Friends,

Here’s this week’s video. Please have a look, and please share!

You’ve heard me talk about this, but I wanted to present it in a way that would be absolutely clear.

The wealth of the richest Americans has exploded. I’m not even talking about the top 1 percent. I’m talking about the richest 0.1 percent — the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

In the 1990s, most Americans’ wealth grew at about the same pace. But after 2010, the top 0.1 percent pulled ahead of the rest of the 1 percent, and everyone else.

2010. Remember that year, because I want to come back to it.

After 2018, in part because of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich that went into effect at the start of that year, America’s richest 0.1 percent are now worth more than the entire GDP of China.

What do they do with all this money? Well, when they’re not just shooting rockets into space or building hideous trucks, they’re spending it on politics.

Billionaire political spending in presidential elections is exploding.

After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, it took off.

In the last presidential election, just 300 billionaire families spent roughly $3 billion. Those families gave an average of $10 million each — roughly 100,000 times what an average donor gave.

And the super-rich are getting a big return on their “investment.” They’re getting more tax cuts, more deregulation, and a government that lets them get away with busting unions, exploiting workers, and monopolizing their markets while poisoning the environment.

All so they can get even richer and accumulate even more power. So they can get even richer and accumulate even more power. And so on.

But this vicious cycle is unsustainable, both politically and economically.

When so much of our economy is in relatively few hands, we will inevitably get to the point where consumers cannot buy all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. This puts the entire economy at risk.

It’s also politically unstable because it’s inherently divisive — pitting losers against winners and laying the groundwork for an authoritarian state — where no one’s future is secure, including the super-rich.

So we ALL have a stake in stopping this vicious cycle.

To do this, we need to raise taxes on the rich — not to punish them but to ensure that the system works for everyone. This means raising their income taxes and taxing their wealth.

And we need public financing for federal elections — matching public dollars to small-dollar donations in order to balance the power of super-rich and corporate donors. Many states and cities are already doing this — and it works.

Finally, we’ve got to undo Citizens United. One way to do that is for states to follow what Montana hopes to do and what Hawaii has already done: take away the power of corporations to make political contributions in the first place.

Look, it’s time to get big money out of politics — for all our sakes.

Please share!

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Friends,

Yesterday I asked a group of eight specialists who have closely watched Trump over the years — two clinical psychologists, a psychiatrist, two medical doctors, and three political advisers — about their reactions to Trump’s interview that aired on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”

Here’s the part of the interview I asked them to focus on. For those of you who missed it, please click on the arrow to see it.

Today’s Office Hours discussion will focus on what, if anything, this interview reveals about Trump at this point in his second term.

The views expressed by my panel of medical and political experts were thoughtful and nuanced. For the sake of discussion, I’ve grouped them into the following categories:

Read more

Friends,

Bari Weiss was hired by CBS to be editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025, when Paramount Skydance acquired CBS.

Weiss had no television-news experience. She was a New York Times Opinion staffer and founder of The Free Press.

In May, Weiss made Nick Bilton the new executive producer of “60 Minutes.” He has no television experience. He has no management experience, either.

I remember when CBS News was the most admired news organization in America — home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. They spoke truth to power. Cronkite had the guts to challenge Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Murrow had the guts to expose Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.

Now, CBS News is a disgraced shell of a news organization that last week fired famed “60 Minutes” senior correspondent Scott Pelley after gutting most of the rest of its team.

Pelley says Weiss repeatedly interfered in stories “60 Minutes” sought to run. When, for example, the show did a piece on the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Weiss wanted to make “the protesters look more violent” and to describe Good “as driving toward the officer,” when videos show her driving away from him.

Pelley concluded that Weiss was trying to put “a thumb on the scale for the President’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News. … a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the President.”

Why was Weiss doing this? Presumably because her boss, David Ellison, wants to suck up to Trump, and hired Weiss to help him — and she hired Bilton to aid her in doing so. And she fired other staff because they wouldn’t.

Trump, meanwhile, has chosen Bill Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no background in national security. He was head of Trump’s federal housing agency. His entire professional experience before that was at companies tied to his family’s wealth.

Trump chose Pulte not because he knows anything about intelligence but because of his eagerness to advance Trump’s political revenge campaign. He used his housing office to attack Trump’s enemies, leveling accusations of mortgage fraud against people Trump considers political enemies — Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook, a Fed governor Trump has sought to fire.

Trump has also chosen Todd Blanche to be attorney general. Blanche’s qualifications? As acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey over a photo he posted on Instagram in May 2025 of seashells on a beach that spelled out “86 47,” which the department characterized as a threat to the president.

It was the second attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute Comey, against whom Trump has vowed retribution for Comey’s alleged disloyalty to Trump during Trump’s first administration — when Comey said Trump pressured him to drop the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, publicly refuted Trump’s allegations that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump, and publicly challenged Trump’s narrative regarding the Russia probe.

Before becoming Pam Bondi’s attack dog at the Justice Department, Blanche was one of Trump’s personal lawyers.

Speaking of no relevant experience, I can’t resist pointing out that Lindsey Halligan, whom Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been a White House aide with no experience as a federal prosecutor before she was appointed. Halligan was tasked by Trump with prosecuting James Comey and Letitia James, after her predecessors as U.S. attorney — Erik Siebert and Todd Gilbert — refused to do it. The ploy didn’t work. The federal courts threw out both indictments.

I could go on — Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — but you get the point. Under Trump, experience, knowledge, and talent are irrelevant. The only criterion for getting a top job is blind loyalty to Trump.

But now this poison has also leached into the private sector, in vital places such as CBS and CBS News — places where people used to be hired for their experience, knowledge, and talent. Now they’re hired for their willingness to sacrifice their integrity to suck up to Trump.

This is how dictators poison the organizations a free society depends on. Trump is destroying CBS News by putting suck-ups David Ellison and Bari Weiss in charge, just as he’s destroying the Department of Justice and the Office of National Intelligence by putting suck-ups Todd Blanche and Bill Pulte in charge.

Sadly, a dictator will always be able to find people whose blind ambition exceeds their integrity.

But you and I don’t have to accept any of this.

We can boycott CBS News and its sponsors.

And we can do everything within our power to get out the vote in the midterm elections whose mail-in ballots start in four months and put responsible people in charge of Congress who have the courage to stand up to the dictator.

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