Welcome back to our 250th-plus-one-week anniversary edition! Hope you have had a good week, despite the cacophony out of Washington.

Today, Heather and I try to understand the real source of Trump’s power — his power to berate the heads of state at this week’s NATO and yet have them defer to him. His power to conduct a war in Iran that’s increasingly bogged down and which the American people don’t support. And his power to keep Republicans in Congress quietly neutered while much of his Republican base is outraged at his never-ending war, the soaring prices of gas and groceries, and his continuing refusal to release half of the Epstein files.

Trump is on an escalator heading downward at great speed, but his power seems to be intact. Why? We’ll get into that. Please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the conversation.

Robert Reich

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Friends,

Through the end of June, about $3.2 trillion in AI deals have occurred this year. That’s a 45 percent jump from a year earlier, according to Dealogic, a data provider. It’s the most spent on deal-making over a half-year period in at least a decade.

Many of these were truly giant deals — 44 were larger than $10 billion, including takeovers.

Is this a bubble that’s going to burst?

Because I’m located in the Bay Area, I often come across people who are deeply involved in AI. They rhapsodize over it.

But when I ask them who’s going to buy all the wondrous AI products and services — especially after AI destroys millions of jobs and decimates the American middle class —they have no answer.

And AI will destroy millions of jobs and decimate the middle class. Already, Cisco, Block, Coinbase, HP, IBM, and Salesforce have cited AI as a reason for mass layoffs.

Two weeks ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a sweeping policy memo warning that AI will produce labor market disruptions larger and longer-lasting than any previous technological shift.

Earlier this week, noted short-seller Carson Block predicted that AI-driven job losses could eliminate 15 percent of knowledge worker positions within three years. He warned that this disruption could rival the worst economic crises in modern history.

AI corporations are of little value without enough demand for AI products and services. Yet unless people have enough income, they won’t be able to afford AI products and services.

Where will the demand for AI come from if AI erodes what remains of the American middle class and much of the working class?

I’m told we’ll just need to reduce work hours. But this answer doesn’t solve the riddle, because corporations aren’t going to reduce hours and continue to pay the same weekly or yearly salaries they paid before. They’ll pay less.

Zoom’s Eric Yuan told The New York Times that “A.I. can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week? Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says advancing technology could push the workweek down to just three and a half days. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates openly wonders whether a two-day workweek could be the future.

Elon Musk pushes the idea to the extreme (as he does everything else): “In less than 20 years — but maybe even as little as 10 or 15 years — the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional.” Even better: “There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,” says Musk. “There will be universal high income.”

All of this is pure rubbish. Even if AI yields big productivity gains, it’s far from clear that workers will see much, if any, of the benefits.

If productivity rises, as it’s supposed to do when the workplace becomes immersed in AI, each worker will generate more value, by definition. And supposedly with more value, we’re all better off.

Not so. Although worker productivity has been rising for years, the median wage has barely risen, when adjusted for inflation.

Here’s the truth: the four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.

So, as AI takes over much of their current work, workers will get poorer or have to take additional jobs to maintain their current pay.

So, back to my question: Where will the demand for AI come from when most of us won’t be able to afford it?

You’d think that Amodei or Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) or even Elon Musk would take the lead in trying to come up with an answer to this riddle. But so far, nothing. Nor is there any conversation about what we should be doing to help the next generation of young people survive the specter of mass technological unemployment.

The distribution issue can’t be ignored. Unless the broader American public gets a share in the productivity gains from AI, profits will go to an ever-smaller circle of owners — leaving the rest of us with less money to buy what can be produced.

We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them.

There’s no shortage of ideas for how AI’s productivity gains might be redistributed. Those gains could be redistributed through wealth taxes financing childcare, elder care, and healthcare.

Or they could be redistributed via a sovereign wealth fund owning half of all AI shares of stock, that distributes yearly dividends to every citizen.

Or a Universal Basic Income financed by high taxes on the profits of America’s biggest corporations.

There are lots of ways to do it. The real question is where the political will is expected to come from to do it.

Surely part of the answer depends on the leaders of AI realizing how much they will need a consuming public with enough income and wealth to buy all the wondrous things AI will be able to deliver.

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Friends,

At the NATO summit just ended, Trump lashed out at other NATO members, saying he was “very disappointed with NATO” and asking “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us?” He reiterated his desire to take over Greenland, blasted European energy and immigration policies, insulted Spain, and worried allies by declaring that the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow “doesn’t affect us.”

Yet throughout the proceedings, Trump was treated by other NATO powers with as much deference as any U.S. president has ever received from NATO — perhaps more. “It was a great meeting, there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity,” Trump crowed when it was over.

What happened? It’s important to understand the source of Trump’s power.

His power doesn’t come from his being president of the most powerful nation in the world. In fact, his arbitrary tariffs, absurd war in Iran, and outright abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife have reduced America’s standing in much of the world.

Nor does his power come from his MAGA base, which is now having second thoughts about supporting someone who got the U.S. involved in another Middle Eastern war, caused prices to rise, and still refuses to release the complete Epstein files.

Nor does his power flow from his strategic brilliance or cunning. Of all U.S. presidents in modern times, he easily ranks as the stupidest.

Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules, and laws about how American presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power, and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way.

The NATO presidents and prime ministers treated Trump with extraordinary deference because they’re afraid of what he might do if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Whether it’s NATO, Iran. the World Cup, the 2020 election, making billions off his presidency — or anything else — he’s unconstrained by norms, rules, treaties, and laws.

When the global community of World Cup fans objected to his intervention last weekend on the side of the U.S., he responded, “If [Belgium] beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say it was — I’d say — it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020.”

Note how he corrected himself — from we’ll say to I’d say. Ethics is all about “we” — our collective judgment about what’s right or wrong. Trump doesn’t give a fig for the world’s or the nation’s judgment about right or wrong. He doesn’t think about right or wrong.

We’ve been missing the boat by characterizing Trump as breaching ethical standards. Ethics assumes some sort of agreed-upon standards against which a breach can be defined and measured. But Trump doesn’t have any standards at all. His entire approach to life, to business, and now to the presidency, has nothing whatever to do with standards. It’s about winning at all costs. Whatever it takes.

Trump isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.

It’s hard for most of us to conceive of living in a Trumpian world without standards, norms, rules, or laws — a world composed only of transactions and calculations in which the only test is what’s in it for me and at what cost.

And that difficulty most of us have of imagining such a world is itself the key to Trump’s power.

Whether you’re president of the United States or anyone else, it’s always possible to extract personal benefits by being the first to break a widely accepted norm.

Think of a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows because of the unwritten rule that no one steals. Under these circumstances, the first thief to commit robberies operates at a huge advantage. He can effortlessly get into anyone’s house.

This first-mover advantage disappears as soon as people catch on and start locking their doors and windows. But the thief doesn’t bear the costs of the locks or the hassle of locking all the doors and windows. He exploits the community’s trust. Then, once he destroys that trust, he leaves it to them to protect themselves against such future violations.

That asymmetry — small cost for the violator of trust, large costs for everyone who has to thereafter protect themselves — is the very essence of Trump’s MO. He gains wealth, power, and glory for himself by shattering norms, after which everyone else has to pick up the pieces.

As president, he has far bigger norms to shatter than does a small-down thief, and at far greater benefit to himself

As president, his thuggery has paid off, at least for himself. But it has also damaged all sorts of institutions that America and the world have relied on — from NATO to FIFA to the U.S. Department of Justice — institutions based on the trust that no American president would ever do what he’s done.

He’ll be remembered as the most powerful president America has ever had, but also the worst.

When he’s gone, all of us will be paying to clean up the mess. We’ll have to buy an infinite number of locks for an endless number of doors and windows, and spend huge amounts of our time installing them and then keeping them locked.

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Friends,

By now you’ve probably heard the latest news that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has officially surrendered to Trump and American soldiers are now occupying Tehran.

I just made that up. But who the hell knows? Two weeks ago, Trump declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”

Today, he declared that the ceasefire is “over.”

Weeks ago we had a ceasefire and a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran that, according to Trump, gave us everything we wanted, including an end to Iran’s nuclear program.

But the so-called “memo of understanding” left almost everything to be negotiated, including Iran’s nuclear program, its missile program, its support for terrorist groups, and its repression of its own people.

Before that — at the end of February — we had the promise of a quick “four-to-six-weeks” intervention.

The cold, hard fact is that America is far worse off today than we were before Trump started this conflict — without consulting with Congress or our allies. The Strait of Hormuz is once again effectively closed. Oil prices are moving upward.

Iran’s nuclear stockpile remains hidden. The regime in Tehran is more extreme and resolute about gaining a nuclear bomb than ever before.

Meanwhile, 13 Americans have been killed and some 425 have been wounded in action. Over 3,400 Iranians have been killed, including 120 schoolchildren, and 26,000 Iranians have been injured. The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.

Trump never gave the American people a good reason for attacking Iran in the first place. He had no objective and no exit strategy.

The likeliest future is a low-level continuation of this conflict as far as the eye can see — coupled with sporadic announcements from Trump that it’s over and America has won, which are then contradicted by another set of attacks by Iran’s missiles and drones, followed by another round of American aggression and Iranian retaliation.

This is the “forever war” that Trump criticized when he ran for office in 2024.

The question is whether he and the spineless Republican Congress that have supported this debacle will be held to account.

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Many of you have already signed up for tonight’s final free live watchalong of The Last Class film — about my final semester of teaching (after more than 40 years), and also about education, democracy, leadership, and the arc of life.

I’ll be joining Elliot Kirschner (the film’s director) and Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse (executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action and also the film’s producer), as we watch it along with you — starting at 5:30 p.m. PT / 8:30 p.m. ET.

We’ll introduce the film, offer a bit of commentary during it, and answer questions at the end. They’ll also show a sneak peek of our next film.

All you need to do is click this link to watch.

Again, the film will begin promptly at 5:30 p.m. PT / 8:30 p.m. ET (and time zones between).

This is a live event, just like TV in the old days. We’ll start right on time. So please try to log on a few minutes early.

The Last Class film link

Note: When the event ends, the link will no longer be watchable.

Feel free to share this invitation, and we hope to see as many of you as possible later this evening.

See you at the movies!

RR

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Friends,

If you’re like me, you don’t want to think about anything Trump is doing that you don’t have to think about. The horrific domestic police called ICE, for example, appears to have quieted down. So we can erase it from our minds, right?

Wrong. ICE has not quieted down. It’s even worse. It’s just become less visible.

ICE has quietly doubled its immigrant arrest quota. It’s now arresting 2,000 people per day.

But you’re not hearing about it because the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has decided to quietly spread ICE agents around the country instead of targeting one Democratic-controlled city at a time.

Rather than fueling media spectacles, lawsuits, and community backlash, ICE is now going about its ruthless business in more hushed tones.

But every day, more of our neighbors — and more people who are in the United States legally — are being swept up at immigration check-ins, traffic stops, workplaces, and public spaces. Raids have intensified in Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Dallas, McAllen, Brownsville, New York City, Newark, Passaic, Plainfield, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Nashville, Charlotte, Chicago, and even in Minneapolis.

Local media continue to report what’s happening, but the national media seem to have lost interest. Among raids reported by local media are:

• ICE’s cold-blooded murder yesterday, July 7, of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas.

• The mass arrest of more than 30 workers at the Scholar Crafts plant in Birmingham, Alabama.

• Raids at two laundromats in Madison, Wisconsin.

• Courthouse immigration arrests in South Florida.

• A Mexican father arrested while driving to a soccer game in Salt Lake City.

• Arrests of dairy farm workers in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

• Arrests of several workers across Montana.

• Dozens of arrests in Kansas City during its hosting of World Cup games.

• The arrest of a 56-year-old Catholic nun on her way to Mass in McAllen, Texas.

• The arrest of at least three people during immigration check-ins at New York City courthouses last week in violation of federal court orders explicitly barring such arrests.

  And so on.

Refugee communities are bracing for additional ICE raids in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision revoking Temporary Protected Status of asylum seekers from Haiti and Syria, which could affect at least 356,000 people. (Haitian asylum seekers in Springfield, Ohio, are expecting “the mother of all ICE raids” after Stephen Miller voiced enthusiastic support for “finally removing all those Haitian illegal immigrants.”)

Community groups in Texas expect increased crackdowns after the conviction of eight activists on domestic terrorism charges following an incident last year in which a police officer was shot during an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center. A ninth defendant in that case, Ines Soto, was sentenced last week to 50 years in prison for “providing material support to terrorists” because he had transported political pamphlets in his car.

Fifteen Minnesota protesters also pled not guilty last week to conspiracy charges stemming from protests in January. Activist and healthcare worker Isaac Sant, one of the accused, said the trial was “a naked attempt to silence our voices, to squash dissent and to have a chilling effect on organizing here in the Twin Cities,” which, he noted, “is not going to work.”

Meanwhile, ICE’s budget has tripled. The House narrowly voted in June to direct roughly $70 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for ICE and Border Patrol — more than three times its last annual budget. The money comes with few stipulations on how and when it should be spent. It includes:

• $38 billion for ICE to hire, pay, train, and equip its officers and agents. That includes $7 billion for Homeland Security Investigations and $31 billion for immigration enforcement work like hiring more attorneys, supporting local law enforcement who coordinate with ICE, and technology like body cameras;

• $22 billion for Border Patrol to pay, train, recruit, and equip agents and personnel. That includes $13 billion specifically for immigration enforcement work;

• $5 billion for border security technology and screening, including artificial intelligence.

ICE is now using facial recognition technology and has already scanned thousands of immigrants’ and protesters’ faces. This kind of street-level surveillance raises profound legal questions about what are in effect warrantless searches.

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be creating a vast database of people who merely object to its actions.

How else to explain how federal agents tracked down Rochester resident David Streever last month when he was visiting New York City with his daughter? They gave Streever a warning notice alleging that he had potentially violated the law when he wrote a three-paragraph email to Todd Lyons, former head of ICE, criticizing ICE’s mass deportation program and comparing Lyons to a Nazi.

Similarly, during New York State’s primaries in June, ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse to question Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker. Gonyea, an American citizen, says the agents were concerned about an Instagram post she supposedly made in January identifying Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter.

Well, I’m criticizing ICE for these violations of the First Amendment rights of Americans. Come arrest me for my public criticism!

The Trump regime continues to open new detention centers, including a 528-bed holding facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children next to an airport hub in Alexandria, Louisiana, to speed up deportations. ICE is calling the facility a “staging area,” not a detention center, and says people would only be there a few days at most. But immigration advocates worry that children could be held at the new facility for weeks or months.

ICE is bigger and worse than ever, although the major media have stopped reporting on it. Not only is ICE’s reign of terror intimidating many undocumented immigrants and their families — preventing them from seeking the healthcare they need or attending school or going to court — but ICE is also sweeping into its maw many American citizens who are protesting Trump’s police state.

Hence, my request to you:

1. Please continue to protect the vulnerable in your communities. Make sure they have Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center informing them of their rights.

2. Report ICE sightings to your local Rapid Response Network (RRN) to ensure the community is alerted and those affected receive legal support. You can also submit and track anonymously and locally using the ICE Activity Tracker. (When making a report, be sure to note the specific location — intersections or addresses — the number of agents, the types of vehicles, and whether anyone is being detained. Document the activity if it can be done safely from a distance.)

3. Report all ICE activities in your area to your local newspaper, radio, and other local media. Take videos of what ICE is doing — again, doing it safely and from a distance. Share with your local media and ask them to pass it on to their affiliated national broadcast networks.

4. Alert your members of Congress. (Again, to connect directly with the office of you representative or senators, call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 (or the House direct switchboard at (202) 225-3121). An operator will answer and route your call after you state the name of the lawmaker you wish to reach. Before calling, you can look up your specific representatives using your ZIP code on the House Finder Service or search for your elected officials on Congress.gov.)

5. Above all, do not be intimidated by ICE and the police state Trump and his assistant Stephen Miller are creating. Its purpose is to intimidate. We have a responsibility to one another and to future generations to resist it with the same sort of courage and commitment to democracy our founders summoned just over 250 years ago.

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Friends,

Today, on their first day of trading on the Nasdaq-100 stock index, SpaceX’s shares dropped 6.8% to $149.47. That’s above their IPO price of $135, but down from a peak above $200, and below the $150 price where shares began trading on June 12.

SpaceX’s decline disappointed investors who wagered that inclusion in major indexes would provide a boost to the shares.

But, what about all the Americans who didn’t even know they were buying into SpaceX, but whose savings are in index funds linked to SpaceX and the Nasdaq-100? They’ve been taken for a ride.

On May 1, the Nasdaq 100 implemented a new “fast entry” rule that included companies among the top 40 most highly valued in the U.S. — which put SpaceX on board automatically.

The result: A big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) are now automatically tied to SpaceX’s market value.

At the same time, all that automatic infusion of investment was expected to jack up the value of SpaceX, at least in the short term.

If today’s launch is an indication, that didn’t happen.

SpaceX insiders — such as Musk and, reportedly, senior Trump officials — can sell their shares sooner than is usually the case with an IPO, because that’s the way the SpaceX IPO has been structured. Which means they can enjoy the stocks’ upward tide as the major indices have essentially forced millions of investors to buy it, and then they can still exit SpaceX before the tide runs completely out.

If this sounds to you like a Ponzi scheme, it does to me, too. SpaceX may turn out to be the universe’s biggest Ponzi scheme — with the possible exception of Trump meme coins.

Of course, the Nasdaq’s overall weakness today didn’t help. Weighed down by semiconductor stocks, the Nasdaq composite fell 1.2%. The S&P 500 dropped 0.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.2%.

But investors have been nervous about SpaceX for weeks. The rocket company started to veer off course with a report out on June 22 that, notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding its IPO’s raising $85 billion in its first trading days, SpaceX wasn’t really flying all that high.

In fact, it was floating a $20 billion bond sale to refinance its debts (mostly from its acquisition of X, on which Musk had put a lofty valuation). The sale seemed to go well initially, but the bonds dropped in the secondary market to a degree rarely seen by investors, driving up their yield premium (or spread) to U.S. Treasurys.

So SpaceX investors are now confronting several big unknowns, including how much cash SpaceX will burn and how much borrowing it will do going forward.

Which means average Americans who hold their savings in index funds are flying blind, even if they don’t yet know it. They may even be lost in space.

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Private equity firms are buying up all sorts of things that fire departments rely on — and jacking up their prices.

This is particularly harmful to volunteer fire departments, which make up about 85 percent of fire departments in the country and operate on shoestring budgets.

Even modest price increases on software can limit a fire department’s ability to protect the public. One Connecticut volunteer fire department reported that after a private equity firm bought the software platform it used to track emergencies, the yearly price skyrocketed from $795 to $5,000.

Private equity is also buying up companies that produce emergency radios, fire truck engines, and flame retardant chemicals.

By now we should all know that when private equity gets involved, prices go up and quality goes down — whether it’s housing or healthcare or even local newspapers.

Private equity managers get rich as they plunder vital industries and then take advantage of the carried interest loophole, which lets them pay a lower tax rate by classifying their incomes as investments.

Fire departments all over America are now facing higher costs, which makes it harder for them to replace aging equipment, train firefighters, and provide emergency services. Some firefighters even report going out on calls in fire engines with faulty brakes.

Can you imagine?

And even if they can afford new equipment, they have to wait longer for it. Sometimes years for a fire truck.

Let me ask you, honestly: Are private equity profits really more important than public safety?

States can and should prohibit private equity firms from sinking their teeth into vital public goods and services.

Oregon, for example, just passed the nation’s strictest law blocking private equity firms from controlling healthcare practices.

And Congress must follow through on eliminating the carried interest tax loophole that lets private equity managers get away with paying less in taxes.

We must not let private equity firms cash in while our communities burn.

Please share this video.

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Friends,

Today I’m going to ask you to make a difficult decision: name the worst elected official in America today, other than Trump.

The point of this exercise is not for you to become any more discouraged with American politics but to highlight that Trump is hardly the only horrendously awful elected official in America. A second purpose is to name (and shame) elected officials who deserve to be better known for the horrible things they’ve said and done. Finally, it’s to stimulate a candid discussion about why voters have chosen these loathsome people (and why eligible voters who wouldn’t have chosen them don’t vote).

It’s been difficult to pare the list down. I’ve had to eliminate Ted Cruz because two other finalists are from Texas, and I didn’t want to make this solely about the Lone Star State. I’ve also eliminated members of the House Freedom Caucus because there’s no meaningful way to differentiate their bigotry and fanaticism from one another. I’ve included Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s technically no longer a public official — she resigned from Congress on January 5 — because her influence continues, and she’s now talking about forming a third party.

So here are the finalists for the worst elected official in America today, other than Trump:

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I’ve been an enthusiastic proponent of young progressives who are now taking on establishment Democrats — and winning. But lest there be any doubt about where I stand on the candidacy of Maine’s Graham Platner, I want to make it clear. He should exit the race, and exit now. The evidence against him appears credible — and it’s appalling. The people of Maine deserve to be represented by someone whose character is exemplary. I hope that the Democratic Party of Maine moves quickly to find a replacement.

RR

Friends,

Make no mistake. I’m rooting for the U.S. as we take on Belgium today in Seattle for a place in the World Cup quarterfinals.

But the game isn’t what it was — before Trump got FIFA president Gianni Infantino to lift the suspension of America’s top scorer, striker Folarin Balogun, who got a red card in a match against Bosnia and Herzegovina and would otherwise have been suspended from tonight’s match.

“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump clucked on social media Sunday afternoon.

When my two boys were young and just learning to play games, they were very competitive — as children often are. When one of them was losing, he often asked me to intervene. “Dad! Adam cheated!” “Dad! Sam cheated!”

Unless the so-called “cheating” was obvious, I gently explained that I wouldn’t weigh in. I wanted them to understand that one of the purposes of learning to play games is to accept losses, even if the result may seem unfair.

Later, when they became teenagers and played soccer or Little League baseball, there were times when they didn’t agree with a referee’s call. On a few of these occasions, they came to me in tears of outrage and self-righteousness, wanting me to say something to the referee.

I did not. “We have to rely on referees,” I remember saying. “That’s part of the game.”

The purpose of the game wasn’t just to win. The purpose of any game is to have fun, to enjoy the sport. It’s also to appreciate the contestants on both sides — their skill and excellence. And to follow the rules.

Yet now Trump is showing the world once again that America doesn’t play by the rules. We don’t accept losses, and we don’t accept referees’ calls.

I don’t know about you, but Trump’s intervention in the World Cup has ruined the game for me.

How can anyone ever again trust that the United States has won a game fair and square? How can the fine athletes representing us rejoice in a victory when the president of the United States has used his political power to change a referee’s call?

We try to teach our children morality. We explain to them the difference between winning and playing honorably and well. We try to inculcate in them a sense of fairness.

We want them to trust that in the game of life they may be rewarded for their skill and their tenacity, but they may not always be. We also want them to play the game of life with honesty and compassion.

We don’t want them to bully their way to success, as Trump has done his whole life.

Bullies who abuse their power by altering the rules of a game to favor themselves end up spoiling the game for everyone.

They destroy the trust on which any system — be it a World Cup competition, or a political race, or a market economy — ultimately depends.

Now we have a World Cup in which an American president has put his thumb on the scale. As a result, he has forever tarnished the integrity of the game.

Like his big lies about the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump has also tarnished the integrity of America.

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Friends,

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.

It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.

McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.

During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).

I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.

So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.

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RR

Friends,

As you likely know, I’m a big fan of W. Kamau Bell, the stand-up comedian, director, all-around insightful thought leader, and television host who sometimes visits us on The Coffee Klatch. His news commentary is ruthless and irreverent, and important.

He invited me to be on the latest episode of his new podcast WHO’S WITH ME? which came out today.

If you aren’t already following Kamau here on Substack, I recommend you sign up for “Who’s With Me?” here.

W. Kamau Bell asks, "Who's With Me?"

Come hang out with a pop-culture-obsessed, antiracist, lefty, OG Blerd who lives in Oakland, CA.

RR

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:

“Isn’t the monster usually under the bed?”

(Congratulations, Sidge.)

Runners-up:

“I thought I sprayed for bedbugs!”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Celebrating the birth of a nation, mourning the death of its character!”

(Congratulations, John F. M. O’Sullivan O’Shea.)

“I guess now we wake up at the ‘crack of don?’”

(Congratulations, Jane A Malecki.)

“I’d like to get out on the left side please.”

(Congratulations, Mark Robokoff.)

“Honey wake up! The president is in our bed, and he’s grabbing me by the pussy!!”

(Congratulations, Adam Laurie.)

“No matter how you try, you can’t get rid of him.”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“If this is a three-way, we’re really getting screwed.”

(Congratulations, Rachel Brown.)

“Geez - I thought he was only in bed with the oligarchs.”

(Congratulations, Katy McDonough.)

“Please let us all Wake Up from our National Nightmare and its Narcissist in Thief!”

(Congratulations, Linda.)

“How can you sleep through this! My nightmares are the same as my daymares!”

(Congratulations, Sue Schneider.)

“I thought you set the clock to Obama.”

(Congratulations, bRad Weller.)

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Friends,

Okay, we’ve now gone through the bitter-sweet 250th anniversary. Now let’s get to work.

Every day brings more news of Trump’s greed, incompetence, cruelty, and criminality. Raking in $2.2 billion in his first year in office, much of it siphoned off from taxpayers and gullible followers. His Iran debacle. His malignant narcissism, putting his face and name everywhere. His cruel mass deportations. His use of the Justice Department to prosecute anyone he feels has wronged him. And so on.

As journalist Tom Edsall writes, “The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.”

I think it important to separate the loathsomeness of Trump as a person from the horrendous things he’s doing. Trump won’t change, but we can begin seeking changes in our system to prevent such awfulness in the future — especially if/when we boot out the Republican cowards and sycophants from Congress.

What basic reforms are necessary to begin cleaning up the mess? I’m not talking about specific policies such as reducing the size of the military, saving the planet from climate change, providing Medicare for All, or dealing with AI — as important as they are. I’m focusing on basic meat-and-potatoes reforms of how our government functions — reforms that will be necessary to get anything done.

I’ve tried to boil it down to 10 bare essentials. Herewith:

1. Subject Supreme Court justices to term limits. Limit the terms of justices to 18 years, after which time they must move to courts of appeals or district courts. Justices already on the high court can remain only until they’ve been there for 18 years. Those who are beyond this limit must immediately move to other courts. (Another reform is to expand the number of justices, but FDR tried this and it proved so politically unpopular that he had to abandon it.)

2. Prevent conflicts of interest. End the exemption of the president and vice president from conflicts of interest laws. Require all federally elected officials to put their investments into blind trusts. Prohibit all trading of specific shares of stock.

3. Stop a president from using the Justice Department. Prohibit a president from having any involvement in decisions about whom to prosecute. Require congressional review of any pardons or commutations.

4. End gerrymanders. Require states to create independent commissions to draw congressional district lines.

5. Revive voting rights. Reenact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (which barred voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity) and Section 5 (which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval before changing any voting laws or procedures).

6. Protect press freedom and independence. Amend the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts to bar large corporations, or any person already owning major media, from purchasing major media networks or platforms.

7. Protect the freedom of inquiry. Bar the executive branch from conditioning research or other educational grants to universities on any ideological litmus test. Researchers should be free to pursue truth.

8. Get big money out of politics. Establish public matching funds for small-dollar donations for all federal elected offices. Encourage states to grant corporate charters only on condition that corporations refrain from political activity (as Hawaii has done and Montana is considering, and hopefully California will do). Pursue a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and establish Congress’s authority to limit big money in politics.

9. Tax large aggregations of personal wealth. Enact a wealth tax. Eliminate the “stepped-up basis at death” rule that allows large fortunes to be transferred from one generation to the next without paying taxes on capital gains.

10. Eliminate the Electoral College. Pursue a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and base the selection of president and vice president on whichever ticket wins the overall popular vote. In the meantime, seek a compact among states (and the District of Columbia) to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote.

You may have different priorities, in which case please add them in your comments below (but indicate which of the above you’d knock off so we can keep the list manageable).

The point is that we need to begin talking about major structural reforms of how our government functions — and pushing candidates for every level of government to support them. Trump has revealed how easily the system can be abused. When we have the power, we must act to end such abuses.

RR

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Today marks 250 years since we declared our independence from a vile, arbitrary, impulsive, capricious, greedy, selfish, narcissistic authoritarian. Oh, wait. Sorry, we’re not yet independent of Trump. But George III was pretty awful, too.

Today Heather and I examine where America has come — with a Supreme Court that thinks Trump and any successor president needs more power, a president who is making billions off his office, and an utter dud of Trump-glorification activities on the National Mall.

Please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in our 250th July 4th conversation.

Oh, and Happy Fourth of July.

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Friends,

On this July 4 — the 250th anniversary of the start of this country — many people, including the current occupant of the Oval Office, believe that celebrating America means waving the flag or standing for the national anthem or shouting, “America First.”

That’s not what real patriotism is.

Real patriotism means sacrificing to keep America going.

It means paying taxes proportional to your wealth. I’m talking to you, Donald Trump, and you, Jeff Bezos, and you, Elon Musk.

It means paying your workers a living wage so they can thrive. I’m talking to you, John Furner, CEO of Walmart, and you, Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s.

It means fully reckoning with how racial oppression and white supremacy have shaped this nation, not whitewashing our history and ignoring racism’s continuing legacy. I’m talking to you, Ron DeSantis, and other lawmakers trying to prevent students from learning the roles slavery and genocide have played in our history.

Real patriotism means protecting American democracy and our form of government, not trying to overturn an election that was upheld by 60 federal courts and the Supreme Court, or lying about election fraud when it barely exists, or seeking to suppress the voting rights of people of color.

I’m talking to you, Trump, along with traitorous members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election, and you, state legislators who have advanced nearly 400 voter suppression bills, and you, Supreme Court justices who have gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Real patriotism means not flooding our politics with big money, so the voices of the people can be heard. I’m talking to you again, Elon, as well as Charles Koch, Timothy Mellon, Miriam Adelson, and Michael Bloomberg.

And it means putting the interests of our country over partisanship. Do you hear me, Mike Johnson and John Thune?

Finally, real patriotism means using your position of power in the media to inform and educate the public rather than weaponize lies and promote extremism to get more clicks. I’m talking to you, Mark Zuckerberg, and you, David Ellison, and you, Rupert Murdoch, and, once again, you, Elon.

On this July 4, the 250th anniversary of America, we must recommit ourselves to real patriotism — the hard work necessary to make American democracy survive.

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Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we mark 250 years, what do we see?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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