Today, after almost a year of Trump’s second regime, I want to talk about the challenge Trump and his regime pose to America’s moral purpose. The best way into the subject is, I think, to ask a few questions about what’s been happening, and then offer an answer to all of them.
Questions:
— Why does Trump’s latest National Security Strategy, released this month, make no distinction between despotism and democracy?
— Why is Trump abandoning Europe and siding with Putin over Ukraine?
— Why is Trump also solicitous of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince MBS, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Benjamin Netanyahu?
— Why is the Trump regime so intent on detaining or deporting undocumented people in the United States who have not committed any crimes and have been productive members of their communities for years?
— Why is the Trump regime barring people from even entering the United States whose home countries are predominantly Muslim or whose inhabitants have mostly black or brown skin?
— Why has the Trump regime allowed Andrew and Tristan Tate — arrested in Romania in 2023 on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women — to come to the United States?
— Why is the Trump regime admitting into the U.S. white South Africans as refugees, but not Black or brown people who are in grave danger around the world?
— Why has the Trump regime cracked down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in universities, the public sector, and the private sector?
— Why has Trump targeted for prosecution or intimidation so many women of color who are now in, or have recently occupied, positions of power in the United States?
Answer to all of the above:
Trump and the people around him are not interested in protecting America’s democratic ideals from the global enemies of those ideals. They reject the progress America and the rest of what used to be called the “free world” have achieved in advancing democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and human rights.
The world they seek is one of white supremacy, male dominance, the superiority of the Judeo-Christian tradition over all other creeds, and America-first nationalism.
White male Christian nationalism is about power. It seeks to give white Christian men power over Black and brown people, over women, over people who are not Judeo-Christians, over people born outside the United States, and over anyone who does not fit neatly into the structure and roles of a traditional family.
White male Christian nationalism has more in common with Vladimir Putin, who condemns LGBTQ+ people and scoffs at human rights; with Saudi Arabia, which confines women to second-class status and murders critics of the regime; and with Viktor Orban, who views Muslim immigrants as direct threats to Europe’s Christian values, than it does with America’s traditional allies.
So, when Trump and his regime refer to America’s “national security,” they are not talking about security against authoritarian regimes that eschew democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Their view of “national security” is security against forces — both inside America as well as abroad — that advocate democracy, the rule of law, and human rights (which they describe derisively as “woke” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) rather than white male Christian nationalism.
White male Christian nationalism is a throwback to the world before the enlightenment of the 18th century took root in the West; before the core ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights provided a beacon to America and the world; before Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man.
America has not always lived up to these core enlightenment ideals, but it has at least striven to face its shortcomings and overcome its moral hypocrisies. It fought a horrendous civil war that ended the scourge slavery. It extended voting rights to women. It enacted the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts to guarantee equal political rights to Black and brown people. It committed itself to equal marriage rights.
Our system of rights has rested on a civic culture that demands mutual respect, adherence to the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, rejection of bigotry and hatred, dedication to freedom and justice, and deep suspicion of centralized power whether in government or in the economy.
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After almost a year of Trump’s second term — even more violent and extreme than his first — the moral challenge he and his regime pose to the soul of this nation has become clear: the loss of our core ideals, the deterioration of our founding principles, and the abdication of America’s moral authority in the world.
In 11 months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), & their bought-&-paid-for politicians…
The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”
And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.
Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.
The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.
Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.
(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)
Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.
Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:
“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”
The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin
“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land
Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.
All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.
Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”
And we get there through voting.
This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.
In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.
As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.
But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?
Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.
We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.
But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.
“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”
Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”
Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and JD Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.
Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.
With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.
“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.
Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”
What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.
“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”
This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.
With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.
Dr. Tim Roper told me:
“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”
I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.
He was emphatic:
“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“
Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.
When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.
When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).
It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.
This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.
As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.
Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.
I agree with Reich. Trump is losing it faster and faster. He says more crazy, racist, hateful, and false statements every day. He has failed to live up to his impossible promises. His job approval numbers continue to plummet, and he has no rational plans to correct his failures and inadequacies.
Reich reminds us that when in trouble Trump “does the biggest and craziest things to deflect attention.” I most fear he will invade Venezuela to distract from current and future investigations, and ratchet up the chaos and failings of our government to much greater levels than we have even now.
Ten and a half long months ago, America began spiraling in a terrifying direction. We knew Trump was bad; his first term had been a calamity. But few of us were prepared for the catastrophe that awaited us in the second.
Part of it came because Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress, and Trump was able to intimidate and browbeat them into submitting to whatever he wanted to do.
Now, finally, the ground is shifting.
Some congressional Republicans are turning hawkish on the budget and reject Trump’s zany notion of $2,000 “tariff dividend” checks, as well as his stated desire to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for two years.
Russian hawks dislike Trump’s love fest with Putin on Ukraine.
Nor did they appreciate his happy meeting with Zohran Mamdani.
Or his refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Some are demanding to know more about Trump’s and Hegseth’s bombing (and re-bombing) of boats in the Caribbean.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene decided to pick up her bigotry and leave Congress, I assumed it was because she had picked a fight with Trump and lost. But other Republican members are threatening to depart too — potentially leaving Trump and his puppet Speaker Mike Johnson without enough votes to stop the Democrats.
Could it be — is it really possible? — that a few congressional Republicans are now feeling their backbones?
Yes — which is enough for other congressional Republicans to realize they, too, have vertebrae.
Why now?
Because the MAGA base that every congressional Republican is so afraid of and solicitous toward is falling apart.
They’re finally seeing Trump for what he is: a man without principle except getting richer and more powerful and engraving his name on buildings.
A lame-duck president who said he’d make life better for MAGA starting on “day one” but has made life worse for MAGA by month 10.
He doesn’t even believe in lowering prices. He calls the affordability crisis a “con” job.
Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections and performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district.
If you’re taking some satisfaction from the MAGA crackup, don’t let your guard down.
It’s when Trump feels he’s in trouble that he does the biggest and craziest things to deflect attention.
Why every era ruled by the morbidly rich ends the same way: corruption, collapse, and ordinary people paying the bill..
By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ December 2, 2025
One of the greatest gifts Donald Trump and the thirteen billionaires he pulled into his administration have given America is the reminder, finally and once and for all, that just because somebody is rich doesn’t mean they’re smart. Particularly if they inherited their starting capital from daddy, like Trump and Musk both did.
Wealth in this country has become so intertwined with our mythologies of genius, destiny, and merit that we’ve ended up elevating into near-sainthood (and electing to high office) some of the least thoughtful, least competent, and least self-aware people ever to walk a boardroom floor. It’s a dangerous confusion, and one with deep roots.
I still remember a conversation on my radio program back in 2009 with Bill Gates Sr., one of the kindest and most grounded men I’ve hosted on the air. He told me, matter-of-factly, that while his son Bill was indeed a very smart guy, he also had the sort of upper-middle-class safety net that most Americans could only dream about. Had Bill Jr. been born poor, Gates Sr. said, the trajectory of his life (and the existence of Microsoft) would likely have been very different.
Talent exists everywhere; opportunity does not. That’s true for the brilliant, and just as true for the average or below-average minds who happen to be born into staggering wealth. Privilege — not genius — is what insulates foolish people from the consequences of foolish decisions.
Trump’s casinos went bankrupt even though casinos are literally engineered to make money. He claimed windmills cause cancer. He altered a hurricane map with a Sharpie rather than admit he was wrong. His incompetent handling of Covid caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and now he’s up all night ragetweeting.
Elon Musk blew $44 billion on a website he’s turned into a global punchline, called a Thai cave-rescue diver a “pedo” because the man contradicted him, and cheer-led the destruction of USAID, an act that has severely damaged America’s international soft power, handed a huge geopolitical gift to Russia and China, and already led to what could be millions of unnecessary deaths. Mark Zuckerberg spent tens of billions on a plastic cartoon “metaverse” almost nobody asked for or used.
These aren’t the moves of geniuses. They’re the stumbles of men surrounded by people too afraid to tell them the truth. But this isn’t just about today’s crop of oligarchs. We’ve seen this movie before.
The plantation oligarchs of the 1850s South — men who were some of the richest Americans ever to live — tried to build a continent-wide authoritarian slave empire. They launched a war against democracy itself in 1861 and almost 700,000 Americans died in that Civil War as Lincoln and the Union fought valiantly to preserve our democracy.
During the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, the robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt — were worshiped as industrial gods. Tesla and Edison (genuine geniuses) were hailed as saints of electricity, but it was the financiers behind them who used their inventions to create monopolies and accumulate dynastic wealth.
Only later did America realize that many of these men were less geniuses than gamblers with armies of lawyers; that they built fortunes by crushing competition, often hurting communities, workers, and even the nation itself in their unquenchable quest for more, more, more money!
And then there was the Roaring Twenties, when the super-rich were again treated like royalty. The stock market was their playground, the nation their casino. Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover gave them everything they asked for, from banking deregulation to massive tax breaks.
The result was the Republican Great Depression, and an entire decade of breadlines and collapsed banks. It took FDR and a generation of reformers to remind America that letting the wealthy run wild always ends the same way: with ordinary Americans paying the price.
After Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms, after the humiliation of the Depression, after decades of regulations and high taxes and guardrails to keep the oligarchs from crashing the system again, the morbidly rich mostly kept their heads down.
For a while, at least.
But by the late 1960s and early 70s, something was happening: people were forgetting the damage that celebrating unrestrained wealth had done the last time it was allowed to dominate American politics. That’s when Lewis Powell delivered his infamous “Powell Memo” in 1971, a corporate call to arms urging the wealthiest Americans to seize control of the media, academia, Congress and the judiciary, public opinion, and the political system itself.
It worked. And over the following decades — with the morbidly rich funding right-wing think tanks, engineering media consolidation, and pouring rivers of dark money into our political system — America once again drifted back toward the worship of wealth as a sort of near-divine wisdom. We thus elected a corrupt, felonious billionaire to the presidency, twice.
Every time we let the morbidly rich take the wheel, our nation veers off the road.
Part of the problem is psychological. Extreme wealth isolates people from reality. Studies on the wealthy show declining empathy, reduced capacity to recognize others’ emotions, and a dangerous overconfidence in their own intuition.
Research on CEOs finds that around 20 percent exhibit psychopathic traits — lack of empathy, superficial charm, impulsivity — compared to about one percent of the public. These aren’t qualities that make for wise leadership, but they do let people crawl over the bodies and lives of others to make themselves rich and powerful.
They also can make for headline-grabbing blunders, cruel policies, and breathtakingly stupid decisions insulated from consequence only by inherited wealth and an army of sycophants.
And as I wrote in yesterday’s Hartmann Report about the “Great Secession of the Morbidly Rich,” once wealth reaches a certain scale it becomes indistinguishable from hoarding disorder. Billionaires don’t just accumulate money: they stockpile influence, lawmakers, media platforms, even entire political movements. They withdraw from the common good, then blame the rest of us for the social and infrastructure instability their own excesses have created.
The truth is that America has always been at its strongest when it remembers that great nations are built by great communities, not great fortunes. When we measure character by contribution, not by bank balance. When we demand guardrails, boundaries, and democratic accountability for everyone, especially those with the most power to do the most harm.
The morbidly rich won’t police themselves. They never have. It thus falls to the rest of us to stop confusing wealth with wisdom, and to stop granting automatic deference to people who’ve shown us, over and over again, that riches are no guarantee of intelligence, judgment, or moral clarity.
If we forget that lesson again, they’ll be more than happy to remind us…at our expense.
TBPR Editor Asks:Is there anything Trump can do to take headlines from imminent news about his part in Epstein’s crimes?SeeAnswer Below:
CNN.Com/By Kevin Liptak, Zachary Cohen and Jim Sciutto/November 14, 202
President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.
Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.
While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.
President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.
Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.
While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.
Democrats swept the off-year elections, Trump’s popularity is sliding. The Democratic Party seems on the rise. It makes no sense to stop the momentum and give the Republicans a way out of their mess. The Democratic Party needs new leadership and a better strategy to regain approval from voters. This is not the way to do it. –The TBPR Editor
Before I get into today’s story, last night was an absolute effing disaster. Eight Democratic-caucus senators sold us out by voting with the Republicans:
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Angus King (I-ME), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Tim Kaine (D-VA).
And you know none of this could’ve happened without Chuck Schumer agreeing to it. The Vice-Chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressman Ro Khanna (a regular on my program) was blunt, saying Schumer “is no longer effective and should be replaced.”
I agree.
None of the eight are up for reelection next year (two are retiring), so Schumer and they figure over the course of the next several years we’ll forget what they did to us last night.
I, for one, have no intention of forgetting.
Trump will say that now “even the Democrats agree” with him and he was “right all along.” Over a month of brutal pain was inflicted on the American people, and now he’ll claim it was “all the Democrats’ fault” and “they finally came to their senses.”
They’re already crowing across rightwing media. Look at the damage those heartless Democrats did to our food, healthcare premiums, and air travel! Remember this next November: if they regain the House or Senate they’ll stick it to the American people again just like they did over the past month! See how dangerous it is to vote for Democrats? They just can’t be trusted.
If you want to call any of these fools and cowards, the number for the Senate switchboard is 202-224-3121. Bernie Sanders, who called this “a policy and political disaster,” added:
“There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight. And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I’m angry – like you. But I choose to keep fighting.“
California governor Newsome called it “pathetic”; Illinois governor JB Pritzker said: “This is not a deal — it’s an empty promise.”
I don’t know who is paid off (Fetterman?) or simply wimped out (Durbin/Schumer?), but this is right up there with Sinema and Manchin stabbing America in the back three years ago on the legislation to kill Citizens United and pass the John Lewis Voting RightAct to make voting a right rather than a privilege.
Both pieces of good legislation died because two corrupt on-the-take Democrats joined the Republicans. And here we are again.
Meanwhile, is Donald Trump also trying to buy the 2026 or the 2028 elections with a $2,000 check?
He’s extremely pissed off that voters (and the media and even the Federal Reserve) noticed that his tariffs are driving up inflation.
He’s also raging that the Democrats are getting credit for fighting for the little guy by wanting to extend/renew the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare) subsidies in exchange for voting with Republicans to reopen the government, although it looks like he might’ve just won that one.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS! … A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
Forget the inflation, the serially-bankrupt con-man says it’s a “con job” when Democrats talk about “affordability”:
“What the Democrats do is, they lie. We are the ones that have done great on affordability. They’ve done horribly on affordability. We just lost an election, they said, based on affordability. It’s a con job by the Democrats.”
Please ignore, in other words, that his tariffs are openly unconstitutional (the Founders explicitly wrote that only Congress can impose tariffs). And, they’re driving inflation sky-high.
And don’t even mention that Trump’s been using them to strong-arm foreign governments and their leaders into giving his sons billions for their crypto businesses and putting up Trump-branded hotels and golf courses where he risks nothing whatsoever but takes a continuous slice of the revenues as “licensing fees.”
Not to mention how they’re throwing the nation into recession at the same time they’re driving up the cost of everything, a pain that’s going to get really visible as we hit the holiday gift-buying season.
And forget about the fact that your health insurance premiums are exploding in your face, as he also ranted:
“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over.”
In other words, let’s also get rid of the protections of the ACA — for example, the requirement that they must cover payment for chronic or preexisting conditions — and force every American to buy insurance (if they can afford it) from those same insurance companies he’s pretending to rage against. It’ll be a huge boon for the companies and their morbidly rich executives.
In exchange for screwing Americans on tariff-caused inflation and healthcare, he wants to send us a check just like he did with the Covid stimulus checks back in 2020, thinking putting his signature on them would help him win the upcoming election.
His promise of a “dividend” to every citizen isn’t economic policy, it’s a proposed payoff. After five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice of billionaires buying politicians and judges, Trump’s now cutting out the middlemen and proposing to buy the voters himself.
The tariffs (and his assaults on democracy) were hurting him with the voters enough to affect the election this month, driving a Democratic sweep across the nation. And now he’s also freaked out because his Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill gutted the ACA subsidies that made health insurance affordable for at least 24 million Americans and Democrats dared (until last night) stand up against it.
Trump voters are experiencing buyer’s remorse and Americans more generally are furious that he and his billionaire buddies are screwing us while they live the Great Gatsby life.
Thus, he’s now waving cash in our faces, believing we’re stupid enough to trade our democracy, economy, and healthcare for a quick hit of cash.
But this isn’t generosity; it’s corruption in broad daylight, a desperate, cynical attempt to turn the American vote into a cash transaction.
The only question left is: how many Americans will take the bait?
America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty.
Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: “law and order,” “family values,” “national security.” Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering.
From the actuarial tables that justified the deaths of Black people a hundred years ago, to the silence that let gay men die in the 1980s, to the unmarked vans prowling our streets today, the design remains the same. The faces change; the purpose — upholding straight white male supremacy — never does.
While many Americans are shocked by the cruelty and brutality of Trump’s/Miller’s/Vance’s ICE and CPB thugs against Hispanics in the United States, such attempts to “purify” the country are really nothing new. Hopefully, though, our response to them will be different this time.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the vice president of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, published a widely cited “scientific” book claiming that Black people were so biologically inferior that they would “eventually die out.” He argued that if white society simply refused to extend medical care, social support, or public health infrastructure to them, their extinction would “occur naturally.”
It was an extraordinary act of pseudoscientific cruelty: a man with corporate and political power using the language of statistics and medicine to rationalize genocide by neglect. Hoffman’s 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — one of the best-selling books of the early 1900s — became the actuarial and intellectual foundation for denying healthcare to Black Americans to this day, giving white policymakers cover to block public health investment while claiming to be guided by “data.”
Hoffman’s claim is why there’s a 20% hole in traditional Medicare: it was created at the demand of white racist southern senators so elderly Black people — who couldn’t afford the 20% co-pay — wouldn’t show up in then-whites-only hospitals and doctors’ offices.
That same brutal logic — intentional genocide by state action or inaction — reappeared when the AIDS crisis erupted in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s response to the disease was defined by silence and contempt. As tens of thousands of mostly gay men got sick and died (several of them close friends of ours), America’s bigoted President Reagan refused even to utter the word “AIDS” throughout his presidency.
— His press secretary laughed, from the official White House podium, about gay men dying .
— Conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan called the disease “nature’s retribution” for “immoral” homosexuality, and Senator Jesse Helms successfully banned federal funding for educational materials about safe sex and AIDS that he said might “promote homosexual activity.”
— William F. Buckley Jr. (who also wrote about the supposed genetic inferiority of Black people) proposed tattooing people who had AIDS so they could be identified, discriminated against, and segregated from the rest of us.
The message from Republicans in power was unmistakable: the queer victims of HIV were morally defective, they deserved their excruciatingly painful deaths, and government had no duty to save them.
It was Hoffman’s calculus all over again, dressed up in the language of religion and “family values” instead of racial eugenics.
Now that same monstrous pattern is repeating itself both along our border and border towns, as well as across the interior of the United States. The logic of white racial and cultural superiority reflected by Republican rhetoric has today metastasized into open brutality.
The so-called Kavanaugh stops — made possible by a morally evil shadow-docket ruling written by Brett Kavanaugh for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — have effectively given Trump’s agents permission to seize and detain people based solely on the color of their skin or the way they speak, just like the Klan could do in the Old South.
Under this blatantly unconstitutional decree, masked federal goons can snatch anyone they choose, hold them without due process, and claim they’re “immigration suspects.” There are already reports of U.S. citizens, including fathers and mothers driving their kids to school, being pulled from their cars, cuffed, and dragged away by men in black or camo tactical gear with no badges and no warrants.
One video shows a terrified child screaming as her father — a US citizen, brutalized in broad daylight — is shoved into an unmarked van, because he looked Hispanic. They then kidnapped the terrorized child and held her for much of the day.
This is not law enforcement. It’s state terror. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “The cruelty is the point.” Stephen Miller and his colleagues in the Trump White House appear to have designed these policies precisely to maximize fear and suffering.
During Trump’s first term he bragged to colleagues that family separation worked as “deterrence.” Children were warehoused in cages, parents deported without them, and about a thousand have vanished to this day through a shadowy network of pop-up “Christian” foster homes that vanished after they got the kids from the Trump administration.
The trauma was — and is — intentional, an explicit message to would-be brown-skinned migrants that America would destroy their families if they came here. Now Trump, et al, are expanding that same logic nationwide, empowered by corrupt white Republicans on a Supreme Court that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of hateful, bigoted ideology and obedience to the party that appointed them.
What we’re witnessing right now is the third great chapter in a grim American tradition: define a population as “lesser,” withhold or weaponize care, legalize and expand harassment, and watch the consequences unfold — people brutalized, children traumatized, citizens terrified — while pretending they’re inevitable and the cause is noble.
Hoffman’s statistical analyses justified abandoning Black Americans to early death by refusing them healthcare. Reagan’s silence and cuts to government funds allowed a generation of gay men to die untreated. And Trump’s immigration machine now turns suffering into policy.
In each case, the people inflicting the harm claim moral superiority — that they’re protecting the “real” America from impurity or invasion — while what they’re really doing is institutionalizing cruelty and brutality as governance while being cheered on by their bigoted white supremacist base.
This is not hyperbole. When a Supreme Court packed with rightwing ideologues uses an unsigned opinion to strip away constitutional rights and green-light racial profiling, we’re no longer operating under a system that respects equal protection under the law.
When federal agents are masked, unmarked, unaccountable, and armed, snatching US citizens and peaceful protestors off the street, we’re living in a police state. And when our national conversation treats all that as normal, we’re back in Hoffman’s world; the world where suffering isn’t an error to be corrected but a strategy for how the powerful maintain straight white male supremacy.
We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations.
They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice” for straight white men and a society that claims they should exclusively be in charge.
The outrage of the Kavanaugh stops isn’t just about immigration or policing. It’s about whether the United States still recognizes limits on government power.
It’s immoral. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic evil that once hid behind actuarial tables and “family values.” Rightwing leaders in past fascist regimes have used it to justify the wholesale destruction of a people.
We must not let history repeat itself again. We know where this road leads: to children in cages, to communities terrorized, to hospitals turning patients away, to families burying their dead while officials shrug.
Hoffman — a Republican who openly celebrated the death of FDR — thought Black extinction would come naturally if white men in power simply withheld care. Reagan thought the gay community would vanish if government refused to help. And Trump’s America First ideologues continue to argue that nonwhite people will “self-deport” if the state makes life unbearable enough as they welcome white South Africans.
In every case, the goal is erasure of “undesirable people” through pain.
We have the power to stop it, but only if we refuse to normalize it. Every senator, every judge, every journalist, every citizen must confront the reality that the machinery of cruelty is running again in our names.
Once a nation accepts pain as governance, democracy becomes performance and compassion becomes treason. Republicans have perfected the unthinkable. The only question left is whether America will finally refuse to justify it.
Silence is complicity. Outrage is the only moral response, and action the only cure. Tag, you’re it!
Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she is being attacked by Republican men for appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher and The View.
Greene, a Georgia Republican Representative, wrote on X on Thursday: “There are pathetic Republican men (mostly paid social media influencers) attacking me for going on Bill Maher’s show and The View.
“Here is my voting card and nothing has changed about me, I’m 1,000,000% America ONLY.
“Sorry I’m not sorry I don’t obey Republican men’s demands that I, as a woman, don’t remain seen but not heard.”
Why It Matters
This is another example of Greene, known for her previous unwavering support of President Donald Trump and the America First agenda, generating controversy within her party.
She has broken away from the party line, disagreeing with her colleagues on a range of issues including the Jeffrey Epstein files, health care subsidies and the Israel-Hamas war.
Greene told podcaster Tucker Carlson last week: “Americans got to the point where electing Donald Trump was a referendum on the Republican Party. And I very much feel that, because many times I hate my own party, and I blame Republicans for many of the problems that we have today.”
Greene’s response to the latest controversy not only highlights ongoing divisions within the Republican Party but also raises questions about the role of women and independent voices in conservative circles, with potential implications for the party’s messaging and unity ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington D.C. in September. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP)
What To Know
Greene announced that she would be appearing on The View on Tuesday, in a post on X that also shared a clip of the commentators telling her audience the same thing.
“People in Washington are starting to say ‘my constituents’—they’re starting to remember why they’re there,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said. “Because you don’t get there without people putting you there and remembering that those same people can pull you out of there.”
“And that’s why I’m happy to say that (Greene) is going to be here on Tuesday,” she added.
Numerous conservatives on X have spoken out against this, including the Red Eagle Politics account, followed by Vice President JD Vance, who said: “MTG trashes Trump, and gets to be the first conservative to be allowed on The View in years. Are people not paying attention to the psyop here?
“But ‘muh aipac’ as if that’s the only thing that matters—these people are so dense and their narrative falls apart by their own logic.”
Xaviaer DuRousseau, a social media influencer known for his transition from progressive to Gen Z conservative, shared the announcement and said: “This may cost us the midterms and I’m not even kidding.”
A MAGA-supporting account called Pino Americano, with more than 98,000 followers, said: “I can’t think of any reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene to go on The View unless she wanted to go there to bash Trump.”
What Happens Next
Given Greene’s prominence and the reactive nature of political discourse within the GOP, further divisions could shape Republican dynamics ahead of the next election cycle. How party leadership and conservative media figures respond to Greene’s criticisms of so-called “America last” Republicans and her push for women’s voices will likely influence broader Republican strategy and unity in the coming year.
Hartmann is writing what I’ve been thinking. As Trump’s psychosis worsens, his approval rating declines. Little by little, Independents, MAGA diehards and ordinary Americans can see Trump’s bizarre behavior and overreaching policies (like tariffs) hurting more and more of our fellow citizens, while economic progress, inflation, and lost jobs become more evident. Yes, Trump can’t always win, and is likely starting to lose support. Indications are that this madman has lost his momentum. But until that comes to pass, patience is necessary.–TBPR Editor
The strongman act is cracking, but as the cops, the crowds, and even the cult start to walk away, is this finally the moment his empire begins to fall?
Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump.
What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?
In 1999, I was working in a remote part of rural Russia for a German-based international relief agency; we were building housing and trying to teach peasant agricultural methods to people who’d only ever known massive, collective factory farms. I was staying in the home of a family of four with two young children; Dad was Russian and Mom — her name was Olga — was from East Germany, although she’d grown up watching West German TV.
The night before the first open and fair election in Russia’s entire history, we were watching Russian TV news and eating dinner in the midst of a huge snowstorm when a wild-eyed fellow came on the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with a kaleidoscope of extreme emotions. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again.
He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary with a solemn expression. Olga suddenly broke out in laughter, although her husband’s face was serious, if not confused.
“What’s that about?” I asked Olga. (My German is pretty good, but not my Russian.)
“Vladimir Zhirinovsy [the extreme right-wing candidate],” she said in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election. The news lady is wondering where he’ll get all the turkeys.”
“People fall for that?” I said.
She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever. Ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe. And he doesn’t really care what he promises; if he gets elected he’ll do whatever he pleases.”
Donald Trump seems to be bringing Zhirinovsky’s political strategy to America.
He made a simple, straightforward deal with his supporters. It included elected Republicans and his base voters, and was elegant in its simplicity.
He promised that he’d make life miserable for Blacks, Hispanics, women, queer people, academics, and people living in big cities. The deal was first offered when he came down the infamous escalator in 2015, and repeated in rally after rally, campaign commercial after campaign commercial, for the past decade.
He also promised to make life better for his white male base, saying he’d “end inflation on day one,” “make America affordable again,” “slash energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months,” “unleash American energy,” and “get prices down” on “groceries, cars, everything.”
In exchange, he asked them to let him steal as much as he could from the public treasury, get away with past and present crimes, ignore his marital infidelities, and look away from his associations with child rapists, his Miss Teen USA Pageant, and Jeffrey Epstein.
His loyal followers did their part. They ignored his payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy bunny, his bragging about sexually assaulting women, his adjudication as a rapist, his 34 convictions for stealing the 2016 presidential election by fraud, his hustling made-in-China campaign swag, and even the hundreds of millions he and his third wifemade selling them nearly worthless digital tokens.
Loyal preachers and even business leaders groveled before him, basking in the glow of his base’s love. Apple’s Tim Cook embarrassed himself and his company by slobbering over Trump as he handed him a chunk of 24 karat gold. Thirteen billionaires in his cabinet simpered when the cameras came on, repeatedly and pathetically reassuring Donald of his brilliance and nobility.
Mike Johnson engineered a coverup of Trump’s association with Jeffery Epstein, and Republicans averted their eyes as Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from a real prison to a Club Fed where she lives in an unlocked dormitory and can entertain herself with tennis and puppy-training.
They disregarded his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his placing his own personal lawyers in charge of justice in America, and his subsequent weaponization of the Justice Department against their own former lifelong Republican peers.
Now they’re defending his defilement of the White House, his depraved sons taking billions from foreign governments, and his betrayal of Ukraine in his never-ending deference to Vladimir Putin.
Republican politicians who for years warned about “jackbooted thugs” as they waved “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are suddenly fine with masked secret police openly and brutally beating American citizens as they build a massive network of concentration camps across the country.
It’s been a good run and a great grift. But scams like this — even well-engineered ones with the power of a corrupted government behind them — usually don’t last.
Nixon went down in flames, and his attorney general went to prison. Warren Harding’s health was destroyed, many biographers claim, by his association with Teapot Dome. Bill Clinton lost his law license and was impeached for his lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Now, it appears, it’s Donald Trump’s turn to pay the price for his cozenage. Although all but a small handful of elected Republicans don’t yet seem to realize it, Trump is losing his grip.
Four Republicans in the House of Representatives are demanding to know the details of his association with child rapists. Five Republican senators yesterday voted to blockhis illegal and unconstitutional tariffs against Brazil.
Several Republican senators have voiced concerns about his illegal murder of “drug traffickers” in the Caribbean. The public is aghast at his destruction of the historic “people’s” White House.
His approval in every category is underwater. Seven million or more people poured into the streets two weeks ago to defy him. His ICE and CPB thugs are pursued by citizens with whistles and apps to identify their locations.
Instead of fixing inflation, his tariffs have caused it to take off again. Instead of increasing employment, jobs are increasingly hard to find.
Instead of making groceries and housing more affordable, Trump’s policies have made things worse.
Instead of cutting energy prices, his killing off Biden’s green energy projects in exchange for fossil fuel campaign money is jacking electricity prices sky-high nationwide.
About the only thing holding up so far is the stock market, and most of that is being driven by an AI boom (which may be a bubble) that started under Biden; 21 states are in or near full-blown recession now as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
Republican politicians openly worry about the 2026 elections as they desperately try to rig them with outrageous and transparently corrupt gerrymanders and widespread voter suppression, mostly by voter roll purges in Red states.
Meanwhile, America’s allies around the world are recoiling from Trump’s embrace of Putin and Netanyahu, his betrayal of Ukraine, and his saber-rattling against Venezuela. His misguided tariff policies have devastated our relations with our nearest neighbors and traditional partners, while China and Russia play him for a sucker.
Most importantly, the racist, homophobic, misogynistic base Trump made his original deal with — the deal that put him into office twice — is turning away from him, disillusioned.
His “get the brown people” deportation scheme is wreaking havoc with the economy, devastating farmers and low-wage industries, and causing even the most hateful racists to admit he’s shooting America in the foot.
The LA Times, owned by a Trump-humping billionaire, is even pointing out that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and podcasters like Andrew Schultz have “caught the scent of blood in the water” and are turning against him.
Even MAGA Republicans in the US Senate turned against Trump’s most recent nominee, Paul Ingrassia, because of his pro-Nazi postings.
How long can Trump hold things together?
That’ll mostly depend on what happens with the larger economy. If prices continue to rise, employment stays paralyzed, and Republicans do nothing about healthcare and housing costs, there’ll be a huge reckoning in November, 2026.
Similarly, if the media continues to desert him over corruption and foreign policy, and even deals like Don Jr.’s spiffing Fox’s primetime host Laura Ingraham fail to hang onto network loyalty, his fall could be spectacular. No matter how many networks David Ellison buys, he and Rupert/Lachlan won’t be able to cover up the wreckage.
America is not Russia or Hungary; both were ruled by dictators for millennia while we’ve practiced democracy for 250 years. Most of us believe in it. We want it to continue.
Sophocles famously said, “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” Trump thought he could invert that, but three thousand years of history taught us that the truth generally triumphs over lies and corruption.
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