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Editor’s note: The following, which is for Editorial Board subscribers only, first appeared in Dan’s newsletter, Dandadad.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book out titled White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. It has proved controversial. There are two major objections, as I understand them. First, Schaller and Waldman may have misrepresented or misunderstood scholarship on the rural context. Second, their thesis — white rural voters pose a unique threat to American democracy — may be overstated and under-supported.

I've known of Schaller and Waldman's work for a long time, and know Tom himself at least a little. So I was a bit surprised to see the vehemence and breadth of the pushback on the new book. I was equally surprised to see other folks I know strongly defend their thesis. The authors got their own word in at The New Republic.

Is it rural or is it race?
It may surprise you to hear this, but I am neither a rural sociologist or political scientist. I decided I was in no place to give an authoritative assessment of these arguments. Then, while I was groping around for what I did want to say, Noah Berlatsky ... just went ahead and nailed it?

Democrats struggle not with rural voters in general, but with white rural voters in particular. And white rural voters do not vote for the GOP because they are rural. They vote for the GOP because they are white.

That's pretty much it. As one scholar argues, if you control for other factors, the difference between rural and urban voting patterns essentially disappears. Race is a much stronger predictor than things like income, religion or place of residence.

Let's put that more anecdotally. I've known some straight-up, stone-cold racists in rural areas. But then I've also known some in urban areas.

It's not quite as simple as saying that rural whites are a bunch of racists. But for at least some people, it's a straightforward enough syllogism:

1. Cities are the source of all our problems.
2. Black people live in cities.
3. Democrats run cities.
4. Ergo, Democrats and everything they stand for are bad and wrong.

There are variations on this theme. Illegal immigrants are overrunning our society! Democrats let them all in! Therefore, etc. Or: covid is a city problem, Democrats run cities and liberals run health departments. Therefore, we're not interested in getting vaccinated or practicing social distancing.

As with any white people, rural or urban, the supremacist elements of these formulas are more or less explicit, depending on the individual and their community. It could be that rural whites are more prone to bias due to lower levels of education. But other than that, racists are racists, no matter where you find them.

Social incentives
There is one factor particular to rural areas that deserves consideration before we look at potential answers to the "rural problem." Rural folks traditionally don't move around as much as city folks.

Deep roots feed social capital through rich networks of relations, neighbors and friends. Rural communities are able to offer impressive support to those in need or to accomplish shared goals. Think food pantries, volunteer fire companies, churches that persist with a handful of members.

But those same roots provide lots of incentives not to rock the social boat. This boils down to "Don't tick off the neighbors because you're stuck with those assholes for a long time and you never know when you might need their help." That makes it difficult to confront your loudmouth bigoted uncle. It makes it even harder to disagree with those weird dudes down the road with all the AR-15s. It also can create a "culture of bullying" that reflexively smashes down anyone who doesn't conform to gender, political or racial norms.

Asking better questions
I don't say these things to valorize or demonize rural areas. It's just that knowing them helps us to ask the right questions.

For example, Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, tells Tyler Austin Harper:

The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems — our government, our economy, our modes of communication — that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?

On the surface, this seems like a decent enough question. But it falls apart when you consider its easiest answer. Some people feel unseen, unheard and disrespected because they're bigots who have been spoon-fed a diet of resentment and entitlement courtesy of rightwing media. That leads to the practical but not very satisfying conclusion that they're best ignored in any kind of political project to the left of Attila the Hun.

You might also ask, as Thomas Frank did, What's The Matter With Kansas? Or as Frank's thesis is often formulated: Why do white rural residents vote against their economic interests?

The usual hot take is that they've been hoodwinked by Republicans into voting on culture rather than cold hard cash. But that doesn't give them much credit. They're not fools. What if they know what they're doing? What if there's something they value more than economics?

To put it more exactly: What is it that white rural voters are willing to sacrifice so much for? It could be maintaining various forms of privilege, especially racial hierarchies. Or it could be saving a rural way of life that they perceive to be under threat of vanishing. (These options are not mutually exclusive.)

Getting better answers
Whatever the case, I suspect the most productive response to the situation will involve two things. They might seem like pie-in-the-sky projects at first. But I at least think there's some cause for a bit of optimism for each of them.

Democrats and progressives will need to do a lot less writing off rural districts as hopeless and a lot more intentional work on developing solidarity with them. A revived union movement such as we're currently seeing could go a long way toward meeting this goal. So could a new "green economy." It would help if there were a leftwing media ecosystem to push the good news coming out of those developments. Rural voters may not be fools, but there is evidence that messages of economic success aren't getting through to voters. There is also a desperate need for more positive racial narratives than the ones provided by Fox News and AM radio. But that might be too much to ask, given the kind of investment it would take.

And in the end the answer to overcoming divisions between rural and urban areas will have to come from within the communities themselves. They'll never accept a solution imposed from outside, and it is their community, after all.

It may very well be that cultural differences and the tensions between extractive and information economies are too big to bridge. On the other hand, maga extremism might prove finally too much even for country mice. Trump's unpopularity might create an opening for home-grown — and less extreme — leadership to emerge. And as Schaller and Waldman point out in their New Republic piece, there is a sizable rural minority population to build upon.

On the third hand, I despair.

Why bother?
But on the fourth hand, I'm pleased to see homegrown rural Democratic candidates emerging to challenge Republican hegemony. I'm also encouraged to hear of communities adopting more inclusive policies out of self-interest, if nothing else. With time and investment, I'm fairly confident liberal messages can get through to rural voters and a progressive vision can take root.

Rural white voters aren't more extreme than anyone else in my experience. Nor are they more racist. Your mileage may vary. They are, however, primed to support Republicans in a lot of ways. It would take a lot of time and investment to overcome those factors. There are legitimate arguments to be had about how worthwhile the effort would be. I've made some of the same arguments about religious outreach.

But it can be done, and I think it should at least be attempted. It won't win Democrats the next election, probably not the next few either. But if the nation is ever to emerge from the shadow of racialized politics, it will have to confront white beliefs and practices. White racism may not be all that different in the cities than it is in the country. Still, it's as good a place to start as any. Which, come to think of it, is the tacit motto of a lot of rural places.

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke this week at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies’ Legislative Leadership Summit and offered some spirited advice for the young people present.

“We have to know that sometimes, people will open the door for you and leave it open, sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that fucking door down,” Harris said, as the audience went wild. Laughing she added, “Excuse my language.”

All the resulting press has focused on the vice president’s language. People were apparently confused: Was this a political speech or a David Mamet monologue?

This felt very 1990s when there was no cursing on primetime TV. If you had HBO, you could hear Samantha on Sex and the City say “f—king.” You could also see her f—king. Now, though, it seems every streaming series is like a Richard Pryor routine. The word just doesn’t seem that shocking anymore. It’s exactly what an almost 60-year-old vice president would say and was far less profane than shooting puppies.

Watch a video clip of Harris’s remarks here. Parental guidance is not suggested.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter to comment on the vice president’s “language.”

“I’m not going to repeat that language,” he said. “I don’t use that [language] publicly.”

Jean-Pierre said it was “up to you” if he wanted to say “fuck” in public. The guy’s still living in the Hays Code. Harris only said “fucking” once (and not in the context of sex), so that’s good enough for a PG-13 rating. This wasn’t Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, which uses the word 569 times at a rate of 3.15 time per minute.

“Was this a one-off,” the very serious reporter asked, “or can we expect similar language from the vice president going forward?”

Why do so many men assume that everything a woman politician does is calculated? She’s a normal human being who probably uses the word “fuck” when excited or angry (it’s a very flexible word). It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that she slipped up and used the word in public. She even immediately apologized. Move on.

Kamala Harris has been the vice president for more than three years and has spoken publicly quite often. Her “fuck” average is nowhere near Wolf of Wall Street’s. The word is used more often in the “Don’t fuck with Mr. Zero” scene from When Harry Met Sally.

A YouTube commenter posted, “I am glad my parents are not still around to hear what comes out of the mouths of people leading this country. So disrespectful and unprofessional. Justifying using vulgarity to defend killing preborn humans would be on course for these people. Pretty sick.”

Of course, this person is probably voting for Donald Trump, who’s often used the word “f—k.”

Trump went full Tarantino during a 2011 speech to Republican donors in Las Vegas. CNN reported at the time:

“They (OPEC) want to go in and raise the price of oil because we have nobody in Washington that sits back and says you're not going to raise that fucking price, you understand me?” he said.
And when it came to Iraq, Trump said, "we build a school, we build a road. They blow up the road. They blow up the school. We build another school, we build another road, they blow them up. We build again, in the meantime we can't get a fucking school built in Brooklyn.”

Trump has said “f—k” multiple times in public, both before and after his presidency. Yet Jesse Watters at Fox News freaks out over the “foul-mouthed Momala.” However, Harris isn’t a man or white.

Past political potty mouths

During a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, President Barack Obama suggested Republican Mitt Romney was a “bulls—ter.” He said, “You know, kids have good instincts. They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that's a bullshitter, I can tell.’”

Republicans were, of course, very offended. Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said people shouldn’t get “distracted” by the word, but instead “focus on the issue” — Romney’s overall untrustworthiness.

Rolling Stone also ran “A Brief History of Presidential Profanity” that documented examples of non-family hour language from political leaders.

Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes were filled with “expletive deleteds.” Nixon said in 1990 that “millions were shocked” by his words because “neither I nor most other presidents had ever used profanity in public.” He added, “I have heard other presidents use very earthy language in the Oval Office.” This might’ve included Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, who both dropped the f-bomb in conversation.

There were quite a few public profanities, but usually after an interview had ended or when a politician failed to notice the green light was still blinking. When Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008’s South Carolina Democratic primary, Bill Clinton directly linked Obama to Jesse Jackson. After a contentious interview, Clinton was overheard saying, “I don't think I should take any s—t from anybody on that, do you?”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush described New York Times reporter Adam Clymer to his running mate Dick Cheney as “major-league asshole.” Four years later, Cheney would reportedly tell Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to “go f—k [himself].” Cheney would later claim, “That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”

It probably was.

When Jess McIntosh, vice president of communications for EMILY’s List, joined the 2016 Clinton campaign, there was a lot of faux rightwing outrage over McIntosh’s liberal use of “f—k” in her tweets. She was Mamet-level creative with the word. She tweeted in 2013 that she “ate the f—k out of a bagel.” Breitbart observed that McIntosh “used the word to describe her movement around Washington, DC, and other places in the country in 2013.” (She fucked around the city, etc.)

McIntosh wondered if anyone would make such a fuss about her tweets if she were a man. It’s a legitimate point, considering Bill Clinton was filmed saying “f—k” during a card game.

Current President Joe Biden publicly called the passage of the Affordable Care Act a “big f—king deal.” Biden said in 2010, “I’m embarrassed as hell by it, but apparently we’re selling t-shirts and making hundreds of thousands of bucks.” He shouldn’t have beat himself up. He was caught on a hot mic, but here’s how Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry explained his Iraq vote to Rolling Stone: “I voted for what I thought was best for the country. ... Did I expect George Bush to f—k it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did.”

Everyone protesting the Iraq War f—king knew.

Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego did not seem embarrassed when he used “f—k” in a public tweet to Ted Cruz — a man so odious his official title is “f—k,” as in “F—k Ted Cruz.”

“F—k you @tedcruz,” Gallego wrote, “you care about a fetus, but you will let our children get slaughtered. Just get your ass to Cancun. You are worthless.”

When most people exclaim a variation of “f—k,” they are expressing anger, frustration or outright sexual aggression. That’s not what Harris did. She wasn’t talking about that “f—king” Trump but the “f—king” door that stands in the way of progress.

You might recall that in September 1976, Norman Mailer interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter for the New York Times. This is a particularly apt passage:

“The real answer is to get those of us who are running the government going right” You see, Carter went on to say, he was not looking to restore the family by telling people how to live; he did not wish to be president in order to judge them. “I don't care,” he said in his quiet decent voice, as if the next words, while not wholly comfortable, had nonetheless to be said, “I don't care if people say —,” and he actually said the famous four‐letter word that the Times has not printed in the 125 years of its publishing life.

Yes, the Times insisted on missing the point even back in 1976. The uncensored line carries a great deal of weight and reinforces the man Carter was and still is: “I don’t care if people say f—k.” If Carter doesn’t, neither should we.

Last week, Harris discussed defending reproductive rights with Abbott Elementary’s Sheryl Lee Ralph. No “f—ks” were said or given. You should watch in full.

The Timesreleased a new poll this week showing that Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden in five crucial swing states, and that he’s leading because of monumental upheavals within the president’s coalition.

The popular takeaway Monday was that Trump is a strong candidate, because of adverse reactions among Democratic voters to the president’s economic policies and approach to the Israel-Hamas war.

Trump is weak, though.

The Times poll shows it.

To be sure, the numbers are what they are. They suggest the former president’s “strength among young and nonwhite voters,” Nate Cohn wrote, and that “has at least temporarily upended the electoral map.”

Trump is surging, he said, “to a significant lead in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — relatively diverse Sun Belt states where Black and Hispanic voters propelled Mr. Biden to signature victories in the 2020 election.”

However, the appearance of Trump’s strength is just that. It’s based on the idea, underscored by this poll, that he’s witnessing a “breakthrough among traditionally Democratic young, Black and Hispanic voters” who expressed “discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza.”

But deep into the piece, Cohn acknowledges that such an appearance “may not rest on a solid foundation.” Trump’s strength, he said, “is concentrated among irregular, disengaged voters who do not pay close attention to politics and may not yet be tuned into the race,” he wrote. “They may be prone to shift their views as the race gets underway."

Trump’s strength is illusory.

Also deep in Cohn’s piece is this:

“Around 13 percent of the voters who say they voted for Mr. Biden last time, but do not plan to do so again, said that his foreign policy or the war in Gaza was the most important issue to their vote,” Cohn wrote.

That’s around one in 10 Biden voters. That’s, you know, not a lot of people, who may also “shift their views as the race gets underway."

The numbers contradict themselves, but they also contradict history. Black Americans, especially Black women, are the beating heart of the Democratic Party, and they have been a pivotal voting bloc since Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats passed the Social Security Act of 1935.

Yet this new poll suggests a massive, epochal shift, with Trump winning more than 20 percent of Black voters – “a tally,” Cohn said, “that would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

That’s … just not believable, but I guess that’s what we can expect from a poll that also asked respondents whether the president bears any responsibility for the fall of abortion rights. The Times knows for a fact that he has no responsibility, whatsoever, and that Trump is entirely to blame. Even so, the Times asked, and lo! Twenty percent blame Biden.

Michael Herriot explained the disconnect between the numbers and the apparent disconnect with Black American political history. In 2020, he said, Trump won 8 percent of the Black vote. The poll’s “weighted sample contains 391 Black voters. Thirteen percent of all respondents were between 18-29. If weighted the same as the total group, in this poll, the difference between 8 percent and 20 percent is six responses.

“Yep,” he said. “Even with all that math and science, the entire notion that Trump is gaining ground among 1.2 million young Black voters is essentially based on phone conversations with six Black people.

“Six.”

There’s reason why it’s incredible to see a poll finding that Donald Trump is winning more than 20 percent of Black voters – “a tally,” Cohn said, “that would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” – and that’s because it’s literally incredible.

Trump’s strength is illusory.

The problem isn’t the Times poll. It is what it is. The problem is the Times poll being taken as the voice of God. It’s not. There are plenty of other polls, many of them higher in quality, but only the Times has the influence and prestige that sends liberals and Democrats into a panic.

And the problem is the Times’ interpretation of the Times poll, as if that, too, were the voice of God. It’s not that either. As I have demonstrated, I can spin the same numbers differently. Where the Times chose to highlight Trump’s strength, I chose to highlight his weakness. I think my interpretation is better. It’s grounded in history.

I’ll close with this curiosity. Nowhere in the Times interpretation of the Times poll is there an acknowledgement of the risk being taken by the Republican Party in sticking with Donald Trump, nor is there recognition that the Times’ poll itself continues to expose that risk.

All things being equal, and they are pretty equal, even by the standards of the Times’ polling, victory for Trump may depend on an epochal realignment among Black voters. In order to win, his tally of Black voters has to be better than any GOP candidate in the last 60 years.

That’s incredible.

And incredibly weak.

Former President Donald Trump returned to rally in a small New Jersey city that his campaign stiffed on a five-figure police and public safety bill in 2020.

Consider that a lesson learned for Wildwood, N.J.: This time, Trump's campaign needed to pay ahead of time for the rally Trump is hosting on Saturday at Wildwood Beach.

RELATED ARTICLE: Stiffed: How Trump's campaign visits cost local police departments

The Trump campaign paid $54,200 for public safety and clean-up costs ahead of Saturday's rally that's expected to draw thousands of visitors, NJ.com reported.

Lisa Fagan, public information officer for the city of Wildwood, N.J., confirmed to Raw Story that the Trump campaign paid $54,200 plus an additional $150 that "covers all event costs that the city might incur."

"We are working in tandem with the Secret Service who are running all security measures," Fagan said.

All city departments work together to support such an event, Fagan said.

“Take the politics out of it and people would bend over backward for this number of people to come to their town,” Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr., a Republican and Trump supporter, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “We become national spotlight. They see the size of the beaches, they see the amusement parks we have to offer, our restaurants and hotels take a good hit.”

Trump's campaign was invoiced $33,900 after a rally he hosted on Jan. 28, 2020, prompting then-Wildwood Mayor Pete Byron to plead with Trump to pay up as the city of 5,000 dealt with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for Public Integrity reported.

Federal campaign finance records offer no indication that Trump's campaign ever paid the 2020 bill Wildwood sent, and Fagan confirmed that the City of Wildwood did not receive payment, which "has not affected the city," Fagan said.

“We’re a small, seasonal resort. It’s all a scary proposition,” Byron told the Center for Public Integrity back in 2020. “The president could help now.”

Trump's history of non-payment

Wildwood was one of 14 municipal governments across the country that implored Trump to pay up a collective $1.82 million in debts for security at his Make America Great Again rallies, the Center for Public Integrity reported.

Raw Story found that eight of Trump’s campaign visits in 2023 cost local taxpayers at least $100,000 in total — expenses that the local municipalities covered as Trump's campaign refused to pay.

ALSO READ: How Trump could run for president from jail

“They have no choice but to put personnel there and protect these events or police these events,” Justin Insalaco, who worked for the West Windsor Police Department in New Jersey for 11 years, told Raw Story in December. “It shouldn't fall on the taxpayer of those towns.”

Trump is campaigning while he is in the midst of a criminal trial in New York involving the falsification of business records over an alleged hush money payment to adult film director and actress Stormy Daniels. Trump faces three other criminal cases involving retention of classified documents, election interference and his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

In all, Trump faces 88 felony counts.

Trump was also found liable in civil trials for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll, and he was ordered to pay more than $450 million in damages for fraudulently inflating property values for tax breaks and more favorable loans for the Trump Organization.

Spokespeople for Trump's campaign did not respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

The Republican Party has a knack for keeping America sick.

In 1994, when virtually every other developed country had universal healthcare, Republicans and their medical-industrial complex allies used a flood of disinformation to kill President Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform bill.

For 16 long years after, Republicans blocked structural reform, with predictably grim results. By 2010, 49 million Americans lacked coverage. Medical bills accounted for 62 percent of U.S. bankruptcies (up from 8 percent in 1981). Tens of thousands of Americans a year died from a lack of healthcare coverage.

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Summarizing a 2010 Commonwealth Fund report, science writer Maggie Fox said that “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system.”

Just months earlier, Democrats had overcome a Republican filibuster to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but the law hadn’t taken effect yet.

Several frivolous court challenges and then-Sen. John McCain’s act of political courage later, the ACA has achieved a number of big things. They’ve made us healthier. And they’re worth listing individually:

• The ACA, colloquially known as Obamacare, currently provides healthcare to 40 million Americans.

• The U.S. now has its lowest uninsured rates in modern history. If not for state-level GOP resistance to Medicaid expansion, the number would be even higher — an estimated 2.3 million additional Americans would have healthcare coverage.

• The number of Americans under the age of 26 who receive coverage through their parents’ policies has more than doubled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• Americans with pre-existing conditions (including “up to 86 percent of people ages 55 to 64” who are not yet Medicare-eligible) are no longer at the mercy of healthcare industry greed.

• Americans aren’t necessarily bound to toxic employers for their healthcare coverage, since they can sign up for the ACA if they leave a job with benefits. This is especially beneficial to the self-employed.

• Americans who experience traumatic, life-changing events won’t be gouged due to caps on annual out-of-pocket costs and the end of insurance company limits on payouts for a given patient.

• The ACA uses rate review to make insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of their budget on direct care, rather than on expenses which have no value to patients—marketing, advertising, profit margins, lavish CEO compensation and the inflated administrative costs that come with privatization and multiple billers.

Closing the health gap

Despite these big steps forward, four decades of Republican obstruction has ensured that the United States still has a long way to go before it catches up to its peers.

Unique among developed countries, the United States still fails to cover tens of millions of its citizens, which contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths during the COVID pandemic.

Millions with employer-based coverage self-ration their care to avoid exorbitant co-pays and deductibles.

Relative to other developed countries, America still has far more medical bankruptcies, far higher infant mortality rates, far higher maternal mortality rates, and higher avoidable mortality rates.

Our fragmented healthcare system contributes to by far the highest rates of childhood deaths of any industrialized country, and our life expectancy is lower than some developing countries.

Because of GOP hostility to government price regulation (a component of all universal health systems), Americans continue to pay by far the most for healthcare and prescription drugs among our advanced economy peers.

To the extent he has been able — despite senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and unified Republican opposition — President Joe Biden has ameliorated these problems.

His American Rescue Plan Act increased ACA subsidies for millions, decreased income requirements for ACA eligibility, and lured additional states into Medicaid expansion with increased subsidies. Thanks to Biden, new ACA enrollments hit a record high this year.

The Inflation Reduction Act keeps ACA subsidies in place through 2025. It caps costs for insulin and other drugs covered under Part D of Medicare and will limit out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses to $2,000/year for Medicare beneficiaries in 2025. It also forces prescription drug companies to negotiate the costs of the 10 most expensive drugs (a number that will rise to 20 drugs annually.)

When blocked by Congress, Biden has used executive actions. Biden expanded postpartum Medicaid eligibility and open enrollment periods for the ACA and increased funding for navigators that assist Americans signing up for ACA coverage. He reformed Title X to extend family planning access to women who’d had it stripped away by the Trump Administration. He also fixed the “family glitch,” which kept family members of people with overpriced employer-based coverage from getting coverage through the ACA.

Biden also took a number of steps to shore up the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and increase funding for the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, which provides health benefits for Alaska Native and American Indian families and pays for itself many times over.

Your health is on the ballot

If given another term, and a Democratic Congress, Biden would continue improving the nation’s healthcare system, as reflected in his most recent budget.

Biden would expand care to the uninsured, improve coverage and lower drug costs in the CHIP program, Medicare and Medicaid.

He would try to extend ACA subsidies beyond 2025 and increase ACA subsidies to lower premiums.

He would raise the number of drugs Medicare negotiates to 50 annually, expand the $2,000 annual prescription drug cap to private plans and limit co-pays for generic drugs.

He would try to make Big Pharma pay rebates if the cost of a specific drug goes up more than inflation. His agenda also includes expanded home care services, improved access to mental health care, and increased research in women’s health.

He would continue to work on lowering maternal mortality rates and improving neonatal care. He could revive policies blocked by Congress during his first two years — such as a Medicare buy-in for Americans 50 and older and a national public option, which has lowered patient costs at the state level.

ALSO READ: How Trump could run for president from jail

By contrast, Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, shows little interest in healthcare reform. His website is conspicuously light on healthcare policy. He rarely talks of it on the campaign trail.

In a nod to his old-and-white constituency, he promises to take on Big Pharma, but Biden is already doing this and congressional Republicans have actually considered a repeal of the pricing curbs that Biden established.

Trump’s site makes a vague statement about appointing a panel to review childhood illnesses, Washington-speak for kicking the can down the road.

His public statements offer mixed messages on the big issues. Would he try to repeal the Affordable Care Act? Would he protect Medicare, privatize it or cut funding? Would he maintain protections for people with pre-existing conditions or allow them to go without coverage by leading an effort to repeal the ACA, as he has threatened to do?

Given Trump’s prior record — his lack of clarity about future plans, his habit of lying consistently, the 88 felony counts pending against him across four separate criminal court cases — healthcare advocates have no good reason to trust him.

In fact, if Trump serves a second term with Republican majorities in Congress, the GOP would almost certainly make our healthcare system more expensive and less responsive to the average citizen’s needs.

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The recent House Republican Study Committee budget proposal slashes Medicaid, as did the House Republicans’ 2023 budget proposal. These cuts would be devastating to the poor, the disabled, special needs children, and millions of elderly Americans (Medicaid funds over half of America's long-term care.)

The United States, alone among its developed world peers, has 5 million children with no healthcare. GOP plans to gut Medicaid and the CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) could cause millions more to lose coverage.

GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act — which Republicans have attempted before and Trump and congressional Republicans remain open to — could have catastrophic consequences.

Up to 30 million Americans could lose their coverage, including many of our most vulnerable citizens. Up to 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions could again be at the mercy of healthcare industry profiteers. Medical debt and bankruptcies could skyrocket. Millions of Americans could lose access to no-cost preventive services.

Women would bear the brunt of this, stuck with co-pays for (or simply foregoing) mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, pregnancy-related services, contraception, and Pap smears. Their children would lose vital pediatric immunizations.

Due to his unholy alliance with extreme-right, self-proclaimed Christians, Trump would likely exhume his policy to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations, thereby taking away birth control from millions of cash-strapped women and exacerbating America’s contraceptive desert crisis.

He would probably re-start his “final conscience rule,” which allows healthcare entities to deny reproductive healthcare to women for religious reasons.

His Justice Department would either support or (at best) present no legal challenges to red state abortion restrictions so ambiguously worded that they actually threaten certain forms of birth control.

He would pack the federal courts with anti-abortion judges such as Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee who recently ruled to outlaw mifepristone, an FDA-approved medication used to end early-term pregnancies since 2000.

He would hamper fetal tissue research and undermine the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Again.

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In effect, Republicans could inflict the worst of all worlds: big steps backward toward the highly dysfunctional healthcare system we had pre-ACA, with its higher costs, fewer benefits, and more uninsured Americans. They would handcuff groundbreaking health research for American women.

We could expect less healthcare security, more anxiety about keeping our coverage (and our family’s coverage), more rationing due to prohibitive for-profit mark-ups, children not getting basic needs met, low-income disabled and elderly Americans going without and more back-alley abortions.

American lifespans, which already trail other highly developed nations by several years and have significantly regressed since their 2014 peak, will get shorter yet.

The 2024 presidential election will determine if the U.S. continues to gravitate toward the humane and effective healthcare models that exist everywhere else in the developed world or wins a race to the bottom with itself.

Dan Benbow has been an online political features writer since 2003. His work has appeared at Raw Story, the Miami Herald, the New York Daily News, Salon, Truthout and the Progressive. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel and can be reached at benbowauthor@gmail.com or followed @danbenbow on X.

The previous seven days have featured a lot of build-up in anticipation of last night’s vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “motion to vacate the chair.” That’s the rule in the US House of Representatives allowing any member to bring forward a vote to remove the current speaker of the House. There was a lot of excitement, but every one of the reporters who built up that story knew what was going to happen. Nothing.

They knew nothing was going to happen to Mike Johnson, the speaker, because they knew Hakeem Jeffries is really in charge of the House. In fact, Jeffries is the House minority leader, but his caucus is united while Johnson’s conference, which has a majority of one vote, has been shattered. It never mattered how much Greene wanted him removed. It never mattered how much attention she was getting for her bid to remove him. If Jeffries didn’t want Johnson gone, he wasn’t gone.

And he didn’t want Johnson gone. Why? Because he’s weak, on account of people like Greene repeatedly threatening his position. With a weak GOP speaker, Jeffries and the Democrats get things they want. Johnson is so far cooperating. If he doesn’t, Jeffries can get rid of him. To be clear, Jeffries has that power, not Greene, not Matt Gaetz, not Donald Trump, not anyone in the GOP conference. Jeffries has it.

Since last May, the Postreported this morning, Jeffries and the Democrats have “helped two Republican speakers over 10 times to pass high-stakes legislation that prevented a debt ceiling catastrophe and multiple government shutdowns. They have also channeled $95 billion in aid to foreign allies including Ukraine; helped restructure a government surveillance mechanism; and surmounted floor blockades by hard-line Republicans in the name of maintaining regular order.”

Reporters know Jeffries is in charge, but they have decided instead to chase after the Greene story. That’s partly because Greene is a copycat of Donald Trump. She represents in miniature the politics of revolt that has characterized the Republican Party since 2010. But it’s partly due to a bigger misunderstanding of the story of what happened to Johnson’s predecessor, the first speaker to be ousted, Kevin McCarthy.

The story goes that Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, also a Trump minion, orchestrated McCarthy’s ouster as punishment for working the Democrats to keep the government open. But that version of the story elides Jeffries’ role. The majority of the GOP conference wanted McCarthy to stay. Gaetz had only a handful of insurgents ready to boot him. If Jeffries didn’t want McCarthy gone, he’d still be speaker. But McCarthy did something (I’m still not clear what it was) to piss off Jeffries and his caucus. That sealed his fate. The Democrats joined the GOP insurgents to form a majority that showed McCarthy the door.

McCarthy was pretty clear at the time that Gaetz didn’t act alone. He blamed the Democrats for breaking the informal but heretofore strictly observed rule allowing each party to decide its own leader.

But over time, Jeffries’ role faded in importance. Attention returned to Gaetz and the GOP insurgents, including Greene. Eventually, the story of McCarthy’s ouster was subsumed by the older story about Trump and the politics of revolt in the Republican Party. That story, and all the attention that comes with it, incentivized Greene last week to try to do alone what she believed Gaetz had done alone. All she ended doing, however, was empowering Jeffries. Indeed, as long as there’s a Greene, he’s in charge. As long as there’s a Greene, Johnson’s ass is Jeffries’.

I’m not sure why, but at least some reporters are starting to make Jeffries’ command of the House a story in its own right. Over the weekend, he was the subject of an enormous piece on “60 Minutes” in which he said that, “even though we're in the minority, we effectively have been governing as if we were in the majority because we continue to provide a majority of the votes necessary to get things done.”

"Those are just the facts,” he added, to which “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell didn’t bat an eye, as if she understood that that’s plainly true. Though this is the least productive Congress since the Civil War, if anything gets done, it’s because of Hakeem Jeffries.

Then came today’s Post in which reporter Marianna Sotomayor said “many argue that Democrats are no longer just the majority in waiting — they have already arrived. Lawmakers of both parties, including Republicans with a distinct bitterness, say that Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t just sit atop his party but also the entire House.”

Perhaps the shift is rooted in the fight over aid to Ukraine.

In voicing opposition to it, Greene ended up repeating Russian propaganda to the point where she cited details so specific and obscure as to expose the Kremlin as its true source. Evidently, this unnerved some leading Republicans. They, along with Fox, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, associated her with Russian propaganda. On CNN, Colorado Congressman Ken Buck called her “Moscow Marjorie.” The Post put that line on its tabloid cover.

That didn’t stop Greene, however. She followed through on her threat to seek Johnson’s removal if Ukraine aid passed. That set the stage for a rescue, but not for the Republican who are too shattered, but from Jeffries. Thanks to Greene, saving Johnson didn’t seem like a raw power play. It seemed like a move made in the national interest.

Last week, after Ukraine aid passed but before Greene filed her motion, Jeffries said that “upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed.”

She didn’t.

He did.

And now he’s getting credit for it.

It’s not that the news was wrong.

It’s that it wasn’t quite right either.

And because it wasn’t quite right, lots of liberals and Democrats (and even some leftists) are not really hearing what the president is saying. That’s too bad, because what he’s saying is what they want him to say.

Joe Biden gave brief remarks at a ceremony commemorating victims of the Holocaust. The AP’s lede is representative of coverage elsewhere:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday decried a 'ferocious surge' in antisemitism on college campuses and around the globe in the months since Hamas attacked Israel and triggered a war in Gaza, using a ceremony to remember victims of the Holocaust to also denounce new waves of violence and hateful rhetoric toward Jews.

That’s right.

But it’s wrong, too.

It’s right in that’s what the president said. It’s also right in that’s the immediate context for understanding his remarks. In recent weeks, there have been scores of demonstrations on college campuses protesting Israel’s killing of about 35,000 Palestinians. Some of the protesters have expressed what looks like – or, in fact, is – antisemitism. Protests have emerged amid a rise in antisemitism worldwide, though they play a tiny part in the global phenomenon.

But it’s wrong, too, in that the context is larger than that. It’s wrong in that Biden himself outlined that larger context. He was very clear that hatreds, all hatreds, are bad for everyone, and that if they are allowed to fester, as they have been allowed, bad things can happen, for instance, the catastrophe (or shoah) whose victims he commemorated.

“We have an obligation, an obligation to learn the lessons of history so we don’t surrender our future to the horrors of the past,” Biden said. “We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone. Anyone. From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans represented only about 2 percent of the US population and helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience, we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy(all italics mine).

Later, he said: “I’m calling on all Americans to stand united against antisemitism and hate in all its forms. My dear friend, he became a friend, the late Elie Wiesel said, quote: ‘One person of integrity can make a difference.’”

In another passage, he addressed American Jews speficially: "I see your fear, your hurt, your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will."

In this, he was echoing past remarks to other minorities.

Just days after the Hamas massacre, on October 7, 2023, Biden said the exact same thing to Arab-Americans and Muslims in the US. “We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia. To all of you hurting — those of you who are hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong.And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.”

Last month, on Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday, the president said: “Today, we show millions of transgender and nonbinary Americans that we see them, they belong, and they should be treated with dignity and respect. Their courage has given countless others strength, but no one should have to be brave just to be themselves. Every American deserves that freedom.”

To Jews, he said: You belong. You are America.

To Muslims, he said: You belong. You are America.

To trans people, he said: You belong. You are America.

This is the full story behind Tuesday’s news. Whenever Biden talks about one kind of hatred toward one kind of group, he’s never only talking about that one hatred or that one group. He’s talking about all the groups and all the hatreds toward them, because, while the details are consequential in ways peculiar to each group, the evil is the same.

This is what liberal and Democrats (and even some leftists) want from Joe Biden. They want him to recognize the perils facing each minority group, even if, or especially if, the perils come from another minority group. And they want him to offer assurances that he, as the president, is going to defend them using the force of law. They want the leader of a democratic community of equals to treat everyone equally. They want him to honor and practice the idea of the universal human family.

In an American* context, they are getting what they want.

But I’m afraid they are not hearing it. And I’m afraid they are not hearing it, because they are not listening to what Biden is saying. Instead, they are listening to what someone else said Biden said.

If someone is against college campus protestors, because they believe college campus protests are the same thing as antisemitism, then they will find what they are looking for in Biden’s speech. That person can point, for instance, to the Associated Press report and say, look – the president denounced college campus protests. See? I was right.

Biden did not denounce campus protests. He denounced hate speech against Jews credibly reported on college campuses. (He very clearly defended the right to “peaceful protest.”) Moreover, he denounce all hate speech against all minority groups. He even elevated it as one of the biggest threats not only to democracy but to civilization itself.

But if you’re only hearing what this person said Biden said, then you might not know any of that. You might even conclude that Biden is somehow sanctioning one kind of hate by way of whitewashing another. Liberal and Democrats (and even some leftists) want don’t want that. Happily, Biden isn’t doing what they don’t want him to do.

*I’m talking about politics in America. While Israel is an ally, Biden can’t force its leader to quit looking like a war criminal. He can stop sending arms, though. We shall see. The AP reported Tuesday that the US paused a shipment of weapons as Israel prepared to invade Rafah.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is making the Republican Party look ridiculous.

That’s according to Republican senators.

In exclusive interviews with 22 Republican U.S. senators, Raw Story found a trend — ranging from annoyance to anger to alarm — over the Georgia Republican congresswoman’s plan to formally deploy her motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johson this week.

“I think it's ridiculous, it's counterproductive, and, frankly, just foolish,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told Raw Story. “Blowing up the speakership undermines conservative principles profoundly.”

READ: Governor Kristi Noem didn’t have to shoot her dog. She wanted to

Last week, Greene told Raw Story polls showed Trump’s base is behind her. Her own party isn’t, though. And some of her own constituents aren’t, either, according to Raw Story interviews conducted last week across Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Greene is now angling for a deal.

“It's stupid, and it's selfish on her part,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told Raw Story. “It's either one, a political stunt [or] two, selfish on her part.”

While Democratic leaders feel they have a solid chance of recapturing the House this November, over in the United States Senate GOP leaders and rank-and-file members alike see a winnable path back to the majority in November.

‘Certain individuals tear us apart’

Greene’s antics have some senators worried they’ll cost Republicans majorities in the House and Senate.

“I’m focused on winning the Senate majority,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) – who’s chairing the National Republican Senatorial Committee this election cycle – told Raw Story. “It’s time to come together and not have certain individuals tear us apart.”

Daines isn’t alone in his refusal — Voldemort-style — to even say Greene’s name out loud.

Among the others: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s former right-hand man, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). The senior Texan in the U.S. Senate served as Republican whip under McConnell but was term limited out and replaced by Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — who Cornyn is now running against in his bid for McConnell’s gavel.

Cornyn, who’s still one of McConnell’s close confidants, dismisses MTG out of hand.

“She’s becoming more marginalized by the day,” Cornyn told Raw Story.

In the McConnell leadership retirement shakeup, Senate Republicans’ current number three, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), is running to be the party’s second in command in the Senate. Barrasso initially brushed aside Raw Story’s inquiry. Ask a House member, he said.

“But is that a distraction for the party?” Raw Story pressed.

“We need to make sure we win the presidency, win the Senate and hold the House,” Barrasso, not answering the question, told Raw Story. “And that’s where my focus is.”

'Just don't think it's helpful'

It’s not just wannabe GOP leaders.

Some of former President Donald Trump’s top Senate allies refuse to criticize Greene publicly — even though they oppose her effort.

“I just don’t think it’s helpful,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story. “About all I can say.”

Others who proudly rep the MAGA-rightwing of the Senate may not personally know Mike Johnson, but they have their alternative set of facts down.

“What do you think of Speaker Johnson?”

“Well, you don’t get up and tell people you’re gonna do one thing and do another. You lose all integrity that way. Now, he better have a good excuse for what he did,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story, before offering. “I don’t know the guy.”

These days, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is the leading libertarian of the Senate Republican Conference. This is why it’s probably no surprise that he’s all in with Greene after she helped make his isolationist view of foreign policy more mainstream in today’s GOP.

“If you’re a Democrat, Mike Johnson’s probably done a pretty good job,” Paul told Raw Story. “He got their spending bill through – $1.5 trillion deficit this year. He worked on them to kill reform of FISA, and then he worked on them to give money we don't have to Ukraine. So I'd say, from a Democrat point of view, Mike Johnson’s a pretty good speaker. That's why they're saying they may vote to keep him.”

As for whether Greene challenging Speaker Johnson will hurt the Republican Party?

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) – who told Raw Story he’s “close to MTG” – says he’s not worried.

“She obviously has the prerogative to do it,” Vance said. “I don't think it ultimately goes anywhere, but she knows better than me because it's her chamber.”

“Do you think it's bad for the party heading into November?” Raw Story asked.

“No. I think obviously there's a lot of frustration over how the security supplemental went down,” Vance said. “Sometimes these things are necessarily messy, but I think having this debate, having this fight is not the worst thing.”

When nudged, Vance – who’s rumored to be on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist – did admit he wouldn’t be with MTG on her anti-Johnson quest if he served alongside her.

“Look, if I was in the House, do I think we should be sacking the speaker right now? No,” Vance said. “But I don't think that's going to happen. So having the debate is actually, I think, a pretty healthy thing.”

Whether it’s healthy for today’s Republican Party to again broadcast their party’s civil war across the globe isn’t — to many in the GOP — up for debate.

Senator who served in House sees ‘turmoil’ ahead

Many more senior Republicans are braced for another brawl.

“I don't think the House needs any more turmoil,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told Raw Story. “I’m sorry to see it happen, I hope it's not successful.”

Capito is far from alone. Other former House Republicans are gently trying to dissuade Greene by gently offering lessons applicable to everyone from, say, a toddler, all the way on up to a member of the House of Representatives.

“She's within her right,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told Raw Story. “But there are lots of things that are within your right that you don’t get.”

This is the first Senate term for Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), but she has four terms in the House under her rodeo-sized belt buckle. While there, Lummis was a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus – the same group of giddy conservative bomb throwers who booted Greene last year for publicly cursing out Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).

Lummis didn’t overlap with Greene, but she’s buddies with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the lead co-sponsor in Greene’s effort to oust Johnson.

“Well, I'm a huge Thomas Massie fan. That said, I think that that's ill-advised. I wish they would reconsider. There's been enough chaos around the Capitol building,” Lummis told Raw Story.

She may not be a party leader, but Lummis knows few things rally the Republican base like fighting regulatory overreach, whether real or merely perceived. That’s why she wants to keep the focus not on a fellow Republican, but the top Democrat of them all — President Joe Biden.

“This may be a better time to let the dust settle,” Lummis said. “Let's get through this absolute deluge of rules that are coming out of this administration. Let's stop this obscene rulemaking. And the way we can best do that is just to join forces, especially as Republicans, to stop the onslaught.”

Still, other former House members are almost embarrassed by the antics.

“I think it’s a waste of time,” Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) told Raw Story.

Other Republican senators agree, though they, of course, say it in their own senatorial way.

'Don't understand the dynamics over there'

Talking to many Senate Republicans, one comes away feeling as if the House and Senate inhabit different universes, as opposed to being housed in the same, historical building.

“Look, this is my 40-what … 43rd year in the Senate,” Sen. James Risch (R-ID) told Raw Story. “I’ve never served in the other House. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in those 43 years, don’t try to tell them how to do their business.”

No one – at least none of his colleagues – asked Risch. And no one’s asking his colleagues, though senators have thoughts, even the ones who tell you they don’t.

“It’s not up to me. House members will handle it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Raw Story. “Now, do I think Speaker Johnson should be removed? No. But no one over there’s gonna ask our opinion, so why offer it?”

Twins.

“That’s up to the House of Representatives,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Raw Story. “But they won’t be successful.”

Grassley’s fellow Iowan, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), feels the same way. But even though she says it’s not a matter for senators, she has … thoughts.

“House’s business, obviously,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Raw Story. “I just would love to see those that continually threaten Republican leadership, can they do a better job?”

“Well, they haven’t even put forward a replacement,” Raw Story noted.

“Exactly,” Ernst said.

Other senators claim utter ignorance when it comes to House matters.

“I don’t understand the dynamics over there. I don’t have a comment on that,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told Raw Story. “House math is very different than Senate math, so I don’t think I should weigh in on that, because I know nothing about how it works over there.”

Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) never served in the House. Nor does he ever want to. He’s running for governor of Indiana.

In fact, Braun’s locked in a six-way GOP primary. Indiana Republicans will decide his fate this Tuesday when they cast their primary ballots, which may be why he’s concerned Greene’s bomb throwing is going to result in his gubernatorial campaign getting hit with unnecessary shrapnel.

“I don't know why we’d do that. In the sense of, who would do much better?” Braun told Raw Story. “I understand some of the frustrations there, but, I think, politically that looks like you're sowing the seeds of chaos and not focusing on some of the key issues.”

‘Embarrassing herself and embarrassing the chamber’

The impulse to stay in one’s senatorial lane is strong on the northern, formerly more deliberate side of the United States Capitol, the one senators call home. Senators are senators; House members are just different, at least to senators. “The House is a mystery,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

The House may be a mystery but some Republicans say the mystery isn’t innate to the chamber. They say the problem is the person. One they won’t even discuss these days.

“I have no thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) told Raw Story.

“Yeah?” Raw Story pressed. “But she’s going to move on the motion to vacate Speaker Johnson…”

“I got nothing on her, man,” Young – head down, avoiding eye contact – replied.

“But do you think it’s bad for the party to have another motion to vacate fight?”

“I don’t feel like offering a comment on this,” Young, his back to Raw Story, said as he entered a Senate elevator. “Thank you.”

He may be retiring at the end of his term, but Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the former GOP standard-bearer as a 2012 presidential nominee, knows politics and hates political ploys.

“She's doing her very best to get attention and contributions,” Romney told Raw Story. “She's embarrassing herself and embarrassing the chamber, I'm afraid.”

NOW READ: Inside the Trump Crime Syndicate

I trust the readers of the Editorial Board will correct me if I’m wrong when I say I don’t recall having paid any attention to Kristi Noem. The Republican governor of South Dakota pops into my field of vision now and then, recently as a leading candidate for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. Other than that, however, I haven’t been interested.

I wasn’t interested even after The Guardian broke the story, on April 26, about the time she shot and killed her 14–month-old dog, an episode she recounts in her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.

While sensational and humiliating (for Noem), I didn’t think the story had legs. There might be something to say, but by the time I said it, something else would come along to commandeer our attention.

Noem wrote that the dog, named Cricket, was “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” She tried taking her hunting with older dogs to train her, but that failed. The dog went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

Later, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck to attack chickens on a nearby farm, “crunching” one of them “to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” Noem said “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem took the puppy to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.”

The reaction has been impressive. It wasn’t just the quote-unquote effete liberals who were outraged. Even the trolliest rightwing trolls disapproved. Politico reported that Noem “badly miscalculated.”

“The particulars of her dog-killing story — Noem chronicled how she got her gun, led Cricket to a gravel pit and put her down with a single shot — made her come off as cruel and uncaring. The backlash to her story continues to chew through news cycle after news cycle, potentially torpedoing her chances of becoming a vice presidential candidate.”

That’s what’s getting my attention – that this story, which is otherwise forgettable, “continues to chew through news cycle after news cycle.” The story broke three weeks ago. Yet Noem was on Fox last night.

Host Jesse Watters, that putz, seemed keen on rehabilitating her public image. He let her characterize her choice as one that any mother would make to protect her children from a “vicious” animal that attacked people “for the joy of it.” It would be parody if it weren’t intended to persuade Donald Trump that Noem is a viable VP pick.

This is where I have something to say.

Noem probably liked killing her dog.

I say “probably,” because I’m not a therapist, nor am I a mind reader. But all things considered, she wanted to shoot that dog. She wanted to inflict suffering, not relieve suffering. I suspect that’s the true basis for her decision, and the true beginning and end of the story. Everything else is a rationalization for doing what she already knew she shouldn’t.

The key here is this: “It had to be done,” she said.

Nope.

There’s a lot you can do with a dog you don’t want. You can give it away. You can send it to a shelter. You can call in a dog trainer. You can put it on serious sedatives. You can dump it on the side of the road. Point is, there are lots of choices. Some good, some bad. She did not have to shoot her dog. Saying she had to rationalizes her wanting to.

She doesn’t stop there in her book. Rationalizing became conning. She suggests that shooting a dog is totally normal when you work with animals. “We love animals,” she wrote, “but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”

That’s a con.

People who work with animals on farms and ranches actually don’t shoot animals for being “useless.” Animals cost money. If they don’t serve their purpose, find another purpose! Anyway, if you do choose to shoot an animal, its use is beside the point. Suffering is the point. I assume those three horses that had been in Noem’s family for 25 years were put down because they were suffering from old age and disease.

Her dog, it bears repeating, was 14 months old.

No, she wanted to shoot that dog.

More importantly, she wanted to talk about shooting her dog, because talking about shooting her dog sends a message, not only to Donald Trump, who might pick her as a vice presidential candidate.

In her book, she said the story illustrates her readiness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it must be done. Democracy is full of choices, but authoritarians like her don’t see them. Like Cricket, someone has to suffer, and she’s willing to inflict that suffering.

As I was writing, Noem was on Newsmax. An anchor there accused her of fabricating a meeting, recounted in her book, with the North Korean dictator. I should have known better than to spend my day writing about her. Something else did come along to take our attention from her dog-shooting story. I just didn’t know that something would be Noem admitting he was right and falling to pieces on live television.

Before Donald Trump criminalized the White House, Republican Party and perhaps the Supreme Court, he was the CEO of the Trump Organization — a fraudster, racketeer and patriarchal Boss of a family owned and operated criminal enterprise. He spent five decades in New York and beyond avoiding charges and prosecutions for sexual harassment, tax evasion, money laundering and nonpayment of employees.

If this wasn’t enough, Trump also busied himself by allegedly defrauding tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, attorneys, students and charities, not to mention making use of undocumented workers.

In retrospect, Trump’s lifetime of lies and lawlessness appear to have prepared him for the fateful moment in which he now finds himself — in a court of law, answering for the first 34 of 88 felony counts that stem from alleged crimes he committed immediately before, during and after his presidency. Trials involving Trump’s alleged 2020 election interference and illegal retention of national secrets loom.

As the fraudster-in-chief and Benedict Arnold of our time, Trump continues to maintain his innocence and blames everybody but himself while attempting to make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

In light of Trump’s defiance, and the potential for more illegal Trumpian interference during the 2024 election, in which he is almost certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee, now is a good time to go beyond Trump and explore the criminal culpability of Trump Crime Syndicate lieutenants and Trump’s kitchen cabinet of MAGA knaves and rogues.

These are the people who have aided and abetted Trump, and continue to assist him in his single-minded quest to become the most powerful man in America.

They are worth your attention precisely because of the danger to democracy that they represent.

Criminalizing the power of the pardon with the intent to defraud

At the federal level, a gaggle of powerful Republican actors were deeply involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. These include — and are not limited to — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

At the state level, dozens of Republican fake electors and Trump stakeholders have been criminally indicted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.

All of these criminal indictments for election interference like Trump’s indictments are “basically telling the same story of corruption and venality” except for their “different charges” according to Kenneth F. McCallion, a former Special Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney with the DOJ who also worked for the New York attorney’s general office as a prosecutor on Trump-related racketeering cases.

But before proceeding further with this examination of presidential crime, politics and accountably, it is important to highlight Trump’s unprecedented usage of the pardon power, which facilitated the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Republican electioneering of 2024.

Prior to Trump, the presidential power of the pardon had always been about showing mercy and compassion. It was most certainly not a tool for rewarding criminal loyalty and weaponizing criminal conduct.

Excluding Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and former “partner in crime,” the Boss pardoned several of his other loyal associates, especially those within the Trump Crime Syndicate.

For example, in relation to Russian election interference in 2016, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Revealed for the man he is in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report The Torturers’ Lobby, Manafort in 2019 was found guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to disclose an offshore bank account.

Manafort also pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the federal District of Columbia. Most of these crimes were connected to his lobbying work in Ukraine.

Then, just days before his longtime friend and campaign adviser Roger Stone’s 48-month incarceration was scheduled to begin for seven felony convictions, including impeding a congressional inquiry, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.

And when Trump was literally leaving the Oval Office and almost out the door, he granted clemency to his former chief political strategist Steve Bannon who had defrauded Trump donors out of more than $1 million to allegedly help build the border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Trump also pardoned retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the only one-time White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russian investigation carried out by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In the cases of both Stone and Flynn, Trump’s “forgiveness” cameafter Bill Barr, Trump’s third of five attorneys general, failed to shut down these investigations on the spurious grounds that these two perpetrators, Stone and Flynn, had been the victims of witch hunts and overzealous prosecutors.

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We have also known for nearly two years since former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before a House select committee that the pardon power does not prohibit preemptive pardons. Nine members of Trump’s kitchen cabinet requested them in the wake of Jan. 6, demonstrating their full knowledge and intent of criminal wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, and Flynn are back supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign as they did in 2016 and 2020. And, Trump and Putin are closer than ever. The Russian president has even publicly endorsed him this time round . It didn’t hurt that Trump seemed to have Putin’s back most, if not, all the time since he took office. Trump opposing NATO as well as Ukraine helped as well. Trump’s pardoning his own men involved in the 2016 interference seemed to condone it. His illiberal authoritarian and anti-democratic credo was another plus.

Trump’s minions began their election interference in 2015 and never stopped

Let’s begin with the criminal prosecutions related to the 2016 Russian election interference investigated by Mueller.

Mueller’s investigation led to the indictments of 34 individuals and three Russian companies. Five Trump associates and campaign officials were convicted of felonies including those mentioned above. Mueller’s final report, while finding insufficient evidence of a Trump-Russian conspiracy, did conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and expected to benefit from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Key players in the 2016 Russian collusion affair

• Paul Manafort (discussed above) according to the U.S. intelligence community was also believed to have passed internal Trump campaign and polling strategy information to Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik.
• Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of Manafort and also a former Trump campaign official, was also charged in two separate federal courts and he too plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States, lying to federal prosecutors, financial crimes, and lobbying without a license.
• Michael Flynn was also pardoned by Trump and worked on the 2020 as well as the 2024 presidential campaigns. Since 2022 Flynn has had a ReAwaken roadshow with the Army of God for Trump. He was the first to plead guilty in 2017 after admitting that he made false statements and omissions in FBI interviews only days after Trump was sworn in to office. The former Army general “impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”
• Roger Stone (discussed above) was the subject of the video, The Roger Stone tapes, that reveals Stone working from the Willard hotel in D.C. with Giuliani and others, and quickly checking out while the riots were taking place.
• Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and “fixer” for more than a decade,pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to one count of making a false statement to Congress as well as to other crimes committed in his taxi related business in the Southern District of New York. He spent almost three years in prison serving time concurrently for both convictions.

Cohen and David Pecker are two of the key, among, many witnesses from Trump’s inner circle testifying against their former Boss in the New York presidential election interference case.

By contrast, defendant Trump has no witnesses on his behalf. He also has no family or friends except son Eric who showed up in court on April 30 for the first time. Otherwise surrounded by only his attorneys who are devoid of any facts and some twisted law, maybe, if they are lucky.

And through testimony on Friday the defense had scored no points during cross-examination that so far could create reasonable doubt.

2020 Election Interference as part of Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet

Turning next to a review of three of the 2020 Trump election interference cases. I do so without concern with the consequences for or accountability of the fake electors because none of these individuals were either affiliated with the Trump Crime Syndicate or members of the former president’s kitchen cabinet.

Although a number of them were or are elected state officials and high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaigns of 2020 as well as 2024.

• Jeffrey Clark, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia
• John Eastman, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia and Arizona
• Rudy Giuliani, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Jenna Ellis, convicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Sidney Powell, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
• Kenneth Chesebro, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
• Peter Navarro, convicted and in prison
• Steve Bannon, convicted and out on appeal
• Mark Meadows, DOJ witness, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Boris Epshteyn, unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• An unidentified political consultant is also a DOJ unindicted co-conspirator

Nixon’s Watergate was ‘much ado about nothing’ compared to Trump’s failed coup and insurrection

To put Trump’s minions in perspective, a brief examination of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen is required.

In response to the criminal cover-up of the crimes involved in the attempted burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Nixon was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" on March 1, 1974, by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. This was a wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names at the time to prison.

Compared to Trump’s failed coup, Nixon’s Watergate break-in and cover-up was no big deal; it certainly was not an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law. There was no violence toward the Capitol or danger to members of Congress and the vice president.

Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case. These included Nixon's highest-ranking officials such as the former Attorney General and chairman of his 1972 presidential campaign John Mitchell. Along with the disgraced Mitchell there was John Dean, White House legal counsel, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Halderman (White-House senior staff), Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, and James McCord, Security Director of CREEP. They were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the January cover-up trial of 1975. All of these men carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself.

What stands out as a huge difference between the Watergate crimes responsible for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the US and the Jan 6 insurrection was that Nixon became an unindicted co-conspirator while still in office. And he received his comeuppance after only a little over two years since the crimes occurred. At the time, Nixon had been president for the better part of six years.

Trump after eight years of election interference and four years as president has yet to receive his criminal comeuppance. Even if he is convicted later this month on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, his appeals could delay his well-deserved imprisonment from occurring for at least another year or two.

By contrast, three years after Jan.6, and the violent assault on the Capitol building there have been 749 convicted and sentenced offenders. At least 467 rioters have been incarcerated in either jail or prison for an array of offenses including assaulting law enforcement officers, felonious obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder.

More than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy were convicted of the serious charges of seditious conspiracy. Additionally, 53 persons have been indicted as fake electors, many of whom have been high ranking Republican officials in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.

Compared to racketeering, Trump and company’s very complex and organized election interference that included more than 2000 rioters besieging the Capitol on Jan. 6, and hundreds more working away in seven swing states including Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Paradoxically, it may seem strange given the reaction of the Republicans and the Department of Justice to Nixon and Watergate, that Trump and his election interference crimes have been given a free pass by the Supreme Court.

With respect to Trump’s inner circles, a few have already pleaded guilty and many more will be held to account regardless of whether Trump is, although this is certainly a reflection on a man who boasted of surrounding himself with the “best and brightest” the nation has to offer.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

There’s plenty of good news out there, people, even if during this endless money grab called “election season,” our click-bait corporate media would rather you didn’t see any of it.

The United States economy is once again the envy of the entire free world, much of which is still gasping for air, struggling along in the turbulent wake of a once-in-a-century killer pandemic the morbid, “pro-life” Republican Party would prefer we all just forgot about.

The U.S. dollar is strong, wages are up, inflation is down, and our jobless rate is historically low. Sure, we have a way to go to get back to the economy we enjoyed during Barack Obama’s Administration, before the ghastly Donald Trump became just the latest Republican to wreck it by handing over our hard-earned money to billionaires, and making it easier for them to line his slippery, 10-gallon pockets, while stepping on the necks of powerless consumers of all political stripes.

To be crystal clear: Damn near any good that happened with our economy during Trump’s disastrous administration was inherited from Obama. He simply went on to wreck it, which he has done his whole miserable life with literally everything he bangs into. Check out the numbers when this nuclear-powered blowhard took over in 2017, and when he left whining like 300-lb. baby in 2021.

And if you come back at me that the pandemic contributed to the orange gasbag’s massacre of our economy, then you better explain to me why he ignored it, and then lied about it for months and months, before finally suggesting — his pudgy, little hands flailing about — that we try chugging Lysol to save ourselves.

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He had no damn idea what he was doing while hundreds of thousand of Americans were dying. You’ll never get a more terrifying example of complete incompetence, seasoned with his trademark lack of empathy for human suffering than that disgusting state of affairs.

As his very own Secretary of State confirmed, the man is “a moron” and his four years in office was an ever-expanding disaster area of government shutdowns, Nazi-coddling, impeachments, childish threats to build a damn wall, a documented 30,573 lies, an attempted coup, and a busted economy that was leaking jobs faster than Rudy Giuliani’s fat head sweats out black hair dye.

And have we already forgotten how hard he tried to kill Obamacare, with absolutely nothing lined up to replace it? Imagine how bad things would have been during the pandemic if he had somehow rammed that one through his Republican Senate?

Thinking of you, John McCain ...

And you’ll remember, it was Obama who took over from George Bush the Far Stupider One. He left us with a war in Iraq he lied about, the Great Recession, and the worst economy in 75 years.

It was yet another terrible time under a Republican president.

Of course, Bush the Far Stupider One inherited a great economy from Democrat Bill Clinton, before wrecking it, and giving way to Obama, who spent the next eight, blissful, uneventful years restoring America, and making her whole again.

Obama was so successful in returning calm and normalcy to our country, self-satisfied Democrats fell asleep at the wheel while Tea Party Republicans led by Mitch McConnell took a baseball bat to our judiciary and beat the living truth out of it.

All this Republican malfeasance only serves to highlight the long, distinguished pattern of Democrats repairing economies the GOP has wrecked the past 100 years. This is an ironclad piece of historical fact that has been woefully underreported through the years, and certainly during this election cycle, where President Joe Biden is delivering good economic news and policies that benefit all of us seemingly every day, with but a whisper of a mention from the press.

How else to explain why a majority of Americans still somehow think that the party that has provably ruined economies over the decades is better with our money than the party which fixes them?

The truth is, economic rebirth is happening yet again under a Democratic Administration, and if nothing else, is a great talking point if you are still in the risky habit of arguing politics with members of our country’s insurrection party, who hate facts almost as much as they have grown to hate what America is supposed to stand for — namely, truth and justice.

Democrats have been bailing out these obnoxious loudmouths for going on a century, and it’s about time they at least had the decency to say, thank you.

In addition to being just the latest Democratic president to repair our economy, and once again make it a beacon for the rest of the world, consider Joe Biden signed yet more legislation last week that will protect our public lands from the monstrous corporate Republicans who would rather destroy it.

Is there anything more important than protecting these pristine environments and all the beautiful, necessary things that inhabit them from the callous, rightwing outlaws who have proven just how much they mean to harm them?

And if time and again it’s the Democrats who are standing up for the environment and the beautiful animals who own it, what of those Republicans who shoot their pets and then make a point of bragging about it for political gain?

Surely you’ve heard about South Dakota Governor Kristin Noem, a vice presidential frontrunner on Trump’s fascist, get-out-of-jail-free ticket. Noem wrote a memoir titled: No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.

Well, we learned last weekend thanks to some great reporting by The Guardian that the pie-eyed Noem is what’s wrong with politics, because she thinks America’s way forward starts with murdering our pets.

Noem went into great and gory detail in her book about proudly shooting her puppy, Cricket, who “she hated” for having the audacity to act like a puppy, before finishing off a pet goat during her killing spree just for good measure.

This is astonishing cruelty, even from a member of a party that does nothing except pray for our dead children after they have been slaughtered in our schools by other subhumans who “hate” living things. It’s just more bile from the party that talks a good game about respecting life, even if by action they continually show us how little tolerance they have for it.

And let me duck in here real quick, to remind everybody that it is Biden and the Democrats who have proven themselves serious about trying to end the insane carnage from all these damn guns that the “pro life” Republicans are paid well by the heinous gun lobby to avoid at all costs.

So why did Noem choose to include this in her book? What sane person shoots their pets and then publicly brags about it? Well, according to the puppy-killer herself, she just wanted everybody in America to know that as an aspirant to the White House, she can make tough decisions.

I ask you: Is there anything more Republican than that?

This is the world we are living in right now. While Biden is restoring our economy, protecting our nation’s lands, standing up for our rights, and rebuilding our infrastructure, his opponent is in court for campaign fraud for illegally funneling money to hide the truth about screwing a Playboy bunny while his third wife was pregnant, and then screwing another adult movie actress right after his wife had delivered their child.

Biden quietly goes to church on Sundays to pray for a nation he is working tirelessly to protect, while Trump attacks America, avoids church, and is beloved by millions who practice a sick and evil strain of Christianity that has taken Christ and anything good and wholesome out of their religion.

Now guess which candidate is getting the most press?

Thanks to Democrats, there are plenty of great things happening out there to make America and Americans’ lives better and safer, because that’s what they have been doing for the past 100 years.

Everybody would profit mightily if we finally heard a helluva lot more about that.

NOW READ: The stunning reason Donald Trump thinks he’s going to win

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

The oligarchs are on the move, and they know who they want leading America.

The RNC held an annual fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend, attended by Republican senators and members of Congress, along with a few hundred morbidly rich individuals.

Two donors paid $1 million to get up on stage to support Trump’s assertion that Jack Smith is a “fucking asshole,” “deranged,” and an “evil thug.” Trump added that Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration” and — in an astonishing bit of projection — is a “Manchurian candidate.”

Trump wrapped up his hour-plus rant with dozens of obscenities that showed his commitment to Christian values: one of the million-dollar donors told the crowd that “Donald J. Trump is the person that God has chosen.”

READ: The stunning reason Donald Trump thinks he’s going to win

On the other coast, a secret group of billionaires got together in Hollywood last week to support Trump’s hatred for Joe Biden and Democrats. The crowd included, according to Puck News, immigrants Elon Musk (South Africa), David Sacks (South Africa), Peter Thiel (Germany), and Rupert Murdoch (Australia).

Puck News reporter Theodore Schleifer described them as “members of a burgeoning anti-Biden brain trust, united by a shared sense of grievance.” Elon Musk, according to Schleifer’s reporting, is apparently — and ironically — particularly upset about poor Black and Brown people trying to achieve the American Dream:

“Both in public and in private, Musk has expressed feeling deeply unnerved by America’s migrant crisis—a fear that has driven his rush into Republican politics—and the issue was a key topic of discussion at the dinner.”

As mentioned Saturday, the combined massive tax cuts by Reagan, Bush, and Trump not only racked up a $34 trillion debt for America but also made our country’s oligarchs richer than any pharaoh, king, or emperor in world history. And every time President Biden flirts with raising their taxes (the top 1% now officially pay a lower income tax rate than working class people) they get all twitchy and begin throwing money at Republicans.

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP embrace of authoritarianism and oligarchy to replace the democracy that is increasingly rejecting them at the polls will keep them safe.

They’re wrong.

From the time in 1980 when David Koch ran for vice president on a platform of ending Social Security and Medicare along with gutting all federal support for public education, healthcare, and “welfare” programs, “Libertarian” billionaires have worked to end every part of what they call “big government” that may help average working people, the environment, or the poor.

Reagan won the election that year, but Koch’s worldview prevailed, taking over the GOP.

Over the past 42 years, Reaganomics has moved over 60,000 factories and nearly 20 million good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

Devastating the working class was actually part of the plan: now that the American middle class has gone from almost two-thirds of us down to a mere 43% of us, Republicans are trying to harness the outrage people are feeling and then use it to tear our society apart.

Out of the chaos, they believe they can rebuild our nation on the foundations of hypermasculinity, racism, religious bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, control of women, and threats of violence. These are the weapons that every fascist leader in history has relied on, and in every case those leaders — from Mussolini to Hitler to Putin and Orbán — were first heavily supported by the obscenely rich who thought they could “control the madman.”

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him richer and it would never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 52 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Just ask the families of the four police officers killed by Trump’s January 6th rioters. Or the mourning parents of over 1,000 children Trump stole at the southern border and then trafficked into a rightwing “Christian” adoption scam and are still missing.

Once they acquire power, fascist dictators never relinquish it, regardless of how many people must die, how many lives are destroyed. When they fail to hold onto power or are simply held accountable for their crimes, as Hitler did when he was arrested in the 1920s and Trump did in 2020 and is now, they fight like hell to seize or regain it. And once they succeed, their commitment to revenge makes them ten times more deadly.

Speaker Mike Johnson — who was at the Saturday fundraiser in Florida — and his House Republicans are making the same bet as the morbidly rich men who own them. They naively believe that fascist leaders like Trump actually care about “unborn children,” budget deficits, and Drag Queen Story Hour.

In fact, all America’s morbidly rich who fund the GOP care about is power and the obscene wealth that is protected by it. Everything else is chum they toss into the water to bring along the lowest-common-denominator voters. Once Trump seizes total power, he’ll turn on them, too.

Nonetheless, America’s rightwing billionaires are still funding and thus growing this fascist movement within the GOP, just like Fritz Thyssen did back in the day.

Pushing conspiracy theories. Casting minorities (gender, race, religion), teachers, and politicians as actual evil. Passing laws that increasingly narrow our democracy and prevent people from voting, until one day there will only be one party governing this country and that party will be wholly beholden to them.

Can they pull it off? Can they create a rightwing movement so powerful it will lock the Democratic Party out of national power forever? Will their stooges on the Supreme Court help them block future Democrats from the White House with more corrupt endorsements of political bribery, gerrymandering, and voter purges?

Or will the beast they’re empowering turn on them, like it did on Fritz Thyssen when he had to flee his homeland to avoid the brutal fate so many of his wealthy peers suffered?

Outlawing actual (as opposed to purely symbolic and impotent) opposition took a few months in Chile when Pinochet took over; it took about two years in Germany; arguably four or five years in Russia. If Trump becomes president in this year’s election, just six months from today, it could happen very quickly. He and the billionaires even have a plan for it, called Project 2025.

It can happen here. And the morbidly rich are not going to save us.

This November’s election will determine the fate and future of what’s left of our democracy, so badly battered by bought-off and corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress: this cancer that started with Reagan and was put on steroids by Trump’s racist “birther” claims about Obama in 2008 has now fully metastasized across American society.

The very wealthy can now quietly put their billions into dark-money “donations,” thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Citizens United lets rightwing billionaires minimize outrage over their practice of nakedly purchasing elections, of carpet-bombing American homes with lie-filled television advertising, and of turning the algorithmic social media screws to fill our nation with hate.

It will take an overwhelming number of us waking up and becoming politically active to stop this authoritarian juggernaut and rescue American democracy.

And we’re going to have to get it done soon, while it’s still legal to write, protest, and vote. Because if Trump is elected, all those rights will quickly vanish.

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The H5N1 “bird flu” is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? Particularly since Trump is polling so well after he totally botched our response to Covid?

Keep in mind, Trump shut down the offices of pandemic preparedness in the White House and NSC in 2017, leaving America vulnerable to Covid; in this week’s TIME magazine interview he says if he becomes president again he’ll repeat that performance by shutting down the new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) that Congress authorized in 2022.

When Covid first hit the world four years ago, its fatality rate among unvaccinated people (all of us, back then) was estimated at 1.4 percent (it was 20% among hospitalized patients). By August of 2023, when it had killed over 1.1 million Americans, it had declined to an estimated 0.3 percent, in part because of vaccination, herd immunity, and an apparent diminution of the virulence of the disease as it mutated across those years.

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By comparison, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 had a fatality rate of 2.5 percent.

And Ebola, the disease that caused Republicans to fall into hysterics when President Obama let a physician infected with the disease back into America for treatment, has a fatality rate of an estimated 50 percent, although it’s mostly hit poor people in Africa with little access to modern medicine. Estimates among healthy people with access to modern medicine put the fatality rate closer to 25 percent.

But none of them can hold a candle to the bird flu.

If you have a carton of milk in your refrigerator, odds are it contains dead virus particles from the H5N1 bird flu that has an estimated fatality rate of 52 percent. Over 800 people worldwide have contracted the bird flu so far, and more than half have died. And now it’s spreading through the US milk cow herd; the FDA reports particles of the virus have been detected in one-in-five milk samples nationwide.

The good news is that pasteurization entirely kills the virus; the bad news is that it’s already made the jump from birds to cows, cats, dogs, and even a dolphin. How, you may wonder, did such a deadly pathogen find its way into our milk cow herd? As Zeynep Tufekci documents for The New York Times, it may well be because:

“[T]he U.S. allows farmers to feed leftover poultry bedding material — feathers, excrement, spilled seeds — to dairy and beef cattle as a cheap source of additional protein.”

For the record, this is illegal in Canada and most of the rest of the developed world; because five Republicans on the Supreme Court have legalized political bribery here, however, the Big Ag industry has successfully lobbied to allow vegetarian cows to be fed bits of birds, feathers, bird feces, and straw from bird cages.

The H5N1 bird flu has been ripping through flocks all across the world, hitting the US poultry industry particularly hard: since February 2022, over 82 million birds have been destroyed because they were infected. It’s a large part of why eggs have gone up so much in price.

This happened once before in a big way.

Back in 1916 a bird flu started killing birds around the world. In 1918 it hit Camp Funston in Kansas as birds carrying the bird flu virus either infected farm animals in a nearby farming operation providing meat to the military base or directly infected humans via bird droppings or a similar route.

Once the virus hit a human or pig that was already infected with a garden-variety flu, the bird flu virus and the human flu virus exchanged DNA to become an entirely new and extraordinarily deadly flu: H1N1 or the so-called Spanish Flu.

Of the 1.2 million men in US Army training camps in 1918, after the virus jumped from birds to humans, fully 11.8% (143,986) were hospitalized just during the first three months of its spread from March to May of that year. American soldiers then carried the virus to the killing fields of World War I, first showing up in a big way in Spain, giving it the name we know it by today.

The Spanish Flu killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide during the three years it was spreading (when the world population was a third of what it is today); Covid, by comparison, has killed an estimated 7 million people worldwide since it first began spreading in December, 2019.

Today’s H5N1 bird flu virus has now been found in 920 counties across all 50 states. It’s also spread to mink in Europe (whose respiratory systems are so similar to ours they’re used for research) and has caused seizures and death among bears in the United States.

For the H5N1 flu to move from bird-to-human transmission to human-to-human transmission will only require a small mutation in the virus.

It would just have to pick up a human-friendly gene that’s present in the other flu variants that currently infect people, presumably by infecting an animal or a person who’s also already infected with or recovering from a “normal” flu. Like a poultry worker who catches the seasonal flu but goes to work anyway because he doesn’t have paid sick leave.

In an eerie echo of yesteryear, Paul Digard, an influenza virologist told the Financial Times of the H5N1 virus now circulating among birds around the world:

“One concern is ‘reassortment’: when two flu viruses circulating in the same infected animal swap genetic material. ‘H5N1 in pigs would be a very large, exceedingly red flag,’ Digard warns, ‘given the frequency with which humans and pigs have exchanged [flu] viruses over the last 100 years.’ The respiratory tracts of pigs show similarities to ours, meaning that a swine-adapted flu virus might not require many changes to threaten us.”

Odds are if it stays as deadly as it currently is it won’t spread as rapidly or as widely as a less deadly variety, simply because it would kill its hosts so quickly.

But even if its pathogenicity dropped from 52.8 percent all the way down to 2.5 percent, that would equal the Spanish Flu.

To deal with this potential crisis, America is already developing, in limited amounts, an H5N1 vaccine to inoculate workers in factory farms, slaughter, and meat-packing operations.

Meanwhile, the Republican response to the possibility of a second deadly pandemic is predictably bizarre.

Instead of going along with government efforts to prepare for and even prevent another pandemic, Republican politicians — as an apparent homage to the way Trump handled Covid — are already trying to block public health efforts.

As KFF News reported last fall:
“‘Public health is being politicized to a point that’s never been seen,’ said Kyle McGowan, of consulting firm Ascendant Strategic Partners, who served as chief of staff at the CDC during the Trump administration. Cutting public health spending ‘is not smart,’ he said. ‘These culture wars are now leaking into and harming public health.’”

The Republican proposal from the Labor, Health, and Human Services committee’sappropriation for 2024 includes drastic across-the-board cuts in public health programs. As the Republicans themselves brag in a press release about the budget proposal:

“The Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill provides $147 billion for programs under the jurisdiction of the Subcommittee, which is $60.3 billion (29%) below the FY23 enacted level and $73 billion below the President’s Budget Request.”

In other words, the disease may not be as big a threat to America as the GOP: Republicans in Congress just rolled out an additional new proposal that cuts fully one-sixth of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the subcommittee was blunt in her assessment of the GOP’s plan:

“Cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are as outrageous as they are dangerous.”

But the GOP continues to echo Trump’s efforts to blame his malicious and incompetent handling of Covid on Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC, and that lie is now official doctrine within the party. For example, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Texas Representative Kay Granger, claimed the appropriations bill, which guts the CDC:

“[W]orks to responsibly fund programs that help improve the health and lives of the American people. It also holds agencies accountable when there has been a history of poor performance or controversial activities.”

We need to keep an eye on this virus and prepare ourselves for the possibility of another worldwide pandemic (keeping in mind nobody can predict how deadly a new H5N1 flu virus would be once it hybridizes with a human flu virus and starts to spread person-to-person; it may be extraordinarily deadly, just another run-of-the-mill flu, or something in between).

At the same time, we need to monitor Republican efforts to gut America’s public health infrastructure as they chase Qanon conspiracy theories about vaccines and supposedly nefarious activities at the CDC.

Which will turn out deadlier, a new H5N1 flu or the GOP? Stay tuned and stay vigilant…

NOW READ: Here are 17 worthless things Trump will give you for your money

Are you a lobbyist itching for a fishing trip with Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), the top Republican on the powerful Senate Finance Committee?

How about skiing and face time with Crapo?

For years, Crapo has brazenly given donors to his political action committee a veritable menu for the access that their money can buy.

READ: Here are 17 worthless things Trump will give you for your money

This year, according to a flier obtained by Raw Story, $5,000 given to the Crapo Victory Committee buys donors one of the following:

• Annual Ski Fest at Sun Valley, Idaho (last February).
• Fishing on the Chesapeake at Solomons Island, Md., in June.
• 25th Annual Hook ‘n Bullet at Sun Valley, Idaho, in August.
• 12th Annual Greenbrier Resort Retreat at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., in November.

What the committee calls the “Max Out Benefits Package” — a reference to donations reaching the legal limits — also includes the Holiday Potato Fest Reception in Washington, D.C, in December and a “donor or industry event.”

In case that’s not enough flexibility, there is another option for donors of $5,000. They can get a “DC Luncheon” in addition to the Potato Fest and donor or industry event.

Crapo, 72, who was elected to his fourth term in the senate in 2022, used to be even more aggressive in marketing his “Max Out Package.” He had gold, silver, and bronze levels of donating, all of which included “quarterly virtual calls or briefings” and a “reception or Zoom” with the senator, Business Insider reported..

Crapo’s office did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s questions.

In a 2019 article in the Idaho Statesman, former Illinois Lt. Gov. and former Boise State University President Bob Kustra criticized Crapo’s fundraising methods.

“The issue here is not whether a law was violated, but how the influence of campaign contributions from special interests affects the behavior of our elected officials when performing their official duties,” Kustra wrote. “Money might not always talk, but, at the very least, it whispers in cases like this, and aids and abets the interests of those who have the most cash to supply.”

The Crapo Victory Committee raises money for his election committee, Mike Crapo for U.S. Senate, and the Freedom Fund, a leadership PAC that Crapo operates.

While Crapo aggressively courts contributions from corporate PACs, some members of Congress, from both parties, have sworn off that particular kind of cash.

Election law limits individuals from contributing more than $3,300 per election to candidate committees and $5,000 per year to PACs.

PACs may contribute up to $5,000 per election to candidate committees and $5,000 per year to other PACs.

Crapo appears to have been successful in encouraging donors to “max out.”

His campaign committee reported $2.3 million in cash on hand at the end of March.

NOW READ: ‘Lord of the Flies’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene's effort to oust Mike Johnson

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is expected to survive a challenge from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and other far-right Republicans next week, but the goal isn’t to elect a new speaker. At least not this time around.

The goal is to move today’s GOP even further to the right, they indicate, and Johnson’s the perfect prop for this latest political ploy.

While most Republicans oppose Greene’s plan to formally call for a vote on her motion to vacate Johnson’s – the same tool used last autumn to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy – she doesn’t care what her fellow Republicans are saying.

“They didn’t vote for me,” Greene told Raw Story on the Capitol steps Wednesday.

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“But who is your base?” Raw Story asked. “Is your base Steve Bannon’s War Room? Or is it Georgia folks?”

“My district is great,” Greene said. “I think you should talk to my comms director right here, and he’ll tell you about all the support I have.”

Greene then went in to vote on the House floor, as her communications team sent Raw Story the last three Economist / YouGov polls showing Johnson’s favorability rating going from “50% then down to 47% and then plummets to 41% with [Donald] Trump voters.”

Only 22% of respondents to those Economist / YouGov polls have a favorable view of Greene, but 47% of Trump supporters view her favorably.

While Johnson has been losing support from Trump’s base since ushering a foreign aid package — heavy on Ukraine spending — through the House, Greene hasn’t seen her numbers budge.

“MTG stays steady,” Greene’s communications team noted to Raw Story.

Greene may be lonely in her effort to challenge Johnson, but she’s not completely alone.

Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) are the two other Republicans to publicly endorse the motion to vacate.

“It's our cause,” Massie told Raw Story from the U.S. Capitol. “I couldn't think of a better person to work with on something of this magnitude than Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

The Greene-Massie-Gosar axis expects more restive Republicans to join them next week, especially after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and other Democratic leaders announced their plan to come up with the votes to table Greene’s motion to vacate, thereby freezing the motion and saving Johnson’s speakership.

“He has passed everything the Democrats’ wish list, and now has the endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries,” Greene tweeted on X. “I will be calling for a vote to vacate the chair next week, so the American people can see who stands with the Uniparty and who stands with the people.”

The threat is barely veiled from Greene, who with Gosar and Massie feel betrayed by Johnson, beholden to Trump’s base and empowered by House rules that allow any one member to challenge the speaker.

“It's basically ‘Lord of the Flies’,” said Massie, referring to the classic book where a group of stranded children attempt to govern themselves on an adult-free island. “Where McCarthy had some ability to say, ‘Hey, don't do that,’ Johnson does not. He's like the substitute teacher that nobody takes seriously.”

The Ukraine aid package — which Greene summed up to reporters as, “Make Ukraine Great Again” — revealed the fault lines dividing GOP hawks from the party’s MAGA/isolationist wing.

“There is a big realignment right now. I call it a cold civil war in the party, and it's gone hot and Johnson's picked a side of the appropriators and the ‘Uniparty’ and the military industrial complex, which isn't what he led on to be when he got elected speaker,” Massie said. “But he's picked a side in this.”

Greene, Gosar and Massie know their motion to vacate is likely to fail, but they’re betting it will empower them by weakening Johnson.

“I think there'll be enough votes to show that Mike Johnson is a lame duck,” Massie said. “He doesn't know that, and so next week, I think, he's gonna have to come to terms with, ‘Well, when I come back next Congress I'm not going to be the speaker. Should I stay in this spot now that the world knows it? Am I depriving our party of a general who can go out there and lead the majority?’”

And they’re fine if Johnson’s publicly humiliated in the process.

“One of the goals is to show that he is not viable next Congress, because he would be terrible. He would be worse than Paul Ryan,” Massie said, referring to the House speaker who stepped down in early 2019 after deciding not to seek reelection.

While Johnson’s expected to keep his gavel next week, Greene and others on the far-right are hoping the vote will expand their ranks of rabble-rousing Republicans set on upending Washington and the GOP of yesterday.

“It's gonna be a list of people that are the problem and people who aren't,” Massie told Raw Story. “Or, who are trying not to be the problem.”

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is back playing the stock market after an extended absence — and she just purchased stock in two companies whose business dealings potentially conflict with her congressional committee assignments.

In a public filing released today and reviewed by Raw Story, Greene reported buying up to $15,000 Qualcomm, a federal defense contractor. Greene serves on the Homeland Security Committee and the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement.

She also reported an investment of up to $15,000 in technology giant Microsoft. Greene serves on the Government Oversight and Accountability Committee and the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation.

Greene also reported buying up to $15,000 each in Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, Hershey, Berkshire Hathaway and Tractor Supply Company stock. She also purchased up to $500,000 worth of U.S. Treasury bills — short-term investments that mature between four and 52 weeks.

Greene’s office did not immediately answer Raw Story’s request for comment.

Family stocks that Greene disclosed made an 18.6 percent return on stocks in 2023, as estimated by Unusual Whales. That was above average and in the middle of members of Congress who traded stocks. Asked on Fox News about the trades, she said an account for her son must have made the trades, a claim widely mocked on social media.

Notably, Greene’s new investments do not include Trump Media & Technology Group, whose stock has tanked since it came on the market.

In October 2021, Greene became the first member of Congress to personally invest in Digital World Acquisition Corp, which in March merged with Trump Media to form the publicly traded Trump Media & Technology Group, which trades on the NASDAQ market under the ticker symbol “DJT” for “Donald John Trump.”

In 2021, Greene reported that she and her then-husband Perry Greene purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of Digital World Acquisition Corp.

Greene has not reported that she sold the stock. She was divorced in December 2022. It appears the Digital World Acquisition Corp. shares — along with the shares of many other stocks — went to her ex-husband.

Greene’s husband frequently bought stocks in companies that openly supported social efforts that the congresswoman opposed, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and LTBTQ+ rights, Business Insider reported.

Greene had personally stopped trading stocks since 2023, according to financial disclosures filed with Congress.

Unusual Whales, which tracks the stock trades of members of Congress, warned in a 2023 report that stock trading by members of Congress poses risks: “It is important to remember that many of these stocks these members are trading are also legislated by their very committees. In no surprise, these conflicts do not stop members from trading those very stocks, like members of the Armed Services trading war stocks, and others.”

Unusual Whales noted in the report how Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) reacted when asked about his highly successful trades in 2021.

“His exact words were that without trading, ‘You have no way to better yourself’ as a congressperson,’” the report said.

Raw Story has reported that 42 members of Congress — Greene is not among them — have violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 during the current congressional session because they’ve improperly disclosed personal financial trades.

Bipartisan efforts to ban stock trading among members of Congress have so far proved unsuccessful.