Friends,

Last Thursday, populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner shook up the Democratic establishment when his primary competitor, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her Senate campaign amid polls showing her badly trailing Platner, an oyster farmer who had come out of nowhere to win a national following.

Platner is the latest example of the rise of anti-establishment outsiders in the Democratic Party — a trend that also includes self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who last year defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.

Yet the Democratic establishment — corporate Democrats, wealthy Democratic donors, entrenched Washington “centrists,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — still don’t get it.

Hell, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it a decade ago when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee (and, not incidentally, Jeb Bush was considered a shoe-in for the Republican nomination).

I remember interviewing voters about their political preferences in the late spring of 2015, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, for a book I was then writing. When I asked them whom they wanted for president, they kept telling me Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Often the same individuals offered both names. They explained they wanted an “outsider,” someone who would “shake up” the system, ideally a person who wasn’t even a Democrat or a Republican.

The people I met were furious with their employers, with the federal government, and with Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and enraged at those at the top. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis or the Great Recession that followed it.

They kept reiterating that the system was “rigged” in favor of the powerful and against themselves. They didn’t oppose government per se; most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and roads and bridges. But they hated “crony capitalism” — large corporations using their political clout to gain special favors and changes in laws that often hurt average people.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries — came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses. Had the DNC not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging its financing in favor of Clinton, Sanders would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and he had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America: a full-scale rebellion against the political establishment.

That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history.

Trump’s approval rating among independents now stands at 25 percent, while 68 percent of independents disapprove of him. In 2024, independents were evenly divided, with 48 percent voting for Harris and 48 percent for Trump. In 2020, independents favored Biden by 9 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment still doesn’t see the groundswell — or is actively fighting it.

In Iowa, whose primary is June 2, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly backing state Rep. Josh Turek against state Sen. Zach Wahls. That’s probably a mistake. Turek is a good candidate, but Wahls is a young, dynamic progressive — similar to Platner in his ability to inspire and rally. (In Iowa, independents who want to vote in the Democratic primary need only declare themselves Democrats by June 2.)

In California, whose primary is also June 2, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just rejected Randy Villegas as its preferred nominee for the 22nd Congressional District and instead endorsed doctor and assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains. Villegas, known as a strong progressive, has been endorsed by the congressional progressive caucus and the congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm. “This is about party leadership and D.C. elites putting their thumb on the scale for who they know will bend the knee to party leadership and corporate interests,” Villegas says.

In Arizona, whose primary is July 21, the DCCC has endorsed Marlene Galán-Woods in a Democratic primary to replace Representative David Schweikert, the Republican who is leaving Congress to run for governor. The DCCC rejected Amish Shah, a doctor and former state legislator who won the primary in 2024 and came within a few points of defeating Schweikert. (That year, Ms. Galán-Woods finished third in the primary.) Shah has been leading Galán-Woods by a 3-to-1 margin in the only public poll of the race. Shah says Democrats should stop backing the party apparatus if they want to win the House majority.

In Michigan, whose primary is August 4, the DSCC is backing Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s in a tight race against rival Abdul El-Sayed. Also probably a mistake. El-Sayed is another young progressive who’s showing a remarkable ability to galvanize Democrats and independents. (Michigan has open primaries in which any voter can participate.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

What does this anti-establishment surge — including the remarkable growth of independents and their sharp rejection of Trump — mean for the presidential race in 2028?

For one thing, it suggests that the current presumed Democratic frontrunners — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — are frontrunners only because of their name recognition. As voters find out more about the alternatives, it’s unlikely that either of them will make the cut.

For another, it suggests that anti-establishment candidates are the ones to watch.

Obama chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a packed crowd at the Milken Institute Global Conference this week that the biggest challenge both parties have faced over the last quarter-century has been the battle between establishment forces and anti-establishment forces.

Emanuel was correct. But he then went on to suggest, absurdly, that he’s anti-establishment. Emanuel’s cozy ties to corporate America, his closeness to Citadel founder Ken Griffin (who praised Emanuel from Milken’s main stage), and even Emanuel’s presence at the Milken conference, belie his claim.

But the mere fact that Emanuel thinks it important to claim anti-establishment creds underscores that the biggest force in American politics today — and in the Democratic Party — is anti-establishment rage at political insiders.

Despite the Democratic establishment, a younger and more charismatic generation of populist and progressive Democrats is on the way to winning primaries and general election races across America. If Graham Platner beats Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, which seems likely, he’s the kind of candidate who (in my humble opinion) will be the future of the Democratic Party.

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Friends,

Our media is controlled by just a handful of billionaires and their corporations. And Trump is making it worse.

Trump’s FCC just approved a massive merger that would let one huge media company control what over 80 percent of American households see. One of these merging companies, called Nexstar, tried to silence late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

Trump’s FCC also cleared the way for billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, to buy Paramount — which includes CBS News. The Ellisons are huge Trump boosters.

Under their ownership, CBS News has already seen a massive shift toward a Trump-friendly agenda. Which is probably why Trump gave his blessing for the Ellisons’ company, Skydance Media, to also acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. If that deal goes through, Trump allies would also control CNN. Larry Ellison has reportedly had discussions with Trump about firing CNN hosts Trump doesn’t like.

And thanks to Trump, the Ellisons can also count TikTok as part of their growing media empire. Did you know that one out of five Americans gets their news from TikTok?

So, what can we do about this?

1. Pressure our State Attorneys General to sue and block these mergers. You can find your state AG here.

2. When Democrats take back power at the federal level, bust up these massive media conglomerates.

3. Support local independent media, as well as outlets like NPR and PBS — news funded by the public, not owned by billionaires.

4. Please share this post and video, so as many people as possible are aware of the Trump media takeover.

As a once-respected newspaper says, “Democracy dies in darkness.” We can’t let Trump’s billionaire helpers turn out the lights.

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Friends,

We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate but cannot.

Iran is unlikely to give in. It can withstand the economic pressure of a blockade better than Trump can withstand the political pressure that comes with rising gas prices (now nearly $4.50 a gallon, on average), soon followed by rising food prices.

His looming failure in Iran is not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump.

Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.

Here again, not just a political defeat for the Republican Party but a personal crisis for Trump.

His ego cannot accept a humiliating loss, as we saw after the 2020 election. His need to bully, dominate, and gain submission is so hardwired inside his insecure head that the defeats he’s now facing — to Iran and to Democrats — are already setting off explosions.

He’s posting more wildly than ever — attacking, insulting, ridiculing, threatening.

On Sunday, Trump posted that Democrats had “RIGGED the 2020 Presidential Election. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS—THEY’RE COMING, AND THEY’RE COMING FAST! They’re no good for our Country, they almost destroyed it, and we don’t want to let that happen again!” He demanded that Republicans “approve all of the necessary Safeguards we need for Elections to protect the American Public during the upcoming Midterms.”

More of his posts are bizarre AI-generated paeans to himself, his godlike powers, his wished-for physique, and his self-image of omnipotence. On Friday night, he posted an AI-image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini. Minutes later he posted an image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holding a baseball bat, with a caption calling Jeffries “low IQ,” “a THUG,” and “a danger to our Country.” On Tuesday, he posted AI-images of Joe Biden on one knee with the caption “COWARDS KNEEL,” Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”

His mouth — never in control — is now in diarrheic mode. He’s even back to attacking the pope, accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” adding, “but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

His thin-skinned vindictiveness is beyond anything we’ve seen before, which is saying a lot. Last week, after German chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. was “being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” Trump repeatedly attacked and ridiculed Merz. The Defense Department then said it was pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany, and Trump said he was increasing tariffs on European cars and trucks to 25 percent (from 15 percent).

He’s becoming ever more obsessed with monuments to himself — his ballroom, his arch, his so-called “garden of heroes,” his Trump-embossed passports, his image on 24-karat gold commemorative coins, and his name plastered or etched all over Washington. His plans for self-monuments are becoming larger by the day, more grotesque, more grandiose, and more expensive. Senate Republicans just proposed $1 billion more for Trump’s ballroom, which, recall, was supposed to “cost taxpayers nothing.”

He has even directed the Treasury to announce that his own signature — yes, the same one that appears in a book of birthday greetings for Jeffrey Epstein — will replace the Treasurer’s on all new U.S. paper currency. This will be the first time in American history that a sitting president’s name will appear on circulating cash money.

His thirst for vengeance is exploding, too. Last week the Department of Justice launched another criminal case against former director of the FBI James Comey (whose earlier indictment was quashed by the courts) for posting a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47” on Instagram a year ago. Trump is also insisting that the Justice Department restart its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell and double-down against former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley and others he considers “enemies.”

Facing the two monumental failures of Iran and control over Congress, Trump is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance. On Tuesday, his Education Department announced a civil rights investigation into Smith College over enrolling transgender students. Expect more of this.

Regardless of what happens in Iran, he’ll claim victory. That will be difficult to do convincingly when gas prices remain over $4 a gallon, but he’ll undoubtedly try.

What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated? The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss.

We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?

The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.

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Friends,

Two weeks ago, I listed the top four potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates by current name recognition: Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Out of the 7,174 of you who voted on these four, only 6 percent chose Kamala Harris; 12 percent were for Gavin Newsom; 26 percent of you chose Pete Buttigieg; and 6 percent were for AOC.

The rest of you — 49 percent — wanted someone else.

Last week, I listed the top four “someone else” candidates: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. Out of the 6,422 of you who voted on these four, 24 percent chose Pritzker, 37 percent were for Kelly, 7 percent were for Shapiro, and 18 percent were for Beshear. The remaining 14 percent wanted someone else.

That left a “third tier” — in terms of name recognition — comprising California Congressman Ro Khanna, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and former congressman and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.

So this week we’re going to assess these four. Here’s a summary of the current third tier’s strengths and weaknesses. Please vote among these four.

Read more

Friends,

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the three or four wealthiest people in the world, with a net worth hovering around $260 billion to $277 billion, is devoting some of his wealth to fighting California’s wealth tax on billionaires.

So far, he’s spent $57 million trying to defeat the measure.

Brin’s actions — along with Elon Musk’s $250 million “investment” in getting Trump reelected in 2024 — should be Exhibits A and B in why America needs a wealth tax.

First, let’s stipulate that there is nothing inherently wrong about being a billionaire, a multibillionaire, or even, as Musk is likely to become, a trillionaire.

Wealth isn’t a “zero-sum” game in which these vast accumulations at the top depend on the rest of us losing an equal amount. In fact, the super-wealthy may help the rest of us do somewhat better than we were doing before.

Even though the wealth of the top 0.1 percent has soared in recent years, the bottom 50 percent are doing somewhat better than before. (See chart below.)

But wait.

The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game. The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less political power in everyone else’s hands.

It’s almost impossible to separate wealth from power, because the wealthy turn their fortunes into campaign contributions to politicians who will change laws to their liking and stop laws they’d detest — such as higher taxes on the super-wealthy. The wealthy also finance public relations campaigns and think-tanks to persuade the public of the wisdom of their positions.

Billionaire spending on presidential elections has soared even faster than billionaire wealth. And if you believe they’re donating because they want people with great integrity and excellent character to be elected president, consider that most billionaire political spending in 2024 went to Trump.

They’re donating because they want to protect and enlarge their fortunes and don’t want politicians elected who support higher taxes on them.

Nor do they want politicians elected who support stricter anti-monopoly legislation or who would make it easier to form labor unions or stop climate change (all of which might reduce the profits of, say, Google).

Take Sergey Brin and his $57 million against California’s tax on billionaires — which, not incidentally, was proposed because California must now pay more for Medicaid for lower-income Californians, because Trump and his Republican lackeys enacted a giant federal tax cut whose benefits have gone mostly to the wealthy.

Brin has become a major Republican donor. Last May, he donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee.

Why? Because the Republican Party is more dedicated to protecting and enlarging the wealth of the super-wealthy than is the Democratic Party.

By spending his fortune trying to stop California from taxing billionaires, Brin is illustrating why we need to tax billionaires. He’s making the argument for a billionaire wealth tax more clearly and articulately than anyone else possibly could.

Thank you, Serge.

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Friends,

This is the time of year when young people are graduating — from college, from high school, from family and familiar surroundings to different and unfamiliar places, from being children to being adults.

Because I’ve been around them so long here on this university campus — and maybe just because I’ve been around so long, period — they recently asked me some questions, the answers to which might be of interest to you.

Today also happens to be Teacher Appreciation Day — and as an old boomer who’s dedicated to teaching and who has prized his years in the classroom — I thought perhaps my responses and reflections particularly appropriate.

So, here goes.

Hope you enjoy,

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Thank you to Americans Who Tell Truth for collaborating on this piece with our team at Inequality Media, and for their important advocacy. You can learn more about them, and view a recent portrait and profile they wrote about me here.

Friends,

How can the stock market be rising to record levels while jobs and wages are going nowhere, most Americans are paying higher prices for just about everything, and consumer sentiment is in the dumps?

Answer: Stock prices reflect corporate profits, which have risen to record levels. And corporate profits are soaring for two big reasons:

1. Corporations have more monopoly power than ever. This means they can raise prices without worrying that competitors will grab away consumers by underpricing them.

This is also a reason why wages are going nowhere. Workers have fewer competing companies to work for. Plus, more corporations are requiring their workers to sign so-called “noncompete agreements” so they can’t work for a competitor even if they found one. Researchers estimate that 38 percent of workers are now subject to such noncompete agreements at some point — not just for white-collar but increasingly for blue-collar jobs.

2. Corporations are using artificial intelligence (AI) — and the anticipation of AI — to slash jobs and wages.

Wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total costs. So a key way to increase profits is to cut total payroll costs by reducing the number of workers and keeping down the pay of those who remain.

AI is rapidly becoming central to this. Regardless of whether AI can substitute for all these jobs, corporations are behaving as if it can — and Wall Street is rewarding corporations that are slashing jobs in anticipation of AI.

The U.S. job market is already experiencing a wave of mass layoffs. So far, in the first four months of 2026, big corporations have cut over 128,000 jobs.

Meta is laying off 8,000 employees as it shifts toward AI. Meta’s shares have risen briskly since the start of the year. Amazon has cut 30,000 jobs, many of them replaced by AI, while racking up record profits. The six biggest Wall Street banks are cutting 15,000 jobs and showing profits 18 percent higher than last year’s. They’re crediting AI.

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs and gaining over $6 billion in profits as part of its AI push. Its expected layoffs could total 20,000 to 30,000. UPS is planning to cut up to 30,000 jobs this year. Dow, the chemical maker, has announced cuts of about 4,500 jobs, leveraging AI and automation. Block, Inc. (Square/Cash App) is cutting nearly 40 percent of its workforce, or roughly 4,000 jobs, in an AI-driven restructuring.

So, the answer to how the stock market can be rising to record levels — when jobs and wages are going nowhere and most Americans are paying more for goods and services — is that it’s hitting records because jobs and wages are going nowhere, and most people are paying more for goods and services.

Monopoly power (including noncompete clauses) and AI are creating one of the largest redistributions in history — from workers to the owners of capital (top executives and investors).

Meanwhile — and for much the same reason — consumer sentiment hit a record low in April, dragged down by worries about the Iran war, gas prices, and job risks from AI. Today’s perception of the economy is darker than during any previous crisis since the University of Michigan started tracking sentiment more than 50 years ago,

3. A final crucial point: Wealthier Americans keep spending (the richest 10 percent now account for almost half of all spending; three decades ago, they accounted for 36 percent), while most everyone else is strapped. The people really taking it on the chin are the bottom half. Not only are they losing jobs and wages but the Trump regime is cutting the federal assistance they rely on.

Because of Trump and congressional Republicans’ refusal to extend subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, ACA enrollments are declining about 20 percent — from 24 million people who were covered last year to around 19 million now. Larger losses are forecast by the end of the year.

In addition, Trump’s work requirements for Medicaid are making it harder for many of the nation’s low-income people to qualify because they can’t get work.

More Americans are losing food assistance under SNAP. And the Trump regime’s proposed rule to impose harsh work requirements and time limits on people receiving rental assistance will put an estimated 3.7 million people — more than half of them children — at risk of losing housing.

***

How should Democrats respond to all this? At least, pledge to:

(1) Break up monopolies through major antitrust enforcement.

(2) Regulate AI so corporations using it cannot engage in mass layoffs, but are only permitted to downsize by a small percentage (3 percent?) of their workforce per year.

(3) Establish Medicare for all.

(4) Institute a Universal Basic Income financed by higher taxes on those at the top, so all families have at least a subsistence wage.

Will Trump take these steps? Of course not. Will Democrats demand them and pledge to take these steps if elected? I hope so.

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Friends,

Tonight is the Met Gala, an annual paean to the conspicuous extravagance of America’s wealthy. Its honorary chairs this year are, appropriately, Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos.

If you’d like a ticket to the Bezos Ball, all you’ll need do is shell out $100,000 and wear something memorably daring and expensive. Oh, and you’ll also have to be on the “A List” of Very Wealthy People.

A record 55 percent of Americans now report their financial situation is worsening, citing severe stress from high inflation, housing costs, and rising gas prices, according to Gallup/USA Today polling. One in 3 households is unable to cover a month of living expenses. Prices are soaring, wages are going nowhere, millions are losing access to health insurance. Yet corporate profits are in the stratosphere.

This year’s Met Gala is a testament to the vapid arrogance of the Bezoses and other neo-robber barons of this second Gilded Age.

As I mentioned recently, Bezos has made his fortune off the backs of millions of working people. According to a newly unsealed filing in an antitrust lawsuit, Bezos’s Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

Another recent lawsuit against Bezos accused Amazon of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Bezos’s workers are among the worst-treated in America. Bezos is virulently anti-union. Until Trump took over the National Labor Relations Board, its attorneys were prosecuting Amazon for firing delivery employees because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a direct violation of labor laws.

On April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by an Amazon manager not to. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue packing items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

As of April 2026, Bezos’s net worth was estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world. And he won’t let anyone forget it.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.

What really puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump media suck-up — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

In February, Bezos fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff. He paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back almost none of it — a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump wants. After Trump complained to Bezos about Amazon’s plans to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump’s second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era. And one could say it’s not Bezos’s “fault” that he’s filthy rich — he’s just taken advantage of the current system. But he’s also made the system even more rotten.

Why did the Met choose him and his wife as honorary co-chairs of tonight’s gala? It’s his money, of course. But there’s nothing honorable about him. His public-be-damned business practices, his conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Bezos, at least to my mind, the worst billionaire of them all.

If you’re in New York tonight, you might consider attending — as a protester.

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Friends,

When I learned what Samuel Alito and the other Republican appointees to the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act last week, I thought of Mickey.

(Forgive me if I’ve already told you about him, but he was very important to me.)

I met Mickey the summer after third grade. His family had rented one of the summer cabins in the Adirondack Mountains where my grandmother also had a tiny summer cabin. I was eight, and Mickey was a teenager. We were not friends, yet I came to love him.

Mickey was kind and gentle, with a ready smile. I don’t recall asking him to protect me. He wasn’t the kind of hulking kid I usually chose as protector from bullies who’d torment and ridicule me. Mickey was on the short side and thin. He wore a sailor’s cap and seemed forever cheerful. I don’t remember him fighting to defend me or even quieting the kids who made fun of me, but I do remember his warmth and reassuring presence. His calm good nature seemed to cast a positive spell over kids who might otherwise turn to teasing or bullying.

Years went by and I grew into a teenager who no longer needed older boys to protect me from bullies, and I lost track of Mickey.

It wasn’t until September 1964, the start of my freshman year at Dartmouth College, that I heard what had happened to him.

Early that summer, Mickey — whose full name was Michael Schwerner — had traveled to Mississippi. The Civil Rights Movement was gaining strength. Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, where 250,000 people had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear him.

“Freedom Summer” of 1964 had brought college students, both Black and white, Mickey among them, from northern schools together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters, under the aegis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Mississippi was chosen because only 7 percent of the state’s eligible Black voters were registered, in a state that was about 40 percent Black. Most had been frozen out of the polls with poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and brutality. It had been that way since 1877. The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state run by white supremacists.

Mickey was among the first wave of volunteers to arrive in Mississippi for Freedom Summer. On the afternoon of June 21, he and two other student volunteers — Andrew Goodman, also white, and James Chaney, a young Black man — were driving near the town of Philadelphia when Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped them for allegedly speeding. Price locked them up in the local jail. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them in his police car, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members. They beat Mickey, Goodman, and Chaney with chains. Then they killed them and buried their bodies in an earthen dam under construction.

For weeks, no one knew what had happened to the three volunteers. Lyndon Johnson used concern over their disappearance to pressure the House to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.

On July 16, a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared, and two weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Senator Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination for president at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. Goldwater told Republican delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Mickey’s body and those of Chaney and Goodman were found August 4. They were illustrations of extremism in the defense of what white supremacists defined as liberty.

The state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against any of the killers, but eventually Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Laurence Rainey, also a Klan member, and sixteen others, including Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, were arraigned for the federal crime of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the murdered young men. An all-white jury found seven of them guilty, including Price and Bowers. After several unsuccessful appeals, each received a sentence of between three and 10 years. None would spend more than six years behind bars.

When the news reached me that Mickey had been beaten and murdered by white supremacists — by adult bullies who would stop at nothing to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote — something snapped inside me. It was as if I had gotten a new pair of eyes and began to see everything differently. Before then, I understood bullying as a few kids picking on me for being short, making me feel bad about myself. After I learned what happened to Mickey, I began to see bullying on a larger scale, all around me: Black people bullied by whites; workers bullied by employers; girls and women bullied by men; the disabled or gay or poor or sick or immigrant bullied by politicians, insurance companies, landlords, and bigots. I saw the powerful and the powerless, the exploiters and the exploited.

It seemed as if the world had changed, when in fact it was I who had changed. I had a different understanding of the meaning of injustice. It became as personal to me as were the bullies who had called me names and threatened me in the boys’ room and on the playground — but larger, more encompassing, more urgent.

In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, protecting the right of Black people to vote.

After that, the stranglehold of the white supremacists on the one-party South began to loosen. At the center of the law’s success was Section 5, commonly referred to as the “coverage formula,” which determined those states that had to receive clearance from the Justice Department before changing their election rules, based on their histories of race-based voter discrimination.

Another critical part of the law was Section 2, which prohibits states and political subdivisions from imposing voting qualifications, standards, or practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. It forbids any election rule that results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote, aimed at preventing vote dilution, such as discriminatory redistricting.

In the 20 years following the law’s passage, the disparity in registration rates between white and Black people dropped from nearly 30 percent in the early 1960s to 8 percent. Based on its continuing success, the Voting Rights Act was repeatedly reauthorized by Congress. But the forces of racism and violence did not disappear.

On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a rally at the Neshoba County Fair, only a few miles from where Cecil Ray Price had stopped Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman on that fateful night 16 years earlier. In defending “states’ rights” that day, Reagan, the cheerful “morning in America” candidate, was sending a dark dog-whistle to racist bullies, telling them he was on their side.

Thirty-three years later, on June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act, in the case Shelby County v. Holder. The court’s five conservatives decided that the formula was out of date, despite Congress’s repeated reauthorizations, effectively ending pre-clearance. The court’s opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. Reagan had put Scalia and Kennedy on the court.

“Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote. The Voting Rights Act was “strong medicine,” but in 1965 it was the right response to “entrenched racial discrimination.” When first enacted, he wrote, the rate of voter registration among Black people in Mississippi was 6.4 percent, and the gap between Black and white rates of registration was more than 60 percentage points. But now, Roberts said, pre-clearance was no longer needed.

Yet within 24 hours of the ruling, states of the old Confederacy were already proving Roberts wrong. Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law. Mississippi and Alabama began to enforce the same photo ID laws that federal pre-clearance had previously barred. Other Southern states began to purge voters from their rolls, curtail early voting, eliminate same-day registration, and prevent county boards of elections from opening polls for an additional hour.

In 2021 and 2022, in response to record voter turnout in the 2020 election, 19 states passed more than 30 laws making it harder to vote. The United States Senate, although nominally under Democratic control, did not have the votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster and restore Section 5.

Then, last week, the six Republican appointees on the court decided to gut Section 2. In Louisiana v. Callais, Alito — in a remarkably dishonest opinion, even for him — said he was only bringing Section 2 up to date. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country,” Alito wrote, “particularly in the South.” As a result of the Voting Rights Act, he claimed, Black Americans, once barred from the polls, now vote at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.

Rubbish. According to a recent study in which researchers analyzed nearly a billion votes cast in federal general elections between 2008 and 2022, “significant and robust evidence” shows that the racial turnout gap widened in parts of the country that had been covered by the Voting Rights Act after Shelby gutted Section 5.

The Republican appointees on the court have now invited Republican state legislatures to draw new congressional maps that will likely create a solid red south, creating the largest reduction in Black political representation since the death of Reconstruction. It could result in a loss of as many as 19 seats in the U.S. House and nearly 200 state legislative seats nationwide — and dramatically remake the balance of power in favor of Republicans. The Roberts-Alito court has ensured that Dred Scott and the Confederacy are reborn.

Immediately after the ruling, the Florida legislature passed a new congressional map drafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office, aiming to flip up to four Democratic-leaning seats. Louisiana is postponing primaries to allow for a special session to redraw maps. Officials in Alabama are seeking to lift a lower court injunction to change their map. Mississippi is also actively exploring new white Republican districts.

It is hard for me to think back on the deaths of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr. and other martyrs to civil and voting rights, and not fear that — because of the dishonest and regressive opinions of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and other Republican appointees to the Supreme Court — they died in vain.

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Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

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Last time’s winner (from two weeks ago):

“Remember — when you dis the Pope it makes you a Dope.”

(Congratulations, Donald Hodgins.)

Runners-up:

“You will be going straight to hell. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Jesus H. Christ.”

(Congratulations, Marvel.)

“Just between you and me, I’m God and you’re not.”

(Congratulations, Shirley Butz.)

“So this was the ear you were shot in huh? Can you hear me???”

(Congratulations, Scott Neuman.)

“Good-Bye Donald, the elevator downstairs is over there.”

(Congratulations, Ken.)

“And lo, I say unto you: Don’t be such a dick!”

(Congratulations, Christine Meyer.)

“Really Donald. On Easter? You make Judas look like a Boy Scout.”

(Congratulations, Clare C Gunther.)

“Dante called — they’re adding an extra circle for your ass.”

(Congratulations, John Bernard.)

“Dude, stay in your lane. You have no cards.”

(Congratulations, Hal Garyn.)

“What part of ‘love thy neighbor’ did you not understand?”

(Congratulations, Victoria Sweet.)

“Don’t worry, Donny, you’re going to be FIRED like no one else has ever been FIRED, in THE biggest, most beautiful FIRE ever.”

(Congratulations, Just Judy.)

“Release the Epstein files!”

(Congratulations, Jim Cook.)

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Friends,

I’m not going to dwell on this week’s outrages by Trump and his regime — his Supreme Court appointees gutting the Voting Rights Act, his bizarre claim that his war doesn’t require congressional approval because it’s “terminated,” his murders of additional sailors he suspects of smuggling drugs, his ongoing ICE raids, his continuing efforts to use the Justice Department to punish perceived enemies, his renewed attempts to silence comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel, his giant self-aggrandizing triumphal arch (what triumph?) and grotesque ballroom, his never-ending corruption and lies.

Yet in the midst of this cataclysm, the backlash against Trump is growing. Your work has been critical — your demonstrations and No Kings marches, your letters and phone calls to Congress, your boycotts and your local activism. Trump’s approval ratings are in the cellar. Two-thirds oppose his war. Many are demanding an end to his reign. Even some MAGA faithful are turning on him.

But it’s more than resisting Trump.

A new progressivism is being born.

Many of you are leading this. You are the activists in Montana and Hawaii pushing a new vision for reining in corporate power. You’re the activists in California and New York devising new ways to tax the super-wealthy to pay for what most people need.

You’re the activists in Massachusetts taking the lead on reproductive rights and access to health care. In Washington state, pushing new and more aggressive environmental regulations and renewable energy. In San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco, devising new ways to address homelessness. Organizations like Voz in Portland, Oregon, empowering immigrant day laborers.

You are the activists in red states refusing to let warehouses be turned into migrant detention centers or let their towns host giant AI data centers.

You’re raising the minimum wage across America. Since the start of this year, 22 states have raised it, bringing the total number of jurisdictions raising the minimum — including cities and counties — to almost 90, with 18 states and the District of Columbia now mandating $15 an hour or more.

You’re supporting a new generation of young progressives in Congress: Maxwell Frost, Summer Lee, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez, and the just-elected Analilia Mejia. And new progressive local leaders like New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani.

You’re encouraging a new cohort of progressive rising stars, including Minneapolis’s Omar Fateh, Tennessee’s Aftyn Behn, Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, Illinois’s Kat Abughazaleh, Texas’s James Talarico, San Francisco’s Saikat Chakrabarti, Maine’s Graham Platner, Tennessee’s Justin Pearson, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Florida’s Elijah Manley, and many others.

In my six decades in and around American politics, I’ve never seen anything close to the progressive talent and energy that’s now emerging.

Make no mistake. These are terrible times — the worst I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through some bad ones. (Remember 1968? Nixon’s enemies list? Anyone old enough to recall Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts?) Trump and his goons are doing everything they can to destroy America and much of the world.

But out of the embers and rubble that Trump and his despicable regime have wrought, a new America is being born. We are making it happen.

As long as we are alive and as long as we are resolved, as long as we are taking action to stop the worst of this catastrophe and also trying to make America and the world better, have no doubt: We will prevail.

Be safe. Hug your loved ones. Never, ever give up.

Robert Reich

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Friends,

Today, Heather and I ask: Why is Trump so obsessed with his ballroom? What is actually going on in Iran? Is this the worst Supreme Court of all time?

We look ahead to the midterm elections in six months and make some predictions.

We’re also joined by Ben McKenzie to discuss Trump’s crypto corruption.

So please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the discussion.

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Friends,

Today marks 60 days since the start of Trump’s failed war in Iran. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) gives Congress the power “To declare War,” and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 — enacted over Nixon’s veto — mandates that troops be withdrawn within 60 days unless Congress extends the deadline or declares war.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that Trump doesn’t need Congress’s approval to continue the war past the 60-day mark because the ceasefire agreement with Iran has effectively stopped the clock. (Trump echoed Hegseth’s claim today in a letter to Congress.)

That’s bullshit, of course. But the interesting question is why — when Republicans have majorities in both chambers of Congress — Trump doesn’t want such a vote. Why not just let Republicans vote in favor of continuing his war, and be done with it?

It’s possible, of course, that Trump is worried that some Republican members might vote against the war — joining with all or almost all Democrats in voting against its continuation. Even a close vote could force a debate and pressure Trump to set the conditions and timeline for a withdrawal.

But there’s an easier and more straightforward reason.

Trump’s war is so unpopular that Republican members of Congress don’t want to have to go on record as voting in favor of it. With midterm elections in six months, they know their votes in favor of Trump’s war could be held over their heads — especially if the war drags on, or if gas prices continue to rise because Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, or both.

They’ve let the White House know that forcing them to vote on the war will hurt their chances of maintaining control of Congress.

So congressional Republicans are choosing the coward’s way out: agree with Hegseth and Trump that there’s no need for such a vote because the ceasefire has tolled the clock. Or claim, even more absurdly (as has Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) that there’s no “war” to begin with, and hence no reason for such a vote.

Republicans in Congress are not brave people. To the contrary, they may be the most cowardly group ever to claim to represent the American people.

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Friends,

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted last Thursday on the Ellison family’s purchase of the company. Some 1.743 billion shares were cast in favor of the sale; 16.3 million were cast against it, a ratio of roughly 99 to 1.

1. Great for a Handful of Super-Wealthy, but Bad for Workers and Bad for America

This vote came soon after more than 4,000 workers in the media industry — directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, editors, cinematographers, musicians, and composers — signed a letter predicting an industry disaster if the sale went through.

That’s because, as my friend Harold Meyerson from The American Prospect has noted, such deals typically saddle the purchased companies with gigantic debts that buyers incur to make the deal — in the case of Warner Bros. Discovery, $79 billion — and this debt, in turn, requires that buyers slash costs (especially payrolls) to pay off some of it.

More than 70 percent of all the shares in Warner Bros. Discovery are held by institutional investors — including the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street. These institutions voted for the sale because they believe it will make their shares more valuable.

The sale will also make certain individuals a lot of money. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, stands to collect some $886 million for shepherding it, in addition to his regular pay package (which was $51 million in 2024). Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son, David, the new owners of Warner Bros. Discovery, are already among the richest people in the world.

But what about the workers in the industry who’ll lose their jobs as a result of the sale? What about all the people whose wages will be slashed? What about Los Angeles, which may lose a sizable portion of its major industry?

And what about the concentration of so much of the news business — so much of what Americans learn about what’s happening — under these two Trump suck-ups?

If Trump’s Justice Department approves the deal (do birds fly?), CBS News and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert, whose contract is about to run out and who will be taken off the air because of his criticisms of Trump) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies, the Ellisons.

2. The Moral Bankruptcy of Shareholder Capitalism

At the heart of modern American capitalism is the assumption that a corporation exists for only one purpose: to make its shares more valuable.

That goal trumps (excuse me) all other goals — such as raising workers’ wages, improving workers’ job security, creating more jobs, enhancing the quality of life for the community where a company is headquartered or does business, making life better for the inhabitants of the nation and the world, even protecting democracy.

In fact, if shareholders can make more money by shafting these other “stakeholders” and destroying these other values, that’s thought to be perfectly fine. It’s simply the way “impersonal market forces” work. It’s “efficient.”

Before the 1980s, American capitalism ran on a very different principle: that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”

The sentiment may seem quaint or inauthentic today, but in the three decades after World War II, it laid the basis for rapid economic growth and, with strong unions, an equally rapid expansion of the American middle class.

It reflected the sincere views of corporate executives. Many had endured the Great Depression and the war and felt some responsibility for America’s future well-being. These views helped legitimize the role of the large corporation in the public’s mind.

Today, shareholder capitalism has replaced stakeholder capitalism — and most Americans are excluded from its benefits.

Over 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans is owned by the richest 10 percent. More than half is owned by the richest 1 percent. And even they have turned over their votes to giant institutions like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, which have no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything other than the short-term value of the shares they buy or sell.

We are witnessing the logical ending point of shareholder capitalism.

As the share values of America’s biggest corporations continue to soar — even as (and in many cases, because) they eliminate tens of thousands of jobs — the goal of “maximizing shareholder returns” is revealing itself to be morally bankrupt and economically rotten.

And as Artificial Intelligence takes over a growing amount of the work Americans do, the gap between share values (including the wealth of top investors and executives) and the incomes of most Americans will widen into a chasm.

3. Toward a New Stakeholder Capitalism

But here’s the good news: We don’t have to stick with shareholder capitalism. We don’t have to be victims of “impersonal market forces” over which we supposedly have no control.

We can have control. The market is a human creation. It is based on laws that humans devise. We can make laws that alter market forces to serve the interests of the vast majority instead of mainly the oligarchs at the top.

Over the last four decades, corporate laws have been shaped by wealthy individuals to channel a large portion of the nation’s total income and wealth to themselves.

If America’s super-wealthy continue to have unbridled influence over laws and gain control over the assets at the core of Artificial Intelligence, they will end up with almost all the wealth, all the income, and all the political power. Under such conditions, our economy and society simply cannot endure.

Laws can and should be changed to produce a new version of stakeholder capitalism that shares the wealth more widely.

How? For example, corporations could be required to provide long-term employees with the same number of shares as are held by investors. Profitable corporations could be required to provide their workers a portion (a quarter?) of their profits.

Corporations whose highest-paid executives earn more than 100 times their lowest-paid employees should have to pay a surtax. Corporations over a certain size (worth, say, $1 trillion or more) or having more than a certain share of their markets (say, 25 percent) should be broken up. Unfriendly (hostile) takeovers should be banned (as they were, in effect, before 1980).

The “stepped-up basis” rule that allows the wealthy to pass assets to their heirs without ever paying capital gains taxes on them should be eliminated. Vast accumulations of private wealth (say, in excess of a billion dollars) should, after a certain number of years, automatically be turned over to a fund providing subsistence incomes — a universal basic income.

State corporate laws shouldn’t empower corporations to make any campaign donations (effectively reversing Citizens United).

Sound radical? Maybe it is. But shareholder capitalism doesn’t work — as illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery fiasco. Unless radical changes are made, that fiasco is just a taste of what’s to come. If Artificial Intelligence isn’t to destroy capitalism and obliterate democracy, we’re going to have to come up with something that does work, and soon.

Happy May Day, 2026.

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Friends,

I was driving my car yesterday, heading home after doing some errands, when someone ran a red light and just about hit me. I swerved to avoid him, then stopped my car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road screaming at the vanishing as*hole and giving him the finger.

Are drivers becoming more belligerent, or am I becoming grouchier?

Not just drivers. A few days ago, I was waiting in line at a bakery when someone broke in line ahead of me without even a “Please excuse me.” I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.

Is our civic life becoming more brutish, or am I becoming angrier about it?

I’ve been seeing more people dump their trash on the street, and telling them to stop. I’m watching parents scream at their kids with a ferocity I’ve rarely witnessed before, and occasionally I suggest they treat their kids better. My neighbor has started using a loud power tool in the evening, and I’ve asked him to keep it down.

I’m aware of more shoving and pushing — in a department store, at a local restaurant, at an airport — which pisses me off. I hear more people using racial, ethnic, and sexist insults, which I just won’t tolerate. Yesterday’s errands included a stop at the neighborhood Safeway, where someone called the cashier a “bitch.” I told him he shouldn’t say that.

Are such small acts of bullying on the rise, or am I becoming less tolerant of them?

Okay, maybe I am turning into a grouchy old man. But there’s another old man in the White House who has lowered the moral tone of the nation. His selfish, bigoted belligerence has signaled to America that it’s okay to disregard social norms in pursuit of whatever you want.

He’s signaled it’s okay to disregard norms, not just in social interactions but in the system as a whole.

CEOs of hugely profitable firms are now laying off large numbers of workers — not because they have to, but because they figure they can make even more money that way. Until recently, highly profitable corporations didn’t do mass layoffs; it was considered bad form.

A Wall Street Journal story calls the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reports,

“Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.”

Wall Street, meanwhile, is investing in crypto and private credit, in apparent disregard for the dangers they pose to the financial system. It’s as if the Street is saying: Who cares, if there’s money to be made?

We’re in a wave of selfish assertiveness even worse than the “greed is good” days of Gordon Gekko.

Trump is not singularly responsible for every such breach of public morality, of course. But a president inevitably influences the character of a nation. We’re continuously bombarded by how he acts, what he says and does, the ways he treats others, his style, his attitude.

Trump’s are disgusting.

This coarsening of American life should be counted among the myriad ways Trump has worsened America.

I for one am going to resist this degradation of our civic life, even if it earns me a reputation of being an old grouch.

Even if it makes me one.

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Joyce Vance was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. I’m grateful to her for sharing her views on today’s shameful and dishonest Supreme Court decision kneecapping Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, in which Samuel Alito pretends he’s not nullifying Section 2 while doing exactly that. It’s a bad day for American democracy.

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Friends,

Today, with all six Republican appointees in favor and all three Democratic appointees opposed, the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.

In striking down a Louisiana voting map as a racial gerrymander, the court opened the door for other states to redraw their maps in ways that dilute the votes of minority voters.

But Justice Alito — writing for himself and the five other Republican appointees on the court — did this by sleight of hand. Rather than directly strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, Alito weakened Section 2 so much he renders it almost toothless.

Until today’s decision, an assessment of whether a state violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would begin with a simple question: Is a minority group sufficiently large and compact to form a single member district where they would have a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice?

Now, according to the test announced by Alito, plaintiffs get that chance only if a random computer model would give them that opportunity.

This is totally contrary to the history of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress amended in 1982 specifically to respond to an earlier Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) in which the court said plaintiffs had to prove discriminatory intent. Congress responded by saying that if a redistricting plan results in vote dilution — that is, has that effect — plaintiffs have proven their case.

Today Alito says that the court must reject that 1982 law to avoid a clash with the 14th and 15th Amendments. Rubbish. The ratifiers of those amendments engaged in race-conscious legislation to protect former slaves. Everyone understood that those amendments permitted race consciousness in order to reverse America’s horrible history of slavery — which still has repercussions today.

Rather than be faithful to Congress’s effects test, Alito revives the intentional discrimination test:

In short, §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.

This effectively guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It will end what has been the most successful way Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, in state legislatures, and in local bodies. It will make all our legislative bodies whiter. It will significantly diminish protection for minority voters.

A Supreme Court so fundamentally hostile to the rights of minority voters places the court at odds with democracy itself.

From now on, favoring a party is viewed as a venerable tradition in districting. And when a state favors a party in a way that significantly dilutes the votes of minorities, it’s not a Section 2 violation unless minority voters would have been hurt without a redistricting plan that favors one party.

What does this mean for the 2026 elections? In many states, primaries are over, or nearly so. But the decision could affect places still redistricting for 2026, including, most importantly, Florida. It could also affect state and local elections, from school boards and city councils to state legislatures.

Its major effect will be in 2028.

Justice Kagan’s dissent is correct. She notes that the court is now bringing back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent — while denying it is doing so.

Alito knew precisely what he was doing today — making it seem as if he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through legal and technical gibberish, while turning it on its head.

Alito’s mission has long been to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents, rather than all Americans. His five Republican-appointed colleagues on the court appear to believe the same thing.

Shame on them.

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Friends,

So many of you participated in last week’s Office Hours discussion about who should be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 that I think it will be useful to have your views about the “second tier” of candidates (second tier only in terms of national name recognition at this point).

Last week, I listed the top four potential Democratic candidates by current name recognition: Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Out of the 7,174 of you who voted on these four, only 6 percent chose Kamala Harris; 12 percent were for Gavin Newsom; 26 percent of you chose Pete Buttigieg; and 6 percent were for AOC.

The rest of you — 49 percent — wanted someone else.

So today we’re going to focus on the top “someone else” options in current polls: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. (That still leaves a “third tier” comprising California Congressman Ro Khanna, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and former congressman and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel — all of whom we’ll get to soon.)

Here’s a summary of the current second tier’s pros and cons.

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Friends,

As much as he’d love to be, Trump is not king of America. Which makes Charles III’s visit here a bit odd. It’s billed as a state visit, but Charles isn’t a head of state; his function is purely symbolic.

Most Americans disapprove of Trump, but there’s something special about the relationship between the Brits and their Royal Family. For it is in fact their Royal Family — not just an archaic symbol of what remains of the British Empire but a living, breathing, soap opera of a family that in the minds of many Brits represents modern-day Britain.

To those who say it’s bizarre for one of the world’s major democracies of the 21st century to cling to the fiction of royalty — and it is indeed a fiction, because Charles III has no tangible political power — I say this: It’s a relatively harmless fiction and one that arguably meets the needs of people to gossip about, project upon, and vicariously live the lives of a storybook family that tries to be of service to their nation.

Here in America — at least before Trump — some of us romanticized our presidents and their families. Remember Camelot?

But because our presidents also run the executive branch of our government, the two roles — the projected glamor and the political reality — have often gotten confused, leaving us disappointed on both grounds.

After Camelot came Lyndon Johnson, who pulled up dogs by their ears. And then, eventually, Donald (“Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything”) Trump. You can’t get any further from a romanticized Camelot.

Britain’s government may seem drab and boring but is at least free to do its drab and boring best.

Here, we demand that our presidents and their spouses throw formal balls (Trump is trying to build the biggest ballroom anywhere) and state dinners, decorate the White House like a castle, appear in person at every major national anniversary or memorial or funeral, and always symbolize the nation.

I’m certainly not suggesting America should have a royal family. Count me in the “No Kings” camp.

It’s just that Britain’s infatuation with its own royalty may have some social utility there that we Yanks don’t fully understand. Keeping the trappings of royalty separate from the daily slog of governing makes some sense.

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Friends,

His aides don’t trust his judgment, so they’ve excluded him from the war room. So, who’s in charge of his war with Iran?

He’s losing his marbles, friends. For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we faced the reality that the head of the most powerful nation in the world can’t do the job. Congress should impeach and convict him as soon as possible — and get him out of the Oval Office.

Please see the following:

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