The president complained about primary victories of progressives backed by New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, who this week secured a rent freeze for a million units and put $15 million toward gender-affirming care.
President Donald Trump is seen on stage at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC on June 26, 2026.
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Jessica Corbett
Jun 26, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
After a series of electoral victories for democratic socialists and legal blows to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda this week, the Republican on Friday ranted to a Christian conference that progressives—whom he called “hardcore, godless communists”—are “the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago.”
Trump previewed his nearly 50-minute speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s policy conference with a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform in which he wrote: “I’d be the Greatest Communist in History. I’d give free rent, free houses, free food, everything is free. Unfortunately, after two or three years, the Country where this is taking place would fail. It always does, and then you’ll start living in squalor. There will be no food, there will be no housing, there will be no Military, there will be no nothing.”
In a signal that he was specifically targeting the left flank of the Democratic Party, Trump said: “They’re animals! In many cases, not smart but, in some cases, they are. It’s easy for them to get followers because they make promises that they know they can’t keep, and the Dumocrats aren’t fighting back. In many ways, they’re allowing them to go their own way. They’re afraid they will lose their Election, they’re afraid of conflict. They’re not smart enough or tough enough to fight this plague.”
“These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless Communists,” the president continued. “Isn’t it ironic, we’re celebrating a very important Birthday, and instead of speaking about Christ, Freedom, and Victories of all different kinds, we’re speaking about yet another threat to the Foundations of America. These ruthless Communists will attack all Religions but, in particular, Christianity—They always do. All Communist Countries attack Religions violently.”
“As you know, we recently struck Nigeria, and largely ended the slaughter of their Great Christian population,” he added. “They know that if they go further, the attack will be far greater and, in that, they don’t want to get involved. I am saving Christians throughout the World, even though we are not in those various Countries, by hitting these Terrorists violently and hard. They will close your Churches, they will kill your people. This is what they’re about.”
During the actual speech, Trump specifically took aim at “the communists elected in New York City recently,” who he claimed “want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” an apparent jab at a slate of candidates who won their Democratic primaries earlier this week: Claire Valdez in New York’s 7th Congressional District, Brad Lander in the 10th District, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th District.
By contrast, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, called the trio’s victories proof that Americans “are sick and tired of status quo politics” and “want to end the corrupt campaign finance system, which enables billionaires to spend huge amounts of money to elect candidates who will represent their interests and go to war against working-class people.”
All three campaigned on progressive policies including more affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians—and they were backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who continued delivering on his campaign promises on Thursday, when the NYC Rent Guidelines Board approved a two-year rent freeze affecting roughly a million apartments.
While Trump complained about that NYC development in his Friday speech, others have celebrated it. Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for universal single-payer healthcare, said that “the real threat Zohran Mamdani poses is to the career politicians who’ve spent decades making promises, then making excuses, then telling people to vote harder next time. He’s showing people that elected officials can actually do things that help them in their everyday lives.”
Shortly before Trump’s swipe at the New York progressives running for Congress, he claimed that left-leaning Democrats “want to resume the transgender ‘mutilization’ of our children.” In addition to attacking lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, the president has restricted abortion access and signed legislation that’s already led to millions losing insurance coverage.
Meanwhile, Mamdani on Friday announced a $15 million plan to expand access to gender-affirming care for youth and adults across the city, which includes a direct care access fund, a call and text line, and funding for research. He said that “as the federal government attacks transgender people and attempts to intimidate patients, families, and providers, New York City is stepping up.”
Despite Trump’s claim that the Democratic Party establishment isn’t fighting back against ascendant progressives and democratic socialists, Axios reporting from Thursday suggests centrist Democrats are, in fact, gearing up to do so—and over a dozen have endorsed the “Promise to America” manifesto, emphasizing their support for capitalism, “fiscal discipline,” and law enforcement.
Ripping the manifesto, D’Arrigo said: “'Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology. It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”
In addition to serving the corporate interests that bankrolled his return to power, Trump has also served himself during his second term, growing the wealth of his family by billions of dollars and even accepting a luxury plane from Qatar.
Trump has also made a range of other moves that demonstrate his contempt for US law—from pardoning donors and other supporters, including insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol, to weaponizing the Department of Justice against his enemies, to carrying out multiple illegal military actions, such as his invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, the ongoing war on Iran, and deadly bombings of boats his administration claims were trafficking drugs.
The president’s violent and authoritarian agenda has faced some setbacks in court this week: Federal judges ruled against the administration’s policy pushing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests at courthouses, as well as a pair of Trump executive orders that attacked voting rights.
However, those cases are ongoing, plus another federal judge issued lengthy prison sentences for a group of activists who protested outside an ICE detention center and were falsely accused by the administration of being members of a nonexistent “North Texas Antifa Cell.” Trump has also continued his assault on voting rights this week, scrapping plans to sign a bipartisan housing bill in a bid to pressure Congress to pass the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
With the November elections just over four months away, Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, also took Trump’s Friday Truth Social comments as a threat, saying, “This sounds a lot to me like Trump laying the groundwork to steal the midterms.”
“As you know, we recently struck Nigeria, and largely ended the slaughter of their Great Christian population,” he added. “They know that if they go further, the attack will be far greater and, in that, they don’t want to get involved. I am saving Christians throughout the World, even though we are not in those various Countries, by hitting these Terrorists violently and hard. They will close your Churches, they will kill your people. This is what they’re about.”
During the actual speech, Trump specifically took aim at “the communists elected in New York City recently,” who he claimed “want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” an apparent jab at a slate of candidates who won their Democratic primaries earlier this week: Claire Valdez in New York’s 7th Congressional District, Brad Lander in the 10th District, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th District.
By contrast, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, called the trio’s victories proof that Americans “are sick and tired of status quo politics” and “want to end the corrupt campaign finance system, which enables billionaires to spend huge amounts of money to elect candidates who will represent their interests and go to war against working-class people.”
All three campaigned on progressive policies including more affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians—and they were backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who continued delivering on his campaign promises on Thursday, when the NYC Rent Guidelines Board approved a two-year rent freeze affecting roughly a million apartments.
While Trump complained about that NYC development in his Friday speech, others have celebrated it. Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for universal single-payer healthcare, said that “the real threat Zohran Mamdani poses is to the career politicians who’ve spent decades making promises, then making excuses, then telling people to vote harder next time. He’s showing people that elected officials can actually do things that help them in their everyday lives.”
Shortly before Trump’s swipe at the New York progressives running for Congress, he claimed that left-leaning Democrats “want to resume the transgender ‘mutilization’ of our children.” In addition to attacking lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, the president has restricted abortion access and signed legislation that’s already led to millions losing insurance coverage.
Meanwhile, Mamdani on Friday announced a $15 million plan to expand access to gender-affirming care for youth and adults across the city, which includes a direct care access fund, a call and text line, and funding for research. He said that “as the federal government attacks transgender people and attempts to intimidate patients, families, and providers, New York City is stepping up.”
Despite Trump’s claim that the Democratic Party establishment isn’t fighting back against ascendant progressives and democratic socialists, Axios reporting from Thursday suggests centrist Democrats are, in fact, gearing up to do so—and over a dozen have endorsed the “Promise to America” manifesto, emphasizing their support for capitalism, “fiscal discipline,” and law enforcement.
Ripping the manifesto, D’Arrigo said: “'Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology. It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”
In addition to serving the corporate interests that bankrolled his return to power, Trump has also served himself during his second term, growing the wealth of his family by billions of dollars and even accepting a luxury plane from Qatar.
Trump has also made a range of other moves that demonstrate his contempt for US law—from pardoning donors and other supporters, including insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol, to weaponizing the Department of Justice against his enemies, to carrying out multiple illegal military actions, such as his invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, the ongoing war on Iran, and deadly bombings of boats his administration claims were trafficking drugs.
The president’s violent and authoritarian agenda has faced some setbacks in court this week: Federal judges ruled against the administration’s policy pushing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests at courthouses, as well as a pair of Trump executive orders that attacked voting rights.
However, those cases are ongoing, plus another federal judge issued lengthy prison sentences for a group of activists who protested outside an ICE detention center and were falsely accused by the administration of being members of a nonexistent “North Texas Antifa Cell.” Trump has also continued his assault on voting rights this week, scrapping plans to sign a bipartisan housing bill in a bid to pressure Congress to pass the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
With the November elections just over four months away, Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, also took Trump’s Friday Truth Social comments as a threat, saying, “This sounds a lot to me like Trump laying the groundwork to steal the midterms.”
Corporate Democrats Mobilize to Counter Rise of Democratic Socialists Within the Party
“The progressive movement is winning across the country, from the heart of New York to Michigan to Maine,” said US Rep. Ro Khanna in response to centrist critics.
On election morning, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani joins former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on June 23, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Brad Reed
Jun 26, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is looking to fight back after three insurgent progressive candidates knocked off establishment favorites in primary elections in New York this week.
Axios reported on Thursday that centrist Democrats are gearing up to organize against progressives and democratic socialists, who have been racking up victories over the last two years by presenting themselves as an alternative to a failed status quo that lost the 2024 election to President Donald Trump.
‘Voters Are Seeing Through the Bullshit’: Progressives Take Down Corporate Dems Nationwide
‘The Message Is Pretty Clear,’ Says Sanders After Progressive Wins in NY
One anonymous centrist Democrat predicted to Axios that “there’s going to be a war” between factions in the party, referring to democratic socialists as “bomb-throwers, not problem solvers.”
“Clearly there has to be organization,” another centrist Democrat explained to Axios of their faction’s plans. “You can’t just wring your hands on this stuff.”
To push back against recent victories by democratic socialists, 15 centrist Democrats on Thursday announced their support for the “Promise to America” manifesto in which they emphasize their support for capitalism, law enforcement, and “fiscal discipline.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Jessica Killin, a Democratic candidate running for US Congress in Colorado who signed the manifesto, said that moderate Democrats need “to be organized and clear in our vision,” arguing that democratic socialists “should not be the face of our party.”
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), another signatory of the manifesto, told the Post that he gave the democratic socialists credit for their organizing, while warning that “that kind of campaign and that type of ideology is not going to play with the people in our districts.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), however, pushed back on the centrists’ efforts to marginalize progressive insurgents.
On the floor of the US House on Friday, Khanna made the case for the growing number of progressives within the ranks of elected Democratic Party officials by saying that voters across the country have shown their hunger for this brand of politics.
“The progressive movement is winning across the country, from the heart of New York to Michigan to Maine,” Khanna said. “The people are saying no to foreign wars and they’re saying no to genocide in Gaza. They’re saying no to the unfair and lopsided economy that has allowed a few people to hoard extreme wealth and power, and they’re saying yes to Medicare for All.”
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the New York Health Campaign, accused the centrist Democrats of offering a substance-free platform that would not improve Americans’ lives.
“'Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology,” D’Arrigo wrote. “It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”
In an interview with The Independent, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that centrists’ fears are misplaced if they believe that the democratic socialists would act as obstructionists and saboteurs as the Tea Party once did.
“I don’t want to replicate the Freedom Caucus on our side,” Balint insisted, “because it has made this place completely and totally dysfunctional, and we are not delivering for Americans.”
The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning
Tuesday’s New York primary results are the latest sign that Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
Congressional candidate Claire Valdez speaks during her primary-night watch party at 99 Scott Studio on June 23, 2026 in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Thom Hartmann
Jun 26, 2026
Tuesday’s New York primary results are the latest sign that Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
Congressional candidate Claire Valdez speaks during her primary-night watch party at 99 Scott Studio on June 23, 2026 in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Thom Hartmann
Jun 26, 2026
Common Dreams
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.
Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than 30 points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assemblymember Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.
Tax the Rich and Save the World
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.
Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than 30 points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assemblymember Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.
Tax the Rich and Save the World
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than 120 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.
Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).
I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII); got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan; and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every three years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.
Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.
And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.
The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws, Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.
They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.
The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom 90% of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top 1% since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on—now requiring two paychecks—by its fingernails.
In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom 90% fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made.
The one fully socialized, fully government-run healthcare system we do have in this country, the Veterans Administration, works so well (it has the highest happiness-approval rating of any other healthcare system in America) precisely because it isn’t run for profit, which is exactly why the Republicans are now busy gutting it.
And during the George W. Bush years they took a run at Medicare itself, creating the Medicare Advantage scam through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private insurers to “manage” the care of our parents and grandparents.
We can see now how that’s going. A federal watchdog reported this month that the biggest for-profit insurers are denying pre-approval for post-hospital care at rates between 51-80%, with more than a third of those denials reversed the moment somebody appeals, which tells you the care should have been approved in the first place.
A Senate investigation found those same insurers overcharged taxpayers by $83 billion in a single year while denying sick seniors the rehabilitation they were promised. But the health insurance industry oligarchs made out like bandits; several are now billionaires or worth hundreds of millions.
And now the administration is importing that very same denial machinery into traditional Medicare through a “test” program in six states that literally pays contractors a bounty for every claim they refuse.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
Forty-five years of this has produced a country where, thanks to the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, with on-the-take Justice Clarence Thomas the deciding vote, billionaires can legally own politicians outright. And that’s exactly what they’re doing: Just look at the billions that flowed to President Donald Trump and the GOP in 2024 and ask yourself who that government really works for.
Oligarchy, as history teaches and as I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, is never a stable form of government. It’s a transitional stage because sooner or later ordinary people figure out they’ve been stripped of any real say, and they rebel.
When that moment comes—and, frankly, it’s here now in America—the oligarchs and the politicians they own face exactly two choices:They can pull back and let the people back in, the way America’s elites grudgingly did in the face of the Republican Great Depression when they swallowed the New Deal in the 1930s.
Or they can stomp the middle class rebellion flat with an iron fist via police, the courts, and lawsuits against the media and those who speak out, the way Vladimir Putin did in Russia in the early 2000s.
Donald Trump and the lickspittles who work for him have very plainly chosen the iron fist.
His Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters in Minnesota on conspiracy charges while the federal agents who shot and killed two American citizens during that same operation walk free, and a jury in Texas just handed protesters 50-100 years in prison on “terrorism” charges.
His DOJ even tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters before a grand jury to force them to burn their sources, backing off only after the papers fought back in sealed court filings, an effort that can be reissued the instant he wants it back.
The blueprint for all of it, Project 2025, is the latest plan to drag America back to the dog-eat-dog, mostly poor and powerless country we were before Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the middle class was a sliver rather than a majority and the rich owned everything and made most of the decisions.
What the overpaid corporate Democratic Party consultants miss, and what Trump’s own pollsters figured out years ago, is the shape of the actual American electorate.
Political scientists who map voters find that the single largest bloc of white voters is neither “conservative” nor “liberal,” but both. As Trump’s former PR guy Anthony Scaramucci told us all a few months ago:
Trump told me something once that I haven’t forgotten. He said, “You Wall Street guys are imbeciles. You’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You know what MY base is? Socially conservative and fiscally liberal.”
A meaningful share of white voters (probably a bit over half, looking at Trump’s two successful elections) carry real prejudice—hate—against either non-whites, queer people, or both, which is precisely why Republicans run almost entirely on trans panic and on demonizing Black “welfare queens” and brown immigrants, because those are about the only issues left on which they’re aligned with that bloc.
On the economics, though, as Scaramucci and Trump noted, that same white voting bloc wants the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-era middle class back, the secure one we had before Reagan started tearing it all down in 1981.
That’s why Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.
But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability—which I read as blowback against oligarchy—and Tuesday in New York the floor under corporate Dems who’re still singing the Reaganomics song gave way again.
And it isn’t only New York. Progressives took a House primary in Pennsylvania last month, swept races across Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, and on Tuesday night knocked off four incumbent state legislators in New York alone, while Bernie Sanders kept drawing the biggest crowds of his life on what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
So we’re watching two parties move in opposite directions at once.
What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots, away from the Clinton-era deals with Wall Street and the Davos set, away from Barack Obama’s bargain with the insurance giants, away from the bipartisan habit of bankrolling distant wars, including the weapons still flowing to Israel’s assault on Gaza, because people here can’t make rent, go to college, or see a specialist without a three-month wait and a homelessness-threatening bill.
Opposition to that war inside the Democratic coalition has gone lopsided, and the base has noticed that its leaders—mired in big money—missed the moral question entirely. What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda.
Just look at the last two days: On Tuesday the Senate found the spine to pass a war powers resolution reining him in on Iran, and by Wednesday night, after Trump reportedly screamed at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in a closed-door lunch, the Senate turned right around and reversed itself when Cassidy lost his spine and flipped his vote and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ducked into a cowardly “present.”
November will tell us which direction the majority of Americans actually want to go, assuming Trump’s many efforts to rig the outcome don’t all succeed (and I’ll get into those efforts in detail in a future piece).
For now, though, we all should understand what these primaries and the wins that are shocking the Schumer-Jeffries crowd actually represent.
After 45 years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.
We’ve been here before, and now at the end of the third of these 80-year cycles, Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again, this time with Zoomers leading the way.
If any of this matters to you, don’t just nod and scroll. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them where you stand on healthcare, on the minimum wage and free college, and on the right to protest.
Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org, because the people rigging the game are counting on you staying home.
And if this piece helped you see the pattern a little more clearly, share it, forward it, post it, and consider subscribing at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work together.
Democracy, as Bernie used to say every Friday for 11 years on my radio program, isn’t a spectator sport, and the next three years are, I believe (if we all work hard enough), going to prove it.
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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than 120 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.
Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).
I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII); got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan; and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every three years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.
Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.
And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.
The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws, Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.
They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.
The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom 90% of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top 1% since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on—now requiring two paychecks—by its fingernails.
In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom 90% fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made.
The one fully socialized, fully government-run healthcare system we do have in this country, the Veterans Administration, works so well (it has the highest happiness-approval rating of any other healthcare system in America) precisely because it isn’t run for profit, which is exactly why the Republicans are now busy gutting it.
And during the George W. Bush years they took a run at Medicare itself, creating the Medicare Advantage scam through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private insurers to “manage” the care of our parents and grandparents.
We can see now how that’s going. A federal watchdog reported this month that the biggest for-profit insurers are denying pre-approval for post-hospital care at rates between 51-80%, with more than a third of those denials reversed the moment somebody appeals, which tells you the care should have been approved in the first place.
A Senate investigation found those same insurers overcharged taxpayers by $83 billion in a single year while denying sick seniors the rehabilitation they were promised. But the health insurance industry oligarchs made out like bandits; several are now billionaires or worth hundreds of millions.
And now the administration is importing that very same denial machinery into traditional Medicare through a “test” program in six states that literally pays contractors a bounty for every claim they refuse.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
Forty-five years of this has produced a country where, thanks to the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, with on-the-take Justice Clarence Thomas the deciding vote, billionaires can legally own politicians outright. And that’s exactly what they’re doing: Just look at the billions that flowed to President Donald Trump and the GOP in 2024 and ask yourself who that government really works for.
Oligarchy, as history teaches and as I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, is never a stable form of government. It’s a transitional stage because sooner or later ordinary people figure out they’ve been stripped of any real say, and they rebel.
When that moment comes—and, frankly, it’s here now in America—the oligarchs and the politicians they own face exactly two choices:They can pull back and let the people back in, the way America’s elites grudgingly did in the face of the Republican Great Depression when they swallowed the New Deal in the 1930s.
Or they can stomp the middle class rebellion flat with an iron fist via police, the courts, and lawsuits against the media and those who speak out, the way Vladimir Putin did in Russia in the early 2000s.
Donald Trump and the lickspittles who work for him have very plainly chosen the iron fist.
His Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters in Minnesota on conspiracy charges while the federal agents who shot and killed two American citizens during that same operation walk free, and a jury in Texas just handed protesters 50-100 years in prison on “terrorism” charges.
His DOJ even tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters before a grand jury to force them to burn their sources, backing off only after the papers fought back in sealed court filings, an effort that can be reissued the instant he wants it back.
The blueprint for all of it, Project 2025, is the latest plan to drag America back to the dog-eat-dog, mostly poor and powerless country we were before Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the middle class was a sliver rather than a majority and the rich owned everything and made most of the decisions.
What the overpaid corporate Democratic Party consultants miss, and what Trump’s own pollsters figured out years ago, is the shape of the actual American electorate.
Political scientists who map voters find that the single largest bloc of white voters is neither “conservative” nor “liberal,” but both. As Trump’s former PR guy Anthony Scaramucci told us all a few months ago:
Trump told me something once that I haven’t forgotten. He said, “You Wall Street guys are imbeciles. You’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You know what MY base is? Socially conservative and fiscally liberal.”
A meaningful share of white voters (probably a bit over half, looking at Trump’s two successful elections) carry real prejudice—hate—against either non-whites, queer people, or both, which is precisely why Republicans run almost entirely on trans panic and on demonizing Black “welfare queens” and brown immigrants, because those are about the only issues left on which they’re aligned with that bloc.
On the economics, though, as Scaramucci and Trump noted, that same white voting bloc wants the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-era middle class back, the secure one we had before Reagan started tearing it all down in 1981.
That’s why Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.
But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability—which I read as blowback against oligarchy—and Tuesday in New York the floor under corporate Dems who’re still singing the Reaganomics song gave way again.
And it isn’t only New York. Progressives took a House primary in Pennsylvania last month, swept races across Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, and on Tuesday night knocked off four incumbent state legislators in New York alone, while Bernie Sanders kept drawing the biggest crowds of his life on what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
So we’re watching two parties move in opposite directions at once.
What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots, away from the Clinton-era deals with Wall Street and the Davos set, away from Barack Obama’s bargain with the insurance giants, away from the bipartisan habit of bankrolling distant wars, including the weapons still flowing to Israel’s assault on Gaza, because people here can’t make rent, go to college, or see a specialist without a three-month wait and a homelessness-threatening bill.
Opposition to that war inside the Democratic coalition has gone lopsided, and the base has noticed that its leaders—mired in big money—missed the moral question entirely. What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda.
Just look at the last two days: On Tuesday the Senate found the spine to pass a war powers resolution reining him in on Iran, and by Wednesday night, after Trump reportedly screamed at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in a closed-door lunch, the Senate turned right around and reversed itself when Cassidy lost his spine and flipped his vote and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ducked into a cowardly “present.”
November will tell us which direction the majority of Americans actually want to go, assuming Trump’s many efforts to rig the outcome don’t all succeed (and I’ll get into those efforts in detail in a future piece).
For now, though, we all should understand what these primaries and the wins that are shocking the Schumer-Jeffries crowd actually represent.
After 45 years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.
We’ve been here before, and now at the end of the third of these 80-year cycles, Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again, this time with Zoomers leading the way.
If any of this matters to you, don’t just nod and scroll. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them where you stand on healthcare, on the minimum wage and free college, and on the right to protest.
Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org, because the people rigging the game are counting on you staying home.
And if this piece helped you see the pattern a little more clearly, share it, forward it, post it, and consider subscribing at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work together.
Democracy, as Bernie used to say every Friday for 11 years on my radio program, isn’t a spectator sport, and the next three years are, I believe (if we all work hard enough), going to prove it.
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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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