‘Children Are Dying’: Trump-Musk Gutting of USAID Helps Push Somalia to Brink of Famine

“Without urgent action now, Somalia risks becoming one of the clearest examples of what happens when early warnings are ignored and humanitarian systems are allowed to erode.”


Residents of the Maacani Camp in Mogadishu, Somalia struggle to survive in tents on May 05, 2026.
(Photo by Abuukar Mohamed Muhidin/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A report released Thursday showing that Somalia is rapidly descending into famine underscored the harms done by the illegal dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, a department that President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk targeted as part of a broader assault on the federal government.

New data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) showed that more than six million people—around a third of Somalia’s population—are facing acute hunger as drought and conflict combine with humanitarian aid cuts to create a devastating humanitarian emergency. Around 1.9 million children in Somalia “are now expected to require treatment for acute malnutrition in 2026,” according to IPC, and regions of the country are at severe risk of famine.

“Humanitarian assistance remains a lifeline but is far from sufficient, reaching only 12% of people in Phase 3 or above,” said IPC, a partnership of aid organizations and United Nations agencies. “A rapid and sustained scale‑up of multisectoral assistance—particularly in hotspot areas such as Burhakaba—is urgently needed to prevent further deterioration and loss of life.”

Reuters noted that “global cuts to foreign aid, including by the United States, have substantially reduced support to Somalia.” The outlet added that “impacts of the US-Israeli war on Iran are complicating efforts to respond to food shortages caused by multiple failed rain seasons ⁠and ongoing insecurity.”

Mohamed Mohamud Hassan, Save the Children’s Somalia director, said in a statement Thursday that the country is “in the grip of a deepening humanitarian catastrophe” and the “window to prevent famine... is closing fast.”

“Children are dying from preventable causes—malnutrition, disease, displacement—while funding falls far short of what is urgently needed,” said Hassan. “We call on the international community to act now, scale up lifesaving assistance, and ensure that no child dies because the world looked away.”

“Somalia is once again standing at the edge of catastrophe. This is a crisis of access, affordability, and global political failure.”

The US has historically been the largest contributor of humanitarian aid to Somalia, but the Trump administration’s shuttering of USAID cut off much of the American food and medical aid that was flowing to the East African nation. The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID has also severely harmed Somalia’s economy.

“Somalia is once again standing at the edge of catastrophe,” Richard Crothers, Somalia country director at the International Rescue Committee, said Friday. “This is a crisis of access, affordability, and global political failure. Without urgent action now, Somalia risks becoming one of the clearest examples of what happens when early warnings are ignored and humanitarian systems are allowed to erode.”

Experts say the closure of USAID last year is already responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, and researchers have warned that millions more could die by 2030 if the aid is not restored.

In addition to sounding the alarm about Somalia, IPC released reports this week detailing increasingly dire hunger in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan—countries that were also devastated by the gutting of USAID.

“USAID was the leading donor in the country and most aid agencies relied on its funding to help people survive and rebuild their lives,” said Manenji Mangundu, Oxfam International’s DRC country director. “Without it, agencies have been forced to make terrible triage decisions including who gets to live and who might needlessly die.”

Trump Blasted for ‘Unconscionable’ Auto Industry Giveaway That Will Worsen Pollution

“The EPA has one job, to protect the health and welfare of the American people,” said one critic. “But, yet again, the Trump EPA is choosing polluters over people.”


Critics say the Trump administration’s delay of Biden-era emissions rules will increaase pollution from light vehicles like those seen in this photo of a traffic jam on Interstate 95 in Miami.
(Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

Brett Wilkins
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The US Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed postponing enforcement of vehicle emissions standards enacted during the Biden administration, a move that critics warned will worsen air pollution, one of the leading risk factors for premature death in the United States and around the world.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed delaying Biden-era emission standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for two years until model year 2029, claiming that implementation of the policy meant to ensure that a majority of new light vehicles sold in 2032 were electric is “unattainable,” and that Americans “overwhelmingly rejected” electric vehicles.

“Freedom is the foundation of this nation, and this includes the freedom to choose the car you drive. The American people have been very clear; they do not want EVs forced upon them,” said Zeldin, who took more than $400,000 in Big Oil campaign donations during his tenure in the New York state Legislature and US Congress, and who questions the scientific consensus on climate change.

Zeldin claimed the proposal “is projected to save over $1.7 billion” for US automakers, “providing hundreds of dollars saved per vehicle for American families,” and “aims to return EPA regulations to reality, restoring consumer choice, protecting good paying American jobs, and strengthening the nation’s global competitiveness.”

It will also kill people. More than 100,000 people die prematurely in the United States each year due to breathing polluted air. According to a 2024 Environmental Protection Network analysis, President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of pollution rules could cause the deaths of nearly 200,000 people in the United States by 2050.

“In its latest unconscionable act, Trump’s EPA looked at a rule intended to protect public health from toxic tailpipe pollutants while saving tens of thousands of lives, and decided it could wait,” Public Citizen Climate Program deputy director Deanna Noël said Friday.

“The decision will not just cost lives; it will cost working-class people more money in medical bills, more missed days of work, and more years chained to volatile gas prices,” Noël continued.

“Working families are already stretched thin. Everything from groceries to home insurance to gas is getting more expensive, with no end in sight,” she added. “Delaying commonsense emissions standards will only make communities sicker and send costs higher. The EPA’s entire reason for existing is to protect public health and the environment. Yet under this administration, it has been weaponized to serve corporate interests over the American public, no matter the cost.”

According to the advocacy group Climate Power, fossil fuel industry interests spent more than $445 million during the 2024 election cycle on campaign donations, lobbying, and other efforts to bolster Trump and other Republican candidates and causes.

Responding to Zeldin’s announcement, Natural Resources Defense Council clean vehicles director Kathy Harris said in a statement that “the EPA has one job, to protect the health and welfare of the American people. But, yet again, the Trump EPA is choosing polluters over people.”

“Delaying these standards is going to mean more toxic pollutants spewing from tailpipes, and more soot and smog in our cities,” she continued. “That means more asthma, more heart attacks, and more lung disease.”

“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims to want to provide clean air and clean water, but time after time he is acting to increase pollution,” Harris added. “The Trump administration’s war on our health continues unabated.”



Zeldin’s proposal is part of a wider Trump administration push to roll back Biden’s efforts to promote electric vehicles, and serves Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy. Last year, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered the cancellation of Biden-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars and light trucks

During Trump’s second term, the EPA has moved to repeal or replace stronger carbon emission limits on fossil-fueled power plants, revoked California’s ability to enact stricter vehicle emissions rules, and signaled plans to overturn the agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard.

The EPA has also revoked the long-standing “endangerment finding” that allowed it to pass climate regulation, stopped counting the monetary value of reducing pollution, weakened water and wetland protections, rolled back regulations limiting so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water, dramatically cut or eliminated environmental justice programs, reduced enforcement of environmental violations, dismantled advisory and scientific panels, removed all mentions of human-caused climate change from its website, and more.

‘Big News’: Hawaii Targets Citizens United With Law Clarifying Corporations Are Not People

“The far-right Supreme Court hijacked the Constitution to let corporations spend in our elections. But we are not powerless. We can fight back,” said US Rep. Greg Casar.


Attendees hold signs as they listen to speakers during a rally calling for an end to corporate money  in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The state of Hawaii has passed a law that poses a direct challenge to the infamous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which opened the door to unlimited corporate spending in US elections.

Democratic Hawaii Gov. Josh Green on Thursday signed into law a bill that takes aim at the court’s ruling that corporations are effectively people with full free speech rights who can face no limits on what they can contribute to political organizations.

As explained by More Perfect Union, the law, which is set to take effect next July, classifies corporations as “artificial persons” who do not have a constitutional right to make political donations.

“The bill could limit the influence of super PACs,” noted More Perfect Union, “and be a model to challenge the influence of money in politics.”

Democratic Hawaii state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, a supporter of the law, said on Thursday he was proud that Hawaii has become “the first state in the nation” to take direct action challenging Citizens United.

“As elected leaders, we do not serve artificial entities,” Keohokalole said. “We serve the people.”



US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, hailed the law as “big news” that should inspire opponents of limitless corporate political spending across the US.

“The far-right Supreme Court hijacked the Constitution to let corporations spend in our elections,” said Casar. “But we are not powerless. We can fight back.”

The new law passed despite opposition from Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, who argued that defending it in court could be difficult and expensive.

The law’s passage earned praise from campaign finance watchdogs who have long called for overturning Citizens United and reestablishing guardrails for corporate cash in US democracy.

Michael Beckel, who directs the Money in Politics project for the advocacy group Issue One, said the Hawaii law is a “model for the country” that other states should rush to emulate.

“This measure... is among the most innovative and impactful ideas to curb corporate and dark money spending in campaigns since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United ruling in 2010,” Beckel said. “Those looking to bring more transparency and accountability to elections should embrace this powerful proposal and follow Hawaii’s lead.”

End Citizens United, the nonprofit campaign finance reform organization dedicated to overturning the 2010 Supreme Court ruling, also pushed other states to look at Hawaii’s law as a roadmap for their own legislation.

“Hawaii has provided a blueprint for how to prevent super PACs from spending dark money by passing state law,” the group said in a social media post. “Let this win be a testament to the ability states have to put power back in the hands of everyday people by neutralizing the effects of the Citizens United ruling.”

Tom Moore, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, praised the Hawaii law in an interview with The Associated Press, calling it “a brave and bold step to get corporate and dark money out of America’s politics” that “will send a powerful message that will be heard loud and clear across the Pacific and across the mainland.”

As AIPAC Spends Millions to Oust Him, Massie Unveils Bill Requiring Pro-Israel Lobby to Register as Foreign Agent

“The lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country, whether it’s Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel,” said the Kentucky Republican.

US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) speaks during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Second Amendment hearing in Dirksen Senate Office Building on April 15, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Luke Johnson/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As the Israel lobby attempts to end his political career, the Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has introduced a bill that would require lobbyists working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commonly known as AIPAC, to register as foreign agents.

The bill, known as the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity (AIPAC) Act, would amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which requires those working to influence government policy on behalf of a foreign power to register with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

Most lobbyists and donors for AIPAC are American, leading the DOJ to classify it as a domestic, rather than foreign, lobbying group. But critics have argued that it engages in extensive coordination with the Israeli government and that groups lobbying for the interests of other countries are treated with stricter scrutiny.

“Today, I introduced a bill called the AIPAC Act… which would make AIPAC subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” Massie (R-Ky.) announced on Redacted News Thursday. “For some reason, they’re immune right now, and I think not just the money that’s spent in politics, but the lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country. Whether it’s Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel, it needs to be reported.”

Massie has established himself as the leading Republican critic of President Donald Trump in Congress, agitating for transparency from the DOJ on the Jeffrey Epstein files and stridently opposing increased military spending and the president’s aggressive overseas wars, including in Iran.

He has also distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans willing to publicly criticize Israel and call for the US to “immediately terminate” military aid in response to its killing of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza.

His debut of the AIPAC Act comes as he’s in the fight of his political life in Kentucky, where pro-Israel lobbying groups have unleashed a flood of money to unseat him in next week’s Republican primary.

The United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC, has spent about $2.6 million, according to Axios, while the Republican Jewish Coalition has dropped $4 million to support Massie’s opponent, retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. The Christian Zionist group Christians United For Israel has dropped six figures on a campaign to blanket “every available billboard,” it said, in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district with anti-Massie messaging.

Trump has also thrown his support behind Gallrein, and two of his senior political advisers, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio, have raised more than $2 million for their MAGA KY PAC from a trio of top pro-Israel billionaires—hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor John Paulson, and a group linked to casino mogul Miriam Adelson, according to Axios.



In all, the GOP primary in KY-04 has become the most expensive House primary on record in US history, with more than $25 million spent on advertising in total, surpassing the 2024 Democratic primary in New York’s 16th district, where AIPAC and its allies unleashed another torrent of cash and successfully felled the progressive Rep. Jamal Bowman (D).

“[The money] didn’t come from regular people. It’s come from billionaires, and 95% of it... has come from the Israeli lobby,” Massie said of the funds spent to oust him during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last week. “Their position is more war, it’s more strife, it’s more bombs, it’s more foreign aid, and those are the things that I’ve been voting against.”

Right now, the ad blitz—which has portrayed Massie as disloyal to MAGA—has put the incumbent in a position to lose his race. A Quantus Insights poll earlier this week showed him trailing with 43% of likely voters to Gallrein’s 48%.

Massie said: “The real reason that this race is a serious race, and I may lose, is because a foreign lobby has fully funded to the extent that they’ve never done in any Republican race ever before.”

'Reporting Isn’t Treason’: Trump Rant at Journalists Sparks Alarm

“No American should be comfortable with the president of the United States accusing a reporter of treason for critical reporting.”


President Donald Trump briefs reporters after he concluded his trip to Beijing aboard Air Force One on May 15, 2026 as he returns to the United States.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump on Friday sparked alarm among press freedom advocates when he accused New York Times reported David Sanger of committing “treason” for portraying his illegal war with Iran in a negative light.

Speaking with journalists aboard Air Force One on his flight home from China, Trump was asked by Sanger about his failure to accomplish political changes in Iran that he swore to achieve when he launched the war without congressional authorization in late February.

“I had a total military victory,” Trump replied. “But the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly. You’re a fake guy, and guys like you write incorrectly. We had a total military victory. We knocked out their entire navy, we knocked out their entire air force, we knocked out all their anti-aircraft weaponry.”



Despite this purported “total victory,” however, Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz and has prevented commercial vessels from traveling through it for the last two months.

After attacking the Times’ reporting about the Iran War, the president pivoted to impugning Sanger’s patriotism.

“I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write,” the president said. “You and The New York Times, and CNN, I would say, are the worst... You should be ashamed of yourself. I actually think it’s treason.”

The Times on Tuesday reported that the Trump administration’s “public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what US intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities.”

Hours after the president’s tirade against Sanger—which echoed Trump’s previous remarks about media coverage of the war—New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander released a statement defending its reporting on the Iran war.

“Reporting isn’t treason,” Stadtlander said. “It’s foundational to a free press and the work that America’s founders wrote the First Amendment to protect. That includes making clear when the claims of government officials and the reality of their actions don’t line up... We will continue this important, constitutionally protected work.”

Trump’s treason accusation also drew a rebuke from Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who said that “no American should be comfortable with the president of the United States accusing a reporter of treason for critical reporting.”

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued that Trump’s attack on Sanger was really a sign of weakness given the failures of his military campaign against Iran.

“President Trump unloading on David Sander reflects a combination of anxiety, insecurity, and desperation about the Iran War,” Kristof wrote. “David is the dean of national security reporters: experienced, meticulous, and fair. Blaming the messenger underscores that the reality itself is pretty bad.”

Kristof’s sentiment was echoed by former ABC News journalist Terry Moran, who wrote that he can’t “understand how anyone can see Trump here and not see weakness.”

Former Republican Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh said Trump’s interaction with Sanger exposed him as “the biggest fucking crybaby in all of human history.”

WORKERS NEED THEIR OWN PARTY

Unions Decry Spanberger Veto of Collective Bargaining Bill as ‘Betrayal to Virginia’s Workers’

“We believed that she was being authentic and honest with us,” said one Virginia labor leader. “She just flat-out flipped.”


Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia are joined by local government officials to call on Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) to sign collective bargaining legislation outside the Fairfax County Government Center on May 6, 2026.
(Photo by the SEIU Virginia State Council/X)

Stephen Prager
May 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Labor unions are feeling betrayed after Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed a bill on Thursday that would have restored collective bargaining rights for half a million public sector workers.

Virginia is one of the most restrictive states in the country for public sector bargaining, a holdover from the Jim Crow era when the General Assembly and other state legislatures across the South sought to crush the power of a public workforce with many Black employees.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Virginia has one of the largest public sector pay gaps in the country, with state and local government employees making about 27% less on average than their private-sector peers, and it is similarly stratified in other states with weak collective bargaining rights.

Spanberger, a former US representative who was elected governor this past November, made pro-union messaging central to her affordability-focused platform. She decried President Donald Trump’s executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights last year and said that as governor, she’d “look forward to working with members of our General Assembly to make sure more Virginians can negotiate for the benefits and fair treatment that they earn.”



But since taking office, Spanberger’s support for restoring public sector union rights has been more tepid as she’s gotten an earful from fiscally conservative Right-to-Work and taxpayer advocacy groups who claimed higher salaries for public employees would drain state funds and raise the cost of services.

When a bill to immediately mandate collective bargaining rights to 500,000 workers was proposed in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, she introduced amendments aimed at watering down the bill—making it optional for employers to recognize unions, delaying the full implementation until 2030, and introducing what unions called a “kill-switch” that would have allowed future governors to revoke collective bargaining power.

The legislature shot Spanberger’s amendments down and passed the bill in its original form. On Thursday, the governor vetoed it altogether.

In her veto message, Spanberger said she wanted the bill’s other collective bargaining provisions for state employees, home care workers, and higher education employees to go into effect first “in order to demonstrate the efficacy of this new system” before it was opened up to all public employees.

But the unions that advocated for the bill say Spanberger led workers on with false promises.

“This veto is a devastating betrayal to the hundreds of thousands of public employees who have spent years, and in many cases decades, fighting for a seat at the table,” said Doris Crouse-Mays, the president of the Virginia AFL-CIO. “Spanberger campaigned publicly and privately on promises [of] affordability, to support working families and respect workers’ rights... Instead, when presented with the opportunity to make history and deliver on those promises, she chose to side with fear, political calculation, business, and the same anti-worker arguments that have been used for generations to deny workers power in Virginia.”

LaNoral Thomas, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia 512—a union which helped lead the charge to pass the bill—told the Virginia news site Dogwood that her union had “high hopes” for Spanberger when she was elected.

“We believed that she was being authentic and honest with us,” Thomas said. “She just flat-out flipped. It is shocking.”



“Public employees are not a special interest. They are our neighbors. They are the educators, bus drivers, social workers, librarians, custodians, and first responders who hold our communities together,” said a joint statement from Carol Bauer, president of the Virginia Education Association, and Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association.

They emphasized that the veto also carried “a deep racial and gender impact,” noting that “Virginia’s public sector bargaining ban is rooted in a Jim Crow era effort to silence Black workers at the University of Virginia Hospital who organized for fair pay and dignity.” They said, “Preserving that legacy today disproportionately harms women and workers of color, who make up so much of the public-service workforce and who have the most to gain from fair wages, safer workplaces, and a real voice on the job.”

Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—the largest national union of public sector workers in the US, with more than 1.4 million members—said that Spanberger had caved to “anti-worker extremists [who] have sidelined working people while starving the public services Virginia families rely on, earning the state a reputation as one of the most anti-worker in the country.”

“While the governor has broken her word,” Saunders said, “AFSCME members are deeply grateful to the bill’s sponsors and the leadership of both chambers, who kept theirs. Their commitment to working people stands in stark contrast to the governor and will not be forgotten.”

“Gov. Spanberger made a choice today,” he added. “Working people will remember it.”

Donald Trump’s Tower Envy

Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures, from arches to paint jobs to statues, no matter the violation of law or taste.


The main entrance of Trump Tower with the inscription on it and a US flag are shown in New York City in the United States of America.
(Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Paul Josephson
May 17, 2026

Common Dreams

In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.

Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.

His Triumphal Arch

Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues. Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol. Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history. Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive, and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the president overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 150 feet, was completed.

Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meager crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route. Recalled one observer, “Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, two thousand guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen’s uniforms.” (Peter the Great assembled a parade of little people in 1710, but out of jest and love, not out of inferiority.) Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s. He said, “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”

He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia.

Crowd size envy has its roots in psychological turmoil. Napoleon obviously had the first Napoleon complex. In the search for the source of his many complexes, the doctor who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 secretly removed his penis. The member made its way through various collectors, becoming “like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” but perhaps bigger than Trump’s who, while tall and obese, is “smaller than average… not freakishly small,” but with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”

Painting Over His Inadequacies

Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas over 20 by 30 feet. In 2014 Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation check to pay for a massive portrait of Trump in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.

To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties. Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy. Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool,” the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 430-foot Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the West Wing to build a ballroom.

For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the color and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for Trump at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began. Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 the mortally obese Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside with several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman, but apparently one over 18 years old, as they lounged in the pool. The impotent creature followed by posting a photo of Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the pool filled with feces.

Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia

The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia. His masculine maneuvers do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Center, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.” Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, centers, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centers for the arts.

Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as president, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-story Trump Tower“ becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 70-foot tall aluminum ”Kartlis Deda“ (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue located on Sololaki Hill. Then there’s the Trump Tower Down Under, a $1 billion development at 91 floors, to rise with other real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the ”Gaza Riviera,“ if the president can get Jared Kushner and the Israelis to remove all Palestinians.

Tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.

Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes. The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers,” activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read. Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,” but no Botox or orange dyes. Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1,400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs. In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.

If You Paint it, They Will Come

Trump loves gloss paints and gold accoutrements to distract attention from his infirm, swollen, and discolored appendages; for them he uses concealer and support socks. He ordered covering the blemishes of the 130-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House with white paint. White paint white may help make the building appear larger, but still not as large as Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, with more than 1,100 rooms and a nuclear bunker underneath. (Three thousand workers died during its construction.) Perhaps in response to Ceausescu’s grandiosity, Trump insists on erecting an ever-growing ballroom, now at $1 billion and with a nuclear bunker of its own.

But an authoritarian paint job will destroy the Eisenhower Building’s exterior of granite (quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, in America, not like most Trump products that are manufactured abroad). Paint adheres poorly to granite, reveals its imperfections, leads immediately to peeling, chipping, staining, and requires forever high maintenance—which is why no one paints granite kitchen counters. But tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.

Everything He Touches Turns to Gold

If not his own Lenin-like mausoleum, which was constructed with polished, but not painted granite, there will be a Miami-based excrescence, the Trump Presidential Library, perhaps with a mock-up bathroom to display the secret documents he stole from the White House—modeled on the bathroom he used at Mar-o-Lago to hold them. Also to be interred are the 747 jet that the Qataris gave him in return for favors. An auditorium featuring an already completed 22-foot gold statue of Trump will crown the spectacle. As one of his potent progeny, Eric, wrote, “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team… This landmark… will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” Sculptor Alan Cottrel manufactured the recently-unveiled statue, but was misled about its purposes and meanings, and he gently called it a “cluster f--k.” Contrell was instructed by the statue’s crypo investors “to alter Trump’s appearance… making him thinner and removing his ‘turkey neck,’” which may be a euphemism for some other appendage.

Whatever the size of the gold president, Trump’s Christian nationalist handlers have forgotten the fact that the 22-foot gold erection recalls the biblical story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the punishment to those who embraced idolatry. Even more, the golden Trump will not rise above the largest bronze statues in the world, the 65-feet tall effigies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. One hopes that Trump does not set his eyes upon the 555-feet tall Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone (marble) obelisk. We have heard that Trump wants to paint it orange.

If you have any doubt, remember after 9/11 Trump instinctively ejaculated on that day that one of his buildings had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Paul Josephson
Paul Josephson is professor emeritus of history at Colby College and the author of 15 books, with 40 years of experience working in archives in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. on the political history of modern science.
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Grifty Colossus Strikes Again and Again and...

Slapping the tacky gold everywhere
Image from Bluesky

Abby Zimet
May 15, 2026
Further

COMMON DREAMS

Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue “Fuck You” upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein “Memorial Reading Room” packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where “the truth is hard to deny.”

Trump’s narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn’t his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is “something dictators have done throughout history,” noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both “arrogant” and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, “Let the chiseling off begin,” but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we’re stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he’s proposed a $10-billion fund for more “beautification” projects around “the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world.”

Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he’s leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional “fans”: “Remarkable leadership,” “Master of the Deal,” “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN.” From the guy who’s “confused the country for his living room,” there’s D.C’s re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar “albatross“ nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, ”Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP“- ”like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug“ we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, ”Fuck You Cunt.“

Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a “VIP snorkel” in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a “patriotic,” seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with “head-spinning” corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers’ now-rapidly-shrinking dime.

Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka “reflective pond,” from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, “smart and beautiful construction” that Dems stupidly opposed - “Dumacrats love sewage” - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it’s now by a contractor he “did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with “uneven application” leaving bubbles, holes and “mottled shades of blue” in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn’t properly vetted, ditto a color “more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”

More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of multi-million-dollar waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for $10 for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, “where the Republic is currently moldering.“ Before ”a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory,“ the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but ”a celebration of life“ and symbol of ”the hand of God over (Trump’s) life.“ Definitely not a cult.

Tacky is as tacky does

Bluesky screenshot


Despite being heralded as God’s second favorite son - one who “understands the Scriptures better than the Pope” - Trump is also widely deemed “an economic serial killer” presiding over an “America First Corporate Graveyard,” skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly “the largest single act of grand larceny in American history” with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there’s never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he’s still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, “for the forgotten MAGA man.”

Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, “proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 “deposits” to “pre-order” the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The “deposit” provided “a conditional opportunity” to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were “non-binding.” “Made in the USA” became “Proudly American Designed.” “Delivery” dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called “Customer Service” got “Omega Auto Care.“ To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks ‘R Us.

"Service for the forgotten MAGA man"

Image from Bluesky

Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC’s War Memorial; they promise “high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism,” or, per Hegseth, “laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure.” Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against “Iranian schoolgirl,” “DEIyatollah,” low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other “threats to American freedom.”

Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing.

Another piece of protest art brings the truth of “one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump’s hometown. “The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York’s Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, “a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime.” The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities.

The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein’s more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men’s lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims “there’s nothing left to investigate.” The vast trove of information, organizers say, is “what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like.” Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, “wanted his name on stuff.” Now, here it is.

From the Trumpsonian

Image from Memorial Reading Room


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Hope in a Time of Democratic Decline

Two major reports released this year tell a grim story: Global freedom continues to decline and the US has lost its longstanding classification a liberal democracy. But hope lies in the data.


Protesters hold signs as they participate in a “No Kings” protest in Manhattan on March 28, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Frances Moore LappéLewis D’Avigdor
May 17, 2026

Common Dreams

The US score on the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24% in only one year, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.“ The US joins nearly a quarter of the world’s nations undergoing democratic backsliding, and is on its way to joining the three-quarters of the world population, some 6 billion people, who live in autocracies. If President Donald Trump’s first term “laid the foundation”, according to the report, the second term has seen the backslide quicken.

The bad news is now measurable. V-dem rates the US as an elected democracy, losing its higher position as a liberal democracy. V-dem points to a breakdown of liberal characteristics including freedom of expression, respect for civil liberties, and well-functioning checks and balances, especially those between the executive branch and the judiciary. Freedom House reports a similar dramatic decline. As does the Democracy Meter.

Such a democratic crash is typically associated with coup d’etats. According to V-Dem we are back to the lowest level of democracy since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, establishing the US as a democracy that enfranchised, at least in law, all citizens.

Trump did not create our democratic weaknesses, but he is exploiting them. Power has been unevenly coalescing in the presidency since at least Andrew Jackson’s administration. Democrats have done little to roll back the executive overreach that marked George W. Bush’s post 9/11 War on Terror or Barack Obama’s drone strikes. Even former President Joe Biden could not help but overuse executive orders to overcome congressional gridlock. These precedents emboldened Trump. If the imperial presidency has previously been restricted to despotic rule abroad, it is now directed to the US’ own citizens and subjects. Trump is the domestic return of the imperial boomerang, establishing what political theorist Nikhil Pal Singh calls a “Homeland Empire.”

The 2026 midterm elections are more than a referendum on Trump. They are a test of whether American democracy can repair itself.

We were warned. This most recent executive power grab was foreshadowed by the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation plan to enact “unitary executive theory.” By 2026, according to Project 2025 Tracker, half of the 320 objectives have been met. We have entered what former Republican adviser Gregg Nunziata calls “the age of American Caesarism.”

Still, buried within V-dem’s report are two important lessons of hope. The first lesson is that demand for democracy, as both a norm and practice, remains strong. Democracy remains powerful as an ideal, which is why even autocrats rarely reject elections outright and often rely on the appearance of democratic forms to confer legitimacy. Trump may troll liberals by cosplaying a king, selling 2028 merch, or even quipping in relation to the midterms that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.“ But Trump still requires elections to be viewed as legitimate—even within the Republican Party. Uncertainty in elections can never fully be removed while democracy remains the norm.

The second lesson is that the first election after a democratic slide is a pivotal moment to reverse the trend. This means the 2026 midterm elections are more than a referendum on Trump. They are a test of whether American democracy can repair itself. Elections remain dangerous to autocrats precisely because they cannot fully control what voters will do.

Nevertheless, autocrats still attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor. To consolidate their grip on power, autocrats engage in what Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism.” Opposition remains legal and elections are still contested. But authoritarians weaponize the executive and judicial machinery of the state to make opposition costly.

Taking a page out of the authoritarian playbook, Trump has worked to discipline institutions that might constrain him. He has filled the administrative state with party sycophants, hollowed out government agencies, and targeted media and universities. He wields violent rhetoric to delegitimize opposition, both antifa bogymen and centrist liberals, and pardons those who illegally act in the administration’s interests, encouraging others to act with impunity. The list goes on. The point is to intimidate civil society and silence dissent. Historian Timothy Snyder calls this “anticipatory obedience.”

The danger, however, is that Trump is not alone. His impulses have become intertwined with party strategy. Voting rights are the clearest example of this unified threat. Trump’s SAVE Act has stalled in the Senate, but the Roberts Court has arrived with the cavalry to fulfill the Republican party’s long-awaited agenda. The recent Callais v Louisiana has already revealed itself to be a cudgel in Black voting districts. In a perverse acceptance that racism no longer exists, the ruling has green-lit a gerrymander race to the bottom.

Trump is a political bully. He seeks to whittle us down with near constant reminders that he has the power and we do not. Broadly, this thumb-on-his nose strategy underpins his social media message. This is its only message: Power begets power. Trump is relying on us to accept defeat that has not yet occurred. But power is not the same as inevitability. Despite the increasingly stacked odds, the upcoming midterm elections are a pivotal moment to repudiate autocracy.

Justice Elena Kagan, in her stinging dissent in the Callais v Louisiana decision, reminds us that the Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers” and “[brought] this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.” Rights were born in struggle. They can be lost in despondency. We must remind ourselves that democratic institutions are not self-executing: We are the guardrails.

What I call a “living democracy” builds on the uncertainty and hope that lies within the heart of the democratic project. The late political theorist Sheldin Wolin named this hopefulness “fugitive democracy,“ something fleeting that must be continually renewed. As Wolin writes, ”The possibility of renewal draws on a simple fact: that ordinary individuals are capable of creating new cultural patterns of commonality at any moment.“ It is up to us to rebuild hope in our political communities and in such numbers that we can defeat the electoral odds stacked against us.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Frances Moore Lappé
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of 20 books, beginning with the acclaimed "Diet for a Small Planet." Most recently she is the co-author, with Adam Eichen, of the new book, "Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want." Among her numerous previous books are "EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want" (Nation Books) and "Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life." She is co-founder of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Small Planet Institute.
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Lewis D’Avigdor
Lewis d’Avigdor, PhD, is the managing director of Small Planet Institute. A former lawyer and historian, having taught at Cornell, Harvard, and Wheaton College, his work focuses on American and African-American politics and culture.
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