| The Smirking Chimp (original) (raw)
by Robert Reich | June 8, 2025 - 5:37am | permalink
Friends,
What is our moral responsibility as citizens of the United States when the President of the United States moves to deploy thousands of American soldiers against us?
Trump signed a memo late yesterday ordering 2,000 members of the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles County after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.
Trump’s action is extreme although technically legal. Title 10 of the United States Code allows a president to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” In a presidential memo, Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
by Alex Henderson | June 8, 2025 - 5:31am | permalink
When the relationship between President Donald Trump and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk went sour, it did so very quickly.
Trump and Musk stood side by side in the White House on Friday, May 30 when the president held a media event to thank Musk for his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And Trump told reporters that although Musk's work with DOGE had ended, he looked forward to working with him in the future.
But less than a week later, Trump and Musk were hurling insults at one another. After Musk called Trump's "big, beautiful bill" a "disgusting abomination," Trump lambasted him during a Thursday, June 5 press conference and told reporters, "I'm very disappointed with Elon…. Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore."
by Amanda Marcotte | June 8, 2025 - 5:24am | permalink
He'd never admit it publicly, but I'm betting Donald Trump is regretting that he relaxed the White House rules about drug testing.
As I predicted last week, Elon Musk's vow to leave politics behind did not last long. But I confess I had no idea that he would come back to the fold by taking swings at his beloved daddy replacement, Trump. It seems, however, that someone told Musk in recent days how much his businesses, which rely heavily on government subsidies, will be screwed by the president's already imperiled budget bill. So now the tech billionaire has become fixated on killing the bill. Musk kicked off his crusade Tuesday by tweeting that Trump's bill is a "disgusting abomination," and has been on a tear since, rallying his supporters to oppose the bill and making room for more Republicans on Capitol Hill to start pulling back support. As he and Trump snipe at each other publicly, the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart.
by Robert C. Koehler | June 8, 2025 - 5:02am | permalink
Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again—making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority.
This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior to the changes the movement wrought—I’m old enough to remember those days—polite ladies at church could say, “Oh my, that’s very white of you.” And lynchings were not only normal but quasi-legal, or so it seemed, far more likely to result in postcards than convictions.
Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is. Dehumanizing a particular group of people—turning them into “the enemy” of the moment—is such a useful governing tool. And creating the enemy isn’t limited to waging war.
by Rev Dr Liz Theoharis | June 8, 2025 - 4:54am | permalink
by Aaron Scott, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Moses Hernandez McGavin
This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of President Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, seem to be on steroids. After all, since taking office a second time, Trump has issued executive orders that ban transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military, while limiting federal recognition to two genders. And his executive actions are only the spear tip of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat transgender people, who make up just over 1% of the U.S. population.
Believe it or not, so far this year, 701 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. More than $215 million was spent on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election season alone. Now, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” barely passed by the House and at present in the Senate—which would gut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other lifesaving safety-net programs—takes explicit aim at gender-affirming care for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) patients. If the Senate passes it, the result will be devastating for trans people, who are already twice as likely as the general population to be unemployed and unhoused and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty. It should be no surprise, then, that almost half of transgender adults in this country have already relocated or are considering relocating to more trans-affirming places.
by John Hamilton | June 7, 2025 - 6:28pm | permalink
A simple way to solve the debt crisis, or at least the Big Beautiful Bill crisis: Progressive taxation.
I remember when I was young that Nelson Rockefeller was described as being in the "90% tax bracket," meaning that he paid 90% of his income in Federal tax. Without complaint. A rich guy, from a robber baron family.
It seems unthinkable now, but reducing taxes on the rich to near zero is what got us into this mess. There will be a lot of demagoguery to overcome, but it can be done. Just as the Republicans have their Grover Norquist Pledge, Democrats can have a pledge of their own. They could call it the AOC Pledge, or the Bernie Sanders Pledge. Or the Save our Civilization Pledge.
by Carl Gibson | June 7, 2025 - 5:25am | permalink
One Washington Post columnist predicted in 2024 that should he win election to a second term, Trump would launch an unprecedented attack on his political opponents and democracy itself. Now, he's chastising Americans for not doing more when they had the chance.
In a Friday essay, the Post's Colbert I. King wrote that "Trump's own record, his musings on the campaign trail and the words of his inner circle" should have been all Americans needed in order to forecast everything the 47th president of the United States would do during his first months back in the White House. King recalled his July 3, 2024 column, in which he warned that a term-limited Trump would run roughshod on the Constitution with little to no interference from the other two branches of government.
by Heather Digby Parton | June 7, 2025 - 5:19am | permalink
It seems like only a couple of days ago that I was writing about President Trump and his former BFF Elon Musk's apparent falling out. Actually, it was a couple of days ago, but even though I was pretty sure that the famous bromance was on the rocks, due to all the vicious, anonymous back-stabbing by administration figures, I had no idea it was going to blow up as spectacularly as it did on Thursday.
I won't go into the details because I'm sure you've heard all about it. The upshot is that Musk is apparently upset by Trump's unwillingness to do everything he wanted, which convinced Trump to finally listen to the people around him and ease his "special government employee" out of the federal government. Unfortunately for Trump, Musk didn't want to go quietly. He worked himself up into a frenzy about the "One Big Beautiful Bill," undoing his measly work at DOGE and began a crusade on X to kill it. It attracted a torrent of whining from Trump at a White House event with the German chancellor on Thursday, followed by an afternoon of Musk tweeting furiously in response. It continued until Trump finally threatened to cancel Musk's government contracts. Musk shot back with a threat to leave the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station and then blew up the MAGA universe by claiming that Trump won't release the Epstein files because he's in them.
by Thom Hartmann | June 7, 2025 - 5:08am | permalink
The alpha-male dick-measuring contest between Trump and Musk isn’t entertainment: it’s the inevitable outcome of America’s complete surrender to oligarchy.
After centuries of democratic progress, we’re watching the World’s Richest Man® and the World’s Most Powerful Man® battle for supremacy on social media like feuding warlords. How did the land of Lincoln and Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy, become a playground for billionaire sociopaths?
The answer has a name: John Roberts.
Back in the day, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned us:
by Steven Harper | June 7, 2025 - 4:55am | permalink
During an NBC interview on November 6, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was cleaning up his lifelong anti-vaccination act as he lobbied to become Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice…”
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.
by Tom Gallagher | June 7, 2025 - 4:44am | permalink
Sometimes a little procrastination can be a good thing. A recent case in point was this year’s California Democratic Party’s convention decision to postpone consideration of a resolution calling for a mandatory retirement age for state and local officials. By not acting on the measure the party has, at least for the moment, spared itself a diversion from the real question of just what message it wants to convey – regardless of the age of the messenger.
The resolution was offered by Eric Kingsbury, a member of a heavily tech-funded slate that succeeded in moving the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee dramatically to the right in the last election. Kingsbury was quick to state that this was “decidedly not about Nancy Pelosi. If every elected leader in this country were like Nancy Pelosi [the 85-year old San Francisco Representative who is a fellow Committee member] we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” And yet SF Democratic Committee Chair Nancy Tung suggested a specific age cap of 70: “That’s the general thought. Though we are thinking that an exploration by the state party is the way to go. But 70 is an age that other jurisdictions have adopted for judges and the like.”
by Harvey Wasserman | June 7, 2025 - 4:39am | permalink
by Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman
Donald Trump on May 23rd declared nuclear power to be “a hot industry.” Nuclear power plants are “very safe and environmental,” he said. He made the claims as he issued executive orders to quadruple nuclear energy capacity in the United States.
He failed to mention that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic accidents—such as the Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. And in routine operation, they release deadly radioactive emissions. Also, the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling, enrichment of nuclear fuel—is highly carbon-intensive.
He missed the fact that in pure economic terms they portend the largest economic debacle in human history. He omitted mention of who would pay for 300+ new nuclear plants in the U.S. to be built under his executive orders. (There are currently 94 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.)
by David Douglas | June 7, 2025 - 4:32am | permalink
Elon Musk has left the White House, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. But of all the actions Musk and President Trump set in motion before their recent rupture, nothing will hurt more people around the world than their dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
By making disease-stemming drugs, clean water, and food available to millions, USAID has probably saved more lives worldwide than any entity in history.
Since 2000, USAID’s programs have prevented the deaths of 58 million people from tuberculosis, 25 million from HIV/AIDS, and over 11 million from malaria. It’s given 70 million people access to safe drinking water and, working in concert with global vaccine initiatives, helped to nearly eradicate polio.
As the main funder of global health interventions, USAID served as a bulwark against diseases that don’t halt at national borders. Its programs identified emerging epidemics and minimized the spread of drug-resistant diseases that threaten Americans as well.
by Robert Reich | June 6, 2025 - 5:35am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
I’m trying not to be too delighted about the new reality TV show starring Elon and Donald, but the dialogue is truly extraordinary (I’m quoting them verbatim but putting their volley in what appears to be its intended order).
ELON (February 7, 2025): “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”
ELON (June 3, 2025, four days after leaving the Trump regime): “[Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a] disgusting abomination” and “shame on those who voted for it” and “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people”
DONALD (June 5, 2025): “You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval desk. Even with a black eye. I said, do you want a little makeup? He said, no, I don’t think so. Which is interesting, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more.”
by Ailia Zehra | June 6, 2025 - 5:22am | permalink
The Associated Press's White House correspondent Seung Min Kim has said the public feud between President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk could have serious consequences for the president's agenda.
While speaking during a segment on CNN Thursday, Kim said she heard some early reactions to the development from some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill who fear this spat could impact Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill."
She said Rep. Ryan Zinke, (R-Mont.) who served as interior secretary in Trump's first term, said this fight "can put the bill in serious jeopardy."
"You have the richest man in the world, and you have the most powerful man in the world going up against each other," the Montana Republican said, per the reporter.
by Amanda Marcotte | June 6, 2025 - 5:14am | permalink
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, certainly has absorbed the first rule of MAGA: You're never in the wrong as long as you're "triggering" the liberals. On Friday, she drew outrage from her constituents at a town hall in Butler County, Iowa, with her bizarre defense of taking away people's medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires: "Well, we’re all going to die." The crowd, furious about her plans to vote for drastic cuts to Medicaid that will deprive millions of health care, booed her. Ernst, having absorbed Donald Trump's philosophy of always doubling down, responded on Saturday with a favorite lady MAGA trick: pretending to be stupid.
by Jim Hightower | June 6, 2025 - 4:51am | permalink
The right wing routinely demonizes family-friendly policies of liberals as “social engineering.”
But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hardhats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable.
They intend to re-engineer the American family! These “pronatalists” want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure — specifically, a dominant man married to a subservient stay-at-home woman, having beaucoup children. Not a couple of kiddos but six, 12, or more!
For example, extremist MAGA senator Josh Hawley has become a cheerleader for a federal policy to entice women to quit work, stay home, and have more babies. He proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per child, gushing that this would cause working families to exclaim, “Oh, my gosh, we can actually raise our kids.”
by Bill Berkowitz | June 6, 2025 - 4:44am | permalink
Dystopian fantasy writers beware: Trump, MAGA, the Republican Party and its Christian nationalist allies may put you out of business!
Works of dystopian fiction, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, once seemed like dark fantasies of an authoritarian future. Their themes were warnings, not forecasts. Now, in 21st Century America, with the political landscape being fashioned by Donald Trump, MAGA, the Republican Party, Elon Musk’s DOGE, and their Christian nationalist and white supremacist allies, literary nightmares are no longer speculative. What once was fiction is now the stuff of daily headlines.
Dystopian themes such as: Big Brother watching; censorship threatening; women’s rights eroding; history rewritten; and violent white gangs roaming the political landscape, once viewed as hyperbolic, are now today’s reality.
by Edward Hunt | June 6, 2025 - 4:38am | permalink
— from Foreign Policy in Focus
Among all the cons that Donald Trump has pushed on the world, none has compared to his plan for facilitating genocide in Gaza.
While his administration has continued providing Israel with the weapons that it is using to destroy Gaza, the U.S. president has been making a business pitch in favor of genocide. By proposing to depopulate Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” Trump has been trying to persuade the world’s wealthiest people that they can gain from the destruction of the territory. Although the media has shifted its focus away from Trump’s proposal, he continues to promote it.
“Think about it,” Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said in a speech from the Senate floor on May 8. “2.2 million desperate people who have been bombed and starved and driven from their homes are now about to be forcibly expelled from their territory into God knows where so that Trump and his friends can build a Riviera for the billionaire class.”
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2025 - 5:33am | permalink
It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.
This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.
Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”
But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.
by Heather Digby Parton | June 5, 2025 - 5:23am | permalink
I had the weird experience last evening of watching the new film "Mountainhead," written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of the iconic HBO series "Succession," while simultaneously doom-scrolling social media. The premise of the movie is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in the guise of four tech billionaires, gather at a $50 million mountain castle to play poker while the world literally burns due to the richest one's release of a new AI program that allows undetectable deepfakes and disinformation. (It's not hard to figure out who his character is based on.)
As I was watching and scrolling, like the card-carrying internet addict I am, imagine how startling it was to come across this headline from Time: "Google’s new AI tool generates convincing deepfakes of riots, conflict, and election fraud—sparking fears about AI’s role in misinformation"
by Ailia Zehra | June 5, 2025 - 5:16am | permalink
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation Wednesday banning the entry of foreign nationals from 12 countries citing national security concerns.
The countries on the travel ban list include Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma), Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
This move, effective June 9, 2025, mirrors aspects of his 2017 travel ban.
Partial restrictions were imposed on travelers from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
The administration emphasized that the restrictions apply to both immigrants and nonimmigrants, signaling a comprehensive approach to limiting entry from the specified nations.
by Robert Reich | June 5, 2025 - 5:09am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
When it comes to non-Americans, Trump and his regime are clear: Foreigners — especially if they’re Chinese — are no longer wanted here. Nor are their products. Nor are we prepared to sell them our advanced technologies.
But foreign bribes? Hell, they’re welcome at the highest levels, even if they result in some critical technologies reaching China.
First, consider all the front doors now closing to China.
The State Department is revoking the visas of Chinese students who are “studying in critical fields.” This could be a big deal. Some 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, second only to the number of students from India.
by Farrah Hassen | June 5, 2025 - 5:04am | permalink
In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest — or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.
The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend — where the average home price is nearly $800,000 — are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told the New York Times.
This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.
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