"Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion"

Trump’s thought police may already have your name in their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around 300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes, but, rather, for people who they think may commit crimes in the future. Thought and opinion crimes.

Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:

— Purge government institutions of professionals and replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear Leader they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutstaffel, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)

But key to their entire identity and supporting their base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the nation that they must be suppressed. If you’re a democrat or lean that direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or Tradwives.

But that was just the beginning.

Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.

The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening Center.”

And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s” unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who are queer or otherwise support the queer community.

One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever, even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and operating within the DOJ and FBI.

And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes: “Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”

Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me. America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own, and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them. 

Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.

The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.

Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless: sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.

-Thom Hartmann

Killing History: DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declares the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional

 

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

―George Orwell, 1984

Enacted in 1978, in the wake of Watergate, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) makes all records created or received by the President, Vice President, and their staff in the course of official duties the property of the United States government. They are explicitly not the personal property of the officials whose desks they cross. The law mandates they be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as soon as a President leaves office.

Remember the stories during Trump’s first term in office about how he would tear his papers up into tiny shreds, forcing his staff to retrieve them and tape them back together? That happened because of the PRA.

The PRA is the law. It’s clear. Presidents are advised about the requirement when they take office. So, the reports that Trump was destroying his records should have been taken as an early warning sign of his utter disregard for the law. Instead, they were treated more like a cute affectation, a sign that this was an outsider who was new to being a political insider. At most, he was a little difficult to work for.

The report in Politico began like this: Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

Trump seems to have learned a lesson from all of this, but it’s the wrong one. That perception may also have been shaped when the National Archives contacted him after he left office to seek the return of classified documents still in his possession. We all know how that ended up. So, this term, Trump had his law firm, the government agency formerly known as the Justice Department, issue an opinion declaring the PRA unconstitutional. You can find it here, running to 52 pages.

“You have asked,” it begins, “whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (“PRA” or “Act”) is constitutional.” The answer follows immediately: “We conclude that it is not.” There are two reasons, either of which, standing on its own, would have been sufficient to undo the PRA. The opinion explains that they are “interlocking.” 

The Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers”, and it also “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In other words, we’re watching another power grab by this administration, a stratagem to expand the power of the executive at the expense of Congress, while claiming it’s the other way around.

That opinion came from the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ. Part of that office’s job is to provide legal advice to the President and executive branch agencies. It issues formal opinions; reviews proposed executive orders and legislation for constitutionality and resolves legal disputes within the executive branch. Its decisions are authoritative and they bind executive branch employees, not just the folks at DOJ.

The current Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Division is T. Elliot Gaiser. He clerked for a trifecta of Federalist Society hardliners: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Judge Neomi Rao on the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit. He graduated from Hillsdale College, known for its conservative Christian principles. Gaiser became Ohio’s solicitor general in 2023 and was billed by the state’s Republican AG at the time as “a master craftsman of ironclad legal arguments rooted in originalist principles and constitutional restraint.”

Gaiser’s opinion regarding the PRA concludes that it “unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President.” The result is that “the President need not further comply with its dictates.” But the Supreme Court held that a nearly identical law was constitutional almost 50 years ago when President Nixon, upon leaving office, challenged the first version of the PRA. The OLC opinion fails to explain why that case is no longer good precedent. Gaiser seems to have simply, with the stroke of a pen, overruled the Supreme Court.

The American Historical Society (AHA) and American Oversight, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in government, promptly sued. They begin by writing, “This case is about the preservation of records that document our nation’s history, and whether the American people are able to access and learn from that history.” 

They explain that both plaintiff organizations and their members “rely heavily on access to historical records about the inner workings of the federal government to undertake their missions” and that their ability to do their work “will be significantly harmed by Defendants’ actions.”

The AHA explains that if the PRA comes to an end, they will no longer have access to the information that makes it possible for them to “create the historical record of presidential activities,” which would leave them with an “incomplete historical record by which to professionally research, produce scholarship on, and teach U.S. history.” 

They point out that once lost, the records and the opportunity to record history are gone. AHA has some gravitas in this regard: It was their 1910 request to Congress following the discovery that many records from the 1800s were missing that ultimately led to the creation of the National Archives, according to their lawsuit.

The case will be heard by federal District Judge Beryl Howell in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that OLC got it wrong and that the PRA is constitutional. They want an injunction that will prevent Trump from taking Presidential records away with him when his time in office comes to an end. The relief they are asking for would explicitly prevent him from relying on the OLC opinion.

The Justice Department will have to defend its opinion in court. Judge Howell has already ruled against the Trump administration in two cases: one involving a law firm Trump targeted by an executive order, and another rejecting the government’s assertion that it could make warrantless immigration arrests in cases where there was no evidence the target was a flight risk. 

Previously, she ruled in 2019 that DOJ had to turn over sealed grand jury evidence from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to House investigators. In her opinion, she called the arguments the administration mustered to oppose releasing the evidence a "farce."

None of these cases presupposes how she will rule in the current one; the issues before her are different. But she has a strong predilection for enforcing the bounds of the executive branch’s constitutional authority—the issue that will be presented here. Intuitively, it makes sense to preserve our history. The question the administration should have to answer here is: Why wouldn’t it?

Back to Orwell: “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Thank you for supporting Civil Discourse and helping to create a community of well-informed people who care about the future of democracy. Your paid subscriptions make it possible for me to do this kind of analysis consistently—and to keep it accessible for a broader audience.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"A Moral Obscenity": Trump Budget Pairs Record Military Boost with Billions in Cuts to Social Programs

Donald Trump’s White House released a budget proposal on Friday that pairs an unprecedented, debt-exploding $1.5 trillion in military spending with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, healthcare, climate, and housing programs.  

Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress, includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.      

Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing “woke programs” and “ending the Green New Scam”—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, renewable energy initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.

The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the already-depleted Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures. One budget expert noted that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to “its lowest level in the modern era.” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in response to Trump’s request that “to pay for his endless wars, he wants the biggest increase to military spending in 70 years.” “How does he pay for it? Cuts to ‘education, health, housing, and more,’” Casar added. “Hell no.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement that “the Trump-Vought budget proposal is a moral obscenity,” referring to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed Pentagon spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare, from the climate crisis to affordable housing, from improving schools to making college education affordable,” said Weissman. “Instead, Trump and Vought propose to spend an unfathomable amount on a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit to further empower an out-of-control and incompetent leader in Pete Hegseth.”

“As usual, the priorities of the people are simply unimportant to this administration as they think about spending our taxpayer dollars,” Weissman continued. “Republicans and Democrats in Congress should treat this proposal with all the care it deserves and immediately hit delete.”

“Trump said that our country cannot afford to help families with childcare or healthcare—but his own budget proves what a ridiculous farce that is.”

The White House unveiled its budget request days after Trump said it is “not possible” for the federal government “to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” because “we’re fighting wars,” comments that observers viewed as a stark summary of the administration’s priorities.

“Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can’t afford childcare, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Friday. “He is wrong. We are the wealthiest country in the world and can absolutely afford to both defend and invest in the American people.”

“The president is now demanding a massive increase in defense spending, including a $350 billion slush fund for his reckless war with Iran, while cutting billions from healthcare, education, housing, and more. This budget represents ‘America Last,’” said Boyle. “I will be demanding answers from White House OMB Director Russell Vought when he testifies at the House Budget Committee on April 15.”

The Trump White House is calling on Congress to approve a significant chunk—roughly $350 billion—of its proposed military budget increase via the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to push the funding through without any Democratic support. The new budget request also calls for a “historic investment” in the Department of Homeland Security, which has been partially shut down for more than a month as Democrats push for reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“This funding would come in addition to the $170 billion passed just last year that has enabled the deaths of migrants in detention centers, the detention of children, and the deaths of US citizens at the hands of mass deportation agents,” Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, said in response to the budget request.

“The president looked at the country, with our rising gas prices and nearly half of us struggling to afford basic necessities and decided what we really need is a bigger war budget,” said Koshgarian. “Not healthcare or childcare or relief from high prices or expensive housing, but a nearly bottomless budget for whatever wars his cronies and the contractors dream up next.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

Russia threatens nuclear strike on Ukraine in 48 hours: "Wipe cities off Earth"

 

Russian state television has issued a chilling warning that nuclear weapons could be deployed to "wipe Ukrainian cities off the face of the earth" and eliminate Volodymyr Zelensky "in his bunker." The alarming threat emerges as Vladimir Putin faces setbacks in the conflict and acknowledges his inability to subdue Ukraine through conventional missiles, drones, and ground forces.

In the broadcast, Putin's propaganda figures brazenly refer to themselves as the "Nuclear Maniacs Club." Kremlin TV military analyst Col. Mikhail Khodarenok acknowledged to millions of viewers that Putin's approach over four years of warfare has not achieved its objectives.

He proposed a threat comparable to the one Donald Trump made to Iran, though the Russian blueprint for destroying Ukraine involves the potential deployment of nuclear weapons. "The Ukrainian leadership will be faced with the question of whether the country will be left in complete ruins, or we move to some kind of peace agreement," he said. "The task isn't solvable with conventional weapons, the ones we have, so perhaps we should switch to special [nuclear] weapons and end this conflict within ten days, by May 1?"

Putin's chief TV propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, responded: "Welcome to our Nuclear Maniacs Club. I've been calling for this for a long time." Khodarenok - a retired air defense forces commander - stated he no longer supported "caution." "If the [Ukrainian] leadership, the military-political leadership, certain high-ranking officials, political leaders, are hiding in underground bunkers, located at considerable depths... How can they be reached there, except with special weapons...?" 

Russian state television has issued a chilling warning that nuclear weapons could be deployed. "For me, the time has come when the use of special weapons should not be considered an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence. "Because the conflict must be ended, ended as quickly as possible. This will save tens of thousands of lives. This will protect our country's infrastructure from attacks." Both he and Solovyov declared, "We don't care" regarding international backlash.

They suggested Ukraine should receive a Trump-style ultimatum to accept a Moscow-imposed peace agreement, effectively capitulating to Putin's demands, or face nuclear attacks within 48 hours. Solovyov issued a stark warning: "Citizens living in Kyiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv, leave your cities immediately.

"They will be wiped off the face of the earth."

 -Antonio Scancariello and Will Stewart, Newsbreak, Military

“25th Amendment RIGHT NOW"

 

US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Tuesday urged President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to immediately invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office following his genocidal threat to wipe out the “whole civilization” of Iran. “After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on social media. “It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.”

Some of Tlaib’s colleagues echoed her demand. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) wrote that “Trump is too unhinged, dangerous, and deranged to have the nuclear codes.” 

“25th Amendment RIGHT NOW,” Pocan added. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) said in response to Trump’s openly genocidal Truth Social post Trump “just threatened to slaughter 100 million people.”

“It’s clear he’s unfit to be president, the 25th Amendment must be invoked,” wrote Thanedar. “If Vance, Rubio, and the others continue to be spineless cowards, Congress must do everything possible to stop Trump and this war.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who led the push in the US House for a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s illegal assault on Iran, told Common Dreams that he also thought the president should be removed.

“When an American president threatens the extinction of a civilization,” said Khanna, “we should be looking to invoke the 25th and remove him if Congress is to have value and independence.”

The 25th Amendment gives the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet—or a majority of a body established by Congress—to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and remove him from the position, elevating the vice president to serve as acting president.

Given the composition of Trump’s Cabinet—which is filled with sycophants who lavish the president with praise at every opportunity—any 25th Amendment push would likely be doomed to fail.

But Trump’s Cabinet has nevertheless faced growing calls to use the tool since the president’s Easter-morning outburst warning Iranian leaders to “open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, warned the president’s Cabinet officials on Tuesday that “if you take any part in assisting this, you too will be guilty of the crime of genocide.”

“Use the 25th Amendment now to lawfully remove Trump from office,” Williams urged. “Congress: This is an impeachable offense. Come back to DC now ready to impeach and convict Trump.”

The National Iranian American Council said in a statement that the president’s “insane, genocidal” threat to wipe out the “whole civilization” of Iran must be “wholeheartedly condemned.”

“Military leaders are not bound to follow unlawful orders, including but not limited to the destruction of civilian targets and making good on this outrageous threat,” the group added. “We call on President Trump to recant this abominable threat against 92 million Iranians. If he does not, both Congress and his Cabinet must be prepared to remove him from office via lawful means.”

-Common Dreams

Trump warns a 'whole civilization will die tonight' if a deal with Iran isn't reached

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Airstrikes hit two bridges and a train station in Iran on Tuesday, and Iranian officials urged young people to form human chains to protect power plants, as U.S. President Donald Trump warned that a "whole civilization will die tonight" if Tehran does not meet his latest deadline for the Islamic Republic to agree to a deal that includes reopening the crucial Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. also struck military targets on the Iranian oil hub of Kharg Island, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The attack marked the second time the island was targeted. Earlier in the war, American forces struck air defenses, a radar site, an airport and a hovercraft base there, according to satellite analysis by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project.

Bottom of Form

Trump has extended previous deadlines but suggested the one set for 8 p.m. in Washington was final, and the rhetoric on both sides reached a fever pitch, leaving Iranians on edge. Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran's power plants and bridges if Tehran does not allow traffic to fully resume in the strait, through which a fifth of the world's oil transits in peacetime. Iran's president said 14 million people, including himself, have volunteered to fight.

It was not clear if the latest airstrikes were linked to Trump's threat to attack bridges. At least two of the targets were connected to Iran's rail network, which Israel earlier signaled it might attack. Israel has increasingly carried out strikes that it says are aimed at delivering a blow to Iran's economy.

Iran, meanwhile, fired on Israel and Saudi Arabia, prompting the temporary closure of a major bridge. While Iran cannot match the sophistication of U.S. and Israeli weaponry or their dominance in the air, its chokehold on the strait is causing major damage to the world economy and raising the pressure on Trump both at home and abroad to find a way out of the standoff.

Officials involved in diplomatic efforts said talks were ongoing — but Iran has rejected the latest American proposal, and it was unclear if a deal would come in time to head off Trump's threatened attacks. World leaders and experts warned that strikes as destructive as Trump threatened could constitute a war crime.

As the deadline approaches, rhetoric ramps up: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," if a deal isn't reached, Trump said in a post Tuesday morning, while keeping open the possibility of an off-ramp, saying that "maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen."

Earlier, Iranian official Alireza Rahimi issued a video message calling on "all young people, athletes, artists, students and university students and their professors" to form human chains around power plants.

Iranians have formed human chains in the past around nuclear sites at times of heightened tensions with the West. This time though, it was unclear who would heed the call, and one major power plant in Tehran apparently had been closed off for security purposes at the time the demonstration was to start.

President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on X that 14 million Iranians had answered state media and text message campaigns urging people to volunteer to fight — and said he would join them — while a general from the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard urged parents to send their children to man checkpoints. The Guard, meanwhile, warned that Iran would "deprive the U.S. and its allies of the region's oil and gas for years" and expand its attacks across the Gulf region if Trump carries out his threat.

In Tehran, the mood was bleak. A young teacher said that many opponents of Iran's Islamic system had hoped Trump's attacks would quickly topple it. Now, as the war drags on, she fears U.S. and Israeli attacks will spread chaos. "If we don't have the internet, and if we don't have electricity, water, and gas, we're really going back to the Stone Age, as Trump said," she said told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for her safety.

Trump's threat prompts warnings of war crimes

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot joined a growing chorus of international voices and calling for restraint, saying attacks targeting civilian and energy infrastructure "are barred by the rules of war, international law." "They would without doubt trigger a new phase of escalation, of reprisals, that would drag the region and the world economy into a vicious circle," the minister said on France Info television.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres also warned the U.S. that attacks on civilian infrastructure are banned under international law, according to his spokesperson. Such cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute, and Trump told reporters he's "not at all" concerned about committing war crimes.

-PBS

READ MORE: Experts say Trump's threats to destroy Iran's infrastructure could be considered war crime

WATCH: What international law says about Trump's threats to bomb Iran's bridges and power plants

WATCH: Trump claims Iranians 'want to hear bombs' because they want to be free

WATCH: People in Tehran on edge as Trump's deadline for Iran looms

 

A Crisis of Confidence in America

 

Trump is tearing America apart with his threats against Iran and comment that domestically, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” He’s also succeeded in intentionally pitting Americans of different races, religions, and across the rural/urban divide against each other.

As Michael Corthell noted on the Essay X² Substack: “There was a time when Americans expected political leadership to involve sobriety, judgment, and at least a passing acquaintance with reality. That time now feels like one of those lost civilizations historians whisper about, somewhere between Atlantis and the Republican Party of 1956.”

While it’s worked to the advantage of the GOP, the fossil fuel and private prison industries, and the billionaire class for four decades or more, it’s extraordinarily dangerous to our nation and our children’s future.

That’s because a society can’t function when its people don’t have faith in its institutions, and it’s even more of a challenge for a democracy, a form of government which only exists “by the consent of the governed.” When people lose faith in their nation’s institutions, the result is both social and political chaos much like America is experiencing right now.

I saw this over and over again when doing international relief work back in the 1980s and 1990s: in failed and failing states, people not only distrusted their governments, but were openly disdainful of them and their elected and bureaucratic officials.

Out of that distrust grew a plethora of conspiracy theories that tried to explain why things got so bad, and those often led to political violence (I saw this in Haiti and Colombia), authoritarian takeover (I witnessed this working in Russia) and, in two cases where I worked (Sudan and Uganda), actual civil wars.

America is now going through something similar. For example, prior to Reagan’s presidency, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” Pew found in 2024 that 85% of Americans said most elected officials “don’t care” what people like them think, and only 4% said the political system is working “extremely” or “very” well.

That’s absolutely unsustainable without radical change.

We’re also experiencing a crisis of confidence in America internationally, as nations that were formerly allies across the planet are now openly questioning whether they can ever again trust us after all the betrayals, trash-talking, and Putin-fluffing coming from Trump and his lickspittles.

Tariffs, destroying USAID, and silencing The Voice of America have devastated our soft power and credibility around the world, moving dozens of countries away from us and toward mostly China and Russia.

All of which raises the question: How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess? Three factors that burst onto the scene in a big way in the 1960s led us to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which brought us to today’s crisis.

— The first was the invention of neoliberalism in the 1940s, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
— This was followed by the creation of the Libertarian Party a few decades later as a lobbying vehicle against rent control by the real estate lobby.
— And, finally, in the 1980s a handful of fossil fuel billionaires jumping into politics to fund think tanks, media, and politicians who’d preach the doctrine that, as Reagan famously said, ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Prior to these interventions, the New Deal consensus had brought Americans together around the idea that the purpose of government was, to quote the Constitution’s Preamble: “[T]o form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Neoliberals, Libertarians, and rightwing Petro billionaires like David Koch (who ran for VP in 1980 on a ticket of shutting down pretty much all domestic spending, presaging Trump’s recent rant that the only legitimate function of government is to run the military) all began the refrain that government is essentially evil, because they all objected to paying taxes to “promote the general Welfare,” or losing profits to regulations that prevented harms to workers and average Americans.

An army of sycophants and spokesmen was mobilized from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to the “stars” of Fox “News” and its imitators. Soon, the word spread. As Limbaugh used to joke, social programs were actually evil because: “What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he’ll never get up!”

Men with wealth beyond the imaginings of Midas were telling average white working Americans that it wasn’t the GOP’s tax cuts and Republicans’ destruction of unions that crushed them, but brown-skinned immigrants, women, and Black people who wanted to “steal” their jobs, invade their homes, and rape their daughters.

The foundation of Trump’s 2024 campaign was the ad repeated on loop asserting that Kamala Harris wanted government to pay for trans surgery for people in prison. Don’t think about being robbed by billionaires; there are queer people out there who just want to live their own lives!

By the end of the George W. Bush presidency (and his and Cheney’s lies that led us into bloody quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq), most Americans had decided they couldn’t believe or trust our government. Then Trump came along and, presumably on Putin’s orders, told the world that we couldn’t be trusted internationally, either.

Just like with domestic politics, our nation can’t effectively function internationally if other nations also don’t have faith in our institutions. The Reagan Revolution, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party have destroyed both our faith and the world’s faith in the institutions of America and thus put our democracy at serious peril.

Part of that peril is that Donald Trump is now threatening to turn America into an “illiberal democracy” police state with rigged elections like Russia and Hungary. And it’s Americans’ cynicism that is his main weapon.

As John Mac Ghlionn wrote this week for The Hill about how hard a serious recession could hit Americans: “The cultural confidence that once carried societies through genuine hardship – the belief that sacrifice was worth something, that tomorrow warranted patience – has faded into a nihilism that is difficult to condemn in people who arrived at it honestly. “A society that still believes in endurance can survive contraction. A society built entirely on consumption faces a harder test.”

The solution is straightforward, and it appears we’re moving quickly in that direction, just like we did in 1932 as we woke up and chose to move out of the Republican Great Depression.

First, Americans must realize that these nihilistic ideologies promoted by billionaires and massive, monopolistic corporations are grounded in lies. We’re not a society of selfish individual consumers driven primarily by greed; we’ve historically been here for each other, and that’s why our government was first formed. It worked best during the 1933-1981 New Deal era, when the Middle Class went from around 10% of us up to around two-thirds of us. And it was crippled by the Reagan Revolution, which has cut it down to around 43% of us.

Second, the Democratic Party needs to re-embrace the social and economic goals of the New Deal and Great Society that brought us Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, free and cheap college, etc., etc. Put “we, the people” first and again restrain the toxic impulses of billionaires and corporations through appropriate taxation and regulation.

And third, we must repudiate the GOP’s corrupt ideology at the polls this fall and bring into office a new generation of FDR-style progressives who are committed to undoing Reagan’s, Bush’s, Musk’s and Trump’s damage and rebuilding American institutions, so they’ll once again work for the average family. It may seem like a big lift, but more and more Americans are waking up to the Great Grift billionaires and their Republican toadies have been running on us for the past half-century. A new America is possible!

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