Jesuits say Olympians are more Christian than Trump and his ungodly lies

President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of a church in Washington, DC in 2020 (Image: Screengrab via C-SPAN / YouTube)

Matthew Rozsa

February 19, 2026

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump criticized America’s Olympic freestyle skier Hunter Hess as a “real loser” for criticizing his policies, but according to a prominent Catholic magazine, Hess and other anti-Trump Olympians are acting in the Christian spirit.

“Mr. Trump understands greatness differently from the U.S. athletes,” wrote Patrick Kelly, S.J., a contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine and an occasional Vatican consultant. “He has a very hard time admitting that he failed or made a mistake. He told the big lie that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was stolen, and he continues to peddle this lie up to the present.”

Trump repeatedly claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though Joe Biden’s victory has been repeatedly proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Before entering politics ,Trump accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was snubbed for "The Apprentice." After losing the 2016 Iowa GOP caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Trump baselessly alleged fraud and demanded a second election. Throughout the 2016 campaign Trump declared he'd only accept the results if he won. After winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote, Trump falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots, despite never finding evidence of that. In 2020, Trump preemptively undermined mail-in voting, declared victory prematurely on Election Night and falsely claimed votes were being "dumped" against him. In fact Biden won convincingly in both the popular vote (81.3 million to 74.2 million) and the Electoral College (306-232), the latter being the same margin Trump had won by in 2016. Trump nonetheless continues falsely claiming to this day that he won the 2020 election.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Republican columnist George F. Will recently wrote for The Washington Post. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Kelly, proceeding from the fact that Trump is lying when he says he won the 2020 election, explained that this lie is both sinful and socially harmful.

“It has now become part of the ‘organized lying’ in segments of his administration and among some of his allies,” Kelly wrote. “It was the rationale for the FBI. seizing sensitive voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., recently. If the president was able to admit that he lost to Joe Biden, he might be able to learn something from it and grow as a person and a leader. But the lying keeps him stuck where he is.”

Kelly then quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says that “since it violates the virtue of truthfulness, a lie does real violence to another. It affects his ability to know, which is a condition of every judgment and decision. It contains the seed of discord and all consequent evils.”

He concluded, “Lying is destructive of society; it undermines trust among people and tears apart the fabric of social relationships (No. 2486).”

Kelly is not alone among prominent Christians to denounce Trump’s policies and actions as un-Christian. Describing Trump’s “might makes right” foreign policy as inconsistent with Christianity, former director of church and society at the World Council of Churches in Geneva Wesley Granberg-Michaelson wrote for the Christian publication Sojourners Magazine that Trump’s approach is in fact “narcissistic grandiosity.” Because Trump unilaterally invaded Venezuela, Granberg-Michaelson worried that he will soon go after Denmark (for Greenland), Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, Syria and other nations he has threatened, as well as sabotage NATO and other world peacekeeping institutions.

"The ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ an egocentric name for reasserting U.S. primacy in Western Hemisphere, won’t geographically limit Trump’s military intervention to the continental neighborhood,” Granberg-Michaelson wrote. In response people of faith should “bear witness” as “our nation is on an unpredictable glide path with no guardrails."

"We should remember the strident biblical resistance to unaccountable power, including the divine warnings about the desire for kings (1 Samuel 8) and placing trust in chariots and horses (Psalm 20:7),” Granberg-Michaelson concluded. “The prophets continually challenged the pretense, pride, and self-serving power of rulers that fomented injustice and violated God’s intentions for the world. Jesus proclaimed a promised reign of God breaking into the world, undermining the false claims of the reigning empire. The power of might was subverted by the power of love."

Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois recently wrote on his Substack that, instead of being Christians, Trump’s supporters act like they are in a cult.

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh wrote. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” Then, despite Trump’s actions against Denmark, Venezuela and Iran, they still support him.

Walsh concluded, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters? What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

'Strident Biblical resistance': Religious leader urges Christians to oppose Trump

Donald Trump outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2020 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead/Flickr)

Matthew Rozsa

February 19, 2026

ALTERNET


A major Christian world leader is urging people of faith everywhere to engage in “strident Biblical resistance” against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

"Trump’s worldview was expressed transparently by Stephen Miller, his trusted deputy chief of staff," wrote Sojourners contributing editor Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America and former director of church and society at the World Council of Churches. "After Venezuela, Miller explained that 'strength,' 'force,' and 'power' are the 'iron laws' that govern the world. It’s all a matter of transactional relations, where deals enriching the U.S. are obtained by force."

Arguing that “might makes right” is inconsistent with Christianity, which focuses on helping the poor and powerless, Granberg-Michaelson described Trump’s approach as “narcissistic grandiosity.” He also predicted that, because Trump has already unilaterally invaded Venezuela, the rest of the world should expect similar operations in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Nigeria, Iran, Syria and elsewhere. Trump will also undercut NATO and other world peacekeeping institutions.

"The ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ an egocentric name for reasserting U.S. primacy in Western Hemisphere, won’t geographically limit Trump’s military intervention to the continental neighborhood,” Granberg-Michaelson wrote. He then argued that people of faith should “bear witness” to Trump’s un-Christian behavior as “our nation is on an unpredictable glide path with no guardrails."

"We should remember the strident biblical resistance to unaccountable power, including the divine warnings about the desire for kings (1 Samuel 8) and placing trust in chariots and horses (Psalm 20:7),” Granberg-Michaelson wrote. “The prophets continually challenged the pretense, pride, and self-serving power of rulers that fomented injustice and violated God’s intentions for the world. Jesus proclaimed a promised reign of God breaking into the world, undermining the false claims of the reigning empire. The power of might was subverted by the power of love."

Pointing out that democracy bases its theological rationale on institutional and personal accountability, and that these things cannot be reconciled with autocratic power, he argued that “shared systems of mutual constraint are required to protect the common good. But all of that can crumble.”

"We are facing modern expressions of ancient idolatry,” Granberg-Michaelson concluded. “Always, in such times, people of God are called first to faithfulness. Proclaiming ‘Jesus is Lord’ had direct political, as well as personal, meaning for those first called Christians. It does as well for us in our day. For if everything is Caesar’s, nothing is God’s."

Other religious people are also speaking out against Trump. Never Trump conservative David French, writing for The New York Times, warned that Trump-supporting Christians are abandoning their faith’s core tenet by eschewing empathy.

"Now, let's talk about empathy," French wrote. "A year ago this month, I wrote a newsletter warning about a new trend on the MAGA Christian Right. Christian theologians and influencers had begun warning about the 'sin of empathy' or 'toxic empathy.' In books, essays, podcasts and speeches, prominent Christian influencers, ministers and theologians sounded the alarm that secular progressives were leading Christians astray by appealing to their emotions at the expense of their reason."

Yet the MAGA anti-empathy argument is not reasonable, as French pointed out, but rather an excuse to ignore how Trump’s actions cannot be made logically consistent with Christian teachings.

"Evangelicals are desperate to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents," French wrote. "That's exactly how empathy becomes a sin….. Many in MAGA decided that cruelty was a virtue, decency a vice, and — worst of all — that empathy was a sin. Now, we live in the harsh new world they made."

Meanwhile Andrew Egger of The Bulwark, another conservative publication, bashed Trump for not believing he could do whatever he wanted morally because of his widespread support among the Christian right.

"He sees himself as Christianity’s Punisher, the guy who will blacken his own soul to do what must be done to protect the righteous," Egger wrote.

Christian conservative demolishes MAGA evangelical talking point

First Lady Melania Trump at an evangelical White House dinner on August 27, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks/Flickr)

Alex Henderson

February 19, 2026

ALTERNET

In the past, the word "empathy" was hardly controversial among conservatives. President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) never used "empathy" as an insult. But in recent years, many far-right MAGA Republicans and evangelical Christian nationalists are attacking "empathy" as a major weakness — and when they accuse conservative or libertarian of showing "empathy," it is meant as an insult.

Never Trump conservative David French, in a biting February 19 column for the New York Times, cites Christian nationalists' anti-empathy arguments as a prime example of how twisted MAGA's view of Christianity is.

"Now, let's talk about empathy," French writes. "A year ago this month, I wrote a newsletter warning about a new trend on the MAGA Christian Right. Christian theologians and influencers had begun warning about the 'sin of empathy' or 'toxic empathy.' In books, essays, podcasts and speeches, prominent Christian influencers, ministers and theologians sounded the alarm that secular progressives were leading Christians astray by appealing to their emotions at the expense of their reason."

The conservative columnist continues, "The steel man version of their case goes like this: Progressives have turned Christians' soft hearts against hard truths. Progressives have persuaded all too many Christians that the suffering of, say, undocumented immigrants or women facing unwanted pregnancies should override their concerns about the economic and social costs of large-scale immigration, or their compassion for victims of crimes committed by immigrants, or their concerns about the plight of the unborn child."

But MAGA anti-empathy argument, French stresses, isn't promoting strength — it's promoting "cruelty" while demeaning a "vital human virtue."

"Given the sharp differences between Trump and every other Republican president of the modern era…. evangelicals are desperate to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents," French laments. "That's exactly how empathy becomes a sin….. Many in MAGA decided that cruelty was a virtue, decency a vice, and — worst of all — that empathy was a sin. Now, we live in the harsh new world they made."

This dark history uncovers the roots of Trump's racist paramilitary police

Thom Hartmann
February 4, 2026

COMMON DREAMS


People are reflected in a federal agent's sunglasses in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Tim Evans

ICE thugs dragged a Minnesota woman out of her car and assaulted her, stopping only when local police showed up, leaving her with cuts and bruises from being dragged on the ground. Her “crime” was following and tracking Trump’s violent, racist, masked federal modern-day Klan goons.

Joe Scarborough expressed the shock and outrage of most Americans, when he said:
“This is so out of control, and it looks like a paramilitary force from the third world! And so [the] police chief — not Antifa, Republicans, not Antifa, liars on the right — she calls the police to ask for help in America from paramilitary-type officers. It’s disgusting!”

What Scarborough and most Americans probably don’t know — particularly since Ronald Reagan gutted civics education — is that this is nothing new for America.

Between the 1830s and the 1860s the American South ceased to be a democracy altogether, more closely resembling a Nazi-style race-based fascist oligarchy.

Thus, Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy — something factions within the GOP have demanded for years — dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media.

They’re not so much expressing nostalgia for Dixie as much as they’re engaging in a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was neofascist oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled the politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead. Even white people who spoke up against the system risked losing their lives.

That same racist, fascist goal animates today’s GOP politicians, who fight tooth and nail to defend the interests of white men, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden.

Government subsidies in the hundreds of billions now flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that refuse to go along with Trump and his lickspittles are punished both by the withdrawal of federal support and the brutal attacks on their people by armed, masked ICE punks.

And, it appears, they’re rehearsing now to use those same terror tactics this November to intimidate voters of color in the relatively small handful of states and congressional districts where control of the House and Senate will be decided this fall.

They don’t need to attack or control the entire country; half a dozen cities, or maybe a dozen, and they will definitely keep control of the Senate and probably the House.

It looks like Black Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, a crucial state for Democrats, are next on their list.

Both Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) can see this coming, with Warner saying:
“I’m deeply concerned about the potential for Trump to send ICE agents to polling places to intimidate voters in this year’s elections.”

For years, white supremacist groups have worked to infiltrate and evangelize within our military and police departments; now, thanks to Trump, Miller, and congressional Republicans there’s an entire federal agency — with a massive budget — devoted exclusively to their beloved racial enforcement.

They’re so into using the racial profiling Brett Kavanaugh legalized with his so-called “Kavanaugh stops” that (Minneapolis-area suburb) Brooklyn Park’s Police Chief Mark Bruley publicly said that several off-duty police officers from local departments — every single one a person of color — have been stopped by ICE agents even though they were U.S. citizens and not suspected of any immigration violation.

One reported incident involved an off-duty dark-skinned Brooklyn Park officer who was “boxed in” by federal agents, had agents draw weapons and demand “paperwork” proving her citizenship, and had her phone knocked out of her hand when she attempted to record the encounter. Once she identified herself as a police officer, the agents immediately left without apology, Bruley said.

The chief said multiple local officers have had similar experiences, including two from the St. Paul Police Department who said they were pulled over in situations that seemed outside legal authority for immigration agents, and one who was pulled over on two different occasions for driving while brown. All were people of color.


These actions resemble the old Slave Patrols that terrorized both Black people in the South and abolitionists in that region (mostly poor, working-class white men, many unemployed) who argued for an end to slavery (and its free labor competition).

In the old South — like in American cities today occupied by ICE — opposing the oligarchs and their one-party segregationist regime was treated as a threat. If you spoke up for labor rights, racial justice, or democratic reforms, your name was put on informal but very real blacklists that circulated among police, employers, banks, and political bosses.

Enforced by White Citizens Councils and the masked, deputized agents of the Klan — that era’s version of ICE — that meant you’d experience harassment, bogus arrests, firings, evictions, and sometimes even execution. Dissent wasn’t just frowned on in the Confederate South: it was systematically tracked and punished.


This wasn’t some kind of random bigotry. It was a coordinated public-private system of control where business elites, politicians, and law enforcement worked hand-in-glove to intimidate anybody who dared challenge their power.

Police routinely stopped “known troublemakers,” arrested activists on phony charges, and looked the other way when intimidation or violence against the activists erupted.

Terror and even death were always waiting in the wings if someone didn’t get the message.

The result was a regional police state in all but name: one-party rule, oligarchic power, racial caste enforcement, political surveillance, and intimidation as daily governance.


Even after the Civil War, in the Jim Crow South, challenging this racialized fascist system didn’t just make you unpopular; it put you on a list. And once you were on it, the machinery of repression could crush you anytime they chose.

From Stephen Miller’s rhetoric to Pete Hegseth’s purge of dark-skinned officers to Kristi Noem strutting for the camera in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, the racism and naked authoritarianism of the Trump regime is the cornerstone of their support by their racist, white supremacist MAGA base.

To his base’s delight, Trump is deleting the stories of Black heroes from our museums and cemeteries, restoring the names of slave-owning Confederate generals to our military bases, and bringing back their statues. Outside of a few tokens, his administration is almost entirely all-white with 13 white billionaires in his cabinet.


Today’s Republican Party — something Dwight Eisenhower would recognize as what he fought against in Europe — is based on and sustained by racism, male supremacy, cheap labor, corporate cronyism, propaganda, a devotion to a mythic white past, immunity for powerful white men, a race-based form of religious fundamentalism, dynastic families, the censorship of schools and libraries, isolationism, violent policing of people of color, and the embrace of foreign dictatorships.

In every one of those, it’s a virtual clone of the Confederacy with the exception of explicit chattel slavery, although legal slavery is enthusiastically practiced in the prisons of most Red states under the rubric of the 13th Amendment, which legalizes slavery against a person convicted of a crime.

As we see red states eagerly embracing gerrymandering and voter suppression, the danger is not simply that Trump may rig an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws.

The real danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and funded and refined by generations of American oligarchs (particularly since the Brown v Board SCOTUS decision roused Fred Koch to fund the John Birch Society and their “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards), is becoming normalized across Republican-controlled states and increasingly in the federal government.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their billionaire and GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better or freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked, enjoying Cognac and a cigar (and the occasional underage girl) in an exclusive men’s-only club.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be.

America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

Hopefully, these rightwingers won’t force us into a second civil war, won’t start a foreign war, and their motion toward full-on fascism can be stopped this fall at the ballot box. If not, America is in for a world of hurt.

Double-check your voter registration, wake up your friends and neighbors, and show up on March 28th for the next No Kings Day. See you there!

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Signs of the Times

Trump is destroying America; he must be stopped

(RNS) — At the ballot booth and in the streets, we must show that nonviolent collective action is still alive in America. What is at stake is the soul of our nation.

Thomas Reese
January 28, 2026
RNS

(RNS) — Donald Trump is a godsend for political cartoonists, op-ed writers and social media enthusiasts, but I find him paralyzing.

Cartoonists are having a field day. A recent cartoon showed polar bears with AK-47s ready to defend Greenland from an American invasion.

Social media has also blown up with screaming outrage as Trump acolytes and Trump haters attack each other with fanatical rage.

Op-ed writers have been busy as Trump provides them with outrageous words and actions to write about.

But I find him psychologically exhausting — like being blasted by a firehose.

Every day, if not more frequently, he verbally attacks some person, group, institution or nation with demeaning and insulting language that should not be tolerated from a schoolyard bully, let alone from the president of the United States. He acts like a spoiled child who is out of control — except he is bigger, meaner and stronger than anyone around him.

If he were a private citizen, we could laugh him off as a lying, narcissistic egomaniac, but he is the president of the United States.

As president, Trump is destroying the United States. He has poisoned our political culture, setting citizen against citizen, celebrating conflict and even violence. He unites his base by stoking hatred of perceived enemies. His inflaming of partisanship has made a calm discussion of politics impossible, even among friends and neighbors.

He is enriching himself, his family and his cronies while president.

He has even corrupted religion, where pastors can lose their pulpits if they are not enthusiastic supporters of Trump, driving away those who want their churches to be free of partisan politics.

He has undermined the justice system by pardoning insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol and violently attacked police. Pardons are also handed out to political supporters and donors.

He has used the Department of Justice to attack his political opponents with trumped-up criminal investigations. He has also turned Homeland Security into a partisan tool of his vengeance. He has taken FBI agents away from investigating organized crime, corruption and national security threats so he can use them against politicians and areas of the country that do not support him.

He has invaded Democratic cities and states with poorly trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol officers who act against immigrants and citizens without restraint, resulting in two homicides by federal agents in Minneapolis.

RELATED: Trump, the destroyer of worlds

The man who is the chief law enforcer of the nation shows a contempt for legal restraints that get in the way of doing whatever he wants.

His attacks go beyond Democratic politicians and cities. He attacks universities and the scientific community with lawsuits and unilateral cuts in funding. He uses the mistakes of a few to punish all. The damage he has done to scientific research will set back the country for decades just as China has caught up with and surpassed us in some areas of research.

Pretending to defend free speech on university campuses, he intimidates academia into silence. Pretending to defend Jews, he embraces antisemites if they support him.

The media have also felt his wrath. Reporters who challenge the administration or ask pertinent questions are insulted and demeaned. Reporters’ homes are searched; computers and phones are confiscated. Owners of news outlets find their other businesses threatened by government regulators and by the possibility of losing government funding and contracts.

Media outlets have become increasingly siloed, catering to rabid supporters or opponents of Trump. Attempts at objectivity in news coverage are ridiculed.

Even premiere law firms have been beaten into submission so they are now reluctant to take clients the administration considers enemies. Rather than being ferocious defenders of the law, they abandoned their clients like Chicken Little in the face of the president’s threats.

Trump has also destroyed the Republican Party by making it his own fiefdom that switches positions depending on which way the Trump tornado is blowing.

RELATED: Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ is a huge, ugly disaster

First it is for free trade; then it is for high tariffs. It goes from being an opponent of Russia to trying to be chummy with Vladimir Putin. The Hyde Amendment banning government funding of abortion used to be a pillar of the Republican platform; now it is negotiable.

During the 2024 election, Republicans promised to release the Epstein files; now they are buried or redacted to protect Trump and his friends. As president, Joe Biden was denying the reality of inflation; now “affordability” is a Democratic hoax. Americans have an unconditional right to bear arms, until a citizen with a gun permit comes to an anti-ICE demonstration; then he can be disarmed and shot.

The Republican Party no longer has any principles; it follows whatever Trump says like a puppy wanting a treat. This has undermined Congress’ ability to be a check on the imperial presidency.

If only John McCain, Barry Goldwater or someone of principle were alive and willing to speak truth to power. But the Republican establishment has kowtowed to Trump, fearing no one can win a Republican primary without his support. Republicans are destroying themselves and the country on the altar of Trump. If they lose big in this year’s election, they will be getting exactly what they deserve.

Trump has also undermined the American economy. Business leaders are kept happy with tax cuts and deregulation, but the long-term future of American business is in question. His tariffs have disrupted supply chains and alienated trading partners. Businesses can’t plan a year in advance because he changes policy so erratically. Making plans five or 10 years into the future is impossible.

Agriculture has been hurt by retaliation from importing nations who don’t like our tariffs. Farmers and food processors have lost workers who have been deported for no crime other than being undocumented.

Trump is destroying the American auto industry by disrupting supply chains and making sales abroad impossible. While the rest of the world is turning to electric vehicles, America has conceded this market to China. While Henry Ford catered to the working class with the Model T, Detroit is making SUVs and trucks for a shrinking population. Making an affordable car for the masses is no longer on Detroit’s agenda.

And the Trump administration is fighting green technology just as wind and solar energy have become cheaper than energy from fossil fuels. The country that invented these technologies has abandoned them to China, which is also leading in battery technology so wind and solar energy can be stored for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

The revolution in energy shows why Trump’s Venezuelan adventure is so stupid. He is spending billions to get access to Venezuelan oil, which major oil companies are not interested in exploiting because long-term investments require economic and political stability. This is unlikely with the current or future regimes in Venezuela.

In addition, cheaper green energy is going to threaten the profits of fossil fuel companies. Even in Texas,the market is causing a green revolution that is unstoppable.

Meanwhile, Trump is threatening our national security by undermining NATO and alienating allies around the world. He does not care about international law or human rights. Ukraine is not his problem, and he is practically inviting China to invade Taiwan before he goes out of office.

Trump has been a disaster for the United States, and we still have three more years to go. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. But he alone is not to blame. We elected him. And we are sitting back uninvolved unless what he does affects us personally. We get the government we deserve.

The country must unite and block the stupidity and tyranny of Trump. Universities must unite and speak with one voice in support of academic freedom. Scientists must speak against the use of bad science for political and economic agendas. Law firms must develop a backbone. All races, ethnic and religious groups must not let him divide us into warring factions. Christians must affirm we have only one king: Jesus.

At the ballot booth and in the streets, we must show that nonviolent collective action is still alive in America. What is at stake is the soul of our nation.

This conservative lie made Trump possible and will hasten our downfall

Thom Hartmann
January 21, 2026 

RAW ST0RY


Donald Trump gestures at the College Football Playoff National Championship game. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

For decades, Americans were told that “conservative values” stood for restraint, responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. The rise of Donald Trump forces an unavoidable question: were those values abandoned, or were they a generational lie that made his authoritarian takeover possible?

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP’s abandonment of the principles that animated John McCain and Mitt Romney in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy will keep them fat and happy.

They’re wrong.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said something on my radio program on Monday that would have been shocking just a few years ago but now is becoming increasingly self-evident to anybody with a conscience and an honest view of American politics and history.

He said the GOP as a party with an ideology, a set of principles, or even a governing philosophy is now almost entirely dead.

It’s been replaced by a violent, racist, lawless, unprincipled cult organized entirely around Trump. It’s a cult that demands total loyalty and punishes dissent with both political annihilation and, increasingly, with threats of real-world violence.

Remember when Romney said there were plenty of Republicans in the Senate who wanted to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, but they began flipping when senators started getting death threats against their families?
His biographer, McKay Coppins, wrote that Romney told him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment — vote to convict Trump — and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety.”

That terror is delivered from the hands of both prosecutors who can threaten imprisonment and MAGA lone-wolf assassins like the one who murdered Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota, and those who routinely terrorize federal judges who rule against Trump.

Republican elected officials, Walsh said, echoing Romney, now live in a state of deep fear. Not a metaphorical fear, but genuine terror.

It includes a fear of physical violence, the fear of being primaried and losing their jobs, and the very legitimate terror that Trump will turn the power of the state against them and thus break them financially with legal fees and the threat of prison, as he’s trying to do today with Letitia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff, etc.

Mark Twain noted that history rhymes, and this one is getting downright alarming.

The end of the modern-day GOP and its conversion into a fascist-tolerant party started with Ronald Reagan flipping classical economics on its head with his “supply side” scam and his scapegoating Black people to justify gutting social and educational programs, all to benefit his morbidly rich donors.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement, exploded the costs of health care, housing, and college education, and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

He did this because devastating the working class was actually part of the plan to return “stability” to the American social order, following the outline of Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, and Lewis Powell’s infamous memo.

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the middle class, Republicans believed they could rebuild our nation along the lines of a new form of feudalism, one of the most stable of the ancient governing systems. And when Trump came along, riding the wave of outrage at the economic devastation Reaganism had caused, they thought they could control him, too.

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he’d made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him massively richer but never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 54 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators, he learned — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Thyssen described how traditional German conservatives also convinced themselves they could ride a demagogue into power and then control him. They feared the left more than they feared authoritarianism, believed “order in society” mattered more than democracy, and were certain that once Hitler’s power was secured, moderation would follow.

What followed instead, however, was a demand for total submission or the threat of total personal and national destruction.

Thyssen’s story shows us how fear dissolves loyalty to principles and power silences the soft voice of conscience. Loyalty to a man replaces loyalty to the law and its traditions.

By the time conservatives realized what they’d enabled, escaping Germany was the only remaining option; Thyssen fled the country in 1939 (although the Vichy French captured him and turned him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him until the end of the war).

That brings us back to Russell Kirk and his landmark book The Conservative Mind that I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Although Kirk argued strongly for “classes and order,” claiming that inequality is both natural and good, he also tried to anchor American conservatism in moral restraint, historical humility, institutional continuity, and a deep suspicion of demagogues and mass movements.

He warned repeatedly that if conservatives were to abandon those restraints out of fear or resentment, they’d become something else entirely. He explicitly feared rightwing hate ideology, leader worship, and the belief that force could substitute for virtue.

There’s little doubt Kirk would have despised Trump. Trump embodies almost everything Kirk warned against: contempt for history and institutions, appetite over restraint, grievance over stewardship, and power over a moral order. Trump is not even remotely a conservative in any Burkean or Kirkian sense.

He was able to seize control of the GOP because, over the past four decades, much of American conservatism has simply hollowed itself out as it embraced racism (Southern Strategy); promoted lies about trickle down, voter fraud, and tax cuts; and conducted debt-financed foreign adventurism including Iraq and Afghanistan.


What survived was hierarchy, nationalism, hostility to the left, cultural grievance, and the protection of wealth. Tragically, the GOP has discarded the moral restraint, constitutional humility, reverence for truth, and respect for institutional limits that were once elevated by men like Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and Mitt Romney.

Starting in the 1980s, American conservatism became less a philosophy than a set of race- and gender-based resentments married to perpetual deregulation and tax cuts for the party’s morbidly rich donors. Once that happened, the GOP was defenseless against a charismatic authoritarian who promised dominance and control instead of democracy.

Trump didn’t hijack conservatism from the outside: he stepped into a vacuum created by the GOP’s abandonment of constitutional and traditional American principles. Like Thyssen’s peers, today’s Republican donors and leaders believed they could use the wannabe dictator, ride his popularity, placate his followers, and keep the machinery of government power under control.

They were wrong in the same way German conservatives were wrong, and for the same reasons. Once fear takes over as a governing principle, the most ruthless and outspoken leader will inevitably own the party. Everybody else gets destroyed, some sooner, some later.

Now the GOP exists as a sort of permanent loyalty test. Tell the truth and you’re exiled, uphold the Constitution and you’re primaried, defy the leader and you’re threatened with death or imprisonment.

As Walsh pointed out, most Republicans know exactly what’s happening. They know the lies are lies, the elections weren’t stolen, and under Trump and Kristi Noem violence is being normalized. Many know where this road leads, but fear of Trump’s wrath silences them more effectively than their conservative ideology ever unified them.

This is where the comparison between today’s Republicans and their donors to Thyssen becomes unavoidable. In Germany, conservatism didn’t just die the day Hitler seized power. It began to collapse a decade or more earlier, when conservatives decided that democracy, law, and moral restraint were simply political tools rather than binding commitments.

Once they crossed that line, they lost both the authority and the moral courage to resist Hitler and his Nazi Party. As a result, when the time of real terror directed at them arrived a few years later, that terror was all that was left of the system.

That is where the GOP now stands. It’s no longer a party arguing about tax rates or regulation or even federalism. It’s become, instead, an cult of personal loyalty dedicated to the deification and enrichment of one man and his family. That’s neither conservatism nor democracy.

Which brings us to the question Democrats — and the rest of us — today find ourselves confronting: what do we do about it?First, Democrats must stop treating this as a normal partisan contest. This isn’t a disagreement over policy, it’s a struggle over whether the United States remains a constitutional republic governed by law or becomes a fascist regime organized around loyalty and fear. Democrats must say that plainly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. Not “threats to norms,” not “concerns about rhetoric,” but the clear truth: one of our two major parties has abandoned democracy and embraced fascism.
Second, Democrats should relentlessly frame Trumpism not as strength but as weakness. Authoritarian movements thrive on the myth of invincibility, and Thyssen tells us how that myth collapses when its confronted. Democrats should point out, over and over again, that a party that can’t tolerate dissent, won’t allow truth-tellers, and must rely on hate, fear, and intimidation is not strong, but is fundamentally brittle and weak.
Third, Democrats should invite disaffected conservatives like Joe Walsh and independents into a pro-democracy coalition without demanding ideological conformity. This is not the moment for purity tests: traditions — including our democratic traditions — survive by coalition and continuity. As fanatic a progressive as I am, I also know Democrats must welcome former Republicans, libertarians, faith conservatives, and business leaders who still believe in the Constitution, even if they disagree on taxes, healthcare, or regulation. The message should be simple: democracy first, arguments later.
Fourth, Democrats must model the courage of our Founders and the generations since who fought for democracy. That means unrelentingly defending courts, free speech, and the rule of law. The contrast matters: as we saw in South Korea when Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from power last year, authoritarian movements collapse when their opponents are willing to fight for democracy rather than flee or hide in panic.
And finally, this isn’t just about politicians. We average citizens have the biggest role to play, and Thyssen’s story makes clear what happens when we don’t.

Speak up loud and frequently. Support local journalism. Show up to school board meetings, city councils, and your local Democratic Party meetings. Defend your neighbors who’re being targeted by Trump and his ICE goons. Double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

Authoritarianism feeds on isolation; democracy survives on solidarity and participation.

The most chilling part of Thyssen’s book isn’t that he and his family had to flee Germany: it’s that by the time they did in 1939, it was the only option left.

For those of us who Trump identified in his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), it might be a matter of months or a year or two unless he and his regime are blocked from moving forward with their repression. America’s top three experts on fascism have already fled the country; if we don’t win this battle for the soul of America, the same may become necessary for many Americans sooner than we’d like to imagine.

Although the media covered it as a one-day story, NSPM-7 directs the FBI, ICE, other federal police agencies, and over 200 local police departments coordinating with them to begin putting together dossiers on any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”


If that list includes you or people you love, now is the time to speak up and take positive political action to stop this missile aimed at the heart of our democracy and our Bill of Rights.

Russell Kirk warned that social and political order without moral restraint becomes despotism. Fritz Thyssen taught us that conservatives who empower authoritarians don’t survive the experience. Joe Walsh is describing the end state of that process in real time: a party that has ceased to exist as a governing institution and now operates only as an extension of one demented man’s will.

History doesn’t guarantee outcomes, but it does show us trajectories. Fear is never a stable foundation for politics and only delays the day of reckoning. And the longer the party exploiting it delays, the more catastrophic that reckoning becomes.

The lesson here isn’t that conservative values inevitably lead to authoritarianism: it’s that any political movement without courage, conscience, and adherence to constitutional principles and individual freedom eventually dies.

If “conservative values” can be so easily discarded in favor of fear, loyalty, and power, then they were never values at all, only a story they cynically told us to get elected.

Hopefully that’ll sink in for enough Republicans — and be loudly pointed out by enough Democrats — soon enough to rescue our republic from Germany’s fate.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's Davos embarrassment proves who is pulling his strings

Thom Hartmann
January 22, 2026 

RAW STORY

Donald Trump attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. REUTERS/Romina Amato

Donald Trump went to Davos on Wednesday morning and gave the speech that Vladimir Putin wanted him to, lying and pissing off Europe and shaking the North Atlantic alliance to its core.

Our president has refused to help Ukraine in any meaningful way for a year now, giving Russia the room to destroy much of that country’s electric and heat infrastructure so badly that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel his trip to Davos to deal with the crisis.

Trump’s now invaded Venezuela and is threatening the same with Greenland, legitimizing Putin’s land-grabs in Georgia and Ukraine.

Trump’s ICE goons are destroying the rule of law in America, running amok in Minneapolis, punishing — and killing — the residents of that city for having elected politicians who’d dare advocate democracy over autocracy.

Russian media is proudly proclaiming that their own internal crackdowns on immigrants, dissidents, and people of color aren’t so bad because Trump’s doing the same thing in America. We’ve legitimized Putin’s racist police state.

Trump’s destroyed much of America’s “soft power,” our friendly relations with resource-rich developing nations, by killing off John F. Kennedy’s USAID program, directly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with more to come.

Many of the countries we’ve abandoned are now re-aligning themselves with Russia and China, to Putin’s delight.

Trump’s duplicating Putin’s “enemy within” rhetoric to amplify the Russian-promoted “Great Replacement Theory” meme that claims wealthy Jews are paying to have Black and brown people “replace” white men in their jobs and lives.

It’s become the operating system for ICE and is tearing America apart, pitting friends, neighbors, and relatives against each other while Russian media celebrates.

The biggest thorn in Putin’s side has been NATO, all the way back to his days as a murderous KGB intelligence officer, and Trump is now shaking that organization all the way down to its foundations by threatening to seize Greenland and trash-talking alliance member states.

Early on as Putin was rolling out his dictatorship, having destroyed Russia’s brief experiment with democracy, he put himself above the law by simply refusing to enforce rights the Russian constitution and laws gave to average citizens.

Trump’s today doing the same thing, simply defying the Epstein Transparency Act and other laws while approving as his ICE goons routinely violate Americans’ civil rights.

From Russia’s point of view, America’s biggest historic strength hasn’t been our formidable military (they have just as many nukes) but was our rock-solid multi-century relationships with allies.

Today, Canada is — for the first time in over a century — preparing to fight back against an American invasion, while the European Union is trying to figure out how to disentangle itself from our economy in the event we start a war with them.

Meanwhile a bigoted Australian billionaire family continues to pump daily pro-Russian-worldview (racist, nationalist, anti-democratic) poison into the minds of Americans.

In the 1940s, Sir Keith Murdoch built his family’s media empire, in part, by running sensationalist articles about Black American GIs stationed in Australia during World War II “raping” and having affairs with white Australian women. Now Fox “News” is one of the most frequently quoted American sources for Putin’s captured domestic media, according to The New York Times.

Everything Trump does, when it doesn’t involve soliciting bribes, hustling pardons, or making himself richer inures benefit directly to Putin. Which raises the question diplomats and leaders across Europe are increasingly asking out loud: why are elected Republicans tolerating this?

Is it just because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery and thus billionaire oligarchs who don’t believe in democracy now own them?

For example, billionaire Peter Theil, who financed JD Vance’s rise to power as the senator from Ohio, has said:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Could it be that most Republican politicians simply agree with those types of sentiments, that democracy is mob rule and inconvenient, and that strongman autocracy is a more stable and predictable form of government? That they’d love to jettison European and Asian democracies in favor of corrupt police states like Russia and Hungary where they can get away with just about anything just so long as they keep the emperor happy?

After all, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nakedly taking millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires with business before the Court and became the deciding vote in the Citizens United case; are Republicans going along with Trump’s corruption because they, themselves, are also taking bribes and using otherwise illegal insider information to make themselves rich?

Or is it because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from crimes and he thinks of himself as America’s monarch, as if he were mad King Ludwig of yore?

Are Republicans afraid — as Mitt Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins — that Trump will use the force of law or activate his lone-wolf white supremacist terrorists to bring GOP politicians to heel or even have their families intimidated or their homes attacked like the Trump supporter who went after Paul Pelosi?

Could it be that Republicans know that most Americans — at least those who haven’t bought fully into the Fox “News” and MAGA cults — have figured out that the GOP’s only loyalty is to billionaires and massive corporations?

All they’ve done since the Reagan Revolution is cut taxes on the morbidly rich while gutting the agencies that catch criminal or unethical activity in government and the military; maybe the GOP now realizes we’ve got their number and that’s why they’re working so hard to purge voting rolls in Blue cities?

Trump’s shocking behavior — and the even more shameful docility of elected Republicans and the lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with — raises questions that will probably only be answered by future historians.

Nonetheless, we must push back. Democrats need to grow a spine, and the upcoming vote on the DHS budget is a great place to start. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) have indicated they may support the legislation, while Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Sen. Rubén Gallego (D-AZ) are signaling a fierce opposition. The battle will almost certainly play out in the Senate over a Democratic filibuster; you can call your two senators and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at 202-224-3121.

Democrats also must signal now and repeatedly that Trump’s pro-Putin, anti-American rhetoric and actions are so unacceptable that impeachment is necessary, both for him and his brownnosers at DHS, ICE, and the FBI.

And if there are any Republicans who have left an ounce of decency, now is the time for them to stand up and speak out. And not to back away as soon as Trump growls, the way Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Todd Young (R-IN) just did with the proposed Venezuela war powers legislation.

Republican senator Barry Goldwater famously walked from the Capitol to the White House to inform Richard Nixon that his criminality had become so severe and obvious that Republicans in Congress could no longer support him and would, if necessary, vote to impeach and convict him.

America needs today’s Republicans to find their spines, reclaim their integrity and patriotism, and politically stop Trump in his tracks. And maybe it’s starting to happen: Republican Rep. Don Bacon (R-NB) just told reporters he’s threatening impeachment:
“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this [Greenland issue]. If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s a start, but there’s a long way to go if Trump is to be held to account.

When future historians ask what Putin wanted from Trump, the answer may be painfully simple: “Everything America once stood for.”

Whether that happens is not yet settled and ultimately depends on what we Americans — across the political spectrum — do next.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump the Davos diva only made this key weakness more obvious — and more costly

John Casey
January 22, 2026 
RAW STORY


Donald Trump attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum. REUTERS/Denis Balibous


Donald Trump didn’t just fly to Davos, after a false start thanks to problems with Air Force One, to attend the World Economic Forum. He fled there to be with his brethren.

Some say he fled mounting scrutiny of the Epstein files. More likely, he fled the affordability crisis crushing working Americans, and the reality that his central campaign promise, to lower the cost of living, has collapsed under the weight of his obsessions with revenge and self-enrichment, and his insatiable need to dominate the global spotlight.

Davos gave Trump what he craves: billionaires, deference, a room full of powerful people forced to listen to his garbage and kowtow. A far cry from the poor, obtuse, gauche MAGA crowd he secretly loathes like everyone else.

In the days before Davos, Trump kicked up a geopolitical kerfuffle, threatening to acquire Greenland, floating military action against Venezuela, aiming reckless rhetoric at allies. None of it was accidental, none of it served American interests. It served Trump.

Trump is obsessed with attention, and Davos, an annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest elites, was the perfect stage. He didn’t want to attend as a participant; he wanted to be the main character. He wanted to dominate the news cycle, command the room, and surround himself with flunkies eager to flatter, validating his delusions of dominance.

And it worked. Everyone scampered around him, wanting to know about Greenland, and wouldn’t you know it, as evening fell, he miraculously announced that one of his “framework” agreements had been reached with NATO. It happened so quickly because Trump got the attention he wanted.

It was from his patented playbook of pandemonium: Trump creates a problem, and lo and behold, Trump fixes the problem, and Trump is the hero.

But Trump has also created an affordability problem, and he has no idea how to fix it. While he hobnobbed in Davos, working Americans were being crushed at home.

Prices are rising. Groceries cost more. Health insurance premiums are surging. And now even executives aligned with Trump’s economic worldview are admitting the obvious. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently acknowledged that Trump’s sweeping tariffs are beginning to show up in consumer prices, as sellers pass costs on to shoppers.

Economists warned this would happen, the moment Trump launched his tariff tantrum last year. Consumers picking up the tab was never a question of if, but when.

That “when” is arriving now. The only question is whether it will wake people up.

Democrats are rallying around two simple words: affordability and accountability. As the midterm campaigns ramp up, affordability will only grow more urgent. By summer, after the primaries, as messaging crystallizes, the cost-of-living crisis will hit an inflection point. Prices will continue rising, largely unchecked, and voters will start looking for answers.

Trump has none. And Republicans are having hissy fits, panicking that he’s coming up empty-handed on the issue that put him back in power.

Accountability stretches across the wreckage of Trump’s second term: Justice Department retribution, Homeland Security overreach and ICE raids, legally dubious experiments like the Department of Government Efficiency, reckless military action, and an administration increasingly untethered from the Constitution.

But Trump’s most glaring failure is personal. He promised to lower costs for working families, and he has abandoned even the pretense of trying.

Instead, he is enriching himself at breakneck speed.

He surrounds himself with gold. He covets prizes, accepts luxury gifts, and monetizes everything: Bitcoin, branding, real estate, and influence. Billionaires flocked to his inauguration. Tech CEOs and luxury executives parade through the Oval Office, bearing tribute. Trump isn’t governing. He’s cashing in like he always planned to do, because he couldn’t do it in the business world.

When Trump failed as a businessman, he didn’t regroup or reform. He declared bankruptcy. Six times. The lazy way out. That instinct hasn’t changed. Faced with an affordability crisis he created and cannot solve and a working-class base he can no longer plausibly serve, he is once again walking away. He’s declaring political bankruptcy on the very people who put him in office.

And he knows it.

Trump may be unread and uninformed, but he isn’t stupid. He understands that his MAGA base, especially its lower-income core, will be hit hardest by rising prices and economic instability. He also knows he doesn’t need them the way he once did. If he wants to retain power, he’ll pursue it through intimidation, exploiting legal loopholes, or he’ll do it illegally. He won’t go to the trouble of stumping red states.

Trump has turned the People’s House into a personal palace, complete with ballrooms and gilded excess. The choice before him is simple: invest in affordability or indulge in opulence. For Trump, there is no choice.

At Davos, surrounded by the world’s richest men, Trump tried to sell a fairy-tale economy built on lies and bravado. “Nobody thought it could be done.” “Numbers nobody’s seen in years.” But those numbers aren’t real, and working Americans feel it every time they pay a bill.

Some of Trump’s base will never see this. They live in an echo chamber where imperial bullying sounds like strength and every hardship is blamed on Democrats or invented statistics. Even an economic calamity may not shake their loyalty.

But independents are paying attention. Casual voters will notice. People who don’t follow Davos or cable news will still recognize betrayal when their bills rise and Trump is nowhere to be found, except on a global stage, basking in billionaire adoration.

Trump is inching away from MAGA. He knows he can. He knows many will never leave him. And he knows the elite world he always wanted has finally opened its doors.

That’s what makes him so dangerous and so offensive. He doesn’t just exploit his supporters. He holds them in contempt.

Empathy for MAGA was always a lie. Davos just made it more obvious.

John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”

The US Doesn’t Need a Party, It Needs a Revolution

Ron Jacobs

 December 30, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Two hundred and fifty years ago, European colonists mostly from Britain were conspiring to chase the elements of the British monarchy from the shores of what we now call the United States. Many of those in the conspiracy were mostly interested in personal financial gain, whether it was measured in stolen land, enslaved humans or actual coinage. Freedom for all was not on the agenda for most of the men involved. However, freedom to keep their profits was. Over the years, the struggle by the humans left out of the founding fathers’ intentions has waxed and waned, occasionally winning those freedoms only to see them become weakened over time, mostly via the courts but almost as often through legislation and white supremacists in the White House.

Fifty years ago—1976—the year began with Washington and its media machine hyping the two hundredth birthday of the United States. The resignation of President Richard Nixon some seventeen months earlier was celebrated as proof of the superiority of the US way of governance. You know, no one was above the law and all that stuff. To top it all off, the year 1976 was also a presidential election year; another example of the durability of the “experiment in democracy” being touted by the mainstream media no matter what its political leaning. The then liberal Washington Post and New York Times shouted the same misleading malarkey about the land of the free and the home of the brave as New Hampshire’s right-wing Manchester Union Leader (now New Hampshire Union Leader) and William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review. Tributes to the nation’s history never seemed to mention the genocide of the indigenous that paved the highways and laid the rails across the amber waves of grain, while the fate of the millions forced to take the Atlantic crossing into slavery that consumed their descendants as well was most often framed in terms of denouement as a result of civil war. Rarely, if ever, was the situation of most African-American working people in the 1970s touted as proof of the success of the white man’s American dream. That dream had, as Langston Hughes reminded us, been deferred for far too long. Indeed, it had exploded only a few years before the big Bicentennial bash and been put down by thousands of cops and troops.

I was working as a short order cook at an IHOP in 1976. The best thing about the job was the access to food and the fac that my paycheck—as paltry as it was—covered my expenses and left me with money to spend on various entertainments, from beer to weed and concerts. This had a lot more to do with the price of things (and my side gig of selling weed to friends) in the mid-1970s than it had to do with the $2.50 an hour I was making for my fifty-hour work weeks. The US Left, which was in disarray but still capable of raising a fuss, was planning protest actions for the big day when the Bicentennial party would climax in a spasm of nationalist celebration from sea to shining sea. If Irving Berlin were alive, his royalties would certainly jump in the year to come. Francis Scott Key’s paean to the rocket’s red glare would be set on permanent repeat. The rulers were still convinced that God was on their side and that this land was their land. And don’t you forget it. The ultraleft in the form of the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the remnants and political allies of the Weather Underground were looking towards Philadelphia for their marches, while the more mainstream Left formed a coalition called the Peoples’ Bicentennial Commission and began acquiring permits for their rally in DC. Meanwhile, the official celebration that took place every July Fourth on the National Mall was booking bands and musicians. The myth became ever more magnified.

It’s now 2026. Fifty years later. The nation intends to celebrate its two hundred fiftieth birthday even as it becomes a mere shadow of what it proclaimed it wanted to be. If nothing else, we can see the emptiness of words in the wake of history, although this might be the place to note that some of the finest words we hear repeated regarding the founders of the nation were first written by men who owned slaves and celebrated the murders of the indigenous. Francis Scott Key was an attorney who represented slavers in cases challenging their abductions of runaways while he traded in slaves himself. And we know the rap sheet on Thomas Jefferson. Pretty words can only hide ugly truths for so long.

1976 was the historical moment just before the advent of neoliberal capitalism. The free marketeers’ ongoing attack on the so-called welfare state was enjoined in Britain and the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter made speeches that claimed the private sector could do many, if not most, things better than the public sector. Those sentiments were magnified by Ronald Reagan, the ultra-right’s candidate in the Republican party. It’s a reasonable argument that Reagan’s 1976 campaign was the beginning of his successful 1980 campaign for the White House. It’s also quite reasonable to conclude that that campaign began at least back in 1964 with Barry Goldwater who, at least had the wisdom to reject the support of the so-called Christian right wing. It would be Reagan’s embrace of that bunch of zealots (calling themselves the Moral Majority) that would propel the US into the long dark night of Reagan’s morning in America. Just like the champions of capital had proclaimed a hundred years earlier, the Christian god and the god of capital were united in their own pursuit of happiness at everyone else’s expense. When the nascent racism of the US white nation was added into the mixture, a new Trinity was conceived. Like they say on the TV, “Praise the Lord©.” And like they say in the Pentagon: “and pass the ammunition.”

Despite the ravings of countless cheerleaders, neoliberalism was never a unique economics untethered to the history of capitalism; it is a logical step in capitalism’s destructive thrust. Fascist government is the political means by which capital and those who operate within its mechanism ensure their pursuit of profit proceeds. This is where we are currently at—the government of the United States operates primarily, if not yet completely, in the service of capital and those who hold the bulk of that capital. Marxists and capitalists alike agree that this 250^th birthday is the anniversary of a nation that put the capitalists in charge, transferring power to a capitalist class and unleashing market forces through debt, land reform, and institutions designed serve that market.

As far as I’m concerned there isn’t much to celebrate when it comes to this national birthday. Washington’s military is murdering people on the high seas and bombing Africans under the guise of religion. Domestically, unaccountable enforcers kidnap citizens and non-citizens alike in scenes reminiscent of police states around the world. Its war industry arms a genocide while provoking conflict across the globe. The rich and the super-rich profit from the rampage. The world can ill afford another twenty years of this, much less two hundred and fifty.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com