Friends,

Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Blanche, who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump — rather than the United States — is his client.

At the very least, the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.

The purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his family.

The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.

Boiled down to its bare essentials, the deal “forever” protects Trump and his family from “all claims” or “causes of action” or “requests for any relief” including “examinations” that “could have been” asserted by the United States against Trump, his children, “or affiliated individuals” or “parties” which arise out of “any matters” or of “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” or of any matters that “could be pending” before the United States or its agencies and departments.

Put another way, the U.S. government is prohibited from looking into any of the corrupt sh*t Trump or his family have gotten into.

And there’s a lot of corrupt sh*t.

Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more. Some examples:

• Trump and his family have created multiple crypto businesses — World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin — that have received favorable deregulatory treatment and reportedly generated at least $2.3 billion in income for Trump and his family since he won the presidency.

• Six days after a company backed by Eric and Donald Jr. took a 20 percent stake in an American mining group, the group’s parent company received $1.6 billion in federal financing. That’s because the president of Kazakhstan granted the company the right to mine the world’s largest known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in semiconductors, lightbulbs, and warheads.

• In late 2025, Don Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital acquired an equity stake in critical minerals company Vulcan Elements. Shortly after, the White House and the Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million federal loan without competitive procurement or independent technical review.

• After Eric and Don Jr. backed the drone manufacturer Powerus, the U.S. Air Force awarded the company a lucrative contract.

• Eric and Don Jr. have conducted numerous undisclosed meetings with foreign government officials (including representatives from Hungary, the UK, Vietnam, and Qatar) while simultaneously negotiating global real estate deals for the Trump Organization.

• Don Jr. serves as a strategic advisor or investor in prediction market firms Kalshi and Polymarket, which have received favorable, deregulatory treatment from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

• Don Jr. is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which will benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.

• Presumably, someone has made a fortune trading stocks and bonds on the basis of insider knowledge of decisions that Trump would announce — about tariffs, his war in Iran, and other news that moved stock and bond markets. The trades occurred just before the announcements.

• In May, Trump disclosed that his trust was actively trading individual stocks, an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern era.

• Trump has pardoned some of the most brazen financial criminals in American history, and one can only wonder what he received in return. They include Philip Esformes, convicted in what Trump’s own Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged”; Joseph Schwartz, convicted for a $38 million fraud scheme; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’s sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, both tied to tens of millions in fraud.

If the “settlement” remains in force, we will never know the details of any of these transactions, because the “settlement” — devised and signed by Todd Blanche — will result in the largest cover-up of presidential wrongdoing and illegality in American history.

Without it, Trump and his family could be required to disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

For his role in this scam, Blanche should not be confirmed as attorney general. At the very least, his confirmation should be conditioned on this so-called “settlement” being deemed null and void.

If you’re with me on this, please contact your senator’s office and tell them to vote NO on confirming Blanche. (At the very least, NO to the immunity deal Blanche gave Trump and his family.)

The Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Elected officials prioritize their own voters, so please share your name and your city/town so the staff knows you live in their state.

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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.

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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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Friends,

Friday’s jobs report — showing that America added 172,000 jobs in May — stimulated a lot of celebratory bullsh*t.

Trump said, “It’s raining jobs!” White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett claimed the job market is "hitting on all cylinders.” The mainstream media called it a “blowout jobs report,” “stronger-than-expected jobs data,” the labor market’s “best three-month stretch in more than two years.”

What all this acclaim left out was that wages are falling relative to prices.

Average hourly earnings for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers — that is, for most employees — rose by only 8 cents (or 0.2 percent) in May. That’s the weakest pace of wage growth since 2021.

Meanwhile, prices are rising quickly — by around 3.8 percent annually. Hence, real wages — that is, their actual purchasing power — are dropping. The paychecks of most American workers aren’t covering rising costs. They’re getting poorer.

It’s no cause for celebration that the American economy is adding a lot of jobs that are paying less. Hell, if paychecks keep shrinking relative to prices, there’s no telling how many jobs can be added. June’s job report could top May’s 172,000 new jobs.

There’s no limit to the number of terrible jobs an economy can create. If inflation-adjusted pay keeps dropping, we could see many hundreds of thousands of crappy new jobs per month. But most Americans would be getting poorer and poorer.

Bottom line: Don’t fall for any breezy, celebratory focus on the number of new jobs. Always ask: What about real (inflation-adjusted) wages?

When real, inflation-adjusted wages are dropping, we’ve got a real problem — regardless of how many jobs are being created.

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Friends,

Scott Pelley, the famed CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent who was fired last week by Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, gave an interview to The New York Times about what occurred. I reproduce it below because it’s an important indictment of Bari Weiss; of Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News; and of David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance, the parent corporation of CBS. It shows very clearly that, in effect, Trump fired Pelley because Trump doesn’t want Americans to get the truth about what he’s doing — just as Trump fired Stephen Colbert from the same network because Colbert was telling Americans the truth about Trump, through satire. The question I want to leave you with (and will take up in a later post) is: What are we going to do about this?

Here are Pelley’s words:

“No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she’s the first woman ever to be executive producer of “60 Minutes.” And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and a growth of our online presence of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That’s a third of humanity! So we’re riding high.

The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like “60 Minutes.”

Explain to me exactly how you felt. Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us. That’s a family at “60 Minutes.” My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years. We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.

CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes before Bilton’s first day and you didn’t speak to them. Why not? I’m almost 69 years old, and if I’ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I thought, I’m going to give it a day. I’m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing. I am not going to hear what they have to say. This isn’t the moment. So we got through the weekend, and I learned that Nick Bilton was going to speak to the “60 Minutes” staff that next Monday morning. My wife and I had a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies planned, and I wasn’t going to be able to be at the meeting and she and I talked about it, realized that this was an existential moment for “60 Minutes” and canceled the vacation so I could be there. That was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet Nick Bilton.

At that meeting, you spoke up very forcefully. You asked him why he’d taken the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors? It was behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I’m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to “60 Minutes.” They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she’s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Bari’s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better. And also, if I can give you a little bit of context.

Please. What happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical. Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.

Why did you feel that you were the person that needed to get the answers at that meeting? First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They’re not there. I looked around the room. I’m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I’m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person. So when I saw Nick Bilton’s email and then saw him reading to my brokenhearted people off his phone, I felt that somebody had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don’t know that, have never felt that, and don’t understand it, is a tragedy.

You know, Bari Weiss came into a job with a mandate to evolve and modernize CBS News, to reinvent legacy media. In that meeting, you said Weiss was “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” language that you’ve used here. Can you explain what you mean? It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited — I’m paraphrasing here — to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.” So that’s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.

You then have a meeting with CBS leadership after this very contentious interaction [with Bilton]. Did you go in expecting to be fired? Oh gosh, furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me. The president of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us? And I said, absolutely. I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting. I didn’t know who was going to be there.

It really didn’t occur to you that you could be fired after so many of your colleagues had been let go, and after you’d had this very contentious interaction with your new boss? Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. I mean, was this meeting [with Bilton] contentious? Yes, but “60 Minutes” is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.

There was a screening once with Mike Wallace, and Mike and the executive producer and founder of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air and yells at Don, “Well then you write the effing thing!” One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He’s bleeding now. He’s got a paper cut on his face. That was about a story. The meeting that I was in was about whether “60 Minutes” was going to even survive.

So, you walk in and what was the energy of the room? Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let’s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.

So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes. Cibrowski tells me, you’ll have our answer in a few minutes. I went over to my office, and much to my surprise, all of my guys on my team were still there. They wanted to know what happened in the meeting. What was that all about? Did they explain why our people were fired? And I sat down in my office, it has a big plate glass window that looks out on the newsroom, and there were a whole bunch of people standing out there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’m waiting to find out what my fate is. I explained to my team, “I think I just got fired, but they haven’t told me that.” And then I look up and all those people are still out there, and then it hits me. This is a vigil. Four hours go by, and I go outside and said, “I’m leaving.” I packed up and left just so those people would go home. And not long after that, the email came through and said that I’d been fired.

I want to take a step back because this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The saga at CBS News began when David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS as part of his purchase of Paramount. There was a lot of turmoil around that sale. The longtime previous owner of Paramount and CBS, Shari Redstone, told my New York Times colleague that she sold the company to Ellison in part because, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, she wanted to devote herself to causes around Israel. I’m sure there were other reasons as well. Did you ever speak to Ms. Redstone about the sale, and how did you feel about it? I didn’t speak to Shari Redstone about the sale. I felt the sale was very necessary. The company was in financial trouble. It wasn’t clear what our path forward was going to be. Mr. Ellison came in with a lot of money, a young man of vision, and I thought this was going to be very good for all of us.

The very last thing that the previous ownership did was pay a multi-million-dollar bribe to the president to settle this frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit. And very shortly after that, somehow the Trump administration approved the sale. That lawsuit against “60 Minutes” had caused a great deal of concern. Paying the bribe broke our hearts. No lawyer thought that was necessary, but they did it to get the sale through. At that point, my colleagues and I thought, great, that’s behind us. We have bright new leadership with financial resources. We’re in better shape than we were before. That was the theory.

Ellison then hires Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Weiss is a former opinion writer at The New York Times who left to start her own publication after claiming bias in the Times Opinion section. I never worked with her, for the record. The Free Press, which she launched, is generally pro-Israel and bills itself as pushing against what it sees as the mainstream media. What did you make of her appointment? I was not familiar with her name, so I did some research and discovered those things that you just outlined. What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News. Those were red flags to me, but I thought, David Ellison thinks she’s the right person for the job. We are absolutely going to welcome her, listen to her, and give her the benefit of the doubt.

When Bari comes in, she has a meeting with senior “60 Minutes” staffers, and in that meeting she asked, “Why does the country think you’re biased?” I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been told by my colleagues, and they were shocked.

What was the feeling about that opening salvo? “Uh-oh.” She didn’t offer any kind of a metric. Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about? We felt that she was making statements that she couldn’t back up and was coming into the news division with hardened preconceived notions that didn’t seem to be thought through.

You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.

So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

Did you do as she asked? I asked my producers, “Did we leave anything out that’s important? Did we make a mistake here? I don’t think so, but go back and look.” And then I sat down with a video editor, and I went over the video of the Renee Good killing over and over again, and realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it. And it’s late. Our deadline was noon. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. That’s dangerous as hell. So I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.

Did you change any language in the broadcast? Anything? Not that I recall based on her notes, but as you probably are aware, when you’re doing a story, especially on deadline, a lot of things happen, there’s a lot of input, and you’re just scrambling to save everybody’s skin because you’re going to have a crash, which is what happened.

Next day I didn’t hear anything. Nobody called, nobody said anything. It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made. But that’s how that happened. There was 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.

Could she not have been trying to be fair to the administration at a moment of very high tension? She could have been trying to be fair to the administration, except I felt that the story was abundantly fair to administration and to the ICE officers and to border patrol officers who were caught in that moment.

Is it possible to see this as the system working? She had notes, you felt they didn’t make sense to take, the piece ran, and there was no retaliation. Well, it was the interference that’s a problem, especially in a story that’s been approved by the top editors. And the bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence. The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air. The entire hour of “60 Minutes”! It was the night of the Grammys. “60 Minutes” was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast. I pledged to myself that no matter what Bari Weiss wanted to do in a story, I would never break the deadline again because we put the entire network in jeopardy.

Why did you think she was asking for these things? I need to be a little bit careful here because I don’t want to be hyperbolic. My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.

Cecilia Vega, who was recently fired, also alleged interference after she was let go. Sharyn Alfonsi as well, and you are now doing the same. CBS has denied any bias or interference, saying in a recent statement that changes and disputes were “the normal back and forth between editor and correspondent that happens in every newsroom.” A more generous interpretation of Weiss’s tenure might be that her missteps have been due to a lack of experience. Could inexperience be the real problem? I think inexperience is the larger part of the problem. The most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television. It’s been enormously stressful.

.Another high-profile “60 Minutes” host, Anderson Cooper, declined to renew his contract this year. And at the end of his final show, he went on air and said, “I hope ‘60 Minutes’ remains ‘60 Minutes.’” That was seen as a swipe at Bari Weiss. Did you talk to Anderson about why he did not renew his contact and his reasons for leaving? I did not.

How did you receive that news? Correspondents don’t resign from “60 Minutes.” It’s the greatest job in the world. There is nothing else to aspire to. So, if a person of Anderson Cooper’s stature decides that he has to leave the broadcast, that’s an indication that he has found his role there untenable.

It’s been reported that Bari Weiss was upset that Anderson Cooper’s comments had aired in that way. That’s my understanding.

Do you think that was part of the reason executive producer Tanya Simon was let go? Yes. My understanding from people directly involved in that interaction is that Bari Weiss was quite livid that Anderson Cooper was allowed to say those things and that she, Bari, was not consulted beforehand, which in our normal course of business would not have been done anyway. I believe that was part of the reason Tanya was let go. But she wasn’t let go for cause. She was let go to create a space for the new person, Nick Bilton, to come in.

Tanya was completely blindsided by this. She was told that she was coming into a meeting to discuss the past season and the next season. She walks in; she sits down. And Tom starts the meeting with, the nature of this meeting has changed. We’re letting you go. And told her she was fired and had to get out of her office by 5 o’clock.

Can I give you a little bit of background? The Simon family is legendary at CBS News. Her father was a famous Vietnam correspondent and then Bob Simon covered every single war, everywhere in the world throughout his entire career. I was with him in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990. We would stand on the roof of the hotel and watch the missiles come in. He taught me how to be a war correspondent. And then Tanya Simon comes in. She’s at the broadcast 30 years. There is no respect for that. Get out of the office by five o’clock? What company in the world treats their precious people that way? [Tears up] Tanya Simon spent her whole childhood waiting for the call that her father was dead, never knowing if she would ever see him again. Her whole childhood. Get out by 5 o’clock. Make of that what you will.

I can hear how much this has hurt you. Yes, it’s like your spouse being murdered. I don’t care about me. It’s not about me. I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job. I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart, and it’s going to take me a long time to get over it.

One of the arguments that Bari Weiss has made about “60 Minutes” and CBS News is that they need to be brought into the modern era. Nick Bilton also said in that staff meeting with you that “broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.” Do you think they have a point, even if “60 Minutes” is reaching a huge audience now? Does its metabolism, the kinds of correspondents that it has have to change to reach a younger audience that interacts with media in a completely different way? Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is. At CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first “60 Minutes” online show, “60 Minutes Overtime,” in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We’re there. We’re everywhere.

Nick Bilton sent a very conciliatory note to the staff this past week. At last.

He promised editorial independence. He praised some of your longtime colleagues, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, Jon Wertheim. And while we’ve been talking, those three released a statement that they are staying at “60 Minutes.” How does that make you feel? Same reason I was staying. I haven’t talked to them. I assume it’s the same reason. And we have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can’t help. There have been other times — when Anderson left, when others were fired — that we could have stormed into a meeting and quit, but those very distinguished correspondents and myself did have conversations about this and decided that we were better working on the inside, and that we could influence things for the better. And we did. And it was my intention to stay and do exactly that.

Do you think they can trust those assurances? No. I would venture to say that trust is broken.

Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed? Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, “There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.” I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.”

President Trump reacted to your being fired. Did he?

He went on a podcast and called you a stiff. I’m surprised that the president of the United States would bother to notice, but please tell me. I’m not aware of this.

He said you were part of this gang of “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.” Stupid? I can take that. Stiff? Yeah, probably. Don’t care about the country? I’ve never worn the uniform. But I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I’ve been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I’m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I’m wrong. You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.

***

“There was 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. … she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the President. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.” — Scott Pelley about Bari Weiss, whom Trump buddy David Ellison made head of CBS News.

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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:

“You tried to ‘Trump’ the law and THE LAW WON!”

(Congratulations, Daniel Black Coal.)

Runners-up:

“Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

(Congratulations, Timbo.)

“YOU did it to yourself!”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“You can bet your last $1.776 billion I can.”

(Congratulations, Carol Schachner.)

“I’m following the law. Try it sometime.”

(Congratulations, Jean Knowlton.)

“Look on the bright side, orange is your color.”

(Congratulations, Seniors Taking Action.)

“I CAN and I DID.”

(Congratulations, Karla Von Huben.)

“No Kings isn’t just a catchy slogan, pal!”

(Congratulations, Mark Robokoff.)

“You’re fired!”

(Congratulations, Karen Cook-ronan.)

“Guilty until proven guiltier!”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“I hold you in contempt of all that is good, moral, ethical and true!”

(Congratulations, bRad Weller.)

“Handcuffs will hide the bruises on your hands.”

(Congratulations, Ruth Fader.)

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Friends,

I detest him and everything he does or says. Ditto his despicable aides and Cabinet members, his unprincipled sycophants and suck-ups.

But it’s possible that someday we’ll look back on this horrendous era and say we needed Trump. We needed to see how horrible it could get before America was able to revive its ideals.

Please hear me out.

Even before Trump, we were barreling down the wrong road. Inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity were worsening. Legalized bribery was soaring in the form of mounting campaign contributions from big corporations and the wealthy. Workers were getting shafted. On Wall Street and in C-suites, fealty to the rule of law was giving way to “greed is good” selfishness. Giant corporations were monopolizing ever more of the economy. America was losing its moral authority in the world (think Abu Ghraib and the torture memo).

We couldn’t have remained on that road. Even if we didn’t know it then, most of us understand that now. Trump has opened our eyes to the consequences of extreme greed, corruption, cruelty, and utter disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. His brazenness and shamelessness have awakened us to much that we took for granted.

He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall.

It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.

Before Trump, how many Americans understood the importance of “checks and balances” among the three branches of government, as envisioned by the Founders?

Now nearly everyone knows, because we’ve seen what happens when the head of the executive branch usurps the power of Congress and defies the federal courts.

How many of us really knew what “due process” meant when it came to giving people accused by the government an opportunity to defend themselves?

By now most of us have seen videos of people dragged out of their homes in the dead of night by masked agents of the U.S. government and thrown into detention camps without so much as a hearing. And we’ve seen government agents murder American citizens in cold blood on the streets of our cities.

Did we understand the meaning of corruption, bribes, self-dealing, and pay-to-play before Trump extorted corporations and billionaires to contribute millions to his campaign, his PAC, his inauguration, his ballroom, and his 250th birthday party? Now, we surely do.

Did we really know the importance of professional civil servants before Trump fired tens of thousands of them and substituted brainless loyalists? Before he got rid of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it published truthful jobs data he didn’t like?

Did we understand the importance of expertise before Trump turned his back on career diplomats at the State Department, doctors and epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, and experienced lawyers at the Justice Department and replaced them with loyalist hacks?

Or the meaning of “equal justice under the law” before Trump turned the Justice Department into his own private law firm to prosecute political enemies and pardon supporters?

Did we comprehend the true meaning of freedom of speech and expression before Trump attacked our universities for allowing demonstrations he disliked? Before he got CBS to fire Stephen Colbert for satirizing him and muzzle “60 Minutes” for criticizing him?

Did we know the dangers of oligarchy before Trump authorized Elon Musk to destroy entire federal agencies? Before Trump suck-up Jeff Bezos prohibited the editorial board of The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris? Before Trump turned over to Larry and David Ellison much of how Americans learn what’s going on — CBS’s broadcast network, its news division, and over 28 local television stations, as well as CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, Discovery, HBO and HBO Max, and Warner Bros. Studios?

Did we understand the importance of the federal government keeping us safe and healthy before Trump eviscerated health and safety regulations? Before he decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, and much of the Department of Health and Human Services? Before he authorized a crackpot with no medical background who opposes vaccines to run the world’s largest and most powerful health agency?

Did we understand why the Federal Reserve needs to be independent of politics? Did we know why the Federal Trade Commission needs to crack down against monopolies? Did we appreciate why the National Labor Relations Board must protect workers’ rights to form unions?

I venture to say, in answer to all of these questions: No, we did not know.

Now, most of us do.

It’s a terrible time. I share your sadness, anger, and fear. But prior to this daymare, too many of us had fallen asleep at the wheel. We had let America barrel down a road that was compromising too many of the ideals we hold in common.

Maybe we needed this horrific wakeup call in order to get back on the road we should have been on. We needed to see how fragile the institutions of self-government are in order to know why we must strengthen them. We needed to be reminded of what America is all about — what it should be about — in order to revive it — and reclaim it, for and by the people.

We will use what we’ve learned. We will fight for a stronger democracy. We’ll demand equal justice and the rule of law. We’ll commit ourselves to the common good. And we will assign Trump and his regime to the dustbin of history.

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Friends,

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day — the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It’s referred to as “D-Day” after the military term for a day when a secret combat attack or operation is planned.

It was the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began the Western Allied effort to liberate western Europe from Nazi Germany.

Over 2,500 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed during the initial amphibious assaults and airborne operations. All told, there were 4,414 confirmed Allied deaths on the first day of the invasion, which also included troops from the United Kingdom and Canada.

At the time of the invasion, my father was 30 years old, in a tank battalion readying to go to Europe. My mother was 25, working in a factory producing gas masks for the war. Some of their friends participated in the invasion. A few were paratroopers. Others were pilots. Others were soldiers.

As a small boy, I remember trying to talk with my father and my mother about D-Day. I wanted stories. The little I’d heard about it made it seem romantic and exciting. But they were reluctant to talk about it. They answered my questions in short sentences. Their voices were hurried. It was as if I was trying to open a door they’d rather keep closed. They had lost friends, relatives. D-Day, and the war it helped end, had left deep scars.

Eventually they and their generation were called America’s “greatest generation” for their valor and sacrifice. They had fought fascism and won.

Now, 82 years later, we have homegrown fascism. An entire political party seems to have given up on democracy. They’re supporting an egomaniacal “strong man” who cares only about enlarging his own (and his family’s) wealth and power.

His regime is marked by a degree of corruption, cruelty, and criminality never before witnessed in America’s national government.

The firing of so many top brass by Trump and his “war” secretary, Pete Hegseth, can be seen as a way to guarantee the loyalty of other officers to Trump rather than to America. Trump’s proposal to increase the U.S. military budget by nearly 50 percent can be understood as a bribe to officers. He wants them to side with him, if and when he tries to stay in power indefinitely.

He has already tried to turn much of America into a police state.

Public support for him is waning, and the federal courts have fought back. But it is startling and saddening how far Trump and his regime have gotten.

What happened to the bravery and dedication of the greatest generation? What became of the sacrifices my parents and their peers made so that this nation could be free?

How and why did so many Americans succumb to neofascism?

I think it has to do with the anger so many Americans have felt that they and their children haven’t been able to get ahead, no matter how hard they work. Trump and other neofascists have channeled that anger toward immigrants, gay people, transgender people, Muslims, and Black people.

Democrats and progressives should be channeling that anger toward the real culprits — a wealthy elite that’s used their money to gain political power and rig the economy to their benefit and against everyone else.

Another reason so many have succumbed to Trumpian neofascism is the passage of time. Eighty-two years is long enough for a nation to forget, especially a nation whose collective memory is short to begin with. Very few living Americans remember the terror and heroism of our fight against Nazi fascism. The greatest generation has mostly died off.

But we must not forget. Fascism is being born again, in America and in Europe. This time it’s masquerading as white Christian nationalism, but it’s as dangerous as ever.

The best way to remember and honor the men and women who risked everything for us is to fight neofascism — fight for a stronger democracy, fight for the rule of law and social justice, fight against bigotry.

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Today’s weather is so beautiful that Heather and I decided to have our coffee klatch outside on the Berkeley campus. Much to talk about — including the giant initial public stock offerings of the Artificial Intelligence behemoths Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, in coming weeks, expected to generate over a trillion dollars each. AI may create all sorts of fabulous things, but it’s also dangerous as hell, and the window is rapidly closing on what can be done to stop AI from eating our jobs and destroying the human race.

We also talk about Trump’s 10 days — the House voting to end his war in Iran (or get authorization to continue it), the courts ordering his name off the Kennedy Center and pausing his $1.8 billion Thug Fund, entertainers bailing out of his 250th anniversary megalomaniacal show on the mall, his endorsee losing Iowa’s governor’s race — and what it means for the future of his pathetic lame-duck presidency.

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

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Friends,

I focused this morning on Chevron and the Big Oil monopoly — and the importance of antitrust enforcement. I’d like to give you a bit more background on what happened to antitrust in America.

Whether it’s Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Big AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX), corporate concentration is on the rise.

And its social costs are growing.

— The typical American household is paying more than $5,000 a year because corporations can raise their prices without fear that competitors will draw away consumers.

— Such corporate market power has also been a major force driving inflation.

— Huge corporations also suppress wages, because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs — limiting the ability of workers to negotiate higher wages and benefits. According to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, this drop in labor market bargaining power costs U.S. workers more than $1 trillion annually.

— And corporate giants are also fueling massive flows of big money into politics (one of the major advantages of large size).

Yet the federal courts have been slow to do anything about this. And the monied interests — as exemplified on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — argue that antitrust shouldn’t be enforced. Why? Because of a man named Robert Bork.

I first met Bork in September 1971, when I took his class on antitrust at Yale Law School. I recall him as a large, imposing man with a red beard and a perpetual scowl.

He was only in his mid-40s then, but he seemed impatient and bored with us (also in that class were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton).

We kept challenging his view that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to lower consumer prices.

“What about the political power of giant corporations?” we asked.

His retort: “How do you expect courts to measure political power?”

“But what about the power of big corporations to suppress wages?”

“Employees are always free to find better jobs.”

“What about their power to undercut potential rivals with lower prices?”

“Lower prices are good for consumers.”

“What about the sheer power that comes from their gigantic size?”

“Also good for consumers. Large size means lower costs through efficiencies of scale.”

Bork had an answer to each of our objections, but we were never satisfied. He spouted economic theory based on dubious “Chicago School” assumptions that all economic players have perfect information and face no cost of entering or leaving markets (Bork had attended the University of Chicago and its law school).

Even in our mid-20s, we knew this was bullshit.

Bork refused to recognize power — even though antitrust laws emerged from the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when a central concern was the untrammeled power of giant corporations.

A few years later, Bork wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox that summarized his ideas. The staff of a conservative California governor bound for the White House read it and passed it along to their boss, and Bork’s book formed a basic tenet of Reaganomics.

Federal judges read it, too. Most judges didn’t (and still don’t) know much economics and hated getting bogged down in interminable and almost incomprehensible antitrust trials that could last for years. They found Bork’s simplicity and cogency helpful in limiting such lawsuits.

BORK’S INFLUENCE over the courts represented the culmination of years of work by the monied interests to kill off antitrust. They’re still at it.

Which is why the new view of antitrust that was pioneered by the Biden administration — through Lina Khan’s FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department — was so important.

This new view regarded corporate concentration as a problem even if it provides economies of scale that might allow lower consumer prices in the short term. That’s because corporate concentration also means less innovation, more wage suppression, predatory behavior, price-push inflation, and increased political power.

The optimist in me thinks that as the public becomes more aware of the close connections between corporate power, predation, high prices, inflation, wage suppression, and political corruption, the new antitrust movement will eventually succeed.

This won’t happen in the Trump regime, of course, but it should be a central part of the progressive message for the midterms and in 2028.

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I rarely share with you anything written about me. But I decided to share this article from the British Prospect because I think it does a decent job summarizing my work (including my recent book “Coming Up Short” and movie “The Last Class”) and because you’re unlikely to come across it on this side of the pond.

Robert Reich’s Good Fight

For decades, the former US labour secretary has waged a lonely struggle against corporate greed. Has he failed?

By Benjamin Clark

June 4, 2026

Robert Reich is short: 4ft 11in, to be exact. He has multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbank’s disease, a rare genetic disorder affecting bone growth.

Throughout his career in government and academia, including stints as the United States’s secretary of labour under Bill Clinton and an economic adviser to Barack Obama, Reich has often made jokes about his height. In the late 1990s, he hosted a PBS talk show with the late Republican senator Alan Simpson called The Long and the Short of It (Simpson is 6ft 7in). And when Reich ran unsuccessfully in the 2002 Democratic primaries for governor of Massachusetts, he titled his concurrent book I’ll Be Short. The Boston Herald even ran the front-page headline “Short People are Furious with Reich” for joking about his height on the campaign trail.

From the title Coming Up Short, you might expect Reich’s new book to follow a similar pattern. But this, unlike his more straightforwardly polemical books, is a memoir—and in it, he reveals that his height has not always been a laughing matter. In particular, he details his experiences of severe, traumatic bullying as a child, with his size marking him out to nastier students as an easy target.

Reich recounts the survival tactics he would employ, including finding benevolent older students who could act as his protectors. One such student was Michael Schwerner, whose kindly presence made him feel safer at school. Recruited by civil rights leader John Lewis to volunteer in Mississippi, Schwerner later joined the civil rights movement, and he and his wife helped to register African-American voters during the state’s “Freedom Summer” in 1964.

Months later, aged 24, Schwerner was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. His body remained undiscovered for 44 days. After hearing of Schwerner’s murder as he started university, something changed in Reich. He saw that there were much more powerful and dangerous bullies in the world than the ones he confronted in the playground. He began to see bullying not just as an interpersonal challenge he had faced, but as a structural condition of society. From politics and economics to gender relations and the law, bullies were everywhere. And, quite often, they won.

“By the time I was a young man,” Reich tells me from his study in Berkeley, California, “I understood that bullying really is a metaphor for all sorts of abuses of power. Men bullying women, or white supremacists bullying black people and brown people, or employers bullying employees.”

His own experiences, he says, solidified his “lifelong conviction that our moral responsibility is to protect the weak from the strong”. He remembers his father, a progressive Jewish Republican, yelling “son of a bitch” at political figures he saw as bullies—such as Senator Joseph McCarthy—when they appeared on his television set.

Meanwhile, Reich became inspired by the legacies of populist Democrats such as Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he saw as the antidote to the bullies of the world. This would set him on a mission into the reformist circles of law and government.

But first, he needed training. The young Reich travelled to New Hampshire to study at the Ivy League Dartmouth College, where he would go on a date with Hillary Rodham from the all-female Wellesley College.

Later, he would meet fellow Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton on a transatlantic ship on their way to the University of Oxford. The young Clinton offered the seasick Reich a comforting bowl of chicken soup. They would later agonise over whether to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam, which would have cut their overseas studies short. Reich narrowly missed out due to his height (one inch too short), while Clinton had to manufacture a more complex excuse, one which would later haunt him politically. They later attended Yale Law School together, where Reich introduced Clinton to Hillary Rodham, and the rest is political history.

(Reich with Bill Clinton, 1993. Image: Associated Press / Alamy)

Another of their classmates, Clarence Thomas, now sits as a conservative justice on the Supreme Court. According to Reich, “Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.” Meanwhile, “Bill was never in class.”

From there, Reich bounced from government to academia and back again, becoming more progressive as his prominence grew. But with greater access to the halls of power came a creeping sense of alienation from a Washington machine that seemed to be increasingly oiled by large corporate donors and ever more amenable to their demands. He soon became a thorn in the side of such lobbyists.

The tension was encapsulated in the late 1990s by what was dubbed the “battle of the Bobs”, a long-running disagreement between Reich and Robert “Bob” Rubin, Clinton’s treasury secretary. It was far less acrimonious than the press made it out to be—“I liked Bob. We often had dinner together,” Reich writes—but the two officials nonetheless held “two fundamentally different views, not only about what [Clinton] should do but more generally about the role of government”.

Rubin had spent his career on Wall Street, including 26 years at Goldman Sachs. He commuted to Washington from New York by private jet. He emphasised deficit reduction and deregulation of the financial sector, which he held would boost the economy and eventually enable more social spending. Reich, conversely, advocated for rapid public investments in education, childcare and healthcare, and emphasised the need to arrest widening inequality.

Reich argued his side vigorously, often leveraging the fact he was the only cabinet member small enough to fit in the jump seat of Clinton’s limousine in order to lobby him in private. But Clinton generally sided with Rubin on most matters—“not because [he] had better arguments”, Reich writes, but because “Bill was intimidated by Wall Street”.

Reich was the only cabinet member small enough to fit in the jump seat of Clinton’s limousine, where he could lobby him in private

Reich eventually stepped down from Clinton’s cabinet to spend more time with his children, which allowed him to air his concerns more publicly. Yet when recounting his transition from Democratic establishment sage to vocal critic, Reich’s tone is almost brooding. In trying to confront the economic bullies, Reich believes his generation of Democrats “came up short”. This is where his polemical edge returns—his memoir does not retell his life, and through it the recent history of American liberalism, for the fun of it. Instead, it is a cautionary tale for the next generation, whom he believes have been let down by even their well-meaning forebears. Reich’s argument is that, since Ronald Reagan’s election, American liberalism has failed to check the forces of Wall Street—and has too often been seduced by them.

His career has been a lonely struggle to avert this outcome and push the Democratic party’s economic agenda to the left. When telling his story, Reich resists the obvious metaphor of David and Goliath—a small man up against big business. But his ultimate defeat seems to weigh heavily on him. Reich laments the missed opportunities and instances where he could have more effectively changed minds. The fourth section of his book, dedicated to his time in government, is titled simply “Failure”.

This failure, he argues, caused the Democratic party to lose its working-class supporters, many of whom became primed for the demagoguery of the Maga movement.

He puts the price of this failure in unceremonious terms, calling Trump a “neo-fascist” forging a “dictatorship”—“and I use the term dictatorship advisedly”, he tells me. Born to a Jewish-American family in 1946, Reich is filled with the sinking feeling that history is approaching a full-circle moment.

Though he now spends much of his time in rural California (earlier attempts to interview Reich had been thwarted by the intermittent wi-fi, a byproduct of frequent windstorms), Reich maintains a connection with Berkeley, where he taught for 17 years until his retirement in late 2023. His academic career lasted more than four decades, including teaching at Harvard and Brandeis. Surrounded by dusty books and an old globe, he looks and sounds almost professorial again.

But Reich conveys a good deal more feeling than the average public policy professor, which he expresses principally with his hands. In The Last Class, a documentary on his final semester teaching at Berkeley, he laments that too many students are “used to absorbing data to regurgitate on exams”. Instead, Reich tries to use data to tap into their emotions. When the subject is the divergence of the super-rich and everyone else over the last 40 years, who can blame him?

“Since Reagan, American liberalism has failed to check the forces of Wall Street—and has too often been seduced by them,” Reich says.

Now, Reich has turned his attention to raising the consciousness of the next generation—and not merely in the classroom. He starred in the 2017 Netflix documentary Saving Capitalism and even made a cameo on The Simpsons, explaining the decline of the American middle class. And, despite being a near octogenarian, he has become something of a TikTok star, with more than 1.4m followers. For these he has his son to thank—Sam Reich suggested shortform video would be a more effective means than books of communicating his ideas to a younger generation. “I believe, but have no way of proving, that I am the oldest person to fastdance on TikTok,” Reich confesses. The video in question, in which he dances to an audio sample titled “pretty young twerkalator” beneath text reading, “Is he a ‘radical lefty’ or does he just think billionaires should pay more in taxes than schoolteachers?”, has been viewed more than 2.2m times.

Much of his credibility among this younger audience derives from the sense that he was prophetic on the dangers of inequality—or, as he puts it in Coming Up Short, “unfortunately prescient”. The book even contains a memorandum to Clinton, dated 2nd October 1994, in which he wrote: “Profitable companies must share part of the burgeoning profits with their employees.” The memo received no response.

But was Reich really so consistently sceptical of the Washington Consensus as he now suggests? Last year in the American Prospect (no affiliation to these pages), a magazine that Reich helped create, his co-founder Paul Starr wrote, “[Reich] doesn’t say much in his memoir about the considerable change in his politics since he burst into national prominence.” Starr argues that Reich was perhaps more neoliberal in his mindset in the 1990s and more in favour of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) than it might seem from his book.

When I put this criticism to Reich, he counters that he was “always concerned” about the agreement, which enabled US industries to outsource manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt to Mexico. But “I couldn’t publicise my concerns because I was secretary of labour in an administration that was supporting Nafta. It’s always a trade-off. When you’re in an administration that is doing something you don’t want, do you resign or do you think that you can do better by staying on, at least for a time? I chose the latter.” Starr argues that Reich advocated strongly for Nafta before he entered Clinton’s cabinet. Though, at that time, it was intended to be coupled with the Reemployment Rights Act to upskill affected workers—an idea which was eventually shelved.

Reich concedes to changing his mind on one thing, however: the causes of widening inequality. “For many years, I thought the major causes were globalisation coupled with technological change,” he tells me. But “I was missing a very big factor, and that was power that came from big money in our election system. [It] was changing the rules of the market in favour of people who were wealthy and against everybody else.”

Throughout our conversation, Reich returns to this core theme with the message discipline of other American progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani—the idea that everything, ultimately, comes back to the perversion of the political system by economic elites. Some might consider this reflexive or reductive. But others find it brave and consistent. Whether he had a Damascene conversion or was always ahead of the curve, my impression of Reich is one of almost painful sincerity.

Something his left-leaning supporters might find surprising is Reich’s lifelong friendship with certain conservative Republicans, including the late Alan Simpson. In the book, he calls his bond with Simpson an “illicit affair”, the odd couple slipping out to have lunch together without telling their staffers, who advised against them being seen together in Washington for fear of alienating their respective supporters. I posit that Reich would find it harder to forge such alliances across the aisle in Washington today, and he emphatically agrees: “I respected many [Republicans]. But… they no longer have any purpose other than rubberstamping what Trump wants. He has purged the Republican party of anybody who is not supportive of him personally.”

There is another critique of Reich’s narrative of failure: that he has been quite successful in steering the Democratic agenda in recent years as a commentator, perhaps even more so than he was as a government official. Might he be selling himself short? Are the next generation of progressive Democrats implicitly students of Reich?

“There are a few Democrats who are really stating what needs to be done,” he concedes. “But there are too many Democrats who still believe that what the Democratic party ought to do is move to the centre, like Rahm Emanuel [Obama’s former chief of staff], who really don’t demonstrate any idea of what the real stakes are these days.”

Perhaps his skillset is more as an educator than a bureaucrat or political writer. Reich has never believed he was a great success in government, and the book catalogues a series of minor administrative and public relations blunders. But in The Last Class, he was visibly emotional when giving up his true passion: teaching. I suspect he never really wanted to stop.

In the years before his retirement, Reich found many of his students wracked by pessimism. They were so concerned about the trajectory of economic inequality and growing authoritarianism that he identified, along with rapid climate change and environmental degradation, that some even called themselves members of the “last generation”. But Reich implored them not to let these feelings curdle into nihilism.

He recently gave the commencement address at Berkeley to more than 7,000 graduates. “I told them in no uncertain terms that we are relying on them,” he tells me. “In terms of this battle between democracy and authoritarianism, in terms of making the system fairer.”

“Pessimism is fine and it’s understandable,” he tells me. “But if it dips into cynicism and hopelessness, then I do worry because [those are] the last refuges for people who don’t feel that they have a responsibility, agency or the ability to change the system. And if it’s not going to be young people, I don’t know who it’s going to be.”

If nothing else, Reich’s inside account shows that, despite the areas where his generation failed, the course of history is not inevitable. People can still change the trajectory of politics. And if his students and admirers succeed, he’ll have played his part.

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Trump and his Republicans say gas is hugely expensive in California because of state taxes and fees (mostly related to the environment).

Here’s the sign you’ll see at Chevron stations:

This is total rubbish. See my video, above.

Gas prices are higher in California because giant oil corporations like Chevron have more monopoly power in California than they have in other states, which gives them the power to charge higher prices and make a fatter return.

Chevron, by the way, is a direct descendant of the original Standard Oil Trust, which the Supreme Court decided in 1911 was an unlawful monopoly, and busted up. (Chevron used to be called Standard Oil of California, SoCal.) It’s regrown to become one of the largest corporations in the world.

Sources:

[https://prospect.org/2026/04/28/aftermath-california-gas-prices-are-up-not-just-the-war/]

[https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-mystery-gasoline-surcharge]

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Friends,

If you hadn’t noticed, Trump is failing.

Iran is more dangerous today than it was when went to war on it, and energy prices are far higher.

Trump’s brutal efforts to crackdown on undocumented people in the United States have generated a huge backlash, including among Latinos who voted for him in 2024 but are moving into the Democratic camp.

His attempt to cover up the Epstein files continues to rankle MAGA voters.

His $1.8 billion “slush” fund and family immunization from future IRS audits, in “settlement” of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, has drawn widespread bipartisan scorn and hit judicial roadblocks.

I could go on, but you get the point. Trump’s failures are mounting.

Why?

I’ve worked for three presidents and advised a fourth. All of them solicited honest feedback, including criticism.

Trump solicits only praise. He relishes compliments. He needs everyone around him to pander to his egomaniacal need for admiration. He punishes the bearers of bad news.

He promotes people who kiss his assets, such as Bill Pulte, the home-building heir Trump put in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who Trump is now making acting director of national intelligence.

And Todd Blanche, the lawyer who represented him in his multiple lawsuits and who Trump now wants to become Attorney General.

Pulte, with no known experience in national security, got the job because he told Trump what Trump wanted to hear. He weaponized the housing agency and tried to dig up dirt on Trump enemies — specifically, the Fed’s Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As the person in charge of national intelligence, Pulte will continue to tell Trump whatever he wants to hear. Trump won’t get national intelligence; he’ll get national stupidity.

Trump has so many people “he could be listening to,” said a former Trump official, “and he listens to Pulte, who just continually f*cks things up.”

Blanche got the nod for Attorney General because he went even further than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, was willing to go in throwing integrity and principles odown the toilet in favor of going after Trump’s enemies. He secured a second felony indictment against the former FBI Director James Comey, alleging Comey threatened Trump ia a social media post that arranged seashells to spell “86 47.” Blanche also commenced a bonkers criminal investigation of Fed chief Jerome Powell, and tried to establish a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump as well as immunity from I.R.S. audits as a fake “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

So how does Trump make decisions if he doesn’t have people telling him the truth?

He relies, he has said, on his gut. “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” He told The Washington Post that he reaches decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense.”

In other words, he doesn’t listen to anyone — especially not anyone who tells him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Presto. He makes colossal mistakes.

Even normal people don’t like to get negative feedback. And most people don’t want to give it.

Yet receiving and giving truthful feedback are absolutely essential in a complex world.

If you have power over other people, it’s even more important to get negative feedback, because your mistakes could harm many others. Yet the more power you have, the less willing people are to give you negative feedback, since they have more reason to fear your reaction to it. Which means you have to go out of your way to solicit it.

The best leaders I’ve had the privilege of serving during my nearly 60 years of working life have been people who have actively sought and rewarded negative feedback.

Trump does just the opposite. Small wonder he’s one of the worst leaders the nation has ever endured.

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Friends,

No, he’s not over over. I wish he were. But something important has changed.

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to direct him to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war. It was a remarkable rebuke. Four Republicans sided with Democrats.

His “short-term excursion” into Iran, which he promised in late February would last no more than “four to five weeks,” has now entered its fourth month, with no end in sight. His claim to have “destroyed” Iran’s missiles and drones is belied by Iran’s massive attack on Kuwait on Tuesday. Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Its highly enriched uranium remains hidden. Even MAGAs have had enough of his forever war.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are rebelling. They’ve forced Trump to abandon the $1 billion request for his gilded ballroom, which was becoming ever more grotesque as Americans struggle to make ends meets.

His $1.8 billion Thug Fund is also dead, largely because a significant number of previously gutless Republicans (including — gasp! — Lindsey Graham) pushed back.

Trump’s name is coming off the Kennedy Center because a federal judge ordered it off and no Republicans came to his defense.

Even Trump’s endorsement is losing its magic. On Tuesday, Iowa voters rejected Trump’s choice for governor, Randy Feenstra, whom Trump called “MAGA all the way.” It was Trump’s first major endorsement loss.

And even with Stephen Colbert off the air, Trump has become a bigger late-night joke than ever. All the entertainers — even the B- and C-list also-rans desperate for exposure — dropped out of his 250th anniversary ego trip. So he’s going to be the headliner in a four-hour Fidel Castro speech. Good luck with that.

His Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House’s South Lawn has become a one-liner. To attend, military members have to pay their way to Washington and cannot have a waist size more than 55 percent of their height. (“No Fatties at UFC White House Event,” declared a Facebook page.) We’ll see how many show up.

As if all this weren’t enough, he’s nominated an unqualified sycophantic MAGA mortgage clown to be the director of national intelligence — an action so absurd that even Mitch McConnell had to object: “Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote.” Get ready for a circus of a Senate confirmation fight.

No, Trump’s not done. He’ll continue to torment us with his cruelty, corruption, and criminality for some time, so we have to keep fighting.

But his power is disappearing. He’s become a lame duck whose quack no longer causes anyone to quake.

He has no one to blame but himself. His hubris finally reached its own breaking point.

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Trump is trying to rig the midterms because he’s scared. And because Trump’s scared, he’s trying to scare Americans with an imaginary boogeyman: so-called “voter fraud.”

Here’s the truth: Every study shows voter fraud, including noncitizen voting, is so rare that a person is more likely to get struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent ballot.

But Trump’s using this boogeyman to sabotage our elections. Here are three things I’m worried about — then I’ll tell you how we fight back.

#1 New voting restrictions

Trump is pushing for strict voter registration laws (the so-called “Save America Act”) that would require eligible voters to prove their citizenship. But a state ID or driver’s license won’t do. Voters would need to show either a current passport or a certified birth certificate from the state they were born in to register.

Yet, more than 21 million Americans cannot easily provide those documents, either because they simply don’t have them or they can’t afford to get them. (Do you know where your birth certificate is?)

And even if you do have it, about 80% of married women and 30% of trans people have legal names that don’t match the name on their birth certificates — which makes it even harder to register.

Trump isn’t stopping there; he also wants to restrict mail-in voting, despite frequently voting by mail himself.

Trump’s hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Some 45 million votes were cast by mail in the 2024 general election (which he won, and doesn’t say was rigged, by the way). Restricting mail-in voting, along with instituting harsh voter ID laws, is blatant voter suppression.

#2 Voter intimidation

Trump insiders say he might deploy armed ICE or Border Patrol agents to polling sites.

Trump’s violent ICE agents have run rampant in our streets, abusing both noncitizens and citizens alike. The presence of armed agents of the state at polling places would almost certainly have a chilling effect on voter turnout — which is exactly what Trump wants.

#3 Denying election results

Trump’s latest big lie is that any Democratic victory is illegitimate.

What if Republicans lose the midterms but follow Trump’s 2020 example and try to hold onto power? A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable. But after what Trump tried doing in 2020, it’s frighteningly plausible.

The bottom line is Trump is deeply unpopular, which is why he is trying to suppress the vote.

But here is how we can fight back.

1. Press your state and local leaders to protect our elections right now. Your state attorney general and local election officials still have authority over our voting system. Urge them to develop a plan to protect our elections. Call on them to sue the Trump administration if it tries to seize ballots. Tell your state legislature to ban armed federal agents from polling places, like New Mexico just did.

2. Second, VOTE — and help turn out the vote! We need to show up in such large numbers that no amount of voter suppression can change the result. Go to vote.org right now and check your registration. Then reach out to three friends and make sure they are registered to show up.

3. Lastly, SOUND THE ALARM. Share the video I’ve posted above, which I made with the talented team at Inequality Media Civic Action. Help spread the word that the boogeyman of voter fraud is just a cover for Trump’s election sabotage.

Trump’s strategy to sabotage the election depends on fear, confusion, and division.

We must respond by being brave, focused, and united.

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Friends,

The Senate is set to vote this afternoon on a motion to proceed to Trump’s budget package. This will allow senators to vote against Trump’s $1.8 billion payout slush fund, via amendments before final passage. Trump and his Justice Department have already dropped the slush fund, but that should be codified into law.

Congress must also vote against the part of the deal that releases Trump and members of his family from any pending or future prosecutions or investigations involving their tax returns. At a hearing yesterday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed that this part of the settlement remains intact.

This protection for Trump and his family is unprecedented in its scope and form. It even extends to “affiliates” of the Trumps. It’s potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. One estimate puts it at $100 million.

If it’s interpreted to mean that the Trumps are protected from future IRS audits — and you can bet that Trump and his family will argue that in court, should they ever be audited again — all the self-dealing and the pay-to-play bribes that Trump and his family have collected will vanish.

Previous standard IRS procedure was to audit the president every year, rather than confer on him sweeping protection from scrutiny on tax returns.

Senate Republicans have protested the $1.8 billion fund but have looked the other way at the audit protection. “I haven’t been focused on that, to tell the truth,” said Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins. Well, it’s time that she and other Republicans did focus on it.

Only one Senate Republican — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who’s not running for reelection — has been critical of the audit immunity. “How can you not at least have them be subject to the same thing that I’m subjected to, and every one of you?” he asked yesterday.

Blanche has tried to cast the audit protections as a “standard” and “typical” outcome of litigation against the IRS. “Like anytime the IRS settles with an individual taxpayer or another company, as part of the settlement, it’s standard, it’s typical to get rid of past ongoing audits,” he testified yesterday.

Bullsh*t. First, Trump’s lawsuit against his own IRS is hardly “typical.” No president has ever done this before.

Second, his lawsuit had nothing to do with an audit or tax issue. It focused on the leak of his tax returns by a former IRS contractor during Trump’s first term.

Third, this “settlement” provision — giving the Trumps protection against IRS scrutiny — directly violates a law barring the IRS from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.

Fourth, Blanche, the acting attorney general, doesn’t even have authority to order the IRS — a separate agency that’s part of the Treasury Department — to stop civil tax audits.

Compounding all this is the fact that Blanche had been Trump’s personal defense attorney from April 2023 to March 2025, representing Trump in the New York hush-money case, the classified documents case, and the election interference case. His conflict of interest now is so blatant that he should have recused himself from participating in Trump’s IRS suit to begin with, along with its ersatz “settlement.”

Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro said at yesterday’s House hearing that the IRS order proved that Blanche was continuing to act as Trump’s personal lawyer. “Do you not find there’s any conflict of interest in what you are doing here as the acting attorney general of the United States?” she asked. Blanche said there was none.

The vote is coming up in a few hours. Please call your senators and representatives now and tell them you want them to reject Trump’s entire “settlement” — including both the $1.8 billion fund and the IRS immunity.

Reminder: The congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121. An operator will answer and connect you directly to the office of any senator or representative in Congress.

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Friends,

Someone I didn’t know approached me early this morning on my way to breakfast. He looked about 60 years old, with dark hair graying at the temples. He was dressed in a tie and jacket.

He asked me if I was Robert Reich. I admitted to it.

“Well, I just want to say …” he began, but nothing more came out of his mouth. “I just want to say …” he started again. Then silence.

“I’m sorry,” I said with as friendly a smile as I could muster at that hour of the morning, “but I’m meeting someone for breakfast.”

His eyes welled up.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude!” I said, suddenly feeling dreadful. “I apologize. I just …”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “It’s just that I’ve been feeling, well, so lonely in all this …”

“I understand,” I said.

“You see, I-I’m from the Central Valley,” he continued. “My wife and my brother are Trumpers, and a lot of my neighbors. You have no idea ….” His eyes welled up again.

“I really do get it. I hear it all the time.”

“They tell me stuff that’s just … well, not true.”

“It’s like they’re in a different world,” I said.

“Yes! Exactly!” he became more animated. “I mean, sometimes I don’t know if they’re crazy or I’m crazy.”

“Well, I don’t know you, so I can’t say for certain,” I said with a smile, “but I very much doubt you’re the crazy one.”

“So when I saw you … well,” his voice grew quieter. “You make sense.”

“I try to,” I said, starting to feel embarrassed. I glanced at my watch. “Look, I really …”

“Oh, I don’t want to hold you up!” he said. “It’s just that ….”

“Look, there are millions of people like you,” I said. “Some live in MAGA parts of the country. They often feel lonely, and sometimes they wonder if they’re crazy. But let me assure you .…”

“No need!” he said, shaking his head. “You go on to your breakfast! I’ve taken enough of your time.”

“I just want to tell you most Americans now feel exactly as you do. Even if they didn’t a year and a half ago, they do now. They’re now seeing the results of this despicable regime.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Good luck!” We shook hands. He turned away, walking quickly in the other direction. I ran to breakfast.

I’ve had a lot of brief discussions like this with people who feel isolated and sometimes unsure of themselves.

In my experience, the vast majority of Americans are decent people. But like the man I briefly spoke with this morning, they can sometimes feel alone and confused.

Our job — yours and mine — is to reassure them that they’re not alone and they’re not crazy, that America has been taken over by a man and a regime that are spewing blatant lies, and those lies are being amplified on social media and occasionally on mainstream media.

Too many people don’t understand this. They feel as if they’re the only ones feeling disconnected and powerless. But they’re not powerless. In fact, if each of them votes in November, their votes will force a great change in America. Even greater in 2028.

I think it also important to reassure each other that these terrible times will end. More Americans are seeing through the lies as well as the cruelty and corruption. They’re deciding they want this daymare to end, peacefully, and are committed to rebuilding and rectifying the nation.

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Friends,

Famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired tonight. “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who CBS News’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss hired last week as the show’s new executive producer, wrote in a memo to the staff this evening.

What had Pelley done to get the axe? At a staff meeting yesterday, he accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded him. (Earlier today I gave Pelley this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)

It was all part of Weiss’s shakeup of the revered broadcast.

Why, you may wonder, is Weiss so eager to shake up “60 Minutes”?

I mean, it’s the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history. It has remained the #1 news program for 50 straight years and consistently ranks among the top 10 of all Nielsen-rated television programs.

And it pulls in a fortune for CBS. “60 Minutes” is one of the most profitable programs in all of television, generating tens of millions in annual profit for CBS. In one recent year, its advertising revenues were $67.5 million. The network wholly owns the franchise, which makes it a gold mine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.

I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?

One hint: Besides firing Pelley for insubordination and chucking the show’s former executive producer, Weiss has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” producers Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

In December, Alfonsi challenged Weiss’s decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on an El Salvador maximum-security prison where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, including alleged gang members. Weiss had raised concerns about the comment-seeking process and determined that it needed additional reporting. Alfonsi termed the decision a political move. (The segment, called “Inside CECOT,” eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)

Alfonsi calls the network’s decision now to allow her contract to expire “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” that “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”

Vega is no less blunt. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”

Of course it’s censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trump’s assets to get Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.

Trump’s “fingerprints and DNA are all over this,” veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft says. “He’s been making threats against ‘60 Minutes’ and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”

Trump has fixated on “60 Minutes,” calling the show “a dishonest Political Operative disguised as News.”

Trump sued CBS News over an interview of then presidential candidate Kamala Harris that Trump claimed had been edited in such a way as to hurt his presidential campaign. After “60 Minutes” aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, Trump said CBS “should lose their license.”

This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a gold mine. Politically, Trump thinks it’s dangerous as hell because it tells the truth about him and his regime, and wants it killed.

Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone who’s been fired from “60 Minutes” knows this. Trump’s lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.

You need to know this.

“60 Minutes” — the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history — is being dismantled because Trump doesn’t want America to know the truth.

It’s the same reason CBS canned Stephen Colbert — because Trump hated Colbert’s truth-telling jokes about him.

It’s important to see all this as a systematic effort by Trump to silence the truth about what he’s doing to America.

Trump’s increasingly corruption — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing an increasingly corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaires and multibillionaires, and monopolists.

When political and economic deal-making become personal transactions — when greed and payoffs replace trust — what happens? Authoritarianism replaces democracy. And an economy collapses, as it did at the end of America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.

One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s despicable reign.

In the meantime, thank you Scott Pelley for telling the truth. Thank you, former “60 Minutes” producers, correspondents, and staff, for telling the truth.

And now, what do we do in the interest of the truth? We boycott CBS.

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Friends,

Anthropic — the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude —confidentially filed yesterday for an Initial Public Offering of its shares of stock. Soon, SpaceX and OpenAI will be doing the same. These three I.P.O.s could mark a once-in-a-generation creation of giant AI firms — valued at more than a trillion dollars each— and huge money for a relative handful of people (including the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk).

But this giant AI wave is also likely to spell the end of a large number of jobs. True, AI will also create some new jobs. But the AI tsunami is coming so quickly that, unlike in previous technological waves, most workers won’t have much chance to adapt.

Not only will AI destroy jobs, but it will further reduce the bargaining leverage workers now have — which means that to stay employed (or land a job) they’ll have to settle for lower wages.

Put this together with (as I pointed out Sunday) languishing returns to labor and soaring returns to capital even before the AI tsunami hits, and AI is sure to shift the balance of economic power further from labor to capital — making wages an even less reliable mechanism for distributing prosperity. We’re heading for a major shakeup of our entire political economic system — and it’s coming soon.

So what should be done?

Herewith, four ideas that are being actively discussed — in schools of public policy, in legislative cloakrooms, and among the billionaire class. I’m going to set each of them out as clearly as I can, along with their downsides, and ask you to weigh in.

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