Chicago mayor sees Pope Leo XIV as key ally on social justice, migration after Vatican meeting

ROME (AP) — The mayor said it was comforting to know that someone who comes from the city of Chicago "can speak to justice” and defend “the most vulnerable among us.”

Andrea Rosa and Giada Zampano
June 1, 2026 

ROME (AP) — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson cast Pope Leo XIV as a powerful global ally on social justice, migration and reparations after meeting the Chicago-born pontiff at the Vatican, saying their shared roots and priorities could help amplify efforts to protect vulnerable communities.

“As the mayor of Chicago, we are incredibly elated and proud of him,” Johnson told The Associated Press in an interview Friday, a day after meeting the American pope in a private audience.

The mayor said it was comforting to know that someone who comes from the city of Chicago “can speak to justice” and defend “the most vulnerable among us.”

Johnson, a first-term progressive Democrat leading the third-largest U.S. city, traveled to Rome with a delegation of some 50 local officials, drawing strong media interest. He is a leading critic of U.S. President Donald Trump and has applauded Leo for pushing back against the war in Iran and Trump administration immigration policies.

Johnson said he used the meeting to thank the pope “for his courage and his strength and particularly his moral stance,” framing the encounter as a convergence of civic leadership and moral authority.

He noted the meeting underscored areas of alignment between Chicago’s policy agenda and the pope’s emphasis on social justice, particularly on the legacy of slavery and the treatment of migrants.

Johnson said the pontiff’s apology for the Catholic Church’s role in slavery reinforced his administration’s push for reparations, including efforts to fund a task force examining the lasting impact on Black Americans.

“The fact that the pope made a very clear declaration apologizing for the church’s role in slavery … is an affirmation to the work that we’re doing,” he said.

Johnson stressed the visit reflects an effort to position Chicago within a broader international push for human rights, with the pope’s global influence lending weight to the city’s agenda on justice, migration and reparative policies — and potentially extending that message well beyond the U.S.

Focus on migrants’ conditions amid US crackdown

Migration was also central to their discussion. Johnson said Pope Leo asked directly about conditions in Chicago following a broader U.S. immigration crackdown and efforts to deport migrants.

“He wanted to know the conditions on the ground in Chicago … how we were responding,” Johnson said, adding the pontiff was aware of “the mass effort to deport immigrants from the city of Chicago and really around the country.”

Johnson described outlining the city’s response to migrants facing fear and uncertainty, including rapid-response efforts to ensure families had access to schools and basic necessities. He also highlighted executive actions intended to shield migrants, saying Chicago’s approach has been adopted by other municipalities.

Johnson framed the meeting as the beginning of broader cooperation between city government and the Vatican. “We talked about how his pulpit and my pen can come together to protect all of humanity,” he said, referencing both descendants of enslaved people and immigrant communities.

The mayor also emphasized the shared Chicago background, saying the city’s history of activism makes it “uniquely positioned for this moment.” On Thursday, he marked the visit by presenting Leo with a key to the city and inviting him to celebrate Mass in Chicago’s Grant Park.

It’s at least the second official invitation that Leo has received to visit the United States. U.S. Vice President JD Vance invited Leo soon after he became pope last May.



___

Associated Press writer Silvia Stellacci in Rome contributed to this report.

Op-Ed

Trump’s Violent Memes Expose Long-Simmering Truths About US Imperialism

Trump’s white nationalist revanchism is on display as he turns state violence into entertainment.

By Michelle Chen ,

Truthout

May 31, 2026

It seemed on brand for our meme-obsessed President that the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury with an epic video mashup. While Trump never bothered to articulate a real justification for waging war on Iran, he gestured toward a righteous mission with a montage of dramatic violent scenes, featuring heroic and antiheroic characters from Braveheart to Walter White of “Breaking Bad,” spliced like a Hollywood trailer under a banner proclaiming “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The cinematic celebration of American “justice” came about a week after about 155 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a school in Minab, in a spate of bombings aimed at schools and hospitals across Iran.

The valorization of military power as a force of justice has always colored the nation’s imperial imaginary. Around 130 years ago, Puck magazine promoted the Spanish-American War to readers with “The Cuban Melodrama,” a cartoon depicting a gallant Uncle Sam in a feathered cap and star-print pantaloons shielding a damsel in distress with a pro-U.S.-annexation flag emblazoned on her hip, while her swarthy Spanish colonial master scowled behind a bandit’s cloak. People in the U.S. continue to see Cuba through media spectacle, detached from the reality of the war back then, and from the cruel U.S. economic siege of the island now. The White House has fired off many such spectacles to glorify or sanitize U.S. and Israeli military operations, including an action-movie–style video depicting the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a grotesquely surreal AI-slop showcase of a genocide-ravaged Gaza rebranded as Palestine’s Vegas Strip.

The aestheticization of military brutality is not limited to warfare abroad. The administration has posted propaganda videos of immigration raids in Black and Brown communities, lionizing the ferocity with which ICE agents are tearing apart families.

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Trump’s treatment of state violence as entertainment speaks to a longstanding animating force behind U.S. jingoism and militarism: the lust for empire has been as much about projecting dominance as it is about grappling with the U.S.’s internal racial and class tensions and the surrounding infrastructure of oppression.
American Injustice

Trump’s boorish war cheerleading recalls past symbols of U.S. empire as providence, a political and media narrative that lashed the nation’s fate to the expansion of slavery, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands under the halo of “Manifest Destiny.” It also evokes the image the nation has long projected as a crusader for “freedom” while imposing its economic and political hegemony abroad. The current warmongering overseas accompanied by domestic anti-immigrant crackdowns represent twin faces of settler colonial violence, both constitutive of the nation’s founding myth: that the U.S.’s destiny is to grow — to expand westward, to open new markets, or, as Trump mused about Venezuela and Iran, to “take the oil.”

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Op-Ed |
War & Peace
Trump Has Made the US War Machine a Spectacle – and It’s Spectacularly Unpopular
Trump has brought the full extent of the war machine out into the open. Let’s channel public anger into organizing.
By Khury Petersen-Smith & Azadeh Shahshahani , Truthout/InTheseTimesMarch 3, 2026

As historian Nikhil Pal Singh noted in a recent talk with fellow historian Greg Grandin (a talk hosted by Democratic Socialists of America Academy in New York City that I helped to organize), Trump’s brand of imperialism departs from the Cold War “liberal” order, which nominally enshrined civil rights and racial equality in a framework of egalitarian, free-market capitalism. Instead, Trump pushes a revanchist, white supremacist ideology that the U.S. is what Singh described as “a nation based upon a particularistic ethno-racial conception of heritage or ancestry.”

Fueling Trump’s neoimperialist adventures, Singh explained, is a drive to “revalorize white supremacy as the basis of U.S. citizenship.” The White House and the MAGA movement have channeled their white nationalist fervor into “a project of mass deportation,” to roll back the whole edifice of civil rights legality” that buttressed the liberal ideal of “a nation of equals.” But in breaking from the veneer of egalitarian democracy, Trump lets the mask slip on the brutality underwriting the American Dream.

While the conventional narrative myth of U.S. society emphasizes inclusive democracy, the ideal of liberal values has always belied a paradox of colonial and imperial oppression. As Grandin explained, “what we think of as liberalism, all the great progressive advances … has all been in many ways achieved through a trade off with empire, with expansion. Andrew Jackson’s extension of suffrage of white men was tied to indigenous dispossession. … During the Cold War, the expansion of civil rights was a tradeoff for support of containment [of Communism].”

The prosperity that came with industrialization and global commerce was premised on the entrenchment of wage capitalism and the exploitation of Black and migrant labor, which in turn paralleled the marginalization and eventual exclusion of “undesirable” foreigners who were deemed biologically and morally deficient. Today, the perception of immigrants, particularly those who are not white or Christian, as dangerous social parasites, is key to the Trump administration’s narrative of “securing” the border. Sidestepping the fact that the U.S. has in many cases exacerbated the “migrant crisis” by political intervention and economic destabilization of countries in the Global South, Trump adviser Stephen Miller warned that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
The Long History of U.S. Nativism

Since the 19th century, the systematic exclusion and criminalization of “aliens” has been integral to the enforcement of the boundaries of whiteness (even though the category derives its power largely from its arbitrariness), giving rise to the security apparatus built along the Southern border, along with restrictive ethnic quotas that privileged white Western Europeans.

The globalization of white nationalism under Trump and other right-wing leaders reflects the enduring concept of “herrenvolk democracy,” (a reference to the Nazi “Master Race” idea) which frames democratic rights as the province of a racial in-group. In politics and culture, historian Cristina Beltrán writes, “herrenvolk democracy was a mass-based, participatory endeavor, reproduced and administered from both above and below.”

Both herrenvolk nativism and imperialism derive from the overarching concept of a nation built on the freedom of some to subjugate others, whether they live down the street or across an ocean. In enforcing the boundaries of empire and the internal social borders of race and class, a pattern of dehumanization through institutionalized violence has spanned the globe, extending from the Black Codes and racial pogroms in the post–Civil War South, to the U.S.’s first colony in Asia a generation later. It was in the Philippine-American War that the modern torture technique of waterboarding was first routinely used by U.S. soldiers on Filipino people before becoming an officially authorized practice in the U.S. “war on terror.” During the U.S. occupation of the archipelago, during which U.S. troops committed many acts of torture and sexual abuse, a soldier wrote that the land “won’t be pacified until the [anti-Black slur] are killed off like Indians.” Invoking an anti-Black slur to refer to Filipinos, he seems subconsciously to grasp that he is fighting a much deeper war, which traces its lineage from the cleansing of North America of its Indigenous inhabitants, to the enslavement of Africans, and to the suppression of so-called “savages” in newly colonized land across the Pacific.

Under Trump, the crusade to bolster U.S. hegemony continues with an added boost of racial panic. The Trump administration is pushing the narrative that white men’s dominion is existentially endangered: the white share of the population is shrinking amid broader demographic shifts, while the U.S.’s superpower status appears to be waning, at least in Trump’s narrative of populist grievance, stoking paranoia about national decline and “white replacement.”

The fusion of authoritarian repression with imperial power dynamics is evident in the chaotic expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a paramilitary-like force. In recruiting some 12,000 new agents, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has lowered training standards systematically, reducing the length of its course for new recruits from 22 weeks to just eight weeks and centering the curriculum on “more tactical and operational drills” rather than studying the immigration laws they are supposed to be enforcing. The barrage of social media posts vilifying immigrants as alleged criminals and flashy videos of vicious ICE raids formed the backdrop to DHS’s claims that the killings of two individuals during protests in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were somehow justified. The brazen aggression, directed in this case at white citizens, suggests that a so-called imperial “boomerang” may be in play, in which the practices of right-wing authoritarian militarism and repression in the Global South, often supported covertly by the U.S., are now mirrored within the homeland.
Anti-Imperialism From Within

Yet the historical resonance of Trump’s domestic and international tyranny points to a history of anti-imperialist, anti-fascist resistance from within. The Black Power and Third World movements of the late 1960s understood the U.S.’s racial hierarchy as an imperial project and oppressed communities as internally colonized peoples.

As the Black radical organizer Kwame Ture (who then went by the name Stokely Carmichael) explained in his 1967 address to the Organization of Latin American Solidarity in Havana, Black power was the domestic battlefront against a white supremacist empire. “Our people are a colony within the United States,” he told the gathering of liberation movement activists from across Latin America. “You are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Black communities in America are the victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation.” But the connective tissue of oppression could also be a source of empowerment, he added, saying:


Black power means that we see ourselves as part of the Third World; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world…. We must, for example, ask ourselves: When Black people in Africa begin to storm Johannesburg, when Latin Americans revolt, what will be the role of the United States and that of African Americans?

What would a movement for democracy and self-determination look like for working-class and oppressed communities in this country? Such a movement might emerge from the grassroots coalitions and ideological connections being forged as communities confront ICE assaults on immigrants and constitutional rights.

The Sunrise Movement, for example, incorporates ICE resistance into a global agenda for environmental and economic justice, connecting the crackdown on immigrants to the fossil fuel industry’s global expansionism. The organization targets a “self-sustaining cycle” in which fossil fuel corporations collaborate with governments to pursue mineral extraction, economic coercion, imperialist expansion abroad, and the corruption of democracy at home. Under the convergence of state and corporate oppression, “extraction drives instability, and enforcement manages the consequences.”

The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Union of America (UE) — which has for years organized cross-border labor solidarity campaigns — has condemned Trump’s assaults on immigrant communities within a broader critique of U.S. foreign policy and trade policy, especially as migration is oftena response to political and economic crises fomented by Washington. In its recent statement calling for a pro-worker foreign policy, the union argued, “The biggest threat to the people of the U.S. is not Iran, China, or military invasions from other countries, but a rapacious military-industrial complex, which fails to provide living-wage jobs, affordable healthcare, education, housing, and necessary social services…. Further, we must recognize our responsibility, as workers in the U.S., to workers elsewhere who are affected by U.S. foreign and military policies.”

What responsibility do denizens of an empire bear toward subjects of neocolonial oppression, whether they are being attacked abroad or exploited at home? Amid the wars raging inside and outside U.S. borders, working-class communities are realizing that the fight against empire starts at home, and the homeland itself must be liberated from the imperial framework behind its myth of liberal democracy. Turning away from brutal spectacles of “Justice the American Way,” we can start to envision a society built not on dominion, but on equity and dignity for all.


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.

Michelle Chen  is a contributing editor at Dissent Magazine, and a contributing writer at The Nation, In These Times and Truthout. She is also a co-producer of the “Asia Pacific Forum” podcast and Dissent Magazine’s “Belabored” podcast, and teaches history at the City University of New York. Follow her on Twitter: @meeshellchen.

Trump 'dementia' claims fly amid 'completely insane' posting spree: 'Nonstop nuttery'

David McAfee
May 30, 2026
RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump reacts while sitting next to the President of Poland Karol Nawrocki during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder


Donald Trump lit up Truth Social on Saturday afternoon with a stream of posts that left onlookers across the political spectrum questioning his state of mind, ranging from a drone port rendering on top of the White House to an AI image of himself appearing to blow his nose on an American flag.

The spree drew immediate reaction from all corners of social media sites. "Trump's Truth Social posting over the last hour or so is completely bats--- insane," independent journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X. "Get a load of this nonstop nuttery."

In a later post, Rupar declared, "Trump’s behavior on social media today is so unhinged even by his standards that I can’t help but wonder what the doctors really told him the other day. This is a deeply unwell person."

Among the posts, Trump shared attacks on judges, criticisms of musical performers who bailed on his event, and a rendering of what he called a "DronePort" on the roof of his proposed White House ballroom. Regarding the latter, Bill Kristol, the veteran Republican commentator, noted the structure would also include a bunker underneath. "It's not just a childish extravagance," Kristol wrote. "It will be a kind of military encampment. All the more reason, obviously, for Congress to stop it."

Trump also posted a meme depicting Rep. Lauren Boebert and several other Republican lawmakers in a vehicle captioned "GET IN LOSER, WE'RE GOING LOSING" — this despite the fact that Boebert had recently pushed for the release of the Epstein files, a cause popular with the MAGA base.

Separately, Trump posted an AI-generated watercolor image of himself clutching the American flag to his face in a pose that critics immediately compared to using it as a tissue.

He also reshared an old post of himself declaring, "I just want to stop the world from killing itself," which prompted the PatriotTakes account to reply: "Says the guy who bombed a girls elementary school."

Political analyst Molly Jong-Fast offered a dry summary: "He's probably fine, right?"

Former Ambassador Dan Shapiro kept it simple: "It's a beautiful day in Washington. Wish he would go outside and touch grass."

Spanish-language commentator Dr. Mario Muñoz offered a blunt diagnosis of the afternoon's activity. "The gentleman with dementia who lives in the White House is bored," he wrote on X, according to a translation.

Melanie D'Arrigo, a progressive activist and former congressional candidate, similarly connected the dots between the posting spree and broader questions about Trump's fitness for office. "When a President is posting insane stuff like this, it really doesn't matter how many dementia tests he passes to tell that he's not mentally fit for office," she wrote.

'Such a baby': Trump ridiculed after 'crash out' over Kennedy Center 'narcissistic injury'

David McAfee
May 30, 2026 

RAW STORY


President Donald Trump points a finger during a meeting with Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney (not pictured) in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 7, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Donald Trump's Saturday Truth Social spiral drew swift mockery from critics across the political spectrum, with a prominent journalist declaring the president was "really crashing out" and a former Republican congressman summing it up in three words.



Trump said Saturday:

"We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name 'TRUMP' despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED."

Aaron Rupar, who has built a large following tracking Trump's online behavior, quoted Trump's lengthy rant calling for a MAGA rally to replace the America 250 concert and his threats that the Kennedy Center would collapse without him. "Holy s---, Trump is really crashing out," Rupar wrote.

Adam Kinzinger, the former Illinois Republican congressman who voted to impeach Trump and has since become one of his most outspoken GOP critics, had a shorter take. Quoting Rupar's post, Kinzinger wrote simply: "Such a baby."

Author Jennifer Erin Valent chimed in, "His notorious self obsession has reached the stage of derangement, and still, no one seems inclined to do a thing about it. The dereliction of duty in our time is truly staggering."

Academic Karen Piper said, "This is called a narcissistic injury."

The posts came as part of a broader meltdown that included Trump unveiling a drone port rendering for the White House roof, posting an AI image of himself appearing to use the American flag as a tissue, calling Republican allies "losers," and demanding that Judge Christopher Cooper be impeached after the jurist ordered Trump's name removed from the Kennedy Center.

Crazy Flows the Don

Matthew Stevenson

 May 29, 2026

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Screengrab from White House video posted to X.

Leaving aside the amen choir in hard-core MAGA circles, is there anyone out there who doesn’t think Donald Trump is bat-shit crazy? How much more evidence is needed before he is gold-chained to the wall of a padded cell?

The midnight tweets of himself as a cartoon action figure are sufficient proof of cognitive disorientation, but at the state level, we have the course of the war in Iran, which, if laid out on a medical chart, would indicate that American foreign policy is being dictated by someone capable of hiding their own Easter eggs.

+++

The war in Iran did not begin after a new Iranian threat or after a congressional resolution; it began as everything does in Trumptopia—with either a billionaire whispering bizarre sweet nothings into Trump’s ear (between DJ sets at Mar-a-Lago) or as a result of a ninety-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was Netanyahu who dog-whispered Trump into an air campaign over the Persian Gulf, and subsequently, Trump’s reasons for the Iranian war have bounced from regime change and dealing with terrorists to destroying Iran’s nuclear capability to opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite waging such a war, you can be sure—given Trump’s addled brain—that he remains clueless about the geography of the Middle East, the alignment of the various coalitions, or the strategic dilemmas now facing the United States as it tries to put the oil genie back in the $2 gallon of gasoline.

As happens with persons suffering from dementia (and there are many forms, as all of us know from our families), Trump’s earlier impulses have become more exaggerated, the further his mind drifts down the rabbit hole. (I bet that on some bad days, he does not remember that there’s even a war going on.)

Trump was always impulsive (sexually and mentally), but now his impulses come with aircraft carriers and cruise missiles.

+++

In the negotiations to end the war in Iran, the only frame of reference in Trump’s mind is some long-ago Manhattan real estate deal where, if you shout loud enough and long enough, you might just end up with the corner lot at a discount price.

At the same time, we know from Trump’s legacy of bankruptcies that, more often than not, his style of negotiation has led him to failure. And that was when he was in his fifties; now in his eighties, with his mind in free fall, for the most part Trump is negotiating with himself.

When Trump first sent family retainers JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff to Islamabad to negotiate with the Iranians, he telephoned Vance some 12 times during the talks (in the middle of the night, Washington D.C. time), which I am sure is one reason why those negotiations and those that have followed have never gone anywhere.

Imagine on one hand, having to negotiate with the Iranians, and on the other, get instructions from Trump. In the latest go-round, Trump has sent the draft peace plan to all “concerned parties,” including Israel, an easy way to ensure it fails.

+++

It does not help the American cause (justice and liberty, not what we have now, which is rape and pillage) that the addled Trump cannot keep straight our friends and our enemies.

He somehow thinks that Israel is helping the United States in the Middle East (not simply wagging its own dog), just as he’s in a muddle about Oman (a traditional ally) and the long game of the Saudis (which is to turn Trump into an off-balance sheet asset of its sovereign wealth fund).

In many ways, the president is another Donny (from The Big Lebowski—itself a film about American ineptitude in the Middle East), to whom Walter Sobchak says: “So you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know…”

All Trump really can keep in focus is who has promised to pay him money, and my guess is that the short list includes Qatar, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The rest of the world might just as well be plumbers in Atlantic City who can easily get stiffed on payday.

+++

Without either memory, a frame of reference, core values, or access to history, the demented Trump clings to his “notions” as if they were toys on his nursery floor—something to throw around for a while at the other kids until he gets bored or Daddy’s chauffeur comes to collect him.

Take these examples of how often the president has indulged in changing whims:

—In 2024 Trump ran for the presidency as a Woodrow Wilson Democrat (“He kept us out of war…”) but then once in office behaved like a cross between William McKinley and William Randolph Hearst (“You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war…”);

—In the Iranian war, Russia’s intelligence agencies helped Iran to target U.S. troops in the field, but then Trump rewarded Putin’s Russia by lifting sanctions on its oil exports and withdrawing American support for Ukraine and NATO;

—In the broader Middle East—because Trump senses a chance for a few golf resorts in Gaza—he has aligned American policies with Israel’s genocide and then, for good measure, made American customers hostage to the fortunes of the OPEC cartel (which, lest we forget, has Trump and his sons in its deep pockets).

+++

None of these positions adds up to a calculated policy, for the simple reason that Trump himself is incapable of coherent thought. Call it frontotemporal dementia, malignant narcissism, or old style psychosis, but whatever Trump has, his mind no longer functions.

He can send out tweets at midnight of himself as Jesus or a Jedi knight; he can march around a parade ground with Putin, Xi, or King Charles; and he can answer a few questions with airplane engines running in the background, but, despite gambling with the future of American civilization by threatening nuclear war in Iran, he cannot discuss Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the Treaty of Sèvres and Sykes-Picot.

Trump can neither read nor write (other than his name with a Sharpie), and I suspect that the day after he has met a world leader (take the dance extravaganza in Beijing) he recalls no details of the meeting, and a week later will say to some aide: “Why don’t we ever have a summit with the Chinese?”

Even more amazing is that Washington D.C. is full of people earning fat salaries to govern the nation, and yet a majority in Congress or on the Supreme Court refuses to act, even when the president spends most of his days and nights barking/tweeting at the moon.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails; Appalachia Spring; The Revolution as a Dinner Party (China throughout its turbulent twentieth century); Biking with Bismarck (France during the Franco-Prussian War); and Our Man in Iran. Out not long ago were: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and The View From Churchill, about the places that shaped the life of the British wartime prime minister. His next books are Playing in Peoria (by bike across the American Mid-West) and Friends of Kind, a literary travel history of World War I.

Donald (Disaster) Trump And the Fight for a Humane Future

William D. Hartung

 May 29, 2026

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Image by charlesdeluvio.

Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls

As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a nineteenth century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.

Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.

The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet — climate change — is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.

The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the U. S. government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”

On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture — the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.

Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the nineteenth century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.

The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).

The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:

“Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called ‘new class’ of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language — although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this ‘new class,’ so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.”

However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.

The crusade — and it’s nothing less than that — against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality health care for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind — not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.

Silicon Valley Saviors

In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction — Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.

In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “if you die in the game, you die in real life.”

The political reach of the Silicon Valley crowd has grown dramatically in the age of Donald Trump. JD Vance, his vice president, was, of course, groomed and financed by Peter Thiel, the founder of the omnipresent firm Palantir, which provides technology to patrol the border, helps ICE identify suspects, and has provided software to Israel that its leaders have used to step up the pace of bombing in their genocidal war in Gaza. After a stint at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, Vance won a Senate election in Ohio with major financial backing from him and his allies.

When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, champagne corks popped in Silicon Valley and the money started flowing to help Trump get elected, including up to a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money from Elon Musk. As a result, Silicon Valley now has its man in the executive branch.

Nor is Vance alone. Former employees of tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril are now embedded in key agencies of the federal government, and Secretary of — yes! — War Pete Hegseth has gone all in on integrating AI into U.S. military planning and practice to the delight of the billionaire tech moguls and their hangers-on.

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves — and of the potential of the technology their companies produce — would distinctly be an understatement.

Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, a self-appointed chief ideologist and cheerleader for the Silicon Valley tech takeover of America, gave a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2025 that analyst Gil Duran described as an effort to “equate most government actions with communist dictatorships… while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.” Boyle’s bread and butter argument — call it a potentially fatal kind of narcissism — was that only the “founders” (yes, they call themselves that!) are serious enough, skilled enough, and endowed by their creator with enough persistence to solve and reverse America’s imperial decline. The rest of us should just get out of the way and let the new techno-gods do their work.

Will Trump’s Patchwork Quilt Come Apart at the Seams?

The Trump coalition is a strange kaleidoscope of confusing views and contradictory cover stories: the know-nothings; the know-it-alls; the false prophets of White Christian nationalism, the billionaires and millionaires, the people who (once upon a time) watched too many episodes of The Apprentice and think Trump is a good businessman; those who want yet another tax break; those men among us who want to control what women do with their bodies, and the (mostly) men who feel liberated because Trump openly and repeatedly makes racist, sexist, anti-gay, and anti-trans statements, legitimizing vocal expressions of prejudice in a way not seen in decades.

Yes, his is a motley crew, but so far they have rallied around the president, no matter the promises he breaks or the harmful policies he jams down all of our throats (policies that could ultimately hit many diehard Trump supporters who aren’t billionaires as hard or harder than they will hit his opponents). Fortunately, there are at least signs that his ability to thrive politically (even as his policies drive America into a ditch) may be fading. His brutal, illogical, illegal, ill-defined war on Iran — complete with genocidal rhetoric about ending an entire civilization — may be the beginning of the end of his grasp of our politics and our psyche.

Unfortunately, he may be as much a symptom of what’s wrong with America as he is a producer of deep damage to the future prospects of democratic governance and human cooperation in this country and on this planet.

Which Way Out?

Any resistance to such know-nothingism and incipient technofascism must start on a human scale. If we are ever going to build a tolerant, welcoming nation that meets the basic needs of its residents, while leaving ample room for scientific inquiry and creative endeavors of all sorts, we need to get off our machines and start talking to — and crucially, listening to — each other.

This is already happening more widely than you might imagine if you’re a prisoner of your news feed. And it’s happening not just in large gatherings like the No Kings rallies, but in local organizing around schools and housing, voter registration and education efforts, and attempts to help communities survive the double-injury of runaway capitalism and the shredding of the social safety net thanks, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which is the ugliest, most inhumane piece of legislation in living memory).

We need to fight on at least three fronts — economically, politically, and culturally. Senator Bernie Sanders has shown just how a truly populist economic program could draw support even among diehard MAGA backers, and such a program is a necessity if we are ever to dig our way out of our current predicament.

But economics is hardly the only problem we have. There’s also the reality of racism to contend with, not to speak of a thriving anti-immigrant sensibility, and misogyny, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination — all deeply embedded in a nation that was founded as a colonial enterprise fueled by slavery and genocide. Such a history has to be transcended by embracing the values and elevating the leadership of the people most impacted by the legacy of America’s repressive past, while building a new culture based on tolerance, respect, and (yes!) love for our fellow human beings.

To be clear (as President Barack Obama would often say), by “transcend” I don’t mean ignore. We must fully acknowledge and seriously commit our society to repairing the crimes embedded in our development as a nation, not to speak of those being committed right now in Donald Trump’s America against so many of us and our planet as well.

And sadly, it’s all too obvious that coming together to save this planet and retain our basic humanity will not be easy. People are messy and, frankly, can be a pain to deal with (yours truly included). We are, however, all we have, and making the effort will matter.

I believe in the saying, attributed to leaders of the Wobblies (the radical union founded in 1905 and known formally as the Industrial Workers of the World), that we must sow the seeds of any new society in the shell of the old one. The way we treat each other in our homes, workplaces, schools, sites of worship, and other public and private spaces will determine whether we can build a better world or are fated to live in a never-endingly Trumpian one. In that context, it’s important not just to speak truth to power, but to begin trying to create alternative sources of power and good ideas aren’t enough for that. (If they were, we would already be living in a far better world.)

Building alternative power and charting a path to such a world will be a distinctly collective undertaking. A handful of charismatic leaders or courageous organizers can’t do it for us. We all need to be leaders since we are all experts (in the sense of knowing our communities and our bits of the world).

There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee, and if enough of us join that fight, we at least have a shot at building a society and a world worth sustaining for generations to come.

What are we waiting for?

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.