Friends,

For as long as I can remember, the White House Correspondents dinner was where the Washington press corps and Washington officials basked in each other’s celebrity.

Last night’s ended abruptly with gunshots, Secret Service officers screaming at attendees to “get down,” Trump and other officials being rapidly ushered out of the ballroom, plates crashing and chairs falling, and general pandemonium.

Last night, the celebrities became normal people feeling panic and fear.

Most of the time, Washington is a stage on which actors take on roles and dress up for assigned parts. I remember wearing an uncomfortable tuxedo to the White House Correspondents Dinner, trying to make pleasant conversation with people who had skewered me that very morning.

The glamor and swish of the event was at such sharp odds with the hard daily slog of my job that the event seemed strangely disembodied, as if everyone had been given a script that they knew was total bullshit.

Trump has changed much of this. He has brought a grim hostility to the jobs of doing the public’s work and reporting on those who do the public’s work. This was the first White House Correspondents dinner he agreed to attend, and by all accounts he was prepared to give the media pure hell in his remarks.

And then hell erupted in the form of another crazed gunman. As I write this, it appears that one Secret Service agent was injured but none of the luminaries was hurt.

There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of last night’s attendees were in Congress on January 6, 2021 when Trump’s thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol.)

Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.

It is no longer the hard slog I remember. The drama in Washington is now a chaotic tragedy, most of whose actors — those who make the news and those who report it — live in continuous uncertainty and turmoil.

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Today, Heather and I try to make sense out of this week’s riddles: What is Trump’s strategy for reopening the Strait of Hormuz? What’s he doing to stop his base from unraveling over his failed war? How can he avoid a “blue wave” in the midterm elections? And, by the way, why are jobs so hard to come by these days, anyway?

We answer these and other riddles of the week. Please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join the conversation.

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Friends,

Today’s question: Why did Trump on Wednesday post the video and transcript of a bigoted podcaster who used racist tropes against Chinese and Indian immigrants?

In it, Michael Savage says:

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet. … [T]here’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today. No, they’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors. … We’ve gone from the melting pot to the chamber pot.”

Savage also derides American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecillia Wang, a U.S. citizen who argued before the Supreme Court against Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship. Savage claims she is “pushing to destroy our national identity” and to “turn us into a colony of China.”

Why did the president of the United States repost this excrement?

The easiest answer is Trump wants to stir up America’s bigots to support his executive order against birthright citizenship, as the Supreme Court considers its constitutionality.

But this can’t really be the reason. Not even the high court’s most dishonest and stupid right-wing justices would be swayed by messages coming from bigots stirred up by Trump’s repost.

Could it be that Trump just wants to stir up racism and bigotry because he likes stirring it up? (Hours before reposting Savage’s sewage, Trump posted disparaging remarks about the Supreme Court, singling out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “Low IQ person,” a critique he often directs toward Brown and Black people.)

But why would Trump want to stir up racism and bigotry right now? Doesn’t he have enough of a problem on his hands with his war in Iran going so badly that even his MAGA base is starting to unravel over it? (Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other MAGA luminaries have recently broken with Trump over the war.)

Bingo. This is exactly why he wants to stir up racism and bigotry now.

Trump knows that the way to keep his base together — to stop it’s unraveling over his war in Iran — is to stoke fear of “them.” His MAGA base may not like never-ending wars in the Middle East, but they dislike immigrants of color even more.

This is Trump’s M.O., friends. Every time he needs to strengthen his base, he feeds it more bigotry.

After the Justice Department released of millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents in January and February, including thousands of references to Trump — which shook the MAGA base — what did Trump do? He reposted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law on November 19, 2025, what did Trump do? He described Somali immigrants living in the U.S. as “garbage” who “contribute nothing” to society.

Every instance of Trump’s reposting bigoted filth follows some potential crack in the MAGA base. Trump’s tried-and-true method of recharging the base is to give them some more reasons to fear “them.”

This was also the purpose of his executive order against birthright citizenship, which he signed on January 20, 2025, his first day in office.

Officially titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” its purpose wasn’t so much to get the Supreme Court to overturn birthright citizenship — highly unlikely, given the express language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Its real purpose was to reassure his base, on his first day back in the White House, that he was on their side, and against the “other,” whom he had spent almost his whole campaign demonizing.

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Friends,

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk that title. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk.

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon.

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans.

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

The New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products.

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it 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, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now.

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws.

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks.

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America.

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that 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 a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking 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.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

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.

But what 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 cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned 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.

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all.

What can you do? You might share this post and boycott Amazon.

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Friends,

Trump and “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth say Operation Epic Fury has destroyed Iran’s military capacity.

“We’ve taken out their navy, we’ve taken out their air force, we’ve taken out their leaders,” Trump said Tuesday.

At a Pentagon briefing on April 8, shortly after Trump declared a ceasefire with Iran, Hegseth said, “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory.” He added, “By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat ineffective for years to come.”

But CBS News’s Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta report a very different reality. They interviewed “multiple officials with knowledge of intelligence,” who say the Islamic Republic of Iran “maintains more military capabilities than the White House or Pentagon has publicly admitted.”

According to three of the officials, about half of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles and its associated launch systems were still intact as of the start of the ceasefire in early April.

Roughly 60 percent of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still in existence, the officials said, including fast-attack speed boats.

Although the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of Iran’s conventional navy, the naval arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, equipped with many smaller vessels, remains partly intact, and it’s that navy that’s hampering oil shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

On Wednesday, Iranian gunboats attacked several commercial ships in the strait, shortly after Trump announced he was unilaterally extending a ceasefire to allow more time for peace talks.

Iranian air power has been significantly degraded but not erased. U.S. officials say that about two-thirds of Iran’s air force is still believed to be operational.

According to a written statement submitted to a House Armed Services Committee by Marine Lt. Gen. James Adams, head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, “Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region, despite degradations to its capabilities from both attrition and expenditure.”

The regime in Tehran is showing itself to be far more tenacious and hardline than the regime it replaced. Iran seems more committed to building a nuclear bomb than it was before Trump’s war and is less constrained than it was after the agreement negotiated by the Obama administration.

And the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, not by the United States but by Iran — causing global oil prices to resume their upward trajectory. (Reminder: It was open before Operation Epic Fury.)

Epic Fury is likely to go down as an epic failure.

What will Trump do next? No one knows.

What do you think?

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Friends,

Tucker Carlson told the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that Trump is “a wonderful person. I know him well. By the way, the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life, actually. You can’t be funny without perspective or without empathy, which is true.”

But on Tuesday, Carlson admitted that he’ll be “tormented” for a long time by his support for Trump in the 2024 presidential election and that “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Well, thank you, Tucker. I — and I’m sure many others — appreciate your apology.

And we hope your torment continues.

By the way, I’ve got to ask: Are you also tormented by — and apologetic for — supporting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen?

And what about your minimizing the presence of white nationalists among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021? And your claim that the attack on the Capitol “barely rates as a footnote?”

Are you now tormented and apologetic for any of this?

And while we’re at it, Tucker, what about your racist screeds? Does any of the filth you’ve spewed for years make you ashamed?

You pushed the “great replacement theory,” claiming that immigrants made America “poorer and dirtier.”

You said a Black Democratic politician spoke like a “sharecropper.”

You told your viewers that America is a “civilization under siege” — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters, by diseased migrants from south of the U.S.-Mexico border, and by refugees importing alien cultures.

When hundreds of refugees from Africa began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the first Trump administration, you warned that Africa’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.”

Amid the nation’s outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, you called those who protested the murder “criminal mobs.”

When Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you asked rhetorically, “Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” And: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

Are you troubled by any of this, Tucker? Are you apologetic? Ashamed?

And if not, why the hell not?

Why should anybody believe you when you say you’re now “tormented” and “sorry” for misleading people about Trump if you express no remorse for supporting his blatant lies about the 2020 election, for backing the rioters at the Capitol, for justifying the murders of protesters, and for poisoning America with your bigoted screeds?

Tucker, we know you’d like to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028 and you think distancing yourself from Trump on his idiotic war is the way to do it — especially with JD Vance as your likely opponent in the primaries.

Well, I have news for you, Tuck. You’re not fooling anyone with your newfound conversion. You’re the same intolerant, dogmatic, puerile fanatic you always were. And just as dangerous for this country and the world as ever.

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Friends,

When Democrats gathered in Philadelphia in 2016, Michelle Obama famously declared, “When they go low, we go high.”

That became the supposed moral choice facing Democrats: Either maintain the integrity and dignity of our governing institutions or stoop to the “ends justify the means” destructiveness of Republicans.

That was then. Yesterday, Democrats in Virginia successfully pushed through one of America’s most aggressively gerrymandered congressional maps. Said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “When they go low, we hit back hard.”

But the real choice isn’t between going high or going low. What blue states are doing — and should make clear they are — is to deter red states from going low by neutralizing any political advantage red states might get from redistricting.

I used to see the choice exactly as Michelle Obama put it. I was something of a purist about gerrymandering. When I chaired Common Cause, I toured the country urging states to set up independent commissions to decide on the shape of congressional districts rather than leave the decisions up to politicians.

But I think Michelle Obama set up a false choice. I’d rather we go high, but to do that it’s first necessary to deter them from going low. I applaud what the voters of Virginia (and my state, California) have done. I don’t view it as a betrayal of earlier reforms. The only way to deter them from going low is to match them — not go lower than they go, but match them in a way that removes their incentive to go low in the first place.

After all, it started when Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott — at the direction of Trump — went so low as to super-gerrymander Texas’s congressional districts, to come up with five additional Republican seats so Republicans could keep control of Congress after the 2026 midterms.

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom responded by redistricting California, gaining a likely five Democratic seats.

Some feared this tit-for-tat would turn into a race to the bottom that would further erode American democracy. But California’s threat was actually meant to save our democracy by neutralizing the likely five-seat advantage Republicans got from Texas’s redistricting.

Then Republicans in North Carolina and Missouri redistricted to create two more likely Republican seats, thereby unbalancing the truce created by California voters. Under those circumstances, Virginia was justified in responding to eliminate that advantage.

Last night, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman expressed dismay that Virginia’s redistricting initiative had passed, declaring, “We all lose at this point” because “the wrong thing doesn’t make it the right thing.” Fetterman warned that “if we continue to just attack the other side, whether it’s a red state or whether it’s a blue state, our democracy is degraded.”

I don’t see it that way. If Democrats counter what Republicans have done — and no more — they prevent Republicans from degrading democracy. Virginia’s move isn’t a betrayal of earlier reforms to limit political interference in map-drawing. It’s part of an ongoing effort by Democratic states to match what Republican states are doing and thereby deter them from further moves.

Democrats and blue-state governors should make clear they’ll continue to redistrict if red states continue to pull the trigger on super-gerrymandering — and that blue states will do no more of it than necessary to counter-balance what red states do.

Ohio may push forward with a plan to eliminate two House seats held by Democrats. Florida Republicans have also floated plans to redraw their district lines. Which is why it’s important that New York, Maryland, New Jersey, and Illinois let it be known that they’re ready to redistrict to counter-balance any potential red-state gains through super-gerrymandering.

This isn’t a race to the bottom. It’s a means of avoiding the bottom. When they go low, we must go low too — but only to deter them from going even lower.

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Friends,

Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States in January 2021, to his ICE and Border Patrol excesses (including murders in Minnesota), to his incursion into Venezuela and abduction of its president, to his attack on Iran, and his threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — all undermine the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

But that’s not all. They threaten what we mean by civilization.

The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

Trump believes that might makes right — that the stronger are entitled to attack and exploit the weaker. Violence against those who are or appear weaker is a hallmark of his presidency and his outlook in general.

He is profoundly and dangerously wrong.

In January, he called the unilateral military intervention that ended in the kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro an example of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

What “iron laws” is he referring to? “Might makes right” is not an iron law. It marks the destruction of the rule of law.

When challenged about the Maduro operation, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller mocked Jake Tapper on CNN for his apparent naïveté about “international niceties” like the United Nations charter. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” said Miller.

Sorry, Stephen. Strength, force, and power do not “govern” anything. They’re the exact opposite of governing. They’re survival of the fittest — the law of the jungle.

On April 7, Trump told the Iranian regime to surrender to American might or “a whole civilization will die tonight.” That kind of talk doesn’t enlarge American power. It delegitimizes American power.

In reality, Trump is destroying any remaining faith that the United States can be trusted to exercise power responsibly. He is also, not incidentally, erasing any distinction between the exercise of American might and Russian conduct in Ukraine and Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or (potentially) over Taiwan.

If the United States stays on this course, it will find itself bereft of allies and friends, a lonely superpower in a lawless international system it has helped to create.

The genius of America’s post-1945 foreign policy was to embed America’s power in international institutions and laws, including the UN charter, emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

America didn’t always live up to these ideals, of course. But all nations, regardless of their size or power, had a stake in them. They not only helped legitimize American power but maintained international stability and avoided another world war.

The same moral underpinning provides the foundation for a good society. To be morally legitimate, any system of laws must be premised on preventing the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. If a system is to be broadly accepted and obeyed, the entire public must believe that it is in their interest to support it.

But this aspiration is easily violated by those who abuse their wealth and power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.

Yet we now inhabit a society grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated and less constrained than at any time since the first Gilded Age. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker because the powerful feel omnipotent.

The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of America and the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more.

Meanwhile, Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and unaccountable agent of American government in history, arrayed on the side of the powerful, domestically and internationally.

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 and January 2021 to his capture of Maduro to his attack on Iran without congressional authority to his blatant corruption. All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by Big Tech and Big Oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.

But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.

History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, and empires. And threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness is already bringing him down. It will haunt America and the world for years to come.

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Friends,

The fog of war is getting thicker.

According to The Washington Post, a “U.S. delegation was expected to depart Tuesday for a second round of face-to-face peace talks with Iran” but “was delayed for ‘additional policy meetings’ involving Vice President JD Vance.”

So, the reason for the delay was additional policy meetings in Washington?

Not quite. According to The New York Times, Vance’s trip was “suspended because Tehran did not respond to American negotiating positions.”

Well, not really. The Wall Street Journal reports that plans for negotiations are “in flux” because “Tehran hasn’t yet decided on sending a delegation.”

Wait. According to CNN, Iran isn’t participating in peace negotiations because of “contradictory messages, contradictory behaviors, and unacceptable actions by the American side.”

These are just the latest in a series of confused reports.

Why the confusion? Is it because these news organizations are getting inconsistent information? Because the U.S. is getting inconsistent messages from Iran? Because U.S. decision-makers don’t themselves know what’s happening? Or because no one on the U.S. side is in charge?

It’s probably all of the above, but I fear it’s largely the last — no one on the U.S. side is in charge.

On April 18, the Journal reported:

“After the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing … Tump screamed at aides for hours ….

Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said ….

Six hours later, the chest-thumping president was back with another audacious gamble to loosen Iran’s grip on its most powerful point of leverage, the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he blasted on social media Easter morning from the White House residence, adding an Islamic prayer to the post.

A president who thrives on drama is bringing an even more intense version of his unorthodox, maximalist approach to a new situation—fighting a war. He is veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.

At the same time, the president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.”

I’ve served three presidents and advised a fourth. I’ve been in and around several White Houses. If presidential aides tell a reporter that they’ve had to keep a president out of the room because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, what they’re really saying is they’re dealing with someone who’s so irrational they don’t trust his judgment.

This is the most chilling thing I’ve heard so far about Trump and his war in Iran. It means Trump isn’t in charge. But neither, presumably, is anyone around him — not JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, or Dan Caine, nor the staffers clustered around each. Even assuming that they’re trying to do the best job they can, even assuming they’re making every attempt to coordinate with each other, the most likely scenario is an ongoing mess.

At best, the fog of war causes many to lose sight of where they are and what their priorities should be. At worst — when the judgment of the commander-in-chief isn’t trusted — the fog is impenetrable. I fear that’s where we are now.

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Friends,

It’s not too early to engage in one of America’s greatest pastimes, which is handicapping the upcoming presidential election.

Not too early because in each of the last five presidential elections, the people who finally emerged as the party’s candidate in the general election began running for the nomination three years before. Early in a campaign cycle, the candidates with high name recognition usually lead the polls. That lead often holds, unless others emerge to take center stage.

Here, according to early polls and political observers, are the people most likely to be the Democratic nominee — as of April 21, 2026 (no candidate has yet officially announced their candidacy).

Who do you think should be the Democrats’ candidate?

Read more

Friends,

Sorry to impinge on your email for a third time today, but I want to make sure you know that Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned as secretary of labor [translated: she was told to resign by the White House], after facing investigations by the department’s inspector general into multiple allegations of misconduct.

She’s alleged to have been drinking during the workday from a “stash” of alcohol in her office, arranging official trips for herself that were extended vacations, taking subordinates to an Oregon strip club while on one such trip, showing no interest in the work of the department, and having an affair with a member of her security team.

Sources have described Chavez-DeRemer as the “boss from hell,” saying she demanded staffers run personal errands for her or perform other menial tasks unrelated to their government jobs. More than two dozen department employees from across the political spectrum described in interviews with The New York Times a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary, hostile aides, and a deeply demoralized staff.

In other words, Chavez-DeRemer was turning the great department I once headed and loved into shit. And I hold Trump responsible because he appointed her.

As I shared with you a few weeks ago, I loved the Department of Labor from the moment I entered the Frances Perkins Building on Constitution Avenue as secretary of labor in January 1992. I loved its mission: to protect and raise the standard of living of working Americans.

I loved its history. The first secretary of labor, Frances Perkins — appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 — was also America’s first female Cabinet secretary. She was the guiding light behind the creation of Social Security, the 40-hour workweek, the National Labor Relations Act, and much more.

I hung the painting of Frances Perkins behind my desk in my huge second-floor office. Whenever I felt discouraged, I looked at her, and she bucked me up. (Although I’m Jewish, I called her Saint Frances.)

I admired the Department of Labor’s career staff, who were dedicated to helping American workers. I was deeply impressed by the assistant secretaries, the deputy secretary, the chief of staff, and other appointees with whom I toiled, often six or seven days a week from early morning to late at night.

Never before or since have I had the privilege of working with such talented people who cared so much about what they were accomplishing for the American people, and who made such a positive impact on so many lives.

We raised the minimum wage for the first time in many years, even under a Republican-controlled Congress. We implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act. We fought against sweatshops. We took on big corporations that were cheating their employees. We kept workers safe. We … well, I could go on and on. (And I have, in my book Locked in the Cabinet, which you can also find here, but please don’t order from here.)

But like so much else Trump has done, he’s turned what was once a great department into a fucking mess. And it frankly breaks my heart.

It’s what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s ass about whom they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television.

Trump and his White House assistants don’t mind if his appointees wreck our government because they don’t care about government. Hell, they came to government to wreck it. If the public loses confidence in, say, the Department of Labor, that’s perfectly fine. If Congress slashes its funding, so much the better.

What they do mind is if a Cabinet member makes Trump look bad, which is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are now history — along with Chavez-DeRemer.

It infuriates me, because I’ve seen government work for the people. I’ve witnessed public servants who care deeply and bust their asses in service to this country. I know how important government can be if it’s doing the job it should be doing.

I loved the Department of Labor because it has improved the lives of millions of Americans. I worked like hell as secretary of labor because I believed in what we were doing. That it’s been treated like crap is an insult to generations of hardworking DOL employees, to American workers, to America.

The least we can all do is flip Congress in November, so senators and representatives who care about this country can oversee the departments of the government and try to remedy some of the wreckage that Trump and his appointees have wreaked on America.

In the meantime, goodbye and good riddance to Madam Secretary Chavez-DeRemer.

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Friends,

Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s admission yesterday that it “could be next year” before gas prices return to below $3 a gallon is causing trauma in Republican circles because “next year” is after the November 3 midterm elections.

Initially Trump said he could end the war “in two or three days.” It then became “four to five weeks.” He then stretched it to six. His so-called “cease-fire” ends Wednesday.

We’re now in the eighth week of what Trump called his “little excursion” into Iran (he hasn’t called it a “war” because under the Constitution he needs Congress’s okay to go to war), with no end in sight, and oil prices are again on the rise.

Over the weekend — only hours after Trump said the Strait of Hormuz had been “reopened” — Iran said it had closed the strait.

Yesterday, Trump claimed that his blockade would quickly bring Iran to its knees:

“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it. They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing. … We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

But Trump’s blockade isn’t working as Trump intended.

Last night, the U.S. Navy opened fire on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship to disable its engines after it apparently refused to stop despite repeated warnings.

Following the incident, oil prices soared higher, and experts predict it will make ships even less likely to brave the strait.

Last week’s Quinnipiac poll shows that almost two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) blame Trump for the spike in gas prices, including 73 percent of independent voters.

This is important. The economic costs of this war to average Americans are understood by average Americans to be the direct result of Trump’s personal decision. Trump went into this war without consulting anyone or getting anyone else on board — not Congress, not America’s allies, not NATO or the United Nations — and didn’t even explain to America why he was taking the nation into war. So, it is indubitably his own war.

If Trump believes he’s holding all the cards, he has no idea whom he’s dealing with.

The new regime in Iran believes it has more leverage than Trump because (1) it’s able to stop traffic in the strait as easily as can the U.S., and (2) it’s better able than Trump and the U.S. to wage a long war of attrition. It knows Trump is under increasing political pressure in the U.S. to bring down gas prices and is facing midterm elections in less than seven months — but all it needs to do in the meantime is survive.

The Iranian regime has also likely concluded that it hasn’t yet inflicted sufficient pain on Trump (and American consumers) to prevent America from attacking it again, so it will hold out for ironclad guarantees from the United States that the U.S. won’t resume bombing — guarantees Trump not only refuses to grant, but continues to threaten Iran every time he opens his mouth or posts another screed.

This is a war without end.

Meanwhile, today marks the opening of the government’s new tariff refund portal, through which businesses can claim reimbursements for the import taxes — that is, tariffs — they’ve paid, which were struck down by the Supreme Court.

The government — that is, we taxpayers who fund the government — owes tens of thousands of importers a total of up to $175 billion in refunds for the tariffs imposed by Trump last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

But the people who have actually borne much of the cost of these import taxes — American consumers — won’t see a penny of refund. The $175 billion will just contribute to the record profits of American corporations.

If corporations worried that competitors might pass these refunds on to their consumers in the form of lower prices, presumably all corporations would do the same. But corporate power is so concentrated now — monopolies and oligopolies now dominate most industries — that corporations have no such worry.

So you and I and other taxpayers are in effect refunding American corporations for the import taxes they paid, although we paid for most of them in the form of higher prices — which they won’t now lower because they have monopoly power to keep them high.

Which means — like Trump’s war and its effect on oil prices — Trump’s tariffs will continue to require us to pay more.

Put the two together, and you see why American consumers are f*cked.

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Friends,

In light of Trump’s increasingly cruel and bonkers behavior — toward Iran, toward the pope, his posts, his bottomless vengeance, his continuing ICE raids, his continuing use of the Justice Department to target his enemies, his shameless corruption — many of you want to know: “What can I do now?” Here are 10 recommendations, in rough order of importance.

1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are most vulnerable.

This is an urgent moral call to action. As Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol continue their roundups and deportations, many of our neighbors and friends are endangered. They and their families are understandably frightened.

Trump’s executive orders allow ICE to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, health care sites, shelters, and relief centers — thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need.

If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep ICE away from hospitals, schools, and shelters. And to alert all members of your community when ICE is present.

Organize and mobilize your community to support it as a sanctuary city and to support your state as a sanctuary state. Trump’s Justice Department is investigating cities and states that go against federal immigration orders. Your voice and organizing can be helpful in fighting back.

You might also consider sponsoring a refugee family.

If you haven’t done so, I recommend you order these red cards from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards | Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.

2. Protect them against bigotry and hate — LGBTQ+, immigrants, “hyphenated” Americans, and people of color. Trump continues to try to make life far more difficult for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other people through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws, or changes in how such laws are enforced. He’s also fueling bigotry against immigrants, especially Muslims and immigrants from Iran, and against people of color.

I urge you to work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. Get your churches and synagogues involved. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.

3. Help protect officials in your community or state whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance. Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they don’t have the means to legally defend themselves, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone seeking to harm or intimidate them, immediately alert local law-enforcement officials.

4. Organize and mobilize for the midterms. It’s not too early to plan to get out the vote on or before November 3 — ensuring that people who are eligible to vote are registered, that they know when and how to vote, that they know how to vote by mail or are otherwise able to get to polling places. Knock on doors, raise money for progressive candidates, and mobilize your friends, neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances. Join your local Indivisible organization (find the nearest group here).

If you hear of any plans for ICE or Border Patrol agents to be deployed at voting places, contact the ACLU (you can locate the nearest office by visiting aclu.org/affiliates). If you hear or know of any plans by Republican election officials to meddle in the upcoming elections, notify the League of Women Voters, here, or local representatives of the Democratic Party.

5. Participate in or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime — including Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News. Never underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.

6. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump. Much of the action stopping Trump and his regime is occurring in the federal courts. The groups initiating litigation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, Center for Biological Diversity, Democracy Forward, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Common Cause. All could use your help and encouragement.

7. Spread the truth. Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources. Urge friends, relatives, and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X, and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram. They are filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.

Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.

8. Push for progressive measures in your community and state. Local and state governments retain significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize, and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders.

9. Call your members of Congress. Tell them to oppose Trump and support progressive initiatives. And keep calling! Your calls count. (Staffers do keep count of how many constituents are for or against various issues.) The main U.S. Capitol switchboard phone number is (202) 224-3121. The operator can connect you directly to the office of your Senator or Representative. To find your specific representative, you can also look up their contact information on www.house.gov or www.senate.gov.

10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America. This is a long and difficult slog but we have no choice. The fight we’re in will determine the future of this nation and much of the world. I understand if you’re tired and sometimes discouraged, but we can and must win.

Trump won the popular vote in 2024 by only 1.5 points, and 35 percent of eligible voters didn’t even vote. By any historic measure, this was a squeaker. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans’ lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won. Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, Democrats have won all special elections or dramatically over-performed in them.

America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it — or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. We cannot allow them to.

We will never give up.

***

Beyond these, please be sure to find room in your life for joy, fun, and laughter. Do not let Trump and his darkness take you over. Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of yourself. If you obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry, and anxiety, you won’t be able to keep fighting.

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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:

“The only strait Trump should be in is a straitjacket.”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

Runners-up:

“Whenever he says he wins, we all lose!”

(Congratulations, Adam Laurie.)

“His endorsement of Orbán was his latest win. For Hungary.”

(Congratulations, Carol Nylen.)

“He’s experiencing Hormuz Derangement Syndrome.”

(Congratulations, Jefryclair.)

“He’s drowning in his own egomania!”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“It ain’t over ‘til the fat boy sinks.”

(Congratulations, Steven Ugoretrz.)

“And away goes trouble down the drain!”

(Congratulations, Susan S.)

“He’s in a Dire Strait!”

(Congratulations, Susan Ryan.)

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Friends,

You can almost feel the change in the air we breathe.

It’s not just that Dems are winning special elections by wide margins (and even where they’re not, they’re “overperforming” in ruby-red areas by an average of 16 points).

Nor just that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was overwhelmingly defeated after 16 years of authoritarian rule, with almost 80 percent of eligible voters turning out. (The victor, Peter Magyar, overcame Orbán’s rigged system by focusing on Orbán’s corruption and linking it to the economic difficulties facing average Hungarians.)

Or that Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, revealing his God complex and causing even evangelical Christians in his MAGA base to question his religiosity and mental stability.

Or that Trump and Vance were dumb enough to pick a fight with Pope Leo, who has used it to explain his (and, for Catholics, Jesus’s) objections to war and to tyrants everywhere.

Or that Trump’s major ally in Europe (and the only European leader to attend his inauguration), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Malone, described Trump’s attack on the pope as “unacceptable” (Trump responded by attacking her for “lacking courage” in refusing to join his war on Iran).

Or that Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization — prompting even Tucker Carlson to call Trump’s threat “vile on every level,” Candace Owens to demand that the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove him from office, conspiracist Alex Jones to accuse Trump of threatening “genocide,” and Megyn Kelly to concede that Trump’s coalition is “completely fractured and in smithereens.”

Or that Trump’s war has been such an abominable failure that it’s demonstrated his dangerous ignorance and diminishing mental capacity.

It’s all these, together.

Add in Trump’s legal failures to prosecute his political enemies, to target universities and law firms, to impose his tariffs, and to mount defamation lawsuits — and you understand why the air around us is beginning to feel different.

I hesitate to say we’ve reached a turning point in this horrific time. But something profound seems to be changing.

America and the world’s democracies are beginning to win this overriding fight — against the forces of authoritarianism, corruption, bigotry, ignorance, lies, greed, and violence.

We are starting to win because Trump and the forces he’s unleashed are so deeply repulsive to the consciences of most Americans and much of the rest of humanity.

The more Trump and these forces reveal themselves for what they are, the more that decent people — whether they call themselves Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, right or left, American or non-American — are recoiling from them.

We have not yet prevailed, of course. But, my friends, we are making progress. And we will prevail.

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Friends,

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito’s financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20^th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, its dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backward. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neofascism.

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.

Thomas claims that “the century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as were Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” — asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say, partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers — whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.

Nor has he respected judicial ethics.

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack.

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neofascists?

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “my wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last 20 years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of the Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

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Today Heather and I are joined by our colleague Michael, who helps us dissect a wild week. What’s the truth about the Strait of Hormuz? Why did Trump and Vance pick a fight with Pope Leo? Who or what’s behind the booming stock market?

We grapple with these and much more on today’s Klatch. Please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the conversation.

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Friends,

I hear from many of you every day. I read your comments on this substack. Some of you email me or Inequality Media. I run into you during my travels.

You tell me you can’t recall a worse time. You point to the war in Iran, ICE in our towns and cities, Trump’s vengeful ravings against his critics (including the pope), his disrespect for democracy, his promotion of fossil fuels, his corruption.

The list of horribles goes on and on.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), some of you tell me you’re more fired up than ever. Others tell me you’re barely hanging on. Others of you are depressed and fighting hopelessness. Some say you’re simply exhausted.

The purpose of today’s check-in is to get a sense of how you’re honestly doing. However you feel, I promise you that you’re not alone.

So please choose the category that best expresses your true sentiments right now:

Read more

Friends,

You’ve got to hand it to Pope Leo, who used a speech today in Cameroon to express “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

I can’t imagine who Leo was talking about, can you?

In case there was any doubt, the pope added: “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

The tyrant in the Oval Office has been trying to portray his war in Iran as a “just war” backed by the will of God and Jesus Christ. Pope Leo disagrees. Jesus, he says, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-described secretary of war, has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime, and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

At a worship service at the Pentagon on March 25, Hegseth asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s words apparently provoked Pope Leo to preach on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.

This past Sunday, Trump attacked the pope on social media as “terrible on foreign policy” and suggested that Trump himself was the reason Leo was selected to be pope in the first place.

On Tuesday, JD Vance said the pope should be more “careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Hello? What in heaven’s name is the vice president to the least-careful-of-what-he-says president doing telling the pope to be more careful of how he interprets Catholic theology?

I’m not Catholic, but I always thought the pope’s words about matters theological were considered by Catholics to be as close to God’s own words as humans can get.

Today in Cameroon, the pope also said: “The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation.”

At this rate, Trump is going to demand the Justice Department open a criminal investigation of the pope. Trump will get hold of all the bills for restoring the Sistine Chapel and claim the pope misappropriated funds. He’ll have Jeanine Pirro seek an injunction against the pope to block any further papal statements. He’ll threaten that unless the pope stops criticizing him, he’ll get God to reconvene the College of Cardinals and fire Leo.

So far, though, Pope Leo isn’t backing down.

Praise the Lord.

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Friends,

It’s a catastrophe on the way to becoming a cataclysm.

Trump is rapidly going stark-raving mad. He’s a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.

Yesterday he lashed out at The New York Times after its chief White House correspondent questioned his mental health and stability and pointed to his “erratic behavior and extreme comments.”

“HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY?” Trump posted in CAPITAL LETTERS about the Times, inadvertently echoing the famous words of Joseph Welch when standing up to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Trump went on to take issue with the Times’s coverage of his war in Iran rather than his mental state, as if to prove the Times’s point.

He keeps saying he’s “won” the war with Iran, although he’s never said what “winning” means. At one moment his goal is to free Iran’s people. At another, it’s to end Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. At another, to destroy Iran’s missiles. At another, to achieve “regime change.” At another, to open the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before Trump started his war). At another, he says he’ll know the U.S. military operation in Iran is over when he feels it "[in] my bones.”

He can’t even stay on the same subject for more than a few minutes. In the middle of a high-level Cabinet meeting about the war, he spends five minutes talking about his preference for Sharpie pens. He interrupts another Iran war update to praise the White House drapes.

He threatens that if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he says America doesn’t need the strait reopened. Then he says: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He calls the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the Pope wants peace. He posts an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus, then says he was only depicting himself as a physician.

He won’t give up on his illegal and dangerous (for the economy) criminal investigation of Fed Chief Jerome Powell, claiming it’s not just about Powell’s renovations at the Fed but also a “probe on incompetence,” adding he’ll fire Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term as chair ends.

He claims that the United States “needs” Greenland. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says whales are being killed by windmills. He claims that he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. He says the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. He goes on an eight-minute ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. He boasts of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia.

After Robert Mueller’s death, he says, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” He blames the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle on “the anger [Rob Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” After Joe Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump says, “I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9, that’s a long time” (there is no Stage 9 cancer).

He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental condition posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.

In 2021, members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump’s lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.

During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then went into the stratosphere of his bonkers mind:

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

It’s no longer possible to overlook his conspiracy-obsessed paranoia, his uncontrolled rage, his emotional volatility, his delusional claims, his vengeful rantings, his foul-mouthed posturing, his increasing detachment from reality.

Yet his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice. His billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. The media tries to “sanewash” his growing incoherence.

But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilization is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” A White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says “he’s clearly not well.”

The public is catching on. Fully 61 percent of Americans think he’s become more erratic with age, while just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” (down from 54 percent in 2023).

For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we face the reality: The most powerful man in the world does not have the mental capacity to do the job. Donald Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly unhinged.

We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?

Don’t wait. Impeach him now.

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