From The Onion

Just another day

Sherlock Trump solves another mystery

Trump's Magnet of Malevolence

Trump's inner circle egg him on

Robert Reich

The conventional explanation for why Trump’s second term is far more extreme than his first (which was extreme enough) is that the guardrails are now gone.

The people who occupied significant roles in the White House and Cabinet during his first administration — who talked him out of (or subverted) his illegal and unconstitutional cravings — are no longer there. In their places are loyalists who will do whatever he wants.

But this conventional view overlooks a more important explanation.

He’s more extreme this time because he’s attracted people around him who are also extreme and pushing him to new levels of malevolence.

I’ve served under three presidents and advised a fourth. In every case, I’ve seen the same pattern: A president acts as a magnet, drawing into the highest levels of his administration people who not only share his values but amplify them.

When a president wants to do a decent job — at the least, respecting democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law — the magnet produces an administration of people who respect our institutions of self-government.

But when a president is malevolent, those drawn to him are among the most fanatical and dangerous in the land.

Trump 2.0 is deploying new surveillance methods to extend its authoritarian power

Big Brother Donald Is Watching You

Rebecca Gordon for TomDispatch

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.

But before I could make the call, my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.

“Mary! I was just about to call you.”

“But you did call me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”

It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they’d followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They’d have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company’s central office.

Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what’s legally possible in Donald Trump’s United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.

All the President’s Tech

Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way.

If you watch police procedurals on television (which I admit to doing more than is probably good for me), you’ll see a panoply of surveillance methods on display, in addition to cellular location data. 

It used to be only on British shows that the police could routinely rely on video recordings as aids in crime solving. For some decades, the Brits were ahead of us in creating a surveillance society. Nowadays, though, even the detectives on U.S. shows like Law and Order SVU (heading for its 27th season) can usually locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.

Facial recognition is another technology you’ll see on police dramas these days. It’s usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish—a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: “MATCH.”

Why does Trump and MAGA hate education?

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny

Robert Reich 

Friends,

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.

The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA sufficiently complied with Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion.

UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.

This is the first time the Trump regime has explicitly tied grant dollars to the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.

On June 30, the Trump regime said Harvard University violated federal civil rights law by failing to address the harassment of Jewish students on campus.

On July 1, the regime released $175 million in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, but only after the school agreed to block transgender women athletes from female sports teams and erase the records set by swimmer Lia Thomas.

Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletics are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.

Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?

They’re following Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” — an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:

First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.

Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check or in process.

Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.

Then go after the universities.

What’s Driving the Republican Party to Climate Murder-Suicide?

At what point will the body count become intolerable for them?

William Debuys for TomDispatch

In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. 

Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal—it’s murderous.

The deaths are mounting. By one accounting, the disruption of overseas food and drug shipments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including life-saving HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria treatments, has already caused nearly 350,000 deaths (and they continue at an estimated rate of 103 per hour). 

Here at home, cuts to Medicaid, as contemplated in the absurdly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” would lead to more than 21,600 avoidable deaths annually. And those numbers pale next to the levels of mortality expected to arise from the effects of climate change—a worsening catastrophe that the Trump regime is dead set against doing anything about. Indeed, with an array of policies under the rubric “Drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump and his officials seem intent on worsening matters as quickly as possible.

Worrying about how future generations will cope with a savagely inhospitable climate is for losers.

If the World Economic Forum is to be believed, deaths from flood, famine, disease, and other nonmilitary consequences of a hotter, more violent global climate might reach 580,000 per year, or 14.5 million by 2050. And that may be a lowball estimate, according to the American Security Project. Its models assert that warming-induced fatalities are already running at 400,000 annually and are heading for 700,000.

Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of misery. Given that the Trump regime is opening new areas for drilling; aggressively curtailing funding for climate-related programs; purging mention of climate change from government websites and publications; and disassembling the government’s capacity to track, let alone predict climate-change impacts, it makes sense to wonder WHY?

Why does MAGA spread hate and violence?

The MAGA mind virus

Stephen Robinson

The disastrous choice American voters made in last year’s presidential election was put on grim display earlier this month in response to the politically motivated shooting of Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses by a right-wing extremist named Vance Boelter.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responded to the violence like a decent human being and condemned the shooting as an attack on all Americans and our very civic order.

“We are not a country that settles our differences at gunpoint,” a somber Walz said during a press conference. “We have demonstrated again and again in our state that it is possible to peacefully disagree, that our state is strengthened by civil public debate. We must stand united against all forms of violence — and I call on everyone to join me in that commitment.”

The president, meanwhile, responded to the shootings like — well, like a maniac.

Trump rejected Walz’s call for unity and as always refused to even pretend he’s supposed to be the president of the entire United States.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. Why would I call him?” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?”

Trump’s predecessors responded more humanely to gun violence. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, Republican president George W. Bush immediately reached out to Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine and offered his support and sympathy. 

Four years later, when 19 people, including Rep. Gabby Giffords, were shot in Tucson, Arizona, President Barack Obama offered Republican Gov. Jan Brewer — a vocal political opponent — the full resources of the federal government.

Unfortunately, 77 million Americans surrendered these moments of shared humanity when they put Trump back in the White House. The tragedies that once united us now only result in more division. And no one, including his supporters, should have expected anything else.

A normal day in Trumpworld

If you have tattoos, you should self-deport

"Lights, makeup, camera"

What Trump's cabinet members said about him BEFORE they got the job

Liberation from reality

'Unabashed Fascism': Trump Executive Order Targets 'Improper Ideology' at Smithsonian

An ignorant racist will decide what is proper to display at the Smithsonian

Eloise Goldsmith

U.S. President Donald Trump has elicited a fresh wave of anger after he signed an executive order on Thursday targeting exhibits or programs critical of the United States at the Smithsonian Institution, a sprawling network of largely free museums and Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo.

The order aims to prevent federal money from going to displays that "divide Americans based on race" or "promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy," as well as remove "improper ideology" from Smithsonian's museums, education centers, and research centers.

"This is unabashed fascism," wrote the journalist Lauren Wolfe on X on Thursday. Amy Rutenberg, a history professor at Iowa State University, wrote: "Last week, while visiting several Smithsonian museums, I kept wondering how long it would take for this administration to direct exhibits to be pulled. Not long, it turns out."

Trump is trying to destroy our nation's most vital asset—our innovative minds and ability to think for ourselves.

Trump, a Fascist Tyrant, Targets Universities and the Media

Robert Reich for Inequality Media

Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Nothing to see here

Make America Great Again - sort of

King Donald Demands Journalists Use Language He Wants or Face Punishment

Ominous Move to Strip Americans of First Amendment Rights

By David Cay Johnston

Donald Trump’s oft-stated hostility to journalism, and his dictatorial efforts to force journalists to heel, took a disturbing turn in a Washington courtroom on Monday, February 24. A turn detrimental to the health of our First Amendment rights.

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump indicated that he would allow the Trump administration to bar from the White House press room the nonprofit Associate Press, one of the country’s largest news organizations.

The AP was blocked because it does not use language that Donald Trump demands that all Americans use or risk government punishment, calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

This could be seen as a petty dispute, but I see it as a window into Trump’s continuing efforts to consolidate power as our de facto dictator, which in large part requires bringing the press to heel so Americans learn only the official Trump version of events, not some pesky independent reporting.

Telling journalists what language to use contradicts the free speech and free press rights all Americans enjoy under our Constitution’s First Amendment.  But Trump knows that this will have a visceral impact only on the minority of Americans who understand, care about, and will fight for our Constitutional rights.

Most Go Along

The social experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo on inflicting pain and running a faux prison showed that only one in six people will resist or reject orders to harm others. Zimbardo, a Stanford University professor whose experiment I wrote about at the time, insisted to his dying day that he had no interest in those who wouldn’t go along, only those who complied.

Donald has a long history of showing his utter lack of regard for our Constitution when he finds it inconvenient. In this his obsequiously loyal ally is Vice President JD Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer who knows better, but favors demonstrating his fealty to Trump above his oath of office to protect and defend our constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Now Trump appears to have another ally in U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a 2017 Trump appointee.

In that Monday’s hearing, judge McFadden declined to direct the Trump administration to let Associated Press reporters into the White House press room.

“I can’t say the AP has shown a likelihood of success here,” Judge McFadden said.

McFadden called the AP ban “problematic” and advised the government that “case law in this circuit is uniformly unhelpful to the White House.” He then ordered a hearing in March. without any relief for AP until then.

The judge also critiqued AP for waiting five days to file its case, saying it showed that AP didn’t consider this an emergency.

It’s hard to imagine a clearer First Amendment violation. Trump is punishing the Associated Press for exercising a Constitutional right, namely, to choose the words it thinks are proper and appropriate in news articles. That Judge McFadden is trying to weasel out of his duty to uphold Constitutional rights is another sign of obeisance to our dictator’s demands.

Trump made clear last week that unless AP writes the news as he demands, using his fictional Gulf of America in relevant articles, it will not be reinstated.

“We’re going to keep them out until such time that they agree it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said.

10 Reasons for Modest Optimism in the Fight Against the Trump-Vance-Musk Regime

Don't lose hope

Robert Reich for Inequality Media

If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing—not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.

Here’s a partial summary—10 reasons for modest optimism.

1. Boycotts Are Taking Hold

Americans are changing shopping habits in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with Trump.

Millions are pledging to halt discretionary spending for 24 hours on February 28 in protest against major retailers—chiefly Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy—for scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in response to President Donald Trump.

Four out of 10 Americans have already shifted their spending over the last few months to be more consistent with their moral views, according to the Harris poll. (Far more Democrats—50%—are changing their spending habits compared with Republicans—41%.)

Calls to boycott Tesla apparently are having an effect. After a disappointing 2024, Tesla sales declined further in January. In California, a key market for Tesla, nearly 12% fewer Teslas were registered in January 2025 than in January 2024. An analysis by Electrek points to even more trouble for Tesla in Europe, where Tesla sales have dropped in every market.

X users are shifting over to Bluesky at a rapid rate, even as Musk adds more advertisers to his ongoing lawsuit against those that have justifiably boycotted X after he turned it into a cesspool of lies and hate (this week, he added Lego, Nestle, Tyson Foods, and Shell).

2. International Resistance Is Rising

Canada has helped lead the way: A grassroots boycott of American products and tourism is underway there. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in effect become a “wartime prime minister” as he stands up to Trump’s bullying.

Jean Chrétien, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003, is urging Canada to join with leaders in Denmark, Panama, and Mexico, as well as with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to fight back against Trump’s threats.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum is standing up to Trump. She has defended not just Mexico but also the sovereignty of Latin American countries Trump has threatened and insulted.

In the wake of JD Vance’s offensive speech at the Munich security conference last week, European democracies are standing together—condemning his speech and making it clear they will support Ukraine and never capitulate to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as Trump has done.

How Trump’s compulsion to dominate sabotages dealmaking, undermines democracy and threatens global stability

Bullies are terrible deal-makers

Karrin Vasby Anderson, Colorado State University

Journalists covering the Feb. 28, 2025, Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described it as a “jaw-dropping” “spectacle” and a “striking breach of Oval Office comity.” Slate’s Fred Kaplan asserted, “Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

People shouldn’t have been surprised.

The Oval Office encounter was expected to be an on-camera meeting between the president and the Ukrainian head of state before the signing of a crucial minerals deal between the two countries that was meant to be a key step toward ending the war in Ukraine.

But as reporters described it, the initially routine meeting devolved into a “fiery exchange” in which Trump and Vice President JD Vance “berated” and “harangued” Zelenskyy after he pushed back on Vance’s assertion that Trump’s diplomatic skills would ensure that Russian President Vladimir Putin would honor a ceasefire agreement.

Trump’s compulsion to dominate both allies and enemies seems to have caused him to jettison the negotiation the moment that Zelenskyy declined to perform subservient fealty. The meeting, which was ended by Trump with no agreement signed, illustrated why authoritarians are lousy dealmakers, particularly when autocratic instincts are exacerbated by what’s known as toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is a version of masculinity that discourages empathy, expresses strength through dominance, normalizes violence against women and associates leadership with white patriarchy. It devalues behaviors considered to be “feminine” and suggests that the way to earn others’ respect is to accrue power and status.

As a communication scholar who studies gender and politics, I have written about Trump’s displays of toxic masculinity and authoritarian tendencies in a variety of situations, during and after his first presidential term.

Trump’s reaction to Zelenskyy in the Oval Office illustrates how these inclinations stymie the president’s purported dealmaking abilities, undermine democratic values and make the world a more dangerous place.

Excerpts from the Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting, featuring U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.