Commentary

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.

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.

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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.

ALSO READ: Trump vs. history: Former presidents typically implode on their comeback tours

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.

ALSO READ: Trump’s Manhattan trial could determine whether rule of law survives: criminologist

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.

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.

READ: Dictators — even those who start out as a 'Dictator for a Day” — play for keeps

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.

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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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It doesn’t look it, but Donald Trump is weak. It doesn’t look it, because he keeps saying scary things. That gives the impression of strength. He’s weak, though. My evidence? Those scary things he keeps saying.

No presidential candidate in his right mind would say out loud for everyone to hear that he wants to establish for himself, in the words of Time magazine reporter Eric Cortellessa, “an imperial presidency.”

But that’s what he did. Over and over, in two long interviews with Cortellessa, published last week, the former president said he would turn the office of the president into something no one alive has seen.

Trump said, for instance, he would withhold funding for things he doesn’t like even if funding for those things had been approved by an act of Congress. To spell out its essence, this is what he’s saying:

“I would do the same thing I was impeached for the first time, and I would do it, as you can see from my saying this out loud for everyone to hear, with absolute impunity, not only for the rule of law and the Constitution but for the democratic institution that impeached me.”

In our lifetimes, no candidate has pitched himself as a lawbreaker. No candidate has pitched himself as a lawbreaker after being held accountable for breaking the law. (In 2019, he withheld congressionally approved military funding to Ukraine in order to involve that country’s leader in a conspiracy to smear Joe Biden. For that, he was impeached.)

It’s almost like he’s willing to say such things, because, for him, there’s no downside to saying them. Trump is like the rich man’s son who knows that Daddy will bail him out, no matter how much he fails.

Which is what he is.

Not only did his actual dad come to the rescue throughout much of his profligate life, so have many other very obscenely rich men, who are these days ponying up millions in anonymous contributions, as well as the whole of the Republican Party and the rightwing media apparatus. They will bail him out no matter what. They must. Trump is weak.

The more they bail him out, the worse he gets. It should come as no surprise that what started as bad (his 2016 campaign) has since then decomposed into something no one alive had thought was thinkable.

In addition to saying he’d “withhold funds appropriated by Congress,” according to his interviews with Cortellessa, Trump said he would:

• “build migrant detention camps and deploy the US military, both at the border and inland.”
• “let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.”
• “withhold funds appropriated by Congress.”
• “fire a US Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone.”
• “[give] pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.
• “might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.
• “gut the US civil service.”
• “deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit.”
• “close the White House pandemic-preparedness office.”
• “Staff his administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Again, I know these things sound scary, and they are. Very scary. But these are also things no candidate in his right might would say. You’ll notice no one else is saying them quite like this. There’s a reason other Republicans are more circumspect. The consequence for saying such things is too high and they aren’t going to get bailed out like Trump.

Let me put this another way.

A strong presidential candidate would look at his successes (in Trump’s case, 2016) and his failures (2020), and try to modulate so that his current campaign, at the very least, does more of the latter and less of the former. A strong candidate would fear losing. He would learn from his past mistakes, recognize his liabilities and build on his assets.

A weak candidate, on the other hand, has no such fear. He would refuse to learn from his mistakes, because what’s there to learn when he didn’t do anything wrong the last time? On his third try, he does the same thing, over and over, oblivious to the consequences, and he’s oblivious, because he’s being shielded from those consequences.

He offered a shit sandwich in 2016 and got lucky. Just enough people in just enough places thought a shit sandwich was better than a female president. He offered it again, in 2020, and he lost. Most people didn’t want a shit sandwich because it’s a shit sandwich. But because he’s surrounded by people – billionaires, Republicans, Fox – who tell him Americans love eating shit, here he is, in 2024, with more of the same.

That’s the most striking thing about his interviews with Time magazine. Not the scary things he said, though they are scary. The most striking thing is that he’s running the same campaign he ran the last two times. That’s what happens when you’re prevented from feeling the consequences of your actions. History doesn’t matter.

History never happened.