Send your questions and concerns in the comments below — or if it’s something private or sensitive, whether a personal issue or something you have information on — DM me, or send an email. I’m putting together a team of folks to help.

See you tonight!

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Or is it actually (and disgustingly) accurate when JD Vance has declared that the ICE agents slaughtering innocent peaceful American citizens have “absolute immunity”?

If a federal officer murders you for trying to drive away, or for trying to help someone who’s been pushed to the ground, or for using your phone to record those officers, or for having a legal firearm — is there any recourse at all?

Why hasn’t anything been done to these killers? Will anything ever happen?

Or are they effectively above the law, able to act with total impunity, a law unto themselves, Trump’s personal Gestapo or SS, the bloody knife edge of fascism and tyranny cutting off nearly 250 years of freedom?

There are times for more measured responses, more methodical approaches, a slow analysis of whether a case is worth bringing, a sober and relentlessly realistic calculation that some fights are not worth fighting because they cannot be won.

This is not that time.

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This is a time to bring cases that may not win, that may be blocked, that may result in defeats that are reversed in time, that may result in victories that are later heartbreakingly undone.

As we will see, many of the paths ahead may lead to nothing — at first. But even the losses will shine a light on the the future paths that must be cleared through the wilderness we now inhabit.

1 - State prosecutions of federal officers

The loudest cry of all in the wake of the Good and Pretti executions has been for state law prosecutions of the murderers.

This will be an uphill battle, but far from an insurmountable one. Federal officers are subject to state law, but they have what is known as “qualified immunity.” It’s immunity — but with conditions. Among them, the condition that the officer was acting reasonably in the “necessary and proper” discharge of his official duties.

This is a winnable fight. There is absolutely an argument to be made that when these ICE agents used lethal force on civilians who were posing no physical threat to them, they were engaging in actions that were not reasonable and not necessary to their official work. Good was clearly driving away at the time Jonathan Ross shot her, and Ross had no authority to stop Good in the first place. Pretti was helping someone who had been pushed down, then engaged verbally with ICE officers, while recording the situation with his phone. Neither posed any physical threat to anyone. It is clear that the killers acted because their perceived authority was being defied — not because of any actual threat. And peacefully defying authority is not a justification for lethal force.

The district attorney for Minneapolis, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, should without a doubt bring cases to prosecute these killers. The cases would be brought in state court. The federal government would then almost certainly remove the cases to federal court and move to dismiss them based on immunity. But then a federal judge in Minnesota would determine whether the case can go forward — and there is a good chance that one or both cases would indeed proceed.

After that though, admittedly, the road will be far harder. Minnesota is in the Eighth Circuit, which is among the most conservative in the Court of Appeals system — with 15 Republican-appointed judges and, somehow, only one lonely Democratically appointed one. It is possible to draw a three-judge panel that will adhere to the law and find that these cases could move forward, but the odds are not favorable. And even then, there would be the Supreme Court to contend with.

But there are now wonderfully encouraging signs that prosecutions may be forthcoming — even if they may not succeed. A coalition of 9 district attorneys have formed the wonderfully named Fight Against Federal Overreach (yes, FAFO), pledging to join forces to prosecute any federal officers who commit crimes in their cities.

And Mary Moriarty is one of them.

To be continued…

A year ago when Elon Musk was running around with a chainsaw and hijacking Oval Office pressers and wearing tech bro clothes to Cabinet meetings, there was a clear sense that the so-called “DOGE” had a more sinister purpose of accessing the motherlode of federal government data and using it for private gain.

And lo and behold, now we’re beginning to see evidence of exactly that.

Two of Musk’s minions lodged like hookworms inside the Social Security Administration (SSA) — i.e. the agency that truly has all the data on everyone — were in cahoots with an unnamed “political advocacy group” that was aiming to challenge overturn election results, so they could match up Social Security data with voter data. Data was siphoned out of government systems into private, third-party, unapproved servers. At least some data was accessed by non-government parties, but we do not know how much. SSA discovered this happened, and they referred the matter to DOJ.

And how do we know this? Because DOJ felt compelled to confess to it in a court filing. Which likely means that it was going to be revealed in documents they had to produce in discovery.

This is just the part we know about thus far. If DOJ is admitting to this, there is a disturbingly high probability that there is far more evidence of this kind of data theft and misappropriation that has yet to be revealed.

Now let’s review the list of things that likely will not happen.

1. The data thieves will likely not be prosecuted by DOJ; the matter will be “taken under consideration” and given roughly the same consideration that DOJ is giving to the Epstein files, which is to say, their mission is to sweep everything under the rug and to run out the clock until the statutes of limitation expire, all relevant parties are deceased, or until the heat death of the universe.

2. I would also not be placing too much stock in the notion that Republicans in Congress will do anything about this. Even the ones who do not like Musk would prefer not to face a primary opponent juiced up with Musk’s money.

3. Legacy media outlets are not going to be turning this into the scandal that it should be. Not when the outlet that brought you Woodward and Bernstein is now owned by a multi-billionaire who spent $40 million to buy a hagiodocumentary of the first lady in order to butter dear Mango Mussolini. World-class journalists may try to dig into this story, and they may even succeed, but if management buries the story on page Q82 or in a D-block at 2:47am, then the tree will fall in the forest to an audience of three.

Where does this leave us? For one thing, it may end up being possible for citizens to sue the government and the Musk minions for this data theft. The Privacy Act of 1974 provides a “private right of action” that allows individuals to sue for unauthorized disclosure of their records. The good news is that there is now clear evidence of a willful, intentional disclosure of government records. The bad news is that any plaintiffs will also have to prove that the disclosure actually caused them harm.

Yet in a way, that is not actually the point. This is not just about money. This is about discovering the truth of what happened and shining the brightest of lights on it. Even if plaintiffs in such a case only recovered the most modest of damages — saying that there was some harm done by the mere fact that their personal and financial data made it out of a government system and into a private server — the real victory would be learning what happened, who did it, who else was involved, and the extent of DOGE data theft throughout the government.

In other words, a case could now likely be brought regarding the data theft we know about — but through the discovery phase of the case, with all its document requests, interrogatories, subpoenas, and depositions, the case could expand into an inquiry about other data breaches, both at SSA and at other agencies.

Finally, of course, there is the enticing possibility that a Democratic majority in the House could result in congressional investigations into DOGE misconduct. Again, the revelation regarding SSA provides more than enough probable cause to justify a sweeping set of subpoenas into DOGE’s data practices, ties to outside organizations, use of outside data servers, all of it.

As if we needed yet another reason to fight like hell for victory in the midterms.

We are literally under siege by our own government and the billionaire kleptocrats who control it.

And it means so many people are hurting — victims of the griftators (both public and private sector), victims of every sort of predation, people with legal or governmental problems, or just citizens who are not getting the services or attention they are supposed to get.

No one is coming to help us — so let’s try to help one another, directly.

Consider this our first virtual Town Hall. Come with your problems, issues, questions, or concerns — and we will try our best to fix them, to point you in the right direction, or to connect you with other organizations or people who can help.

Or, if you want to lend a hand — either personally, or through an organization you belong to — please join us!

Submit your items now in the comments below, or raise them in the chat.

This will be here, on Substack Live, tonight from 5 to 7 pm ET.

See you there!

When I started writing posts online, it began as a curious experiment.

I had lucked into being invited to do some legal commentary appearances on television, and these had increased in frequency in the spring of 2021. And I also noticed that if I went on Twitter on the day of an appearance, I got a bit of attention for my posts and picked up some new followers.

This got me thinking. What if I went on Twitter every day? The way you’re supposed to. For, say, 2-5 hours. And I could try this until the end of the year and see what happens. If something happens, awesome. If not, I stop and move on.

That was the genesis. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2021. I had about 1600 followers. I figured I’d try doing Twitter every day until Christmas and see where things stood.

Two days before Christmas, I reached 100,000 followers.

I didn’t know it when I began, but I was in exactly the right place at the right time. The reason I was getting the television appearances and had something to say online was because the Manhattan District Attorney was investigating Allen Weisselberg, then the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization. Weisselberg was one of the people I had investigated as part of the Trump University case at the New York Attorney General’s office; we ultimately brought a civil prosecution against Trump University, the Trump Organization, and Donald Trump, resulting in a $25 million settlement.

On July 1, 2021, Allen Weisselberg was indicted for a fraudulent scheme to evade taxes in executive compensation, for himself and others at Trump Org. And I had my first viral tweet.

It was the first of what became a string of major cases against Trump and his businesses and associates. I not only was able to cover this emerging beat; I also had been immersed in social media and the creator space going back to 2014, as co-founder of a social video app, and a lawyer and consultant for a wide array of digital content clients, from talent to management to distribution. So it was right place, right time, right random set of experiences.

Yet the more of a response I received, the more thrilling it was, the more I wanted to build more content (Instagram, TikTok, book, podcast, this Substack, etc., etc.), and the more of a full-time job it became — all while engaged in the deeply enervating mission of fighting the fascist griftatorship all around us. Every day. For years.

We can all relate to that. We are all in these digital trenches every day. We are in a war of words and ideas and information and memes — and digital media is supplanting television as the most critical media space for American politics.

So by the time we reached the spring of 2025, when it was of course clear that there would be no break, no gentle or obvious stopping point when there would suddenly be no battle to be won, when I looked up and realized that I had grown an entirely second job (in addition to the law firm that I started and still run), when it was clear that there would be no end in sight, I decided I just needed to take a breath, to simplify things.

It was meant to be a few weeks, maybe a month. Then I made a short-lived attempt to get back into things in July of last year. But then I wanted to take August off anyway, to spend time with family. Then I figured September or October would work. But no. Life was happening, but also something snuck up on me, something I was not expecting.

I was not just enjoying the time off. I was elated.1

I dove into my legal practice and new efforts to expand it. I went on day-long hikes. I devoured book after book after book. I not only took a break and devoured books; I then devoured books about taking breaks. I sketched out where I was in life, what I had done, what I could do next, how I felt about the world and the fights ahead. Even when in the city, I went on increasingly long walks — 10 miles, then 13, then 16, eventually 20, 22, and even 27, a full marathon and then some. I walked through all five boroughs, over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and all the way down to Hoboken, across the harbor to Staten Island, north into Yonkers and Westchester, over the Tappan Zee Bridge, everywhere I could, with my phone and my laptop, doing work along the way, or just thinking.

And I did not read a bit of news. I did not open Substack. I did not open Twitter. I avoided TV. I deleted as many apps from my phone as I could. I turned off notifications. I turned off all vibrating and haptic feedback so my phone can no longer buzz me back into paying attention to it. I got a dedicated e-reader so I could separate my reading from my phone and all its other attendant distractions. I put my devices away entirely during family time. I averted my eyes if I saw a newspaper on someone else’s doorstep or a story on someone else’s phone.

I heard about the news the way most people hear about the news, from other people who read the news. The ones who say did you see what happened in the news? I left our bubble of readers and writers and fighters. I saw what it looked like and sounded like and felt like out there — and it does not look like, sound like, or feel like it does inside the bubble. And yet that world outside the bubble is where the vast majority of people, the vast majority of voters, live. We need to know what they’re seeing and hearing and thinking.

The end of the year served as a natural time to end my sabbatical, and the fifth anniversary of January 6 suddenly made sense as a hook and an anchor for the big-picture piece I had been wanting to write. This is also part of a broader shift in focus I decided to make, to take up the fight against the larger array of fraudsters, grifters, liars, and abusers, of whom Donald Trump is merely the most obvious epitome, a symptom of our deeper disease and an exacerbating factor who has in turn emboldened more predators.

Yet even now, I am aiming for a bit more balance and moderation than I had prior to my time off. I will be writing less, but, I hope, consistently. I will be prioritizing my work as a practicing lawyer — but I will be increasingly active as a lawyer in the middle of these fights, not just commentating on them.

But I also believe, even more strongly than ever, that we all should be finding times to take these kind of breaks from what will likely be a decades-long effort to defeat these forces of fascism and enemies of democracy — and, just as critically, breaks from the 24/7 fire hose of digital information that we all now just treat as a normal part of life.

This is not a new idea, of course. Especially the latter part: the idea of doing a digital detox was popularized by, among others, Baratunde Thurston in a wonderful piece for Fast Company, and the idea of “digital minimalism” is a through-line for a lot of the terrific books from Cal Newport, which I discovered and plowed through last year.

Yet there are very specific reasons why I believe all of us — the Resistance, the pro-democracy digital news and politics junkies — especially need to take these breaks, even if relatively short ones of a month or two. And why we also need to make adjustments even once those breaks are over and we are back in the trenches again.

1. You’re far more exhausted than you know. Whether it’s been a few years since Covid, or a non-stop death march going all the way back to 2016 or even 2015, many of us have been immersed in the never-ending insanity for far too long. You likely could use a reset, some time with less adrenaline, less upset, less stress. We all need to disconnect from the Matrix and to get outside, to do things that energize and relax us, whatever those are. For me, that was hiking, walking, tennis, reading, and a bit of meditating.2 Pick what your things are, and go do them! And keep doing them, even after you return.

2. It’s tough to think bigger thoughts if you’re doom-scrolling and texting and reacting all the time. Information is no longer something we go get. Information is now a feed — and that term is truly horrifying and repulsive if you think about it. We are consuming the info whether we like it or not, pushed to us, in the feeds of our media apps, in the feeds of notifications; it is constant and seemingly infinite. It interrupts any other thoughts or projects we are undertaking, slicing our time into slivers. It compels us to react, rather than to think and to act methodically. It forces us to live all of our waking hours in what psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman called System 1 thinking — fast, intuitive, but emotional and shallow.3 This is something everyone in the digital world is experiencing, but we are even more susceptible to it because of the news-heavy nature of our info consumption — and the fact that we need to be thinking deeper thoughts and taking more well-thought-out actions if we are going to prevail. We need to put down our phones if we want to do any of that, and we need to customize our phones and our digital diets so that we are back in control of them; this is a topic I will definitely be returning to, as it ties directly into our efforts to take back control of our country and society from the tech Goliaths. In other words, we need to be inside this bubble of news feeds in order to be engaged — but we also need to do it on our own terms.

3. We need to understand what life is like outside the news-junkie bubble and to change our messaging accordingly. People are fond of saying that Twitter is not real life. This is both true and not true: Twitter is very much a battleground in the very real-life conflicts we are facing right now, but it is also true that most people are not on Twitter (or any of these other platforms) all or even much the time (or if they are, they’re consuming something other than news and politics). These digital spaces are very much the “town square” of the world today, but they are also not — because unlike the metaphorical town square, in today’s world most of the “town” is not in the square. Most of the public is out there somewhere else doing other things: working, working multiple jobs, picking up or dropping off or chauffeuring or taking care of their kids, meeting up with friends, watching sitcoms and sports and police procedurals and reality shows and Instagram stories about celebrities and literally anything other than news, worrying about their bank balances, running errands — living life, as banal and glorious as that is. And, again, most definitively not consuming the news or opining on it or reacting to it or arguing about it or any of those things. And yet the majority of these people vote. So go be one of them for a while, both because you’ll unwind a bit, and also because you’ll understand everyone better.

This last point is an especially insanely important one — so much so that I will come back to it in another piece soon.

In the meantime, get out of here! Seriously, I mean it. And do it soon. Because we will need all of us back on the field for the midterms this fall. But trust me, you need to take a few breaths, and you’ll be better for it. We’ll all be here when you get back.

It is the darkest not because it was the most devastating — but because it is the most devastating attack on America to which America failed to respond.

Or rather, America did respond: with silence, with complacency, with complicity, with cowardice, with timidity, with indecisive waffling, with a shameful lack of urgency, with half measures that took twice the time at hand.

The aftermath of January 6 should have been one of America’s finest hours, a moment when We the People stood up and recommitted ourselves to upholding the Constitution, to stamping out tyranny and fraud and violence, to prosecuting even the most powerful of criminals, to affirming the principle that no one is above the law.

Instead, we legalized lying.

We legalized fraud. We legalized disinformation. We legalized demagoguery. We legalized abuse of power. We legalized predation. We legalized political terrorism. We legalized oligarchy. We legalized dictatorship. We legalized colonialism. We legalized imperialism.

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We had the chance to set an ironclad precedent that such depredations were beyond the pale and would be met with the full force of the United States of America and all its laws and institutions.

Instead, we set the opposite precedent, that such atrocities are hereby normalized and not to be punished but celebrated, that the laws and institutions of the United States now exist in name only, a quaint period costume that can now be donned by our current despot and any others to come.

January 6 was, at first, a day of infamy, subject to almost universal opprobrium. Now, to the ruling regime — led by the very man who tried to overturn the government that day — it is considered a day of heroic sacrifice. The violent mob of terrorists he sent to the Capitol desecrated the People’s house, and a little more than four years later, in that same building, he used a Bible embossed with his own name1 and took the presidential oath before an exclusive group of billionaire oligarchs and servile sycophants.

Yet our era of infamy is about far more than just Donald Trump and his Big Lie. Or even about all his manifold lies and abuses, his fake persona as a silver-spoon baby posing as a man of the people while he fleeces even his most devoted superfans and fattens himself rather than fighting the towering cost of living, his fake persona as an American messiah when he does the bidding of America’s biggest rivals and enemies, his fake persona as a peacemaking statesman while he uses American military might to push a neocolonial, neoimperialist agenda, his fake persona as a protective father figure when he’s actually a serial sexual predator and was close friends with the most notoriously disgusting predator of our day.

The infamy also extends to his followers and family members and fellow travelers, to their fundraising schemes and supplement pills, to their crypto pump-and-dumps and using campaign donations to buy yachts and luxury shoes and Botox injections, to the giant corporations and their multi-billionaire owners bending the knee and kissing the ring, paying their tributes to Caesar so he spares his knives from their business interests, to the oceans of foreign money flooding political coffers, buying favors, buying American policy decisions, buying off pieces of our sovereignty and our national security, and even to the formerly august halls of the Supreme Court, where billionaires and their lackeys can now change their money freely in the temple, pocketing life-tenured Justices in exchange for private jet trips and stays at five-star resorts.

It extends well beyond the fetid swamps of Washington and into every corner of our economy and society, into our ecosystem of information and media, utterly awash with crypto scams, gambling ads, snake-oil supplements, drugs designed to addict rather than to cure, schools designed to scam rather than to educate, online platforms that actively seek to hook and manipulate you psychologically, and to trick and trap you into paying them forever, while selling your personal data to the highest bidder, with banks that sign you up for products you did not even buy, with insurance companies that use comedic gimmicks to hide their wrongful refusals to pay claims or their efforts to spy on you through your car or through Trojan Horse apps on your phone purporting to help you save money on gas, with lying and tricking so widespread that it has become more noteworthy when a company does not rip off its customers rather than when it does, with companies of all sorts debasing themselves with monster-truck-rally jingoism to please Dear Leader so he does not use his bullying pulpit to call for their destruction, with so many of these companies and their billionaire CEOs paying lower tax rates than you or me.

It extends even deeper, into every household, every family, almost every individual in America, suffering from the highest levels of inequality ever recorded, an America where the middle class has been purposely and deliberately eviscerated with higher taxes, higher costs on groceries and rent and healthcare and education and almost everything, where tens of millions of Americans go hungry for lack of food, sleep on the streets for lack of housing, or die for lack of healthcare or insurance, where millions of Americans live in chronic terror of being rounded up and disappeared and their children abducted from them by masked thugs from Trump’s immigrant Gestapo, and where millions more Americans — predominantly women and children — are raped, molested, abused, groomed, trafficked, enslaved, dehumanized, gaslit, threatened, terrorized, blamed, hushed up, and paid off, trapped in cultures of fear and hierarchy and silence, not by just a single multimillionaire and his rich and powerful friends, not just one Epstein, but by thousands and thousands of Epsteins in communities all over, in churches and youth groups, on college campuses and in workplaces, in positions of authority great and small.

All while seven men literally run the entire planet. All while our nation is led by a convicted felon fraudster, an adjudicated rapist and well-chronicled serial sexual predator — the epitome of the multiple depredations that afflict us. All while Earth will have its first trillionaire before we eliminate poverty, before we cure the world’s curable diseases, before we take any real steps to prevent the Earth overheating and expunging us as a failed species.

We live in a second Gilded Age, far worse than the first.

We live in a second Roman Empire, not of Augustus, but of Nero, of Caligula.

We live in a griftatorship — a confederacy of con men, of predators, of criminals, of bloodthirsty parasites.2

We began this century at a point when such criminals were still brought to justice, from Enron to Madoff to Theranos — but we now live in a world where the Sacklers pressured first the Bush and then the Trump administrations to let them off the hook, where the Trump administration let Epstein off with a slap on the wrist, where Trump got away with fraud and insurrection and stealing national security documents, where Trump pardoned the January 6 terrorists, where the very largest tech giants have legal immunity from liability for their misconduct, where gun companies have that same immunity, where the president has that same immunity, where former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is now literally working on her boyfriend’s new biotech startup from prison, and it has already raised over $20 million from a fresh batch of unfortunate marks. Accountability is dead. Justice is a joke. Blame is shifted from the perpetrators to the victims. You agreed to it in the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It wasn’t the drug’s fault; the people were junkies. She was asking for it; everything was consensual.

We are battling not just a single foe but a hydra. The beast has not one head but nine. We have focused on only one, Trump, and we failed to do even that — while the other heads continue to poison us, to devour us. We must fight all of them, until all of them are defeated, until every battle is won.

We must expand this fight, not only to the voting booths, the knocks on doors, the calling and the lawn signs. Voting is not enough. Organizing is not enough. Winning elections is not enough.

The fight is not just political. It is legal. It is economic. It is technological and informational.

We need to fight all of the liars, the cheaters, the oligarchs, the dictators, the predators, the grifters, whether they are individuals or hiding behind corporate and institutional fortresses. We need to hit them where it hurts: we need to investigate them, blow the whistle on them, tell the truth about them, publish content about them, sue them, depose them, testify against them, boycott them, and amplify everything until everyone hears it, funding and supporting and re-posting every journalist or lawyer or activist who braves the barricades. We need to use our power not only as citizens but as economic heavyweights — as buyers or customers or plaintiffs, not “consumers” or “users” with all the passivity those words connote. Our dollars are the greatest single economic force in the world — while our attention is among the world’s most scarce resources — and we need to start exercising all of our power.

A truly dominant pro-democracy majority coalition in America would have 100 million voters — and it would also file 100 million lawsuits.

We must be an army of Davids to battle these Goliaths.

We are a quarter of the way through this century, and we have definitively lost this quarter-century. Democracy has lost. Justice has lost. Freedom has lost. It will take the next quarter-century or more to win back all that was lost, to turn the pendulum of progress forward again. This is not merely about the midterms this year. Or about 2028. This is about 2050. And beyond.

But win it we can. And we must. It took the abolitionists over 30 years. It took the original progressives over 25 years to end that first Gilded Age — and then another 25 years after that to win another wave of reform. It took the Civil Rights Movement over 30 years — starting in the courts, and in the streets, before finally winning in Congress and the White House.

Our alternative is to risk a Great Undoing, in which the entire Enlightenment is unwound, 350 years of human progress, to return to a world separated into billions, permanently saddled from the moment we are born, and a tiny privileged class of global superpredators, booted and spurred to ride us.

That is the road ahead of us. It is not for the timid. It is not for the complacent, the comfortable, or the contented. Not for the satisfied incumbents, the slick operators, the safe establishment. This is not business as usual. This is not just another cycle, another triangulation, another focus-grouped, poll-tested white paper for how to win 50% plus one — in other words, the way we have fought every political battle of the last 30 years, while our opponents have waged total ideological war with the objective of absolute subjugation of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, to be replaced by fraud and abuse and dictatorship, by a world separated into predators and prey. By griftatorship.

We must meet their obsession to destroy democracy with an equal and greater devotion to defend and extend it.

This road will be difficult, but it must be trod — and it is one that we must commit to walking side by side, for as long as the world needs us.

The question now is how many of us will join this struggle. Will we all do what must be done to bend that arc of history ourselves, rather than waiting for it to bend itself? Or will we slip backward into the chasm? Will we fight off this Gilded Age, limiting it to a single generation? Or will we slouch toward a new Dark Age, lasting centuries still to come?

Yes, I have now finally completed what was a far long break than I ever intended — a subject I’ll cover in full in another post in the days to come.

To all of you who have stuck with me in spite of the radio silence, THANK YOU!!! I will make it up to you. I cannot promise a super high frequency of posts right away or anytime soon — as you’ll see, I will be quite busy with other obligations. But I will be writing again.

And I have a lot of other big news and thoughts to share.

So let’s start by meeting up here on Substack Live tomorrow — Tuesday from 5 to 7 ET.

Be ready with your questions, problems, concerns, ideas, everything, and I’ll do my best to respond to as many of you as I can.

See you then!

This was a famous question during the Watergate scandal, and it is just as apropos today as it was in 1973. If Donald Trump is indeed trying to cover up his involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring — and using the Department of Justice to do his personal bidding in the cover-up — it is absolutely a scandal of Watergatian proportions.

But this is Trump we’re talking about. So I am under no illusions that the normal rules of a scandal apply here, that somehow the third attempt to impeach the king president will prove the charm.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

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Here is the thing about the last five weeks of the Trump presidency. It is not just the revelations of Trump using DOJ to quash the Epstein files — after promising that he would release those files if he returned to the White House. It is the fact that this was revealed only weeks after he launched air strikes on Iran — after promising that he would end American involvement in foreign conflicts.

Why are those things connected?

Because they both completely violate two of the animating obsessions of Trump’s MAGA and QAnon base. The diehards in this base are committed less to any one particular politician and more to a conspiracy theory worldview that sees politics as dominated by a sinister cabal of globalist elites: this is the foundation of “Pizzagate” (in which Hillary Clinton was supposedly part of a sex ring run out of a pizzeria in DC), of their fixation on the JFK assassination (and their theory that JFK Jr. did not actually die in a plane crash but was forced into hiding), of Marjorie Taylor Greene (a QAnon supporter) and her thoughts on “Jewish space lasers.” The latter point is especially telling, as the word “globalist” is often just a dog-whistle for “Jewish.”

Trump’s bombing of Iran was Strike One for the base. MAGA’s isolationism and “America First” mantra turned out to be something they actually believed, whereas for Trump it was just a political expediency, something he just said to get elected.

When Trump had a choice between pleasing the base (by refraining from getting involved in the war between Israel and Iran) and pleasing donors and other big-money and/or powerful interests (including anyone who supports the Israeli, Saudi, Emirati, or Qatari governments), he chose the money and the power.

This was something that comes as no surprise at all to those of us who have opposed Trump for a decade. But this appears to have been a first wakeup call in MAGAland — the dawning realization that Trump is 100% narrowly and cravenly transactional. Pay him off enough, and he’ll do whatever you want. And so he chose the big-money and powerful folks over the base — and it should very much be noted, he chose Israel over the base.

This crack in the coalition was fresh when Trump committed Strike Two on Epstein. And the combination of the two threatens to be a truly seismic event in the GOP base.

Suddenly the cult followers have to ask themselves: Is Trump actually the savior we thought he was, battling the globalist elites — or is he actually ONE OF THE GLOBALIST ELITES? And maybe even the KING, the EMPEROR, the CENTER of the globalist elites??!?

Again, there is really zero surprise here for any of us in the Resistance. Of course Trump is a predator. Of course Trump is a billionaire elite flying off in private jets to private islands. Of course Trump was BFFs with Epstein — the evidence has been out there for years and years.

But the MAGA/QAnon folks could mentally wave all of that away. It’s all fake, a hoax, they told themselves. That was just the globalists and libtards trying to attack Trump, they thought. Trump didn’t really have anything to do with Epstein, they believed.

To be confronted with new evidence — not only of how close Trump and Epstein were but also of how much Trump has used the FBI and DOJ to hide all the evidence — right now, on the heels of the Iran betrayal? When both inner-circle loyalists of Trump and right-wing media moguls1 have all given massive credence to the latest allegations?

Suddenly these allegations are breaking through the bubble in which Trump’s hardcore supporters surround themselves. And much more crucially, these betrayals have now forced the MAGA and QAnon base to choose.

Do you believe and trust Trump? Or do you believe and trust the conspiracy-theory worldview that you immerse yourself in both online and in the company you keep, the events and rallies you attend, everything.

Do you believe Trump? Or do you believe your tribe?

Politicians are expendable. Worldviews and tribes are more durable. And Trump may find this out the hard way. And even if it does not end his presidency, it could cut short his effective power, rendering him a lame duck, not to mention completely torching any ability he might have to seize an unconstitutional third term.

Meanwhile, there is yet another betrayal in the works — not likely to generate as severe a rupture as the first two, but one that may yet have some significant impact for Trump. That would bring us to the Paramount merger.

Trump, all the way back in his first race in 2015-16, promised to “drain the swamp,” and he has of course crowned himself Emperor of the Alligators pretty much since the first day of his first administration. We in the Resistance know this.

But a lot of the corruption from Trump has been complicated and difficult to explain. We know what the Emoluments Clause is, but if we think that’s going to resonate with anyone who isn’t a weirdo politics and government junkie (i.e. most people), think again. We also know what USAID is. Or what the CFPB is. But try explaining the very existence of either agency to someone who isn’t a news junkie — let alone the details of Trump’s and Elon Musk’s attempts to butcher those agencies — and you have unwittingly discovered a non-addictive cure for insomnia.

Yet the Paramount situation presents a clear case of corruption that everyone can understand:

• Paramount wanted government approval for a merger.

• Paramount owns CBS.

• Trump filed a totally bullshit lawsuit against CBS for a story they did on 60 Minutes.

• Trump hates CBS’s late-night talk show host, Stephen Colbert, who had been critical of Trump.

• In early July, CBS coughed up $36 million to Trump to settle the lawsuit.

• In late July, CBS fired Stephen Colbert.

• A few days later, the Trump administration approved the Paramount merger.

This is not rocket science. Everyone knows what CBS is. Everyone knows what 60 Minutes is. Everyone knows who Stephen Colbert is.

And anyone can see that this was bribery.

So much for draining the swamp.

Now, will this damage Trump’s standing with the MAGA faithful? Maybe a bit, especially given the cumulative impact of Strike One and Strike Two above. But there’s a bigger picture consequence here: Trump has now created a simple-to-understand case study of his own corruption that independents and moderates can latch onto, in a way that he has never done before.

Could these self-inflicted wounds thwart Trump’s ability to enact his agenda? Could they deliver a Democratic majority in the midterms? Could they actually result in investigations in Congress, calls for a special counsel, calls for Trump to either release the Epstein files or resign? All while erstwhile Trump loyalists start breaking with him and testing the waters for their own power grabs in a post-Trump universe?

Let’s say we have a lot more to talk about soon — and we will.

You know, just a few light topics. Nothing serious.

In other news, apologies again for the impromptu hiatus — it turns out I’ve needed to recharge the batteries far more than I realized. But there will be more content again soon. Stay tuned!

Yet there is a deeper reason why we’re here, something beyond the sweaty sniping of two aging multi-billionaire megalomaniacs with their giant egos and their teeny, tiny, microscopic senses of self-awareness.

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This is the inevitable culmination of almost a century of right-wing politics and the collapse of the plutocratic project for killing the American social welfare state — and America’s middle class with it — all for the benefit of the mega-rich.

The history is the key here. Virtually from the minute the New Deal began, a wealthy cabal conspired to reverse it, in the name of tax avoidance. Taxes were then raised more during and after World War II, especially on the highest income-earners, to pay for the high cost of America’s successful war efforts, plus the cost of taking care of our service members when they got home (through things like the GI Bill, paying for housing and college for millions of Americans, setting the stage for the roaring economy of the 1950s and 60s). Steadily, the cabal gained more adherents — and by the 1960s, the modern “conservative”2 movement came into sharper focus.

The plutocrats’ strategy was to “starve the beast.” Cut taxes, and then spending would have to be cut, because the deficits and debt would be too overwhelming. That was the thinking. Why? Because cutting taxes was politically popular, whereas cutting spending was politically unpopular (because it turns out people really like roads and schools and not dying of preventable disease and not crumbling into poverty when they’re old).

Here’s the problem, though — “starve the beast” has been a complete failure.

The whole idea was that at some point in the future, a Republican government would come in and say, wow, we can’t afford all this stuff anymore, so we have to cut it all. But the record is now clear: for over 40 years, successive Republican administrations and congresses have gotten into office and said “well, let’s just keep spending a little longer.” In fact, they’ve said something more like “woooooooo, this party’s just getting started, let’s spend even more!”

Deficits get worse under Republican administrations. Much worse. This was true for Reagan, both Bushes, and then Trump, who tries to blame his gargantuan deficits on Covid but who was already running up historically high deficits before the pandemic, largely due to his massive set of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, passed in 2017 with a Republican-led Congress. Then it falls to Democratic administrations to reduce the deficits again, before the cycle repeats.

Fast-forward to today. Trump is at it again with his MAGAbill, with GOP accomplices on the Hill, ready to cut taxes — while increasing spending, adding another $2.4 trillion to the national debt.

“Starve the beast” has turned out to be “feed the beast with debt.”

The Great Reckoning that the plutocrats have hoped for has not come.

And now there is a burgeoning civil war in the GOP along an interesting set of battle lines. On the one hand, Trump seems fully prepared to continue the terrible fiscal policies of his Republican predecessors — and fundamentally, he does not care. Why? It’s the old devil-may-care line that helped lead to the financial crisis: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,” or IBGYBG. Trump knows he probably won’t be the one facing the consequences of these actions. He’ll be out of office and/or in a very, very hot place.3

On the other hand, Elon Musk is in a very different position. He’s already the richest man in the world at 53. He likely will live to see a Great Reckoning — and historically, when nations face fiscal crises, they are just as likely, if not far more likely, to raise taxes (especially on the wealthiest) as they are to cut spending. This is what happened after both World Wars. And if a new Great Reckoning comes, he will likely have a higher tax bill than anyone.

So while the alliances between plutocrats and politicians have been sufficiently strong to win elections for Republicans for half a century, we are now seeing perhaps the greatest rift ever between the two.

Fundamentally, most Republican politicians don’t actually care that much about taxes or debt. They care about being popular and getting re-elected, and the easier way to do that is to cut taxes, raise spending, ignore the debt, and leave the problem for someone else to clean up. Whereas the plutocrats care deeply about taxes and debt — because they’ll eventually be the ones paying much higher taxes to pay off the debts.

It’s like the old joke about a pig and a chicken pondering a partnership in a breakfast restaurant. The chicken is keen on the idea, but the pig demurs: “No thanks, I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

The plutocratic pigs are finally realizing that, true to form, their champion is a chicken. TACO, indeed.

Allow me to start with a personal note. When I launched this a year ago, I was not really sure that writing this newsletter was ever going to be a thing. I did it because I thought it would be fun — and because I wanted to bring my writing to an audience on a regular basis, and because it felt like the natural next step after Taking Down Trump, and because I felt compelled to fight the fight anywhere I could. And really, it was an experiment.

Now the little “experiment” has over 41,000 of you reading, which feels very strange to type into my laptop here.

This truly has a life of its own now. It’s not just my newsletter anymore — it’s our newsletter, our community, our space.

While I have some ideas for what to write about, what to cover, and where to go next, I want to make sure we do this together.

For one thing, I believe that the real tale of our time is much broader and deeper than just Trump and Trumpism — it’s a tale of predation, corruption, fraud, and rampant lies and deceit, robbing and injuring millions and millions of people, a tale of grifters and con artists run amok. Our problem is not limited to the government, and it did not start there. It started with malefactors in the private sector, with entire business models based on fraud and deception rather than offering superior goods or services — and the federal government just happens to be the largest, juiciest target for the grifters to hit.1

So I’ve been considering expanding our focus into consumer protection and false advertising and product safety and assaults on workers, all of the ways that our modern-day robber barons have perpetrated the Art of the Steal.

And this would include doing whatever I can to help you, if you’ve been scammed or ripped off or have spotted some new nefarious scheme. We need a much stronger structure for finding and fighting all of these frauds, and it begins with us.

I also have a never-ending curiosity about big-picture issues of democracy and justice, and how to articulate a more perfect vision for all of us — a better theoretical framework that fits with the real world of today, and a better rhetorical framework that allows us to win elections today, and for years to come.

These are just some of the ideas I’ve been mulling.

What do you think? And what else do you want to explore together? What else can we do to help people, to help one another, and to help America defeat these disgusting liars?

If you have any thoughts at all, please leave a comment below — we all want to hear from you!

Thanks and much more soon!

If you want your question answered, reply with a comment here!

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All right, here we go:

BJ McGee - Has the Trump regime obeyed any court orders yet?

Perhaps astoundingly, yes, they actually have on occasion. Not that they deserve a medal or anything. You don’t get medals for doing things that are legally required of you. Do we all get medals for not running a red light?

The trouble is the inconsistency and the flagrant disrespect. The administration has rehired thousands of government employees after courts ordered them to be reinstated. And while compliance has been glacial at times, the administration has restored some areas of slashed government funds, again after judges made them do it. But meanwhile we all know that there are still hundreds of people imprisoned for life in the CECOT prison in El Salvador with no way to challenge the legal basis of their detentions — to take just one of the most egregious examples.

This actually merits a much more thorough review of the cases, the compliance, and the lack thereof. Time for my team and I to get to work (more on that below).

CharlieFan75 - I’m happy that Trump lost in court but I don’t understand why Trump taking away a law firm’s security clearance is illegal. How is a security clearance a right? Can you explain?

Good question. There are a few things going on here:

1. There isn’t a “right” to a security clearance per se. However, once granted, certain government privileges cannot be revoked without due process, i.e. without the people or entities affected being given advance notice and a chance to challenge the grounds for the revocation.

2. Executive actions cannot be undertaken on “arbitrary and capricious” grounds and cannot be abuses of power; instead they must be based on objective fact-based policy grounds, pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). There is a strong argument that Trump’s targeting of law firms — just because they worked for his opponents or for prosecutors investigating and indicting him — is exactly the kind of abuse of power or “arbitrary and capricious” act that the APA is designed to avoid.

3. Also, while there is not a “right” to a security clearance, the government cannot punish or coerce people based on their speech. By specifically targeting law firms that have opposed him, Trump is violating their First Amendment rights.

MidlandWarrior5 - Do you think the results of the Canadian elections are a good sign for how Democrats will do in the midterm?

While it was certainly a heartening result, the Canadian election probably does not tell us a lot about what will happen in America in the elections to come. The Canadian electorate is significantly further to the left and center than the American one; one poll asked Canadians whom they would vote for if they could vote in the US election last year, and the respondents went for Harris over Trump by 60 to 21, with the remainder unsure or not having a view.

A better bellwether for the midterms? The special elections that were held recently, where the Democrats prevailed in the Wisconsin race for state Supreme Court, and Republicans had shockingly tighter victories in two Florida elections for the House. The Wisconsin race showed a clear blue shift of at least 5-10 points in virtually every part of the state — and the Florida races indicated a 15 point swing toward Democrats.

And another good indicator? Donald Trump’s sagging approval ratings, which are now so bad that his poll numbers are now underwater even in Texas and Florida.

There is a long way to go, of course. But while we’re looking ahead, why don’t we look even further ahead?

Re5istmom56 - Do you think Vance or Trump Jr or someone else will be the Republican nominee for President in 2028?

First off, I do think that Donald Trump Sr. will try to violate the Constitution and run for a third term, and it will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court, at which point there is a non-zero chance that SCOTUS adopts the right-wing loophole argument that Trump could be a VP nominee for someone else (Vance?) and then become president again via resignation (although I think that it is more likely that SCOTUS will reject this attempt to circumvent the Constitution’s two-term limit).

I also think that there will be a segment of otherwise Trump-supporting Republicans for whom this will be a bridge too far — even while most of the MAGA cult will be cheering for Trump to crush representative government completely.

All that said, while right now Vance is the clear choice when Republicans are polled on their preferences for 2028, I do not think he will be the pick in any kind of open primary process. He utterly lacks the charisma and bullying presence that Trump has; when he goes on the trail, he commits at least one completely awkward misstep every single day. Vance is Ron DeSantis, but even more cringy, and his ability to shitpost on Twitter will not be enough to overcome the never-ending visual evidence of his weirdness.

Who else would it be? Don Jr. is equally weird and cringy if not more so. Thoughts of various other Republican politicians, to my mind, miss the boat. Republicans are not selecting their candidates based on traditional qualifications anymore.

So I would think of someone outside the box, as it were. Someone who is not currently in office.

Someone like Tucker Carlson. Or Sean Hannity. Or Jesse Watters. As nauseating as that is to contemplate.

One final personal note, for all of you who enjoy reading these pieces (and I’m so appreciative that you do!).

I want to post even more. Daily, ideally. And I want to be rolling out a regular series of Substack Live shows.

To do all of that, though, I need your help. I can’t do it alone. I have a team of amazing researchers and writers and staff all ready to go — to help me comb through court cases and other material (which is often a LOT of work), to draft pieces, to contact other folks we want to get on the show and coordinate with their teams. And those folks all need to get paid what they deserve.

So consider upgrading to paid support by clicking the button below. It would mean a lot to me — and it would mean a lot more content and community for all of us!

You have a decision to make, although you may not even realize it yet.

There is a good chance that you do some of your legal work with one or more of the firms that have cravenly caved to Donald Trump rather than fight him: Paul Weiss, Kirkland, Latham, A&O Shearman, Skadden, Milbank, Willkie, Cadwalader, and Simpson Thacher. Together, these firms have pledged almost a billion dollars in pro bono legal work to support Trump-selected pet projects.

Yes, this is a despicable appeasement of fascism — but that’s not what this letter is about. Whether our nation remains one of laws and not of tyrants, whether or not we descend into a Kremlinized hellscape of a dictator using the force of the government to turn free people into sycophants and to turn his chosen cronies into oligarchs, whether We the People can in fact keep the Republic we have inherited — all of these things are vital, and yet we can put all of them aside.

There is an even simpler consideration for you.

Money.

Pure self-interest.

A laser-like focus on shareholder value.

All of these law firms share one thing in common: they surrendered, without a shot, some without even being fired upon. Rather than going to court to fight for themselves, they traded their dignity and integrity for humiliation at the feet of their opponent.

Is that how any lawyer should act? Ever? Aren’t lawyers supposed to be fighters? Whether it is a deal, or a patent application, let alone litigation, the entire point of being an attorney is zealous advocacy.

You want a lawyer who will have your back, not a lawyer who has no spine.

If they refused to fight for themselves, how will they ever fight for you and your company?

Vest no credence in the self-serving excuses from these firms, about how they needed to protect themselves and their people — making it seem like they had no choice but to bend the knee. The firms that have fought back, like Perkins Coie and WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, were quickly able to achieve victories in court against what is so obviously a flagrant abuse of power and violation of the First Amendment.

The caving firms did have a choice. And they chose poorly.

Now, you have a choice. Will you choose to continue to be represented by a law firm that faced a tough opponent and immediately blinked? Do you want advocates who not only gave the bully all their lunch money but promised to do free work for the bully and his buddies?

If you’re worried about going out on a limb, fear not. You already have an example you can point to, to show your bosses or your Board that firing the caving law firms is a sound business decision that strongly supports the bottom line.

Microsoft.

Without fanfare, on a major matter, they fired Simpson Thacher (which caved to Trump) and replaced them with Jenner & Block (which fought back).

We don’t know why. Microsoft has not released a statement. They have not taken a vocal public stand in defense of the Republic.

But they don’t need to. And neither do you.

You can simply do the right thing for your business — and if it also happens to be right thing for America, that is a happy coincidence.

Your deals will be better negotiated. Your applications will be stronger. Your litigation matters will be more fiercely and incisively fought.

And your shareholders will thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Tristan Snell

(WilmerHale alum and former NY AAG who prosecuted Trump University)

We need a new brand — a new way to frame what we stand for.

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Democrats’ branding and framing has been leached of vitality for so long that it is of little help in this moment, when we need every ounce of energy and creativity for the titanic battles before us. To be fair, the Republican Party’s official branding and framing is also extremely tired and flat — so much so that a cheap third-rate marketing effort, MAGA, managed to co-opt and devour the GOP’s entire brand. The traditional parties have both struggled to project themselves in this not-really-new-anymore century.

The term “progressive” has also outlived its usefulness to anyone outside its choir. And that is the test for any branding and framing. Is it persuasive? Will it win over converts? Does it resonate outside the existing congregation? If it fails to do any of these things, it is not going to serve its purpose.

Yet there is no doubt that the substance of progressivism is very popular, with clear majorities of Americans — even conservatives, even in the deepest of deep red states — supporting policies such as paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, negotiated caps on prescription drug prices, expansion of Medicaid to help subsidize health insurance on ACA exchanges, and increases to the minimum wage, just to cite a handful.

Those last two policies are so popular, in fact, that they have been successfully implemented by referendum in extremely red states. In 2024, Missouri voted for Donald Trump, by 18.4 points — and simultaneously passed a referendum measure to increase the minimum wage to $15/hour and to require paid sick leave, by 15 points. Meanwhile a slew of red states passed popular referenda to require Medicaid expansion when their legislatures failed to do so: Missouri again, joined by Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah, among the most Republican-leaning states in the country.

What the hell is going on here? Why can progressive policies prevail in those states but progressive candidates cannot?

There are two major problems here, one on strategy, and one on branding.

First, much of the time, Democratic candidates do not actually or wholeheartedly run on progressive policies in those states. There is a perception that a red state automatically means only a moderate Democrat can win there, with a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility and pro-business policies and “finding common ground” that make the Democrat sound like a Lite Republican, a DINO. If apologetic Democrats keep losing while plainly stated progressive policies keep winning, then maybe, just maybe, Democrats should start running unapologetically progressive campaigns.

Second, we need to change the labeling. The word “progressive” just sounds boring. Pedantic. Professorial. It conjures images of a political event that feels more like a college lecture. And perhaps worst of all, when that word is heard away from the coasts, it sounds like what it is — an alien, coastal-elite invading force. This is why most purple and red state Democrats view “progressive” as a four-letter word. They’re right about that part. But they’re wrong on the substance.

Trumpet the progressive policies, but give them a new coat of paint.

What really needs to change is the messaging — and the overall tone and vibe. Don’t apologize. Attack. Act. What people want is help. And someone to listen to and to channel their anger and upset and discontent, with establishment institutions, with predatory corporations, with fraudsters and grifters, with gigantic forces out there that they feel powerless to do anything about. People see Goliath running amok, and they’re looking for Davids.

Some thought they had one in Donald Trump — but he is a charlatan, a fake populist, a phony champion of the people. He promised he’d fight the elites, but he was an elite billionaire, a silver spoon nepo baby, the whole time, and now in his second term, the charade is falling apart completely, as he embraces the mega-billionaire CEOs like Elon Musk who constitute the real elites in America now.

People want a fighter. Many of them fell for a fake fighter. We need to give them real ones.

And what do we call them? Populism comes much closer to capturing the vibe and tone we need to capture — taking anti-elite, anti-establishment fury and channeling it at the actual elite establishment, the multi-billionaires, the modern-day robber barons, and marrying it to the real, true, actual policies that will help We the People live better lives. Without apology. Without triangulation. Without fancified policies that are difficult to understand.

Is there a better word than populism? Of course there could be. Populism, like progressivism, is a dusted-off term from a century ago, recycled for contemporary use. It also carries a whiff of pejorative meaning within the commentariat, as something low and base and craven and pandering. But I would rather have op-ed columnists turn up their noses at “populist” than have voters in the swing states scratch their heads at “progressive.”

Find a better term, absolutely. Until then, give me populism.

The second Trump administration is already, like so many of Trump’s ventures before this, defunct. But it still falls to the anti-Trump coalition of Democrats, independents, and Never Trump Republicans to make the sale, to argue the case, to demonstrate a superior replacement.

One piece of good news for the Resistance, though, is that midterm elections have a built-in tailwind for the opposition party — there is almost always a public feeling of wanting to rein in or check the president, but yet the president is not on the ballot; and if people are unhappy, there is a general desire to “throw the bums out” and to clean house. A midterm is often a yes-or-no referendum on the president, and historically the answer ends up being somewhere on a spectrum of no, hell no, and fuck no.

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Yet the opposition needs to make a case — and it is also a good beta test for 2028, when presidential candidates will absolutely need to make a case for themselves.

Okay, then. Here is the key. Don’t overthink this.

Seriously. This is not a complicated exercise. We simply need to look at how Trump is failing, how it’s hurting people and pissing them off, and run on that.

Begin with the economy. In fact, begin with it, turn to it in the middle, and then end with it. And if we want to latch onto a few other issues too, there’s a way to do that without deviating from the simple message centered on the economy.

First, we have higher prices, falling stocks, and a shrinking economy sinking into recession. Trump ran on lowering prices, and instead he’s driving them higher — his tariff taxes make things more expensive, other countries retaliate and make them even more expensive, the extra costs are passed onto consumers, consumer confidence is collapsing, GDP is shrinking, small businesses are being forced to close, and the bull market on Wall Street has come crashing into a decline.

This alone is enough to win elections for years to come. I repeat: if we did literally nothing but this one thing, we would win. Over and over.

But since Democrats often feel the need to have 14-point plans when a single simple message will do — and because having three points is the gold standard of classic rhetoric — let’s go a bit further, shall we?

Second, we have the billionaires, starting with Trump himself but also including Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and more. This is an administration of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. They want to jack up taxes on the middle class and working class (tariffs) and gut the ACA and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, all so they can pay zero in taxes. A cabal of the richest men in America have declared war on the middle class.

Third, we have the corruption — with Musk engaging in massive conflicts of interest, shutting down or slashing all the government agencies that regulate his businesses, then making sure his fat government contracts are still in place or increased. Plus Trump and Musk selling Teslas at the White House. Plus Trump insiders allegedly timing their stock market trades with Trump’s tariff announcements. Plus the Trumps’ new private members-only club in DC, Executive Branch, for only the ultra-wealthy billionaires (with a $500,000 initiation fee), giving them direct access to senior administration officials and inner circle cronies. And for good measure, don’t forget Clarence Thomas and his $4 million of secret unreported gifts — including free private jet and yacht trips.

Together, these three pillars of the argument focus not only on the urgent what of economic pain but also on who is responsible for that pain and how and why it is being inflicted. It crafts a strong and simple narrative of what has gone wrong and who is responsible for it.

Then, the finale: what are we going to do about it? For a midterm, this is fairly simple. We need to stop them. Put Democrats into the majority in the House and Senate, and we can stop them.

If we want to get specific, we can get specific. Revoke all the tariff taxes. Take back Congress’s constitutional power over tariffs, so Trump cannot set them himself. Ban insider trading by both congressional and executive officials. Revoke the “special governmental employee” loophole that allowed Musk to be in the administration without any ethics check or conflict of interest rules or requirements that he step down from CEO roles or divest himself of his financial stakes in all his companies. Require mandatory conflict of interest checks, barring anyone from holding any office if they will profit from their positions of authority. End all the tax cuts for billionaires. Fight price gouging and greedflation with investigations and prosecutions. Restore the insulin and inhaler and other prescription drug price caps Biden negotiated — and expand them — lowering costs for everyone.1

But don’t get too specific too often. Always come back to the core, high-level message — Trump and his billionaire buddies are breaking the economy, screwing you over, and lining their own pockets.

Of course, there are so many issues one can and ideally would raise — but anything more will create additional complexity and muddle the message. And some of the more pressing grievances can fit within the key points above, partly because “corruption” is such a capacious term. It encompasses far more than self-dealing. It can expand to include all of Trump’s abuses of power — from his attacks on universities, the press, and lawyers, to his lawless executive orders, to his refusal to follow court orders, to his un-American seizure and detention of people without ever getting their day in court. He is a thug, abusing the power of the presidency for personal vendettas and unconstitutional criminality.

So, by all means, attach those sub-arguments to the corruption section of the legal brief against Trump, as it were, especially in front of audiences who will appreciate the level of detail.

But do not forget or lose sight of the simplicity of the core, the big picture.

As James Carville famously said inside the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And the “stupid” was not the people, or the media. It was actually Clinton, along with the other campaign staffers: Carville was trying to get everyone to focus on a single simple message rather than getting lost in the policy weeds.

And it worked. Against a very wealthy, out-of-touch Republican who had infamously raised taxes and presided over a recession — at a point when pundits had written off the Democratic brand and its ability to win national elections.

Trump’s own failures light the path for defeating him. We just need to stay on the path and keep moving forward.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt found a nation in utter freefall and launched a heroic effort to save it — and to remake it as a more durable, more resilient, more just society. Donald Trump found a nation with its best economy and lowest crime rate in over 50 years, mostly at peace, and launched a diabolical effort to destroy it — and to remake it in a nightmare vision of deep economic uncertainty, ravaging incompetence and corruption, and a horrific slide toward hellish injustice, where billionaires literally own the country and do whatever they want, while innocent people are seized and exiled and imprisoned for life without ever going to court.

FDR defined what the first 100 days of a presidency can be. Trump has now shown, in only 100 days, exactly why the founders’ darkest fear was a president-turned-tyrant.

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Yet we must not be despondent. We must not look at his incipient dictatorship and plutocracy and declare there is no hope — pessimistically dismissing the idea that further elections will ever happen, that the courts will play any real role in stopping him, that We the People can still rise up and rescue the Republic we have been charged to keep.

Yes, our fears are valid — but they are not fully realized yet. We still live in a nation where our leaders’ authority relies upon our continued consent, a nation in which public opinion is still paramount. Rather than dismiss our own power and declare that nothing we do or say matters, we must insist that it absolutely does.

In fact, to say otherwise is to engage in a fundamental misunderstanding of the political dynamics in America right now.

Trump prevailed in 2024 precisely because public opinion is malleable, permeable, fragile, and fickle — because enough of us (particularly independent voters) were lulled and fooled and lied to, convinced that Trump’s return would be a net benefit to their lives. People were conned.

There is, however, always a flipside to Trump’s deceptions. Yes, he has his evil powers of manipulating public opinion — but he also has virtually zero ability to deliver on his deceptive promises. He is all sales and no delivery. He has no capacity to execute. Campaigning plays to his strengths, but actually having to govern exposes all of his weaknesses. He has, as one Trump University internal memo once put it, a chronic “fulfillment problem.”

Lowering costs? Grocery costs continue to climb; housing costs continue to climb; inflation remains a problem; consumer confidence has plummeted, and business uncertainty has skyrocketed, as Trump’s tariff taxes have threatened to drive costs even higher, while also taking a wrecking ball to the stock market. And if Trump gets his way in Congress on cutting the ACA and Medicaid, the cost of healthcare for middle-class and working-class Americans will explode.

Fighting unaccountable elites? He literally kicked his own supporters out of his inauguration and filled it with multi-billionaires, then turned the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, into a super-bureaucrat, cutting government agencies that were investigating his own businesses and then awarding his own businesses with government contracts while using the power of the federal government to be a sales and marketing arm for his failing car company. Trump and his cronies are the elites — billionaires with conflicts of interest and no accountability.

Law and order? ICE is now a lawless Gestapo, rounding up not only undocumented immigrants but green-card holders and even US citizens, chaining and shackling them into the cargo holds of military planes and deporting them for lifetime imprisonment in foreign gulags without ever seeing a judge or setting foot in a courtroom. The power of the federal government has been perversely hijacked for Trump to engage in personal vendettas against law firms that represented his opponents, against universities he disagrees with politically, against journalists and media organizations who try to hold him accountable. Meanwhile our nation’s military secrets are shared on text group chats, putting our service members at fatal risk, and there are no consequences at all.

And just as has been the case with every Trump con, eventually more and more people figure out that they are not getting what they bargained for.

Only 41% of Americans now approve of Trump’s presidency — and it’s a shockingly low 31% of independents. These are the lowest numbers ever for any presidency, beating out the previous low: Trump’s first term. Trump took one of the narrowest electoral wins ever and immediately drove it into the red.

It is the worst first 100 days of any presidency — and this is the easy part, the honeymoon phase, the part where an incoming president gets the benefit of the doubt from the electorate. It only gets worse from here.

Trump lied to voters. And more and more voters are now realizing this.

And yes, this still matters. Especially if we all wake up and act like it matters; and we’ll start tomorrow with how Trump’s failures show exactly how he can and will be defeated in 2026 and beyond.

You know, it’s just the richest university on the planet with an endowment of $53 billion1 suing the Trump administration and its virtually limitless capacity to litigate although also with a virtually limitless capacity to undermine itself through overreach and sheer incompetence — all going to federal court in Boston to begin the process whereby a series of judges will decide the fate of billions of dollars worth of federal grant funding mostly for a wide array of medical and other scientific research projects.

And the day Harvard files this lawsuit, rather than being headline news, it almost escaped notice because of the passing of Pope Francis and the continued implosions of both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and also a little thing called the $30 trillion2 American economy.

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Much has already been pinned on this case, before it was even filed; it is the receptacle both of too much hope and of too much fear.

Ultimately, it is merely a lawsuit, and we can analyze it on that basis. What exactly is going on here?

The First Amendment

The headliner here is that Harvard is accusing the administration of violating the First Amendment by threatening to strip federal funding and even revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status under federal law unless Harvard complies with the administration’s diktats on faculty hiring, teaching, curricula, funding of student groups, and more.

The administration’s likely response is going to be upside-down compared with recent legal battles. After decades of conservative litigants using the First Amendment, often successfully, as a way to sidestep civil rights laws, an ultra-conservative government will now argue that civil rights laws should be applied notwithstanding the supposed First Amendment rights of the target in question.

Yet this is where the Trump administration — and Donald Trump personally — have already sown the wind from which they may soon reap the whirlwind. The Trumpers’ attacks on Harvard have been focused both on the university’s supposed “radical left” leanings as well as antisemitism. The problem for the Trumpers is that the former traps them in the quagmire of viewpoint discrimination whereas the latter might have kept them on the terra firma of civil rights law — and taken together, there is a clear picture of political actors with an obsession in search of a justification. They want to attack what they see as left-leaning colleges, and they have seized upon antisemitism as their best cudgel with which to mount the attack.

Yet the courts are likely to see through all this (at least for now; see below). The administration is very clearly engaged in impermissible viewpoint discrimination, no matter how many times the more conniving among them remember to tether everything to antisemitism.

The Administrative Procedure Act

Now we get to the more boring but legally sturdy section of Harvard’s argument. I’ve repeatedly called the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) the most important federal law you’ve never heard of, except that that’s no longer true, as you’ve definitely heard of it by now if you read this newsletter or listen to its sibling podcast.

The APA may not be the headliner, but it will be the workhorse in this case, as it has been in most of the challenges to the administration’s overreach. It not only forbids unconstitutional agency actions; it also forbids agency actions that violate an agency’s own governing laws and regulations, exceed an agency’s legal authority, or constitute “arbitrary and capricious” decisions not grounded in fact, reason, data, etc.

While the government could at least hazard a plausible defense against the First Amendment claim — arguing that it is defending civil rights laws against antisemitism at Harvard — the administration has precious little chance of defending the process by which it has reached its position. There are legally prescribed procedures for finding a university or other entity to have violated civil rights laws, and the administration has not followed them at all, jumping all the way to the conclusion without going through any of the intervening steps.

Critically, as Harvard notes, even if the administration is correct about civil rights violations, the proper punishment would be far, far more narrow and tailored — e.g. stripping federal funding for the specific programs deemed to be in violation, rather than cutting it for the entire university. Most of the threatened funding cuts would hit scientific research, and no one is alleging that Harvard is somehow violating civil rights laws in how it is conducting scientific research with federal grant dollars.

And again, it is clear that political animosity is the real driving force behind the attack on Harvard and other schools, and such vitriol falls squarely into the “arbitrary and capricious” realm.

This is a very strong argument for Harvard. The administration’s disdain for proper procedure is blatantly obvious, and the courts are not likely to overlook it.

The road from Boston to SCOTUS

The case begins in federal district court in Boston, where it is very likely that a judge will soon issue a preliminary injunction stopping the administration from carrying out any of its threats against Harvard. Then there will be a full litigation of the issues, followed by a final decision by the district court — and almost certainly, an appeal to the First Circuit, also in Boston, regardless of who wins below. Harvard is likely to win all of these battles, at least on the APA if not the First Amendment as well.

The real question, of course, will be what happens if the case eventually comes before the Supreme Court — and specifically what John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and perhaps Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh think of the parties’ arguments.

This could easily be years from now, which of course means we’ll have ample time to dissect the arguments and potential results as the case progresses. But for now, suffice it to say, the more Harvard’s lawyers focus on the clear and extreme political animosity of Trump and his cronies, and the clear and extreme procedural violations and overly broad attacks on the university, the better they will do.

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Other scandals feature a one-two punch, or a second shoe dropping. This is what is now happening to Pete Hegseth.

It was bad enough that Hegseth had shared the detailed plans of an air strike, before it was carried out, on a non-secure Signal chat with other senior members of the administration (and, unfortunately for them, but fortunately for America and the safety of our pilots and all our service members, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who blew the whistle).

It’s even worse that Hegseth shared the same strike plans on a second Signal chat — with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, among others — as we learned yesterday. Deeply on-brand for this administration, Hegseth’s wife and brother were nepotistically bestowed “jobs” at the Pentagon, but even so, neither of them should have been privy to the strike plans nor had they any reason or justification for knowing about them.

So in many scandals, this would be the part where Pete Hegseth would resign.

Except that there is an excellent chance that he is not going to do so. Again, total shamelessness, self-absorption, and perverse, twisted dereliction of duty are among the diabolically evil toolkit of powers possessed by these far-right opportunists and mediocrities, from Trump all the way down. They utterly lack honor or competence, and they utterly fail to recognize those facts. Ever.

Yet it does not matter. The Signalgate scandal will boil and bubble on regardless of Hegseth’s presence or absence from the stage — in fact, it may burn all the more if Hegseth stays put.

Why?

There is, by all reports, complete chaos at the Pentagon right now. Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, was just pushed out, and three of Hegseth’s staffers were terminated for leaking information — but not the information you think. This reportedly arose from a separate internal investigation by Kasper into possible non-Signalgate leaking to reporters.

In other words, while Hegseth is being investigated for improperly sharing defense information, Hegseth and Kasper were investigating other DOD staffers for improperly sharing different defense information, and now Kasper himself is leaving for some other role at the Pentagon (supposedly).

Yet we really don’t know the whole story here yet. Was Hegseth merely purging his inner circle of perceived disloyalty, of leakers sharing with reporters? Or was Hegseth more specifically purging staffers who were cooperating with the ongoing investigation into Signalgate by DOD Acting Inspector General Stephen A. Stebbins? Or staffers who were about to cooperate with Stebbins? And even if those staffers were not already cooperating with Stebbins, don’t you think that maybe they might be more inclined to do so after Hegseth just fired them?

No matter what, this is, shall we say, not so good for Hegseth.

Pro tip: when you are being personally investigated by your agency’s internal watchdog, it is not a terribly good look when four members of your inner circle are suddenly pushed out of their roles.

And to be clear, how do we know about this second Signal chat with Hegseth’s wife and brother?

Because four people with knowledge of the chat talked to the New York Times!!! And I would bet there is a very high chance that at least one of the four was one of the staffers Hegseth just pushed out.

If the old World War II message of “loose lips sink ships” is true, then at this rate America will be lucky if it still has a single Navy vessel afloat by July 4.

Again, to be clear — it does not appear that any of this resulted from Stebbins’s investigation, and yet Stebbins of course will take testimony and documentary evidence from everyone involved, including the people Hegseth just knifed.

Stebbins is now operating in what we can very appropriately call a target-rich environment.

And this is before we even get to the report Stebbins will eventually issue, and what will then happen in the Senate Armed Services Committee, where both the Republican chair and the Democratic ranking member appear inclined to get to the bottom of Signalgate.

It is clear that the longer the Hegseth clown car remains parked at the Pentagon, the longer the scandal circus will remain in town, and the worse Signalgate will become for Trump.

And don’t worry, Michael Waltz. No one has forgotten about you — and your twenty Signal group chats on various theaters of conflict around the world. Your time will come soon.

What do we say in response? How do you convince your family members, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors? Here are the 5 key talking points on the case.

I was wrong.

It turned out ICE is not a Gestapo for undocumented immigrants.

It is a general Gestapo — a secret national police force not just for undocumented immigrants but for any immigrants, even legal ones with documents, even permanent residents (green card holders), and if Trump has his way, soon, even citizens.

It is arresting and detaining people without alleging that they have committed any crimes at all — holding them without any legal process, without an immigration removal proceeding, without a trial, without an evidentiary hearing, without anything — and then shackling and chaining them into military cargo planes and deporting them for indefinite imprisonment without trial in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).

Then the administration lies, falsely claiming that it can do nothing to return anyone who has been sent to CECOT.

Then the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, follows along with the lie, claiming that he is powerless to return anyone to the US.

Meanwhile, the ICE officers try to shrug off any responsibility, claiming that they are just doing what the government tells them to do.

Frankenstein’s monster is running amok, terrorizing people and killing them, and yet everyone involved is throwing up their hands, disingenuously, claiming that they have no power to stop the monstrous Gestapo that Trump has created.

Yet every step of the monster’s creation was premeditated — a completely purposeful crime against humanity.

This is not an accident. This is what they meant to do. They had a blueprint, and they are following it.

The question now becomes whether anyone is going to do anything to stop Trump, Stephen Miller, and everyone else involved in these extrajudicial detentions and deportations.

The courts are being defied and flouted, but will they escalate their response to insist that the law be obeyed?

The Supreme Court has now issued two frustratingly elliptical orders, one in the J.G.G. case and one in the Abrego Garcia case — the former, regarding a group of plaintiffs who fear illegal deportation to El Salvador despite the government having no evidence against them, and the latter, who is already there on what even the government admits is an “administrative error.”

In J.G.G., SCOTUS unanimously upheld the settled law that anyone targeted for removal from the US must receive due process, with advance notice of the legal proceedings against them and a meaningful chance to mount an opposition — but it also ensnared everyone in a needless thicket of technicality by forcing the plaintiffs’ challenges to be re-filed as habeas corpus petitions in the district courts where they are being detained, the equivalent of a court order declaring that people were standing in the wrong places on the Titanic.

In Abrego Garcia, SCOTUS unanimously ordered that the administration “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT and continue to provide regular updates to the district court regarding the progress of that facilitation — but it also ensnared everyone in a needless thicket of technicality by noting that the district court must have “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

In other words, certain justices on the Court seem far more concerned with the effect of court orders on the presidency rather than the effect of those same court orders on an innocent man who is being held without trial or any other judicial process in a foreign gulag. Apparently the presidency is such a fragile snowflake that the slightest cross word from a judge would cause it to crumple — whereas an innocent man can be disappeared from his wife and children and held without trial indefinitely, and he and his family are just expected to suffer in silent strength while all the elite lawyers and judges and politicians squabble and furrow their brows.

The Court’s inability to speak clearly and decisively on these matters creates ambiguity that the most craven and evil members of the administration are exploiting.

The onus will thus unjustly fall onto Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to engage in heroic efforts to pressure the courts, which in turn will need to wake up and realize that they are being absolutely mocked and ignored by the administration.

The normal response to mocking and ignoring a judge is to be held in contempt. Will the courts take that highly appropriate step?

What will other leaders do in turn? Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Abrego Garcia’s home state of Maryland, has stepped up to demand his release and pledged to travel to El Salvador to negotiate that release if necessary — a pledge now joined by multiple other members of Congress.

What are we going to do now that Trump’s Gestapo is fully revealed, no longer a proposal in Project 2025, no longer dismissed as a hyperbolic overreaction by the Resistance — but truly and terribly real?