On Wednesday, the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. When asked why the US seized the ship, Trump claimed there was “a very good reason,” but did not appear to know what that reason was. When asked what would happen to the oil on the tanker, Trump replied, “We keep it, I guess.”

[Sidebar: No, the US doesn’t “keep” the oil. It can file a civil forfeiture action in federal court, sell the oil pursuant to a court order, and deposit the proceeds into a designated account in the US Treasury, such as a terrorism victims’ fund. See Congress.gov, Enforcement of Economic Sanctions: An Overview.]

Trump has no idea about the justification, consequences, or details of the most significant US seizure of an oil tanker in US history. He either isn’t interested in the details or is incapable of comprehending them. Neither option is reassuring.

Trump appears to be dazed and confused about the substantive aspects of the presidency, and has been for every day of his two terms. At this point, Trump’s only interest in the presidency is continuing the grift that is making his family obscenely wealthy by monetizing US relationships, prestige, and resources.

Meanwhile, Americans are suffering under Trump’s heartless leadership—and they aren’t willing to take it anymore. The tide is turning, which is a statement of fact that should boost our confidence and optimism about Democratic prospects heading into 2026.

The lesson we should learn from our change in fortunes is that we must work harder, do more, and motivate more Americans to join us. We have no guarantees about the future, save one: If we give up, we will lose everything. But if we continue the fight, we preserve our ability to shape the future. The choice is ours.

On Wednesday, the political reporting outlet Bolts released an annual report on election outcomes. The news was encouraging: Democrats flipped 21% of GOP-held legislative seats up for election in 2025, while Republicans failed to flip a single Democratic-held legislative seat. See Bolts, In 2025, Democrats Flipped 21 Percent of GOP-Held Legislative Seats | Bolts

Per Bolts,

According to Bolts’ analysis, Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections.

Meanwhile, Republicans failed to flip any legislative seats this year, losing ground even in New Jersey, where they had high hopes, and failing to gain several districts in New York State that Trump carried last year.

The reason for the trend in state legislative races is clear: Trump is single-handedly trashing the economy by pursuing self-defeating tariffs. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, acknowledged that inflation is higher than otherwise expected because of Trump’s tariffs. See Reuters, Fed’s Powell says inflation overshoot caused by Trump tariffs.

Per Reuters, Powell said,

It’s really tariffs that are causing most of the inflation overshoot.

Everyone understands the inflationary effect of tariffs, except Trump. Indeed, he continues to falsely claim that foreign countries are paying tariffs when, in fact, US retailers pay tariffs on the goods they import, which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But deep in his bones, even Trump doesn’t believe his own arguments. So, he has taken to urging American consumers to cut back on purchases to control costs.

At Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he blamed Americans for purchasing too many goods. As described by Politico:

Trump stirred up fresh concerns Tuesday at a Pennsylvania rally that was supposed to focus on easing Americans’ anxieties over pocketbook pressures. Instead, he veered off script, at one point urging austerity amid the holiday shopping season by resurfacing a line from earlier this year that American kids should be happy with “two or three” dolls.

As described by NJ.com, Trump is The Grinch who stole Christmas, telling parents to beat inflation by buying fewer toys for their children.

Per NJ.com, Here’s why Trump is telling parents to buy fewer toys for their children. Trump said,

You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils. Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need steel. . . .You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.

Even Trump’s enablers and handlers have been forced to acknowledge the cruel and clueless nature of Trump’s messaging. See Politico, ‘Never going to be pitch perfect’: Trump loyalists see an imperfect messenger. (“One former Trump senior adviser said, “[U]nfortunately I just don’t think Trump is temperamentally capable of reversing himself and saying, ‘Yes, affordability is a concern.’ He’s stubborn.”)

Not to be outdone by Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson is resisting extending Obamacare premium subsidies by offering a smokescreen of supposed “solutions” to the high cost of healthcare that all come down to consumers saving more of their paychecks to pay for healthcare out of their pockets. See The New Republic, Mike Johnson Finally Reveals GOP’s Health Care Plan—and It’s Rough | The New Republic.

Per The New Republic, Johnson told his fellow Republicans at a caucus luncheon that they should pick a handful of ten proposals from a slide deck, which included health savings accounts, allowing doctors to own hospitals, and “fixing Obamacare.”

Mike Johnson’s proposals to the GOP caucus went over like a lead balloon. As a result, Republicans are again circulating a discharge petition to circumvent Mike Johnson’s ability to keep legislation from reaching the House floor. In the most current petition, vulnerable Republicans are proposing a two-year extension of ACA premium subsidies (with additional eligibility requirements added). See The Hill, Republicans launch discharge petition revolt against leaders on ObamaCare.

Per The Hill, vulnerable Republicans understand that the electorate will blame Republicans for increases in ACA premiums, despite Mike Johnson’s contention to the contrary:

Republican centrists have been imploring leadership for weeks to hold a vote to extend the subsidies.

While conservatives appear intent on letting the subsidies expire and pointing fingers at Democrats, centrists warn that Americans will blame Republicans for spiking health care costs and their party’s thin majority will be lost.

There are 22 million people whose monthly premiums are set to increase significantly if the subsidies expire.

As Trump is trying to gaslight American consumers about inflation, he is doing his best to dissuade tourists from visiting America. Trump is demanding that foreign tourists seeking a standard visa waiver to visit the US for 90 days or less provide five years of social media history and intrusive data about family members. See NYTimes, U.S. Plans to Scrutinize 5 Years of Social Media History for Foreign Tourists. (Behind paywall.)

Per the Times,

The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization.

In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to require applicants to provide a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children.

Europeans are increasingly privacy-conscious and have enacted strong protections against the collection and recording of personal data. They will hate Trump’s new data collection efforts.

Tourism to the US has declined over the last nine months under Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, tariffs, and xenophobia. See The Independent, US is the only country facing tourism decline as Trump policies to cost $29 billion in visitor revenue.

Per The Independent,

[T]he U.S. is expected to be the only one out of 184 countries to see foreign visitor spending fall in 2025, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

For comparison, while US tourism revenue decreased by $29 billion in 2025, tourism revenue in Mexico increased by $281 billion in 2025.

The $29 billion hit to tourism in 2025 comes before Trump imposes intrusive, offensive data collection practices on foreign visitors. We should expect the hit to tourism to get worse—which will further exacerbate economic anxieties. The decline in tourist dollars is not abstract. It is affecting destinations that provide a significant source of income for local residents. See Travel and Tour World, Grand Canyon Joins Bryce Canyon, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, and Yosemite in Tourism Freefall – American Natural Icons Are Struggling to Survive as Canada Ditches US and Trade War Escalates.

Trump’s increasing militarization of anti-immigration efforts is undoubtedly partly to blame for feelings that tourists are unwelcome or, even worse, subject to arrest, detention, and immediate deportation. Trump’s fixation on using the US military as a Praetorian Guard is shocking to Americans—and must be more so to foreign tourists considering a visit to the US.

For example, on Wednesday, US District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled (again) that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to California violated federal statutes and the Constitution. See Talking Points Memo, Judge Blocks Federalization of California National Guard, Saying It’s Become ‘National Police Force’.

Per TPM,

Judge Charles Breyer, a Clinton appointee, wrote that there is no feasible reason to justify the continued use of the troops months after the June protest that prompted their mobilization. . . . “That is shocking,” he wrote. “Adopting Defendants’ interpretation of Section 12406 would permit a president to create a perpetual police force comprised of state troops . . . .

Trump wants the world to believe the US is a police state—which is the point of the intrusive social media interrogation for a visa waiver.

In short, nearly everything Trump does is undermining the US economy—even as he tells voters that “there is nothing to see here, move along.” Americans shop for groceries, and they know that Trump is lying to them. They also know that Trump is in charge of the economy and promised that prices would drop on “day one” of his second term.

So, I end where I began: “Trump is single-handedly trashing the economy.” Voters aren’t going to forget that they elected him to reduce prices, and they intuitively understand that tariffs cause prices to increase.

Democrats managed to seize the affordability narrative in the November 4 and December 9 elections. We can do it again as Trump continues to make life more difficult and more expensive by increasing the cost of healthcare premiums.

 

 

 

 

Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Noem?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted, Bondi’s:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

Reach out to your elected representatives (Congress’ phone is 202-224-3121) to let them know your opinion of this new aspect of Trump’s imperial reign, and pass this along to help wake up others.

If Congress and the courts refuse to give serious oversight and regulation to these agencies, we may all one day soon be facing the same neofascist brutality that killed Alexi Navalny and imprisoned (to this day) so many of his supporters.

The full transcript of Trump’s interview this weekend with Politico has to be read to be believed.

Trump is a combination of deeply incoherent, totally mendacious — there are lots of simply made up statistics; did you know that every time the War Department sinks a boat off Venezuela it saves the lives of 25,000 Americans? — and just plain bonkers.

The other striking feature is the toady-like groveling of the interviewer, who sounds like Waylon Smithers interviewing Montgomery Burns, if both were at the center of the MAGA cinematic universe.

A typical sample:

Trump: And we’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too.

Burns: … almost all the illicit fent … fentanyl in the United States is actually produced in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China, according to the DEA. And Venezuela isn’t a significant source or transit country for fentanyl. It barely appears on the DEA’s trafficking assessments.

Trump: Yeah, well, they do send lots of drugs. Those boats come in largely from Venezuela so I would say that’s a significant … and you can see the drugs. You can see these bags all over the boat, I mean, just bags and bags and bags.

Burns: So if it’s about drugs, would you consider …

Trump: But … but let me tell you what they do do. They send really, really bad people into our country, and they’ve done it better than anybody else. They emptied their prisons into our country, and these prisoners are seriously tough. They entered … uh, all of their prisons have been emptied into the United States of America. Murderers, 11,888 murderers …

Burns: So is this about making sure Maduro sees justice …

Trump: Well, wait a minute.

Burns: … then?

Trump: Eleven thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight murderers were entered into our country, and stupid Joe took all those people. And now we’re getting them out. We’re finding ’em. We found a lot of ’em and we’re getting them out or we’re putting them in jail. Some are so dangerous and so bad that we don’t want to put them back to their country ’cause they’ll find a way to get back in. But these are stone-cold murderers. But every time we knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives.

Burns: So would you consider doing something similar wi … with Mexico and Colombia that are even more responsible for fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.?

Trump: Yeah, I would. Sure. I would.

Burns: You pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández and let him out of prison even though he was convicted in a massive international drug trafficking scheme. How is that zero tolerance on drug trafficking if …

Trump: Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama/Biden type setup, where he was set up. He was the president of the country. The country, uh, deals in drugs, like probably you could say that about every country, and because he was the president, they gave him like 45 years in prison. And there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.

Burns: Do you think that could send the wrong message to …

Trump: No, I don’t think so.

Burns: … drug dealers?

Trump: Look, I think, uh, you know, when you weaponize government … uh, they’ve weaponized their government just like they did over here. I’m one of the people that survived. But they weaponize the government. We had the most weaponized government. Our … our election was rigged. They went after me. I was impeached twice. I was indicted. They indicted me. I came out good. Here we are in the White House. Things are looking nice. But they were vicious, uh, and they, uh … they are vicious. They’re sick people.

The whole thing is like that, on every topic.

In terms of cognitive function, Trump is deteriorating quickly from what was already a badly degraded baseline — seriously, listen to an interview with him from 25 years ago, another from ten years ago, and then this — and the fact of the matter is that neither the American political nor legal systems have any adequate way of dealing with something like this, because, and only because, of the utterly corrupt state of the Republican party.

FIFA officials know how to play Trump — they know he has the social maturity of a 2-yr-old, so, tell him how great his is and he’ll do whatever you want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conservatives have spent the last week bitching and moaning about the academic merits of an obscure college essay, a topic in which right-wingers typically show little interest. But in this case, the story isn’t really about college or academia or essays but is instead about yet another front in the right’s never-ending culture wars and an attempt to bully another minority group.

University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky has alleged that her First Amendment right to religious freedom is being infringed after her psychology professor gave her an “F” for a paper on the gender norms of middle school students.

Fulnecky, a conservative Christian, used her essay to attack transgender existence. She cited the Bible and said that “eliminating gender in our society would be detrimental, as it pulls us farther from God’s original plan for humans.” Fulnecky argued that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic.”

Mel Curth, the graduate teaching assistant who graded Fulnecky’s paper, gave the student a failing grade. Curth, who is a trans woman, wrote that the problem was not with the student’s personal views but because her essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” A second instructor agreed with Curth’s findings.

After Fulnecky filed a complaint with the school, the right-wing grievance industry went to work.

Turning Point USA is a college-based pressure group created by deceased racist and hate-filled conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push right-wing ideology on college campuses. The group, which itself has a long history of hiring bigots, attacked Curth in a social media post.

“We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students,” the group wrote, supporting Fulnecky’s bigoted worldview.

The school launched a review of Curth and removed her from her position in response to the controversy.

One of the major promoters of the campaign against Curth was Fox News, who featured the story in multiple segments and hosted Fulnecky for an interview. On the network the interview was advertised as “Trans Instructor Fails Student Over Gender Essay.”

The framing of the interview gives up the tactic at play.

Fulnecky is the sort of telegenic conservative figure that the right-wing outrage machine loves to amplify. Conservatism is at a period of extreme strength at the moment—with Republican control of the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, along with state governorships and legislatures. But the right loves to play victim.

The college student purportedly standing up for “Christian values” against academia, even in very conservative Oklahoma, is too good to resist.  Don’t be surprised if she drops out of college, buys a wardrobe of short skirts and tops with plunging necklines and turns out to be the next big thing on Fox.

The story dovetails almost perfectly with the Trump administration’s assault on institutes of higher learning, defunding important research and shaking down colleges for money in exchange for suppressing speech and admissions.

The academic merits of Fulnecky’s essay are immaterial to the battle at hand. Instead she has been portrayed as an innocent under attack for holding conservative beliefs, which the right has asserted are fundamental American values—even if that means relegating transgender people to second-class citizenship.

The conservative machine is constantly searching for stories like that that tick all of the right’s preferred boxes. They are a way of keeping conservative activists and voters at a fever pitch, ready to turn out to vote—even when leaders they elect like Trump are failing on an array of issues.

The right would much rather have these voters intensely obsessing over a purported victim of “liberal” academia than investigating why food prices are up or why their neighbors are being abducted and harmed.

Focusing on the instructor’s gender identity adds to the right’s strategy of villainizing practically everyone who isn’t a straight white man. This allows the focus to be shifted from individuals and institutions negatively affecting their day-to-day living, be that Republicans in Congress or business leaders, and toward the “other” that they have demonized.

This type of campaign is a major contributing factor to the far-too-pervasive callousness that conservatives have for minorities, which can lead to death and neglect.

Conservatives and their allies in right-wing media like Fox don’t actually care about academic freedom or free expression at colleges and universities. They don’t care about academic merit, and they certainly don’t care about psychology essays.

What they intensely care about is creating another firestorm that can get them votes and allow them to retain and grow their power. It is a strategy that has worked for decades and continues to operate like a well-oiled machine.

 

Late last night (Dec 5), the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war.

The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.

To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations [or] foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia.

The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”

In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

The document calls for “closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.” Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”

The document calls this policy a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America’s past to make it sound as if it is historical, when it is anything but.

President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe.

So in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the [new Latin American republics] to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” Monroe wrote.

In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn’t much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late nineteenth century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect.

After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation’s debt, the president announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. On December 6, 1904, he noted with regret that “[t]here is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought.” If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they “put a premium upon brutality and aggression.”

“Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations,” he wrote, “powers…with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong” must “serve the purposes of international police.” Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention; it also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose “inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations’ right to independence.

Now Trump has added his own “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”

The administration says it will promote “tolerable stability in the region” by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, it says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop,” the plan says, “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.”

Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.

National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”

Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.

This is the President of the United States.  This also is an adult man with the emotional and social maturity of a two-year-old.

Young people are furious. A survey released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics finds that under-30 Americans are “a generation under profound strain” who’ve lost pretty much any confidence in government or corporate institutions.

By a 57% to 13% margin they told pollsters America is on the wrong track, and only 32% agree that the US is a healthy democracy or even one that’s “somewhat functioning.”

Fully 64% of young American adults say the system is either in trouble or has completely failed. Pollster John Della Volpe summarized the Institute’s findings:

“Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”

Which raises the urgent question: How the hell did we get here from the widespread prosperity of the postwar years?

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because they saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.

Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders focused on running their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with:
— modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation;
— nearly free college, trade school, and research support;
— enforcement of antitrust laws which produced healthy small and family businesses;
— unions protecting a third of America’s workers so fully two-thirds of us had a living wage and benefits on a single salary;
— and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports paid for with tax dollars that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class. Young people saw a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them, and wealthy people were doing well, too.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It was a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then seize control of the institutions of America.

Those groups, inspired by Powell, decided to take his advice and infiltrate our universities, create a massive, billion-dollar conservative media infrastructure, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to collect millions of votes, and turn upside-down our tax, labor, abortion, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented, billionaire-owned GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts for the rich, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, ending Roe v. Wade, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered citizens (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “dependent on the government”).

Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 44 years of Republicans’ so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud — as our young people are yelling at us — that it hasn’t worked. For example:

— Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 37% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 44 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 44 years of Reaganomics, it now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

— Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, wherever they wanted, it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill corrupt politicians. Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about American history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. We regularly terrorize young people with active shooter drills; the number-one cause of death for American children (and only American children) is bullets tearing their bodies apart.

— Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools, purged our libraries of books, and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

— Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.” And forget about trying to explain to them the difference between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, and the modern-day governments of Russia, Hungary, and China. Or what Trump and his cronies are up to.

— Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families.

While students are underwater, the banksters who own Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable student loans, the consequence of legally paid-off legislators (because of Clarence Thomas‘s tie-breaking vote in Citizens United).

— Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and thus “more efficient.”

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, inflation-causing price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s hard to find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many being sucked dry by hedge funds or private equity as we enter the cancer stage of capitalism. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants and the door to entrepreneurialism is largely closed to Zoomers.

— Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Stock buybacks used to be called felony stock manipulation, but Reagan legalized the practice in 1983. As a result, every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, communities, and even the businesses themselves suffer the loss.

— Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small handful of billionaires and often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as young people will tell you, are generally absent.

— Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve for payment and which they’d reject. They said this “pre-approval” process would “lower costs and increase choice.”

Instead, in all of the entire developed world — all the 34 OECD countries on 4 continents — there are ~500,000 medical bankruptcies a year…and every single one of them is here in America. And now, as Republicans fight to prevent the renewal of Obamacare subsidies, millions — particularly young people working low-wage jobs — will simply be forced to drop health insurance altogether.

— Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are still lying as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization (around a third of us) we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment (now only a tenth of us have a union).

— Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion all right; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were blown up, torn down, or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying union jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their wealthy donors in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. By purchasing the GOP, they succeeded in delaying action on global warming for at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

— And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech and corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights.” Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by those five billionaire-bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

— So now Donald Trump tells our young people that it’s time to make take the next big step — to reject democracy — as the logical outcome of the Reagan Revolution.

He says if we just abandon the rule of law and make him an uncountable emperor for life; punish with prison his political enemies; make women, Blacks, and Hispanics second-class citizens; end immigration for everybody except white South Africans; and forge alliances with dictators around the world, that life in America will become wonderful.

It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this GOP bullshit.

The bottom line is that we as a nation have now had the full Republican experience. We’ve done pretty much everything they suggested or demanded.

And as a result, young Americans are increasingly disgusted when they hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that the GOP damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever these sanctimonious Republicans are calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and pre-teen girls to give birth against the threat of imprisonment, hiding Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell, or burning books.

Or having masked secret police kidnap people, including children, off the streets of our cities and throwing them into god-awful hellhole prisons.

Not to mention Donald Trump’s sinister “revenge” campaign against the Americans he sees as his “enemies,” his eliminating pollution controls that protected our environment in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel industry donations, and giving his billionaire donors another massive tax cut, to be paid for by the same next generation who’re protesting against him.

America’s young people are over it, Republicans, and they’re going to reboot this nation to fulfill its potential and promise.

A new, progressive America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and the GOP and its billionaire owners can’t stop it much longer.