Weekly Progressive POPULIST
WHEN ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS JUST ISN'T ENOUGH Weekly news and commentary to supplement our printed edition Friday, August 14, 2026
NOTE: We have transitioned our newsprint edition to monthly publication and are producing this weekly compilation of syndicated columns and features our subscribers wouldn’t otherwise see. If you subscribe to the Daily Progressive Populist, you have been seeing these columns through the week, but now we’re saving them for Friday. You can find daily news via the links to Daily Kos and Common Dreams.
Criminals in Control and What We Must Do
By ROBERT REICH
This past weekend, the Republican-led Senate confirmed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. attorney general.
Like Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, Blanche has carried out the illegal orders of a president of the United States. As was Mitchell’s fate, Blanche should be behind bars. Mitchell served 19 months of a two-and-a-half-year sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.
Instead, Senate Republicans have given Blanche a promotion.
On Thursday, a Republican-led Senate panel voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal to answer questions at a hearing last week. At that hearing, Fauci sat stoically for three hours, invoking his constitutional right not to answer questions about his leadership during the pandemic because of his justifiable fear that Senate Republicans would try to find something he might say to charge him with perjury. As it stands now, Senate Republicans may ask the Justice Department to prosecute him for failure to comply with their subpoena.
Fauci is an American hero. He gave invaluable advice to seven presidents — from Reagan to Biden — through anthrax attacks, Ebola outbreaks, SARS scares, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He devised the U.S. global attack plan against AIDS. George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on HIV and AIDS.
Senate Republicans promote Blanche and crap on Fauci? What the hell is going on?
Look, I’m the first to admit that too many Democrats in Congress are lily-livered, unwilling to fight as hard as they should against Trump’s neofascism.
But congressional Republicans are worse than profiles in cowardice. They’ve nearly become a criminal enterprise, actively colluding with the neofascist in the Oval Office.
They’ve confirmed Blanche even without any guarantees that Trump won’t use the $1.8 billion slush fund Blanche created for him to reward the Capitol attackers, or that Trump won’t use the IRS immunity Blanche also got for him to prevent the public from ever knowing the full extent of Trump’s criminal enterprises.
And what’s with the Republican obsession over Anthony Fauci? The guy is 85 years old and retired. Why bother? It can’t be about defending Trump or avenging any damage to him. COVID-19 was six years ago. People don’t blame Trump for it. They probably should, but if they really did, he wouldn’t have had a chance in 2024.
It can’t be because Fauci’s role in the pandemic is a burning political issue, because polls show exactly 0% of Americans care about going after Fauci.
Sure, Rand Paul has a personal grudge against him, but Paul is crazier than a sh--house rat. So why are so many Republicans and even some Republican state attorneys general joining in his crusade against Fauci?
The reason is simple. Republicans have nothing else to talk about in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump’s foreign policy and Iran war are disasters. His economy is a catastrophe. His immigration dragnet, a cruel calamity. His health policy, an embarrassment or worse. His environmental policies, a gift to Big Oil.
Congressional Republicans have gone along with all of it. They’ve also enacted Trump’s giant tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations that are funded in part by cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.
Trump himself is bonkers and losing it by the day. His communist witch hunt is a bad joke. His polls continue to plummet to record lows. Ballroom? Reflecting pool? Crypto deals? All have become Republican nightmares.
So Republicans are desperate for something, anything, anyone — a fall guy, a scapegoat — to rant against, whip up the Republican base against, and raise money for their fall campaigns. Fauci is old, can’t defend himself, is easily demagogued.
Yes, my friends, it’s all upside down. Frightening and nuts. But may I remind you that there are less than three months until the midterms, when we can throw many of these criminal Republicans out of office?
Which gets me to you. I recently asked many of you how you’re coping with this ongoing horror.
In response, some of you said you’re tuning it out, or you’ve concluded that nothing can be done about it so why bother.
I get it. I sometimes can’t stand to hear another word about the loathsome Trump and his insufferable sycophants. And occasionally I despair that he and his regime will continue their reign of destruction regardless of what I or anyone else does.
But the vast majority of you told me you’re coping in two other ways: by choosing to be grateful for what’s good about America and by becoming more activist.
You’re focusing on the generosity you see around you every day, the simple acts of kindness, and the courage and dedication of people such as our teachers, nurses, social workers, and community leaders.
You’re protecting the vulnerable in your community, supporting good candidates, sending postcards to potential voters, protesting against Trump and his outrages, and boycotting companies that are enabling him.
As one member of our Substack community, Johan, commented a few weeks ago, it’s perfectly normal for people to wait to take action until they feel hopeful.
Yet in reality, hope emerges from action. It’s what activism pays back.
Which is also why hopelessness is a trap. “We’re all screwed” may feel like clear-headed realism, but it’s just surrender — draped in the costume of being realistic.
The billionaire class and their Republican lackeys want us to fall into hopelessness so they can have it all without any resistance. Hopelessness costs them nothing, yet it costs us everything. It’s the cheapest possible win for them, yet some of us hand it over for free.
Gratitude is the most powerful and enduring sentiment of all — not because everything’s fine. Obviously it’s not. We’re in deep s--t. Gratitude is powerful and enduring because when you feel gratitude, you pay attention to what’s still worth defending. This fortifies hope and adds urgency to activism. Or, as Johan reminds us, you keep your head by keeping your hands on something real.
I don’t want to be preachy or didactic. I just want to reassure you that despite the loathsomeness of those now in control of our government — despite the Republicans in Congress who have confirmed Blanche and voted to hold Fauci in contempt, and despite the malignant, sadistic narcissist they suck up to — we can be grateful for the kindness, generosity, and freedom we experience every day.
It is worth defending. It gives hope for a better future. It adds urgency to our activism. It fortifies our commitment to rid ourselves of the criminals and quislings now in control of our government, and to do what we can to replace them with good, honest and capable people.
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.” Read more from Robert Reich at
His Name Is Kennedy, His Character Is Trump
By JOE CONASON
At the core of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rise as a political celebrity is the enduring American reverence for his family. Decades ago, during his career as an environmental advocate, that lingering aura inspired admiration and even hope.
Yet the longer Bobby Jr. remains in the corrupting orbit of this regime and its maximum leader, the more he has come to reflect the degraded values and morals of the Trump family rather than his own.
Flawed as the legendary Kennedys were, nobody has ever thought of Jack, Robert or Teddy as low-rent grifters seeking to scam the government or the public for personal gain. Quite the opposite, since they devoted their political careers to protecting the American people from crooks like Roy Cohn — the Trump lawyer and moral mentor who was twice indicted when Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was attorney general.
On the current record, it is clear that RFK Jr. has long since abandoned the illustrious example of his forebears and embraced instead the grabbing-with-both-hands ethic of his new political family. During the past year alone, Bobby has abandoned all the environmental and public health principles that supposedly animated his career for the past 40 years, strictly to enrich and promote himself and his dear leader Donald Trump (a man his father and uncles assuredly would have scorned).
Consider just one of the many abuses of power perpetrated by Bobby for his own personal and political gain. As disclosed earlier this summer in The New York Times, he went out of his way to protect the distribution of Kratom, a highly toxic, mind-bending drug, mostly sold in gas stations and convenience marts, that has been linked to thousands of deaths. Exercising his authority as Health and Human Services secretary in the fall of 2025, he called the governor of Ohio in an effort to stop a state ban on the dangerous substance. Among the Kratom producers who benefited from this action — the opposite of what any public health official should have done — was a man formerly known as Jerry Cash, who had served time in prison for embezzlement and later changed his surname to Ross.
As Jerry Ross, the Kratom mogul poured $162,000 into the defunct RFK Jr. 2024 presidential committee after Trump named Bobby as health secretary. And several months later, after Food and Drug Administration granted additional favors to boost kratom, Ross wrote another million-dollar check to Kennedy’s MAHA PAC.
Like Trump, Kennedy has profited from blatant conflicts of interest while refusing to divest himself of those deals and arrangements. He still stands to profit from his consulting contract with a Los Angeles personal injury law firm that is suing vaccine makers such as Merck. When he was confirmed, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others objected, noting that at HHS he could use his power to increase his legal bonanza (which has brought him millions of dollars over the past few years).
And like Trump, Kennedy banks big money from his “patriotic” sloganeering, by personally licensing “Make American Healthy Again” as a brand - while he uses government resources to promote that brand. When Dr. Anthony Fauci came under fire in a Senate hearing in July, Kennedy used the opportunity to promote his scurrilous book attacking the former federal science official — despite his previous pledge not to run that particular sleazy grift.
How much longer Kennedy will be able to exploit the naivete of the “MAHA Moms” who form his political base remains to be seen. Many of them have grown restive as he repeatedly sells out their ideals to back Trump’s pay-for-play arrangements with pesticide producers, tobacco firms and other industries whose depredations he swore to fight. For the MAHA movement, a bitter realization is coming: They followed a leader named and packaged as a Kennedy, but underneath he was just another shoddy Trump.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com and author of several books, including (with Gene Lyons) “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Conason co-produced a 2004 documentary film, “The Hunting of the President,” based on the book.
Raping and Pillaging Our National Parks
Trump is tearing up pristine habitats in Big Bend to reward a big political donor
By SABRINA HAAKE
On August 6, a date that’s been called “a day of infamy,” construction began on Trump’s border wall through Big Bend National Park. Under a $1.7 billion federal contract strongly opposed by Texas locals regardless of party affiliation, Southwest Valley started bulldozing for profit at 8 a.m., razing habitats of threatened species and destroying native vegetation. Running along parts of the Rio Grande, the project threatens mountain lions, black bears, and desert bighorn sheep that need back and forth access to habitat routes on both sides of the river. Conservationists have made clear that Trump’s 30-foot tall steel wall will sever and permanently destroy those routes.
Nearly as bad as the senseless destruction of habitat(s) is the expense. The project will cost two thirds of the entire, chronically underfunded National Park Service’s annual budget. And for what? The area sees almost no illicit cross-border traffic, accounts for only 1 % of annual U.S.-Mexico border crossings, and is the least busy of nine U.S. border sectors. The park was already endowed with natural barriers that cost nothing: Big Bend’s sheer cliffs and canyons rise up to 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande, making Trump’s wall redundant as well as ridiculous.
Trump, adept at breaking things without knowing how to fix them, is spending billions to destroy habitats and ruin the horizon of a beloved national park for fabricated “national security” concerns. Like his decision to bulldoze significant portions of the White House while framing it as “national security”as if he owned the place, Trump is wielding yet another destructive hammer blind to consequence.
A corrupt environmental dimwit does his worst
Over 100 Texas business owners sent a letter to Congress pleading for help, transparency, and a modicum of thought for what is being destroyed. “Big Bend has been called ‘Texas’ Gift to the Nation’ and generations of Texans have built their lives on this river,” they wrote. “We are asking you, our elected representatives, to protect our livelihoods, our river, and one of our state’s most treasured landscapes from needless and permanent destruction.”
Alas, such entreaties can’t compete with Trump lining his own pockets: Southwest Valley, the private contractor doing the unnecessary and unwanted work, is a subsidiary of Kiewit Corp, a big Trump donor.
Trump’s on again, off again giant steel wall threatens one of the most ecologically intact, biodiverse areas on the continent. The area’s desert and mountain terrain support fragile ecosystems that recover slowly, if they recover at all. Extreme aridity, poor soils, and a delicate climate with hard scrabble plant life means that when soils are disturbed and vegetation is cleared, there will be no rapid regrowth, leaving the newly denuded landscape vulnerable to erosion for decades if not forever.
It will also disrupt the Rio Grande floodplain. Erecting a solid barrier along part of the river will act as a dam, completely altering how water flows through the valley. The administration therefore waived environmental review, even though waiver authority is strictly limited to “areas of high illegal entry,” making Trump’s waiver patently illegal.
Fox News headlines as surrogate for governance
Like so many of his hasty, incompetent, governance by-Fox-News-headlines botched jobs, Trump is serving up permanent destruction in Big Bend without the bare minimum of environmental scrutiny required by law. To quote national treasure Jeff Tiedrich, the incomparable lunacy of Trump and his “abject morons meddling in shit they don’t understand,” is hard to comprehend.
If starving animals, environmental ruination, and harm to local tourism is hard to swallow, even harder is the realization that Americans put a known idiot in office just to shake things up. Said idiot is shaking said things up by destroying everything he touches: the environment, rule of law, global economy, civil rights, military alliances, public education, and banking. There is no sector of American life Trump hasn’t injured, and now, cherry on the rancid cake, he’s re-writing U.S. nuclear strategy.
It is clear that we are being led by the stupidest cohort of the American population, while they, in turn, are being manipulated by the richest cohort to vote against their own interests.
What will it take for Americans to stop the madness?
A quick, partial list of Trump disasters after only 18 months comes easily: ICE agents have caused the deaths of at least 57 people, none of them hardened criminals. Hegseth’s murders on the high seas may trigger an ICC warrant for his arrest as a war criminal. The kidnapping of Venezuela’s president did nothing to help the people of Venezuela as $19 billion in seized oil profits remains unaccounted for. Trump’s unauthorized war in Iran has empowered the world’s most dangerous theocracy and spiked energy prices world wide. His economically illiterate tariffs have extracted thousands of dollars from American families, while his geopolitical ignorance and arrogance have pushed allies into regrouping without America. I could go on, but why?
The point is that these horrific things are happening, and are predicted to get worse, because we let them.
I don’t blame MAGA; MAGA is less educated than most, with attendant IQs. They have been lied to by right wing media serving hidden corporate agendas for decades, and don’t understand that right wing media serve them addictive pablum and rage bait to keep them entertained while the oligarchs’ takeover continues. MAGA still supports Trump in spite of his incompetence because Fox News hides the danger from them.
I don’t even blame the oligarchs who manipulate MAGA into voting against their own interests. At least it makes sense. Oligarchs and the wealthiest 1% fund Trump’s chaos because it serves them—citizens manipulated into hating each other and doubting the system object less when the system is destroyed, and destruction of the regulatory, taxing state is what Republicans have been about since Reagan.
Instead, I blame complacency. Too many Americans either never learned or have forgotten that protecting democracy requires real, sustained effort. It requires sacrifice, it requires time. But 91 million voters didn’t bother voting in the 2024 election even after they saw J6. If watching Trump’s violent coup attempt against the U.S. capital wasn’t enough to get them to vote, what the hell will be?
The phrase, ‘rape and pillage’ originates from pre-modern warfare, and reflects conquering armies’ brutal habit of looting captured towns, often raping the townspeople. Today the phrase fits a deranged and destructive leader unmoored from morals, law, or conscience, freed by the highest court to extract whatever he can and leave the scraps to the poor. We will continue being looted until we learn that freedom requires work, and rise up willing to do it.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and trial lawyer in Chicago specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense. She writes at SabrinaHaake.substack.com
Can an American Muslim Win a Pivotal Senate Seat?
By DICK POLMAN
If words of wisdom could cure the Republicans’ addiction to Islamophobia, these might suffice:
“Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect.”
Those remarks were voiced six days after 9/11 by President George W.a Bush. Which means that in today’s depraved GOP, he’d be a bleeding-heart leftist.
What we’re witnessing across our benighted land, from the White House construction site to the MAGA grassroots, is a demagogic crusade to reduce Michigan-born Oxford and Columbia-educated medical doctor Abdul El-Sayed to a “terrorist” cartoon.
It’s a cinch to explain their motive. Control of the U.S. Senate may hinge on the outcome of the Michigan Senate race, and with Trump’s poll numbers in the toilet, indulging the cult’s racist id and scaring the hell out of voters is arguably the most promising strategy.
Granted, hard-core Michigan MAGAts wouldn’t vote for a Democrat even if that candidate was a white Christian male who’d partied with Jeffrey Epstein. But in that likely tight swing-state election, every vote may be crucial. If even a tiny share can be conned into recoiling at the prospect of a Muslim in the Senate, Islamophobics will spike the ball in the end zone.
I’m not implying El-Sayed, a former Rhodes scholar and author of three books on public health, is a perfect candidate. Some of his progressive stances, like “Medicare for All,” may alienate moderate voters, and his denunciation of Israel’s war in Gaza is anathema to some Jewish voters. His narrow win last Tuesday in the Senate Democratic primary showed he’s weak (thus far) with working-class voters and Black voters.
Healthy skepticism on those fronts is obviously warranted. But MAGA’s personal smears are already far beyond the pale.
Will they work? Possibly. Fox News has long been a cultural blight – it does for journalism what toxic dumps do for the environment – and for three decades it has pumped Islamophobia into millions of weak minds. And we have Trump, the propaganda outlet’s demon spawn, who as early as 2011 was playing the pejorative Muslim card on Obama. Yeah, he conceded on camera, maybe the president does have a U.S. birth certificate, “but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.” (It didn’t.)
But El-Sayed is indeed a Muslim, and Trump’s toadies are in low dudgeon. Tommy Tuberville, the meathead Alabama senator, posted the other day without a shred of evidence that El-Sayed is a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” and a “TERRORIST.” The Senate Republicans’ super PAC says El-Sayed will “unleash terror.” Ted Cruz told Fox News that El-Sayed wants “Sharia law,” despite the dearth of evidence and El-Sayed’s repeatedly voiced respect for the U.S. Constitution and religious freedom. And according to Mike Rogers, the Senate Republican candidate, El-Sayed supposedly believes that America “deserved” 9/11. That’s a viral lie; in truth, a lefty commentator who supports El-Sayed said it in a podcast seven years ago and later retracted it. For what it’s worth, El-Sayed wrote in 2020 that the “craven” 9/11 attacks had “devastated” him.
For the record, El-Sayed at age 31 held public office – executive director of the Detroit Health department and city Health Officer – drawing on his specialty as an epidemiologist. That doesn’t seem to track with the Islamophobic stereotype of a violent terrorist, and what makes the haters’ hypocrisy even more detestable is the fact that they have no qualms about routinely selling weaponry to white Christians who shoot up public places and secure America’s standing among high-income nations as the leader in gun homicides.
All told, El-Sayed is situated at ground zero in an election year when America is truly at the crossroads. Are low-information voters still receptive to the mendacious messaging peddled so successfully by the Trumpists and pre-MAGA Republicans? Perhaps not – according to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim presidential candidate, down from 38 percent in 2015 – but implanted fears of El-Sayed may bloom in the privacy of the voting booth. That would be unfortunate. To indulge those fears, and elect a Republican senator, is to aid and abet the teetering fascist cult.
If only those who hesitate could at least entertain what George W. Bush said: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is about. Islam is peace. Muslims most not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”
And for the umpteenth time since 2016, we will determine whether that America still exists.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com. See the online version, with links, at dickpolman.substack.com
Ever Wonder What Trump Does All Day?
By RACHEL MARSDEN
PARIS — Ever wonder how the President of the United States actually spends his time? You’d think that it would be a critically important issue, given how much work there is to get done.
The President’s own public itinerary reveals that he spends much of his time just fluffing himself up. Shuttling around to and from his New Jersey golf resort, receiving adulation from GOP party faithful at his golf club in Los Angeles, meeting with winning sports teams to snap pics of himself with their trophies, or promoting himself in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Casino, celebrating his socialist “Trump accounts” that launder $1,000 worth of your money through the government to a stranger’s baby, and his “no tax on tips” for wait staff while his futile losing war with Israel on Iran hikes up their fuel and living costs.
“I love tariffs, right?” Trump said during his speech. “Because we’ve been screwed by tariffs used against us for years.” Guess that’s why he’s adding to the screwing of Americans by doing a little himself.
Then he started in on the golden retriever of the global pack: Canada. “Canada’s nasty. They are. They’re nasty. I love the people, but they’re nasty. Nasty leadership,” he said, clearly showing frustration over Canada’s total disinterest in engaging with him on his terms as they look to diversify trade away from unpredictability.
Trump changed topics so many times that each clip could have represented a separate event with its own unique theme. In reality, it was just one long, careening riff, mostly devoid of actual results. At least not in a reliable direction supported by the critical mass of voters who elected him. It had the general organizational structure of an internet browser with 55 tabs open.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, he can’t find an exit ramp in Iran. He can’t get his ballroom approved by Congress or the courts as it sits there half-baked, looking like someone blew up a Home Depot on the White House lawn. He can’t even renovate the reflecting pool in Washington without it somehow visually morphing into the swamp that he vowed to drain. Maybe because it was a no-bid contract to a buddy.
What else is new? I’m surprised his sons didn’t start up a pool cleaning company to cash in like they did with their private businesses now earning money from financial activity involving U.S. government securities and business from foreign state-backed investors. Or with drones, because they saw a chance to mosey up to the public teat and wet their whistle with some Pentagon cash. Or, most recently, with their Trump-hyped magnet venture.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I supported Trump’s re-election partly because of the passion and energy that he showed on the campaign trail for tackling the economy, jobs, and world peace. In retrospect, maybe he was really just motivated by the dismissal or suspension that a return to the presidency would mean for the federal cases against him on alleged election interference and mishandling of classified documents — both carrying a potential cumulative maximum prison sentence of up to 50 years or more.
Because what’s he really doing in office these days? Sure, he’s all over the media with press clips, giving the illusion of activity: one from his plane, another from the White House, yet another from some event. It’s a classic political marketing trick.
Here in France, when former President Nicolas Sarkozy was in office, his entire strategy — as one of his top communications advisers admitted to me — consisted of making announcements for every single action to create the illusion of productivity. It stood in stark contrast to his predecessor Jacques Chirac’s more conventional French discretion founded on the notion that the President shouldn’t be so omnipresent in citizens’ lives through the media that voters start feeling like they spend more time with the President than with their own family.
Chirac, who successfully kept France out of the Iraq war debacle despite enormous U.S. pressure, believed that the results should speak for themselves. But of course, those were different times. People weren’t scrolling for real-time entertainment and noise on digital devices, or expecting instant policy results. But it’s not like Trump is delivering instant results, either. Unless you consider bombing out a result.
But what actual work of value and substance is getting done? Seems that all these grifters are so obsessed with self-promotional or self-preserving optics that they’re now just busy mostly validating each other’s warped versions of reality. Which would explain reports that Trump recently blew up at war secretary and public burpee enthusiast and self-appointed testosterone cop, Pete Hegseth, accusing him of not being forthright about missile shortages caused by the war in Iran.
Trump denies that there’s a weapons shortage, and vows to hunt down whoever leaked details of the weapons shortage that definitely doesn’t exist.
At some point, all these jokers need to sit down and stop auditioning for attention long enough to actually do the jobs they were elected or appointed to do. Not every thought needs a camera or every tantrum a national event.
The thing about substance is that it’s pretty boring. It speaks exclusively through results. Which would explain why it doesn’t have very much to say these days.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at
http://www.rachelmarsden.com
.
Time for Democrats to Widen Their ‘Big Tent’
By CLARENCE PAGE
Here we go again.
We’re approaching another presidential campaign year, and once again I am reminded of what the great sage Will Rogers said back in 1933:
“I am not a member of any organized political party,” he said. “I am a Democrat.”
Yes, I know that Rogers quote is old enough to have whiskers on it.
Yet, compared to the comparatively regimented style of the Republicans, particularly the MAGA faction that runs the party, the Democrats seem to specialize in finding new ways to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, especially since the two successful terms of Barack Obama.
Doom and gloom might in fact be the default state of the Democrats.
When Republicans and a large number of swing voters rallied around Donald Trump in 2024, he was a convicted felon, a sore-loser ex-president dishonored by his failed attempt to nullify the 2020 election, a man hounded by the Justice Department for misdeeds in office.
And yet the Democrats lost to him in what could only be termed a self-inflicted debacle.
The party was left with a debilitating crisis of self-confidence. To many it still feels disorganized and leaderless, in addition to being in debt.
Meanwhile, President Trump carries on, relentlessly finding new norms to violate, shielded by his presidential pardoning power and his party’s majority control of Congress and, in effect, even the Supreme Court.
The result: strongman-style governance, gross self-enrichment by the Trump family, rampant pay-to-play corruption, a reign of terror by sparsely trained immigration agents, a fawning cabinet, and a neutered Congress, all under the watchful eyes of MAGA bureaucrats, influencers and operatives.
I’ve asked conservative friends who long have held that the government should be “run like a business” if this is what they had in mind, and I hear that they’ll get back to me.
Meanwhile, Americans in the political center and on the left are dreading the possibility that the Democratic establishment is going to flub the opportunity to wrest control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections from the increasingly unpopular forces of Trumpism.
It would be wrong, however, to write off the Democrats as moribund and hopeless. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And into the Democratic void stepped a once-in-a-generation political talent: Zohran Mamdani. This eloquent, handsome, preternaturally happy young man came out of nowhere to win the mayoral election of New York City, even though it seemed like the entire Democratic establishment, much of the mainstream media, and of course our kibitzing president were arrayed against him.
As a foreign-born Muslim, a self-described socialist, and an outspoken critic of Israel, Mamdani might have been written off by most as a likely candidate to lead the nation’s most important city, but his superlative political instincts and his charm offensive with voters made him a national sensation — and gave Democrats hope again that a new ascendancy is possible.
Mamdani’s politics aren’t every Democrat’s cup of tea. But Dems of all stripes can learn from his example. To begin with, they shouldn’t be afraid to back candidates who take dissenting but principled positions on controversial issues, or to back candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Enter Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the former public health official running as a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan on a progressive, anti-establishment platform.
Virtually unknown outside Michigan, he sprang into the national spotlight by winning that state’s Democratic Senate primary in a narrow but significant victory, defeating a candidate widely considered to be the safe, “establishment” Democrat.
And, before the sun could rise again on the morning after El-Sayed’s primary victory, President Trump and his fellow Republicans ramped up their condemnations, using some good old tried-and-true slurs.
Trump called him a “communist,” channeling his one-time mentor Roy Cohn, the infamous understudy of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
With that blast of over-the-top demonization, Trump probably did El-Sayed a big favor, as did other Republicans who called him rude and dangerous.
In polls and focus groups, by contrast, respondents praised El-Sayed as a straight-talker who would stick it to the party establishment they no longer trusted anyway.
Still, polls before the primary suggested El-Sayed had a larger lead over his more moderate opponent, Haley Stevens, than was reflected in the final vote tally.
I don’t know how far El-Sayed will get. The more I hear of his real statements, not the ones wrongly attributed to him, the less frightening he sounds.
He’s been called a Democratic Socialist by Trump and others. He is not.
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist by training who was born in the Detroit suburbs to Egyptian parents, has been called anti-Semitic because he criticizes the war in Gaza and has called for an arms boycott of Israel. You don’t have to be anti-Semitic to be pro-peace in Gaza.
Stevens, meanwhile, expressed support for Israel and took campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a group that has become highly controversial among voters of both parties as Israel has continued its war in Gaza and neighboring Lebanon.
The issue of the U.S. alliance with Israel is likely to cause a lot of unpredictable fractiousness in both parties. But of course in El-Sayed’s case there is the added factor that he is Muslim. You don’t have to be a cynic to predict that the Republicans will dial up Islamophobic rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election.
As a rather sharp-tongued maverick, El-Sayed will have to work to bolster support among Democratic constituencies who favored his opponent in the primary. For example, his support among Black voters was disappointingly low. He can and should try to make up for that deficit. Now is the time for the politics of addition, not subtraction.
Like him or not, the Democrats, after numerous well-known setbacks, need to keep open minds about where their next leaders might come from.
So, for that matter, should Republicans, if they can ever pry Trump loose from his perch in the White House.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. Email him at clarence47page@gmail.com.
An Immodest Proposal for Trump
By JAMIE STIEHM
You may wonder why President Donald Trump is doing everything he can, day by day, to destroy faith in democracy in little and large ways, on the job day and night. I have an answer that will presently be revealed.
It involves a modest proposal.
Here in the capital, our hearts are hurting over his huge new White House ballroom construction (paused by the courts for a few weeks), shuttering of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and his proposed “Arc de Trump,” which would overshadow the gorgeous, gleaming Lincoln Memorial and the shrine’s sightline to Arlington National Cemetery.
Don’t even get me started on the historic Reflecting Pool and Lafayette Square, fenced off from the public.
This city is full of grace notes that the president is systematically snuffing out. Call it first-degree architectural murder. But the worst is yet to come later this month: an IndyCar Grand Prix race around the National Mall at speeds of up to 100 mph, putting our precious national museums at risk.
The vibrations alone could compromise the Smithsonian Castle and buildings that hold our storied national heritage inside their walls. But museums are “fake news” anyway, in Trump’s jargon. He is taking steps to erase the tales the museums tell, especially of slavery.
Unforgivably, he let a White South African native of the apartheid era close the U.S. Agency for International Development on his first day in office.
Could Trump be worse? Oh yes.
In a time of extreme climate change, he clings to fossil fuels and says he “hates” wind renewable energy. Also, in burning summers, he wants to end water hydration breaks for workers outside in farm fields and delivery trucks.
He lets scenic national parks take severe budget cuts. Women are subject to “abortion surveillance.” He is running a secret police and mass deportation operation that we the people know little about.
After a poor performance managing the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of deaths, he is letting the fine Dr. Anthony Fauci take the blame.
He started a war on Iran with a zealot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, just because, without asking or telling Congress.
He shows no concern over the most serious issue of all heading into the fall midterms: affordability, affordability, affordability. It ain’t no “hoax.” Meanwhile the gap between the nation’s rich and poor is yawning ever wider.
All this while Trump plunders and profits from the presidency to the tune of $2.2 billion. His Cabinet and circle are stuffed with billionaires. Affordability doesn’t come up on the golf course.
Trump has zero compassion for millions about to lose Medicaid coverage. It is truly remarkable how little he cares — and how he doesn’t even pretend to care.
Speaking of health care, his Cabinet secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. is ludicrously opposed to vaccine schedules and let a measles outbreak go unchecked. Kennedy may also undermine the poverty program for young children, Head Start.
Cabinet secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief, has no idea how to win a war from his Fox News training.
Vain and foolish, Hegseth preens before Trump, who likes the slick look: “Nobody looks better on television than that guy.” But we’re running out of munitions fast.
Women and Black leaders were fired from the military, thanks to Hegseth, and that’s just another outrage.
“A lot of people are saying ...” That’s Trump’s go-to line when he brags about how great he is.
(No, I’ll tell you what a lot of people are saying. They’re saying you’re a crazy and cruel authoritarian.)
The only explanation is that Trump wants to kill us all. He hates Washington most, after his violent Jan. 6 plot failed to overturn the 2020 election.
So we are at Ground Zero. That’s a palpable feeling when helicopters fly low overhead and soldiers are seen on the streets. But he is enraged at everybody for losing in 2020.
Jonathan Swift, the famed satirist, must have had Trump in mind when he wrote, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
Swift suggested in his 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal” that the rich and poor were so far apart in Ireland that the poor could sell their children for the rich to enjoy eating them.
Don’t give Trump any ideas.
Jamie Stiehm is a former assignment editor at CBS News in London, reporter at The Hill, metro reporter at the Baltimore Sun and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is author of a new play, “Across the River,” on Aaron Burr. See JamieStiehm.com.
Facts From ‘Summer of a Thousand Fires’
By JOHN YOUNG
My son was on the phone from a suburb of Denver, driving to an appointment, frantic suddenly for directions.
I know that area well. My answer was calm, knowing where he was: “Turn to the mountains.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t see the mountains.”
For those who’ve not been in eyeshot of the Rocky Mountains, they’re a lot to hide. Gray’s Peak, the biggest bulge on our Front Range, is 14,276 feet.
Ah, but all of the region is simmering in condensed mushroom soup — smoke from out-of-control forest fires.
Is it from the cataclysm in Canada? From Washington State? Or from the half dozen fires burning in our state? It doesn’t matter. All are part of the same brittle template, and global warming is the cause.
How sadly comic it was for America’s joke of a president to blast Canada for its eco-catastrophe and threaten new tariffs.
If there’s any single cause of the smoke circling the planet, it is him — and fellow Republicans who not only deny humanity’s role but who are blocking any and all measures to combat strains on our environment.
Tucked up against the jagged, slate-gray Flatirons outside of Boulder is an entity that would convince anyone of the problem and the human causes if one were inclined to hear: the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Its supercomputers and researchers track and analyze what’s happening around us. Coloradans know it as NCAR. I remember touring it in middle school.
This administration, heeding its Big Carbon puppeteers, doesn’t want to hear what NCAR has to say. It is pushing to dismantle the center, asserting that it promotes a culture of “climate alarmism.”
Recently Colorado District Judge Robert Brooke Jackson blocked the move, calling it arbitrary and capricious. Politically driven? Oh, yes. Under the administration’s order, NCAR operations the White House deems worth continuing would be transferred from our blue state to the redness of Wyoming – Wyo U.
Should voters award control of the House to the Democrats in the fall, punitive decisions against states that did not vote for the Pumpkin Man should be among articles of impeachment.
But back to the climate.
Eighteen years ago, in a book provocatively titled, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” on how communities arose from climate disasters, Rebecca Solnit predicted the future if “cynicism and naivete” ruled the day. Throw in hucksterism by a spray-tanned man in the White House.
Writes Solnit today: “I saw what climate chaos was going to bring: more and worse disasters, and I thought we needed to know how disasters unfold. And here we are in the summer of a thousand fires.”
Here we are, as well, in an energy crisis — gasoline prices at the mercy of a foreign foe.
Jimmy Carter faced such a situation. He preached conservation and energy alternatives.
By contrast, this president cripples the electric car industry, bribes producers of solar and wind operations to shut down, and orders smelly old coal plants to get busy again.
Recently Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse issued a stirring condemnation of Republicans’ willing blindness about the costs of doing what this president promotes – and what he demotes.
The Democrat from Rhode Island showed his colleagues an alarming chart of the rapid spike in billion-dollar weather disasters.
The progression on the senator’s bar graph takes one from the near flatness of the ‘80s to what looks like the Matterhorn of now.
It’s all so abstract. Just numbers.
To put it in concrete terms — and no pun is meant — 80,000 homes in greater New York City may be lost to flooding from sea-level rise in the next 15 years according to a study by regional planners.
Again, no joke. Superstorm Sandy destroyed 650,000 homes.
We know this president’s response: Buy a high-rise.
Back where I live, we are holding our breaths, literally and figuratively, amid the smoke and unprecedented heat. This likely will be the hottest year in our state’s history.
NCAR has certified the truth about this — truth today’s Republican Party chooses not to hear.
Coloradans don’t need supercomputers to know things are amiss. All we have to do here is look to see where the smoke of naivete and cynicism obscures our mountains.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
News Flash: We Live in a Mixed Economy
By FROMA HARROP
Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan keeps calling himself a capitalist. And the Democratic Socialists of America keep backing him to the eyeballs.
Why? Because the DSA understands that El-Sayed has to say that to win over even Democrats in a moderate state like Michigan. They firmly expect that once elected, he would do as they say, which happily conforms with what he truly believes.
Confusing? Yes, on purpose. But let’s move beyond this war of labels. Let’s stop using socialist and capitalist as either compliments or denunciations.
The United States has a mixed economy, as do most modern countries. It has an economic system in which both the government and the private sector control resources. The American government runs public education, Medicare and the U.S. Postal Service, to name a few programs. They are all taxpayer supported.
Why does a stamp on a letter going from a remote farmhouse in North Dakota to Chicago cost the same as a stamp on a letter sent from one Chicago apartment to another three blocks away? In a purely capitalist system, the stamp’s price would have reflected the difference in cost of delivery. The North Dakotan would have had to pay for this service, a lot more. But U.S. law mandates “universal service,” which keeps the cost of a stamp fixed. Thus, dense cities subsidize mail delivery in rural areas.
Private companies, such as UPS and FedEx, charge vastly higher prices for delivery to remote places. Note that President Donald Trump has supported selling off the USPS to a private company.
Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed through the Social Security Act of 1935 as part of his New Deal program. America was in the jaws of Great Depression, and FDR used the power of the federal government to create jobs, stabilize the financial system and keep the destitute elderly alive.
New York’s Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, says he’s another FDR. But FDR said, “No one in the United States believes more firmly than I in the system of private business, private property and private profit.”
Roosevelt’s new government programs were intended to save the capitalist-market system from collapsing, not, to use Mamdani’s words, “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Where are the heroic peasants of the Soviet agitprop films waving banners?
Socialist Bernie Sanders heralds Sweden as the socialist model, citing its free health care, free college and so forth. He also says, “I don’t think billionaires should exist.”
Sanders may not be up to date on Sweden’s economy. It is highly capitalist with more billionaires per capita than the United States. The social programs he admires are supported by taxes.
Sweden, meanwhile, has been tightening the rules for receiving government benefits. For example, it’s been cutting benefits to those not working. It has also adopted a hyper-restrictive immigration policy. In addition to the shock of a massive influx of people from very different cultures, Swedes rebelled at the impoverished newcomers’ claims on its social programs.
The number of migrants entering Sweden was down to 12,000 last year from 117,000 in 2016. And the country is trying to get people already there with residency permits to leave.
What do the “abolish-ICE” Democratic Socialists think of that?
As conservative economist Milton Friedman famously put it, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Here’s how it works: Our capitalist-market system generates a huge amount of wealth that can be taxed to pay for social and other programs. A balance must be found between encouraging wealth creation and crafting a tax code able to raise money for desired public needs. That’s a lot harder than throwing around dated labels.
Froma Harrop is a columnist with Creators Syndicate, formerly with the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Follow her on Twitter @fromaharrop. Email fharrop@gmail.com.
Medicare for All is a Winner
By ART CULLEN
Those who wish me silent six feet under may be disappointed to hear that my blood test came back last week looking pretty good.
Nine months following cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic my prostate is carved by cryotherapy (freezing of the tumor) but apparently clean. Medicare allowed me to go to Rochester. Our newspaper’s health insurance plan confines you to regional providers offering fewer solutions. Medicare is one of the few benefits of growing old.
You can choose your own doctor! Mayo seems happy to have me. You don’t have to ask permission from the insurance company to get quality care. You can choose the University of Iowa or go to Omaha.
A not-so-secret dirty secret: Health insurance companies turn a profit by denying care. A nurse on the phone from Timbuktu is getting between you and your doctor so the insurance company can justify itself.
Call me a socialist or a communist. It is a relief to be unshackled from corporate health insurance. I’ve never understood why it should be the responsibility of businesses to provide for health care. We are editors, not health insurance administrators. We should divert the money we’re already spending to Medicare for All.
It will make health care better in Storm Lake, Sioux City and Des Moines. We can see that Iowa is spending more money on privately managed Medicaid than it did when the state administered the program. Rural health care has suffered terribly.
The procedure performed on me at Mayo is not available in Sac City or Sioux City. It is cheaper than conventional cancer treatments, it is effective, and it is done on an out-patient basis during one procedure. Medicare pays for it.
We can afford it. We’re already paying princely sums in premiums. Our out-of-pocket on a corporate plan is $5,000. The co-pays are frightful. Medicare and Medicaid do not reimburse providers at their cost; private-pay patients subsidize government pay. Incorporating younger, healthier patients into the Medicare system can float the boat — you cut out the profit factor. Our tax dollars would be better spent at the University of Iowa Hospital than bombing Iran.
The current system protects mediocrity by limiting competition through insurance contracts. Sick people are a captive market. Denying care is a moral stain. We should plumb our conservative souls and arrive at a more pragmatic solution.
Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, says he thinks private enterprise can do a better job at health insurance. We have a fundamental disagreement. I wish him well on the farm at Belle Plaine and trust he can swing the premium on a Farm Bureau policy since he can afford to self-finance his campaign.
Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate, would offer a start by undoing the privatization of Medicaid. We need to restore federal funding for Medicaid. That would help to protect rural health providers.
The real answer is beyond Des Moines. Democrat Josh Turek has to force Republican Ashley Hinson into a full debate over single-payer health care in their race for the US Senate. If anyone has actual street credibility on this issue, it is Turek in a wheel chair. Hinson claims she would take care of veterans. What about their sons?
It’s hard for most of us to imagine what a victim of Agent Orange goes through. Turek had 21 surgeries by age 12 from spina bifida. Turek managed to rise above it, win a Paralympics gold medal, and shoot hoops with Barack Obama.
A rectal exam is almost too much for me to endure. Navigating health care decisions is frightening enough without worrying whether the tin cup at the convenience store is getting any donations.
Sand is smart to put strengthening Medicaid at the top of his agenda. Turek should go all in on Medicare for All. He says he would “introduce a public option.” That’s a weak cup of tea. We have waited on a “public option” for 20 years. Medicare for All is a winning issue. Ask any senior citizen — they love Social Security and Medicare. The health system so strained the Turek family that they had to get their clothes from Goodwill. Is that how we take care of veterans and their families?
It isn’t good enough. If Turek intends to win, he should get on board with Sand and create a campaign to get every Iowan Medicare. At least Turek would attempt to restore funding for Medicaid, which could save a lot of rural hospitals and clinics. Medicare for All would give everyone options like I get at age 69. Why make people wait?
Those who wish me dead for appreciating socialized medicine should note I also gave up cigarettes. We will keep haranguing until we run out of breath: The corporate insurance system is a cancer on the body politic. Cure it.
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland, ” released by Viking Press in 2018, and “Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World,” released by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa, in September. Email times@stormlake.com.
JIM HIGHTOWER
Voters Rebel Against Effort by Missouri GOP to Kill Voter Rights
It’s no secret that voters are increasingly disgusted by today’s extremist, right-wing Republican lawmakers. But less known is the fact that extremist GOP lawmakers are even more disgusted by you voters!
They’re so disgusted that a top legislative priority of Republican leaders in the White House, Congress and state legislatures is to rig election rules, literally to rule out issues and voters they don’t like. For example, Republicans in Missouri (the “Show Me” State) showed us what they’re made of by attempting to kill the people’s right to amend their state’s constitution. Missouri and 25 other states have long provided a citizen-led initiative process so the people can propose and pass their own laws, rather than always depending on politicians to “do what’s right.” Yes — it’s direct democracy!
But the people (”Damn them”) have been passing things like providing health care for the poor and raising the minimum wage. So, “No-no,” screeched Republican leaders and corporate lobbyists, who otherwise control the entire state government. In a perversion of people power, they wrote a ballot initiative that, effectively, would leave direct democracy “dead” in Missouri.
Clever, huh? Use the initiative process to kill the initiative process.
But the people rallied, exposed the fraud and in a massive turnout of voters in last week’s elections, 80% — 80%! — rejected the establishment’s anti-democracy ploy.
Missourians showed ‘em — but anti-democracy elites are now pushing direct-voter bans in 15 other states, including Arizona, Florida, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma and Utah. To keep track and shove back against these plutocratic power grabs, connect with the nationwide monitoring and grassroots campaigns of the Fairness Project: thefairnessproject.org.
Moneyed Powers are Forcing Art and Artisans Out of Our Towns
The great thing about “art towns” is, of course, the artists who live there and their art. So why are so many art town officials deliberately and stupidly driving artists out of town?
I live in such a place: Austin, Texas. For beaucoup years, it welcomed and nurtured a blessing of creators — from buskers to tap dancers, muralists to neon sign artists.
Neon Signs? Yes, magical artisans who can bend glass tubes into delightful expressive shapes that light up to identify a community and culture as something more than just another concrete-and-steel erection of corporate power. One such creative is Todd Sanders, an Austin pop artist who for three decades has preserved and advanced this eclectic community’s proud claim to be “Keeping Austin Weird.”
I was personally plugged into that identity when Susan DeMarco, Floyd Domino and I broadcast a two-hour daily radio talk show across America from a down-home Austin restaurant named Threadgill’s. Behind us on the stage was a Todd Sanders gem — a three-by-five-foot neon sign, flashing “Hightower Radio ... On the Air.”
But multimillion-dollar developers — backed by a city council now promoting Austin as a mecca for high-tech billionaires — have no room for funky grassroots “weirdness.” They’ve jacked up city property taxes and artists’ rents in a corporate gentrification frenzy that has squeezed Sanders’ neon shop and others out of Austin. The good news is that art perseveres, so Sanders’ studio and art gallery found a welcoming spot 80 miles east of us in the small town of Round Top.
But Round Top artisans will be next if we keep letting profiteers, with no values beyond money, define who we are, restricting who we can become.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
Tuskegee’s Dress Code Revives an Old Debate
By ELWOOD WATSON
Tuskegee University’s updated dress code has revived an old debate about professionalism, respectability politics, and how much responsibility Black institutions should take in preparing young people for the larger world.
Tuskegee recently prohibited bonnets, du-rags, bedroom shoes, and “revealing clothing” from classrooms and dining halls. In a recent letter to students, President Mark A. Brown said the goal was to prepare students for the workforce.
The decision ignited an ongoing and, at times, contentious discussion: proponents referring to it as preparation, detractors chiding the ban as respectability politics disguised as preparation, with some going as far as to label such action “anti-Black.” Some decry that Black students are being held to different standards than their peers at predominantly white institutions, who often show up to class in casual wear. As I see it, the issue is greater than a university’s dress code requirements. Both camps raise valid concerns.
Anyone with a healthy knowledge of American history is aware of the fact Black people have routinely been expected — in some cases, demanded — to redefine themselves to become socially palatable to institutions whose standards or agendas were seldom, if ever, designed to embrace or include us. Respectability politics defines how marginalized people frequently manipulate and alter their appearance, language or behavior to curry acceptance within dominant institutions. Blackness cannot be minimized to hairstyles.
It is important to note that Tuskegee is hardly the only HBCU to enforce dress codes. Hampton University’s dress code, for example, prohibits du-rags, bonnets, skull caps, scarves, and bandanas “at all times” outside of student housing. Dillard University’s student handbook asks students to “dress neatly” and outlines “appropriate dress for various occasions,” including classrooms, the cafeteria, and university offices. Men must take off caps and hats worn for nonreligious purposes before entering the dining hall at Claflin University. And Virginia Union University has an extensive dress code that bans not just du-rags and bonnets but “pants worn in a ‘baggy’ fashion,” hoodies with the hood up, head scarves, and curlers.
It was not by accident that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists were ever mindful about presenting themselves accordingly in public. They knew they were under the lens of a very discerning public microscope and were always impeccably groomed, neatly dressed in suits and ties and other fashionable attire. They knew they were representing a movement and a greater cause and governed themselves accordingly.
Let’s cut to the chase. Most people make decisions, justified or not, on appearance. You are provided with one opportunity to make a first impression, and those impressions die hard. As a professor at a regional state university, I have witnessed certain students come to class and visit the dining hall in bed slippers and pajamas.
Whether we approve or disagree, the truth is appearance and perception are often reality. It is no accident many of those campus radicals of the 1960s and 1970s traded in their sandals and t-shirts, removed their nose rings, cut their hair and dyed it back to its original color when they applied for summer internships or applied for lucrative jobs in the private sector after graduation.
There is certainly more to a person’s character than what sort of threads they wear in public. Dressing professionally isn’t about assuaging white discomfort. Most people of color know a pristine and elegant appearance does not prohibit racism and discrimination. But that doesn’t absolve appearance as irrelevant. Not every expectation set within the larger Black community should be equated as a nod to respectability politics. Having standards should not be associated with subjugation, oppression or adherence to whiteness. Teaching a young person to present themselves with purpose and mission instills him or her with the tools and choices that can serve as immensely valuable at some point.
Two truths can be true at the same time. No one, Black or otherwise, should ever have to change or transform the basic facets of their culture in an effort to garner the right to be granted dignity and respect. But as a worthy individual, you also need to be mindful how you have decided to present yourself in any given situation. One could argue, if you do not know how to dress accordingly, what else do you not understand?
That is not respectability politics for the approval of any specific people. Rather, it is demonstrating self-respect, for yourself and, in some cases, our ancestors.
Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. HIs columns are distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. He is also an author and public speaker.
States Must Not Determine the Fate of Grizzly Bears
By WENDY KEEFOVER
It’s no secret that grizzly bears in the Lower 48 live close to the edge of extinction. Now, with little explanation and almost no time for the public to respond, the Trump administration and three Western governors have proposed to make it easier for states to authorize the killing of these bears.
The federal proposal would change regulations that now protect grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act, stripping away protections that keep grizzlies in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming alive. States that have repeatedly pushed to kill more bears would exercise far more control. The public has until Aug. 17 to comment.
Lower 48 grizzly bears now live mainly in and near Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, with only about 1,000 bears in each of the parks’ ecosystems: the Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide. That may sound like abundance, as recently suggested by Republican Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, but these figures represent a mere remnant. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 grizzly bears once roamed the West until white settlers shot and trapped them to near extermination.
Today’s populations are small and isolated, occupying a mere 6% of their historic range. The animals face inbreeding as well as disease killing one of their major food sources, whitebark pine.
The Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide populations are not connected to each other, nor to other subpopulations. The smaller Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak populations together hold about 120 bears. The Bitterroot and North Cascades — vast places that should have grizzly bears — have none. These gaps matter because isolated bears cannot find mates or rebuild the resilient populations contemplated by the Endangered Species Act.
The proposed rule divides Lower 48 grizzly areas into three management categories: Tiers 1, 2, and 3. Each carries different rules for who may authorize killing bears and under what circumstances. Yet the proposal does not specify which ecosystems will fall into which category, or what would be allowed in each category.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would retain authority over bears living in places in category 3 it calls “No Tier.” Yet it would now allow trappers of other species (wolves) to trap at times when grizzlies are presumed to be in their dens. As winters grow less predictable, this approach puts bears at clear risk.
Bears in locations assigned to “Tier 1” will also be subject to traps set for other species, and this danger would be year-round and governed by federal-state agreements the public has not yet seen.
Grizzly bears living in “Tier 2” locations provide the least federal protection of all.
The locations would be where the Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded — based on information unavailable to the public — that bear populations have achieved objectives such as the number of breeding females. Management would be under state-federal agreements that have yet to be developed or made public. Given the three states’ history of hostile management, we know this will lead to a dramatic increase in grizzly bear deaths.
In the Yellowstone area in the last two years, record numbers of bears were killed. As the West becomes hotter and drier, hungry bears push into human-dominated areas, underscoring the need for smarter measures that work for protection rather than automatic killing.
Moreover, this administration’s recent Roadless Rule repeal ramps up its campaign against bears by allowing more motorized vehicles in the backcountry. By fast-tracking approvals, the administration has also increased logging, mining and drilling on public land frequented by the bears.
Americans love grizzly bears — including conservatives who live alongside them in rural areas. The bears provide huge economic benefits to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, bringing in millions of dollars annually through tourism. Handing over their management to states undercuts decades of conservation work and erodes the public’s trust.
When grizzlies were first listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened in 1975, fewer than 800 survived in the Lower 48. Five decades later, that number has only grown to about 2,000 under federal oversight.
Much more, not less, needs to be done to protect grizzly bears, and offloading management to states is absurd. Please comment on this rule by Aug. 17 at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/17/2026-14450/endangered-and-threatened-wildlife-and-plants-grizzly-bear-listing-on-the-list-of-endangered-and.
Wendy Keefover is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She works as a wild carnivore advocate for Humane World for Animals.
Trump Is Making Money Laundering Great Again
His administration is destroying one of the paper trails investigators need to follow secret money…
By THOM HARTMANN
Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.
Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?
We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.
But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?
While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.
And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.
Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.
Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.
This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on US persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.
This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.
And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in an report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:
“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”
Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the US was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.
And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.
Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he pissed away the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that Treasury will no longer be looking at.
In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.
Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:
“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:
“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)
Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.
And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.
Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.
And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”
So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.
The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.
So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.
For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.
And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.
Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.
This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.
Thom Hartmann is a progressive radio talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of American Oligarchy” and more than 30 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. This appeared at hartmannreport.com. See the online version, with links, at
See Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American at
See more progressive news at https://www.dailykos.com/
and https://www.commondreams.org/
Help The Progressive Populist Sustainability Fund
As the costs of publishing and distributing newsmagazines continue to rise, please help us shore up our financial reserves so we can keep The Progressive Populist affordable for readers with limited funds.
Send a check to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588. Or donate to The Progressive Populist account at PayPal (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=3DVZ48972B368) or GoFundMe.com (https://gofund.me/be389e3a). Thanks.
Copyright © 2026 The Progressive Populist
The Progressive Populist is edited by Jim Cullen. Email populist@usa.net.
See selections from the current issue of The Progressive Populist at http://www.populist.com and The Progressive Populist blog at http://progressivepopulist.blogspot.com/