This unspoken threat is hastening America's downfall — and it's not MAGA

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters. — President Grover Cleveland

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. — President Theodore Roosevelt

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

In a recent Wall Street Journal report, “The Ultrarich Are Spending a Fortune to Live in Extreme Privacy,” reporter Arian Campo-Flores pulls back the curtain on a disturbing new reality: our country’s wealthiest citizens now inhabit a parallel America of private jets, members-only restaurants, “sky-garage” condos, and luxury wellness centers they can rent out entirely for themselves.

These aren’t just perks; they’re a full-blown escape from public life. The ultra-wealthy no longer wait in lines, navigate public institutions, or share community space with ordinary Americans.

And that’s the real danger: once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy.

America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself.

  • It happened in the 1850s when the plantation aristocracy rose up, destroyed democracy in the South, and then tried to conquer the entire nation.
  • It happened again when the Robber Barons of the Roaring 20s crushed unions and helped trigger the Republican Great Depression.
  • And it’s happening today in the aftermath of the Reagan/Bush/Trump Revolution, as billionaire fortunes have exploded over the past 44 years and the American middle class has collapsed.

What’s different now is that modern oligarchs aren’t just accumulating money; they’re disappearing into a privatized world where only the ultra-wealthy (and their servants) exist.

The WSJ article shows us how: private jet portals that bypass public airports and the TSA, restaurants where only the chosen enter, wellness centers rentable like personal playgrounds, condos where your car rides up the elevator with you, curated social clubs guaranteeing you never encounter an unfamiliar (or less wealthy) face.

This isn’t luxury. This is withdrawal, an intentional retreat from democratic society.

But beneath the marble floors and private butlers lies something even more sinister: wealth hoarding as a form of pathology. As I’ve argued before, extreme wealth accumulation often mirrors a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called “hoarding disorder” in the DSM-5.

Ordinary hoarders afflicted with this mental illness fill their homes with newspapers and empty tin cans; billionaire hoarders fill offshore accounts and investment portfolios with billions they can never use, driven by the same compulsive “more, more, more” impulse.

Historian Michael Parenti described this perfectly: wealth becomes an addictive, monomaniacal hunger that consumes every other human concern.

When people suffering from this pathology then also use their wealth to seize vast political power, society pays the price. And thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Bellotti and Citizens United (as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America), these damaged hoarders can now use their fortunes to buy politicians, distort laws, functionally stop paying taxes to support the public good, and reshape our entire society just to serve their addiction.

They construct or acquire vast media properties solely to convince ordinary people that deregulating toxic businesses and cutting taxes on billionaires will somehow benefit them. They then invest millions in politicians who repay them with billions in tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.

As a result, Americans suffer the consequences: collapsing wages, millions without healthcare, skyrocketing poverty, underfunded schools, rampant gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, deadly pollution, poisons and chemicals in our food and water, and a middle class that’s been gutted and left gasping.

The WSJ article then reveals the final stage of this sickness: once the morbidly rich have extracted so much from society that it begins to crumble, they abandon society entirely.

When the richest Americans want nothing to do with public spaces, those spaces begin to deteriorate. Public airports, public hospitals. Public lines. Public restaurants. Public parks and neighborhoods. Public transportation. Public institutions of any kind.

A democracy can’t survive when its wealthiest citizens refuse to share a common world with the people they govern.

We’ve defeated oligarchs before.

  • President Grover Cleveland warned of corporations using their “iron heel,” to become “the people’s masters.”
  • President Teddy Roosevelt condemned the “invisible government” of the morbidly rich.
  • FDR denounced the “economic royalists” who tried to overthrow democracy for profit.

All confronted their eras’ mentally ill hoarders, broke their power, taxed their fortunes, and built the foundations for a middle class that became the infrastructure of American stability.

Now that responsibility falls to us.

Members of today’s billionaire class are richer than any kings or pharaohs in history, and — thanks to decades of Republican deregulation, four corrupt Supreme Court rulings, and Reaganomics tax-slashing — are far more politically powerful.

They’ve used corrupt Supreme Court rulings to twist America’s laws so that their wealth is protected, their taxes are minimal, their influence is enormous, and their responsibility to the public is nonexistent.

This WSJ article isn’t just a window into their private world, it’s a warning flare. A democracy where the powerful live above and beyond the public realm is no democracy at all.

The path forward is the same one that saved us in the 1890s and 1940s: name the crisis, confront the hoarders, break up monopolies, end billionaire-funded political corruption, restore progressive taxation to put the country back together, and rebuild the middle class.

We can do it. We’ve done it before. In future posts I’ll be detailing many of the steps that have worked in the past here in America and succeed today in other countries.

Tag, we’re it. Spread the word.

This outrage is too grotesque to absorb — yet it explains so much

Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.

Still, nothing prepared us for the Washington Post revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on Sept. 2.

You’d expect rogue militias or failed-state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.

What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.

After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.

They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.

And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.

History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.

It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.

And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.

Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”

That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.

The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the U.S. is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”

Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.

This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.

And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on Sept. 2 was not a one-off. It was the beginning of a campaign.

The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.

The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.

If these men had truly been high-value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.

Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border-crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small-scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.

International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.

Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.

For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.

The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.

This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.

Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.

The strike on Sept. 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.

That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.

Nobody elected Trump or Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.

Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.

If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.

If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.

And if Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.

America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.

America is in hell — but history reveals its inevitable end

Thursday was probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in our lifetimes. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that eerily echoes this moment and may give us some hope?

Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-style ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.

In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?

My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War II straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days. American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.

In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into two different wars. The first is an external war against Venezuela, using America’s drug problem as an excuse. The other is something very much like a 21st-century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans, with his masked secret-police ICE army at the forefront.

Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.

George Bush Jr wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba.

But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.

Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes the pilots of small boats off the coast of Venezuela and anti-ICE protestors in his fantasized “war zones” like Portland for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped Adams carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.

The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.

In the late 1790s, Adams was president and Jefferson was vice president. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called the Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-30 era).

Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House.

Adams was leading the US in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.

Adams’ rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.

On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.

“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.

“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote again to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.

Jefferson later wrote in his personal diary how it would — like today, with California and Illinois leading the charge against Trump’s neofascist agenda — fall to the states to prevent the loss of American democracy:

“Their usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the [Democratic] Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch.”

Democratic Republican Congressman Albert Gallatin submitted legislation that would repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalist majority in the House refused to even consider the motion, while informing Gallatin that he would be the next to be imprisoned if he kept speaking out against “the national security.”

Adams then shut down almost 30 newspapers, throwing their publishers, editors, and writers in prison. The most famous to go to jail was Ben Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. Within a few months, Adams had effectively silenced the opposition.

Then he went after average citizens who spoke out against him.

Adams and his wife traveled the country in a fine carriage surrounded by a military contingent. As the Adams’ family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes.
Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said, “There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

It was the darkest moment in our new nation’s short history. But then a new force arose.

When Adams shut down the Democratic Republican newspapers, pamphleteers — that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications — went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging the state governments to stand tall with Thomas Jefferson.

One of the best was a short screed by George Nicholas of Kentucky, “Justifying the Kentucky Resolution against the Alien & Sedition Laws” and “Correcting Certain False Statements, Which Have Been Made in the Different States” by Adams’ Federalists.

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson. (Rembrandt Peale/New York Historical Society)

On Feb. 13, 1799, then-Vice President Jefferson had a courier hand-deliver a letter and copy of Nicholas’ pamphlet to his old friend Archibald Stuart (a Virginia legislator, fighter in the War of Independence, and leader of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans).

“I avoid writing to my friends because the fidelity of the post office is very much doubted,” he opened his letter to Stuart, concerned that Adams was having his mail inspected because of his anti-war activities.

Jefferson pointed out that “France is sincerely anxious for reconciliation, willing to give us a liberal treaty,” and that even with the Democratic newspapers shut down by Adams and the Federalist-controlled media being unwilling to speak of Adams’ war lies, word was getting out to the people.

Jefferson noted:

“All these things are working on the public mind. They are getting back to the point where they were when the X. Y. Z. story was passed off on them. A wonderful and rapid change is taking place in Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York. Congress is daily plied with petitions against the alien and sedition laws and standing armies.”

Jefferson then turned to the need for the pamphleteers’ materials to be widely distributed across states that might resist Adams.

“The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness in the course of the present summer,” he wrote, “if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. Under separate cover you will receive some pamphlets written by George Nicholas on the [Alien and Sedition] acts of the last session. These I would wish you to distribute....”

The pamphleteer — today he would have been called a Substack writer — was James Bradford, and he reprinted tens of thousands of copies of Nicholas’ pamphlet and distributed it far and wide. Hand to hand, as Jefferson did with his by-courier letter to Stuart, was how what would be today’s independent progressive writings are distributed via email.

In the face of the pamphleteering and protests, the Federalists fought back with startling venom. It was led by a media machine — the remaining newspapers — largely owned by wealthy Adams backers as the Jefferson-backing newspapers had been shut down and their publishers and editors imprisoned.

Vicious personal attacks were launched in the Federalist press against Jefferson, Madison, and others, and President Adams and Vice President Jefferson were no longer on speaking terms. Adams’ goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Jefferson’s Democratic Party, and he had scared many of them into silence or submission.

“All [Democratic Republicans], therefore, retired,” Jefferson wrote in his diary, “leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President.

“Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of [Democratic] Republicans in phalanx together, until the legislature could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain, than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the [Democratic] Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the [Democratic] Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair; and the cause would have been lost forever.”

But Jefferson in the Senate and Gallatin in the House held their posts and fought back fiercely against Adams, thus saving — quite literally — American democracy. Jefferson and Madison also secretly helped legislators in Virginia and Kentucky submit resolutions in those states’ legislatures decrying the Alien & Sedition Acts. The bill in Virginia, in particular, gained traction.

As Jefferson noted in his diary, between his and Gallatin’s resistance in Washington, DC and several state governments standing up against Adams’ having shut down their newspapers and using the army to threaten their protestors:

“By holding on, we obtained time for the legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions, saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period, can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country however.

“The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the XYZ imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself.”

The efforts of that century’s truth-tellers made great gains. The states were fighting back, even challenging Adams’ massive, naked power grab and war-mongering. As Jefferson noted in a Feb. 14, 1799 letter to Virginia’s Edmund Pendleton:

“The violations of the Constitution, propensities to war, to expense, and to a particular foreign connection, which we have lately seen, are becoming evident to the people, and are dispelling that mist which X. Y. Z. had spread before their eyes. This State is coming forward with a boldness not yet seen. Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted [to Adams], have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President.”

Americans and several state leaders were so angry with Adams, Jefferson noted, that the challenge was to prevent people from taking up arms against Adams’ Federalists. He worried out loud that the resistance may, if it erupted into violence, give Adams an excuse to declare an insurrection and totally end democracy:

“New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State [of Pennsylvania], we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit.”

Like today’s progressive movement led by people like Bernie Sanders, JB Pritzker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, and Elizabeth Warren, Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than police violence or even threats like Trump‘s war-mongering against Venezuela today.

“But keep away all show of force,” he wrote to Pendleton, “and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition. If we can keep quiet, therefore, the tide now turning will take a steady and proper direction.”

A week later, Feb. 21, 1799, Jefferson wrote to the great Polish general who had fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kosciusko, a close friend then living in Russia. War for political purposes was the great enemy of democracy, Jefferson noted, and peace was its champion. And the American people were increasingly siding with peace and rejecting Adams’ call for war.

“The wonderful irritation produced in the minds of our citizens by the X. Y. Z. story, has in a great measure subsided,” he noted. “They begin to suspect and to see it coolly in its true light.”

But Adams was still President, and for him and his Federalist Party even a “little war” with France would have helped tremendously with the upcoming election of 1800. And in France some leaders wanted war with America for similar reasons.

Jefferson continued:

“What course the government will pursue, I know not. But if we are left in peace, I have no doubt the wonderful turn in the public opinion now manifestly taking place and rapidly increasing, will, in the course of this’ summer, become so universal and so weighty, that friendship abroad and freedom at home will be firmly established by the influence and constitutional powers of the people at large.”

And if Adams’ rhetoric led to an attack on America by France?

“If we are forced into war,” Jefferson noted, “we must give up political differences of opinion, and unite as one man to defend our country. But whether at the close of such a war, we should be as free as we are now, God knows.”

The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book, The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.

The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power in 1801 and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.

As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.

All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians and states — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.

America has been burdened by lying presidents before, and even one who tried to destroy our Constitution like Trump is today threatening to do. But in our era — like in Jefferson’s — we are fortunate to have radical truth-tellers and political allies to warn us of treasonous acts for political gain.

If we stand in solidarity with today’s truth-tellers, and more politicians step forward to take a leadership role, then it’s entirely possible that with the elections of 2026 and 2028 American democracy can once again prevail.

How Thanksgiving helps America deal with this current chaos

Practicing daily gratitude is a habit I picked up from my spiritual mentor, Gottfried Müller; when Louise and I took a long hike through the trails of Forest Park here in Portland on Wednesday, for example, we stopped a few times to look around at the forest and just notice what an amazing world we live in and then to say “thank you” to all the life around us.

Every day, when we take our daily walk, we do this. Sometimes it’s our amazement at the clouds or the geese or the river or just the fact that we’re alive. I think of what my parents or my deceased brother would give for just a few minutes of what I’m experiencing and it fills me with awe and appreciation.

And I’m so grateful to you for reading and sharing my writings. You’ve helped build a real and meaningful community here. Thank you!

I always suspected that this daily practice of gratitude helped keep me sane in these insane times, but now I’ve discovered there’s actual science behind the mental health impacts of it.

As we celebrated Thanksgiving this week, science is revealing that our annual tradition of giving thanks might be more powerful than we ever imagined. Research shows that expressing gratitude doesn’t just make us feel good momentarily: it actually reshapes our brains in ways that enhance our well-being long after the holiday dishes are cleared away.

When you take a moment to count your blessings, your brain releases dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that create feelings of pleasure and contentment. It’s like turning on a happiness switch in your mind.

But what’s really fascinating is that this isn’t just a temporary boost; these moments of thankfulness create a positive feedback loop, training your brain to look for more reasons to be grateful.

Brain imaging studies have captured this process in action. When people express gratitude, they activate the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center for decision-making and emotional regulation.

This triggers a cascade of beneficial effects, including sharper attention and increased motivation. Think of it like building a muscle: the more you exercise gratitude, the stronger these neural pathways become, making it progressively easier to access positive emotions.

Perhaps even more remarkable is gratitude’s effect on stress. When you focus on appreciation, your brain actually dials down the production of cortisol, your body's primary stress hormone. This helps explain why grateful people often seem more resilient in the face of life's challenges; their brains are literally wired to handle stress better.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

Research conducted at Indiana University found that practicing gratitude can actually change the structure of your brain, particularly in areas linked to empathy and emotional processing.

It’s as if giving thanks regularly renovates your brain’s emotional architecture, creating lasting improvements in how you process experiences and relate to others.

These changes ripple out into nearly every aspect of life. People who practice gratitude regularly report sleeping better, probably because they’re replacing anxious thoughts with appreciative ones before bedtime.

They tend to have stronger relationships, likely because gratitude activates brain regions involved in social bonding and empathy.

Many even report improvements in their ability to solve problems and think creatively, suggesting that a thankful mind is also a more flexible one.

Want to harness these benefits for yourself?

Science suggests several effective approaches. Keeping a gratitude journal helps reinforce positive neural pathways, training your brain to focus on the good in your life. Expressing appreciation to others not only strengthens your relationships but also activates reward centers in your brain.

Even simply pausing throughout the day — my favorite practice — to notice and appreciate positive moments can help reshape your neural circuitry.

The most encouraging aspect of this research is that gratitude’s effects appear to be cumulative and long-lasting. Studies have found that people who regularly practice gratitude experience positive changes in brain function that persist months after they begin the practice. It’s like compound interest for your emotional well-being; small investments in gratitude today yield increasing returns over time.

As your brain becomes more adept at recognizing and appreciating positive experiences, you may find yourself naturally adopting a more optimistic outlook on life. This isn’t about ignoring life’s challenges or pretending everything is perfect. Rather, it’s about training your brain to maintain a sense of appreciation even while acknowledging difficulties.

So this Thanksgiving, as you shared what you were grateful for around the holiday table, you were doing more than participating in a cherished tradition.

You were engaging in a scientifically validated practice that can transform your brain and enhance your well-being. Each expression of thanks is like a small deposit in your neurological bank account, building toward a richer, more appreciative way of experiencing life.

In a world that often seems designed to highlight what’s wrong, cultivating gratitude might be one of the most powerful tools we have for training our brains to notice what’s right. And that’s something truly worth being thankful for.

We've seen this movie before — what happens next is never good

Earlier this week, the number one most-read story in the Financial Times was headlined, “Nvidia shares fall on signs Google gaining upper hand in AI.” It turns out that Google’s AI software/product is doing about as well as its competitors but isn’t using Nvidia’s “must have” AI super-chips, shocking the market.

But even with that, we ain’t seen nothing yet: get ready for the Moores’ Law shock and a few others that seem increasingly inevitable.

For months now, the tech world has been drunk on the language of inevitability. AI will transform everything. AI demand for electricity will double America’s power consumption. AI data centers will be the new steel mills, the new auto plants, the new engines of prosperity.

Wall Street has inflated this into a bubble so big that it’s hard to see where the hype ends and the real economy begins.

But if history teaches us anything, it’s that bubbles don’t pop harmlessly; they burst outward. And when they do, the people who had nothing to do with inflating them are usually the ones who end up paying the biggest part of the price.

We’ve seen this movie before. When the dot-com bubble collapsed in 2000, it wasn’t just stock traders who felt the pain. Entire cities that had boomed on tech spending suddenly cratered. Construction, retail, restaurants, and transit systems all took the hit.

It wiped out retirement savings, yes, but it also wiped out jobs for working people who never owned a share of Pets.com. Economists later found that the recession following the dot-com crash fell hardest on lower-income workers who had been pulled into booming metro economies that vanished overnight.

Then came the housing and derivatives bubble of 2008. Once again, the story was sold as something contained within the financial sector. Exotic mortgage-backed securities. Credit default swaps. CDOs squared.

Most Americans had no idea what any of that meant, but when that bubble burst, they didn’t need a glossary. They felt it in lost jobs, lost homes, gutted neighborhoods, and a social safety net that was suddenly overwhelmed.

George W. Bush made sure that his Wall Street donor executives walked away with billion-dollar golden parachutes instead of going to jail, while average Americans endured a decade of lower wages, higher rents, and shredded public services.

When banksters crashed the S&L banking system during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, he prosecuted more than 3,000 of them and sent more than 1,000 to prison. But Republicans stopped respecting the rule of law in a big way around the time five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court handed the White House to Bush in 2000.

And then, of course, five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010, so now the banksters own DC and have bought a lot of deregulation recently. As a result, the risks now are even greater than they were in 1999 or 2008.

Bubbles don’t stay on Wall Street: they metastasize through the entire economy. And the AI bubble today is no different; in some ways, it’s even more deeply wired into the lives of people who may never touch ChatGPT, Midjourney, or a Nvidia chip.

Right now, electric utilities from Arizona to Georgia are spending billions building power plants and upgrading transmission lines because they’ve been told AI demand will explode for decades.

Utilities aren’t like normal businesses; when they make a bad bet, they don’t absorb the loss. Instead, they pass it on to you. And that means that if the AI bubble bursts — if the rosy forecasts don’t materialize — average Americans could end up paying higher electric bills for a generation to cover infrastructure built for a demand that never arrived.

This has happened before. After the 1990s gas-capacity boom fizzled, ratepayers in multiple states spent decades covering the cost of underused plants. When nuclear projects went over budget or were abandoned altogether, like the VC Summer project in South Carolina, consumers were forced to cough up billions to foot the bill while executives walked away with multi-million-dollar bonuses.

The same fate is now looming over families already struggling with high utility bills. AI operators may walk away from canceled projects, but working class people can’t walk away from the debt that built the substations, transformers, cooling systems, and pipelines intended to serve the data centers. Giant utilities and their morbidly rich executives will squeeze it out of you, me, grandma, and the kids.

Low-income households will feel this first. When utility rates climb, affluent families may grumble, but low-income families get their power shut off. Thousands of Americans die every year in heat waves because they can’t afford air conditioning, and climate change is making the situation worse. Piling the cost of a Wall Street-driven bubble onto electric bills isn’t just unfair: it’s dangerous.

States are also handing out massive tax incentives and subsidies to lure AI data centers. These deals often rely on long-term economic projections that look a lot like the rosy promises made in the lead-up to every other bubble in the last century.

If AI expansion stalls, those states are left with reduced tax revenue, higher infrastructure costs, and no way to fill the gap except by cutting public services or raising taxes on people who can least afford it.

This is exactly what happened when manufacturing plants promised by past booms never materialized or closed early: schools went underfunded, transit systems decayed, and local governments fell deeper into debt. I grew up in Michigan and saw this first-hand as the auto boom collapsed under the weight of Reagan’s free-trade neoliberalism.

And then there’s the jobs picture. The AI boom has unleashed a construction frenzy of data centers, substations, power plants, cooling towers, and fiber lines. These are good jobs for electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, welders, and truck drivers. If the bubble bursts, however, those jobs will vanish overnight.

The layoffs won’t hit coders at Google; they’ll hit working people who relied on the stability of a years-long construction pipeline. When jobs like that collapse, they drag down entire communities: restaurants, small shops, repair businesses, daycares, and clinics. It’s the same domino effect we saw after both the dot-com collapse and the 2008 financial crash.

Meanwhile, pension funds — especially public pensions — are heavily invested in tech stocks and the infrastructure financing now increasingly tied to the AI boom. Teachers, firefighters, public employees, and retirees who depend on those pensions could watch helplessly as their future security evaporates through no fault of their own.

After Bush’s 2008 housing crash, public pension systems all over the country were left with massive unfunded liabilities that led to service cuts, higher contribution rates, and reduced benefits. The same pattern is already being written into the AI bubble, brick by brick, stock by stock.

Worst of all, an AI crash could hit at a moment when tens of millions of Americans have no margin left. Inflation has been punishing, and Trump’s incoherent tariff policies have made him and his kids rich (as they use tariffs to extort foreign governments to give them billions in cash, build Trump resorts, and even gift Trump a jet plane), but they’re relentlessly jacking inflation on the rest of us.

  • Housing costs have become predatory as Republican-aligned Wall Street vultures swoop in and buy up entire city blocks of single-family homes to convert into rentals.
  • Medical debt from for-profit hospitals and insurance companies is pushing families into bankruptcy because Republicans refuse to even allow a discussion of single-payer healthcare like the rest of the developed world has.
  • Student loans, which Republicans sued to prevent Biden from forgiving, are again grinding down young workers.
  • Meanwhile, billionaires are gambling with the $4 trillion tax cut Donald Trump gave them, and that loose money is jacking the stock market like in 1929 after the Republican Harding/Coolidge/Hoover tax cuts (from 91 percent on the morbidly rich down to 25 percent).

In an economy already stretched to the breaking point, the shockwaves from a tech market collapse could intensify already obscene levels of inequality in ways we haven’t seen since the Republican Great Depression.

The wealthy will weather it. They always do. They’ll diversify, hedge, shift assets, pick up distressed real estate at a discount, and wait for the next upswing. Most will even profit from it, buying up homes, businesses, stocks, and other assets for pennies on the dollar.

America’s billionaires saw their greatest gains during the dot-com bust and the housing crash. “Cash is king” was the saying in the 1930s, as well as after the dot-com and housing crashes. And they’re muttering the same today with breathless anticipation.

But low-income and working-class Americans — the people least responsible for the bubble — will face higher electric bills, job losses, crumbling schools, gutted pensions, and reduced public services. They’ll pay for the gambles made by the same financiers and speculators who made out like bandits in 2000 and 2008.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.

Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time — and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most — the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.

Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news just three weeks ago with an article titled and subtitled:

“The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.”

Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:

“Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors — 14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip — with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.”

A data center — a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigiwatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling — replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.

Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?

Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built — if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites — will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.

If there’s a lesson from history, it’s that bubbles only appear harmless until they burst. And the bursting always lands hardest on those who never benefited from the boom in the first place.

In a future article, I’ll examine the political consequences of this possibility (hint: read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book about the 1929 crash and its impact on America, the world, and how it realigned our nation’s politics) but for now, get ready. This could get real ugly, real fast.

The one issue Democrats and Republicans can agree on — if Trump doesn't kill it again

The most gruesome feature of the Trump/Vance/Miller regime is their glee in brutalizing non-white people and terrorizing anybody who objects or tries to hold them to account. Their entire rationale is that the barbarity and savagery are “necessary” to deal with millions of “illegals.”

Denmark is onto something that could blow up their entire excuse for this violence against both people and our Constitution, and Democrats need to pay attention.

Back in June 2008 I did my radio program for a week from the studios of Danish Radio in Copenhagen. They let me hire one of their producers and I asked her to book prominent Danish conservatives, at least one a day, and she pulled it off. (I used to regularly debate conservatives until they started refusing to come on my show over the past decade.)

Several were prominent politicians, a few were well-known commentators, and one was the publisher of a major Danish newspaper. All identified themselves as conservatives, and a few even referred to themselves as “a right-winger.”

I asked every one a similar set of questions, and the answers I got were consistently pretty much the same. It went sort of like this:

Q. “So, you’re a Danish conservative. Does that mean you want to do away with your unions representing about 80 percent of the labor market, resulting in a roughly US$18/hour functional minimum wage?”
A. “No, of course not. Conservatives don’t want people living in poverty. And they have a right to representation to balance the power of giant corporations.”
Q. “So, you must want to do away with free college and the roughly $1,000 stipend Danish college students get every month for living expenses?”
A. “Why would we ever want to destroy our country’s intellectual infrastructure? We conservatives value education!”
Q. “So, if you’re a conservative you must want to do away with your single-payer Medicare-for-All healthcare system that’s free for all residents, has no premiums, free doctor visits and hospital stays, and has very tiny co-pays for dental and drugs?”
A. “What, are you nuts? I don’t want to sit next to a sick person in a restaurant or on the bus. Healthcare is a human right that true conservatives have always embraced.”
Q. “Do you, like conservatives in America, want to do away with environmental protections and the move toward green energy?”
A. “Who would be stupid enough to want to do that? We conservatives are at the forefront of environmental protections and building out renewable energy.”
Q. “So, other than wanting to slightly lower taxes and supporting the Danish monarchy, what makes you a conservative here in Denmark?”
A. “I want the immigrants to leave. Denmark should be for Danes, and Danes only.”

That was 17 years ago, and the Danish conservatives largely got their way in the years since. In fact, they’ve been joined by Danish moderates and even Danish progressives in embracing what here in America we’d call comprehensive immigration reform.

The New York Times reports that particularly since the 2015 influx of Syrian refugees into Europe, “the Danish government has enacted policies to make life challenging for asylum seekers, trying to discourage them from coming.”

For some it’s simple racism, but for most Danes, particularly those on the left, the changes in Danish law and policy just reflect the simple reality that no country can quickly absorb large numbers of immigrants without social and political disruption.

Immigration and accepting refugees is fine, in other words, but only in numbers that allow for successful integration into society. Social scientists have found that when those thresholds are exceeded, the result is a loss of social cohesion, a rise in racism and bigotry, and political chaos that can even threaten democracy.

The embrace across the Danish political spectrum of rational immigration limits and polite, nonviolent expulsion of undocumented immigrants has not just stabilized the political system in that country; by joining hands with conservatives, it’s also strengthened the power and influence of the center-left and progressive parties and politicians.

Left-leaning political parties across Europe are taking notice, and several are actively imitating or emulating Danish policies.

The result is a universal loss of support for radical rightwing parties that had been mostly focused on hating on immigrants, and a rise of centrist and progressive parties, politicians, and policy successes.

Democrats here should be paying attention, as I’ve argued for years, including in my 2010 book Rebooting the American Dream, which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivered to all 99 of his colleagues with a personal note, and then read from on the floor of the Senate during his famous filibuster.

The chapter titled Put Lou Dobbs Out To Pasture basically argues the Danish position: we need immigration, but to avoid disruptions to labor and society it should be well-regulated.

Opposition to immigrants was where Donald Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign. It’s the one consistent issue where Republicans beat Democrats in the polls, typically by double-digits.

Failing to address uncontrolled immigration also endangers our democracy: Viktor Orbán, for example, rose to power in Hungary by railing against immigrants, and has since used the issue as an excuse to create a secret police force, shut down media outlets, pass draconian “anti-immigrant-crime” laws that outlaw dissent, and pack the legislature and judiciary.

Trump, it appears, has similar plans for America. But there is a reasonable solution that would take the wind out of his sails.

In early 2024, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) — a guy who’s about as close to a Goldwater conservative as you can get — and progressive Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced a bipartisan bill that would largely accomplish here in America what Denmark and other European countries are doing now.

It would have limited immigration, tightened asylum criteria, funded deportations of actual criminal immigrants, punished employers who hire people without legal status, and given then-President Joe Biden the legal authority to close the southern border. It had widespread support among members of both parties in both the House and Senate and was sailing toward passage.

But because the bill would have neutralized the immigration issue as a political weapon — both parties openly supported it and it was written by a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat — Trump, then the leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, ordered his MAGA followers in Congress to kill it.

Enough Republicans bowed to Trump’s demand that the legislation died, setting the stage for Trump to demagogue the immigration issue all the way up to election day, and then use it to justify the creation of a massive new masked secret police force largely answerable only to Trump, based on the excuse that immigration was “out of control.”

The last time US immigration policies were significantly reformed was during the Reagan presidency, when he signed legislation that gave amnesty to around 3 million people and tightened up our southern border. A 21st-century reform is long overdue.

Congress needs to step up and revisit the Lankford/Murphy bill to stop the brutality Trump’s ICE and CBP officers are inflicting on our nation and bring sanity to our immigration policies.

It’d not only be a good thing for the Democratic Party (and the Republicans) in next year‘s midterms, it’d help rescue American democracy from the racist demagogues Trump and Miller have unleashed and empowered.

There's one issue on which Dems and GOP can agree — and weaken Trump's poison

The most gruesome feature of the Trump/Vance/Miller regime is their glee in brutalizing non-white people and terrorizing anybody who objects or tries to hold them to account. Their entire rationale is that the barbarity and savagery are “necessary” to deal with millions of “illegals.”

Denmark is onto something that could blow up their entire excuse for this violence against both people and our Constitution, and Democrats need to pay attention.

Back in June 2008 I did my radio program for a week from the studios of Danish Radio in Copenhagen. They let me hire one of their producers and I asked her to book prominent Danish conservatives, at least one a day, and she pulled it off. (I used to regularly debate conservatives until they started refusing to come on my show over the past decade.)

Several were prominent politicians, a few were well-known commentators, and one was the publisher of a major Danish newspaper. All identified themselves as conservatives, and a few even referred to themselves as “a right-winger.”

I asked every one a similar set of questions, and the answers I got were consistently pretty much the same. It went sort of like this:

Q. “So, you’re a Danish conservative. Does that mean you want to do away with your unions representing about 80 percent of the labor market, resulting in a roughly US$18/hour functional minimum wage?”
A. “No, of course not. Conservatives don’t want people living in poverty. And they have a right to representation to balance the power of giant corporations.”
Q. “So, you must want to do away with free college and the roughly $1,000 stipend Danish college students get every month for living expenses?”
A. “Why would we ever want to destroy our country’s intellectual infrastructure? We conservatives value education!”
Q. “So, if you’re a conservative you must want to do away with your single-payer Medicare-for-All healthcare system that’s free for all residents, has no premiums, free doctor visits and hospital stays, and has very tiny co-pays for dental and drugs?”
A. “What, are you nuts? I don’t want to sit next to a sick person in a restaurant or on the bus. Healthcare is a human right that true conservatives have always embraced.”
Q. “Do you, like conservatives in America, want to do away with environmental protections and the move toward green energy?”
A. “Who would be stupid enough to want to do that? We conservatives are at the forefront of environmental protections and building out renewable energy.”
Q. “So, other than wanting to slightly lower taxes and supporting the Danish monarchy, what makes you a conservative here in Denmark?”
A. “I want the immigrants to leave. Denmark should be for Danes, and Danes only.”

That was 17 years ago, and the Danish conservatives largely got their way in the years since. In fact, they’ve been joined by Danish moderates and even Danish progressives in embracing what here in America we’d call comprehensive immigration reform.

The New York Times reports that particularly since the 2015 influx of Syrian refugees into Europe, “the Danish government has enacted policies to make life challenging for asylum seekers, trying to discourage them from coming.”

For some it’s simple racism, but for most Danes, particularly those on the left, the changes in Danish law and policy just reflect the simple reality that no country can quickly absorb large numbers of immigrants without social and political disruption.

Immigration and accepting refugees is fine, in other words, but only in numbers that allow for successful integration into society. Social scientists have found that when those thresholds are exceeded, the result is a loss of social cohesion, a rise in racism and bigotry, and political chaos that can even threaten democracy.

The embrace across the Danish political spectrum of rational immigration limits and polite, nonviolent expulsion of undocumented immigrants has not just stabilized the political system in that country; by joining hands with conservatives, it’s also strengthened the power and influence of the center-left and progressive parties and politicians.

Left-leaning political parties across Europe are taking notice, and several are actively imitating or emulating Danish policies.

The result is a universal loss of support for radical rightwing parties that had been mostly focused on hating on immigrants, and a rise of centrist and progressive parties, politicians, and policy successes.

Democrats here should be paying attention, as I’ve argued for years, including in my 2010 book Rebooting the American Dream, which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivered to all 99 of his colleagues with a personal note, and then read from on the floor of the Senate during his famous filibuster.

The chapter titled Put Lou Dobbs Out To Pasture basically argues the Danish position: we need immigration, but to avoid disruptions to labor and society it should be well-regulated.

Opposition to immigrants was where Donald Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign. It’s the one consistent issue where Republicans beat Democrats in the polls, typically by double-digits.

Failing to address uncontrolled immigration also endangers our democracy: Viktor Orbán, for example, rose to power in Hungary by railing against immigrants, and has since used the issue as an excuse to create a secret police force, shut down media outlets, pass draconian “anti-immigrant-crime” laws that outlaw dissent, and pack the legislature and judiciary.

Trump, it appears, has similar plans for America. But there is a reasonable solution that would take the wind out of his sails.

In early 2024, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) — a guy who’s about as close to a Goldwater conservative as you can get — and progressive Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced a bipartisan bill that would largely accomplish here in America what Denmark and other European countries are doing now.

It would have limited immigration, tightened asylum criteria, funded deportations of actual criminal immigrants, punished employers who hire people without legal status, and given then-President Joe Biden the legal authority to close the southern border. It had widespread support among members of both parties in both the House and Senate and was sailing toward passage.

But because the bill would have neutralized the immigration issue as a political weapon — both parties openly supported it and it was written by a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat — Trump, then the leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, ordered his MAGA followers in Congress to kill it.

Enough Republicans bowed to Trump’s demand that the legislation died, setting the stage for Trump to demagogue the immigration issue all the way up to election day, and then use it to justify the creation of a massive new masked secret police force largely answerable only to Trump, based on the excuse that immigration was “out of control.”

The last time US immigration policies were significantly reformed was during the Reagan presidency, when he signed legislation that gave amnesty to around 3 million people and tightened up our southern border. A 21st-century reform is long overdue.

Congress needs to step up and revisit the Lankford/Murphy bill to stop the brutality Trump’s ICE and CBP officers are inflicting on our nation and bring sanity to our immigration policies.

It’d not only be a good thing for the Democratic Party (and the Republicans) in next year‘s midterms, it’d help rescue American democracy from the racist demagogues Trump and Miller have unleashed and empowered.

Let your member of Congress know you support comprehensive immigration reform now. The issue, after all, is bipartisan, and it’s high time to end the brutality.

The switchboard number for Congress is 202-224-3121.

Trump broke the law with this horrible threat — and it will be his doom

I’ve been feeling something unusual these past few weeks: optimism.

Not naïve optimism or the kind that ignores danger, but the real kind that arrives when you see people waking up, standing up, and refusing to bow before a lawless president who believes rules are for suckers and the Constitution is a mere suggestion rather than the foundation of our republic.

We’re now governed by a man who treats legal limits as personal insults. Donald Trump doesn’t just violate our nation’s norms and laws: like every wannabe third-world tinpot dictator before him, he despises the idea that any law can constrain him at all.

Trump and the spineless sycophants in his administration have rejected the entire idea of a rules-based society. He and his lickspittles are turning the presidency into a throne, trying to transform you and me into its subjects, and painting as enemies anyone who insists soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (and others in government) should follow the law.

Under Trump’s neofascist worldview, the only “legal” act is obedience, while defiance of his whims and illegal orders is a crime. We saw this when Trump lashed out at lawmakers who reminded our military that their sworn oath is to the Constitution and not to him personally.

He posted a rant about those six CIA and military veterans/lawmakers and wrote “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” in response to their message that both history and law — including military law — require soldiers to refuse illegal orders. Then he reposted a message calling for them to be hanged.

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish: it was Trump’s declaration of war on the rule of law, something so essential that it’s the basis of every democracy and civilized society in history throughout the world. Instead of respecting American ideals, he’s sounding more like his “good friend,” the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia (who’s given Trump’s family billions, with more billions on their way).

You’d think that after the My Lai massacre, the horrors committed at Abu Ghraib, and the Nuremberg trials, Americans — and Trump and those around him — would have gotten the message, but over at the Fox propaganda channel and on other rightwing media they’re actually defending this obscene behavior.

It’s also criminal behavior: 18 U.S. Code § 610 makes it a crime for any federal official — including the president — to use their authority to intimidate, threaten, or punish citizens for their political expression, voting behavior, or dissent. Threatening members of Congress with execution for following the law is an extreme, textbook violation.

Meanwhile, the country is learning how this un-American philosophy plays out on the ground. In cities like Charlotte, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc., masked, anonymous, secret police-style federal agents descend without warning, kicking in doors and smashing car windows, arresting U.S. citizens, stealing people’s possessions, invading trusted community spaces, shuttering businesses, and sending tens of thousands of students home in fear.

This isn’t border enforcement or public safety: it’s warfare against due process and America itself. It’s gotten so bad that Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and her peers are getting death and bomb threats.

Our nation’s Founders warned us that America’s greatest threats to liberty would come not from abroad, but from leaders who’d try to turn our legal system and military against us. James Madison said the means used against foreign dangers too easily become instruments of tyranny at home. That warning wasn’t theoretical: it was aimed directly at moments like this.

Yet we’re also see something the Founders hoped for, something that echoed their heroic efforts against King George III: average Americans refusing to be cowed.

People are documenting abuses, flooding the streets in peaceful protest, forming rapid-response networks, hauling the government into court again and again. Ordinary citizens are doing the job Congress has been too afraid, too compromised, or too divided to do.

It’s the most patriotic thing happening in America today.

Which is why Trump’s response to lawful dissent has been so horrific: he’s demanding Saudi-style executions.

He wasn’t being metaphorical: he demanded actual executions (although he later pretended to walk it back). That’s the language of a dictator. It’s the purest expression of Trump’s governing philosophy: if the law gets in his way he simply ignores it.

This isn’t merely corruption. It’s not even ordinary authoritarianism. It’s a direct repudiation of the entire American experiment. Defiance of courts and the law is a poison that says the only legitimate authority is the will of the leader, and Trump’s entire presidency has featured a nonstop campaign to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump.

He enriched himself in office (he’s made billions off his position in just 10 months), he wielded the government as a tool of reprisal, he attacked judges, he extorted foreign governments, he stole government property and lied about it to federal investigators, he’s using public office to reward loyalists and punish critics, and he now presides over masked, unaccountable paramilitary raids that terrorize American communities.

The Constitution offers a clear remedy for a president who behaves like this.

Impeachment isn’t a political act: it’s a constitutional obligation when a president becomes a danger to the Republic. And Trump crossed that line long ago.

The only way to restore the rule of law is for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. Half measures are complicity. Silence is complicity. Delay is complicity.

But impeachment alone isn’t enough. There must also be criminal prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators. Real prosecution, by real prosecutors, following real evidence, for real crimes.

And while we’re at it, DOGE deserves a pretty good looking at, too. And what happened to all those government investigations of billionaire donors’ companies?

Trump and those doing his bidding must face justice. His children who participated must face it. His bagmen and loyalists who broke laws to carry out his will must face it. A nation can’t heal if high office becomes a shield from justice.

Equality before the law is the foundation of any functioning democracy. If we abandon that principle now, we abandon the Republic itself.

I believe we’re at or very near a turning point. People are rising up. Communities are resisting. Judges are pushing back. Journalists are exposing what the administration wants hidden. The illusion of Trump’s invincibility is cracking.

The billionaires who believed he could terrorize the country into submission on their behalf are discovering that Americans refuse to bow.

This country was built by people who rejected kings. It can survive this counterfeit king, too.

But only if we act. Only if we insist that the Constitution still has meaning. Only if we refuse to let a lawless president redefine the rule of law as disloyalty.

Trump has declared war on the American Way. The only acceptable response is the full force of our constitutional system: impeachment, prosecution, and the unrelenting assertion that no man, no family, and no political movement is above the law.

I realize the political reality is that Mike Johnson won’t allow such a vote in the House and the Senate is now controlled by Republicans so timid and cowed by Trump that a GOP senator who’s a physician is afraid to criticize Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But we’re only 12 months away from an election that could sweep both bodies and we must lay the foundation now for that.

That means waking up as many people as possible (share this newsletter and others!), engaging with groups like Indivisible, and supporting litigators and progressive Democrats across the board.

We can do this. We just need resolve, passion, and to begin the hard work of reclaiming the American Way and the American Dream, as Democrats did in the 1930s and the 1960s, and both parties did to oust Nixon and imprison his cronies in the 1970s.

If this psychotic Trump outrage isn't impeachable, nothing is

Donald Trump just called for the execution of American veterans — all of them also elected members of Congress — because they reminded our active duty soldiers that it’s a violation of both American and international law to commit war crimes.

If that’s not impeachable, what is?

This is his most dangerous and insane escalation yet, because it crosses a bright red line the Founders themselves warned about: a president openly demanding the execution of members of Congress for telling U.S. service members to obey the law.

And the horror of it isn’t subtle. It’s not, like in the days of Nixon and Reagan, even coded. It’s not even wink-and-nod stochastic terrorism.

This is the President of the United States calling for hanging lawmakers — by name — for the “crime” of reminding military personnel that their oath is to the Constitution, not to him.

That is the precise scenario the Founders feared when they warned that a would-be tyrant could try to transform the military from defenders of the republic into enforcers of a single man’s will.

What these senators and representatives said in their video is not controversial, not partisan, and not new. It’s bedrock American law. It’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It’s every ethics class, every commissioning oath, every baseline principle of civilian-controlled government in a constitutional republic.

Trump’s reaction — psychotic, paranoid, and dripping with bloodlust — makes one thing painfully clear: he’s terrified of the military remembering who they actually work for.

It also suggests an ominous future Trump may have planned where he turns our military against you and me.

Or uses it against a foreign nation so he can wiggle out of the growing questions about his 1990s teenage modeling agency, his Miss Teen USA pageant, and their possible connections to Jeffrey Epstein and child sex trafficking.

The lawmakers who made that video are, to a person, military and combat veterans or intelligence professionals who’ve literally risked their lives for this country.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) was shot at, launched into space, and flew combat missions over Iraq. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) served in the Air Force. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) was an Army Ranger. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is a Navy vet. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) spent years as a CIA analyst overseeing Iraq policy. These aren’t armchair patriots: they’re the real thing.

So when Trump — who faked bone spurs to dodge Vietnam — calls for them to be executed, it tells you something profound: he wouldn’t be flipping out like this unless he intends to give orders like that.

Everything about this situation is a rerun of January 6th — for which he’s already been impeached — only with the stakes ratcheted up.

Trump has already learned that violent language produces violent followers. He watched it happen in real time. He saw his crowd beat police officers bloody, hunt for Mike Pence, and smash their way through the Capitol while chanting about hanging elected officials.

As I mentioned about the attacks on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), he knows his movement is filled with men eager to “carry out the punishment” for him. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offers a warning — that Trump is lighting a match in a country soaked in gasoline — that isn’t metaphor. It’s a sober assessment grounded in hard experience.

And now Trump is testing the waters again, seeing how far he can go, how hard he can push, before America pushes back.

Consider what these lawmakers actually said in their video: follow lawful orders, refuse unlawful ones, and remember your oath is to the Constitution. That’s the opposite of sedition. It’s literally the definition of military ethics in a democratic society, right out of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, American law, international law, and even the Nuremberg trials

Fox’s commentator Andy McCarthy — hardly a liberal — made this clear:

“There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required.”

Veterans and members of Congress telling soldiers to obey the law? That’s the American system working.

But Trump immediately interpreted it as a threat to himself and his agenda. Not to our country. Not to political or military norms. To him personally.

That should reveal to every American with half a brain who this man really is and what his plans really are.

The cries of “HANG THEM!” and “punishable by DEATH!” aren’t policy positions. They’re the words of an out-of-control authoritarian, a wannabe dictator, a man intent on destroying the rule of law and the American republic that’s been based on it for over two centuries.

They’re the gut-level reactions of a man who thinks loyalty should flow upward to his person, not outward to the nation.

And it’s not a one-off. This is a Trump pattern that necessitates impeachment.

  • This is the same Trump who demanded the execution of Gen. Mark Milley.
  • The same Trump who encouraged chants of “Hang Mike Pence.”
  • The same Trump whose follower mailed pipe bombs to Democratic leaders.
  • The same Trump who says generals should be shot, newspapers and TV networks shut down, and political opponents imprisoned.
  • Who calls soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who also avoided military service, like every man in the Trump family — shrieking that veterans should “resign in disgrace” for stating U.S. law is the purest illustration of an authoritarian mindset straight out of 1930s Germany: loyalty is owed to the leader, he suggests, not to the Constitution. And the moment someone asserts otherwise, they’re a traitor.

And Fox “News” giving Miller a platform to do it, without even trying to push back or defend American values of the role of law, is unspeakable.

Which brings us to a remarkable admission from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Republicans are “afraid” to cross Trump. They’re terrified of Trump’s base, the Confederate flag-waivers, the well-armed Bros. Terrified, because Trump has conditioned those men (virtually all of the violence has come from right wing men) to see critique or embrace of the rule of law as betrayal, and betrayal as punishable.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is right: you can’t negotiate with a party whose operating principle is “wait to see what Trump wants.”

As Murphy noted yesterday in response to Trump’s call to kill Democratic lawmakers:

“If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.”

We now have a major political party that openly accepts their president calling for the execution of lawmakers who simply restate the Constitution. And a White House spokeswoman who pathetically backs him up.

Trump isn’t just attacking political rivals: he’s asserting that the American military’s loyalty belongs to him personally, and that those who contradict him should be killed. That is the exact formula the Founders designed the Constitution to prevent.

That’s not normal political dysfunction. That is a republic confronting its own death-throes.

The heartening part — the only heartening part — is the response from the lawmakers themselves.

These elected officials understand the stakes. They know the oaths they took aren’t merely symbolic.

They know that stopping this modern-day rightwing fascism depends on We the People standing up, speaking out, and refusing to be intimidated while we support members of our military — from the most senior levels to the lowest privates — in their refusing to follow illegal orders.

Trump wants a military that obeys him, not the rule of law. That’s why he’s screaming for the deaths of these congressional veterans. It’s also why Congress must impeach him now.

These veterans in Congress reminded the members of our military that their duty is the exact opposite of Trump’s demand for unthinking, unquestioning fealty to illegal orders.

No democracy survives that.

Even MTG sees this evil truth

The Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who on Friday announced her shock resignation from Congress, has been dissed and ridiculed by the left for years. Progressives mocked her lies, shredded her conspiracies, exposed her QAnon nonsense, and denounced her cruelty. And through it all she never once feared for her life.

She fundraised. She smirked. She gave speeches, traveled the country, and strutted through Congress like she owned the place.

But the second she angered the Republican base, barely 48 hours after she resisted Donald Trump’s demands and broke from the MAGA line, she suddenly feared for her life and needed private security.

She told reporters and the world on Twitter that she’d been warned about threats to her safety coming from Trump’s supporters. Death threats. Serious ones. The man she once called her political soulmate — Trump — had turned on her instantly, publicly labeling her a “traitor” and mocking her fear.

For years she thought she was part of the mob. Now she’s discovering Trump and his followers only ever thought of her as their useful idiot.

This is the difference that America and our mainstream media refuses to say out loud:

When you cross Democrats, you get a political argument. When you cross the MAGA right, today’s GOP, you get threats of violence. And not metaphorical threats: real ones. The kind of threats that force a sitting member of Congress to hire armed guards because she dared anger their god-king.

So let’s stop pretending this is random.

What Greene is experiencing now is the inevitable consequence of what’s known as “stochastic terrorism,” the weapon of choice for Trump and the modern GOP.

Stochastic terrorism means the leader doesn’t need to tell anyone directly to commit violence: he just smears his target, inflame his base, calls his target a “traitor” and “enemy,” and then gleefully waits for the most unhinged followers to “get the message.”

It’s like the infamous plaintive cry from King Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?“ that led to the murder of archbishop Thomas Beckett. The violence becomes “plausibly deniable,” but entirely predictable.

This has been Trump’s signature political method for a decade now.

This is how the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were hunted, harassed, stalked, and driven into hiding after Trump singled them out by name.

This is how the man who tried to shatter Paul Pelosi’s skull was radicalized.

This is how election workers, librarians, teachers, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and now Greene herself end up on the receiving end of death threats.

It’s how the January 6th assault on our Capitol happened, leading to the deaths of three police officers.

Trump knows how his words will be received. The GOP knows it. They’ve built an entire political apparatus on the expectation that some fraction of their followers will respond with violence.

This is nothing new; it’s the same tactic used by authoritarians throughout history.

  • The Klan used it during Reconstruction.
  • Fascist movements used it in the 1930s.
  • Trump’s MAGA movement and his “bros” use it today.

You vilify your target. You paint them as an existential threat. You whip up your crowd. And someone will decide to “do something.”

You don’t need orders: you just need followers who believe you’re speaking for God and country.

Trump has mastered this, and Greene is now caught in it.

Our nation’s Founders warned us about this, over and over: just read George Washington‘s farewell address to the Nation:

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind … It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

They didn’t fear foreign armies as much as they feared internal demagogues who could inflame a faction into violence.

James Madison wrote that the “means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Washington warned that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” could exploit factions to destroy the Republic from within. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both warned that once a demagogue captures a faction, the people become tools, not citizens.

That is exactly where we are today. Take it from someone — me — who’s been on the receiving end of death threats like this for years.

One of America’s two major political parties has normalized violent intimidation as a form of political expression. It enforces loyalty not by persuasion but by fear.

It encourages resentment and rage and then pretends to be shocked, “Shocked, I tell you!” when those emotions spill into threats or bloodshed.

Remember when Mitt Romney told a confidant that he and other Republican senators were afraid to vote to impeach Trump because it would endanger their lives and those of members of their families? What’s extraordinary is that while Romney and other Republican senators wimped out, Greene stood her ground.

And now, as a result, even Greene has discovered what happens when you step outside the lines of a movement built on menace.

The outrage here isn’t that Greene feels unsafe. It’s that she finally feels what millions of Americans have been living with ever since Trump taught his followers that violence is patriotism and that critics are enemies.

The outrage is that we still pretend this is a healthy democracy when one faction uses threats of violence and the media pretends it’s normal.

The outrage is that this monster — which last dominated America during the era of the Ku Klux Klan — keeps growing because too many people in power are afraid to name it.

The outrage is that rightwing outlets keep feeding this beast for profit.

This must be confronted. We can’t keep ignoring the rising tide of political violence tied directly to Trump’s rhetoric and the GOP’s ecosystem of rage.

Federal law enforcement must treat rightwing stochastic terrorism as a real threat to national security.

Like with the Church Commission in the 1970s, we need hearings, investigations, and consequences. We can’t wait until the next shattered skull or the next Ruby Freeman or the next terrified election worker or, God help us, the next January 6th.

If Greene has finally seen the monster, good. Now, the rest of us can’t afford to look away.

This dark addiction has taken over — and threatens to end our republic

In a comment to my recent article about how much Trump-like corruption the American people will tolerate, Sabrina Haake (who writes the “Haake Take”) wrote:

“I really want to see a deep dive on how power affects the brain. A strong addiction, as you say. but it deserves a special study in the age of Trump, given its complete takeover…”

It’s a great question, and the revelations of the Epstein connection to Trump and numerous — perhaps hundreds — of rich and powerful men and their abuse of powerless children again highlights how this addiction warps behavior, destroys lives, and kneecaps democracies.

For most of our history, Americans have believed that political power is something granted — temporarily — to leaders who serve the public good.

But modern neuroscience and social psychology are revealing something more dangerous and more sobering: power doesn’t just sit in someone’s hands; it reshapes the human mind itself.

And — as Trump’s masked secret police abuse people with total impunity and his toadies celebrate it with bizarre videos, as Republicans vote for more tax cuts for billionaires while cutting off health care and food for the poor, as Ghislaine Maxwell is treated like a princess while her victims are demonized — we’re seeing how this has twisted and damaged our nation.

Put a man in uniform and give him unaccountable power over life and death and it changes him. Give a president complete immunity for any crimes he commits and it unleashes a darkness no country should have to suffer.

As our democracy strains under the weight of Trump’s relentless need for dominance, the science raises a disturbing question: Are we witnessing the consequences of a dark addiction to power, and, if so, what does that mean for the future of our republic?

Researchers from Berkeley to Columbia have discovered that when people feel powerful, the brain shifts into what scientists call an “approach state.” Dopamine-driven reward circuits fire more easily. The world seems simpler, brighter, even easier.

Confidence rises. Caution fades. And empathy, that quiet internal tuning fork that vibrates in response to other people’s feelings, becomes less sensitive.

Many remember when the world’s richest man — who oversaw the destruction of USAID, which has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — highlighted what wealth and power had done to him in a revealing comment to an interviewer:

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

In one remarkable experiment, scientists used brain scans to measure how automatically the brain “mirrors” — deeply feels/understands and can empathize with — others’ experiences. People who were praised, flattered, and told stories that put them into a high-power mindset showed less mirroring, meaning their brains became less attuned to the people around them.

Historically, this has been a definition of evil. Less connected. Less empathetic. Less concerned for others because they’re no longer able to actually feel within themselves what others are experiencing.

This neurological shift doesn’t necessarily make powerful people behave as if they’re immoral, but that’s often the case and when it does it can produce tragic results for those around them or those they have power over.

And here’s where modern politics — and particularly the Trump era, Epstein, and the politicians at the center of today’s GOP — enter the picture.

Psychologists have long identified a trio of personality traits known as the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People high in these traits crave status and admiration. They feel little guilt. They view relationships transactionally.

For them, power isn’t a tool to shape policy: power is the point itself. It’s the reward. The psychological oxygen.

When people with these characteristics gain power, dominance becomes patriotism, cruelty becomes strength, and attention becomes fuel.

And we can see that this hunger for power hasn’t just shaped Donald Trump’s life. It’s reshaped the entire conservative movement. The entire Republican Party. Even — particularly those average people who spend hours with rightwing media — our national narrative, the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what our nation means.

And neuroscience gives us one more warning: losing power can feel like withdrawal.

We’re seeing this right now as Donald Trump thrashes about, losing his grip on his party and his followers. Calling a reporter “Piggy.” Sucking up to a foreign tyrant who’s handing his family billions.

We see it as Republican senators slip into legislation a clause that forces the government to give each of them millions of taxpayer dollars, or help cover up Epstein’s crimes.

For someone whose identity is fused with dominance, losing an election — or even facing accountability — can feel intolerable. The result is a frantic attempt to reclaim power at any cost, even if it means attacking institutions, undermining elections, or convincing millions that democracy itself can’t be trusted.

This is how republics falter, reflecting the “narcissistic collapse” that I’ve written about before.

It often begins with a psychological spiral when one leader’s desperation to hold onto power merges with millions of his followers’ fears and grievances, until the nation itself becomes trapped inside his addiction.

So, what do we do? It turns out that the antidote to the danger of power is democracy itself.

Shared power. Checked power. Transparent power. A system of checks-and-balances where no one person becomes the sun around which the nation must orbit.

So the question we face today — the question both science and history force us to confront — is this:

“How will We, the People respond as Trump, his MAGA movement, and the GOP lash out at us as they’re losing the near-absolute power they now enjoy and has been handed them by six corrupt members of the Supreme Court?”
  • Will we stand up and speak out?
  • Will we defy their attempts to militarize our nation and terrify us into submission?
  • Will we take away their tax breaks and immunities and force them back into the world the rest of us inhabit?
  • Will we rally together and support each other and the brave politicians and leaders willing to risk their lives and livelihoods by rising in resistance?

Or will we as a nation — like the Germans and Italians did in the 1930s, like the Russians and Hungarians did over the past two decades, like most of today’s GOP are doing right now — surrender to power addiction and decide that having a “Dear Leader” and single-party state is okay?

The choice is ours.

How Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal lay bare our racist roots

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal stripped away the polite fiction that wealthy white men in America are held to the same standards as everyone else.

Epstein wasn’t an exception. He was the rule, laid bare.

From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.

We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.

That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.

The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.

The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.

And then — as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — that logic didn’t stay confined to the frontier. It seeped into every corner of American life and rose up to try to destroy even the idea of a pluralistic democracy in this country.

Slavery was built on the same logic. It wasn’t an ugly exception to American values; it was a central expression of them. The economy depended on it. Congress bent itself into knots to protect it. The Constitution accommodated it.

When the Civil War ended, our country had a chance to uproot the white male supremacist ideology that had allowed human beings to be treated as property. Instead, we dodged it.

I still remember well, when our son was nine years old and we lived in suburban Atlanta, asking him over dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” and his answer was, “We studied the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”

We allowed the old Confederates back into the halls of power in the 1870s. We let them write the history books. We abandoned the freedmen who had been promised protection and citizenship.

And the system that emerged was simply white male supremacy, the foundation of slavery, by another name.

Jim Crow wasn’t a detour; it was the natural continuation of the racial hierarchy this country was built on and today’s GOP — and ICE, CPB, and Trump’s toadies in DHS — are trying to re-solidify for the 21st century.

Every tool was used to maintain it. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Lynching. Chain gangs. Sharecropping. Segregated schools. Redlining. Policing practices that looked far more like occupation than law enforcement.

All of it justified by the same foundational lie that today animates the brutality of Trump‘s ICE raids: that white people were meant to rule and everyone else existed by their pleasure. And the Big Lie that brown-skinned immigrants are committing “voter fraud” that justifies purging millions from our voting rolls every year.

That lie still echoes in our institutions. It’s why entire communities — and now polling places — are policed like enemy territory. It’s why Republicans on the courts (particularly SCOTUS) have so often sided with the powerful over the vulnerable. And it’s why we’ve seen, in recent years, an explicitly brutal willingness to use federal force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and protest.

When Trump sent federal agents and troops into Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and threatened to deploy them elsewhere, it wasn’t a new idea. It was an old ideology flexing its muscles again. It treats American citizens as though they’re foreign enemies. It uses military-trained forces not for defense but for control.

James Madison warned us precisely about this danger of the military policing civilians:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

He couldn’t have been clearer. The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.

The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.

It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).

It thrives on fear and resentment, and encourages a view of fellow nonwhite and female Americans as enemies to be controlled rather than citizens to be represented.

Today’s GOP and the rightwing-billionaire-funded, 50-year-long “Conservative Movement” that drives it have embraced every bad instinct of the Confederacy, the frontier, Jim Crow, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

They’re not “conserving” anything. They’re restoring an old order.

This didn’t happen suddenly. It took decades and the investment of billions of dollars.

People of a certain age (like me) well remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966-1999 show Firing Line, every Sunday on PBS, as he pontificated about the wonders of “conservatism” and promoted Republican politicians. My dad was a religious viewer and we watched it together every weekend; the show was a major force in national politics.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.

“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Arguably following up, in April 2021, the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.

By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.

Trump told white male voters they were the only “real Americans” and everyone else was suspect. He told them the military and the police existed to protect them from demographic change. He told them the only valid elections were the ones they won.

The good news is that most Americans reject this.

Most Americans believe in a multiracial democracy. They want equal justice. They want freedom that applies to everyone. They don’t want their own government treating nonwhites or women as enemy combatants. They don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men. They don’t want leaders who behave as if the military is a toy for intimidating political opponents.

But we can’t defeat what we refuse to name. America’s original sin wasn’t just slavery or colonialism: it was the belief that white men are entitled to rule by default and women and nonwhites must be subordinate to them.

That belief still infects our politics and largely controls the GOP. It still shapes our institutions. It still animates Republican justices on the Supreme Court who see equality as a threat and democracy as negotiable.

We can’t move forward until we reckon with that truth about our nation’s history and today’s GOP.

We can’t protect liberty while ignoring the warnings of the people who built this country.

And we can’t defend American democracy — and democracy around the world — while the GOP wages war against the very idea of a nation where everyone counts.

The reckoning is long overdue. This time we have to finish the job.

Double-check your voter registration and pass along the good word to everybody you know.

This staggering crisis has even the GOP saying enough on Trump

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the way, or the exception that proves the rule?

By the shocking light of today’s glaring headlines, it’s time to ask a larger question that no one in the media appears to be willing to say out loud: at what point does the accumulation of misconduct by Donald J. Trump become so brazen, so corrosive, so frankly immoral and even criminal, that Republican elected officials and voters finally say, “Enough is enough?”

So far:

  • Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring are demanding Congress release all the files, and Trump was attacking Republicans for even considering going along with them (now he’s opened his own “investigation,” which will prevent their public release regardless of Congress as he pretends to call for them to be made public). A coalition of Epstein survivors has urged Congress to declassify every remaining record tied to his global network of child sexual abuse. They argue that decades of secrecy protected rich and powerful men while silencing victims. House Democrats dropped a political bombshell this week, releasing emails from Epstein’s estate that appear to show Trump wasn’t just aware of the abuse taking place in Epstein’s orbit but “spent hours at my house” with at least one of the presumably underage girls.
  • The January 6 insurrection, the Big Lie, and the GOP’s shrugging at treason. Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after insisting, against all evidence and over 60 court losses, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That wasn’t protest: it was a violent assault on American democracy itself that led to the death of three police officers and the hospitalization of over 140 others. Yet the GOP continues to use Trump’s lie as a political weapon.
  • He’s incited hate against those least able to defend themselves, promoting a culture of violence and intolerance. From people fleeing murder and rape in their own countries to those merely seeking a better life to American communities of queer people and religious and racial minorities, Trump has licensed the most base and disgusting elements in our society.
  • His trade wars gutted American credibility, paved the way for bribes to himself and his boys, all while punishing the very supporters he claimed to champion. Trump’s tariffs on China, Europe, and beyond slapped billions in hidden taxes on U.S. consumers and farmers. They crippled small manufacturers, triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad, and exposed how “America First” became America isolated. In response, corporate and foreign leaders showered Trump and his boys with gifts, investments, gold, crypto, a jet, and overseas Trump hotel projects. The GOP, once the party of free markets, turned away as this con man and his family accepted bribes, committed economic vandalism, and “earned” a reported $5+ billion during his first ten months in office.
  • His praise for Vladimir Putin and contempt for Ukraine revealed a chilling abandonment of America’s historic role in defending democracy. Even after Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, his kidnapping Ukrainian women and children, and his ongoing nightly missile and drone attacks horrified the world, Trump boasted of “good talks” with Putin and mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His words told the world that U.S. loyalty could be traded for personal favors and ego-fluffing — or blackmail. When strength is redefined as submission to autocrats, freedom everywhere grows weaker.
  • The most horrific symbolic act of corruption yet: demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a Trump-style billionaires’ ballroom. In October 2025, the East Wing, a historic cornerstone of American democracy (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the East Portico), was razed for a 90,000-square-foot “Presidential Ballroom,” financed by companies and billionaires buying Trump’s favors and conducted with virtually no oversight. Some preservationists called it the most reckless desecration of the People’s House in American history. This isn’t a renovation, it’s a Marie Antoinette-style attempt at monarchy.
  • He is now the first U.S. president convicted of 34 counts of felony election fraud, and whose company was nailed for falsifying business records to rip off insurance companies and the taxpayers of New York. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of orchestrating a criminal cover-up to hide hush-money payments from voters during the 2016 election. It’s the first time in history an American president has been convicted of a felony, and yet the GOP still kneels at his feet. When “law and order” applies to everyone except the powerful, justice collapses.
  • In a civil trial, a jury of average people found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, with evidence showing he’d committed what the judge in the case called the common-sense “definition of rape.” Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store, and the jury believed her. Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the verdict meant what Trump had done to her met the ordinary understanding of rape. The GOP’s continued embrace of a man found legally liable for sexual violence — after bragging on tape that he had regularly sexually assaulted other women — shows moral bankruptcy in its purest form.
  • Twice impeached, and twice rescued by the party that pretends it swore an oath to the Constitution. Trump was impeached in 2019 for abusing power by trying to blackmail Ukraine into creating phony dirt on his political opponent, and again in 2021 for inciting the January 6th insurrection. Both times, Republicans in the Senate saved him. When loyalty to one man outweighs loyalty to country, impeachment stops being a safeguard and becomes a ritual of surrender.
  • He’s fired senior officials and watchdogs across government agencies, installed incompetent toadies in critical positions, and gutted the guardrails against presidential corruption. From food safety to pollution controls to safeguarding public lands to stopping climate change, Trump has elevated the interests of his donors and morbidly rich friends above those of average Americans and our nation itself. He’s cut taxes on billionaires while hitting working-class Americans with billions in tariff taxes to pay for those same tax cuts. He prodded Texas to gerrymander/rig the 2026 election while demanding his Attorney General prosecute California for their attempt to rebalance the playing field. And now he’s going after his political enemies — many of them Republicans who could no longer stomach his criminality and corruption — with trumped-up charges designed to wipe out their retirement savings or even leave them homeless.

This is a crisis that’s tearing apart the soul of democracy itself.

How much corruption, how much deceit, how many assaults on truth can a republic endure before its citizens stop believing that justice still matters?

When the weight of wrongdoing piles high enough, it isn’t just the Republican Party that breaks and submits; it’s the faith of the people in the very idea of democratic self-government that dies.

And yet the GOP continues to worship him, to kiss his a--, to pretend he’s a great and brilliant man, a modern-day Wizard of Oz. They still rally behind the man. They still defend him, excuse him, and elevate him.

Why? Because corruption is addictive. Once a party decides that power is more important than truth, every lie becomes easier to rationalize, every abuse becomes normalized, every crime becomes “politics as usual.” Power is a drug that numbs the conscience, and the GOP has become a party of addicts.

Democracy can’t survive this level of violence against the rule of law. It must have accountability to survive. It requires honesty. It depends on the courage to face truth even when that truth is painful. The longer a party or a people look away from corruption and criminality, the deeper that corruption and criminality spread, until the whole system collapses from the rot within.

The only cure for that rot is trust, brought about by the evenhanded application of justice and the enforcement of laws and democratic norms. And the only path back to that trust is truth and accountability.

The GOP must decide whether it still believes in the words and examples of Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower or whether it’ll continue to worship at a cheap, gold-painted altar atop which stands one man.

For the sake of democracy, for the sake of the next generation of Americans, these abuses can’t continue. There must be an accounting, and it must come before Trump’s damage is irreparable.

If the Republican Party continues to accept a leader who shatters every norm, effortlessly breaks laws, and ridicules every moral boundary, then the experiment called America will fail.

Because if Republicans continue let a man who once bragged he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” prove himself right, they haven’t saved our country: they’ve destroyed it.

Naive Trump triggered this unthinkable horror to save his skin

“Russia unleashed a massive combined attack on Kyiv” last night, The Guardian reports. “Five people were hospitalized, including one man in critical condition and a pregnant woman, after a series of powerful explosions sounded in the city and air defenses were activated. …

“Pictures posted on social media showed different sites in flames and residents gathering in rubble-strewn streets outside apartment buildings.”

The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are apparently not the only ones who‘ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long relationship with that notorious pedophile.

Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe.

Trump’s coverup may well represent a form of treason, the aid and comfort to an enemy attacking an ally during time of war. It should lead, at the very least, to impeachment.

Right now, the largest nation in Europe, a democracy and an ally, is under violent attack by a brutal dictator intent on reestablishing the Soviet empire. In a threat to European democracy itself, Ukraine is getting pummeled every day because Donald Trump refuses to respond in a meaningful way.

But why?

In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump:

“I think you might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrov can get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”

Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation implies.

If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the pattern: ever since Trump came back into the White House, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have exploded in their ferocity and brutality.

Recently, a missile strike by Russian forces hit the city of Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine and killed at least 20 people including nine children. Apartments collapsed around weeping parents who pulled bodies from the rubble; a baby only a few months old was among the victims.

In another attack, a children’s hospital in southern Ukraine was struck, shattering windows, strewing blood-soaked medical stretchers across the grounds, all while about a hundred people were inside.

Schools, kindergartens and residential buildings have been leveled in multiple towns, as the Russian military targets civilian infrastructure with vicious abandon. They’re daily destroying Ukraine’s fuel and electric grids with the goal of freezing that country’s people into submission as winter approaches.

These are not accidents of war. They’re the deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment buildings, homes, and hospitals. Russian drones hunt civilians down the streets of Ukrainian cities, sometimes smashing the windows of their homes as they chase people indoors to kill them.

And all of this — the horror of what’s happening in plain sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to Putin — appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened Trump with exposure.

We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and afterward seized and destroyed her notes.

Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another lengthy, secretive conversation.

That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide, who’s terrified by some horrible secret; it’s not the behavior of a leader defending the national interest of the United States or our European allies.

On top of that, Trump has been placing private phone calls to Putin repeatedly ever since he was reinstalled in the Oval Office.

No previous American president throughout our 249-year history had ever conducted such meetings and repeated communications in secret with the murderous leader of a hostile foreign power. None has ever tried to cover up meetings with such men.

When we place Trump’s bizarre, unprecedented secrecy next to Epstein’s emails in which the billionaire pedophile tells European and Russian contacts that he could offer “insight” into Trump, the outlines of a deeply troubling possibility emerge.

At this moment, it’s only speculation, but it’s one hell of a big if. Because Trump himself keeps doing things — including trashing NATO and betraying Ukraine in ways that only benefit Putin — and therefore demand a serious, honest investigation.

We now know — from the emails released this week — that Epstein wrote that Sergei Lavrov could “get insight” from him and that Russian Ambassador Churkin “understood Trump” after their talks.

And the Russians, as the world knows, never, ever let such juicy material go to waste. Former KGB senior intelligence officer Vladimir Putin is a man trained to find the soft spot in any opponent and apply the exact right pressure to make them bend to his will, and it’s looking more every day like that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Trump was “best friends” with Epstein for more than a decade. They lived near each other in both New York and Palm Beach, and partied publicly together. They traveled on Epstein’s jet repeatedly. They allegedly shared women.

These don’t prove blackmail, but the possibility that Epstein passed along compromising details to Lavrov or even Putin is staggering.

Imagine Putin, alone with Trump in Helsinki way back in 2018, quietly signaling that he knew more about Epstein, Trump, and underage girls than Trump could survive being exposed.

A soft whisper. Perhaps simply sliding a note card to Trump with the words “Epstein, girls” on it.

And then Trump goes out to meet the press after their meeting, shoulders down looking beaten, and lavishes Putin with praise while trash-talking his own intelligence and military officials. What the hell?

Even former Harvard President Larry Summers was horrified, writing to his friend Jeffrey Epstein on July 16, 2018, moments after the Helsinki meeting:

“Do the Russians have stuff on Trump? Today was appalling even by his standards.”

Epstein replied to Summers the next day:

“My email is full with similar comments. wow. Im sure his view is that it went super well. he thinks he has charmed his adversary.. Admittedly he has no idea of the symbolism. He has no idea of most things.”

The idea that Putin threatened Trump in that first private meeting is only a hypothesis, of course. But the secrecy Trump immediately imposed — and his repeatedly whipped-dog-like servile behavior to this murderous dictator in the years since — makes such a moment impossible to rule out.

If something like that did occur, if Putin delivered even the hint of a threat and Trump immediately bent over and bowed down and has ever since, it would explain Trump’s world-changing behavior and why he’s so seriously damaged the interests of America while abandoning our European allies.

Is there anything else that could possibly explain why Trump has spent years refusing to confront Putin for anything, no matter how shocking or monstrous the Russian dictator’s behavior?

It would also explain his silence in the face of Russian assassinations, Putin’s bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, and now the horrific nightly devastation of Ukraine and Putin‘s kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

If Trump was intimidated in that private moment, if Putin used Epstein’s information as a weapon, then the cost of Trump’s fear of exposure has been measured in thousands of Ukrainian civilian deaths, including far more children then even Epstein himself victimized.

It’s been measured in the suffering of the millions of Ukrainians now facing the possibility of freezing to death this winter without power, as Putin relentlessly and nightly targets their energy grid while Trump plays golf, bulldozes the White House, and throws elaborate parties.

It’s measured in America’s humiliation on the world stage and in the bone-deep terror felt across Europe as Putin tests the resolve of NATO and his officials explicitly threaten the Baltics.

The sheer scale of harm that could have flowed from this one corrupt, degenerate, perverted man’s desperation to protect himself is absolutely breathtaking.

If it turns out that this is what actually happened, it would make historic betrayals like Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, Robert Hanssen, and even the petty treacheries that toppled ancient republics look small by comparison, because none of them placed the survival of modern, worldwide democracy itself at risk.

This isn’t an accusation: it’s the unavoidable suspicion forced upon us by Trump’s own secrecy.

He hid his conversations with Putin from his own government and even from the American people. He created a vacuum where certainty should exist. And now, into that vacuum, flows Epstein’s boast that he was willing to provide Russia with usable, exploitable insights into Trump’s vulnerabilities and psychology.

Trump has refused the basic transparency required of every president who interacts with a hostile foreign leader. If he’d behaved like every president before him, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he has bizarrely, inexplicably kissed Putin‘s ass repeatedly and publicly in ways that have astonished and horrified our intelligence and military officials, as well as those of our allies.

And now he’s in the process of purging any among our military ranks and intelligence services who he appears to suspect may not go along with his inexplicable behavior.

Because Trump’s so frequently surrendered America’s, Ukraine’s, and NATO’s best interests to Putin’ s desires — and now we learn Epstein offered to advise Putin on how to blackmail (or at last control) him — we must now investigate every plausible explanation for his actions, no matter how disturbing.

Just releasing Epstein’s emails isn’t even close to enough to answer these questions.

Congress, what’s left of our independent media, and the FBI must investigate not only Epstein’s crimes and connections but the terrifying possibility that American foreign policy has been warped by a president desperately trying to shield himself from the exposure of unforgivable behavior.

That investigation must be thorough, public, and relentless; it must meet the high standards of the internal and public investigations into Richard Nixon‘s criminality in 1974, at the very least.

If true, the possibilities raised by Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and kowtowing to Putin are far worse than anything Nixon could have conceived in his wildest fantasies.

If Republicans have an ounce of integrity left they’ll not only sanction investigations that could lead to criminal prosecutions; they’ll convene impeachment proceedings.

The American people deserve to know whether blackmail, intimidation, and Trump’s personal vulnerability have cost thousands of Ukrainian lives and shaken the foundations of Western democracy. As well as ignoring — or participating in — the destruction of the lives of hundreds of young girls.

The stakes are too high, the damage too great, and the possible treason too severe to accept anything less.

Trump has twisted this sleazy shame into a crisis that could doom America

The New York Times reported that Donald Trump personally called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and then had Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel take her into the top-secret, no-recording-devices-allowed Situation Room to urge her to drop her support for releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump apparently also tried to reach Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) for the same reason.

Yesterday’s newly surfaced details about Epstein and Trump again reveal something far larger than the tawdry specifics of their relationship, as grotesque as those are.

They point to a structural crisis at the heart of American democracy.

As Republican President Theodore Roosevelt said:

“The exposure and punishment of public corruption is an honor to a nation, not a disgrace. The shame lies in toleration, not in correction…

“If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.”

These newest documents, including Epstein’s correspondences with the journalist Michael Wolff about how Epstein’s knowledge of Trump’s involvement could be used against him — long before Trump was involved in politics (apparently to blackmail him, something Epstein apparently advised Vladimir Putin about how to do) — reveal a pattern we’ve seen throughout history.

It’s a pattern where men of wealth and power create a zone of impunity that protects them while destroying vulnerable people like Virginia Giuffre.

This is where the story moves from sleaze to a massive crisis for American democracy itself.

When a president insists that scrutiny of his possible crimes is illegitimate, he’s not defending his innocence: he’s attacking a foundational principle of the American republic. As John Adams proclaimed:

“We are a government of laws, not of men.”

If only that were true today. If only more than a tiny handful of Republicans believed in that principle.

From Socrates’ collapsing Greece and Caligula’s Rome through the dictatorships of the 20th century and today’s Russia and Hungary, history shows that democracies don’t survive when their leaders live above the law and beyond the reach of legitimate inquiry and a free press.

This danger to America is magnified by Trump’s pardoning or promising to pardon the very people who’ve already committed crimes on his behalf, acts intended to benefit him politically or personally. And he continues to signal that he’ll pardon even more people who help him out.

This isn’t forgiveness: it’s instruction. It’s an explicit message to present and future loyalists that when they commit crimes for him, particularly those involving election or financial fraud, they’ll be rewarded rather than punished.

From Blanche’s treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell to Bondi and Patel’s ongoing coverup for Trump, he’s created a private so-called “justice system” where loyalty to Dear Leader outweighs loyalty to the law.

As we see with the case of Maxwell and Trump's pardon of a crypto executive who made his sons billions, our Justice Department has turned into a “Protect and Enrich Trump Department.”

Amy Wallace, co-author of Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, says she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein. She says the FBI and the Department of Justice know them too.

“Yes, I know who the names are,” Wallace said. “Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”

Was Trump part of it? Was his Miss Teen USA pageant another front in Epstein’s network? Is that why House Speaker Mike Johnson was stonewalling, terrified of the truth?

George Washington warned that when politicians became more loyal to their party or its leader than to our nation or our laws:

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

“It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.”

The principle of a nation of “laws, not men” that Adams envisioned becomes meaningless when wealthy and powerful men are no longer held responsible for their actions.

Thomas Jefferson reminded us that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” a phrase that becomes hollow if the institutions meant to guard liberty are paralyzed by the fear of offending a wannabe dictator like Trump.

We see this with billionaires like Elon Musk, whose destruction of USAID has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children with absolutely no accountability. With Trump’s henchman and Republicans in Congress gutting healthcare and food assistance, while threatening war in Venezuela.

Thomas Paine cautioned that “when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

Paine never imagined corrupt billionaires building a network of over 1,500 rightwing radio stations, four rightwing television networks, and hundreds of rightwing-controlled newspapers and websites, all with the singular message of protecting their wealth, privilege, immunity, and tax cuts.

Today we’re seeing right before our eyes, in real time, how easily democracy can slip away when a leader trains his followers to believe every investigation is treason and every fact is a lie.

The Epstein revelations matter because they’re symptomatic of a larger ecosystem of secrecy and impunity that Trump — and many of the rightwing billionaires associated with him — have relied on for decades. An ecosystem that destroys democracies.

Epstein, Trump, and Maxwell spent years cultivating relationships with extremely rich and politically powerful people. That network helped shield them long after allegations of exploitation became so obvious they would have destroyed a less wealthy or powerful person.

The crisis this affair presents to America — including the complicity of Republicans in the House and Senate, along with the billionaire owners and executives of rightwing media — isn’t simply about “who knew what, when.”

The crisis is that such a network exists at all. That Trump has rebuilt government in a way to protect that morbidly rich network.

These latest releases remind us that when powerful men — including those claiming to be in the press — operate in spaces where wealth and social status shield them from scrutiny, abuses become routine and accountability vanishes for decades or evaporates entirely.

Thus, the most urgent threat to our republic isn’t the past behavior of Epstein or even Trump’s proximity or alleged participation with it. The real danger is that Trump is now rewriting the rules of political accountability in real time in ways that have already corrupted the Republican Party for a generation, and threatened to corrupt our entire nation in ways we may never recover from.

By dismissing legitimate scrutiny as “hoaxes,” by attacking those who want transparency, and by pardoning people who commit crimes for him, our president is teaching his followers that law has no meaning except as a tool to reward friends and punish enemies.

That’s precisely the type of explicit corruption that America’s Founders feared and repeatedly warned us about. Like in ancient Rome, or modern-day Russia and Hungary, it’s the corruption of a republic from within.

Democracy can’t survive this pattern if it’s allowed to continue. A previous generation of Democratic and Republican legislators understood this, which is why they drove the criminal and corrupt Richard Nixon from office.

The Founders also understood this, and their warnings weren’t abstract philosophy. Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had insulated us from exactly what is happening today.

  • But he and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 40+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.
  • They never conceived of an Australian billionaire family coming to America and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and adjudicated sexual abuser would become a noble president.
  • They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to put him back into office after presiding over the unnecessary deaths of a half million Americans.
  • And they never imagined that a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a serial bankrupt and professional con man would be able to leverage rightwing billionaire money and captive media to ascend to the Oval Office twice.

In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

He never imagined the American people tolerating such a widespread level of deceit and corruption.

Today those founding ideals are being tested in a way so serious, so severe, that it puts the future of our country in question.

If we fail to investigate possible crimes and enforce the law, if we continue to allow billionaires and Trump to corrupt our political system, if we continue to tolerate a culture of impunity to harden into a permanent feature of our nation’s political life, America will cease to be America.

And that “shame we let in” is something we must purge from our body politic and never again tolerate.

Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | Manage Preferences | Debug Logs
For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com , for support contact support@rawstory.com .