcissism, his sociopathic inability to feel or even understand the pain of other people, his bullying, or even his compulsive lying, greed, and lechery. This is about whether he’s fit for the job he’s holding or is losing his touch with reality in a way that endangers both our nation and world peace.

When Trump held his press conference announcing the invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, a reporter asked the most basic question imaginable: Who is running Venezuela now and going forward?

Trump first claimed that he was in charge, but then when other reporters asked for details he waved his hand toward the men standing behind him and said, “They are.”

Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Gen. Dan Caine, and Pete Hegseth.

The expressions on their faces told the real story: Surprise, confusion, and even alarm. This was clearly, visibly news to them. Shocking news, even.

Did he just decide to BS his way through the press conference like he’s done so much of his life? Didn’t he realize this was a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution? Did he think for a moment that he’s the king of the Americas? Or the world?

The next day we discovered the truth their expressions revealed; there was no plan for governing Venezuela, or even trying to via an occupation Iraq-style. There was no congressional authorization; in fact, he told the oil companies before the raid but didn’t bother to inform Congress. (Although the oil companies now say he’s lying.)

There was no public debate and no involvement of any visible constitutional process involved in this invasion and body-snatch. Under our federal system, the president doesn’t get to just improvise an occupation or administration of a foreign nation from a podium.

Even Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush didn’t try to pull that off; all sought congressional authorizations for their wars and each gave explanations that at least gave a hat-tip to the traditional American values of democracy, peace, and the rule of law.

Congress, after all, declares war under our Constitution, as well as controlling the purse that makes that war possible. Even the idea of “running” another country would require massive legal, diplomatic, and military frameworks, and now we discover that none of that stuff existed. Instead, apparently, Trump had an impulsive thought or idea and just blurted it out.

That moment should have set off loud alarms throughout Washington and should have shot across our media like a meteorite. Instead, it drifted by as simply another strange episode in a presidency that’s taught us to pretend the abnormal is now normal.

Democrats (and a few Republicans) condemned Trump’s claim that he was running Venezuela; Republican politicians are now twisting themselves into pretzels to try to justify it. Reporters were simply confused. It’s nuts.

And in just the few days since then, Trump has openly threatened to seize Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. These aren’t policy proposals. They also aren’t rooted in American or international law, military or political strategy, or diplomacy.

They are, instead, Mad King Ludwig-like expressions of personal fantasy, of imperial imagination, of a man who appears increasingly convinced — who actually believes — that all power in America and perhaps around the world flows from his will alone.

And then there’s Trump’s bizarre online behavior, like posting over 100 times a night, and promoting a tweet saying that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz hired a hit on State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, close personal friends of Walz’s.

Or his refusal to consider the last Venezuelan election winner, María Corina Machado, to run the country because she “stole” the Nobel prize from him.

Rachel Maddow on her television program suggested the real reason Trump invaded Venezuela was simply because he could. Like a child, or a mad king, he wanted to play with his soldiers, watch them kill people and blow things up, and he doesn’t want anybody to tell him that he can’t.

And, I would add, eventually he plans to turn them on people like you and me. Once he’s made sure they’ll do anything he demands, no matter how bizarre, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. That’s why he’s now going after Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and other members of Congress for telling soldiers they don’t have to follow illegal orders.

Lev Parnas, who once worked closely with Trump and still hears from people inside his orbit, writes that Trump is receiving regular intravenous infusions of a new Alzheimer’s medication, administered through veins in his hands, whose known side effects include “sleepiness” during the day, “poor judgment,” and “impaired impulse control.” It could explain the bruises, the CT scans and MRIs, and the regular cognitive tests that the medication requires.

Not to mention the increasingly bizarre and grandiose behavior.

I’m not diagnosing Trump, but I am watching — a shocked world is watching — a pattern of behavior that is becoming more erratic, more impulsive, and more detached from constitutional reality week by painful week.

This also isn’t a partisan observation; I’m describing precisely the scenario the Framers and a later Congress worried about when they designed safeguards for presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment wasn’t written for removing villains but rather for those moments when a president can’t or won’t reliably discharge the duties of his office but doesn’t have the good grace, insight, or ability to step down himself.

But constitutional tools are only as strong as the people willing to use them.

Bavaria in the 19th century had fewer options than we do. It had no elections to depose Mad King Ludwig, and no amendment laying out a clear procedure for replacing him.

For years, Ludwig had ministers serving him who watched how crazy he’d become but nonetheless delayed, rationalized, and hoped the problem would solve itself. It wasn’t until the damage became so great, as the state trembled on the verge of bankruptcy, that it was impossible to ignore any longer.

Modern America, on the other hand, has elections, courts, and a theoretically independent Congress. And we have the 25th Amendment. What we lack right now, however, is courage in the GOP and Trump’s cabinet.

Republican members of Congress know that a president can’t unilaterally invade or administer foreign nations on his own whim or impulse. They know that threatening annexation destabilizes the entire world, and Trump’s handed both Putin, Netanyahu, and Xi the rationalizations they all crave to expand their own empires.

Even Republicans know that governing by impulse isn’t strength but, instead, represents a very real danger to our republic. And yet they remain silent, calculating that confronting Trump is riskier to their careers than indulging him is to the country.

That GOP calculation is the real threat.

Trump’s love of military spectacle also fits perfectly — and dangerously — into this pattern. Like Ludwig staging operas and medieval fantasies in his version of the Kennedy Center, Trump treats America’s armed forces as props in his own pathetic personal drama. Rallies, salutes, parades, flyovers, and dramatic announcements substitute for deliberation, applause substitutes for legitimacy, and the human costs, the constitutional limits, and the long-term consequences are all fading into the background.

Neuschwanstein still stands today, beautiful and empty, a monument to what happens when fantasy replaces governance. Bavaria survived despite Ludwig, not because of him. Twenty-first century America, however, doesn’t have the luxury of turning its current ruler into a picturesque lesson (complete with a Ludwig-style ballroom) after the damage is done. A nuclear-armed superpower can’t afford indulgence that’s pretending to be patience.

The Constitution isn’t self-enforcing and doesn’t rise up on its own when norms are trampled. It instead relies on people in positions of authority to choose responsibility over fear; that’s why federal officials and our soldiers pledge their allegiance to our Constitution rather than to our government or any particular administration or person.

We hold the rulebook sacred, not the rulers.

If Republicans continue to refuse to even acknowledge the danger in front of them, history suggests the reckoning will come anyway, just at a far higher cost.

Bavaria eventually acted, not because it was easy but because delay had become more dangerous than dealing with a psychologically incapacitated and emotionally stunted ruler. The question facing the United States today is whether we’ll learn from that history or insist on repeating it.

Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they’re stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown.

Let your elected officials, particularly the Republicans, know your thoughts on the issue. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121. And pass it along…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.

This brutal doctrine explains what Trump's done to America — and what's coming next

When Donald Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.

There was a brief, shining moment when Russia was a democracy. I visited there at the time. Starting with Mikhail Gorbachev and lasting about a decade, Russia embraced the ideals of the European Enlightenment, which itself was inspired by the North American colonists’ contact with Native American tribes who had been practicing democracy for millennia.

Then Vladimir Putin came along, began suing media outlets and large law firms into bankruptcy so his oligarch buddies could take them over, packed the courts and rigged the elections, and finally outlawed dissent, calling dissenters “the enemy within” and “domestic terrorists.”

Instead of power flowing from the people up, it began to flow from Putin down, turning the Russian democracy into an autocracy, functionally a dictatorship with the patina of democracy because they still have elections.

Putin, via an oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, gave a man named Paul Manafort $10 million in 2005 to install a Putin-friendly president (Viktor Yanukovych) in Ukraine as the first step to essentially turning that country into a vassal state, the way they’d already done with Belarus, Chechnya, Georgia, Transnistria, Syria, and Kazakhstan.

When, in 2014, the Ukrainian people threw out Yanukovych and voted for democracy, Putin invaded and seized Crimea, one of the most strategically important parts of the country (and where my daughter went to college), a preface to his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine proper.

With this was born the Putin Doctrine:

1. Russia’s policy decisions, both foreign and domestic, are dictated by Putin’s whims, not by the will of parliament (the Duma), or what’s best for the country or its people. He protects and enriches his family and friends while punishing his enemies.

2. The rule of law internationally is irrelevant to the new Russian state; instead, “might makes right.” If another country has something you want, or you don’t like the way it’s being run, just invade, or send millions of bots and internet trolls via social media to disrupt its society and politics (see: Brexit and Trump 2016).

3. The world is now multipolar, with the “great powers” of Russia, China, and the United States having final say in political and military activity in their regions regardless of objections from local governments. Russia will control Eurasia and eventually all of Europe; China will control Asia and eventually Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and the US will be the ultimate power in the Americas, both North, South, and Central.

Manafort, meanwhile, came back to America and ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for “free” while shuttling insider political information to Russian intelligence to exploit with social media trolls and paid podcasters.

While there have been times in America’s past when we’ve flirted with this sort of worldview, it’s never been made official US policy. Even when we’ve attacked other resource-rich countries, we’ve at least provided an excuse grounded in “making the world safe and advancing democracy.”

That’s because the United States, both international and domestically, used to stand for the principles of the European Enlightenment. They included the idea that democracy was the natural state of humanity, ordained by what Thomas Jefferson called “Nature’s God”; that power would be diffused across three co-equal government branches; and that the public good would take precedence over the desires of the president’s or politicians’ friends.

The Putin doctrine — fully adopted by Trump and his lickspittles with his media lawsuits, the invasion of Venezuela, and his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) that identifies Democrats and anti-ICE protestors as potential domestic terrorists — tears all that down.

Trump’s adoption of the Putin Doctrine ignores our history of democracy at home and the promotion of democracy abroad, saying instead that whoever has the stronger military rules the region.

It abandons the “rules based order” that the United Nations proclaimed in the 1950s — which has prevented another world war for 81 years — and says instead that if you can successfully capture the head of a foreign state (no matter how good or bad he or she may be) you should simply go ahead and do it.

Adolf Hitler was following his own version of the Putin Doctrine when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, kicking off World War II. The oligarchs of the Old South were following it when their Confederate Army commenced the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. And now Trump has made America officially embrace it.

Our Founders never envisaged a future where an entire political party would be captured by a small group of oligarchs politically led by a demagogue, who would then abandon the ideals expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution.

As Dan Sisson and I document in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction, America’s Founders considered the demagogue part of the equation, but thought Congress and the Courts would protect the nation; they never imagined that six corrupt Supreme Court justices would rewrite the Constitution to give a president immunity for all crimes committed in the Oval Office after making legalized political bribery the official policy of the country.

As Christopher Armitage points out, about the only government institutions that are trying to preserve democracy in America now are the Blue states. And they have considerable power, because Trump can’t pardon state-based prosecutions even when they’re against officials in his own federal government.

Now that the Trump regime has seized almost complete control of the GOP, has its friends in charge of most of our major media and law firms, has corrupted our federal justice system, has deployed masked secret police across the country, and is challenging voters’ rights at multiple levels, America needs the Blue states to get more coordinated to push back against MAGA’s Putin-like behaviors in Red states.

Each of us who lives in a Blue state has an obligation to reach out to our state’s politicians and demand that they stand up to this corrupt, illegitimate regime. As Armitage notes, we must push them to:

“Prosecute federal officials who commit assault, kidnapping, or civil rights violations in your state. Build public revenue streams that don’t depend on federal funding. Expand state safety nets to catch the people federal cuts will drop. Demonstrate what good governance looks like.”

The differences between the quality of life in oligarch-run Red states and Democratic-run Blue states have become so conspicuous it’s amazing they’re not more widely known:

Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Trump-supporting Red states only produce 29 percent of our income and wealth.
The median family income in Blue states is $74,243. In Red states it’s $63,553. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.
Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are better educated, with 36 percent of their population having some college education compared to Trump’s counties at 25 percent.
Residents of Blue states live 2.2 years longer, on average, than residents of Red states.

Republican/oligarch-controlled Red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

Spousal abuse
Obesity
Smoking
Teen pregnancy
Sexually transmitted diseases
Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
Bankruptcies and poverty
Homicide and suicide
Infant mortality
Maternal mortality
Forcible rape
Robbery and aggravated assault
Dropouts from high school
Divorce
Contaminated air and water
Opiate addiction and deaths
Unskilled workers
Parasitic infections
Income and wealth inequality
Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
People on welfare
Child poverty
Homelessness
Spousal murder
Unemployment
Deaths from auto accidents
People living on disability
Gun deaths

America stands at a crossroads, as the Trump regime moves us closer every day to replacing our democracy altogether with a Russia-like federal autocracy.

There’s no Abraham Lincoln in charge of our government, so it falls to us and our Blue states to enforce the rule of law, stand up for democracy, and show the skeptics and “dark enlightenment” billionaire Tech Bros that the will of the people still matters here.

That doesn’t require waiting for the election this fall or in 2028; it just needs the governors and administrations of the Blue states to stand up against Trump’s embrace of the Putin Doctrine and preserve what’s left of our democratic traditions.

Ballotpedia has a good site at https://ballotpedia.org/States#State_governments where you can drill down to the contact information for your state’s elected officials to let them know you want them to push back hard.

Good luck: the fate and future of the American Experiment may well rest in your hands.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.

Is this key service about to save Trump from a midterms mauling?

It’s not just a brand new year; it’s a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election.

Just a week ago, for example, Trump’s Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it’ll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they’re received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get “processed,” which may happen days later.

In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state are enthusiastically purging voters from the rolls as they get ready for this fall. Remember, reporter and economist Greg Palast found, using official federal and state numbers, that in 2024:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

You’d think we each have a right to vote, rather than voting being just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways.

Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled, for example, that we have a right to own a gun. As a result, before a state or local government can take away your gun, they must first go before a judge to prove the necessity of doing so.

But, Republicans on the Court tell us, Republican secretaries of state can eliminate your right to vote without even telling you; how does that make sense?

After all, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

The 19th Amendment references “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 26th Amendment is all about, “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote…”

Additionally, the Constitution, in Article I, Section 4, says that Congress can make federal laws that overrule state laws restricting or regulating voting:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…”

And, sure enough, Congress did just that in 1993 when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Act because, among other things, it provided for the option of instant voter registration when a person gets a driver’s license in every state in the union.

Now known as 52 U.S. Code § 20501, this law of the land opens with:

The Congress finds that -

(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right

(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right and

(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.

And it wasn’t a particularly contentious law when it was passed: every Democrat present in the Senate voted for it (Rockefeller missed the vote) as did all but two Republicans.

So how did we get from the Constitution repeatedly asserting a “right to vote” and Congress passing a law that unambiguously proclaims that right, to the current state of affairs where states regularly and methodically deprive citizens of their “right” to vote and instead claim that it’s merely a privilege?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, much of the blame rests with the most conservative and regressive of our federal institutions, the Supreme Court.

The first real test of the NVRA came in 2018, when Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, went on a voter-purge binge (that hit Black, student, and elderly neighborhoods particularly hard) and was sued by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for violating Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

In a bitter 5-4 decision, the Republican majority ruled in Husted v Randolph that purging voters because they failed to return a junk-mail-like postcard was entirely legal.

It’s a practice that was called “caging” back when Karl Rove’s guy was allegedly doing it and it was illegal then but has, since that Court ruling, spread to pretty much every Republican-controlled state in the nation.

They’ll identify a part of the state that they consider particularly “prone to fraud“ — in other words, filled with a lot of Black and brown people — and mail postcards that look like junk mail into those precincts. When people failed to return them, they are automatically removed from the voting rolls. In most cases they don’t even know they’ve been purged until they show up to vote and are turned away.

Justice Samuel Alito’s decision was particularly biting, claiming that the arguments made by the citizens who’d lost their right to vote were “worse than superfluous” and their argument that they shouldn’t have to regularly check in with the Secretary of State’s office to stay on the voter rolls represented logic “no sensible person” could agree with.

Sensible or not, in his dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that around 4 percent of Americans move every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters — nearly 20 percent of its 8 million registered voters — as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll....”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was even more scathing.

“Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters,” she wrote, “including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.

“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.”

She then quoted the “right to vote” NVRA preamble noted above, and, essentially, accused the conservatives on the Court of helping Republicans in the states they controlled engage in massive racial and economic discrimination in the voting process.

“[This decision] entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate. … Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote.”

The “right to vote” took another hit when the State of Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a recount of the 2000 presidential election but five Republicans on the US Supreme Court ignored the 10th Amendment (“states’ rights”) and stopped the recount.

That was a good thing for George W. Bush because when the Florida vote was later recounted by a consortium of newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, they found, as the Times noted on Nov. 12, 2001:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won...”

Nonetheless, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dismissed all the nation’s concerns about the Court flipping the 2000 presidential election in that totally partisan 5-4 decision, writing in his opinion:

“[T]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Which casts us in a pretty terrible light. As Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) points out:

“The constitutions of at least 135 nations — including our fellow North American countries, Canada and Mexico — explicitly guarantee citizens the right to vote…”

Instead, Raskin notes, because of five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court we’re in the company of countries like Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, and Pakistan.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda and they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to suppress the vote and thus rig the system.

That’s why they’ve already successfully passed previously-unthinkable major voter suppression laws in 18 states and have them pending in many more. They’ve changed the law in Georgia and several other states so that they can now throw out the votes from entire neighborhoods or cities where they don’t like the outcome; all they have to do is vaguely assert a “suspicion of fraud.”

Between the massive gerrymandering effort the GOP has launched nationwide and the Post Office’s changes that’ll hit Blue states with high levels of mail-in voting (some only have mail-in voting), the next few elections are going to be a real challenge for Democrats.

Additionally, as you’re reading these words, millions of voters are being purged from the rolls in Red states, particularly in Blue cities with significant minority populations.

As a result, this fall we’re going to have to show up in absolutely overwhelming numbers just to get squeaker victories in these now-heavily-rigged Republican-controlled states.

Unless enough of us stand up, speak up, and get active to regain control of Congress this fall and push legislation protecting American voters, Republicans will continue to eviscerate the voting right they’ve now turned into a privilege until it becomes completely meaningless.

And that will signal the end of America as we know it.

Trump's sinister project proceeds — this is how we stop it

The turn of the calendar is more than a ritual. It’s a reminder that democracy is not self sustaining, not guaranteed, and not permanent unless we choose it again and again.

If we want this new year to be about renewal rather than retreat, we need to give some serious thought to what it’ll take to reclaim and defend the democratic republic that generations before us fought, organized, and sacrificed to build.

The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years. Warlord kings. The morbidly rich. And theocrats.

The Founders knew exactly what they were fighting. They wrote about it constantly, in the Declaration of Independence and in decades of letters to one another. They believed those three forces were the natural enemies of freedom, and unless they were restrained, they would always claw their way back into power.

Today, every one of those tyrannies is back. And they’re not even pretending otherwise.

The first tyranny was the warlord king. For most of human history, power came from violence. Kings ruled because their ancestors slaughtered their neighbors, seized land, and enforced obedience at sword point. They claimed God had chosen them, demanded loyalty, and crushed dissent.

By 1776, monarchy was so normalized that the idea of overthrowing a king was considered radical, dangerous, and insane. But that was exactly what the American Revolution set out to do.

King George III ruled as all kings did. He taxed, punished, and occupied at will. He treated the colonies as property. Jefferson spelled it out in the Declaration, describing a ruler who had become a tyrant, “unfit to govern a free people.”

The Founders rejected that model completely. No kings. No thrones. No divine rights.

Fast forward to now.

We now have a president who openly admires strongmen and autocrats. He talks about ruling, not governing. He issues decrees like a monarch and demands personal loyalty and a constant stream of gifts and flattery.

He surrounds himself with suck-ups, fellow billionaires, and yes men. He’s reimagined the White House not as the people’s house but as a palace, complete with plans for a massive ballroom modeled after the gilded throne room of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

This is not just cosmetic: it’s symbolic, reflecting how kings think.

At the same time, this regime talks casually about seizing territory, controlling other nations’ resources, and using military and economic force to bend countries to our will. Greenland, Panama, and now Venezuela. That isn’t diplomacy: it’s warlord logic dressed up in patriotic slogans.

The second tyranny the Founders feared was the morbidly rich.

In the 18th century, they were called lords, dukes, earls, and princes. They inherited wealth they didn’t earn and used it to control governments. They owned monopolies like the East India Company, whose corruption and brutality helped ignite the American Revolution itself.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote again and again about how wealth corrupts democracy, never mincing words. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that the central duty of a republic was to protect the poor from the tyranny of the rich. Jefferson agreed, writing that the rich prey on the poor like animals “devouring their own kind.” Adams warned that once wealth and power become hereditary, elections would collapse into corruption.

Look around today.

Trump is an oligarch who’s stocked his administration with oligarchs. Billionaires write this administration’s policy. Billionaires get tax cuts. Billionaires dismantle regulations that protect workers, consumers, and the planet. The morbidly rich now sit openly in the halls of power, not behind the curtain but right at the table, shaping an economy designed to funnel wealth upwards and lock it there.

This system Trump is reinventing is not capitalism. It’s aristocracy with better branding.

The third tyranny is the most dangerous of all, because it wraps itself in moral certainty. The theocrats.

The Founders knew them well. State churches. Mandatory tithes. Clergy meddling in lawmaking. Religious authorities insisting they spoke for God and therefore couldn’t be questioned.

Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to escape compulsory church attendance and taxes that funded the clergy. Jefferson and Adams spent years fighting off efforts to inject Christianity into our government. They were explicit, repeatedly arguing that religious rule destroys freedom of conscience and poisons democracy.

Today, the mask is off.

A sitting vice presidential candidate can stand on a stage and declare, “By the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation.” That isn’t faith; it’s Christian nationalism. It’s theocratic rule by another name.

Rightwing Christian leaders now openly argue that their particular church’s doctrine should override the Constitution. They demand control over our schools, courts, and bodies. They want public money for their religious institutions and the religious laws they dictate enforced by the state.

This is exactly what the Founders warned us about. Exactly.

And all three tyrannies are now working together.

A would-be king who demands loyalty. A billionaire class that bankrolls him. A religious movement that sanctifies his power and declares him “chosen” by their god.

This alliance has toppled democracies before. We’ve watched it happen in real time in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and beyond, and it always starts the same way. A strongman rises to power and brings along with him the oligarchs. He hands off power to theocrats in exchange for institutional church support. Elections are hollowed out and courts captured by big money. And finally, as he bleeds the country dry, dissent gets criminalized.

We are not immune. We never were.

So what do we do?

We do what the Founders did.

We remember the importance of democracy. We teach real history and real civics. We tell the truth about why this country was founded and who it was founded to resist. We make sure the next generation understands that freedom is fragile and must be defended.

We resist. In the streets, in town halls, at school board meetings, and at city councils. We call Congress at 202-224-3121 and keep calling. We make it impossible for them to pretend we consent to oligarchy, theocracy, or a wannabe king’s gilded rule.

And we reform. We get money out of politics. We overturn Citizens United. We make voting a right, not a privilege that can be stripped away. We break the grip of billionaires and corporations on our democracy and make them pay their fair share to maintain our republic rather than just running up our national debt.

This is the moment.

If we fail, two and a half centuries of struggle will slip away, replaced by a warlord/oligarchic/theocratic state dressed up in red, white, and blue.

If we succeed, we can finally finish the work the Founders began and build a nation that truly belongs to all of us. And that’s worth fighting for with everything we have.

See you in the streets … and on the air.

In 2026, this hardball GOP tactic will help us rebuild the Democratic Party and win

Earlier this week, I published an article about how Republicans have spent millions funding the Green Party since 2016 to bleed votes away from Democrats, and how useful idiots on the left have enthusiastically participated because they don’t understand the difference between a first-past-the-post versus a parliamentary electoral system.

The responses have been enlightening: there are still progressives who think the solution is to complain about the Democratic National Committee, trash people who point out these simple political realities, and promote Green and Working Families Party candidates even more aggressively to “scare” Democrats.

As if any of that would work.

The simple reality is that progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the hard right that’s captured the GOP: we should be learning from them. They had this come-to-Jesus moment back in 2008 when, to their shock and horror, America elected our first Black president.

Instead of just complaining, they got active and in just one short decade “conservative” activists completely took over the RNC, purged it of its “moderates,” and now are transforming America into something entirely new based on the models of Russia and Hungary.

I’m not suggesting that we should be learning from the GOP’s bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest men and women.

But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party in the wake of that 2008 election and forced the entire conservative establishment to lurch so far to the right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at transforming today’s Democratic Party, kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party successfully did a decade and a half ago to take power within the GOP and then nationally.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, in 2009, was in charge of the Tea Party taking over the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and hard right conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:

“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?

“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with local Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power. (Typically they’re voluntary, but in some states or cities they even carry a small salary.)

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees who then go on to hold elected office, and who draft a party's platform.

They’re also generally the first people elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say. As a result, they’re massively more influential than average citizens.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the Republican Party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.

Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.

This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:

“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.

“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”

Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that November’s elections.

In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.

But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: they’d filled up the Republican Party and there were no empty GOP precinct committee-person seats anywhere in the country.

And we saw the results of that Precinct Committee takeover first with big Republican victories in 2012 and most recently in the 2024 election: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by hard-core rightwing activists who’ve taken over the party and are also seizing control of school boards and other local offices.

In 2012, just three years after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the inner workings of the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and Tea Partiers picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and nine new seats in the Senate.

And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.

Progressives need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.

The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.

Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:

“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”

If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate/neoliberal “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to moving back to its FDR roots by adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.

And as we see right now in Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.

We’ve been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, No Kings marches, or even voting, although those are all important.

But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in three short years, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.

If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.

So, in response to the skeptics and cynics who responded to my article yesterday, I’d add the favorite line of my dear friend the late talkshow host Joe Madison. Whenever people would call into his SiriusXM show to complain about Democrats, he’d always say: “So, what are you going to do about it?”

We have 11 months before the next national elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.

Good luck and get started!

Repeat after me: this progressive pipe dream only helps the GOP

Here we go again, only this time it appears to be the Working Families Party that’s fixing to help elect Republicans. They’re proudly proclaiming that by the 2028 presidential election they hope to have candidates on the ballot in 18 states. The party’s national director, rapper/musician Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, told the Guardian:

“Less and less (sic) people are identifying as being a Democrat or Republican. The brand of the Democratic and the Republican parties are underwater consistently. I don’t think there’s been a better and more right time for a third party to emerge in this country that speaks to the interest of everyday working people. I believe that our time has come.”

You’d think by now we would have learned that having progressives seize control of the Democratic Party is a hell of a lot more successful strategy for rebuilding our democracy and our middle class than running against it. In Florida in 2000, for example, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida — and thus the White House — by 537 votes.

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states like Florida not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate John Kerry instead.

Vanity candidate Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College over Hillary Clinton that year, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes andTrump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had progressives not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president, and we never would have been lied into two illegal wars, given trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, or gotten John Roberts and Sam Alito on the Supreme Court.

Had progressives in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared the trauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths; Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch on the Court; another $5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires; and the ongoing DOGE assault to our democracy.

America would be a very, very different country with a progressive Supreme Court and an expansion, rather than the destruction, of New Deal and Great Society programs that built and sustained the middle class. In other words, ironically, we’d be a lot closer to the goals of the Green Party today if they’d never run a presidential candidate in those elections.

This is not to say the Democratic Party is perfect. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin is now hiding an autopsy of the 2024 election, there are still on-the-take Democrats in the neoliberal Problem Solvers’ Caucus and taking piles of cash from AIPAC and corporate PACs, and in many states genuine progressives in the mold of FDR and LBJ are still viewed by the party’s bosses with a jaundiced eye.

But America — with our 250-year-old operating system — is one of only a handful of democracies worldwide with first-past-the-post (FPTP) winner-take-all election systems, which pretty much force a nation into a two-party system. Under those circumstances, a third party will always pull votes (and, thus, victories) away from the main party it’s most closely aligned with philosophically.

This is why Republican donors have historically been so enthusiastic about supporting the Green Party and Democratic donors occasionally pitch in for the Libertarians.

Reporting from AP, CBS, and others document a broad 2024 GOP-linked network that helped Stein and Cornel West with ballot access and legal support in swing states including Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and others, often using Republican-aligned lawyers and consultants who have also worked for Donald Trump or state GOP organizations.

In 2016, so many Republican donors and politicians had helped fund Stein’s effort that the federal election commission forced her to return a fraction of it, almost a quarter-million dollars.

Most likely they’re now courting the Working Families Party, following Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win running on both the Democratic and Working Families tickets in New York (Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families ballot.)

But while the synergy of Working Families and Democrats worked in New York, that was only because it’s one of a tiny handful of states (including Oregon, Mississippi, Connecticut, and Vermont) that has fusion voting or its equivalent, allowing a single candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple parties.

Whether New Yorkers voted for Mamdani on the Democratic ticket or the line for the Working Families Party, the result was the same: a vote for Mamdani.

Anywhere else in the country, though, it would have been a vote drawn away from the Democratic Party because when the Founders put our system of voting together our form of democracy was a new thing. Voting was a novel experiment, by and large, after Europe had been ruled for almost two millennia by kings and queens.

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party “parliamentary democracies” in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — every one of them countries that became a democracy after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on.

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for the higher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to the main, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by the system and my vote for Gore becomes the one that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including my hometown of Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation at the federal level would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining the Democratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and actually elect more progressives to office, something that can only be done within the Democratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the party that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, the end of legal apartheid, and that built the world’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers” or, to a lesser extent, the neoliberal “New Democrats.”

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP.

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying our planet.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Zohran Mamdani, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within the Democratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, they know we must first take over the DNC. (Yes, Bernie is an independent and Zohran prefers the Working Families party, but both ran as Democrats.)

In other words, every one of us should be working to get inside the Democratic Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party and the MAGA movements, and it’s what progressives must do today with the Democratic Party.

No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting. And this is not a small or incidental issue: the stakes for 2028 may well include the continued survival of America as a democratic republic.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind the movement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

And, hopefully, the Working Families Party folks will turn down all the Republican money that will be dangled in front of them and choose not to run candidates in places where there isn’t either fusion voting or instant runoff voting.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates.

Beware this Trump trap — it's just like the rest of his rotten economy

Yesterday, both Donald Trump and his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”

As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.

There was a time when you bought things.

You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

That America is disappearing.

Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.

Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job — a college education — has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt — the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students — and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.

That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: it reports on you.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone — banking, work, navigation, healthcare — being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multi-billion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.

Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.

And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy — all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits — America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

It’s gotten so bad that apps — which also acquire and then sell our data — have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99 percent instead of the 1 percent. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy — not billionaires — sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: we simply rented our way out of it.

The GOP health care onslaught is horrifying but the way they got us here is worse

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 28 percent, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:

They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;
They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100 percent of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);
They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;
And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ’80s and ’90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91 percent top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70 percent of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in the Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his eight years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218 percent increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86 percent to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for two years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

Pass it along and wake up everybody you can!