Friends,

Sorry to invade your inbox again today, but New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani just gave an address about America on this eve of our 250th anniversary, which is the opposite of the speech Trump is expected to give tomorrow. A naturalized citizen born in Uganda to parents of Indian origin, Mamdani sat behind a desk used by George Washington, with naturalized immigrants standing around him holding American flags.

I want to share parts of Mayor Mamdani’s address with you. The full address can be viewed here.

“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.

It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.

We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.

The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all….

You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty ... hither have they fled.”

And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted — but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.

As we mark 250 years, what do we see?

We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.

We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.

We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.

We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor.

Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model.

We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and still believes his country can do better by his family.

Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder.

Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people.

We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors — without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have — as ICE invades our neighborhoods.

We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots.

We see America each time working people demand more — not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.

There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it, they say.

But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time.

It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?
…

Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”

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Friends,

I came across this Public Service Announcement produced by the U.S. government in 1945. It seems apt today, on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, when bigotry and hate are being stoked by a neofascist president. Please take a look:

This is a clip from the original, which runs 23 minutes. It was called “Don’t Be a Sucker.”

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Friends,

Some 163 million people in the U.S. live in areas that experienced dangerous heat on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service — sending “heat risk” forecasts in major cities (including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlanta) into the most extreme risk category through Saturday.

Part of the reason is the planet is warming dangerously, but Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and is encouraging more use of fossil fuels.

Especially endangered are workers toiling under the hot sun, or in stifling warehouses, or in delivery trucks with no AC.

Yet Trump’s pick to run the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, David Keeling, is weakening the agency’s own heat standards by removing specific inspection goals. OSHA’s Heat National Emphasis Program expired on April 8. Its proposed heat standard has been stalled.

For many workers, heat standards are literally a matter of life and death. Every year, workers collapse, suffer permanent injuries, and die while doing their jobs in extreme heat.

Years ago, when I ran the Labor Department, we had the toughest Occupational Health and Safety Administration in history, run by a truly committed worker advocate named Joe Dear. We made workplaces safer — reducing worker deaths and injuries.

Since its inception in 1971, OSHA has reduced workplace-related fatalities by almost 63 percent. It has slashed the rate of serious workplace injuries and illnesses by 75 percent.

But OSHA under Keeling is retreating from worker safety.

Before Trump picked him to head OSHA, Keeling was Amazon’s top safety executive.

During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, a Senate report found that Amazon warehouses were twice as dangerous as those of its competitors.

This year, we’ve already seen reports of Amazon workers dying on the job on a near monthly basis, including incidents in Oregon and North Carolina. Why would we trust Amazon’s safety head with the country’s workers?

Before he was at Amazon, Keeling was in charge of safety at UPS. How did he do there? OSHA repeatedly cited UPS for exposing drivers to excessive heat. Federal investigators found at least 100 drivers were hospitalized for heat-related injuries between 2015 and 2018. UPS delivery trucks had no air conditioning until 2024, when it was won in a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters.

Now Keeling is head of OSHA, and OSHA is weakening its heat protection standards.

Workers are already paying the price. Reports of worker deaths during extreme heat continue to emerge across the country. Heat exposure can trigger heat stroke, organ failure, and chronic kidney disease. These are among the most predictable workplace hazards, which means they can often be prevented with strong safety standards and rigorous enforcement.

But instead of strengthening those protections, OSHA under Keeling has weakened them. At a time when record-breaking temperatures are becoming more frequent, retreating from enforcement sends a dangerous message that worker fatalities are a cost of doing business.

When he was in charge of safety at Amazon, Amazon became notorious for dangerous warehouse conditions. When in charge of safety at UPS, UPS resisted providing air conditioning for delivery vehicles. Now, when the agency responsible for protecting millions of workers should be leading the fight against preventable heat deaths — it’s backing away from its most basic responsibility to protect people over profits.

What can you do? Demand that OSHA head David Keeling take the heat and restore strong heat protections for workers or be removed from his job. Please sign on now.

Robert Reich

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Friends,

For this week’s video, my young colleagues dressed me up in 18th century garb to read portions of the Declaration of Independence that are often overlooked — but shouldn’t be, because they’re directly relevant to what Trump is doing to America.

Have a look:

Please share.

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Friends,

Job growth slowed considerably last month. Employers added a less-than-expected 57,000 jobs in June, according to Labor Department data out today.

That’s far below the 129,000 jobs added in May and comes amid high anxiety about the state of the American economy.

According to today’s report, average hourly earnings increased by 3.5 percent. But prices are increasing at an annual rate of 4.2 percent.

What do you get when prices are increasing faster than wages? You get people who are becoming poorer. And what do you get when people become poorer? Angry voters.

Trump is constantly talking about the strength of the stock market. This morning he even shared a link to an article called “S&P 500 closes with strongest quarter since 2020.” Yesterday, when asked about the huge profits he’s made off his stock trades, he countered, “Well, you know why I’m profiting? Cause the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting.”

The truth is most Americans aren’t profiting in the stock market. The richest 10 percent own over 90 percent of the value of all shares of stock. The richest 1 percent own over half of the value of all shares of stock.

Trump frequently points to 401(k) accounts as evidence of Americans benefiting from the strong stock market. But only around a third of working-age individuals have any savings at all in 401(k) accounts. About 40 percent of all Americans have no retirement savings whatsoever.

Bottom line: It’s a lousy economy. Anyone who voted for Trump in 2024 should have buyer’s remorse.

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Friends,

As we prepare to mark the nation’s 250th birthday, I hope you’ll forgive me if I fill part of your inbox today with some thoughts about what’s worth celebrating — the American common good.

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Friends,

In financial disclosures released Tuesday, Trump reported earning more than $1.4 billion last year from his several cryptocurrency ventures.

All told — including other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets —Trump pulled in at least $2.2 billion last year. That compares to the roughly $622 million his enterprises raked in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

In other words, it’s a fair guess that last year he made more than $1 billion off his presidency.

We’re talking big money and big looting.

Trump has conflicts of interest up the wazoo.

For example, as a candidate in 2024, Trump embraced crypto. Then he and his family invested like mad in it — through CIC Digital — a Trump Organization affiliate that is behind his memecoin, $TRUMP. And through another Trump family-backed crypto company, World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Trump, his sons, and the family of special envoy Steve Witkoff in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign. World Liberty is now behind several prominent crypto tokens.

The problem here is more than potential conflicts of interest, more than the mere appearance of conflicts of interest. The conflicts are real, blatant, outrageous.

Since taking office, Trump has installed friendly regulators to oversee digital assets, and he’s pushed for landmark crypto legislation that would further free crypto from being treated as a security (in which case all sorts of disclosures would have to be made about it).

It goes way beyond crypto. His investment accounts made more than 20,000 trades last year — and many appear to be timed to take maximum advantage of his public announcements that moved markets.

Just one day before he announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, for example, his investment accounts made 327 individual stock purchases, each valued as much as $250,000. It was one of the largest single-day buys disclosed in Tuesday’s financial disclosures. The following day, when Trump announced the pause, the S&P soared nearly 10 percent — one of the biggest single-day gains in the index’s history.

He’s made a bundle from real estate deals that foreign governments have been eager to strike with him and his family, presumably because he’s given them — or will give them — something in return. Entities from the Persian Gulf paid around $300 million to Trump’s businesses last year, more than any other foreign region identifiable in his financial disclosures.

On Wednesday, he traveled to North Dakota on the maiden flight of the new Air Force One, a $400 million jet gifted to him by the Qatari royal family whose ownership will transfer to Trump when he leaves office (technically, it will go to Trump’s own presidential library foundation, but there’s nothing stopping him from using it for private purposes).

This is called corruption, folks. And it’s on a massive scale.

A White House spokesperson says neither Trump nor his family “has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

Oh please. Next we’ll be told Trump never tells a lie, either.

Conflicts of interest like these make it impossible for the public to judge whether Trump is working for America or for himself when he advocates for or implements a particular policy, such as his crypto policy or his moves in the Middle East.

We don’t even know for sure that Trump has disclosed all his investments. The financial disclosure made Tuesday was voluntary. Can anyone be certain Trump has come clean about all his conflicts of interest?

But perhaps the most troubling thing about all this is Trump doesn’t give a shite.

In his first term, when asked about conflicts of interest, he said, “the president can’t have a conflict of interest … because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest.”

He’s also said Americans “don’t care at all” about his unreleased tax returns or his personal finances.

In his second term, he’s even less inhibited about raking in money. “I found out that nobody cared,” Trump told The New York Times in January.

Now, he has nothing to lose by making as much money as possible off his presidency.

He probably figures he’s survived two impeachments so far and won’t be impeached for pesky conflicts of interest. He won’t be running for the presidency again, so he doesn’t have to worry that his conflicts of interest will be used against him in a future campaign. Why not rake in as much as he can?

As to his historic legacy, Trump isn’t worried about that either. He likely believes he can create his own history. That’s what he’s tried to do for the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That’s what his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House is all about — framed portraits of all U.S. presidents accompanied by Trump’s own partisan, gold-lettered plaques, many written by Trump himself.

In other words, we’re dealing with a malignant narcissist who thinks only about his own wealth and power and about vengeance against those who have tried to stop him from acquiring more.

How can we possibly expect that he’s working for the people of the United States rather than for himself?

Trump doesn’t have any conflicts of interest. That’s because he really has only one interest: Trump.

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Friends,

I’m so pleased to tell you that we’re doing one last free watchalong of The Last Class, the documentary about my final semester of teaching. It will be next Wednesday, July 8 at 5:30 p.m. PT / 8:30 p.m. ET and all zones between.

I’ll be there live, as will Heather Lofthouse, who produced the film, and Elliot Kirschner, its director. I’ll introduce the film, we’ll watch it together, then take your questions and respond to your comments. \

Please join us!

Sign up here, and you’ll receive a viewing link by email on July 8, the day of the event:

Sign up for the watchalong here

Last December, I loved seeing thousands of you join us for a live watchalong of the film — asking questions in the comments and adding to the post-screening conversation.

It was such a success that the team decided to do one last free watchalong. We’ll also show you all an exclusive sneak peek of Inequality Media’s new film, which is coming out in September.

Remember: Next Wednesday, July 8, at 5:30 pm PT/ 8:30 pm ET. We’ll all watch together in real time, share some behind-the-scenes stories and commentary, and stay afterward for a live Q&A, followed by an exclusive preview of Elliot and Heather’s new film.

Sign up for the screening and you’ll receive a viewing link by email on July 8, the day of the event:

Sign up for the watchalong here

The watchalong is free. But if you’re able to make a donation to support our work, I hope you’ll consider doing so. Your support helps us continue sharing The Last Class with audiences around the country and helps power the work we’re doing.

One caveat: This really is a live event, and when it ends, the link expires. In other words, this is a one-time showing.

Hope to see you! July 8, 5:30 p.m. PT / 8:30 p.m. ET, and all zones between.

Robert Reich

Friends,

In one of the most notable upsets of the Democratic primaries so far, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, 29, yesterday won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette to represent Colorado’s hotly contested 1st Congressional District.

I expect to see more stories about how the Democratic Socialists of America are taking over the Democratic Party. In New York last week, nine of 10 candidates endorsed by the DSA won primaries for the state Legislature and Congress. All three democratic socialist insurgents Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed for Congress prevailed. Two of them defeated incumbents.

Democratic socialist elected officials now include U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib (both elected in 2018), New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle mayor Katie Wilson (both elected in 2025). Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is set to follow as mayor of Washington, D.C.

In 2025, over 250 DSA members held elected public office across 40 states, with 90 percent of them elected after 2019.

Pundits eager to declare a new movement or sound the alarm about socialism are having a field day.

But they’re wrong.

I don’t mean to minimize the role of the DSA or the significance of democratic socialism. But that fact is, voters who have supported these candidates haven’t done so because they’ve been particularly attracted to the idea of democratic socialism. Most don’t even know what democratic socialism is.

In reality, voters have been attracted to vigorous young people who are committed to getting stuff done. Voters have had it with incumbents who have been in their jobs for decades. At a time of record inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity — when billionaires are behind much of what our government is doing — voters want fighters who will get big corporate money out of our politics and go to the mat for average working people.

Colorado’s DeGette has held her seat for nearly 30 years. Kiros was born the same year DeGette was first elected to Congress.

Kiros is poised to become the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress. Her win in the solidly blue district that makes up most of Denver means Kiros is likely headed to Washington next year.

Kiros is a fighter who understands what’s worth fighting for and expresses it clearly. “The thing is, fighting Trump is just one piece of the problem. Trump is not the cause,” Kiros said during a debate earlier this month. “He’s a symptom of a system that is broken and has been broken for a really long time because our party has failed to understand the role that they need to take in getting money out of our politics.”

A former lawyer and Ph.D. candidate, Kiros easily presents herself as a politician for the working class. Her family immigrated to Denver from Ethiopia when she was a baby.

Kiros has never before run for elected office, but she won support from a range of voters with a message of fundamental reform of the American system.

Or consider Manny Rutinel, 31, a progressive Colorado state representative who on Tuesday defeated a moderate Democrat to win the primary election in Colorado’s most competitive swing district.

A Dominican American activist and lawyer with a significant social media following and a knack for fundraising, Rutinel isn’t a democratic socialist. He appealed to voters with his youth, energy, and multicultural biography in a suburban area north of Denver that’s nearly 40 percent Latino. He prevailed over Shannon Bird, a white moderate Democrat who had argued that she had broader appeal in the general election.

The district is one of Colorado’s ranching and agricultural hubs. It narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and for President Trump in 2024. It is one of just a handful of battleground House districts with a substantial Latino population.

Besides their youth and multicultural backgrounds, these young Democratic politicians are committed to making people’s lives better. New York’s Mamdani focused his mayoral campaign on what New Yorkers needed — affordable housing, childcare, and basic services like clearing sidewalks after a snowstorm.

Seattle’s Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist who won election without the endorsement of the DSA, rose to prominence for advocating affordable housing, increased taxes on large corporations, and workers’ rights.

In Washington, D.C., Lewis George, a city council member, ran on a platform of expanding childcare, education, and housing and revoking the district’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

“From the start of this campaign, we championed the principle that D.C. residents deserve a government that works,” she said in her victory speech. “Over time, failing public services eroded people’s faith in government as a force of good in their lives. As mayor, I will be relentlessly focused on delivering reliable public services to every D.C. neighborhood. These are not trivial issues. They are core government functions, and we need them to work.”

These new young Democrats have also won because they inspired armies of young activists to knock on doors and work the phones for them. They didn’t rely on big money; they relied on big excitement.

Two final things about them. Most are the children of immigrants, and they’re disproportionately female. They’re living illustrations of the diversity, equity, and inclusion America can foster, at its best. They’re the opposite of the white, male, Christian, nationalism that has overtaken the Republican Party.

At a time when Trump and his regime have cast a dark pall over America, a new generation of Democratic politicians is shining a bright light. The source of the energy and excitement they’re generating isn’t democratic socialism. It’s the emergence of the next America.

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Friends,

Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day 1 executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.

The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to directly conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The Trump regime appealed the lower-court rulings, contending that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision had been misunderstood for more than a century. The administration argued that the drafters of the amendment were focused on guaranteeing citizenship for the children of formerly enslaved people — and that the amendment was never intended to extend citizenship to the children of people who weren’t living in the country legally.

Trump and his solicitor general, who argued this case before the court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”— the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.

Trump has been vowing to try to change the law since entering politics in 2015, arguing the 14th Amendment was written specifically to enshrine the rights of freed slaves. His critics have countered that it was always designed to apply to the children of immigrants, too. An 1898 Supreme Court decision confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.

Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump.

Had Trump won, it would have probably caused panic among recent immigrants and their families. Although Trump has insisted his policy would apply only to future births, it was far from clear that the logic of any win for Trump wouldn’t apply retroactively if a future president (JD Vance? perish the thought) wanted to go there.

What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.

Only five of the nine justices ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.

The court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

Pure and utter claptrap.

Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.

Clearly, the Supreme Court must be changed — either by expanding the number of justices or by invoking term limits on Supreme Court justices. The Constitution would permit both remedies.

Perhaps the best thing about today’s majority decision is that it’s a direct repudiation of Trump, who has long taken a personal interest in the issue. During his 2024 campaign, he made curtailing birthright citizenship a key element of his immigration platform.

When the high court heard arguments on the case in April, Trump took the unprecedented step of showing up in person for the hearing, making him the first sitting president ever to attend a Supreme Court argument.

For the court to so directly reject Trump’s position today is surely a humiliation for him. But then again, humiliation requires a capacity to feel shame, and he has repeatedly shown he has no shame.

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Friends,

Last week’s election results in New York City have shaken the Israeli-American alliance.

The sharp decline in Israel’s popularity over its prosecution of the two-year war in Gaza had already strained the relationship. Yet in those New York elections last week, three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel, defeated moderates in hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries.

These election results did not reflect a rise in antisemitism. After all, New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. They reflected an upsurge in sympathy toward the Palestinian cause and rejection of Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack.

To be sure, the Hamas attack was heinous and morally repugnant, regardless of whether you sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. But Israel’s response to it — and the continuation of military aid to Israel in the future — is sure to be an issue in the upcoming midterm elections, in subsequent Democratic presidential primaries, and in general elections of 2028.

So today’s Office Hours examines your thoughts about Israel, its culpability, and what America’s future relationship to Israel should be. It’s a difficult question for many of us, but I think it important to discuss.

Herewith, the major positions on the subject as they’re now being expressed in American politics.

1. Israel is not culpable in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the U.S. should continue to support Israel.

People who hold this view say that Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, forced Israel’s response, which was understandable and necessary. Unless Israel fights to protect itself and its citizens, its very existence is threatened. This existential threat requires all the firepower Israel possesses. When others are committed to reducing Israel to rubble and murdering Jews living in Israel, the only conceivable response is to try to eliminate that threat by any means possible. So the United States should continue to ally itself with Israel, and continue to help Israel militarily.

2. Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government of Israel are responsible for the deaths in Gaza and the West Bank, and the United States should do whatever it can to end Netanyahu’s reign so that a “two-state” solution can be sought.

By this view, neither Hamas nor Israel as a whole are responsible for the deaths in Gaza or Lebanon, nor even the aggression by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The responsibility lies with Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government in Israel. The proper role for the United States at this juncture is to do whatever we can to remove Netanyahu from power and encourage a new regime to seek a “two-state solution” in which Palestinians have their own homeland.

3. It’s not just Netanyahu. Israel as a whole is to blame for genocide in Gaza, and the United States should stop supplying Israel with military aid and equipment and stop guaranteeing its security.

Two of the candidates who won in New York last week — Brad Lander and Claire Valdez — accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza and want the United States to stop supplying it with arms. Many who hold this view want to end the military security alliance between Israel and the United States, regardless of who’s in charge of Israel. (In a Pew survey in April, 60 percent of Americans say they hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel — up from 42 percent in 2022.)

4. Israel is not only culpable but it should not exist because it is a religious state that relegates non-Jews to second-class citizenship, and has no legitimacy in modern society.

One of the candidates who won last week in New York — Darializa Avila Chevalier — has questioned Israel’s right to exist. She is not alone. Since Israel’s attacks on Gaza, a number of Americans have questioned the legitimacy of a Jewish state. They argue that it relegates inhabitants who don’t hold its religious views to second-class citizenship, creating in effect an apartheid state. Some go further and argue that Israel rests on stolen lands (in contrast to Zionist narratives that emphasize the multi-millennial historical and biblical connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and the legal purchase by Jewish organizations of vast tracts of land from willing sellers, including local inhabitants and absentee Arab landlords.)

***

Hence, this week’s Office Hours question: How should the United States treat Israel in the future?

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Friends,

Today’s Supreme Court decision ending the independence of independent regulatory agencies, and directly overruling a court precedent, was justified by a pernicious idea advocated by the conservative Supreme Court majority: that the framers of the Constitution envisioned a so-called “unified executive.” In fact, the framers’ focus was to prevent a United States president from becoming too powerful — like the king they were displacing — so they could not have sought a strong, centralized executive branch. Please see below.

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Friends,

First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.

I’m proud of the work the FTC did then and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.

Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is — or was — independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.

The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy — and corrupted the nation’s politics — during the First Gilded Age.

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the robber barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.

That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people — and not just the wealthiest and most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.

We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.

Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

Hence today’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

Today’s ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Today marks the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.

It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.

In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau — again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor — said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.

Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued: “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”

Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”

That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.

Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary — to check and constrain him.

Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.

But as of today, they are no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Today’s ruling overturns the basic idea — part of the fabric of our government for well over a century — that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.

As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.

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Friends,

JD Vance said on Friday that the U.S. wins “either way” in negotiations with Iran. “If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country.”

Just hours after Vance’s appearance on HBO, Iran launched attack drones on Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

So much for Iran being much weaker.

Pressed by Maher on whether Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed, Vance shot back: “What part of it is not destroyed? The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

In fact, Iran still has a stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which experts concede could be turned into a nuclear weapon.

Vance’s media appearance came two days after he visited the Richard Nixon presidential library and museum in California to talk about his new book on his journey from atheism to allegedly devout Catholicism.

During his visit he defended Nixon for the Watergate break-in scandal that ended his presidency. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” It was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” — not Nixon’s serious crimes.

Hello? The only conceivable reason Watergate might not bring down a presidency tomorrow or be a 12-hour story is the gargantuan criminality and corruption of the Trump-Vance regime, which puts Watergate in the minor league by comparison.

I raise Vance’s recent bizarro comments because in a few months he’ll be actively campaigning to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028.

He’s a more dangerous demagogue than Trump because he wraps his demagoguery in the apparent thoughtfulness of a graduate of Yale Law School and a serious best-selling author.

I’ve spent the last two days reading his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, a memoir focusing on his 2019 conversion to Catholicism, and can assure you of three things: First, it’s a serious book. Second, Vance’s mind is as vacuous and unprincipled as he is in person. Third, the book isn’t worth reading.

In one of the few mea culpas in the book, Vance writes that it was “boneheaded” of him — “one of the dumbest things I ever said” — to call Kamala Harris and several other prominent Democrats “childless cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” In the book Vance calls the insult, “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

What Vance doesn’t admit to is that, when his remark resurfaced during his early days as Trump’s running mate, he refused to apologize or express any regret for it. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said then — sarcastically — adding that “if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” which in his view had made the entire Democratic Party “anti-family and anti-child.”

Vance’s intentionally provocative rather than illuminating demagoguery was in evidence again when he insisted during the 2024 campaign that the pets of upright Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.”

When confronted with irrefutable evidence that Haitian immigrants were not eating pets in Springfield, Vance admitted publicly that he was speaking, shall we say, metaphorically: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

It’s much the same with Vance’s recent response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa in the British city of Southampton. After Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Vance declared that Nowak would still be alive had Europeans “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

Inconveniently for Vance, Digwa didn’t migrate to Britain. He was born and raised there.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s Senate race.

Before running for the Senate, Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why was Thiel such a devoted sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel saw in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the U.S. away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Bullshit. Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Thiel and Vance believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the U.S. is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the U.S. establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” — as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The next step is to foment so much division and bigotry inside the U.S. and within other major Western nations that people come to view those on the other side of the political divide as the source of everything that’s wrong with their lives — which Vance has been eagerly trying to do.

That way, they won’t look upward to see that the billionaire robber barons, plutocrats, and oligarchs of this second Gilded Age have grabbed most of the wealth and power for themselves. Hence, average people will trade in democracy for strongman autocracy.

Behind Vance’s demagoguery about the U.S. winning either way in Iran, Nixon being taken down by the deep state, childless cat ladies, the Democratic Party being anti-family and anti-child, Haitian-Americans eating pets, and immigrants threatening Western civilization is a deadly serious plan to unite the far-right of America and Europe and rid much of the world of democracy. If Vance becomes president, he’s intent on furthering the job.

Vance resembles Trump in every way — he lies effortlessly, he’s utterly without principle, and he’s intent on gaining power — except that he’s smarter and more ruthless than Trump.

Take note and beware.

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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 week’s winner:

“On reflection, I am now the King of Green-land.”

(Congratulations, Carol Nylen.)

Runners-up:

“Mirror mirror in the slime, who’s the sleaziest of all time?”

(Congratulations, Andrew Kelm.)

“Reflection, reflection in the pool: Am I wise, or am I a fool?”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“He’s ‘floating’ a run for a 3rd term as the Green Party candidate.”

(Congratulations, DZK.)

“Mirror mirror on the pool, who’s the greatest king of fools?”

(Congratulations, Mike Hammer.)

“Everything he touches turns to slime.”

(Congratulations, ISOequanimity.)

“It’s even more shallow than me!”

(Congratulations, John Powell.)

“Trump only looks, he never reflects”

(Congratulations, howard levitt.)

“Mirror, mirror in the pool, how do we get rid of this fool?”

(Congratulations, Diane Fogarty.)

“I hired the best pool guy, and I never make mistakes. He’s the greatest pool guy, better than any pool guy ever seen. So it must be some left-wing vandals that caused this.”

(Congratulations, Lynn E Levine.)

“Narcissus in green.”

(Congratulations, ERIK Payne BUTLER.)

“Mirror, mirror, on the mall. I’m the greatest one of all!”

(Congratulations, Sue Kayton.)

“What about my Rhapsody in Blue? I’m green with envy.”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Yep, I am a king, and the water is crystal clear.”

(Congratulations, Michigan Banjo Man.)

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Friends,

For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.

Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.

Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.

But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.

That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.

America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority.

Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support.

I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.

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Friends,

This is my last post to you today, I promise. But I couldn’t resist telling you about Elon’s comeuppance. SpaceX crashed this week, and I just got some of the details.

Remember when Musk became the world’s first trillionaire? No longer. SpaceX’s stock price has settled way down. It’s not even 10 percent over its initial public offering price. Which means Musk’s bag is down to around $900 billion.

The SpaceX crash wiped out just about all of SpaceX’s gains from the last two weeks, which has caused massive headaches for its average investors and initial buyers. Not quite a Ponzi scheme yet, but heading in that direction.

All this shows why we need a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s on the side of average investors and the public and not bought off by today’s robber barons.

SpaceX started to crash with a report out Monday that, notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding its IPO’s raising $85 billion in its first trading days, SpaceX wasn’t really flying all that high. In fact, it was floating a $20 billion bond sale to refinance its debts (mostly from its acquisition of X, on which Musk had put a lofty valuation).

Since Musk took over X in 2022, the platform has lost almost 80 percent of its market value. No surprise. I mean, who wants to read a bunch of right-wing rants?

To make matters worse, xAI, on which Musk also put a sky-high valuation before merging it into SpaceX, has fallen way behind other American AI companies in the race to develop generative AI.

As of May, all of xAI’s co-founders had jumped ship, according to LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who calls xAI a “complete train wreck.” Small wonder that credit-rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch have graded SpaceX’s debt just a few notches above junk.

At the time of SpaceX’s IPO, Musk priced SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This was ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals, to say nothing of its debt.

The wild valuation depended on a belief that Musk can colonize Mars, put a data center into space, establish interstellar travel, and accomplish other wild things that would eventually generate big profits — but are likely to generate zilch until most investors’ great-grandchildren have kicked the bucket.

Let me remind you that because of its size, a big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) are now automatically tied to SpaceX’s market value. Yet SpaceX insiders have been able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case, because that’s the way the IPO was structured.

Put all this together with the increasing likelihood that AI is turning into a bubble whose burst will make the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Bubble look like sparkling water by comparison.

Add in Trump’s fiasco of a war with Iran and its oil shock, his avowed intention to weaken the dollar, and the increasingly likely specter of stagflation in the United States, and you get a perfect storm.

Are Trump and Musk — two of the most despicable people in the world — bringing on a global recession, or worse? We’ll soon find out.

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Friends,

Trump’s war with Iran is continuing. Today, Iran launched attack drones at Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

Those attacks came after the United States carried out overnight airstrikes on Iranian missile and drone sites, in retaliation for Iran’s firing drones at a container ship on Thursday as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tonight, Trump posted that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

The continuing hostilities are exposing the mind-numbing extent of Trump’s lies about “ending” his war: that he’s achieved a lasting peace in the Middle East; that Iran no longer has any capacity to fire missiles and drones; that the Strait of Hormuz is reopen to cargo traffic; that Iran is committed to reducing its stockpile of nuclear material and won’t seek a nuclear bomb; and that, overall, the war he launched on February 28 has made America stronger and safer than we were before he launched it.

These lies aren’t on par with his big lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was undertaken by peaceful, patriotic Americans. But his lies about the so-called “end” of his war with Iran could have equally large consequences, because they’re leading many Americans to believe that an end of the war is within sight and that America is stronger and safer as a result of it.

Yet the mainstream media refuse to call him out on his Iran lies.

The New York Times terms what’s now happening a “flare-up of hostilities” that threatens “to unravel” ongoing “talks to reach a final peace agreement,” and that “neither side seems eager to return to a full-blown war.”

Well, they may not want to return to a “full-blown war,” but they’ve returned to hostilities that are blocking the strait and destroying whatever shred of trust diplomacy depends on. And not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Washington Post calls it “the latest threat to a ceasefire and ongoing talks toward a broader peace” — which of course assumes there has been a real ceasefire, and that the talks now underway will result in a “broader peace,” whatever that means. Also not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Wall Street Journal says the hostilities have “added to pressure on a preliminary peace deal already under stress from continued fighting in Lebanon and disagreements over nuclear inspections.” But that assumes there’s already a preliminary peace deal. Has anyone actually read it? And the disagreements are hardly confined to nuclear inspections. What about free passage through the strait? Oh, and here again, no word about Trump’s blatant lies.

My expectations for the mainstream press were already low. From the outset of this war, the public has received half-baked and inconsistent reports. And although the media know better than to rely on any words emanating from Trump’s mouth, why have they given up holding him to account for what he says about the war?

Trump’s war with Iran was a disaster from the start, and its so-called “end” is a debacle that Americans need to know about. Trump wants the war to go away, but it won’t because he has strengthened Iran’s resolve, which in turn has strengthened its hand.

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Friends,

Today, Heather and I examine all sorts of things that went wrong this week for Trump, starting with Iran’s attack on an oil tanker moving through the Strait of Hormuz and including Trump’s latest problems with the Reflecting Pool — the Strait of Warm Ooze.

Please grab a cuppa, pull up a chair, and join in the conversation.

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Friends,

I keep getting phone calls from politicians wanting to know what I make of the extraordinary victories at the polls this week of young Democratic Socialists. Here’s what I tell them:

The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick.

Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America.

Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism.

Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson; Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C.; and a bevy of newly elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.

Pitted against these economic populists in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine for the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism.

In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II.

It runs vertically from bottom to top.

Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.

Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.

Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP.

They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.

I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties.

One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist.

There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.

But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.

The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.

Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and it has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.

Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “We’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.

Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.

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