Friends,

In one of the most notable upsets of the Democratic primaries so far, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, 29, yesterday won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette to represent Colorado’s hotly contested 1st Congressional District.

I expect to see more stories about how the Democratic Socialists of America are taking over the Democratic Party. In New York last week, nine of 10 candidates endorsed by the DSA won primaries for the state Legislature and Congress. All three democratic socialist insurgents Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed for Congress prevailed. Two of them defeated incumbents.

Democratic socialist elected officials now include U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib (both elected in 2018), New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle mayor Katie Wilson (both elected in 2025). Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is set to follow as mayor of Washington, D.C.

In 2025, over 250 DSA members held elected public office across 40 states, with 90 percent of them elected after 2019.

Pundits eager to declare a new movement or sound the alarm about socialism are having a field day.

But they’re wrong.

I don’t mean to minimize the role of the DSA or the significance of democratic socialism. But that fact is, voters who have supported these candidates haven’t done so because they’ve been particularly attracted to the idea of democratic socialism. Most don’t even know what democratic socialism is.

In reality, voters have been attracted to vigorous young people who are committed to getting stuff done. Voters have had it with incumbents who have been in their jobs for decades. At a time of record inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity — when billionaires are behind much of what our government is doing — voters want fighters who will get big corporate money out of our politics and go to the mat for average working people.

Colorado’s DeGette has held her seat for nearly 30 years. Kiros was born the same year DeGette was first elected to Congress.

Kiros is poised to become the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress. Her win in the solidly blue district that makes up most of Denver means Kiros is likely headed to Washington next year.

Kiros is a fighter who understands what’s worth fighting for and expresses it clearly. “The thing is, fighting Trump is just one piece of the problem. Trump is not the cause,” Kiros said during a debate earlier this month. “He’s a symptom of a system that is broken and has been broken for a really long time because our party has failed to understand the role that they need to take in getting money out of our politics.”

A former lawyer and Ph.D. candidate, Kiros easily presents herself as a politician for the working class. Her family immigrated to Denver from Ethiopia when she was a baby.

Kiros has never before run for elected office, but she won support from a range of voters with a message of fundamental reform of the American system.

Or consider Manny Rutinel, 31, a progressive Colorado state representative who on Tuesday defeated a moderate Democrat to win the primary election in Colorado’s most competitive swing district.

A Dominican American activist and lawyer with a significant social media following and a knack for fundraising, Rutinel isn’t a democratic socialist. He appealed to voters with his youth, energy, and multicultural biography in a suburban area north of Denver that’s nearly 40 percent Latino. He prevailed over Shannon Bird, a white moderate Democrat who had argued that she had broader appeal in the general election.

The district is one of Colorado’s ranching and agricultural hubs. It narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and for President Trump in 2024. It is one of just a handful of battleground House districts with a substantial Latino population.

Besides their youth and multicultural backgrounds, these young Democratic politicians are committed to making people’s lives better. New York’s Mamdani focused his mayoral campaign on what New Yorkers needed — affordable housing, childcare, and basic services like clearing sidewalks after a snowstorm.

Seattle’s Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist who won election without the endorsement of the DSA, rose to prominence for advocating affordable housing, increased taxes on large corporations, and workers’ rights.

In Washington, D.C., Lewis George, a city council member, ran on a platform of expanding childcare, education, and housing and revoking the district’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

“From the start of this campaign, we championed the principle that D.C. residents deserve a government that works,” she said in her victory speech. “Over time, failing public services eroded people’s faith in government as a force of good in their lives. As mayor, I will be relentlessly focused on delivering reliable public services to every D.C. neighborhood. These are not trivial issues. They are core government functions, and we need them to work.”

These new young Democrats have also won because they inspired armies of young activists to knock on doors and work the phones for them. They didn’t rely on big money; they relied on big excitement.

Two final things about them. Most are the children of immigrants, and they’re disproportionately female. They’re living illustrations of the diversity, equity, and inclusion America can foster, at its best. They’re the opposite of the white, male, Christian, nationalism that has overtaken the Republican Party.

At a time when Trump and his regime have cast a dark pall over America, a new generation of Democratic politicians is shining a bright light. The source of the energy and excitement they’re generating isn’t democratic socialism. It’s the emergence of the next America.

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Friends,

Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day 1 executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.

The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to directly conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The Trump regime appealed the lower-court rulings, contending that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision had been misunderstood for more than a century. The administration argued that the drafters of the amendment were focused on guaranteeing citizenship for the children of formerly enslaved people — and that the amendment was never intended to extend citizenship to the children of people who weren’t living in the country legally.

Trump and his solicitor general, who argued this case before the court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”— the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.

Trump has been vowing to try to change the law since entering politics in 2015, arguing the 14th Amendment was written specifically to enshrine the rights of freed slaves. His critics have countered that it was always designed to apply to the children of immigrants, too. An 1898 Supreme Court decision confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.

Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump.

Had Trump won, it would have probably caused panic among recent immigrants and their families. Although Trump has insisted his policy would apply only to future births, it was far from clear that the logic of any win for Trump wouldn’t apply retroactively if a future president (JD Vance? perish the thought) wanted to go there.

What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.

Only five of the nine justices ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.

The court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

Pure and utter claptrap.

Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.

Clearly, the Supreme Court must be changed — either by expanding the number of justices or by invoking term limits on Supreme Court justices. The Constitution would permit both remedies.

Perhaps the best thing about today’s majority decision is that it’s a direct repudiation of Trump, who has long taken a personal interest in the issue. During his 2024 campaign, he made curtailing birthright citizenship a key element of his immigration platform.

When the high court heard arguments on the case in April, Trump took the unprecedented step of showing up in person for the hearing, making him the first sitting president ever to attend a Supreme Court argument.

For the court to so directly reject Trump’s position today is surely a humiliation for him. But then again, humiliation requires a capacity to feel shame, and he has repeatedly shown he has no shame.

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Friends,

Last week’s election results in New York City have shaken the Israeli-American alliance.

The sharp decline in Israel’s popularity over its prosecution of the two-year war in Gaza had already strained the relationship. Yet in those New York elections last week, three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel, defeated moderates in hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries.

These election results did not reflect a rise in antisemitism. After all, New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. They reflected an upsurge in sympathy toward the Palestinian cause and rejection of Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack.

To be sure, the Hamas attack was heinous and morally repugnant, regardless of whether you sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. But Israel’s response to it — and the continuation of military aid to Israel in the future — is sure to be an issue in the upcoming midterm elections, in subsequent Democratic presidential primaries, and in general elections of 2028.

So today’s Office Hours examines your thoughts about Israel, its culpability, and what America’s future relationship to Israel should be. It’s a difficult question for many of us, but I think it important to discuss.

Herewith, the major positions on the subject as they’re now being expressed in American politics.

1. Israel is not culpable in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the U.S. should continue to support Israel.

People who hold this view say that Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, forced Israel’s response, which was understandable and necessary. Unless Israel fights to protect itself and its citizens, its very existence is threatened. This existential threat requires all the firepower Israel possesses. When others are committed to reducing Israel to rubble and murdering Jews living in Israel, the only conceivable response is to try to eliminate that threat by any means possible. So the United States should continue to ally itself with Israel, and continue to help Israel militarily.

2. Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government of Israel are responsible for the deaths in Gaza and the West Bank, and the United States should do whatever it can to end Netanyahu’s reign so that a “two-state” solution can be sought.

By this view, neither Hamas nor Israel as a whole are responsible for the deaths in Gaza or Lebanon, nor even the aggression by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The responsibility lies with Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government in Israel. The proper role for the United States at this juncture is to do whatever we can to remove Netanyahu from power and encourage a new regime to seek a “two-state solution” in which Palestinians have their own homeland.

3. It’s not just Netanyahu. Israel as a whole is to blame for genocide in Gaza, and the United States should stop supplying Israel with military aid and equipment and stop guaranteeing its security.

Two of the candidates who won in New York last week — Brad Lander and Claire Valdez — accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza and want the United States to stop supplying it with arms. Many who hold this view want to end the military security alliance between Israel and the United States, regardless of who’s in charge of Israel. (In a Pew survey in April, 60 percent of Americans say they hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel — up from 42 percent in 2022.)

4. Israel is not only culpable but it should not exist because it is a religious state that relegates non-Jews to second-class citizenship, and has no legitimacy in modern society.

One of the candidates who won last week in New York — Darializa Avila Chevalier — has questioned Israel’s right to exist. She is not alone. Since Israel’s attacks on Gaza, a number of Americans have questioned the legitimacy of a Jewish state. They argue that it relegates inhabitants who don’t hold its religious views to second-class citizenship, creating in effect an apartheid state. Some go further and argue that Israel rests on stolen lands (in contrast to Zionist narratives that emphasize the multi-millennial historical and biblical connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and the legal purchase by Jewish organizations of vast tracts of land from willing sellers, including local inhabitants and absentee Arab landlords.)

***

Hence, this week’s Office Hours question: How should the United States treat Israel in the future?

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Friends,

Today’s Supreme Court decision ending the independence of independent regulatory agencies, and directly overruling a court precedent, was justified by a pernicious idea advocated by the conservative Supreme Court majority: that the framers of the Constitution envisioned a so-called “unified executive.” In fact, the framers’ focus was to prevent a United States president from becoming too powerful — like the king they were displacing — so they could not have sought a strong, centralized executive branch. Please see below.

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Friends,

First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.

I’m proud of the work the FTC did then and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.

Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is — or was — independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.

The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy — and corrupted the nation’s politics — during the First Gilded Age.

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the robber barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.

That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people — and not just the wealthiest and most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.

We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.

Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

Hence today’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

Today’s ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Today marks the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.

It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.

In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau — again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor — said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.

Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued: “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”

Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”

That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.

Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary — to check and constrain him.

Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.

But as of today, they are no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Today’s ruling overturns the basic idea — part of the fabric of our government for well over a century — that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.

As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.

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Friends,

JD Vance said on Friday that the U.S. wins “either way” in negotiations with Iran. “If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country.”

Just hours after Vance’s appearance on HBO, Iran launched attack drones on Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

So much for Iran being much weaker.

Pressed by Maher on whether Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed, Vance shot back: “What part of it is not destroyed? The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

In fact, Iran still has a stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which experts concede could be turned into a nuclear weapon.

Vance’s media appearance came two days after he visited the Richard Nixon presidential library and museum in California to talk about his new book on his journey from atheism to allegedly devout Catholicism.

During his visit he defended Nixon for the Watergate break-in scandal that ended his presidency. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” It was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” — not Nixon’s serious crimes.

Hello? The only conceivable reason Watergate might not bring down a presidency tomorrow or be a 12-hour story is the gargantuan criminality and corruption of the Trump-Vance regime, which puts Watergate in the minor league by comparison.

I raise Vance’s recent bizarro comments because in a few months he’ll be actively campaigning to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028.

He’s a more dangerous demagogue than Trump because he wraps his demagoguery in the apparent thoughtfulness of a graduate of Yale Law School and a serious best-selling author.

I’ve spent the last two days reading his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, a memoir focusing on his 2019 conversion to Catholicism, and can assure you of three things: First, it’s a serious book. Second, Vance’s mind is as vacuous and unprincipled as he is in person. Third, the book isn’t worth reading.

In one of the few mea culpas in the book, Vance writes that it was “boneheaded” of him — “one of the dumbest things I ever said” — to call Kamala Harris and several other prominent Democrats “childless cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” In the book Vance calls the insult, “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

What Vance doesn’t admit to is that, when his remark resurfaced during his early days as Trump’s running mate, he refused to apologize or express any regret for it. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said then — sarcastically — adding that “if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” which in his view had made the entire Democratic Party “anti-family and anti-child.”

Vance’s intentionally provocative rather than illuminating demagoguery was in evidence again when he insisted during the 2024 campaign that the pets of upright Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.”

When confronted with irrefutable evidence that Haitian immigrants were not eating pets in Springfield, Vance admitted publicly that he was speaking, shall we say, metaphorically: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

It’s much the same with Vance’s recent response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa in the British city of Southampton. After Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Vance declared that Nowak would still be alive had Europeans “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

Inconveniently for Vance, Digwa didn’t migrate to Britain. He was born and raised there.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s Senate race.

Before running for the Senate, Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why was Thiel such a devoted sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel saw in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the U.S. away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Bullshit. Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Thiel and Vance believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the U.S. is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the U.S. establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” — as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The next step is to foment so much division and bigotry inside the U.S. and within other major Western nations that people come to view those on the other side of the political divide as the source of everything that’s wrong with their lives — which Vance has been eagerly trying to do.

That way, they won’t look upward to see that the billionaire robber barons, plutocrats, and oligarchs of this second Gilded Age have grabbed most of the wealth and power for themselves. Hence, average people will trade in democracy for strongman autocracy.

Behind Vance’s demagoguery about the U.S. winning either way in Iran, Nixon being taken down by the deep state, childless cat ladies, the Democratic Party being anti-family and anti-child, Haitian-Americans eating pets, and immigrants threatening Western civilization is a deadly serious plan to unite the far-right of America and Europe and rid much of the world of democracy. If Vance becomes president, he’s intent on furthering the job.

Vance resembles Trump in every way — he lies effortlessly, he’s utterly without principle, and he’s intent on gaining power — except that he’s smarter and more ruthless than Trump.

Take note and beware.

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Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

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Last week’s winner:

“On reflection, I am now the King of Green-land.”

(Congratulations, Carol Nylen.)

Runners-up:

“Mirror mirror in the slime, who’s the sleaziest of all time?”

(Congratulations, Andrew Kelm.)

“Reflection, reflection in the pool: Am I wise, or am I a fool?”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“He’s ‘floating’ a run for a 3rd term as the Green Party candidate.”

(Congratulations, DZK.)

“Mirror mirror on the pool, who’s the greatest king of fools?”

(Congratulations, Mike Hammer.)

“Everything he touches turns to slime.”

(Congratulations, ISOequanimity.)

“It’s even more shallow than me!”

(Congratulations, John Powell.)

“Trump only looks, he never reflects”

(Congratulations, howard levitt.)

“Mirror, mirror in the pool, how do we get rid of this fool?”

(Congratulations, Diane Fogarty.)

“I hired the best pool guy, and I never make mistakes. He’s the greatest pool guy, better than any pool guy ever seen. So it must be some left-wing vandals that caused this.”

(Congratulations, Lynn E Levine.)

“Narcissus in green.”

(Congratulations, ERIK Payne BUTLER.)

“Mirror, mirror, on the mall. I’m the greatest one of all!”

(Congratulations, Sue Kayton.)

“What about my Rhapsody in Blue? I’m green with envy.”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Yep, I am a king, and the water is crystal clear.”

(Congratulations, Michigan Banjo Man.)

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Friends,

For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.

Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.

Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.

But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.

That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.

America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority.

Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support.

I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.

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Friends,

This is my last post to you today, I promise. But I couldn’t resist telling you about Elon’s comeuppance. SpaceX crashed this week, and I just got some of the details.

Remember when Musk became the world’s first trillionaire? No longer. SpaceX’s stock price has settled way down. It’s not even 10 percent over its initial public offering price. Which means Musk’s bag is down to around $900 billion.

The SpaceX crash wiped out just about all of SpaceX’s gains from the last two weeks, which has caused massive headaches for its average investors and initial buyers. Not quite a Ponzi scheme yet, but heading in that direction.

All this shows why we need a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s on the side of average investors and the public and not bought off by today’s robber barons.

SpaceX started to crash with a report out Monday that, notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding its IPO’s raising $85 billion in its first trading days, SpaceX wasn’t really flying all that high. In fact, it was floating a $20 billion bond sale to refinance its debts (mostly from its acquisition of X, on which Musk had put a lofty valuation).

Since Musk took over X in 2022, the platform has lost almost 80 percent of its market value. No surprise. I mean, who wants to read a bunch of right-wing rants?

To make matters worse, xAI, on which Musk also put a sky-high valuation before merging it into SpaceX, has fallen way behind other American AI companies in the race to develop generative AI.

As of May, all of xAI’s co-founders had jumped ship, according to LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who calls xAI a “complete train wreck.” Small wonder that credit-rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch have graded SpaceX’s debt just a few notches above junk.

At the time of SpaceX’s IPO, Musk priced SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This was ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals, to say nothing of its debt.

The wild valuation depended on a belief that Musk can colonize Mars, put a data center into space, establish interstellar travel, and accomplish other wild things that would eventually generate big profits — but are likely to generate zilch until most investors’ great-grandchildren have kicked the bucket.

Let me remind you that because of its size, a big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) are now automatically tied to SpaceX’s market value. Yet SpaceX insiders have been able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case, because that’s the way the IPO was structured.

Put all this together with the increasing likelihood that AI is turning into a bubble whose burst will make the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Bubble look like sparkling water by comparison.

Add in Trump’s fiasco of a war with Iran and its oil shock, his avowed intention to weaken the dollar, and the increasingly likely specter of stagflation in the United States, and you get a perfect storm.

Are Trump and Musk — two of the most despicable people in the world — bringing on a global recession, or worse? We’ll soon find out.

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Friends,

Trump’s war with Iran is continuing. Today, Iran launched attack drones at Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

Those attacks came after the United States carried out overnight airstrikes on Iranian missile and drone sites, in retaliation for Iran’s firing drones at a container ship on Thursday as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tonight, Trump posted that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

The continuing hostilities are exposing the mind-numbing extent of Trump’s lies about “ending” his war: that he’s achieved a lasting peace in the Middle East; that Iran no longer has any capacity to fire missiles and drones; that the Strait of Hormuz is reopen to cargo traffic; that Iran is committed to reducing its stockpile of nuclear material and won’t seek a nuclear bomb; and that, overall, the war he launched on February 28 has made America stronger and safer than we were before he launched it.

These lies aren’t on par with his big lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was undertaken by peaceful, patriotic Americans. But his lies about the so-called “end” of his war with Iran could have equally large consequences, because they’re leading many Americans to believe that an end of the war is within sight and that America is stronger and safer as a result of it.

Yet the mainstream media refuse to call him out on his Iran lies.

The New York Times terms what’s now happening a “flare-up of hostilities” that threatens “to unravel” ongoing “talks to reach a final peace agreement,” and that “neither side seems eager to return to a full-blown war.”

Well, they may not want to return to a “full-blown war,” but they’ve returned to hostilities that are blocking the strait and destroying whatever shred of trust diplomacy depends on. And not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Washington Post calls it “the latest threat to a ceasefire and ongoing talks toward a broader peace” — which of course assumes there has been a real ceasefire, and that the talks now underway will result in a “broader peace,” whatever that means. Also not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Wall Street Journal says the hostilities have “added to pressure on a preliminary peace deal already under stress from continued fighting in Lebanon and disagreements over nuclear inspections.” But that assumes there’s already a preliminary peace deal. Has anyone actually read it? And the disagreements are hardly confined to nuclear inspections. What about free passage through the strait? Oh, and here again, no word about Trump’s blatant lies.

My expectations for the mainstream press were already low. From the outset of this war, the public has received half-baked and inconsistent reports. And although the media know better than to rely on any words emanating from Trump’s mouth, why have they given up holding him to account for what he says about the war?

Trump’s war with Iran was a disaster from the start, and its so-called “end” is a debacle that Americans need to know about. Trump wants the war to go away, but it won’t because he has strengthened Iran’s resolve, which in turn has strengthened its hand.

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Friends,

Today, Heather and I examine all sorts of things that went wrong this week for Trump, starting with Iran’s attack on an oil tanker moving through the Strait of Hormuz and including Trump’s latest problems with the Reflecting Pool — the Strait of Warm Ooze.

Please grab a cuppa, pull up a chair, and join in the conversation.

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Friends,

I keep getting phone calls from politicians wanting to know what I make of the extraordinary victories at the polls this week of young Democratic Socialists. Here’s what I tell them:

The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick.

Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America.

Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism.

Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson; Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C.; and a bevy of newly elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.

Pitted against these economic populists in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine for the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism.

In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II.

It runs vertically from bottom to top.

Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.

Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.

Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP.

They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.

I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties.

One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist.

There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.

But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.

The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.

Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and it has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.

Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “We’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.

Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.

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Friends,

Here’s another video for you. Please share.

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Friends,

Nothing makes Trump angrier than being humiliated. Humiliation involves public shame, which Trump’s malignant narcissism cannot abide.

But Trump is facing humiliation after humiliation. They’re causing him to lose his mind even faster than before.

The Iranian regime knows this, which is why it’s publicly humiliating Trump by contradicting everything he says about making progress on the peace talks.

Yesterday, Iran went further. It refuted Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz, and that the strait was again open to shipping, by striking a container ship passing through the strait. Oil prices immediately jumped.

Meanwhile, American judges are humiliating Trump by ordering his name off the Kennedy Center, requiring that the center remain open, pausing work on his billionaire ballroom, threatening to stop his Arch de Trump, ending his slush fund, and vacating charges that Trump’s Justice [sic] Department has brought against Trump’s enemies.

Performing artists are humiliating him by pulling out of his so-called “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall because they don’t want any part in what’s become a Trump rally.

Congressional Republicans are humiliating him by rejecting his demands that they enact the “SAVE” Act (which would make it harder for millions of people to vote), pass his next reconciliation package, and blow up the Senate filibuster.

Four Senate Republicans even crossed party lines to back a war powers resolution directing Trump to halt military operations against Iran or seek congressional authorization to continue. Their support delivered a bipartisan rebuke to Trump’s handling of the war. (After lobbying by Trump, the Senate reversed its stance and rejected the resolution in a late-night vote.)

Turning 80 is itself a humiliation for Trump. Even if the media weren’t harping on it, his body is continuously reminding him that he’s the oldest president ever elected. Not to mention increasing calls from Democrats to invoke the 25th Amendment in light of Trump’s erratic behavior — including his feud with the pope, his doomsday threats on Truth Social, and his posting of an AI photo of himself as Jesus.

But the very worst type of humiliation for Trump is ridicule — as first became apparent in 2011 when Obama skewered him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner by producing his birth certificate and saying Trump could “now get back to focusing on important issues like did we fake the moon landing?”

The audience roared. Trump fumed.

Trump can’t take ridicule — which is why he tried to get ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel and gloated when CBS got rid of Stephen Colbert.

Yet late-night comedians are now having a field day with Trump’s algae-infested Reflecting Pool. Some are calling it the Strait of Warm Ooze.

See below:

The pile-up of humiliations is causing Trump to lash out at anyone and everyone, including his recent explosion at NBC correspondent Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Wednesday’s reported shouting match with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy during a closed-door lunch at the Capitol. The lunch came just after Trump dropped a bombshell by canceling plans to sign a bipartisan landmark housing affordability bill until he gets his way on the SAVE Act.

I’m tempted to enjoy the Trump humiliations. But I think it also important to note that as they mount, Trump is becoming even more erratic and dangerous. So beware.

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Friends,

The real way to read the immigration decisions the Supreme Court issued today is not to see them solely as losses for immigrants to the United States or the rights of immigrants. They are much larger losses. They are losses for the authority of Congress to have its laws fully executed by a president who doesn’t agree with them.

Markwayne Mullin vs. Al Otro Lado concerns a 1917 law that requires immigration officers to inspect noncitizens who arrive at ports of entry to determine whether they may enter the United States. Congress amended the law in the Refugee Act of 1980 to allow noncitizens fleeing persecution in their home country to apply for asylum as part of this inspection process.

The Act lays out a required set of procedures to guide this process. It says that a noncitizen who seeks admission to the United States “may apply for asylum.” If the noncitizen lacks valid travel documents, the officer “shall order [her] removed” unless she conveys an intention to apply for asylum or a fear of persecution, which in turn requires the officer to “refer” her for further processing of her asylum application.

This system is designed to ensure that the U.S. government considers the application of each person seeking to come into the United States to determine who should be let in, who should be turned away, and who should be allowed to apply for asylum.

But today, the Supreme Court’s majority held that a president may circumvent these requirements simply by having U. S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting foot on U. S. soil — even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.

What happened to the Refugee Act of 1980 and the specific procedures outlined in it? The Supreme Court ignored it.

The other decision released today, Markwayne Mullin vs. Dahlia Doe, concerns another law, part of the Immigration Act of 1990 called Temporary Protected Status. For over a decade administrations have provided humanitarian Temporary Protected Status relief to Haitian and Syrian nationals coming to the United States.

Today, the Supreme Court’s majority held that federal courts may not review the Secretary of Homeland Security’s compliance with that law. But in fact the Immigration Act of 1990 specifically allows judicial review of whether the Secretary adhered to the procedures the law requires — exactly what the plaintiffs disputed.

It would be easy to see these two cases solely through the lens of immigration — and conclude that the Supreme Court’s decisions today simply backed Trump’s and his fanatical underling Stephen Miller’s commitment to block noncitizens from the United States or to force them out. And surely these are the consequences of both of of today’s rulings.

But the decisions are even darker and more dangerous than this. Even in the face of two laws in which Congress instructed the executive branch to do certain things, a majority of the current Supreme Court — the abominable Roberts Court — has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.

This must be seen for what it really is — a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.

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Friends,

We’re coming to the end of Trump’s war in Iran, mainly because Trump is under huge pressure to lower gas prices and prevent additional inflation before the midterms. He was elected in 2024 mainly to reduce prices, yet prices are now 4.2 percent higher than they were at this time a year ago. Pay hasn’t kept up, meaning most Americans are poorer.

So the big question is how Americans are likely to judge this war when they vote in just 131 days (or earlier, if they can vote by mail). That’s the subject of today’s Office Hours.

Trump’s war with Iran has been a huge failure by every criterion — energy prices, American security, Iran’s bargaining leverage via the Strait of Hormuz, the war’s cost in lives and dollars, and the hardliners in Iran’s leadership who are now more likely to want to build nuclear weapons.

But what is its effect on American politics? I’ve made the rounds of political and media analysts, seeking their views on how Americans are likely to view Trump’s war and what impact those views are likely to have on the midterm vote. I’ve grouped their responses below:

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Friends,

Today I start my ninth decade on earth. It’s astounding and distressing, but I suppose it’s better than the alternative.

In his latter years, my father would always answer my weekly phone question, “How are you, Dad?” with a brisk “Still here!”

Several of my joints ache, I can’t remember shit, I can no longer do 20 pushups at a clip, several good friends have passed, my bald spot is claiming more territory, and I can’t hear very well (especially in restaurants). But, hey, I’m still here.

And hardly alone. All 1946 boomers still here are turning 80. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year of American history up to then — 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before. Which is why it was called a boom.

Trump is now 80. I’m not proud of that. He’s a wreck of a human being, physically, mentally, and morally.

George W. Bush will be 80 in 12 days. Trump is probably the best thing ever to happen to George W. because George W. will no longer be remembered as the worst and stupidest president in modern American history.

Bill Clinton has another month or so before he’s 80. He still looks great, but his voice seems to have gained two octaves, sounding rather like a squeaky tire. That’s another thing that happens.

Dolly Parton has been 80 since January 19 of this year. I still haven’t met her. Meeting her has been on my bucket list for six decades. She’s my height. We have similar values. I’ve been in love with her since I was 15, but so far, zilch.

Cher has been 80 since May 20 of this year, and I haven’t met her, either. But I take heart that someone can look so fabulous at 80.

When I was a small boy, my grandma Frances was courted by a man named Jack Hirsch, who was then 80. I had never before encountered someone as old as Jack. I was scared to speak loudly in his presence, or sneeze, or cough, for fear he’d fall over and die. I remember thinking he could be Methuselah (who, according to the Bible, lived until the ripe old age of 969).

What happens after you hit a ripe old age? Do you ripen until you rot?

Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma add at least a decade, bringing us 1946 boomers to where we are now. Beyond this is an extra helping. “After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. (His gravy lasted almost 22 years.)

All this celebratory nonsense about America’s 250th obscures that we’re still a baby nation. Lay three of us 80-year-olds end-to-end and we’re almost as old as the country. It was roughly 80 years between the nation’s founding and the Civil War, another 80 or so between the Civil War and World War II, and then about 80 from the end of World War II until now.

Life expectancy for American women is now 81.4 years on average; for men, 76.5, so I’ve already beaten the odds. Why do women outlast men by more than five years? Has evolution made them stronger? Or do men get worn down by competing with other men — testosterone poisoning’s revenge? And if it’s the latter, why the hell is Trump still alive?

Lifespan is important, but health-span is equally important. By health-span I mean how long you feel well.

Yesterday I ran into a former student who upon seeing me exclaimed, “You look great!” I thanked her even though she was probably just being polite. An elderly friend once told me there were four ages to life: youth, middle age, old age, and “You look great.” I’m now in the fourth stage.

My wish for you is that you have a long lifespan and a long health-span, that you relish every day you have, spend time with people you love and value, let go of all the petty crap, wish no one ill (except perhaps Trump), and continue to fight for what’s good and noble and important.

And regardless of your age, my thanks to you for joining me on this journey.

(By the way, you look great.)

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Friends,

Yikes. It’s come to my attention that scammers are trying to impersonate me in comments, chats, and direct messaging on Substack and other social media platforms. I’m told they use my picture to make a fake profile seem real, and encourage people to switch to other communication tools such as Gmail, WhatsApp, or Signal.

If you receive any suspicious comments or messages like this, alleging to be from me, we suggest that you immediately report it as fake.

Please know that I will never ask you to contact me personally, nor will I ever ask you to wire money.

Of course I’ll continue to post here on Substack (with a purple checkmark next to my name). I’ll also continue to send emails and texts from Inequality Media and Inequality Media Civic Action about fundraising campaigns and explainer videos. But, again, I will never ask you personally to communicate with me through other platforms.

I’m truly sorry I have to make this announcement, but unfortunately this is the world we now live in.

Thank you,

Robert Reich

Friends,

I’ve opposed gerrymandering in the past. And I’d continue to oppose it during normal times. But these are not normal times. If Republicans are changing the rules of the game by gerrymandering to protect an unpopular Trump, why should Democrats keep playing by the old rules? Blue states must match red states seat for seat. No more. No less.

Please watch and share:

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Friends,

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani succeeded today in his attempt to build a socialist power base in the Big Apple. His endorsed congressional candidates — Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, and two democratic socialists, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez.— all won their races

Mamdani said the results showed that his victory in the mayor’s race last year marked a turning point in progressive politics. “It was not the end of a political movement, it was the beginning.”

But I think it’s more than that. Democrats across the nation now face the biggest opportunity they’ve had since World War II to change the face of American politics.

The last time Americans faced such overwhelming evidence that the monied interests were screwing them over was the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, resulting in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting in 1933.

The one silver lining of the current Trump-Musk-Bezos-Ellison-Murdoch-Koch horror show is that most Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed. A Harris poll last year found that 53 percent of Americans believe “billionaires threaten our democracy.” That was up from 46 percent in 2024. An Economist/YouGov poll this year found that 80 percent of Americans see the gap between rich and poor as a problem.

Small wonder. America’s first trillionaire is a vicious white supremacist who’s stirring up hate around the world and backing Republican candidates with big bucks. American billionaires are openly sucking up to America’s first dictator, spending lavishly on whatever he wants, and gobbling up media outlets so most Americans won’t know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947, while profits’ share is the highest since 1950.

This is morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his recent encyclical letter.

It’s also undermining our democracy. “America has a choice,” the jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said. “We can have great wealth in a few hands or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.”

It’s time for Democrats to take on the class war that’s being waged by the nation’s oligarchy against most Americans by becoming class warriors themselves.

By class warrior I don’t mean resorting to violence or name-calling. I mean recognizing that a billionaire class is bad for America and calling for bold changes to reverse it: taxing great wealth, busting up monopolies, strengthening labor unions, raising the minimum wage, demanding profit-sharing and capital-sharing, ensuring Medicare for all and a universal basic income, and getting big money out of politics.

FDR wasn’t afraid to be a class warrior: “Never before in all our history have [the monied interests] been so unified against one candidate as they stand today,” he thundered in 1936. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

But these days, most Democratic politicians are reluctant to take on the oligarchs. Other than Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani, who else is loudly doing it?

Instead of being class warriors, many Democratic politicians are class worriers. They openly worry that inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity are out of control — but they won’t fight for what must be done. I’m talking about Third-way “moderate” Democrats who focus on “suburban swing” voters. and Washington-based consultants who urge Democratic candidates to move to the “center.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been trying to stave off the rising tide of Democratic insurgents, but Schumer’s future as the putative leader of the Democratic Party seems in doubt.

Some Democrats are simply class wimps, so afraid of offending the monied interests that fund their campaigns they won’t even support modest reforms.

Even here in California, the putative home of progressive politics in America, too many Democratic politicians are wimping out. California Governor Gavin Newsom publicly opposes the wealth tax initiative now on California’s November ballot, for fear billionaires will leave the state (they won’t). San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie led the opposition to a city ballot measure to expand the city’s higher corporate tax rate on companies whose CEOs make at least 100 times more than their median employees. The measure was narrowly defeated.

This has to change. Unless Democrats stand up to the oligarchs now running this nation, there won’t be any alternative to Trump Republicanism in the future, or any reason for a Democratic Party.

This should be the Democrats’ hour. With inequality at levels never before seen, with a racist trillionaire and scores of billionaires poisoning our politics, with corporate profits at record heights while most American workers struggle harder than ever just to stay afloat, with a Republican majority in Congress slashing Medicaid and food stamps to finance a tax cut for the super-rich, with the looming threat of AI destroying jobs, and with one of the most brazenly corrupt politicians in American history now occupying the Oval Office — with all of this, Democrats should be at least as loud as they were under FDR.

The Democratic Party must seek to return to the American people the wealth and power that the obscenely rich have taken from them. This should be the core Democratic message. It explains the affordability crisis. It reveals the epidemic of corruption. It clarifies corporate welfare and crony capitalism. It shows what must be done.

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