It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, October 04, 2025
The Democrats Must Regain the Working-Class Vote in 2026
To win back the House, the party needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appear before a crowd of 20,000 people in Salt Lake City on April 13, 2025. (Photo: Bernie Sanders/X.com)
With the Trump administration gradually altering the form of US government from a “flawed democracy” to an emerging dictatorship, the 2026 general midterm election becomes especially important for the future of the country. And for the future of the Democratic Party. The sad and unfortunate reality is that, with the United State being a two-party system, the Democratic Party is the only political alternative to a Trumpian dictatorship. But whether the current Democratic Party is able to fight Trump’s neofascism and actually save America is a dubious proposition at best.
For President Donald Trump to be able to remake everything and thus fulfill his dystopian vision of the United States of America, Republicans know that they must retain control of both chambers of Congress in next fall’s midterm election. For the Democrats to upset Trump’s plans, they need a gain of just three seats to flip the House of Representatives from Republican control and to flip a net of four seats to take control of the Senate.
Trump himself is fully aware of the significance of the outcome of the 2026 general midterm election and has already embarked on a series of strategic moves designed not only to ensure that both chambers of Congress remain under GOP control but that they have wider majorities. First, he has called on GOP-led states to redraw the electoral map in favor of the Republican Party; second, he is using his role as GOP kingmaker to shape the primaries; thirdly, he is trying to change the way people vote by eliminating mail-in ballots and making voter identification a requirement; fourth, he is trying to rebrand “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” which is not popular with voters, and the law’s tax cuts overwhelming benefit the wealthiest Americans, as “a working families tax bill;” and, finally, he has announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, that the Republican Party will hold a convention ahead of the 2026 midterm election in order to show the American people the “great things” that his presidency has done since the presidential election of 2024.
Various polls have shown over the past few months that Trump’s popularity is declining, especially with independents but also, however slightly, with Republicans. Whether this drop will last or not is hard to predict. That said, it is important to underscore the point made by political scientist Larry Bartels and author of such path-breaking works as Unequal Democracy and Democracy Erodes from the Top that, when we discuss the Trump phenomenon, we need to “separate the electoral process from the outcome.” As Bartels states, “The outcome of the election is certainly aberrant and hugely consequential, but the electoral process.… operated in much the same way that it usually does, and in particular, in much the same way that it has over the past quarter century or so.”
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote.
Trump received 49.9% of the popular vote, which is actually less than what George W. Bush received in the 2004 presidential election, and not that different from what other Republican presidential candidates received over the past 20 years. The political landscape is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and has been so for many years. As such, all is not yet lost. The tide can turn. The only question is whether today’s Democratic Party has what it takes to shift the balance of power in the House and the Senate in 2026. To do so, it needs vision, strategy, and boldness. It needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future. It needs to fight back against plutocracy and thus put class at the center of politics because it needs to regain the working-class vote.
Most white working-class voters cast their ballots for Trump in all three elections that he ran as president. But this is not a new development related specifically to Trump’s appeal. Working-class voters have been shifting toward the Republican Party over the past few decades, according to data collected from The Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. Yet, some Democrats did not seem to mindthe defection of the working class to the Republican camp. The great strategist Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asserted back in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The fact that this lifelong politician with his long ties to the finance industry is now senate minority leader presumably leading the fight against Trump and his extreme agenda speaks volumes of what has gone so terribly wrong with the Democratic Party.
In saying that the Democrats needs to bring back working-class voters if they expect to regain control of the government, one does not miss the irony that today more Republicans identify themselves as working class than Democrats do. An even bigger irony of course is that neither party is the home of the working-class people.
The truth is that the American working class is trapped in the two-party system. The country needs a mass working-class party, and it is not realistic to expect that it can be built through the Democratic Party, which is a capitalist party. By the same token, building a workers’ party may be a noble and necessary undertaking, but it needs to be recognized that such a political project cannot be completed in a short span of time and that it is very difficult anyway for third parties to tip the electoral scales in the United States. As such, progressive and radicals cannot afford to abandon struggles for the type of reforms that might make an immediate improvement to the lives of working-class people by devoting all their energies to building a new party.
What this suggests is that those aspiring to radical change have to necessarily work mostly outside the system but also do what they can to support the progressive left inside the Democratic Party and cast their votes for progressive candidates running for public office like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. It is through such activism that the Democratic Party was pushed a bit closer to the left during the last few years.
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote. This is clearly what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to do. Those of us on the sidelines should give them a helping hand. It’s the only way that the tide will turn. And take very seriously next fall’s general midterm election. If the Democrats fail, at the very least, to flip the House, Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States will come ever closer to becoming a reality.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021). Full Bio >
Trump and Vought Turn Shutdown Into a ‘Weapon’ to Target Democrats “It’s going to harm them,” boasted Sen. Mike Lee, a top Trump cheerleader. “Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment... since puberty.” Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), speaks with reporters outside of the West Wing of the White House on July 17, 2025, in Washington, DC. Vought was asked a range of questions pertaining to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump is using the government shutdown to carry out an unprecedented attack on his enemies through more layoffs of federal workers and cuts to grants aimed at blue states.
In the Oval Office Tuesday, hours before the shutdown began, Trump told reporters that “when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.”
In the days leading up to the shutdown, congressional Democrats attempted to force Republicans to roll back cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies—cuts that are expected to result in as many as 15 million Americans losing their health insurance while raising premiums for tens of millions more. Trump and the GOP have blamed Democrats for the shutdown, falsely claiming that theyare pushing to fund free healthcare for “illegal aliens.”
However, they’ve struggled to make this story land with the American public. A Washington Post poll released Thursday found that 47% of US adults blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, while just 30% blame Democrats and 23% say they are unsure. The sample was divided roughly equally between those who voted for Trump and those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris (D) in 2024.
In what Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called an effort to use “taxpayer dollars to try and shift blame,” the websites for numerous government agencies—including the US departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as Justice, Agriculture, and several others—were updated with banners that blamed “Democrats” and the “Radical Left” for the shutdown.
Meanwhile, government employees, including those at the Small Business Administration (SBA) were directed to include similar partisan language in their out-of-office auto-reply emails.
Experts have told Politico that the use of taxpayer money for such explicit partisan messaging likely violates multiple ethics laws, including the Anti-Lobbying Act, which forbids the use of appropriated funds for lobbying activities designed to “support or defeat legislation pending before Congress.” It also pushes the boundaries of the Hatch Act, which requires federal programs to be used in a nonpartisan fashion.
The progressive consumer watchdog group Public Citizen said it has filed complaints against HUD and the SBA for what it said was an “obvious Hatch Act violation.”
“The SBA and other agencies increasingly adopting this illegal, partisan tactic think they can get away with it because Trump has gutted any and all ethics oversight of the federal government,” said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with Public Citizen.
After being asked about Trump’s promise to lay off “Democrats” at a press conference on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters, “We are not targeting federal agencies based on politics.”
But in a Truth Social post early Thursday morning Trump struck a somewhat different tone. He spoke of plans to meet with Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
Trump also proudly described Vought as “he of PROJECT 2025 fame,” referencing his leading role in crafting the Heritage Foundation’s infamous blueprint for a far-right takeover of government—a takeover carried out in part through the purging of civil servants disloyal to Trump. During the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly insisted that he had “nothing to do with” Project 2025.
Vought has already begun to unilaterally withhold congressionally appropriated dollars for projects specifically for blue cities and states.
On Wednesday, he said that $18 billion in subway and tunnel funding for New York City had been “put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] principles.” Not long before that, Trump had threatened to entirely cut off federal funding to the city if its voters elect the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and current frontrunner, as its next mayor in November.
Vought then announced Thursday that he was also stripping away another nearly $8 billion worth of funding for climate-related projects, referring to it as “Green New SCAM funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” Vought said that the funding was being withheld exclusively from projects in states led by Democrats: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state.
House Republicans were reportedly told by Vought on Wednesday that mass firings would also begin in “one to two” days, though he did not outline specifics about who would be fired. However, a memo Vought issued last week instructed agencies to prepare to eliminate employees “not consistent with the president’s priorities,” triggering a lawsuit from federal workers’ unions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told the press Thursday that Vought was carrying out these cuts “reluctantly” and is “not enjoying the responsibility” of deciding which programs and employees get the axe.
But in an interview on Fox News, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a top Trump cheerleader, was a bit more candid, proudly declaring that Trump and Vought are using the shutdown specifically to hurt Democrats.
“They’re doing it deliberately. It’s going to harm them,” Lee said. “Because Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment, since puberty.”
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said that “Vought is pushing a scheme to turn a government shutdown into a weapon to fire career civil servants and dismantle programs Congress has already passed into law. That is not only reckless. It is flatly illegal and unconstitutional.”
“Have we ever had a president work so hard to hurt the people he represents?” asked Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “I’m not going to be intimidated by these crooks.”
Media Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail
“A Trump denial is not a fact,” said one media critic.
The Democratic National Committee sponsors a billboard about then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and Project 2025 at 12th & Vine Streets on September 9, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for the Democratic National Committee)
As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.
After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation’s over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as “Trump’s Project 2025.”
She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.
Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the “mass deportations” of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.
Democrats amplified the plan’s danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who’d worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage’s director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”
This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that “President Trump’s very bought in with this,” speaking of the program.
Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.
But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.
Responding to a social media post in July stating that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” a fact check by USA Today rated the statement “false,” because, as the headline said, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”
In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: “Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. That’s still not right.”
In response to Harris’ claim during the debate that Project 2025 was “a detailed and dangerous plan... that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”
A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign’s social media in September remarked that one account “frequently invokes Project 2025,” before caveating that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals.”
In an October interview on CBS‘s “Face the Nation,” anchor Norah O’Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O’Donnell responded: “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan.”
After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.
In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration’s policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.
This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”
“This was always the plan,” Harris responded on social media.
While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.
“All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now,” said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. “A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”
“Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025,” said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual. “Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others ‘both sides’ed’ it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie.”
Bernie Sanders: Trump's shutdown outrage shows we are living in truly dangerous times
Via Common Dreams October 2, 2025 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks in Philadelphia. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger
Make no mistakes about it, we are living in dangerous and unprecedented times as we combat Donald Trump‘s oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and his horrific attacks against working families.
We have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had; we have more corporate control of the media than we’ve ever had; we have more billionaire money buying elections than we’ve ever had.
We have a major housing and educational crisis, people are going to the grocery store and can’t afford the food their families need, and we have a health care system that is completely broken.
Meanwhile, we have a president who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him, threatening to jail his political opponents and talking about the military invading U.S. cities as practice.
And on Tuesday night, as you know, the government shut down because — for the first time in modern history — Trump and the Republican Party are approaching a budget conversation that requires 60 votes with a take it or leave it approach.
I will not take it.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to take away health care from 15 million people by making the largest cut to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in history.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to increase health insurance premiums by 75 percent, on average, for over 20 million Americans who get their health care through the Affordable Care Act.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to fund this by giving a $1 trillion tax break to people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the other oligarchs in the top 1 percent.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to undermine modern medicine and the health and well-being of our children by rejecting the scientific evidence regarding vaccines.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to allow this country to be moved toward authoritarianism by putting federal troops on city streets without a request from a governor or mayor.
I was asked ahead of the vote if I would just continue to vote NO over and over again until these issues are addressed, and you are damn right I will.
Donald Trump and my colleagues in the Republican Party may not stay up late at night worrying about people who can’t afford health care, the medicine they need to survive, groceries and an education for their children, but I do.
Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump’s march toward authoritarianism.
I want the Republicans to go back to their districts and ask their constituents whether or not they believe it’s a good idea to take away health care from millions of Americans to give Bezos and Musk a tax break.
I suspect they will not like the answer they hear.
So no. Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump’s march toward authoritarianism.
Until that happens it is important for all of us to stand up and make our voices heard.
Will it be easy? Of course not.
Is it possible? Only if everyone does their part.
Let me remind you, history has always taught us that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice — and fight back. That is the history of the founding of our nation, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and more.
Sisters and brothers, we are living in dangerous times. Maybe more dangerous than any point in American history since the Civil War.
But this is a struggle that, for ourselves and future generations, we cannot lose.
Let us go forward together in solidarity
Vast Majority of Americans—Including Trump Supporters—Want Health Insurance Subsidies Extended: Poll
The KFF poll shows the public will blame President Donald Trump and the Republican Party if the subsidies are allowed to expire.
As the shutdown of the US federal government drags on, a new poll from KFF shows that the vast majority of Americans are supportive of Democrats’ top negotiating demand.
In total, the newest KFF Health Tracking Poll has found that 78% of Americans want Congress to extend enhanced tax credits for people who buy their health insurance through exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), compared to just 22% of Americans who want to let the credits expire.
KFF found that majorities of Americans across all political demographics want the subsidies extended, including 92% of Democrats, 82% of independents, and even 57% of Republicans who identify themselves as part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
KFF’s poll also found that Trump and the GOP will likely shoulder the most blame if the enhanced subsidies aren’t extended.
“About 4 in 10 (39%) adults who want to see the tax credits extended say that if Congress does not extend these enhanced tax credits, President Trump deserves most of the blame, while another 4 in 10 (37%) say the same about Republicans in Congress,” KFF explains. “About 2 in 10 (22%) say that Democrats in Congress deserve most of the blame.”
The KFF poll also showed that many Americans would likely lose their insurance if the tax credits weren’t extended. In fact, 42% of those who bought insurance on the individual market said they would go without insurance should their premiums double, which is what many analysts have projected will happen if the subsidies aren’t kept in place.
Recent research from KFF found that most people who buy insurance through the ACA are set to see their premiums rise by over 75% unless Congress steps in and renews enhanced subsidies that had been passed into law under the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Trump administration is expressing alarm behind the scenes about the political ramifications of allowing the tax credits to expire, and some White House staffers “are discussing proposals to extend the enhanced subsidies.”
The Journal report also noted that Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio has been sounding the alarm for months about the electoral vulnerabilities Republicans face if they fail to act on insurance subsidies, and he wrote in a memo over the summer that the issue could even hurt the GOP among their own base voters.
“By broad bipartisan margins, voters want to see the tax credits extended rather than expire at the end of the year, whether in the context of premiums doubling or 5 million families losing their health insurance,” the memo said. “This includes solid majorities of Trump voters and swing voters.”
The expiring subsidies aren’t the only threat to Americans’ healthcare, as Republicans over the summer passed a massive budget law that cut spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would result in more than 10 million people, among the nation’s poorest, losing their coverage. Congressional Democrats have also demanded undoing some Medicaid cuts in government shutdown negotiations.
Bernie and AOC Explain How Trump and GOP Are About to Double Insurance Premiums for Millions of Americans
“This messaging is approximately 142 times better,” said one political observer, “than Democrats are getting from leadership.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wave during a stop of the ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ rally in Folsom, Calif., Tuesday, April 15, 2025. (Photo by Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Amid the ongoing government shutdown fight in Congress, two of America’s top progressive lawmakers on Wednesday released a video explaining exactly how President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are going to jack up Americans’ health insurance premiums.
In the video, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained their decisions to vote against the continuing resolution being put forth by Republicans to reopen the federal government
“This is one of the dirtiest tricks being pulled on the American people right now,” Ocasio-Cortez said of the continuing resolution. “Starting today, October 1, and throughout the rest of the month, Americans across this country are going to start getting notifications that their insurance premiums are up to doubling.”
“Say that again,” Sanders responded.
“Monthly insurance premiums are going to double for millions of people across the country,” Ocasio-Cortez emphasized.
Sanders then interjected to emphasize that this premium hike was coming “at a time when we are already paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for healthcare, at a time when people can’t afford it right now.”
Ocasio-Cortez then listed some of the negative consequences that could come from not passing legislation to extend the enhanced subsidies for people who buy their insurance through the exchanges created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“That means people getting bankrupt over chemotherapy, people going to the pharmacy and not being able to get their insulin, and frankly, it means a lot of Americans are going to be in danger,” she said. “And Republicans want us to rubber stamp that.”
Sanders closed the video by reminding viewers that the US healthcare system is already “broken,” given that “we’re the only major country on Earth to not guarantee healthcare to all people.”
“And these guys,” he said, referring to Republicans, “want to make it even worse. We’re not going to let that happen.”
Many political observers praised the video made by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for directly telling Americans, in plain language, the stakes of the current shutdown fight.
“This messaging is approximately 142 times better (highly scientific estimate) than Democrats are getting from leadership,” said polling expert Nate Silver.
Roberto Cabral Duran, vice president of strategic communications, geopolitics, and corporate affairs at global consulting firm Teneo, said that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez delivered “a brilliant piece of political communication” with their video.
“It’s clear, it addresses an issue close to all voters, and it helps further alienate people from the GOP’s position,” he said. “AOC and Bernie did it again.”
Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America, also said that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were running laps around Democratic leadership in terms of effective messaging.
“The two most prominent progressives in America who support Medicare for All deliver the most compelling message of anyone in the party about ACA subsidies,” he said. “They’re also doing it without posting cringe jokes and memes from young staffers. A lesson, perhaps!”
Recent research from KFF found that most people who buy insurance through the ACA are set to see their premiums rise by over 75% unless Congress steps in and renews enhanced subsidies that had been passed into law under the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
The expiring subsidies aren’t the only threat to Americans’ healthcare, as Republicans over the summer passed a massive budget law that cut spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would result in more than 10 million people, among the nation’s poorest, losing their coverage.
THE GRIFT
Trump Pressures Top Universities to Sign ‘Extortion Agreement’ for Federal Funds “It is a document of unconditional surrender,” one professor said of a compact “urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds.”
US President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon during an executive order signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on July 31, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s war on academia continued this week with letters pressuring the leaders of top universities across the United States to sign his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” for priority access to federal funding and other “positive benefits.”
The New York Times reported that “letters were sent on Wednesday to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia.”
The letters “urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds” were signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and two key White House officials, according to the Times.
The compact, published by the Washington Examiner, states that “no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support, with due exceptions for institutions that are solely or primarily comprised of students of a specific sex or religious denomination.”
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” the 10-page document continues.
In an apparent response to campus protests against US complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the compact adds: Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.
The compact also requires strict definitions of gender, including for sports, as well as limits on the enrollment of international students. Transgender athletes and foreign scholars have been key targets of the Trump administration.
While Kevin P. Eltife, chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents, told the Times that the school system “is honored” that its flagship in Austin was “selected by the Trump administration for potential funding advantages” and “we enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” the other eight schools declined to comment.
The president has already used federal funding to push for changes at major institutions, waging battles over admission policies, trans athletes, and campus protests against US government support for Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. Brown and UPenn are two of the schools that have already reached agreements with the administration, while others have fought back.
Critics were swift to condemn the Trump administration’s effort as ”blackmail,” ”extortion,” and a ”shakedown.”
The compact was decried as a ”loyalty oath” and ”political bribe.” Damon Kiesow, the Knight chair for journalism innovation at the Missouri School of Journalism, said that “it is a document of unconditional surrender.”
Edward Swaine, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, warned that “this steps boldly toward a scheme in which the federal government’s role in relation to all colleges and universities, public and private, is akin to how state governments presently govern state institutions.”
“Federalism aside, at what point does every school become a state actor?” he asked.
Despite Republican officials’ long-standing opposition to student debt relief and tuition-free higher education, the compact also calls for a five-year tuition freeze and free tuition for students studying “hard sciences” if a school’s endowment exceeds $2 million per undergraduate student.
Richard W. Painter, the chief White House ethics counsel under former President George W. Bush and now a University of Minnesota law professor, said Thursday that “the Trump administration is absolutely right that universities must freeze tuition.”
“Price gouging of students and wasteful spending must stop,” he added. “The administration’s obsession over ‘definition of gender’ is a silly sideshow undermining higher ed reform.”
‘Decades of Policy Failures’ Confirmed as Elon Musk Net Worth Hits $500 Billion
“Our system isn’t broken,” said one progressive critic. “It’s working exactly how billionaires want it to work.”
Elon Musk speaks during an America PAC town hall on October 26, 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Elon Musk became the first person in history with a net worth $500 billion as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s fortune briefly topped the half-trillion dollar mark on Wednesday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires tracker.
According to this year’s International Monetary Fund figures, that makes Musk’s net worth higher than the gross domestic product of 165 of the world’s 195 nations.
As Forbes noted: Worth just $24.6 billion in March 2020, soaring Tesla shares made him the fifth person ever worth $100 billion, in August 2020. He became the world’s richest person for the first time in January 2021, with a nearly $190 billion net worth. Then, in September 2021, he became the third person ever worth $200 billion (after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH). Musk went on to hit $300 billion in November 2021 and $400 billion in December 2024.
As progressives argue that the existence of billionaires is a public policy failure, Musk apparently no longer wants to be one. That’s because he’s seeking to leave the realm of mere multicentibillionaires behind and become the world’s first trillionaire. Such an outcome is possible under a compensation package recently proposed by Tesla’s board, and Forbes says it could happen by 2033.
Addressing this possibility, Musk—who has long warned about the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence, even as his companies pioneer such technology—said on his social media site X last year that “it’s not about ‘compensation’, but about me having enough influence over Tesla to ensure safety if we build millions of robots.”
“If I can just get kicked out in the future by activist shareholder advisory firms who don’t even own Tesla shares themselves, I’m not comfortable with that future,” he added.
Progressive observers expressed dismay at the news of Musk’s latest money milestone.
Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D’Arrigo said Wednesday on social media that “Elon Musk hitting $500 billion while 60% of Americans can’t afford basic necessities is what it looks like when billionaires buy elections to get laws written to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.”
“Elon Musk is a result of decades of policy failures,” she added.
Podcaster Brian Allen alluded to United Nations World Food Program Director David Beasley’s challenge to Musk to contribute toward the $6.6 trillion needed to combat world hunger.
“He could’ve solved it 83 times, but chose to buy Twitter, pump Dogecoin, and lay off workers instead,” Allen said of Musk. “Welcome to late-stage capitalism.”
Elon Musk has urged his 227 million social media followers to cancel their Netflix subscriptions, accusing the streaming platform of promoting what he describes as transgender propaganda.
In his latest culture war campaign, the Tesla tycoon joined a trend launched by conservative social media account Libs of TikTok that cited the animated series “Dead End: Paranormal Park” and Netflix’s corporate diversity efforts as a cause for dropping the streaming service.
The show’s creator, Hamish Steele, is accused of making social media remarks about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September that were seen by conservatives online as disrespectful and led to the backlash.
Netflix’s shares fell two percent on Wednesday when the controversy gained traction and were down as much as another two percent Thursday on Wall Street.
“Cancel Netflix,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday post on X, the platform he owns, quoting another post made by Libs of TikTok.
That post shared screenshots of a Netflix company report that said it had increased the number of non-white directors and lead actors on its programs.
In a later post on the issue, Musk encouraged his followers to “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids.”
Steele addressed the controversy in a few Bluesky posts that have since been deleted: “It’s all lies and slander!” Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has a personal connection to transgender issues. His eldest daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, publicly transitioned in 2022 and legally changed both her name and gender identity.
Musk has claimed his child was “killed” by the “woke mind virus” instilled at an elite California school.
MAGA influencers rage-quit Netflix over new kids show: 'Bunch of woke garbage!'
Supporters of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump raise MAGA hats, on the day Trump returns for a rally at the site of the July assassination attempt against him, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
MAGA-aligned influencers are rage-quitting Netflix after the company released advertisements for an upcoming kids' show that features a transgender character.
The moves to leave the popular streaming platform come after Netflix announced a new show called "Dead End Paranormal Park," an animated series about a group of friends who fight off demons at a haunted theme park. One of the characters in the show identifies as transgender, which was called out by the popular LibsofTikTok account on X.
Several MAGA voices called out Netflix for including a transgender character, and some posted screenshots of them cancelling their subscriptions because of it.
"We will not support a company who pushes transgenderism on kids and employs someone who celebrates murder," Chaya Raichik, who operates the LibsofTikTok account, posted on X.
Raichik also posted about "Dead End Paranormal Park's" creator, who she said had celebrated the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Elon Musk, X's owner, chimed in, calling the show's creator a "groomer" in a post on X.
"Who actually watches Netflix at this point?" MAGA commentator Nick Sortor posted on X. "It’s a bunch of woke garbage. Is it a bunch of chronically unemployed leftists in LA or something?"
"Cancel Netflix," conservative influencer Gunther Eagleman posted on X.
Watchdog Fears Supreme Court Will Continue to ‘Rubber-Stamp’ Authoritarian Trump Actions in New Term
Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk said the Supreme Court has “regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses.” Protestors holding signs stand outside of the US Supreme Court on June 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
With a new term kicking off for the US Supreme Court on Monday, an anti-corruption watchdog group is sounding the alarm about several cases that may “rubber-stamp” President Donald Trump’s attempts to further erode the rule of law and consolidate more authority over the federal government.
In a statement published Thursday, Tony Carrk, the executive director of the group Accountable.US warned that during Trump’s first nine months in power, the high court’s 6-3 conservative majority has “regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses, which has enriched himself, his family, and his wealthy allies at the expense of everyday Americans while eroding our rights, freedoms, and protections.”
He fears the court may do so again as it hands down new, highly consequential rulings. Some cases it plans to decide in the new term will determine whether Trump can use emergency powers to enact tariffs without Congress’ approval and fire heads of independent federal agencies, including Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, without cause.
These cases are all on the latest so-called “shadow docket,” by which the court issues emergency rulings without providing a public rationale for its decisions. Since his second term began, Trump has flooded the shadow docket with an unprecedented number of cases.
Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck found that in just the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action by the court 19 times—the same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years.
“On issues ranging from dismantling the Department of Education to banning transgender people from serving in the military, federal trial judges from across the ideological spectrum have repeatedly blocked actions by the administration, only for the Supreme Court to halt those rulings with little or no explanation,” explained Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford University, described the Supreme Court as being “in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration.” Between May 1 and June 23, he found, “federal district courts... ruled against the administration 94.3% of the time. The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7% of its cases (15 out of 16).”
Carrk noted that these new cases “come on the heels of the court’s decision in Trump v. United States last year, which granted Trump broad immunity for unchecked abuses of power at the highest levels of government. This considerable expansion of presidential power arguably emboldened him to take even more extreme, accelerated actions.”
Trump is also expected to add other cases to the shadow docket as the term progresses. On Sunday, ABC reported that Trump has requested that the court make an expedited decision on his order ending the constitutional protection of birthright citizenship.
The conservative justices signaled that they may be sympathetic to overturning birthright citizenship when they ruled in June that lower courts could not issue nationwide injunctions to stop its enforcement. Since then, three more federal judges have ruled the order unconstitutional.
The new term will come as the American public increasingly doubts the Supreme Court’s evenhandedness. A Gallup poll published Wednesday found that 43% of Americans believe that the court is “too conservative.” While this was the highest proportion ever recorded, it has held roughly steady since 2022, when the court overturned Roe v. Wade, which has allowed many states to severely restrict or outright ban abortion.
Approval of the court has plummeted more generally over the past five years. In 2020, just two months before the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 58% of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing. Now just 42% say they approve of the court, just slightly up from the 39% nadir recorded in July, which was the lowest level of support the court had received in Gallup’s 25-year trend.
“As the court’s new term kicks off, Carrk concluded, all eyes will be on its conservative majority to show that they’re capable of standing up for our rights, freedoms, and the Constitution, or they will further risk undermining their legitimacy and waning trust among the American public.”
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