Interview

Trump’s Attacks on Black Power and Freedom Show How Far We Still Have to Go


Thinking on the Black freedom struggle from June 19, 1865, to now, where do we collectively want to see ourselves next?

By George Yancy ,

  Truthout

June 18, 2026

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the voting rights group Black Voters Matter, leads people in a chant as they walk across Edmund Pettus Bridge as they commemorate the 60th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" on March 9, 2025, in Selma, Alabama.Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images


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How should Juneteenth be understood, be celebrated, be remembered, given this moment of deep anti-democratic machinations and authoritarian/fascistic ambitions cultivated at the “highest” offices within this land? The tension between the sense of renewed freedom that Juneteenth engenders and the profound unfreedom that this country perpetuates is not lost on me. Indeed, as the 250th anniversary of this nation’s independence is on the horizon, on July 4, 2026, the tension screams of a biting contradiction that forces the observation that the Fourth of July was never meant for Black people. It is within the context of this tension and contradiction that I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of California–Washington Center, and co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition.

George Yancy: It is such a pleasure to be in conversation with you again, Jeanelle. I am particularly excited to talk with you about what Juneteenth means to you. But first I want to return to our previous discussion and connect it to the recent attacks on the Voting Rights Act. In our last exchange, you laid bare the historical dimensions, political commitments, and courageous spirit of the Black anti-fascist tradition. In that exchange, you argued that we must remember that “fascism attacks on all fronts, so we must develop a strategy that recognizes this.” As I reread your instructive and powerful words, I was reminded of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority decision, on April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, which has been characterized as an evisceration of — or, at minimum, a significant weakening of — “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and opened the door for states to enact discriminatory voting maps and laws.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act imposes liability “only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” This standard requires Black plaintiffs to demonstrate intentional racial discrimination. In her book Where Is Your Body?, critical race theorist Mari J. Matsuda critiques the concept of a narrow “linear, intent-based notion of causation” when it comes to racism, arguing that “if the effects of racism exist, that is cause for action.” My colleague, historian Carol Anderson, states: “Jim Crow was a political project designed to preserve racial hierarchy through law and the power structure that depended on it. When we see coordinated efforts to purge voters, centralize election control, dismantle the Voting Rights Act, and dilute Black political power, we should call it what it is.” Within the context of your important historical and political work, let’s call it what it is: the unabashed continuation of anti-Black fascism.




U.S. philosopher George Santayana warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I would argue that the problem for Black people is not a failure to remember the past; rather, it is that the past is not past. We are witnessing the continuation of systems and practices that remind us, repeatedly, that we have no rights that the white state is bound to respect. In short, Black people continue to have their rights violated, their freedoms politically constrained, and their ontology, their being, rendered abject. Speak to how you see this latest attack on Black people’s voting power and freedom — which amounts to a form of civil death — as a manifestation of anti-Black fascism. For those who may not view it as such, what are they missing?

Jeanelle K. Hope: During this election season, we are seeing an all-out conspiracy to effectively roll back voting rights, which Black people have steadily fought for, with redistricting being the main strategy that has effectively sanctioned mass disenfranchisement. The efforts, largely taken up by Southern states, elucidate two major pillars of anti-Black fascism: anti-democracy and dual application of the law. The recent Louisiana v. Callais decision is another example of how the law is being weaponized to cement major objectives within the fascist project. It is evident that the primary goal of Southern state redistricting efforts, and gerrymandering, is to starkly dilute Black voting power, smashing any remaining illusion of democracy for Black people in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama…


The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe
Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror. By George Yancy , Truthout February 21, 2026

As I shared in our last interview, the law is such an integral player in shaping fascism. Despite the liberal belief that the law will save us from fascism, what we are seeing unfold within the courts is the strategy of autocratic legalism — or the creeping dismantling of legal frameworks that have long aided democracy to bolster the consolidation of power for authoritarian and fascist regimes.


“What we are seeing unfold within the courts is the strategy of autocratic legalism — or the creeping dismantling of legal frameworks that have long aided democracy to bolster the consolidation of power for authoritarian and fascist regimes.”

The legal analyses of Matsuda, Derrick Bell, and Kimberlé Crenshaw have long served as sharp critiques of the law’s failure to recognize intersecting forms of oppression, systemic racism, and the upholding of a dual application of the law along racial lines. Moreover, they have been most vocal about the high, and shifting, burden of proof required by the courts when victims name racist and discriminatory actions as stymieing their life, liberty, and freedom. The core arguments of critical race scholars and lawyers can similarly be applied to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. The law has once again proven to not be a tool of justice, but a chisel to decide those that should and should not benefit from democracy.

For the last four years, critical race theory (CRT) has been vehemently attacked by far right and conservative-led school boards and think tanks, with history, English, and ethnic studies K-12 teachers and librarians also caught in the crosshairs. Perhaps it is CRT’s keen explication of U.S. law’s fascist and anti-democratic tendencies that was most threatening, not the thousands of books by Black authors that were banned in the name of CRT.

Living in the Washington, D.C., metro area and having been born and raised in California, it’s not lost on me that redistricting has also been adopted by Democratic-led states as a means of “fighting fire with fire” to “settle the score.” While it looks like California’s redistricting efforts are largely being upheld by the courts, the strategy, though blessed by a majority of voters, is dead in the water in Virginia. In a state where Black people comprise nearly 20 percent of the population and Northern Virginia is nearing “minority majority” status, you can’t unsee the glaring contradictions of the law that once again favors anti-Black fascism over justice.

In response to Virginia’s redistricting referendum, a member of Congress introduced the “Make DC Square Again Act” that would restore the District’s original boundaries for the sole purpose of disenfranchising Northern Virginians by leveraging Washington, D.C.’s lack of statehood. This bill and far right commentary (including the growing position of conservative women willing to give up their right to vote for a more conservative future) regarding redistricting lay bare that disenfranchisement is a priority for the modern American fascist project.

Just last year, Black historical associations and legal groups celebrated 60 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a commemorative moment that felt quite hollow, considering how the legislation was being gutted. In this moment, we must wrestle with what to do over the next 60 years to regain ground lost and to transform what democracy looks like. Redistricting (from the Democrats and Republicans) is a race to the bottom, toward fascism. In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We must stop trying to meet the rise of the far right with the same fascist strategies dressed up in progressive and liberal language. The recent release of “Project 2029” (which leaves much to be desired), the Democrats’ supposed response to Project 2025, is another example of this. Fascism must be met with radical imagination and ambitious world-remaking — not with a reactionary policy framework that is always five steps behind. We must radically reimagine voting, elections (Election Day should be a national holiday), political parties (no more duopoly and get rid of dark money in elections), the Electoral College (how about just the popular vote), and much more.

I began with that recent major attack on the Voting Rights Act as a way of highlighting the deep sense of the tragicomic reality of Black life. As Black people, we constantly strive for freedom, empowerment, and joy. Yet, the viciousness of anti-Blackness forces us into various states of unfreedom, disempowerment, despair. When I think of Juneteenth, I think of the tragicomic. There was the brutality of American slavery, and yet there was that sense of celebration and elation “on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree.” That joyous reality would only be followed by involuntary servitude through the criminalization of the Black body, the creation of Black Codes, convict leasing, and sharecropping. Add to this the reality of mass incarceration of Black people; disproportionate vulnerability to police and state violence; inequitable access to health care, housing, and education; disproportionately high poverty rates; and limited access to economic opportunities and growth. Given these realities, we find ourselves in what Saidiya Hartman terms “the afterlife of slavery” and what Christina Sharpe calls being in “the wake” — that is, that we are still mourning the effects of the transatlantic slave trade. How do you think about Juneteenth within the context of so much anti-Blackness; indeed, the continuation of anti-Black fascism?

There’s a bittersweetness to Juneteenth. On the one hand, there remains a level of excitement as the holiday moves into its sixth year of national recognition following decades of advocacy by people like Ms. Opal Lee. Yet, Juneteenth is probably the single most consequential American holiday as it forces us to truly grapple with the meaning of freedom in a more critical way than the Fourth of July. To borrow from Angela Davis, Juneteenth is a reminder that “freedom is a constant struggle,” and that the old seeds of slavery continue to germinate, taking root in many systems, institutions, and facets of modern Black life — from state-sanctioned violence and mass incarceration to varying structural inequalities.



“To borrow from Angela Davis, Juneteenth is a reminder that ‘freedom is a constant struggle,’ and that the old seeds of slavery continue to germinate, taking root in many systems.”

Juneteenth urges us to consider how we can work in the spirit of abolitionists to root out every seed of slavery. And as anti-Black fascism continues to evolve from its colonial and chattel slavery foundations to more sophisticated outcomes, the Juneteenth holiday demands that we reimagine what freedom fighting looks like. With our nation’s current march toward fascism, so many of our supposed freedoms are on the line — from voting rights and citizenship, freedom of speech, academic freedom, the freedom to protest, and beyond. Let the Juneteenth holiday serve as a reminder of the ever-shifting grounds of freedom.

Thus, celebrating Juneteenth must entail study, organizing, and dreaming. I hope that those celebrating Juneteenth engage in much-needed consciousness raising. Read. Not only about the history of slavery, abolition, and Juneteenth, but also more contemporary works that help elucidate slavery’s afterlives. Juneteenth is a communal event and holiday. So before firing up the barbeque, breaking out the seafood boil, or busting open a box of crabs, I hope folks sit with one another in critical reflection and discussion. We must all consider what freedom fighting looks like within our communities and strategize how to work together in those efforts. As Robin D.G. Kelley’s early work reminds us, for the enslaved and so many Black activists, freedom was only a dream. We must use the Juneteenth holiday to also dream of what new iterations of freedom look like — a freedom beyond anti-Black fascism.


“For the enslaved and so many Black activists, freedom was only a dream. We must use the Juneteenth holiday to also dream of what new iterations of freedom look like.”

Despite the bitterness of Juneteenth, it is Black joy that encompasses the sweetness of the holiday. It is a sweetness that extends to glasses of red drinks, plates of red velvet cake, and slices of watermelon. There is something especially sacred in commemorating Juneteenth through gathering, partaking in Black foodways, dancing, and laughing. I hope that we all revel in joy this Juneteenth.

Juneteenth will precede the 250th anniversary of this nation’s independence on July 4, 2026. I am reminded of the scathing critique by Frederick Douglass, where he writes, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.” As I celebrate Juneteenth, I’m simultaneously aware of the sham of this country’s “greatness” in relationship to the continued violent and dehumanizing logics of anti-Blackness. As this nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, Douglass’s truth-telling to this nation continues to hold: “Your boasted liberty, an unholy license;your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.” Reading your work militates against perpetuating shams. There are times when living in bad faith — lying to ourselves — can feel easier than facing social and civil death. But willfully remaining ignorant will not stop anti-Black fascistic violence, just as remaining critically conscious will not, on its own, stop it either. Yet we still need to remain critically conscious. How do we do so, especially in the context of the upcoming 250th anniversary of this nation’s independence, a day which will be filled with praise, celebration, and, for me, deep hypocrisy? Talk about how necessary it is that we maintain a critical consciousness of this nation’s bloody history, pretense, and anti-Blackness.

The 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence has presented a unique narrative and branding (dare I say grifting) opportunity that has largely been used to support America’s march toward fascism. Living in the Washington, D.C., metro area, the thick veneer of patriotism and nationalism expressed via “America 250” and “Freedom 250” programming and branding is inescapable. Plans to celebrate this moment involve completely reshaping the cultural atmosphere and ethos of Washington, D.C. A few highlights include: the construction of a 250-foot arch (a Western architectural symbol of power and expansion) near Arlington National Cemetery, a mixed martial arts UFC fight recently held on the White House lawn (the event somehow ended with a racist and misogynist jab at former first lady Michelle Obama), the National Mall is currently being transformed into a “State Fair” (it should be noted that this “State Fair” is being held in a District long denied statehood), and a Grand Prix auto race is slated to take place around major monuments. Ironically, much of the National Mall is surrounded by tall fencing, making the space look more like a police state rather than the projected freedom playground. Furthermore, institutions and artists are being called to “promote American and Western values” in a manner that conveys “greatness,” “grandeur,” and “abundance,” while limiting discussions that underscore the very roots of the nation — colonialism, slavery, and Native American genocide. America 250 has effectively served as a narrative tool to reshape U.S. culture through far right politics, Christian nationalism, hypermasculinity, and fascism. The 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, especially under the current political climate, must be understood as a paradoxical moment to interrogate U.S. democracy and freedom, not a moment to lean into the cultural spectacle of “America 250” and “Freedom 250” branding.

With the residents of Washington, D.C., being forced to host all these events across their communities, I challenge folks to shift their gaze from America 250 to the renewed Free DC movement. Since the late 1700s, Washingtonians (who are predominantly Black) have been denied statehood, self-determination, and full participation in democracy — an enduring punishment for the District’s predominantly Black population that traces back to debates around slavery in the region. If we are to celebrate independence and freedom in the nation’s capital, why is it that the people who live year-round in the capital aren’t afforded the fundamental freedom of statehood?

I want to underscore that what UFC fighter Josh Hokit said about Michelle Obama was vile, ignorant, and racist. Given the importance of Juneteenth, I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note, even if pessimism is fully justified. James Baldwin, who was passionately dedicated to radically transforming this country through love — and by demanding that it look at itself in a disagreeable mirror and admit to the lie of its “innocence” — was still skeptical. In The Fire Next Time, he asks, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” It seems to me that if the house is burning, we have been locked in it — and never fully integrated — since the beginning of our arrival. Despite this, we have found ways of pushing back and talking back. We have been able to create, invent, love ourselves, find joy, and deploy our Black imaginations to think and be otherwise.

In your book The Black Antifascist Tradition, you stress the importance of abolition. In fact, I would argue that if the house has been burning for so long, then perhaps it is no longer habitable until the ashes have been swept away to allow for forms of clarity, insight, and wisdom that will begin with the kind of profound and mature love, as Baldwin understood it, that might function as the foundation for a radically new, unprecedented way of political belonging.

You don’t stop at abolition. You write, “The endpoint of abolition is not destruction but futurity.” You link abolition to Afrofuturism. How do you understand the creative dynamics of Afrofuturism? As you know, not all Black people will experience or celebrate Juneteenth with a sense of political exuberance or reflect on how we have made so much “progress.” I’m interested in how you think about Afrofuturism alongside abolition, because the latter suggests a radical future — something yet to come.

As mentioned earlier, in celebrating Juneteenth we must incorporate dreaming. When we dream, we can imagine futures that go beyond the status quo and reform. We place our future selves somewhere anew, with environments that are defined by our holistic well-being. With all that we know about the Black freedom struggle from June 19, 1865, to the present, where do we collectively (not individually) want to see ourselves next?Art and culture are often great avenues to explore this type of imagining and radical world-building. This is why fascism actively works to co-opt and control art, media, and cultural production.

There is no greater entry point to discussing the intersection of Black anti-fascism and Afrofuturism than the work of pioneering Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler. Folks have long discussed how Parable of the Sower outlines the rise of fascism in the 21st century, but it is her follow-up work, Parable of the Talents, where Butler engages in this deeply Black anti-fascist world rebuilding. Beyond Butler, there are so many artists that are creating various forms of art and culture that help us dream of a new future. For example, I’m still sitting with Boots Riley’s film I Love Boosters and the vision he lays out for the future of organizing under technofascism. I’m similarly wrestling with Aleshea Harris’s disturbing yet liberating journey through a tale of Black women’s vengeance in Is God Is. Both films offer poignant meditations on Black futures and freedom, while not shying away from the pessimism of it all. I think it’s important to let art and culture — particularly independent, political, and Afrofuturist art — serve as a guiding light as we dream.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

Trump hit with ridicule as National Guard stands at Reflecting Pool: 'Protect from algae?'

David McAfee
June 20, 2026  

RAW STORY

Visitors to the Lincoln Memorial make their way past a member of the National Guard, as the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been painted blue at the directive of U.S. President Donald Trump, is seen in the background, ahead of America 250, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 9, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The Trump administration has reached the stage of its Reflecting Pool saga where soldiers stand watch over a pond full of algae, and the internet has decided that image needs no embellishment to be devastating.

Video circulating Saturday, licensed through FreedomNews.tv, shows National Guard members in uniform posted along the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool while tourists wander past and cleanup equipment idles nearby. The footage spread quickly, and so did the mockery, much of it from across the political spectrum.

Former RNC chair Michael Steele cut to the obvious question. Responding to a clip of the deployment, he asked simply, "Protect it from what, the algae?" Steven Huffman, posting the same scene, narrated it like a military success story, joked that the Guard and local police "have been dispatched to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to guard the algae" before concluding, "As you can see at the end of this clip, the algae is safe. Well done."

Others leaned into the absurdity of the optics. Physician Carolyn Barber wrote, "Rest easy, America. The National Guard has been deployed to ensure no one breaches the heavily defended algae pond at the Lincoln Memorial. The republic endures." Advocate Melanie D'Arrigo tied it to the administration's spending habits, predicting that "next thing you know, the algae will need a $600 million ballroom."

Beneath the jokes ran a more pointed critique about resources and motive. The account Republicans Against Trump labeled the scene "your tax dollars at work," framing armed troops at a decorative basin as a waste dressed up as security. Security researcher Robert Graham connected the deployment to the broader enforcement pattern that has accompanied Trump's vandalism claims, noting that "in support of Trump's conspiracies about his failures caused by sabotage, multiple police departments and the National Guard are now issuing citations merely for touching the water."

That last point captures why the images resonate. Over the past two days a 67-year-old cyclist has been arrested and another visitor reportedly cited, both for making contact with a pool the president insists was sabotaged by chemical-wielding vandals. The simpler explanation, that a rushed and overpriced renovation bloomed green and shed its paint, requires no soldiers at all. The administration has chosen the version with troops, and the country is watching armed service members guard standing water while critics ask the question no one in the White House seems willing to answer: guard it from what?

Man cited by authorities for simply touching water in Trump's Reflecting Pool: report

David McAfee
June 20, 2026 

RAW STORY

National Park Service workers use skimmers to clean algae from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool following the completion of recent renovations in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 15, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

A man was cited by authorities merely for touching Trump's Reflecting Pool, according to a journalist's published video.

The Trump administration's defense of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has reached the point where reaching into the water can apparently earn you a ticket. Breaking-news reporter Oliya Scootercaster posted footage Saturday afternoon, licensed through FreedomNews.tv, showing a man seated on the grass at the pool's edge as a U.S. Park Police officer writes him up while a mounted colleague looms nearby. According to Scootercaster, the man said his citation was for putting his hand in the water.

The clip, which racked up more than 30,000 views within hours, captures the absurd security posture that has descended on a decorative basin. Officers on horseback now patrol the perimeter, and the cleanup crews share the space with a law enforcement presence better suited to a crime scene than a tourist landmark. All of it stems from a renovation the president ordered, a project that ran past $14 million and was supposed to leave the pool painted "American flag blue" in time for the country's 250th anniversary, only for the water to bloom green and the new surface to peel apart almost immediately.

This is at very least the second known enforcement action in recent days. Also recently, Park Police arrested David Hearn, a 67-year-old cyclist and former Olympian, on a misdemeanor charge after he touched a piece of paint that had already detached from the bottom. Hearn insisted he destroyed nothing. Now another visitor has reportedly been penalized for the crime of dipping a hand into a public pool.

Trump has spent the week insisting vandals and "radical left lunatics" are responsible for the mess, promising arrests and "years in jail." What the cameras keep documenting instead are federal officers apparently guarding green water as though it were a national treasure.

Trump lets loose new details on Reflecting Pool damage: 'Many people have been arrested'

David McAfee
June 20, 2026 

RAW STORY


The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been painted blue at the directive of U.S. President Donald Trump, ahead of the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 12, 2026. REUTERS/Eric Lee

Donald Trump returned to his favorite subject Saturday evening, and his account of the great Reflecting Pool conspiracy grew more elaborate with every sentence. In a lengthy Truth Social post, the president announced that "many additional people have been arrested" over what he called "the disgraceful Vandalism of our beautiful Reflecting Pool," then offered a list of crimes that has expanded well beyond the algae and peeling paint that started the whole saga.

According to Trump, the vandals did not merely tamper with the water. They "took some form of knife or blade" and carved a "250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade," and they "poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool." He framed the alleged sabotage as an insult to history, writing that the damage was "a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly." He added that he met with contractors and may be "forced to release and drain much of the water" to complete repairs.

The president also delivered a characteristic burst of self-praise wrapped around a shaky history lesson. He claimed the pool "hasn't looked or worked like this since 1922, when it was originally built," insisted his version "worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish," and declared it had never been "so beautiful as it was just one week ago." That timeline quietly undercuts itself, since a structure that worked perfectly a week ago would most likely not need to be drained and repaired now.

What Trump did not provide, once again, was evidence. The only confirmed arrest so far is David Hearn, a 67-year-old cyclist and former Olympian charged with a misdemeanor after he touched a piece of paint that had already come loose, an accusation he denies. A second man was reportedly cited for putting his hand in the water. Neither episode resembles a knife-wielding chemical attack on a national monument.

Trump claims multiple were arrested over Reflecting Pool 'destruction': 'Years in Jail!'

David McAfee
June 20, 2026 

Donald Trump (Reuters)

President Donald Trump says the U.S. Park Police have rounded up a ring of vandals who sabotaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The actual arrest record tells a much smaller story: one 67-year-old cyclist who says he reached into the water to touch a piece of paint that had already fallen off

In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump escalated his days-long insistence that his troubled $14 million renovation was the victim of a crime rather than a botched paint job. "The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll," he wrote, misspelling "Pool." "Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair."

According to The Washington Post, Park Police arrested a single person on Friday: David Hearn, a 67-year-old man from Bethesda and a three-time Olympic canoe slalom athlete, on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property.

Hearn's account bears no resemblance to a coordinated assault on a national landmark. He told the Post he had just finished a 52-mile bike ride, including a loop around Hains Point, and swung by the Lincoln Memorial to see the refurbished pool for himself. Noticing a chunk of the new "American flag blue" liner that had partially detached from the bottom, he reached into the water to feel it. Moments later, as he was getting ready to leave, officers put him in handcuffs.

"I didn't vandalize anything," Hearn told the paper. "I didn't destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs."

The footage that fueled the arrest came from conservative journalist Emily Miller, who posted video online and claimed Hearn had grabbed a hose used by cleanup crews. Hearn said he only reached for the loose sealant. Either way, the charge is a misdemeanor, not the felony-grade "destruction of National Monuments" the president invoked, and it carries nothing resembling the "years in jail" he promised.

We will report on additional details if more evidence surfaces.

Trump's Reflecting Pool sabotage claim falls apart: 'Brain is filled with tapioca'

David McAfee
June 20, 2026 

RAW STORY


National Park Service workers use skimmers to clean algae from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool following the completion of recent renovations in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 15, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

President Donald Trump reportedly spent nearly $15 million painting the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue. When the water turned green and the new paint started peeling off, he reached for the explanation he always reaches for: someone did this to him on purpose.

In a late-night Truth Social post Friday, Trump wrote that "we've had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool," and said law enforcement was "actively investigating." He provided no evidence. He claimed the algae was "75% gone," insisted the damaged section was small and would be fixed early the following week, and pinned the supposed sabotage on "radical left lunatics" and what he called "Dumocats." He tied it all to the numbers "8647" that had been scratched into the grass on the National Mall days earlier, slang widely read as a call to get rid of the 47th president.

CNN reported the claim Friday, noting the administration had been scrambling to fix the pool's deterioration just days after Trump's pricey renovation. The story landed about as well as the paint job.

Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman turned full-time Trump critic, was blunt. "Has Trump ever admitted failure once? He's now claiming sabotage on the reflective pool," Kinzinger wrote, before delivering the line that turned his post into a viral hit with more than 9,000 likes: "His brain is filled with tapioca and raisins."

The account YourAnonNews, affiliated with the Anonymous collective, offered a far more grounded theory than the president's. "No one vandalized the Reflection Pool," the account wrote, alleging that Trump "just hired a no bid contractor that never did this kind of work before as a favor to the owner of the company who Trump also pardoned."

Amanda Carpenter, the former Republican speechwriter and Bulwark writer, took the sarcastic route. Replying to CNN's report, she wrote: "Yes... someone sprayed blue paint all over it." The blue paint, of course, was Trump's own, applied during the renovation he ordered.

Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer, skipped the jokes entirely. "This pathetic person hides its staggering incompetence by endless claims of victimhood. It's never their fault, it's always 'the others'. Can't fix a pool? It's a conspiracy!" Skinner wrote. "America, he's not the victim. We are. Of his incompetence & our choices. So reject this pathetic person."

The actual record does not flatter the president's story. The renovation was initially pitched at roughly $1.8 million and ballooned to about $14.7 million, according to a contract summary of the Interior Department's award to Atlantic Industrial Coatings. The basin was repainted "American flag blue" ahead of the country's 250th anniversary, then promptly bloomed into a murky green. Interior officials attributed the algae to residual buildup after supply lines sat dormant for weeks. Scientists pointed to the obvious: a shallow, sunny, stagnant pool in summer heat is a near-perfect algae habitat, and a fresh renovation can stir up nutrients that speed the bloom along.

For good measure, Trump also blamed ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl for the negative coverage. He named no vandals, produced no evidence of chemicals, and identified no suspects. What he did produce was a green pool, a peeling paint job, a $15 million bill, and a chorus of people pointing out that the only person who painted the Reflecting Pool blue was him.

Evidence shows Trump admin caused Reflecting Pool damage it blamed on sabotage: ex-insider

David McAfee
June 20, 2026 

RAW STORY



An ex-GOP lawmaker has heard enough about phantom left-wing saboteurs at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and he is pointing at the only suspects who fit the evidence: the people Trump hired to clean it.

In a series of posts and a new video, former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger dismantled the administration's vandalism narrative by accepting one piece of it. Yes, he conceded, chemicals were used on the pool. The catch is who used them and why. "Just for those who are saying there was chemical sabotage to peel the paint in the reflective pool, you're right," Kinzinger wrote. "It's just, you guys did it to kill the algae."

His central claim cuts straight through the conspiracy theory. "The Trump administration dumped hydrogen peroxide to kill the algae and it stripped the paint," he said in the video, adding bluntly in a follow-up that "it was literally the people who painted it. They poured peroxide in it." In other words, the corrosive chemicals Trump blamed on radical leftists were the cleanup crew's own attempt to rescue a basin that had turned green within days of its multimillion-dollar makeover.

Kinzinger backed the point with a quick search result showing that highly concentrated, industrial-grade hydrogen peroxide acts as a strong oxidizer capable of breaking down the binder in paint and causing it to bubble and peel. That is the same outcome now floating across the surface of the pool, which the president has described instead as a deliberate "knife or blade" attack and a "250 foot long gash" carved into a national monument.

The contrast with how some Trump allies want to treat the matter is stark. Kinzinger was responding in part to commentator Jeff Storobinsky, who suggested that anyone "causing damage at the reflecting pool should face the same consequences of those who stormed the Capitol on 1.6." Kinzinger's reply amounts to a warning that such a standard would land on the administration itself, since by his account the damage was self-inflicted maintenance, not an assault by outsiders.

His broader frustration was with a movement he says cannot tolerate the idea that its leader made a mistake. They are "unable to see a flaw in their God king," Kinzinger wrote Saturday, choosing an elaborate sabotage story over the simpler truth that a rushed, overpriced renovation failed on its own. The peeling paint, in his telling, is not evidence of a crime. It is evidence of a cover story falling apart in real time.

The DC swamp is now drowning Trump

Nick Anderson.

 Raw Story
June 19, 2026 


Nick Anderson/Raw Story

Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.

Elon Musk and the Politics of Trillionaire Fascism

Henry Giroux

 June 19, 2026

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Musk giving a Roman (fascist) salute at the second inauguration of Donald Trump before saying “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” Public Domain.

You can’t have capitalism without racism.

–Malcolm X

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump.  As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?

 In this case, the world’s richest man played a crucial role in closing and slashing aid for the U.S. humanitarian assistance agency (USAID). To be sure, USAID embodied the contradictions of American power. While it funded vital global health and humanitarian programs, it also functioned as an instrument of U.S. soft power, advancing development agendas and political arrangements often aligned with American geopolitical and economic interests. Its history reminds us that humanitarianism under capitalism has frequently been entangled with empire, shaped as much by the imperatives of power and profit as by the demands of justice and human need. Yet acknowledging these contradictions does not diminish the catastrophic consequences of dismantling the agency. The consequences have been almost unimaginable. Becky Ferreira states that:

According to monitoring models, the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, 500,000 of which are children, while the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026….[In addition], after USAID closed, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of conflict, and the lethality of conflict, in nearly a thousand administrative regions across Africa.

 Yet the mythology surrounding Musk erases these social foundations. The self-made billionaire is transformed into a heroic figure, while the workers, public investments, and democratic institutions that made his fortune possible disappear from view. Jenni Krithara is right in stating that “Elon Musk has become a symbol of success! In reality, however, he is nothing more than a symbol of inequality and exploitation. No billionaire created the wealth he possesses alone. Behind every corporate empire are workers, public infrastructure, universities, research programs, natural resources and entire societies.”

At the same time, Musk’s ascent reveals the power of a culture and public pedagogy that normalizes and celebrates massive inequities in wealth and power. In a society saturated by myths of entrepreneurial genius and limitless success, extreme concentrations of wealth and power are legitimated as objects of admiration rather than outrage. The scandal is not simply that one person can possess more wealth than entire nations while millions struggle to survive and are relegated to life-threatening poverty and lack of adequate health care.

As Thomas Piketty makes clear in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, people are taught to view the grotesque imbalance and staggering levels of inequality and power as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. At work here is a politics that normalizes economic injustice, while depoliticizing any attempt to analyze it and hold a system and individuals responsible for propagating it. It is hardly surprising that Musk regards empathy as a threat to the authoritarian ethic of white Christian nationalism and treats free speech as a disposable principle, useful only when it serves the interests of power.

Under these conditions, inequality becomes a spectacle sustained by a lethal public pedagogy in which exploitation is rebranded as achievement and democracy itself is endangered as economic power increasingly shapes politics, public discourse, and everyday life. The media’s celebration of Musk’s wealth is not innocent reportage. It teaches people to admire concentrations of wealth that earlier generations would have regarded as obscene. It transforms plutocracy into aspiration and dispossession into a private failing rather than a public injustice. Under such conditions, private issues rooted in a celebrity discourse are severed from the broader systems of power and inequality that produce them. To understand Musk’s appeal, however, requires examining the spectacle through which his power is organized and legitimized.

Spectacle in the age of Musk no longer functions simply as distraction. It has become a mode of governance. Musk understands that power today depends less upon persuading people than upon occupying the circuits of attention through which people experience reality itself. The billionaire is no longer merely an owner of capital. He is an engineer of attention, a curator of affect, and an architect of the public imagination.

What Debord once called the society of the spectacle has entered a new phase. Spectacle is no longer confined to television screens, political rallies, or advertising campaigns. It is now embedded in algorithms that organize desire, shape perception, and reward outrage. In Musk’s universe, visibility itself becomes power. Every provocation, conspiracy theory, racist insinuation, or theatrical gesture feeds an economy of attention in which shock displaces thought and notoriety becomes indistinguishable from authority.

The spectacle no longer hides domination. It glamorizes it. Wealth appears as genius, cruelty as authenticity, and the dismantling of democratic institutions as evidence of courage. Politics becomes performance while the public sphere collapses into a marketplace of emotions organized around fear, resentment, and manufactured grievance.

Yet Musk’s wealth is inseparable from the politics it enables. Economic power at this scale does not merely influence public life; it reshapes the very conditions under which democracy can survive. Musk’s politics intensify these dangers.He has used his immense wealth and control over digital platforms to amplify conspiracy theories, attack democratic institutions, and lend support to far-right and nationalist movements in the United States and abroad. He has embraced the language of racial panic, amplified antisemitic and white nationalist narratives, promoted accounts trafficking in racist conspiracy theories, and used X to normalize forms of hatred once relegated to the political margins. Wealth at this scale is not simply economic. It is political, cultural, and pedagogical. It shapes public consciousness while insulating itself from democratic accountability.

Musk represents something historically new: the fusion of celebrity culture, algorithmic power, and authoritarian politics into a single figure whose influence extends across nations and institutions. He is not simply a capitalist with political opinions. He is a spectacle unto himself, a brand organized around excess, provocation, and the performance of transgression. The appeal of such figures cannot be understood through economics alone. It must also be understood aesthetically.

Susan Sontag once argued that fascist aesthetics transforms politics into an intoxicating drama of style, ritual, and emotional intensity. The attraction lies less in ideas than in sensations: the thrill of power, the seduction of force, the glamour of transgression. Musk updates this tradition for the digital age. He stages himself as the outlaw billionaire, the rebellious genius unconstrained by norms, laws, or democratic accountability. What he offers his followers is not merely a politics but an affective experience: the pleasure of belonging to a movement that mistakes cruelty for courage and domination for freedom.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

Musk’s rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite. He despises the social contract because it places obligations on wealth and imposes democratic limits on power. As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, in its place, Musk advances a far-right vision that fuses state power with technological control, elevates algorithmic governance over democratic accountability, and normalizes racialized exclusion as a principle of social order. Musk’s political project promises freedom while producing new forms of dependence, claiming to democratize technology even as it concentrates unprecedented power in private hands.

Will Bunch is right in stating that Musk has transformed X into a global amplifier for racial resentment and white nationalist politics. Under the guise of defending “free speech,” he has repeatedly elevated far-right influencers, reinstated accounts banned for hate speech, and promoted narratives that depict immigrants and racial minorities as existential threats to Western civilization. Just before the Belfast anti-immigrant riots in 2026, Musk amplified calls by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson for people to “hit the streets,” adding his own exhortation: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” The consequences were immediate and terrifying: attacks on immigrant communities, immigrant addresses posted online and  homes set ablaze, and an online culture of racial hatred legitimated and endorsed by the world’s richest man.

Zadie Smith has observed that the propaganda machinery of fascism once relied on posters, radios, and megaphones, crude instruments compared to what Elon Musk now commands. The comparison is instructive. The danger today lies not simply in extremist messages but in the infrastructures that circulate them. Algorithms reward outrage, synchronize emotions, and impose forms of conformity that often operate invisibly. The propaganda machine no longer shouts at citizens from a distance. It lives in their pockets, curates their desires, and quietly organizes their fears.

Musk presides over precisely such a machinery. X functions not simply as a platform for communication but as an apparatus for manufacturing attention, resentment, and ideological belonging. The result is a culture in which people increasingly surrender the burdens of judgment and critical thought to the emotional rhythms of the feed. Spectacle becomes a form of social organization, teaching individuals to react rather than reflect and to experience political life as an endless theater of outrage and enemies.

X is no longer merely a communication network. It has become an infrastructure of authoritarian politics, normalizing racism, rewarding outrage, and converting white grievance into a global spectacle of resentment and cruelty. The richest man on the planet has become one of the chief architects of a politics of white victimhood, one in which white people are perpetually under siege by dangerous invaders who happen to be Black, Brown, and immigrants. How else to explain his barrage of racist posts and conspiratorial rhetoric, along with his support for far-right anti-immigrant movements such as Restore Britain?

X has become one of the most powerful pedagogical apparatuses of the digital age, teaching millions to equate cruelty with courage, racial hierarchy with common sense, and hatred with truth. What is marketed as free speech increasingly operates as a machinery of authoritarian desire that erodes the civic and ethical foundations of democratic life. The symbolism surrounding Musk has become increasingly ominous. After making a gesture at a political rally that was widely condemned as echoing a Nazi salute, Musk responded to the ensuing criticism with mockery rather than reflection. The episode was revealing because it exposed an authoritarian politics in which provocation becomes spectacle, cruelty becomes a public virtue, and historical amnesia becomes a precondition for making fascist ideas appear ordinary, even commonsensical. Fascism rarely begins with concentration camps or military coups. It begins with the normalization of contempt, the trivialization of violence, and the celebration of power unmoored from ethical responsibility.

Musk’s growing influence has become a warning sign of a new form of oligarchic rule in which immense wealth, technological power, and political influence converge to hollow out democratic life from within. The danger lies not only in his embrace of far-right movements and authoritarian figures abroad, but in the extraordinary capacity of a single billionaire to distort public debate, destabilize democratic institutions, and shape political life across national borders. Musk is not the real issue. He is the symptom. The larger question is whether any vestige of democracy can survive when private wealth acquires such immense power over the institutions and cultures that sustain public life.

The spectacle of the world’s richest man accumulating unimaginable wealth while endorsing politics that deepen social divisions and undermine democratic norms exposes the moral bankruptcy of a gangster capitalism that rewards accumulation while abandoning social responsibility. Trillionaire politics is not simply the concentration of wealth. It is the concentration of power, influence, and the capacity to shape the stories societies tell about themselves.

The gravest danger is not Musk himself but the culture that celebrates him. Citizens are increasingly schooled to applaud the very forces that diminish their agency and erode their social protections. They are encouraged to admire those who dominate them, to mistake cruelty for strength, and to equate democracy with the freedom of billionaires to exercise unchecked power. Trillionaire politics is the end point of a society inhabited by what might be called the walking dead: citizens politically numbed and morally anesthetized, taught to applaud their own dispossession, embrace loneliness as freedom, and accept misery as the price of greatness.

The first trillionaire is not a monument to human achievement. He is an indictment of a corrupt social order that mistakes accumulation for greatness, toxic masculinity for leadership, and domination for success.  Is it any wonder that Musk views empathy as a weakness and free speech as a disposable principle? Both stand in the way of the politics of cruelty, white nationalism, and unchecked power he increasingly champions.

 Musk is the product of a culture that worships wealth, mistakes spectacle for truth, and increasingly confuses domination with freedom. He represents the emergence of a new authoritarian formation in which capitalism, digital technologies, and fascist sensibilities converge in unprecedented ways. He is the avatar of a techno-fascist order, an updated form of neoliberal gangster capitalism in which state power, digital technologies, and oligarchic wealth converge to erode democratic institutions and remake society in the interests of a predatory elite.

The danger he poses lies not only in the policies he supports or the movements he amplifies. It lies in the world he helps create: a world in which algorithms replace judgment, cruelty becomes entertainment, racism is repackaged as realism, and democracy is hollowed out by spectacles of resentment and manufactured consent.

If Trump embodies the theatrical politics of authoritarianism, Musk represents its technological future. He is the engineer of a new machinery of spectacle, one capable of shaping consciousness on a planetary scale. In this sense, Musk is not simply the world’s richest man. He is among the most powerful public pedagogues of the twenty-first century, educating millions in the pleasures of unfreedom and the aesthetics of authoritarian desire.

Musk is not an exception to our time. He is the most visible symptom of a society in which cruelty is celebrated as strength, democracy is hollowed out by oligarchic power, and freedom is reduced to the prerogatives of the rich. This is more than a failed society. It is capitalism stripped of its myths and revealed in all of its gangster, authoritarian, and fascist impulses.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Musk is a Trillionaire and Wealth Concentration in the U.S. Remains Solidly Entrenched

Rick Baum

 June 19, 2026

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Image by Maciej Ruminkiewicz.

“A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.” New York Times June 13, 2026

I have written many articles published by Counterpunch on the way wealth is distributed in the United States showing how wealth concentration generally keeps growing and is so wrong and disturbing. Marxists would explain that the accumulation of capital has the tendency to give rise to the centralization and concentration of capital. That has certainly been the case with the wealth holdings of individuals as revealed by the Blooomberg Billionaires Index that is recalculated daily and the Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 put out by the Federal Reserve Board covering the changes from one yearly quarter to the next.

The tendency has been one of growing wealth concentration, though there have been periods of setbacks, something inevitable given the instability of capitalism with its periods of rapid growth followed by slow or negative growth. However, those periods of declines in wealth concentration have been followed by the wealthiest holding an even greater share of the country’s total wealth.

For example, according to the Federal Reserve Board figures, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest .1% reached a new high of 11.9% in the third quarter of 2007 prior to the great recession. It declined to 10.3% in the first quarter of 2009. By the second quarter of 2015, it had reached a new high of 12.7%.

After falling to 11.7% in the first quarter of 2020 (that marked the onset of Covid), as of the last quarter of 2025, it reached an even greater new all-time high of 14.5%.

The wealthiest of the wealthy have experienced a more rapid rate of growth than the rest of their colleagues in the .1%. The Fed figures show that the nominal wealth of the .1%, that includes the wealthiest ten, has increased over 14 times from $1.81 trillion in 1990 to $25.47 trillion at the end of 2025. By contrast, using the Forbes billionaires list for 1990 and 2026, the wealthiest 10 (whose membership, with the exception of Buffett, has changed) have seen their wealth increase from $25.92 billion to $2.561 trillion, growing over 98 times in 36 years.

Wealth of the Wealthiest Compared to the Poorest 50%

The gap between the wealthiest .1% and the poorest 50%, almost all of whom belong to the working class, has been increasing since the Federal Reserve Board started putting together its tables on household wealth. According to the Fed, at the beginning of 1990, the wealth of the wealthiest .1% of the population stood at $1.81 trillion while that of the poorest 50% was $.71 trillion making the wealth of the .1% more than 2.5 times as great. At the end of 2025, the wealth of the .1% was $25.47 trillion while that of the poorest 50% came to $4.31 trillion resulting in the wealth of the .1% being almost six times as great as that of the poorest 50%.

Using the June 12, 2026, Bloomberg figures, the wealth ($4.32 trillion) of the 24 wealthiest U.S. citizens surpassed the wealth determined by the Federal Reserve Board at the end of 2025 held by the poorest 50% of the population ($4.31 trillion). 24 people alone are wealthier than some 170 million people in what is often described as the richest country in the world!

Utilizing the Federal Reserve Board figures, at the end of 2025, the average wealth of one among the poorest 50% is around $25,000 while that of one in the .1% is almost $75 million, or about 3,000 times as great.

+++

In January of 2022, I wrote an article in which I asked:

“How many seats need to be on a rocket ship to carry people worth a trillion dollars? An answer to this question will change over time, perhaps soon requiring only one seat if Musk continues to accumulate wealth at the same rate as he has done during the last two years.”

As of June 12, 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, only one seat would now be needed to hold Elon Musk, whose wealth has been put at $1.11 trillion after increasing $490 billion since the beginning of 2026 which is an amount that is greater than the total holdings of anyone else. (Many may now hope that Musk soon gets on a rocket ship and abandons the earth for good.)

Were Musk’s wealth distributed equally to the U.S. population of approximately 340 million, each person would receive over $3,200.

The size of Musk’s wealth of $1.11 trillion can be restated as $1,110 billion or $1,110,000 million. To describe his level of wealth as ridiculously and disgustingly obscene is a gross understatement of its wretchedness.

Much of the growth in Musk’s wealth has come in the form of an increase in the value of his stock holdings on which he has never paid taxes unless he has sold some of it for a gain. By contrast, homeowners often pay a hefty yearly property (wealth) tax on the value of their homes, even if much of the value on which they pay taxes consists of mortgage debt owed on their homes.

In the above 2022 article cited, I went on to write on the decreasing number of seats on a rocket ship required to hold people worth a trillion.

“Great progress has been made in reducing the number of needed seats. Using the Bloomberg figures, in the beginning of 2020, 16 seats were required. At the beginning of 2021, the number needed had declined to 9. The “good news” is that as of the end of 2022, the number has been further reduced to only 7. That represents more than a 50% reduction in just two years–an impressive rate of progress.”

Using the June 12, 2026, Bloomberg Billionaires Index figures, a rocket with enough seats provided for people worth $1 trillion would now require just one seat for Musk. A second rocket holding people worth one trillion would need four seats for Page (total net worth $306B), Brin ($285B), rocket man Bezos ($260B), and Ellison ($238B). A third rocket would need only six seats for Dell ($213B), Zuckerberg ($202B). Huang ($170B), two Waltons ($148B and $145B), and Buffet ($146B).

While sixteen seats were needed on one rocket in 2020 to hold people worth a trillion, eleven seats are needed on three separate rockets to hold people worth over $3 trillion. And a fourth rocket holding U.S. citizens worth a trillion would need only eleven seats! What progress?

Reducing Wealth Inequality

Should a healthy society allow any individual to accumulate one billion or even one hundred million dollars while others must endure inadequate food, housing, and health care, and can’t afford to provide for the needs of their children? Does any individual need the quantity of money now held by the super wealthy? If your answer is no, then confiscatory policies need to be enacted to use the wealth seized to benefit and fill the needs of the majority of the population. Mild wealth taxes of 1-5%/year will likely have an inadequate impact on reducing inequality since the yearly increase in the wealth of the wealthiest has often been greater than the proposed size of the tax.

Update: The June 17 Bloomberg Billionaires Index now places Musk’s wealth at $1.26 trillion which is over $900 billion more than the second wealthiest individual, Larry Page whose wealth is $310 billion. Musk’s level of wealth is greater than the combined wealth ($1.096 trillion) of the next four wealthiest individuals in the world.

Rick Baum teaches Political Science at City College of San Francisco. He is a member of AFT 2121.

Wealth and the Political Power of Billionaires

Dean Baker

June 19, 2026

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Oracle’s billionaire owner Larry Ellison meeting with Mike Pompeo. Photo: State Department.

Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar payday from the IPO of SpaceX has hugely amplified the public’s focus on extreme wealth inequality. Musk’s economic and political power is certainly something to be concerned about, but wealth can be a misleading focus.

I have raised this point before; wealth can be a misleading measure on both ends. As far as bringing down the wealth at the top, I welcome taxes, if they can be made effective, but the most likely way that the wealth of folks like Musk will be brought closer to earth is with a collapse of the AI bubble.

I look forward to the collapse, and the sooner the better, but I’m not sure everyone will be celebrating the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth by America’s billionaires and trillionaires when it happens. Just speaking from experience, very few celebrated the elimination, or at least downsizing, of many great fortunes when the tech or housing bubbles collapsed.

Of course, many non-rich families will also be hit. In the 1990s tech bubble, this meant a huge whack to people’s retirement accounts. In the collapse of the housing bubble, millions lost their homes. In both cases, we got recessions and a big rise in unemployment. It is understandable that people may not have been celebrating, even though there was a huge reduction in wealth inequality.

Individual Wealth and the Welfare State are Alternatives 

On the other side, while it might be nice to see most households with a stash of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, it strikes me as better to ensure that they have access to the necessities of life. Some people have been wrongly led to believe that these necessities require wealth. That is not true.

People might feel they need to own a home to have decent and secure housing. They need wealth to pay for their retirement or their kids’ education, and to cover their medical bills. But wealth is only necessary insofar as we don’t have an institutional structure to meet these needs without wealth.

In the case of housing, other countries and New York City have laws that provide for strong tenants’ rights. These laws typically limit rent increases and provide security of tenure so that landlords can’t just throw out a tenant arbitrarily. As a result, many middle-class people, or even upper-middle-class people rent, rather than own. It’s only necessary to have homeownership as a route to secure housing in places where tenant protections are weak or non-existent.

It’s a similar story with the other uses of wealth. If a country has a strong Social Security system and/or a strong system of employment-based pensions, people don’t need to accumulate substantial wealth to have a secure retirement. Wealth is only needed where these institutions fail or do not exist.

In most wealthy countries, most of the cost of health care is borne by the government. This means that people do not need to have substantial funds in reserve to cover unexpected expenses. The same is true of college and professional education. In other countries, the expense is mostly covered by the government. For this reason, people don’t have to save to pay for their kids’ education.

The Pursuit of Wealth for the Masses Has a Real Economic and Political Cost

If the question is just whether we would be a better country if everyone had $100K sitting in the bank, the answer is yes. But the world doesn’t work like that.

For people to accumulate their $100K or $500K or whatever we consider a reasonable sum for a typical family, they have to invest in stocks, mutual funds, or other assets. This costs money. An average fund would have administrative costs in the neighborhood of 1.0 percent. By contrast, Social Security has administrative costs of 0.4 percent of annual payouts.

But that comparison hugely understates the superiority of Social Security. The 1.0 percent fee applies to a stock of money. The 0.4 percent administrative cost refers to the annual flow of benefits. If an average dollar sits in a mutual fund for 20 years, the cost would be 20 percent of the accumulation, or 50 times the cost of Social Security.

From an economic standpoint, this is pure waste. We can provide the service —whether it be a pension, paying for health care, or whatever — without handing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the financial industry. It’s also worth noting that the financial industry itself is a major source of big fortunes and inequality, so downsizing it is one step toward reducing inequality.

The political side of this equation is straightforward. Wealth accumulation is an individual activity, where some will do better than others. To some extent, that could be skill, where people get wealth by choosing smart investments. It also will inevitably involve a large element of luck, where some people get on the right end of a trend or event, and others end up on the wrong side.

Regardless of the cause, the winners in the wealth contest will be more likely to side with the millionaires, billionaires, and trillionaires in demanding low taxes on the rich and subsidies for their businesses. They will also be less likely to support public programs like Social Security, Medicare, and public education.

For these reasons, the pursuit of mass wealth should never be a priority for progressives. We need to focus on having a high level of public services. If we have ensured everyone decent healthcare, pensions, education, and housing, and we still have $100K left over to send to every family, that would be great. But until we get to that point, the focus on mass wealth is misguided.

Wealth and the Political Power of Billionaires

People are entirely right to complain that ridiculously wealthy buffoons like Elon Musk have enormous political power. However, reducing their wealth through various tax schemes is not likely to address the problem.

To see this point, take your most optimistic scenario. Suppose we manage to tax away 30,40, or even 50 percent of their wealth. Elon Musk, with $500 billon, still has way too much money to affect elections, as do Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg with over $100 billion each. There simply is not a plausible story where we can take away enough of the wealth of the very rich to neutralize their outsized power in politics. (We should restructure the economy so it doesn’t make these people so rich in the first place. That would be the best way to address the problem.)

Also, it is silly to imagine that we will correct the power imbalance with campaign finance reform. Political ads do not have a unique ability to affect votes. If right-wing rich people can buy the media, as in Fox News and now CBS, and possibly CNN, they will control what we see between the political ads. They also own X and TikTok. This is likely to have more influence than whatever they could hope to buy with their ads.

The more plausible route is to take measures that ensure the non-rich have a voice. These measures include policies like the super-match (8 to 1) for small contributions that New York City has for its elections or the democracy vouchers to finance local campaigns in Seattle.

We also need to democratize the media. A system of media vouchers, giving each person a sum to support the news outlets of their choice, would go far in this direction. Also, it is still possible to prevent some of the consolidation of media in the hands of the far-right with antitrust law. And we need to revise Section 230 along the lines that the European Union has done, to prevent Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg from wholesaling lies with impunity.

The Rich Do Have Too Much Political Power, But We Won’t Fix That with a Wealth Tax

As a friend long ago cautioned, we don’t have many bites at the apple; make sure they are good ones. It is important to approach policy with clear eyes, so we can ensure our actions are directed in a way that makes a difference. I would argue that much of the focus on wealth inequality has been misdirected. The rich do have far too much political power, but we will have to go far beyond a wealth tax to correct this problem.

Most importantly, we need to focus on mechanisms for increasing the power of the masses. They do exist.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

Europe's ultra-rich: Which countries are adding the most $30m+ millionaires?

Copyright AXEL SEIDEMANN/AP2001

By Servet Yanatma

Published on 19/06/2026 - EURONEWS

Europe's ultra-rich population has surged by a quarter over the past five years. On average, more than 20 people join the continent's $30m+ wealth club every day, while 89 people worldwide cross the $30 million wealth threshold daily.

Wealth inequality across and within Europe remains stark, as shown by several indicators. According to the European Central Bank's latest report, published in 2023, the median net wealth of households in the euro area stood at €123,500. However, this ranged from just €2,000 for the bottom 20% of the population to €1.01 million for the top 20%.

At the same time, the ranks of the ultra-rich are growing rapidly across the continent. The number of people with at least $30 million (€25.7m) in wealth rose by 26% over the past five years. Knight Frank's Wealth Report 2026 classifies them as ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs).

Their number increased from 146,525 in 2021 to 183,953 in 2026.

Over the five-year period, 37,428 people joined this exclusive group. That translates into an average increase of 7,486 members a year, or roughly 20.5 new entrants every day across Europe.

In Germany, five people join the ultra-rich every day

Germany has the highest daily increase in the number of people joining the $30m+ wealth club in Europe.

The number of UHNWIs in the country rose from 28,942 in 2021 to 38,215 in 2026, an increase of 9,273 over five years.

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In other words, every day, five people in Germany cross the $30 million wealth threshold on average. Of course, they do not accumulate that wealth in a single day; rather, their assets gradually grow until they pass the benchmark.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, ranks third globally by GDP, after the US and China, according to the IMF.

In Switzerland, the number of ultra-rich individuals has increased by the equivalent of 2.7 people a day. Over the past five years, their number has grown by 4,968, bringing the total to 17,692.

France adds two new members every day

Between 2021 and 2026, France added an average of 2.1 new members to its $30m+ wealth club each day. The country's UHNWI population increased by 3,781 to reach 21,518.

Other major European economies follow closely behind. The daily increase stands at 1.6 in both the UK and Italy, followed by Spain at 1.5. In Turkey, the figure is 1.1.

Of these seven countries, five are among Europe's largest economies. Switzerland and Turkey are the only other countries in the region where the number of people with at least $30 million in wealth rises by at least one person a day on average.

The daily increase is 0.9 in Poland, 0.5 in both Czechia and Austria, 0.4 in Denmark and Portugal, and 0.3 in the Netherlands, Ireland and Sweden.

Every 90 minutes, a person joins the ultra-rich in the US

The US is home to by far the largest number of people with at least $30 million in wealth, with 251,352 UHNWIs in 2026. China ranks second with 121,677.

In the US, an average of 36.7 people join the $30m+ wealth club every day — roughly one new member every 90 minutes.

China adds around 12.5 new members a day. Germany ranks third globally, while India (4.2) and Australia (2.2) are the only other non-European countries in the global top 10.

Worldwide, the number of UHNWIs increased by 162,191 between 2021 and 2026, equivalent to 89 new members every day. This brought the global total to 713,626.

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“We are witnessing one of the most significant shifts in global wealth distribution in modern history," Liam Bailey, global head of research at Knight Frank, said. "The US remains the dominant engine, but we are also seeing rising strength from India and a cohort of fast-maturing economies that are now shaping the global landscape."

As of 2026, Germany is home to the largest number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) in Europe, at 38,215, followed by the UK (27,876) and France (21,518).

The average wealth per adult also varied widely across Europe, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 and additional data shared with Euronews. In 2024, it ranged from €29,923 in Turkey to €634,584 in Switzerland across 31 European countries.