In August, the U.S. reached its highest-ever debt level: $40 trillion. As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), it now stands at about 123%. The Republican controlled House Budget Committee reported that our debt now exceeds the size of the U.S. economy.

It surpasses the historic peak following World War II, when the debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio was 122%.

Total debt is referred to as gross debt because it combines debt held by the public and intragovernmental debt (money the government owes to its own internal trust funds, such as Social Security and Medicare). Public debt is bought and sold in the marketplace, with current foreign holdings accounting for about 32% of the federal public debt. The three largest countries holding our debt, in order of size, are Japan, the UK, and China, totaling $2.7 trillion.

The parties feud over who is responsible for our current debt. The Republicans issued a statement through the House Budget Committee accusing “Bidenflation” of causing Americans to feel the pain of higher prices at the grocery store or at the pump over the last four years, without mentioning that about half that time President Donald J. Trump was in office. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on Bloomberg TV and put it bluntly: “People are drowning in this failed Trump economy.”

Aside from the political debate, the reality is that United States budgets have grown exponentially faster than revenue since 1981, during Ronald Reagan’s two administrations. From 1950 to 1975, under both Democrats and Republicans, America kept the debt-to-GDP ratio below 20%.

We recovered from the post-World War II debt because the United States was the world’s leading manufacturer. We produced just over 50% of all products worldwide. Our major competitors, the Europeans, found their countries’ infrastructure destroyed by the war. America dominated the world, not only in military strength but also in economic productivity.

The world’s economy grew, and so did our competition, to the point that the U.S. share of global manufacturing output is about 17%. Meanwhile, China now ranks as the world’s largest manufacturer, producing about 31% of the world’s manufactured goods. As a result, U.S. budget deficits cannot be reduced as quickly as they were in the three decades after World War II, even though the U.S. federal budget ran a deficit in 22 of the 30 years from 1946 to 1975 inclusive. And from 1947 to 1974, the deficit didn’t exceed 20%.

So, budget deficits have been the norm since WWII, not balanced budgets. Nevertheless, Americans should be concerned that President Donald J. Trump, with the backing of the Republican-controlled Congress, has accelerated the burden of historically high debt payments on our country.

Trump’s two terms have each had the highest percentage of public debt as a portion of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since the end of WWII. In 1946, the ratio of our public debt to GDP reached 106%; in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term, it was 100%. Public debt currently accounts for 80% of the total debt.

By the end of the first fiscal year of Trump’s second term in 2026, debt is just above 100%, even though COVID is no longer an economic threat. Without including Trump’s $1.5 trillion Fiscal Year 2027 defense budget proposal, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that public debt will reach 107% in less than 3 years.

Over the past three weeks, I have searched for an explanation of how the world’s richest country now has the largest debt. Numerous articles from both the right and the left describe the seriousness of the situation and assign blame to their opponents.

Journalists and politicians from both sides of the political spectrum present inconsistent and misleading data, such as the following:

- The word “debt” may not be identified as either gross or public debt. I explained the differences earlier.

- The time frame used to measure debt associated with a president is inconsistent; sometimes it is an administration’s calendar years, and other times it’s their fiscal years.

The time period for measuring a president’s contribution to the debt could be either their fiscal years or calendar years in office. Fiscal years begin on October 1^st and end the following year on September 30. As a result, the first nine months of a newly elected president’s term are spent inheriting the budget from the prior year. Comparing debt from different sources is inaccurate if the data does not refer to the same time period.

- Some graphs show changes in the federal deficit by president, which does not measure debt. This implies that a particular president either contributed to or reduced gross debt.

Explanation of the Above Table

The first column after each president shows their actual calendar term, from Jan. 20 of the inauguration year to Jan. 20 of the departure year. This time frame applies to all the data.

The second column comes from data collected in the A-Mark Foundation’s report, “U.S. Presidents and the Federal Deficit.” This column’s data has been presented, by itself, on Facebook and other social media to illustrate that Republicans are largely responsible for the national debt.

The numbers are correct; however, the methodology uses only two data points for each president’s Fiscal Years, which run from a president’s first budget FY (October 1 of the first year in office) to that president’s final FY budget (September 30 of the year after he left office). The problem isn’t using 2 single fiscal year balances, but that It leads the reader to mistakenly assume the single measurement measuring their difference shows which presidents reduced or increased public debt while in office.

The A-Mark report implies that the Democrats reduced deficits and therefore public debt, but it ignores the total debt accumulated over a president’s term. The nominal amounts listed for each president are not totals of all deficits in that president’s term.

The third column shows that the nominal amount of public debt grew in every president’s term. The news doesn’t look so good for the Democrats. The total public debt increase under the Republicans was $13.45 T, and for Democrats it was $14.49 T. If you break it down by the number of terms served by each party, the public debt per term comes to $2.24 T for Rs and $3.62 T for Ds.

The fourth column also shows a nominal amount gross debt increase in every president’s term. The total gross debt increase under the Republicans was $17.077 T, and for Democrats it was $18.345 T. If you break it down by the number of terms served by each party, the gross debt per term comes to $2.85 T for Rs and $4.59 T for Ds.

For columns 3 and 4, the period uses debt changes measured using the quarterly Treasury observation closest to each president’s actual January 20 inauguration and departure dates. Data originates from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Treasury Bulletin series, as reported by FRED: Federal Debt Held by the Public (FYGFDPUN) and Federal Debt: Total Public Debt (GFDEBTN).

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Bottom Line

This chart provides a necessary baseline for a critical discussion of how each administration spent taxpayer dollars, resulting in a $40 trillion debt. We know the exponential increase in debt began during Reagan’s two terms, when the national debt nearly tripled, rising from a gross federal debt of $965 billion to $2.741 trillion.

This table’s numbers were affected by numerous variables. Consequently, it is important to examine the conditions and policies that led to the national debt during each president’s term. To judge the merit of a growing national debt, one must ask whether the borrowed funds are improving or burdening citizens’ lives. Part II of this exploration of the national debt will attempt to answer Why Does America Have a $40 Trillion Debt?

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a former Seattle City Council President.

Todd Blanche exiting a press conference outside Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where his client, President Donald Trump, was charged with 34 felony counts

The Epstein files are the Achilles’ heel for Republican Senators this November, and their vote to confirm Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General is the Democrats’ populist arrow that could topple them.

Populist-oriented voters are up for grabs.

Although polls have repeatedly shown that most voters believe there is a wealth gap between them and the top 1% (see Congress Can Reverse America’s Growing Wealth Disparity), that is only the tip of the iceberg of their dissatisfaction with our society. Many see America as ruled by an elite that disrespects them. As recently as 2024, an Ipsos Global Advisor survey found that 69% of Americans believe the political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.

Democrats don’t realize that a large swath of Republican and conservative independent voters care about the elite class getting away with escapades that would land any of them in jail. They have a populist attitude about exposing this elite class for being above common decency, more so than compensating the Capitol Hill insurrectionists or allowing Trump and his family an exemption from paying their taxes.

Populist discontent among Republicans and conservative independents is evident in polls about the release of all government files related to Epstein. A PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans (67%) wanted all the Epstein files released, and a separate YouGov survey found 73–80% of Republicans wanted the same.

The Epstein files are different for the Republican supporter base like no other issue because they reflect a basic populist tenet that political and economic elites operate under different social norms than everyone else. It is not a partisan issue; it’s about not trusting government to treat elites the same as everyone else, and it is not so much about detailed policy issues.

Senate Republicans’ vote to confirm Blanche as the Attorney General opens the door for Democrats to address the concerns of 53% of Republican voters. According to the YouGov survey, these voters believe the government is covering up evidence about Epstein to protect the elites.

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Democrats’ campaigns are not reaching out to disaffected populists.

Although Senate Democrats note that Blanche refused to release all the Epstein Files, they are not treating it as a campaign issue to attract the populist base they critically need to win elections. The closest Democrats come to capturing the populist spirit that sustains the MAGA movement is to call for a fair tax on the rich. But Democrats have been banging that drum for years, and nothing has changed. Democrats running for Congress must open their eyes and minds to the fact that the Epstein Files are the soft underbelly of Republican candidates because Republicans are keeping them from the public.

Instead, Democrats have focused on objecting to Blanche over two main issues. First, his role in the IRS tax-audit settlement that grants special audit protections to Trump and retroactivity for his Trump-affiliated businesses. Second, his role in providing a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” payout fund for Trump allies.

Democrats don’t realize that a large swath of Republican and conservative independent voters care about the elite class getting away with escapades that would land any of them in jail. They care more about exposing an elite class for being above common decency than about compensating the Capitol insurrectionists or granting Trump and his family an exemption from paying their taxes.

What will motivate these voters is not to allow elites to flaunt their immunity from being called out for violating the most vulnerable in their community, young girls who are used and then tossed aside by old white men.

Senate machinations will force an early vote to confirm Blanche.

Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) capitulated to President Donald Trump’s demand that Blanche be confirmed immediately. With the Senate scheduled to leave the Capitol on Monday or soon after, the confirmation vote must occur before then. That leaves little to no time to persuade Republicans to vote against or abstain from Blanche’s confirmation.

Cornyn and Tillis claimed victory in stopping the payout fund by getting Blanche to write a memo stating he would not have the DOJ pursue it, though he could later rationalize doing so. However, Cornyn and Tillis are now supporting Blanche without pushing to drop the IRS tax-audit settlement. And they have stopped talking about the Epstein Files.

Cornyn and Tillis are leaving open seats because they will not be running for office in November. They had been expected to be easily won by another Republican. However, the Cook Political Report classified both seats as trending toward a Democratic advantage. There is some restlessness among voters for meaningful change. This is an opportunity to reach out to those who would not normally vote for a Democrat.

Blanche is the poster child for protecting a corrupt elite.

Democrats have not highlighted that Republican Senators are protecting powerful men who were guests of Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting prostitution and procuring minors for prostitution. Blanche is directly responsible for hiding the Epstein files from the public. A vote to confirm him is a vote to keep the files hidden from the public to protect the rich and powerful.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee that then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was “in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” In effect, he directed redaction training and privilege determinations regarding who should not be disclosed as an Epstein guest.

Congress was under intense pressure from both left- and right-wing voters, leading to the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R. 4405), with only 1 dissenting vote in the House and unanimous passage in the Senate. The law required the U.S. Attorney General to make all unclassified Department of Justice records, communications, and investigative materials publicly available in a searchable, downloadable format.

According to senior United States District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (appointed to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in 1992 by George H.W. Bush), the DOJ has ignored the express intent of this requirement. This past month, Judge Sullivan ordered the DOJ to turn over unredacted or less redacted versions of the Epstein files, rejecting the department’s arguments for secrecy. Sullivan also concluded that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche essentially admitted violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to address allegations from independent journalist Katie Phang in a lawsuit seeking broader access to the records.

What we have here is more than just “a failure to communicate.” We have direct obstruction of a law that every member of Congress, except one, voted for. Voting to confirm Todd Blanche allows an elite class of wealthy and influential men to avoid recognition and possible indictment based on what is currently in the Epstein files.

Members who vote to confirm Blanche are guilty of obstructing the law, not to comfort the weak or average citizen, but to protect our most elite class of citizens. It appears that all but one or two Republicans will vote to bury the Epstein files by confirming Blanche, who has already acted to do so.

What can Democrats do about it? They can make it a populist campaign issue to throw the scoundrels out for violating the law and family values.

Control of the Senate comes down to appealing to populist voters

If the Republicans lose 4 or more seats and the Democrats lose no seats, the Democrats will take a majority control of the Senate. Democrats have been running on a range of issues, from social justice to affordability, many of which also link to Trump’s corruption and his Iran War. But they have largely ignored campaigning on the issue of the Epstein files.

If the Senate is to have a Democratic majority, it must reach out to voters who would abandon support for the Republican candidates if it were made clear that those Republicans are siding with the carefree values of the elites, not with those held by an average citizen’s sense of responsibility to the community.

Unfortunately, none of the campaign websites for the following Democratic Senate candidates, whether challenging vulnerable incumbent Senators or running for open seats, mention the Epstein Files:

· Alaska - Mary Peltola

· Iowa - Josh Turek

· Maine - Troy Jackson

· Michigan - Abdul El-Sayed

· North Carolina - Roy Cooper

· Ohio - Sherrod Brown

· Texas - James Talarico

· Utah - John Curtis

When Graham Platner was a Senate candidate, he made the release of the Epstein files a central theme of his campaign. As of today, his replacement, Troy Jackson, has not pursued that issue.

Although Democratic Senate candidates have not used the Epstein files to reach out to disaffected Republicans or conservative independents, Democrats and allies of some of those candidates have done so on their behalf. In Iowa, incumbent Republican Senator Ashley Hinson was attacked for her initial opposition to releasing the files. Democrats supporting Ohio’s Sherrod Brown have run ads tying Republicans to what they call the “Epstein class.”

However, none of these candidates have matched Georgia incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff’s level of engagement on this issue. At campaign rallies, he has referred to “the Epstein class” as a symbol of wealthy elites receiving special treatment and has repeatedly called for full disclosure of the files.

Republicans’ biggest Super PACs plan to spend $40 million to unseat Ossoff because he consistently leads Republican challenger Representative Mike Collins. Ossoff’s populist emphasis on tying Republicans to defending an Epstein class appears to be appealing to voters who have supported Trump in the past, as he is the only Democrat running for reelection in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024.

Bottom Line

If the Democrats wish to win enough seats to become the majority in the Senate, they cannot rely solely on voters who have often heard their promises of greater social justice and economic opportunities. Those issues will generate support from their base, but they are not a sufficiently populist message to attract new voters. If candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson run as progressives or as populists, they need to go beyond appealing to liberal voters.

They need to feel the pent-up anger that many working people have toward a system that has failed to meet the expectations Democrats have repeatedly offered. Democratic candidates don’t seem to understand that offering good policies backed by data and logical solutions doesn’t address the gut feeling many voters have of being disrespected by an elite that appears to run this country.

Democrats need to attract voters who feel abandoned by the Republicans. If the Democrats are to appeal to them, they must recognize that this country has a significant social divide between the wealthy and wage earners. And it is a cultural divide, even more so than a divide of wealth.

The Epstein files revealed the cultural divide more than any other event in the past decade. Any senator who voted to confirm Todd Blanche was voting to shield an elite from accountability in our justice system, which applies to all of us. That is the populist message the Democrats need to send.

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Congress can reverse America’s Wealth Disparity. But we must determine whether the public cares and, if so, whether they are aware that it affects their living conditions.

Do we have extreme disparity in wealth? Does anyone notice or care?

Everyone expects there to be differences in wealth and income among Americans, as is true of citizens of other developed countries. Many of us do not expect to be among the richest. Even so, what happens when wealth accumulates to the point that the richest 1% of Americans hold nearly one-third of the nation’s total net worth? That is what we have in 2025.

Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote, “Something has gone wrong here in the U.S. We now have a wider wealth gap between rich and poor than in any other major developed nation.”

However, when measured across all households, U.S. income inequality is comparable to that of other developed countries before taxes and transfers. Nevertheless, after taxes are paid and benefits are provided to lower-income families and business owners, such as tax write-offs, the U.S. becomes one of the highest in income inequality. In other words, the rich receive far more benefits than the poor on welfare; essentially, higher-income households in other developed countries transfer more wealth to their lower-income households.

Analysts and consumers have noticed that since President Ronald Reagan’s two administrations, income and wealth disparity has been growing. It may not be coincidental, since his kitchen cabinet consisted of 16 millionaires who recommended appointees to his cabinet. That was a time when millionaires had the financial and political clout that billionaires have today.

An Economist/YouGov poll from January 2026 found that half of Americans (52%) say the gap between rich and poor is a very big problem. The conservative American Enterprise Institute reviewed Gallup polling from Reagan’s last term onward and found that 60% have consistently agreed that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed.

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If there is an extreme disparity in wealth, how does it impact our lives?

The gap between the richest and average citizens is the same as it was right before the Great Depression began a hundred years ago. That calamity was tied to the stock market’s collapse. There are currently more protections in place to prevent that phenomenon from recurring, and we have a sturdier social safety net.

Nevertheless, the significant income gap between the average citizen and the wealthiest during the 1920s was due in part to rapid productivity and corporate profits growth, while employees saw their wages decline in purchasing power. Consequently, our economy increasingly depended on wage earners taking on greater debt rather than on having more income to meet their basic needs. This is the pattern we see today in America.

Overall, the bottom half of households hold nearly zero net wealth, and many carry debt that exceeds the value of their assets just to afford a decent standard of living. It’s hardest for the poor. In 2016, the bottom 20% of the population had an average income of $15,600; the top 20% earned $280,300. Income disparity also extends into the highest income bracket, with the top 1% earning $1.8 million per year and owning 32% of all US wealth.

This huge gap in income and wealth between half of our citizens and the wealthiest undermines the stability of our consumer-dependent economy. As of the second quarter of 2025, the top 10% of income earners accounted for nearly half of all U.S. consumer spending, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Since consumer spending drives about 70% of U.S. GDP, if one-tenth of households suddenly and significantly reduce their spending, the average citizen will suffer the most, as jobs disappear if a recession sets in.

In the US, the top 10% own roughly 90% of all publicly traded stocks, which make up about 45% of these households’ personal asset portfolios and are closely tied to the AI-driven stock rally. A big chunk of the “growth” in the economy, as measured and publicly cited as a sign that the economy is booming, is really a wealth effect from the portfolios of the wealthiest, not the paychecks of working Americans. If the AI stock rally stalls or dives, AI shareholders may well dump the stock and cause a ripple effect throughout the economy if there is fear of a shrinking economy.

Lower take-home pay is already underway, as evidenced by the fact that consumer spending among middle-income households (40th–60th percentile) has leveled off over the past two years, while consumer prices are up roughly 25% since 2020. As a result, most households are losing ground. While aggregate GDP and retail sales numbers can look healthy, most people experience stagnation or decline in their incomes and wealth.

What do voters want of Congress?

Constitutionally, Congress has the authority to levy and collect taxes. This is the linchpin for maintaining a stable economic system that a democracy must have to sustain its operations. And just as importantly, it helps bolster cultural acceptance of democratic governance as the preferred form of government.

Congress, being elected more often than a president, represents an ongoing regional mix of citizens’ concerns. But unlike a president, it is subject to multiple points of view in reaching a final decision. This is an internal negotiation that occurs among Congressional members.

In the Congressional debates that unfold, it is expected that popular beliefs and needs will rise to the top of Congress’s agenda for action. This has not been what has been happening with regard to the widespread concern about the concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

In the past 40 years, poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans support taxing the rich. As recently as January 2026, 59% said the federal government should reduce the wealth gap, while only 21% said it shouldn’t. Although Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided, 57% of independent voters said the government should. However, as the AEI noted, despite consistent popular support, that support becomes fragmented when specific policy mechanisms are proposed, such as wealth taxes, redistribution, and regulation.

Lost in Congressional debates is an effort to overhaul an unfair tax system that continues to widen wealth and income disparities. Over the last 35 years, Congress, under both parties, has gradually lowered marginal tax rates, resulting in the top 1 percent seeing their incomes reach new heights. Meanwhile, Congress has pushed for the importation of cheaper goods, greater automation, and restrictions on organized labor that would hinder these trends.

One can understand why public approval of Congress has averaged around 30% on Gallup during that time. Under both President Joe Biden’s term and Trump’s current term, hope for what Congress could accomplish peaked in each president’s first quarter, reaching Congressional approval of 36% under Biden and 31% under Trump. Congress’s rating plummeted under both administrations after the first quarter, reaching 12% for Biden in his last quarter and 10% this past April for Trump.

The numbers will continue to fluctuate for Trump, but the pattern is clear: the public doesn’t approve of Congress, and they expect the President to work with it to make America more affordable.

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Congress has the power to close the disparity gap in wealth.

Gabriela Sandoval, the Executive Director of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute (EWDI), provides a report on six taxes that Congress could enact to stem the steady shift of wealth from the top 10% of citizens and redirect it to the other 90%. Taxes are the most direct approach, though not all are equally effective or popular.

Among the six explored (the billionaire tax, wealth tax, raising the top marginal tax rate, millionaire surtax, capital gains taxes, and the estate tax and related dynasty trust reform), the billionaire tax is the easiest to explain and the most acceptable to the public. Consequently, it will be reviewed here, since discussions of the others require more detailed descriptions. An Inequality.org meta-analysis of more than 55 polls found that a billionaire income tax averaged 67% support, including 84% of Democrats, 64% of independents, and 51% of Republicans — the highest cross-partisan support among any wealth-tax variant they tracked.

President Joe Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax proposal (BMIT) is the model that was introduced into Congress. It would have required those who own at least $100 million (approximately the richest 0.01% or about 20,000 households) to pay an effective tax rate of at least 20%. In comparison, the median US wage worker pays an effective total federal tax rate of approximately 16% on their gross income. However, billionaires earn income from investments, not from hours in the office or shop as wage workers do; in addition, they have more spendable income to cover not only their basic needs but also any other needs they desire.

With such broad support, why did the BMIT legislation never receive a vote in Congress? Biden and Congressional Democrats either lacked a strategy to pass it or didn’t make a serious effort. Although Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House for the first two years of Biden’s administration, the BMIT was not introduced until the last two years, when they no longer controlled the House.

It’s typical for the President’s party to do poorly in the midterm elections. Democrats were proud to have kept the Republicans to a slim majority. Still, they lost control of the House, leaving no chance of passing any BMIT legislation with the Republicans in control. The Democrats should have pushed for BMIT while they had a majority in both houses. Instead, they pushed for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which, although it had received between 55% and 70% public support, not a single Republican voted for it. The IRA did pass, and BMIT could have as well by the same count.

Any progressive tax legislation, such as the BMIT or the other five tax options, will not pass Congress as long as Republicans control one of the chambers. Despite half of Republican voters supporting generic progressive tax legislation, taxing billionaires will not pass for two reasons.

First, Republican legislators receive roughly 80% of billionaires’ political spending, which supports GOP candidates in the midterm elections, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings cited by Fortune. Second, the Democrats need to connect the dots between billionaires and the public policies they promote, which make life harder for more than half of Americans.

For Democrats, this is not about pushing socialism as a solution; it’s about pushing for a democratic government that is not another commodity to be purchased. It’s about doing grassroots organizing in rural, as well as urban, communities that are being hurt by policies that benefit only the few, but not them or their neighbors.

Voters must deliver a message to Congress that they are obligated to protect all citizens’ interests above those of the wealthiest.

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Socialist Party Leader Eugene Debs in 1912

LATEST Update on DSA'S New proposal for drastic governmental changes

DSA has finally revealed on its website what dramatic governmental changes it is promoting. As previously noted, it would be to eliminate the U.S. Senate and replace the President and the Supreme Court with an Executive and a Judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, a new Congress.

However, there was no mention of when a vote was taken to adopt this as the new DSA program. The decision simply came down from their National Political Committee (NPC). Although the authors of this measure say they worked on the draft for months and “involved the political breadth of our big tent organization,” it is unclear who selected the members who drafted this platform.

The final decision to pursue these changes was not approved by DSA’s National Convention but instead by a majority of 27 members of their National Political Committee. Five factions are represented in the NPC, and it appears that the majority believe “radical change brought about by workers to transform culture and the economy” is necessary.

If this is DSA's permanent decision-making process, it could easily breed the top-down decision-making of the old Soviet model of Democratic Centralism: policy is derived from a small upper-level central committee and then executed by larger lower-level bodies, such as a convention or an assembly of “workers.” It will be interesting to see whether any objections to the new program are expressed at DSA's National Organizing Conference on July 31st in Chicago.

The piece below is the same as before; nothing else has changed, although it goes into greater detail than this short update.

There is a power struggle within the Democratic Party. It is often framed as a clash between far-leftists and moderate Democrats. That framing is simplistic and inaccurate. It only reinforces stereotypes about each faction and does not lead to a better understanding of the dynamics shaping this struggle.

The clash is essentially between democratic socialists and social Democrats. Many Democrats, inside and outside the party, may not subscribe to either orientation. But the conflict between these two orientations will determine the party’s future.

The root of their disagreement is reflected in the labels for each group that promote democracy and social welfare. Democracy is a process for achieving a range of objectives. Socialism is both an objective to achieve and a condition to maintain.

For Democratic socialists, democracy is a means to achieving socialism. The objective is to build a democratic socialist society. The Democratic Socialists of America is pushing the Democratic Party to adopt the principles articulated in DSA’s platform.

As with all ideologies, socialism has many interpretations and proponents of those interpretations. Nevertheless, the baseline for socialists is the concept of creating a more perfect society. Socialism is an aspiration much more than a process, whereas democracy is a process through which aspirations are pursued.

Democratic socialists and social democrats share objectives, including a more equitable distribution of resources. It is an established socialist belief that it’s both possible and necessary to achieve a sustainable state in which economic equality, social justice, and peaceful harmony prevail. Social democrats recognize conflict as a permanent condition underlying the democratic process. There is no final, harmonious paradise, only a constant journey toward one, without assuming a perfect, stable destination.

Socialism, as interpreted by DSA and many who consider themselves socialists, holds that a socialist state is possible when capitalism is replaced with workers’ control of the trifecta of power, which is the means of force, access to resources, and dominant beliefs (see A Paradigm of How POWER Works). In this narrative, there is a conflict between the capitalist and worker classes over the acquisition of those powers.

The Social Democrats are at a disadvantage compared to the Democratic Socialists because they lack a clear goal for victory. They do not subscribe to the notion of an inherent class conflict that will lead to the end of the marketplace and a capitalist class. Unlike socialists, they accept that there will always be a marketplace and private property (see A Rational View of Capitalism vs Socialism in America & History).

But Social Democrats also believe the marketplace must be regulated to address the social and economic needs of all people. They want more equality, not in the form of equal outcomes, but in the form of fair opportunities for all to improve their lives and to be protected from discrimination based on the color of their skin, gender, beliefs, or culture. In other words, diversity in these areas is accepted as a permanent condition that a democratic society accepts and protects.

Consequently, social democrats’ social policies are not based on class conflict but on the assumption that a democratic process, equally accessible to all citizens, can lead to ongoing improvement in their material and social conditions.

DSA is the primary organization challenging the perceived lethargy and incompetence of the Democratic Party’s policies, similar to what social democratic parties have promoted in Europe.

How big is the DSA? How effective has it been at gaining support for its candidates? And what government and economic changes does it propose?

How big is the Democratic Socialists of America?

DSA announced on social media X that it recently surpassed 120,000 members, calling itself “the largest socialist organization in United States history.” Previously, the Socialist Party of America, under Eugene Debs, reached its peak in dues-paying membership in 1912, with 113,000 members. Keep in mind that America’s population is now more than three and a half times larger, so, to be comparable in size, DSA would need to have over 420,000 members.

Another comparison could be drawn with the fastest-growing group in the Republican camp, the reactionary Turning Point USA student organization (see The unspoken label for a growing political movement is “Reactionary”). A ChatGPT review of all relevant data indicates that TP USA currently has about 50,000 active, dues-paying student members nationwide. TP USA claims 650,000 lifetime student members; however, this is a cumulative total over the organization’s history, not current membership.

How effective has DSA been in electoral politics?

DSA was founded in 1982 and had 6,000 members in 2015. It wasn’t organized to endorse or campaign for candidates. Rather, as initially led by Michael Harrington, DSA’s formal “strategy” was to realign the Democratic Party further to the left by working from within. When Senator Bernie Sanders ran in the 2016 presidential campaign as a self-identified democratic socialist, membership grew by more than 100,000.

Since 2016, DSA has endorsed and canvassed for candidates who align with its values, including Democrats, independents, and third-party candidates. Nevertheless, its most notable successes have come from challenging incumbent Democrats in high-profile races and securing victories for its candidates as democratic socialists. These include U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib (both elected in 2018) and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (elected in 2025).

As of 2025, over 250 DSA members were elected to public office across 40 states. That’s a lot, but one must consider that there are over 500,000 elected public offices, including 537 federal and roughly 7,000 state legislators. In comparison, there are 3,200 state legislators and hundreds of mayors in the nation’s major cities who are declared members of the Democratic Party. DSA has a long way to go to have a national impact, despite President Donald Trump and the Republican Party broadcasting that their elections are a national security threat.

Their successes have largely been concentrated in large, democratic cities. DSA members hold seven of 50 seats in Chicago, four of 12 in Portland, Oregon, four of 13 in Minneapolis, and four of 15 in Los Angeles.^[72] By winning elections in major cities, DSA benefits from national media coverage, and consequently, its importance and its message for change are amplified many times over those of an organization of its size.

But candidates who call themselves democratic socialists may not be DSA members or even receive DSA’s endorsement. For instance, Katie Wilson, who self-identifies as a socialist, won the election for Mayor of Seattle, running against a moderate incumbent. Individual DSA members supported her, but she did not receive DSA’s official endorsement. DSA refused because she was not willing to commit to the organization’s formal “party strategy” and strict platform requirements.

So, what does DSA stand for? Looking at their platform is a good place to begin. Still, traditionally, party platforms, while consisting of core statements of beliefs and goals, are aspirational, not binding, and not comparable to contracts. DSA’s platform is a mix of sweeping objectives and specific changes to pursue.

Highlights of the DSA Platform

The general tone of DSA reflects the classic narrative of 19th-century socialist founders, beginning with Karl Marx. Its five-page Platform’s Preamble & Mission Statement nicely summarizes its major objectives. Workers are identified as its constituency a dozen times, and that emphasis continues throughout the remaining 15 pages of its platform.

In comparison, the 2024 92-page Democratic Party platform mentions workers frequently, though not as often, with no mention of the “working class” and more than half a dozen mentions of the “middle-class”. As expected, DSA makes no mention of the middle-class, but the working-class is scattered throughout.

DSA’s mission is that “working people should have power over our lives, and that includes a government and economy by and for the working class.” This raises the question of who represents the working class. If you go down the road of the two most prominent countries that tried to develop a socialist society, Russia and China, that would be the socialist party.

DSA sees itself as “a working-class alternative to the Democratic Party, capitalists, Democrats, and the far right” that “perpetuate violence and injustice at home and abroad.” As such, it “stands against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests.” Basically, it’s class warfare, and DSA is leading it. Not sure how that’s going to go over as a campaign slogan – but hey, they got DSA members elected in the big blue cities.

The rest of the DSA platform is divided into four sections outlining what they are fighting for: working-class communities, an economy for the working class, a working-class foreign policy, and a working-class democracy.

Choosing just one specificity from each of the above sections, we would have the following. For working-class communities, universal healthcare with no premiums, co-pays, or deductibles. For a working-class economy, a 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay or benefits. For a working-class foreign policy, end economic sanctions that affect the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. For a working-class democracy, replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote for President.

These are aspirations, not detailed programs for amending the Constitution, balancing the budget, or enforcing the measures through the federal government. That gap would likely be highlighted by voters, the public media, and candidates running against DSA members.

Could DSA take over the Democratic Party?

This question is existential for some Democrats, like Jonathan Cowan, President of Third Way. He argues that the far-leftDSA is poised to take over the Democratic Party if it isn’t stopped. That is stretching the imagination, even though DSA’s mission statement says, “an independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority is necessary,” implying that it could be them or they could take over the Democratic Party.

Cowan’s main point is that the DSA’s program will turn off voters and cause Democrats to lose elections in swing districts or states. He cites the slogan “defund the police,” which few Democratic candidates endorsed, as an example. Cowan concluded that it “helped lead to a dozen unexpected House losses for the party. The DSA’s rise could do the same. Every viral statement from a socialist will become a mailer in the swing districts.”

“The DSA’s main target isn’t moderate incumbents but progressives,” Cowan notes, pointing to Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) who lost re-election to a DSA challenger. The CPC has nearly 100 members who promote progressive ideals, grounded in the belief that “government must be the great equalizer of opportunity for everyone.”

The closest CPC has to a platform is its Progressive Promise. There is a significant difference between CPC’s Progressive Promise and DSA’s platform in what they hope to accomplish.

The DSA embraces the traditional socialist future of a worker-controlled government without capitalism. CPC makes no mention of doing so; it is committed to regulating the marketplace to ensure a satisfactory level of welfare for all. Income inequality and racial justice are listed as CPC’s objectives; DSA makes no mention of them in its preamble or mission statement. Instead of reforming the economic system, DSA declares that the “capitalist economic system is the cause of violence, unemployment, and a climate crisis,” and that it needs to be abolished.

However, evaluating DSA solely by its published positions may not accurately reflect its members’ beliefs. This is because DSA has a decentralized structure, with local chapters and ideological caucuses enjoying significant autonomy.Like all political organizations, it will have factions spanning the left-to-right political spectrum. The beliefs an organization promotes depend on who controls its equivalent of an executive board.

DSA has a 25-member National Political Committee (NPC) that serves as an executive board and is elected at its national convention every two years. The majority faction on the NPC promotes revolutionary socialism, which opposes social movements that seek to gradually ameliorate capitalism’s economic and social problems through political reform.“Revolutionary” action is understood as a radical change brought about by workers to transform culture and the economy. Violence is not necessary, but it is not excluded as a last resort for achieving a non-capitalist state.

Bottom Line

DSA is not a national threat, and it will not take over the Democratic Party. It has, however, tapped into the national anger against established authorities who appear unable to adjust the economic system to meet their daily needs.

That may be why, according to a Fox News poll this past March, 49% of registered voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, described capitalism as working “not very” or “not at all” well. CNN cited a Marquette Law School poll showing that DSA now has higher favorability than sitting congressional Democrats among Democratic voters and leaners.

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, aptly summarizes the Democratic Party’s major problem as having “lost the plot” broadly, becoming mired in niche concerns rather than mainstream voter priorities. DSA may be a serious problem for the Democrats if it hinders their chances of winning swing districts. However, spending time trying to kill the squeaky canary in the coal mine isn’t the solution - it’s getting the hell out of the mine to live another day.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a former Seattle City Council President.

It is more likely that President Donald J. Trump was driven by his vanity rather than by the necessity of stopping Iran from attacking America when he bombed Iran and started a war.

There were no grounds for the necessity of starting a war.

After the initial wave of strikes against Iran, Trump cited an “imminent threat” to the US. His officials said we acted in response to potential preemptive attacks by Iran on forces in the region. However, Pentagon officials briefing Congress later contradicted these claims, saying that Iran was not planning to attack unless struck first.

Joe Kent is Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Trump personally endorsed and backed Kent when Kent ran for Congress. Kent promoted the claim that Trump won the 2020 election and campaigned for Trump’s America First foreign policy agenda.

Nevertheless, he resigned as director on March 17, 2026, just over two weeks after Israel and the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, military sites, and government compounds. He believed he could no longer serve the nation faithfully and publicly refuted Trump’s initial rationale for starting the war, writing on X that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

As a narcissist, Trump can never admit he made a mistake, so he doubled down. He repeatedly claimed that Iran, a theocratic autocracy for 47 years, had been terrorizing the US and the Middle East. He also said Iran had been funding armed Palestinian rebellions against Israel, killing innocent civilians in the process. Nevertheless, according to our top military and intelligence officials,

Iran was not capable of attacking America with conventional or nuclear weapons. Therefore, a full-scale bombardment, possibly followed by a military invasion of Iran, was unnecessary.

Trump’s narcissistic personality, not reason, controls his decisions.

Vanity refers to excessive pride, an excessively high opinion of oneself, and an intense craving for admiration and recognition. In medical terms, if it is a compulsive behavior, it would be recognized as a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

This is a real mental health illness. The medical community believes that 5% of the population exhibit pervasive patterns of grandiosity. This can cause significant functional impairment and lead to impulsive decisions because they are incapable of seeing beyond their own false beliefs. This can lead to starting a needless war.

Trump is fixated on surpassing Obama as a peacemaker.

Trump’s vindictive narcissism centered on how a black man with an Arab-sounding name, i.e., Barack Obama, could be more powerful than he was. As the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, Trump dismissed Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize and later said the Nobel Committee “gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.” One could also see Trump leaning into racism when he posted on his Truth Social platform a depiction of Obama and Michelle Obama as apes, a racist trope historically used to dehumanize Black people.

Given these intensely personal, ongoing attacks on Obama’s legacy, it’s easy to imagine that Trump believed bombing Iran, even if it started a war, would demonstrate that he was willing to eliminate Iran’s “Repressive, Militarist Theocracy,” whereas Obama didn’t have the ability to subdue them.

Trump wanted to produce proof that he was a greater leader than Obama, since Obama’s JCPOA left Iran’s regime intact, still holding some ballistic missiles and enriched uranium. However, both resources greatly expanded after Trump pulled out of Obama’s accord with Iran.

Trump’s desire to end Iran’s stream of threats and remove its leaders has been brewing since 2011. Then, as a private citizen, he said that President Barack Obama “will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.” This was before Obama signed the 2015 nuclear accord, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with Iran, along with co-signers China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the European Union.

Trump called it “defective at its core” and “one of the worst and dumbest deals ever made by the U.S.” He alone held that view; all the other signers asserted that the JCPOA was succeeding in its core objectives and that its implementation should not be

jeopardized.

Nevertheless, in May 2018, Trump had his Administration cease implementing U.S. commitments under the 2015 multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran.

He then reimposed all U.S. sanctions that had been in place before the JCPOA. President Trump said these sanctions would pressure Iran to renegotiate a better deal for America than the JCPOA. Eight years later, after failing to renegotiate a deal with Iran, Trump went to war.

Has Trump’s Vanity War provided a road to tangible benefits?

One way to assess whether this war was an imminent necessity or a vanity indulgence is to weigh what each country lost or gained in this conflict. What does the Iran-War balance sheet look like?

A few authors have addressed this question. Neil Abrams (The Detox on Substack), Edward Wong and Aruni Soni of the New York Times, and the Editorial Board of the New York Post have all provided useful information and perspectives that I have incorporated into the section below.

Military Costs:

The U.S. military costs are still being tallied as a 60-day period for further negotiations begins. In April, two independent groups estimated the Pentagon’s war costs at between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day. That estimate did not include the cost of repairing about a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.

A large share of US costs stems from the use of sophisticated, excessively expensive high-tech military weaponry, which Iran countered with just a fraction of the US costs, using comparatively cheap drones and conventional weapons. For instance, each of the 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles used cost $4 million, compared with Iran’s drones costing 1% of that price. Meanwhile, nearly half of the US stockpile of long-range stealth cruise missiles, built for a potential conflict with China, was used.

Iran has not disclosed what military resources it has lost, beyond acknowledging, as Trump said, that its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. However, it has managed to close the Strait of Hormuz using small boats, drones, mines, and onshore missiles, without needing a navy.

Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, though heavily damaged, were not eliminated. While it says its nuclear program will still be negotiated, it makes no mention of limiting Iran’s ballistic missiles. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran began uranium metal production in early 2021, after Trump withdrew from Obama’s 2015 JCPOA accord with Iran, which had prohibited Iran from producing uranium metal for 15 years because the technology has significant weapons relevance.

Human Cost:

According to the U.S., 13 military members have been killed. Lebanon’s health ministry reported that 3,800 people have been killed there since Israel renewed its attacks on Lebanon on March 18.

About 3,500 Iranians have been killed in the war, according to the Iranian government. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the longer-term punishment for their civilian population is that hundreds of schools and health care facilities were damaged or destroyed in the war.

Economic Impact: No winners

The war has affected everyone’s economy: the US, Iran, and non-involved nations. It stemmed from Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation against the US for initiating bombing them.

Cutting off about 20% of the world’s oil supply through the Strait was felt in the US, even though Trump argued we didn’t need that oil because we had enough of our own. However, Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Trackerfound that energy costs, driven mostly by rising gasoline and diesel prices, increased by $60 billion, averaging an extra $460 per American household.

Moody’s Analytics estimated that the US costs of the war in Iran are at least $132 billion, taking into account military spending, rising energy and commodity prices, and interest rates.

Iran’s economy was already deeply troubled before the war, and it is now in free fall as food and other basic goods surge in price, according to The New York Times’s Neil MacFarquhar. With unemployment high and food supplies limited, Iran’s ruling regime is under internal pressure to reach a settlement to avoid a repeat of massive protests.

Other critical resources, such as bulk/wholesale agricultural commodity prices in the Middle East, have remained 75 to 108 percent above pre-conflict levels. The chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization said the disruptions in the strait would “extend well beyond agriculture, threatening higher food prices, higher food inflation, reduced economic growth and increased hunger worldwide.”

The results to date do not constitute a victory for Trump’s war. He began the conflict, promising to set conditions for regime change in Iran, including greater freedom for its citizens and better security for US citizens against Iran’s aggression. The people of Iran will continue to be ruled by a theocratic, militarized oligarchy. Americans, as currently outlined in the MOU, will not see Iran’s nuclear threat reduced compared with the JCPOA, if not increased.

Aside from the military and human costs, the outlook for the US is not promising. The MOU contains numerous loopholes that, if left unaddressed, will allow Iran to gain more power than it has had since the Imams took control of a secular government 47 years ago.

Key elements of Trump’s MOU

Below are sections of Trump’s 14-point, 1.5-page Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was reached in a few weeks. It is an outline of what a treaty will include, to be reached at the end of 60 days. In comparison, Obama’s treaty took 20 months to reach and 160 pages to detail how to trim and regulate Iran’s nuclear material.

The future open use of the Strait of Hormuz is now in question. The MOU provided for an open Strait for only 60 days. Afterward, Trump presumably expected Iran to submit to whatever he wanted to keep it open. However, before the war, Iran had not tried to toll or block the strait. This war has now put that option on the table because Iran realizes it can close it or significantly disrupt shipping through it. This point was made clear when Iranian drones, in a one-way attack, hit 2 commercial vessels on June 25 and 26.

Iran is looking at a new cash flow that has been denied to it, since the US is now negotiating the details of how the US will “make fully available for use, the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic.” No prior administration has released its funds without conditions on their use.

In a major concession to Iran, the U.S. will immediately lift all restrictions on Iran’s oil exports. The Islamic regime has not been able to export oil freely for most of its existence, except during the brief period under Obama’s accord, which included conditions Iran had to meet.

The MOU states that the U.S. will respect Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and not interfere in its internal affairs. This directly repudiates Trump’s encouragement of Iran’s citizens to oust a regime he described as a “wicked, radical dictatorship.” So much for Trump telling Iranian citizens, “I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” in a televised address on Feb. 28. Since U.S. military strikes began on February 28, more than 6,000 protesters, journalists, and lawyers have been arrested.

Conclusion

At this point and for the foreseeable future, the US faces a greater security risk than it did during Obama’s JCPOA.

Trump’s MOU with Iran describes its first stage as Terms of Immediate Capitulation, implying that Iran was defeated by the US and surrendered unconditionally. That is propaganda aimed at Trump’s MAGA base. However, reality might be better captured by the conservative New York Post’s editorial headline: Trump’s Iran deal is worse than Obama’s.Karim Haggag, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said, “The reality is that the region in the aftermath of this conflict will be much more insecure.”

This all begs the question: Why did we fight this war if the current Iranian regime is the same one as before the war? After tallying the losses and gains, the only answer that makes sense is that President Trump stumbled into the war, believing that only he could secure a quick and complete victory, thus overshadowing President Obama’s prior accord.

As a result, Trump’s unchecked narcissism led this country into a needless war, and his Republican Party enabled him to do so. They did not challenge Trump to be accountable for protecting the country’s greater long-term interests. Republicans succumbed to Trump’s personal grandiose fantasies, which do not reflect real needs and require real work to achieve realistic results.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a former Seattle City Council President.

Introducing a Paradigm of Power

Britannica defines power as the capacity to influence or dominate others. This framework holds that power arises from three distinct yet interrelated sources: control of resources, influence over dominant beliefs, and control of the means of force. Each source represents a different form of capacity—material, ideational, and coercive—that can be used to shape outcomes.

These sources are analytically distinct but often overlap in practice. A party may draw on one, two, or all three simultaneously, and their combined use can significantly increase the likelihood of achieving a desired objective. When all three are effectively aligned, they form a trifecta of power that strengthens a party’s position relative to competing forces.

It is important to distinguish between sources of power and the mechanisms by which it is exercised. The same mechanisms—inducement, persuasion, and coercion—can be employed by different sources. Resources may induce cooperation through incentives; beliefs may persuade through legitimacy; and means of force may compel through the threat or application of harm. While all three sources can influence behavior, only the means of force enable direct and immediate compliance through harm, independent of consent, exchange, or legitimacy.

The effectiveness of any source of power depends on several factors: its availability, the skill with which it is deployed, the level of support or opposition it faces, and whether it is recognized as a source of power. In addition, each source may be in either a latent state, in which it is available but not actively used, or a kinetic state, in which it is mobilized to achieve specific ends.

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Access to Resources

The first source of power is control over resources. Resources include any material or non-material assets that can be allocated, exchanged, or withheld to influence outcomes. Controlling their distribution increases a party’s ability to achieve its objectives while limiting others’ capacity to do so.

In market economies, resources are most commonly expressed as wealth, reflecting the accumulation and control of goods, services, and capital. Although the form of wealth has evolved—from land and agricultural output to money and financial instruments—the underlying source of power remains the ability to control or access resources.

The value of resources is often set by demand, allowing them to be bought, sold, or traded as commodities. Commoditization extends beyond physical goods to include information and human capabilities. Intellectual property rights assign market value to information, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and labor can be treated as economic assets. In each case, these resources confer power by enabling their holders to influence decisions and outcomes.

Resources may also be distributed outside the marketplace through political or social institutions. Governments, communities, and religious organizations allocate resources through policies, subsidies, or charitable programs. Conversely, resources may be seized by coercion, such as theft or military action.

Like other sources of power, resources may exist in latent or kinetic forms. They may be accumulated, reserved, or unrecognized, or actively deployed to induce cooperation, reward allies, or constrain opponents. Their effectiveness depends not only on their quantity but also on how they are managed and applied.

A Dominant Belief

The second source of power is the ability to shape and sustain dominant beliefs. Beliefs provide a shared framework for interpreting the world, defining legitimacy, and coordinating behavior. When widely accepted, they enable a party to exercise power with less reliance on inducement or coercion.

Dominant beliefs strengthen cohesion within a group by unifying individuals around a common purpose and reinforcing the norms and expectations that guide behavior. They also confer symbolic and reputational power, elevating individuals and institutions as legitimate representatives of those beliefs. This legitimacy enables authority to be exercised more effectively, often without resorting to direct enforcement.

Beliefs are promoted and sustained by a range of institutions, including governments, religious organizations, and cultural communities. They are often codified in formal systems such as religious texts, laws, and constitutions, which establish rules and standards for behavior. Informal norms and shared values further reinforce these systems by shaping what is considered acceptable in society.

While beliefs can support the use of resources and force, they can also reduce the need for them by fostering voluntary compliance. When individuals accept a system as legitimate, they are more likely to follow its rules without external pressure. Conversely, when belief systems weaken or fragment, greater reliance may be placed on inducement or coercion to maintain order.

Like other sources of power, beliefs may be latent or kinetic. They may exist as a background consensus that stabilizes a system, or they may be mobilized to inspire action, justify decisions, or challenge existing authority. Their strength depends on both the depth of adherence and the breadth of acceptance within a population.

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Means of Force

The third source of power is control over the means of force. These include the tools and technologies that can directly inflict harm, compel compliance, or disable an opponent’s ability to act. Unlike resources or beliefs, which typically operate through inducement or persuasion, the means of force enable immediate compulsion through the threat or use of harm.

At the individual level, physical strength has historically been the most basic form of force, enabling a person to dominate or control others in close proximity. At the group level, organized force is expressed through policing and military capacity, enabling coordinated action that allows one group to subjugate another or defend against it.

Over time, the means of force have expanded beyond direct physical confrontation. Technological advances have introduced new forms of force that do not require physical proximity. Cyber capabilities, for example, can penetrate networks, disrupt infrastructure, and extract critical information. Although non-physical, these tools still function as means of force because they can inflict harm and compel outcomes comparable to those of conventional weapons.

While all three sources of power—resources, beliefs, and means of force—can influence behavior, only the means of force can secure direct, immediate compliance through harm. For this reason, they can rapidly disrupt or overturn the status quo, especially when legitimacy or sufficient resources are lacking.

Like other sources of power, means of force may exist in latent or kinetic forms. They may be accumulated and maintained without being used or actively deployed to achieve specific objectives. Recognizing both their presence and their readiness for use is essential to assessing the balance of power between competing parties.

Two historical examples show the importance of aligning all three powers.

Belief In a God is Not Enough

The distinction between latent and kinetic power helps explain how power operates over time. Power may lie in reserve, underestimated or unrecognized, until mobilized. Conversely, rapidly deployed power may fail if it lacks sufficient support from other sources.

The historical spread of Christianity illustrates the gradual mobilization of belief as a source of power. It took over 200 years for the power of Christian beliefs to win over the minds of the Roman Empire’s emperors, in turn securing their resources and destroying the existing belief system. The early Christian movement was strongly opposed by the state’s physical force and its dominant belief system. However, over ten generations, Christianity remained latent yet continually active, slowly gaining influence by adding adherents as a critical resource. In a critical battle, the Roman Emperor used the Christian faith to rally his troops and won, leading him to adopt it as a belief system to maintain his government.

In contrast, the Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth-century China demonstrates the limits of rapid mobilization. The 14-year-long rebellion was rooted in a cult-like belief that won over the minds of multitudes of the Chinese. Still, between 20 and 30 million died, and the rebellion failed to topple China’s two millennia of imperial rule. The movement was defeated by the emperor’s military because he had more resources, which outweighed the unaligned power of belief. The speed of the rebellion worked against the movement because its adherents lacked time to build up greater material resources and more followers.

Two modern examples of ignoring latent power

Know Where the Sleeping Dogs Lie

The role of latent power is evident in modern conflicts. A nation’s industrial capacity, social cohesion, and belief systems may seem dormant until activated under pressure. Misjudging these latent sources can lead to strategic failure, especially when one party relies too heavily on force while underestimating an opponent’s resources or beliefs.Here are two examples of how latent power has affected US foreign relations and why it is important to recognize it as a factor that could determine the outcome of a conflict.

The power of the United States was considered dormant, not latent, in the 1930s because it could not be accurately measured. The US industrial base was large but not necessarily easy to organize; likewise, the level of support in the country appeared insufficient to enter an unknown and untested war. When the US was attacked, it quickly harnessed resources and public spirit to deliver the physical force that turned the tide of World War II in its favor. The opposing Axis powers had underestimated those resources and relied too heavily on the belief that their military force alone would be sufficient to win a war against the US.

Most recently, the US perceived Iran’s power as much weaker than it proved to be because the US miscalculated the reserve power Iran retained in its resources and its cohesive social belief system. As ABC News reported, Trump initially anticipated the conflict would last only four weeks “or less,” but by mid-June it had spanned just over 15 weeks.

On Truth Social, Trump asserted that the United States had completely destroyed Iran’s military, including its entire Navy and Air Force. After Iran bombed US allies and downed a US aircraft, Trump reversed his view of reality and said the US had left the military alone. President Trump and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, appeared to rely solely on a more powerful military, while, like the Axis powers in WWII, they discounted their enemy’s ability to maintain access to resources and a cohesive spirit that could prevent a quick war.

These examples show that superiority in any single source—including the means of force—is insufficient to ensure success. When these sources are aligned, power is more likely to be sustained; when they are fragmented or misjudged, power is more likely to fail.

Bottom Line: Using a paradigm of power can lead to making good decisions

A paradigm of power helps explain how resources, beliefs, and means of force are distributed and how they interact. It provides a practical framework for anticipating outcomes in political and social conflicts by identifying where power resides. With this information, individuals and institutions can assess the risks and opportunities of attempting to rebalance their relationships with others.

SPECIAL NOTE TO MY SUBSCRIBERS

If you have any comments on this piece, I encourage you to post them on my Substack page

I will try to respond to everyone. I’m particularly interested in suggestions to clarify any parts of Power to help readers better understand this concept.

PS: A subsequent Citizenship Politics will apply this paradigm to review how the balance of power between men and women has evolved over time, leading us to today.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and was a Seattle City Council President.

Sociologist Gregory D. Squires argues that it’s a myth that taxes drive millionaires to flee cities and states that tax them. An abridgment of Squire’s Baltimore Sun commentary, from Monday, January 26, 2026, forms the second half of this piece, where he provides empirical evidence that this belief is false. I believe it is false because many of the wealthy recognize that they need to be taxed, fairly, of course, to sustain a livable economic and social environment for all.

Unfortunately, the belief that millionaires will flee is one both Republicans and Democrats often espouse. Squire quotes then-Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, “If you tax them, they will leave.” Meanwhile, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom has opposed a proposed state wealth tax on the grounds that it will scare wealthy Californians away and has concluded, “Wealth taxes are going.”

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Despite this persistent myth, there is broad public support for equitable taxation.

In February 2025, Seattle voters passed Proposition 1A of Initiative 137, by 60%. It was a citizen-led initiative to fund mixed-income social housing through a new “excess compensation” tax. The tax requires firms to levy a 5% tax on salaries and compensation above $1 million. For instance, if a company paid an employee $100,000 above $1 million, the company would pay $5,000 in tax. In total, about 170 of the 50,000 active businesses registered in Seattle would be subject to this tax, not individual workers.

Overwhelmingly, Seattle voters believed it was a fair tax, given that the housing shortage in the Seattle metropolitan area is most acute among the lowest-income renters. In Seattle, studies show that 86% of those earning the median income (AMI) have to devote between a third and a half of their gross income to rent and utilities.

Outside of Seattle, statewide polling shows that the public recognizes it’s time to start taxing the wealthiest, so their taxes, like everyone else’s, are based on their ability to pay. For instance, 61% of Washingtonians support a 9.9% tax on incomes above $1 million, while just 29% oppose it, according to a poll from Northwest-based DHM Research.

Most importantly, DHM polling showed that “There is a majority backing for the tax across all parties: 71% of Democrats, 54% of Republicans, and 52% of Independents or other (third-party) voters support it.” Additionally, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat noted that support for the wealthy to shoulder their share of funding for government services cuts across geographic lines. For instance, 14 of Eastern Washington’s 20 counties, most of which are rural, including some of the redder places in the state, voted to retain that tax on the rich in a 2024 vote on a capital-gains tax.

Although there is support for taxing the wealthiest, there is no support for taxing the middle or upper-middle class, who are already paying their fair share. Opponents of taxing the wealthiest campaign by blurring the magnitude of income between them and those holding far less wealth, yet still middle-class. The DMH’s survey found that voters strongly rejected applying even a lower rate of less than 9.9% to incomes of $100,000 or above, rather than starting at $1 million.

Consequently, large Democratic-voting cities would be targeted by campaigns that spread fear of job loss and future income tax increases to defeat attempts to raise taxes there. For instance, the ten wealthiest cities with median household incomes at or slightly below $100,000 are all heavily Democratic-voting, as are other large urban regions.

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A spokesman for the wealthy explains why he left when the wealthy were taxed.

Howard D. Schultz, former chief executive officer of Starbucks for over twenty years, explained in a WSJ editorial why he left Seattle and Washington state. His final line offered his most articulate reason, not a heated rant. He simply said that governments have become “ineffective public systems” whose policies promote this condition and then tossed in a snide remark that local “political rhetoric that demonize businesses” was also to blame.

He argued that “civic leadership—while imperfect—understood that private enterprise wasn’t the adversary of the public good. It was one engine for improving the public sphere.” This view gets to the heart of the conflict between the marketplace and community needs.

Business growth creates jobs, and businesses often contribute to local nonprofit institutions. They can grow when the government provides social and economic conditions that sustain that growth. As businesses expand, they do generate more money in circulation if they hire more employees whose wages allow them to improve their quality of life.

At the same time, businesses have greater infrastructure needs that the government provides. Those needs include transportation services such as better roads, more buses or rail lines, more police and fire services, and more parks and affordable housing. These needs cannot be met without revenue to fund them.

Schultz and other critics argue that taxing the wealthiest leads the government to waste money without solving societal problems. Schultz recognizes that chronic homelessness, budget deficits, and declining public-school outcomes “aren’t unique to the state—but Washington’s response to them is.”

His solution, like others’, is not taxation but rather reform or improvement of performance management, and if pursued, it would generate growth and prosperity for all. This description is as utopian as believing that once workers take over the factories, i.e. the means of production, all class differences are eliminated.

No organization, private or public, operates perfectly without internal systemic problems. The key difference is that public institutions are accountable to the public, whereas private institutions are accountable only to their shareholders or a few owners. When citizens, either directly through initiatives or through representatives in government, raise taxes on the wealthiest, they understand the need for public revenue to address societal problems that the owners of private businesses may not address.

Consequently, they not only vote for higher taxes when there is adequate information to represent all sides of the proposal, but they also vote with their feet. The flow of workers and entrepreneurs into the market increases rather than declines when adequate government revenue is available to meet societal needs.

A large excerpt from Squire’s article follows, providing data that show this trend is real.

The myth that taxes send millionaires fleeing by Gregory D. Squires

Available empirical evidence disputes that infringement on the prerogatives of private capital will cause industry to leave a city or state.

Some anecdotes of wealthy families moving away have garnered attention, but the overwhelming pattern of millionaire mobility (or lack thereof ) indicates no aggregate loss of such households. For example, 2,400 millionaire households moved out of New York state between 2020 and 2022. But 17,500 such households moved into the state, according to a 2023 report of the state’s Fiscal Policy Institute.

In 2022, Massachusetts created a 4% surtax on income over $1 million. Opponents argued it would lead to an exodus of millionaires, but in the subsequent two years, the number of millionaires in the state increased 38.6%, and the state collected over 2 billion additional dollars in funding, according to a 2025 report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). In 2022, the state of Washington announced that it would be increasing its capital gains tax from 7% to 9.9% in 2025. Between 2022 and 2024, the number of millionaires grew from 463,000 to more than 681,000, according to the IPS study.

But the deepest dive into the evidence of this issue is provided by Cristobal Young in his 2018 book “The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight.” He studied Internal Revenue Service tax data from everyone in the U.S. who filed a million- dollar tax return between 1999 and 2011, a total of 45 million tax returns from 3.7 million individuals. For an international perspective, he examined data from the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, revealing where they were born, how often they moved after becoming wealthy and how tax rates shape where they live.

The basic findings were the following: Millionaires tend to live in states with the highest tax rates, including New York, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Millionaires move less often than the general population and far less often than poor households. The vast majority of billionaires live in the countries where they were born, with around 5% moving to another country after they have accumulated their wealth. Revenues generated by higher taxes on the wealthy who do not move far outpace the revenue lost by those who do move.

Young persuasively argues that for millionaires and billionaires, places are “sticky.” Critical to the accumulation of wealth is the social capital they develop over time. Colleagues, collaborators, funders, clients and other local contacts are critical. They create what he refers to as a home-field advantage. These are resources that people cannot take with them should they decide to move.

So, millionaires and billionaires remain in the places where they have made their wealth and plan to do so in the future. He notes that when people move, they tend to do so early in their careers, when they are not wealthy but hope to be someday, or when they retire and no longer plan to earn higher incomes.

Perhaps the most important policy issue is the following question: Does the revenue gained from higher taxes exceed the revenue lost when millionaires move? Young shows that a 1% increase in the tax on millionaires is associated with a 0.2% loss of the millionaire population, with those who leave taking $2.4 million with them. But the 99.8% of millionaires who remain would contribute an additional $176 million in revenue. A 10% millionaire tax would lead to a loss of $24 million from out-migration but an increase of $1.8 billion in revenue from those who remain.

Higher taxes on the wealthy do not constitute a magic bullet to resolve all the development challenges our communities face. But contrary to the mantra of that Montgomery County Council, and so many others in key public and private sector positions, it belongs in the community development toolbox.

As Young concludes: “The greater issue is that we are living in an era of rapidly rising inequality and diminished market opportunities for many. If we are to return to a time of shared prosperity — where the dividends of a productive society are enjoyed by many — millionaire taxes are part of the policy solution.”

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and was a Seattle City Council President.

Image from the Center for Human Rights in Iran

Domestic political violence begins by defining who the enemy is

Donald Trump is the only president to have faced three highly visible assassination attempts. Trump and some former presidents, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have exceeded that number under a broader definition of attempts, including those that were disrupted and uncovered in serious plots. Since Obama’s presidency, Presidential historian Timothy Naftali has described our political climate as a “political tinderbox” that has become toxic, fueled by political figures.

Many political and media personalities can be accused of fomenting a venomous environment, but political leaders have access to the largest megaphones, none more so than the nation’s leader. This is true across all forms of government, from democratic republics to theocratic autocracies.

In the last ten years, the leaders of America and Iran have labeled their domestic adversaries as enemies of the people, deserving to be feared and hated. One leader was elected by popular vote in a democratic republic, and the other was selected by a religious elite that represented a plurality, if not the majority, of their citizens.

There are significant differences in their legal powers. Nevertheless, when one strips away the details of their policies, behavior, and beliefs, one is left with the realization that they see the world as a battle between good and evil. It’s a view that goes back about 2,000 years to the ancient Manichaean belief that replaced the early Christian church for dominance. Are we reviving that struggle today?

At the memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump, in his eulogy, disagreed with Charlie in not hating opponents: “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” Later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that Trump was just being “authentically himself.”

This is a prime example of how Trump is a performer who entertains even as he says hateful things. Casual, offhand remarks like that one are accepted by his supporters as simply telling the truth: there is evil out there that must be fought.

When America’s President Trump and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, view their domestic opponents as enemies, they are rejecting a government where liberals and conservatives can pursue compromises that limit their power. One doesn’t compromise with enemies; they defeat them in any way possible.

Domestic Political Violence in America.

Some sixty years after Wallace enabled domestic political violence, Trump has similar targets to Wallace’s: elite colleges and lawless immigrants. But his delivery is far more snidely humorous than wildly angry. The crowd is entertained, but he’s pushing the same buttons of fear and resentment by attacking politicians who are not supporting his MAGA agenda. That anger has contributed to a 74% increase in threats/harassment against local officials from the mid-term election year of 2022 to the end of the presidential campaign in 2024.

For instance, on May first, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a photo of Democrat Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, holding a baseball bat, with the caption that he “is nothing but a THUG, and he is a danger to our Country!President DONALD J. TRUMP. “

Tramp’s mantra of fearing a dangerous domestic enemy was standard fare in his last Presidential campaign. On Veterans Day 2023, he claimed that “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He would root out the “vermin” in the country that would do anything to destroy America. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, wrote in The Washington Post that “calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”

Trump’s authority has been constrained by the independence of our other two branches of government, the legislative and judicial. Should those institutions be fatally weakened, Trump’s critics see an autocratic presidency attacking diversity of thought as means to silence anyone who challenges his executive power. Iran’s people have experienced that condition since a revolution overthrew a corrupt authoritarian monarchy 47 years ago, replacing it with a more authoritarian theocratic regime topped with a Supreme Leader.

Comparing the groundwork of Domestic Political Violence in the US and Iran

To understand how violence and hatred manifest in Iran, it is necessary to understand that Iran is a theocracy, combining the authority of the state and the church. Consequently, comparing the politically generated domestic violence in Iran with that in America is not straightforward, even though both are republics with an elected president, an elected legislative body, and an appointed judiciary. However, the founding principles of each government are fundamentally different.

The United States was created as a democratic republic through a revolution whose founders insisted on separating religious beliefs from the state’s political power. The 1979 Iranian Revolution led to the exact opposite: the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its main principle was to establish a Shia Islamic system of governance. Just as our constitution forbids a “church” from running the state, their constitution enshrines it as the state authority.

While White Christian Nationalists would have the US government embrace Christianity as the national religion above all others, Iran goes much further by making all laws subject to approval by an elite religious body ruled by the Shia branch of Islam. Iran is the largest country with a Shia majority, claiming global leadership of Shia Muslims, who represent no more than 15% of all Muslims worldwide.

Our president heads the government, not society. In Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, as the religious and government leader, oversees all facets of the country’s activities. The American media has referred to Iran’s chief leader simply as the Ayatollah, but that is an honorary title held by more than 100 Muslim clerics in Iran. The correct title for Iran’s Shia leader is “Supreme Leader,” who is appointed by a group of 88 elected clerics, and serves as the political and constitutional “Guardian of the Islamic Jurist.”

His authority extends over the legislative and judicial branches of government, including the military. Their Shia Islamic jurisprudence (Ja’fari) is enshrined in their constitution, which legitimizes the Supreme Leader’s authority. The state’s violent actions against citizens are not random but are taken in accordance with Ja’fari, as interpreted by the Supreme Leader.

While the president and parliament are elected, the Supreme Leader’s power is exercised by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body consisting of 6 clerics appointed by him and 6 jurists approved by Parliament. The Council must sign off on all legislation to ensure it complies with its interpretation of Shia Islamic law. In addition, no candidate can run for the presidency or parliament without the Council’s approval.

Critics of Iran, be they US or Israeli officials and media influencers, rarely understand that Iran has a well-thought-out distribution of political power that can survive the execution of its top leadership by the US and Israeli governments.

Individual Iranian leaders range from mildly reformist to hardline fundamentalists. For instance, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is the ideological leader of the Iranian reform movement. His activities and travel are restricted, and he needs approval to speak publicly. Consequently, he is no threat to the regime, having described it as a “sturdy tree.” Hardline fundamentalists have controlled Iran since the 1979 revolution, which toppled King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s 38-year-old autocratic monarchy.

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Domestic Political Violence in Iran

Despite some variance in how to apply the Shia laws, the overall Iranian governing system tightly binds together all the political and military leaders as a coherent force resisting any fundamental change. This explains why they will mercilessly crush any large nonviolent popular gathering that is seen as an existential threat to their regime.

After Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a US-Israel airstrike at the end of February, his seriously injured son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was selected as the Supreme Leader. A consensus among independent experts is that Mojtaba’s general pronouncements provide the Revolutionary Guard with considerable flexibility in how to carry them out. They are a power separate from the president and parliament, reporting directly to the Supreme Leader.

In January 2026, they carried out Ali Khamenei’s orders to the Revolutionary Guard to suppress the protests “by any means necessary” because it was the first major domestic uprising calling for the Islamic State to fall.

Large gatherings pushing to reform the Islamic regime began in 2009, saying that the national election was rigged after the reform candidate was defeated. Slogans then emerged calling for reform of the regime’s stringent laws. The protests of late 2025 and early 2026 shifted to calls for the return of a monarchy or democracy and for an end to the fundamentalist religious regime.

Although many of the banners this year simply stated “Freedom,” others were more direct: “Until the mullahs are buried, this homeland won’t prosper”, “Khamenei is a murderer; his rule is illegitimate”, “Death to Khamenei” (Marg bar Khamenei), and “Death to the dictator.”

The protests in Tehran spread across the nation, with demonstrations, street rallies, and labor strikes in 88 cities in 27 of the 31 provinces, as well as at 17 universities. Most telling was that protesters chanted pro-monarchy slogans in Qom, a core stronghold of Shiite clerics and the Islamic Republic; this was a major symbolic break in the Supreme Leader’s power, since the city had long been seen as politically untouchable.

Authoritarian leaders, across all forms of government, resort to violent suppression of dissent if it threatens their existence. An Iranian scholar living outside Iran noted that violence will follow when the material foundations of governance erode to the point that authority can no longer translate power into control.

And it was very apparent that its power was fading as protests occurred during a period of dire economic decline, while the state’s limited resources were diverted to sustain its capacity to violently protect the ruling elite. According to sources within and outside Iran, the Revolutionary Guards control and directly profit from up to half of the oil exports, which generate most of Tehran’s revenue: Iranian oil revenues were $53 billion in 2023.

The regime was apparently betting that brutal force was necessary to quell a dangerous public uprising whose anger was not just about the lack of freedoms but also the increasingly higher cost of living. According to Fortune, the Iranian rial has lost 60% of its value since the start of the war. Meanwhile, residents of Tehran and other cities told Reuters that some prices had increased 40% in that period as well.

Since the protests began in December 2025, the Regime has killed between 6,000 and 30,000 protesters, according to various sources in and outside Iran. The protestors are accused of being “rioters,” backed by the U.S. and Israel. Those leaders didn’t help protect them; rather, they increased their vulnerability to accusations that foreigners were manipulating them.

From their safe residences in their own countries, they exhorted civilians to take to the streets to overthrow the whole regime. Exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi urged Iranians to “take control of the streets” in Tehran to bring down the Islamic Republic. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, “If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” That was the last time Trump said anything about intervening to help them.

Israel was publicly silent in supporting the protests, but Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israeli operatives are active in Iran “right now”. Were they there to help protect the protestors or to encourage them to fight the authorities? After Eliyahu’s comment, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his officials to stop giving interviews.

Still, the killing continues. As of May 2026, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), the situation has led to intensified executions of protesters being charged with crimes such as “propaganda against the regime” and “collusion against national security.”

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Bottom Line

Political violence in Iran is a systematic government process of eliminating any threatening opposition to the Islamic ruling elite. The regime’s leaders are more concerned with direct challenges to their authority than with physically oppressing minorities. The Kurds are the exception, with the number of executions being higher in the region where most of them reside.

Although Iran is a theocratic autocracy, their constitution recognizes three non-Muslim religious minorities:Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews, which has the largest intact Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel. State violence is not directed toward those groups and other recognized ethnic groups, but rather violence is used against any group that refuses to submit to the regime’s Islamic laws.

The level of domestic US political violence stems from agitation by public leaders who blame their opponents for endangering the nation or public safety. Some groups amplify those charges and violently attack ethnic, racial, and religious groups identified as “evil” and threatening our nation. In a democracy, these violent attacks are diffuse and not coordinated by the government; ironically, this can be viewed as a democratic approach that allows violence to be free of government interference. In Iran, the delivery of violence is monopolized by the central government.

Our government’s violence toward dissenters is tempered by exposure through a wide range of open media, from print to the internet. The federal government’s response to ultimately distance itself from ICE killing non-threatening citizens was a direct result of being publicly exposed. That type of open media coverage is nonexistent in Iran’s theocracy.

Lastly, public restraints on government violence stem from popular support for principles articulated in our Constitution that protect a diversity of thought, including peaceful protest. That societal norm is under attack when government leaders label their opponents “enemies of the people,” reflecting a Manichaean belief in an existential battle between good and evil.

The danger that America faces today is not that it will overnight become like Iran’s theocratic republic, using violence to maintain a wealthy elite. The danger is that we drift from being an open, secular society toward a republic that disparages diversity of thought and begins to adopt religious beliefs that justify violence to silence enemies.

Consider how, during working hours, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally holds a monthly “Christian Prayer & Worship Service” focusing on our “biblically sanctioned war” to pray for “overwhelming violence” against enemies. Could that logic be used to suppress domestic enemies?

The path forward to mitigate domestic political violence is to promote a secular-framed republic that respects and protects all citizens’ personal beliefs and practices. To that end, the public must insist that our executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government not interpret our Constitution or legislation that permits elevating one religious belief above others, such as White Christian Nationalism or Shia Law, to dominate our society.

Citizenship Politics

Citizenship Politics encourages readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. Nations are not static societies.

By NICK LICATA

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

Voters exit a polling place. Photo by Casey Atkins/Campaign Legal Center

“The most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress” is how Michael Waldman, CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, describes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The former counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell wrote in the conservative National Review that “It federalizes elections in a way that Republicans have long opposed.”

Since mid-March, the Senate has been debating the SAVE Act, with President Trump insisting that the Republican majority must end the filibuster to pass it and help Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections.

The SAVE Act Demands Documentary Proof of Citizenship

The Campaign Legal Center has an excellent summary explaining how the Act works to discourage voting. The following categories are drawn from their post, “What You Need to Know About the SAVE Act.” The list is augmented with material from author Paul Loeb ‘s article linking this Act to a history of Republican voter suppression, which is provided in abbreviated form below.

Creating Documentation Hurdles Requiring Proof of Citizenship

Americans are already required to verify their eligibility when voting. However, the Act imposes unnecessary barriers to the registration process, requiring voters to provide documentation proving they are U.S. citizens, such as a passport or birth certificate, which many either don’t have on hand or cannot access.

More than 21 million Americans lack ready access to these documents, and Black, Latino, and Asian citizens are three times more likely to lack them. Married people who have changed their names, as well as the young and the elderly, who are more likely to move multiple times, would have problems providing the proper documents to cast a ballot.

In addition, most voters wouldn’t be able to register to vote with their driver’s license alone because licenses generally do not indicate citizenship. Instead, they would need another, less common form of documentation, such as a U.S. passport or a birth certificate.

The SAVE Act could also impact registered voters, too. Any time somebody updates their registration, if they change their address or political party, they will need to provide these documents.

The SAVE America Act would also implement a national voter ID requirement that is more burdensome than almost every state voter ID law currently in effect. Conservatives and libertarians are noted for opposing a national identification card that every citizen must have, with the reasonable fear that it may evolve into a requirement to always carry it, which could be the first step toward an overreach by a central government tracking the movement of all citizens.

Eliminating Mail Registration and Disrupt Online Registration

In 2022, more than 7 million Americans registered to vote by mail, and almost 11 million registered online. The Act will overhaul mail registration and require online registration systems, in a manner that severely threatens their continued operations to provide a safe and dependable means of voting.

It eliminates most in-person voter registration drives because election officials require original proof of citizenship and groups can’t submit it on people’s behalf.

Promoting Voter Purges

The SAVE Act mandates voter purges every 30 days. Consequently, registered voters who have previously been removed based on faulty data could be thrown off the voter rolls right before elections. The Act ignores the fact that existing laws already ensure that only citizens vote. Based on state prosecution records, votes by non-citizens account for less than 0.001 percent of all votes cast in federal elections.

Threatening Election Workers with being Jailed

Under this Act, election workers are being intimidated into enforcing a needless law that restricts voting by non-citizens. The Act could send any such worker to prison for up to 5 years if they help register someone without the required documents, even if the person being registered is a citizen.

Disenfranchising some citizens from voting

The following is an excerpt from Paul Loeb’s “Link the SAVE Act to the History of American Voter Suppression.” Loeb details the historical connection between efforts to hinder voting among citizens whose interests do not align with the Republican Party’s most conservative policies and what the SAVE Act would make law.

The SAVE Act builds on voter suppression that Republicans have been carrying out for the past 25 years. The Democrats need to talk about this history because, whether this bill passes, there will be others like it to come.

The SAVE Act didn’t just emerge; it builds on a long and problematic history. In the 2000 presidential election, Florida, under Governor Jeb Bush, threw 12,000 largely African American voters off the rolls by falsely charging them with being former felons, who, under Jim Crow-era laws, were prohibited from voting. This set the stage for a Republican-appointed Supreme Court to tip the state to Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, by 537 votes. Over 960,000 Florida former felons remain without a vote, including 12% of all African American potential voters, because the governor and legislature undermined a successful 2018 initiative that was supposed to give them back their rights.

President Bush benefited from disenfranchisement again in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Kenneth Blackwell purged 300,000 largely African American voters from the rolls in cities like Cleveland and Columbus, including one in four Cleveland voters. Without them, he probably would have lost the state and therefore the Presidency. Blackwell also tried to reject thousands of registrations because they were on the wrong weight of paper and allowed each county, whatever its size, just a single early-voting station, leaving the state’s major cities with five-hour lines.

In 2013, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court overturned major sections of the Voting Rights Act that made it harder for states with histories of discrimination to limit voting rights. Immediately afterward, Southern states began passing newly restrictive laws. North Carolina, for instance, passed a new voter ID law invalidating student IDs, public employee IDs, and photo IDs issued by public assis­tance agencies (while allowing gun permits); shortened the early voting window; banned same day registra­tion during early voting; and prohibited paid voter registration drives.

It also prohibited extending voting hours in the event of long lines, eliminated the right to cast a provisional ballot if you end up at the wrong precinct, and ended a highly successful high school registration program. Local election officials also began removing on-campus voting stations, relocating them sometimes miles away. A federal Appeals Court overturned much of the law, saying it had targeted African Americans with “almost surgical precision.”

Other states once deterred by the Voting Rights Act including Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama passed similar laws to limit acceptable ID. Alabama’s excluded Social Security cards, birth certificates, Medicaid or Medicare cards, and Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards. More than half a million voters were removed from Georgia’s rolls in 2017, including over 100,000 who simply hadn’t voted in recent elections or responded to a mailed notice. These laws and others similar created voting rate gaps of up to 24 points between white voters and voters of color, ones that didn’t exist before the new laws.

The rationale was to prevent voter fraud. But a five-year Bush administration crackdown convicted only eighty-six people of voter fraud nationwide, most of whom had simply made mistakes about their eligibility. The Save Act focuses on non-citizen voting, yet even Project 2025’s creator, The Heritage Foundation, found just 68 proven cases dating back to the 1980s. While the most dedicated voters will find ways to register and vote, voter suppression laws are like adding hurdles to a running track. Top athletes can still surmount them. If you’re just a bit less skilled or dedicated, you’re likely to give up, and if you place enough hurdles, you’ll knock out the majority of those targeted.

So yes, let’s warn of the SAVE Act’s specific destructive consequences. But let’s also talk about the anti-democratic history on which it builds, because this probably won’t be the last Republican attempt to deter the vote.

Bottom Line:

The intent of the SAVE Act is not to secure safe voting but to eliminate voters. As Loeb concludes, the history of suppressing segments of voters is not new. And it will continue if leaders and parties abandon our democratic republic’s basic principle: to ensure fair in elections, everyone must have a fair opportunity to vote and free access to all information.

Our presidents do not control the press, but they control the largest megaphone for government messaging. If their wealthy supporters control the largest swaths of the media, they can repeatedly make blatantly false statements that undermine this principle across the nation.

The SAVE Act is the latest and most extreme example of how a national government project rests on a deliberately false narrative that Trump has repeatedly advanced. Citing a debunked 2014 study that never surveyed actual voter data, Trump claims that nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2024. This premise underlies his administration’s effort to expel millions of immigrants, using the mantra that the nation must have elections free from fraud. In fact, the Brennan Center has compiled research showing that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.

The SAVE Act serves only one purpose: to stop people who would be inclined to oppose Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ political, social, and economic policies from voting. It is the manifestation of a “Big Brother” government that knows what is best for everyone and wants to know who opposes it.

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

His website www.becomingacitizenactivist.org has over 200 searchable prior articles analyzing political and social change.

Our military’s overwhelming tactical victories do not amount to a winning strategy. Even though Trump told the nation in his April televised address that the world is watching and “can’t believe what they’re seeing, the brilliance of the United States military!” A strategy can only succeed by setting a clear end goal, which Trump lacks. Although he has promoted several objectives, only one will fulfill them all: regime change.

Trump set that goal at the start of his war but has since abandoned it—probably because his MAGA base was built on a promise not to engage in another endless war, or at least those that last years, not weeks. He clearly understood that promise when he addressed the nation and his base directly, saying this would be a short military action. He asked Americans to keep this conflict in perspective. It will be short, comparing the time spent fighting a list of each of our last five wars, ending with the eight-year war in Iraq.

An expectation of a quick victory drove Trump to launch his Operation Epic Fury bombing of Iran. It was described as a targeted military operation, not a war. It was to be a “precise” and “necessary” military campaign with limited objectives. However, his objectives kept expanding, all aimed at securing a deal that would force Iran’s remaining leaders to unconditionally surrender. That belief is revealed when he promised to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age unless Iran succumbs to his demands.

He posted in caps on his Truth Social platform that Iran must MAKE A DEAL with him or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT within 48 hours; otherwise, on Tuesday, “Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD.” The second time he made this threat, it ended with, “Praise be to Allah.” Is Trump wrapping his arms around religion as he did with the American Flag?

The response from Iran’s top military commander, General Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, was that the US president’s threat was an “unbalanced and stupid action.” Borrowing from Trump’s grandiose phraseology, he added that his message is simply, “the gates of hell will open for you.” This response doesn’t suggest a quick end to the war with the current regime in power. Despite Trump telling the nation that regime change has happened because of “all of their original leaders’ death,”

Iran has enough weapons to continue fighting for a long time.

Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promote the belief that they have already won the war, mistakenly based on a series of tactical victories, not a winning strategy. The Pentagon reported that over 11,000 Iranian sites were hit in the last five weeks, destroying over 300 Iranian ballistic missiles and roughly 250 launchers. Iran’s navy was now resting “at the bottom of the sea,” with over 90% of missile and drone capability destroyed due to more than 20,000 airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel. The results drew praise from both sides of aisle in Congress on our military’s excellent execution in damaging Iran.

However, US Intelligence discovered that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and retaining thousands of one-way attack drones. Within forty-eight hours after Trump’s prime-time address to the nation, claiming that Iran’s military capability had been “completely decimated,” Iran caused two military aircraft to crash and shot down two Black Hawk helicopters.

The fallacy of just counting how many of the enemies’ weapons were destroyed overlooks the remaining weapons that can still cause damage. In the first month of the Iran War, our warships launched approximately 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, costing around $3 million each and totaling over $2.5 billion. Our supplies are now running low, and it can take up to two years to manufacture a Tomahawk.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Shahed-136, also known as the Kamikaze Drone, costs roughly $30,000, about 1% of a Tomahawk’s price. It is less powerful but easier to launch and more mobile. Most importantly, it is hard to detect by air or radar before launch. Still, it can be just as effective at damaging or sinking non-military cargo ships as a $3 million missile.

Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company Rane, believes that a significant number of Iran’s less advanced short-range ballistic missiles still remain intact. These missiles can be deployed to threaten Gulf states in an “open-ended campaign,” especially if Iran continues attacks at the slower but steady pace they have adopted. Because they are easy to hide and replace, they represent a viable long-term threat to both the Gulf and US military forces.

Even Trump must recognize that the current Iranian regime has the strength and the weapons to engage in a prolonged conflict with the US and continue to harm its hostile Middle Eastern neighbors. As a result, Trump can only achieve his primary and original goal of regime change through an internal revolution or a land invasion. The first option is unlikely, and the second would be a disaster for America.

Iran will not see its citizens overthrowing their theocratic autocracy.

The current Iranian regime has shown that it is willing and capable of killing civilians simply for protesting. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran stated that the number of protestors killed in January could be as high as 20,000. Two senior officials from the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME that as many as 30,000 people could have been killed. Iran’s military-led government would likely kill many more if there were an actual threat of being overthrown.

As Trump started bombing Iran, he told Iranian civilians to “Take over your government. It will be yours to take. The hour of your freedom is at hand.” It was a dishonest suggestion, ignoring that the people are unarmed and any visible opposition would lead to their death. In his address to the nation, Trump mentioned how Iranian civilians were killed by “the most violent and thuggish regime on earth,” but he offered no condolences to the victims, nor any support for citizens trying to take control of their government.

The Guardian reported that the Iranian regime organized more than 850 public demonstrations of support for the government since the war began. According to experts, like the president of ACLED, an independent conflict monitor, the turnout highlighted the resilience of the Islamic Republic despite a month-long campaign of intensive airstrikes by the US and Israel.

Large protests opposing the regime and supporting it highlight a divided citizenry in Iran, with the military favoring one side. There will be no effective uprising without a key part of the military turning against the theocratic regime.

Two reasons why troops fighting in Iran would be disastrous.

Iran is too large to conquer. It is four times the size of Iraq, has a population of over 90 million, and features extensive inhospitable territory that makes supplying an invading army challenging. Although Iran’s terrain differs significantly from Vietnam’s, we failed there to remove a regime even with ground troops because bombing alone does not lead to conquest. Instead, victory depends on land acquisition.

We do not have enough soldiers, even if Israel contributed theirs, to maintain control of Iran’s land mass. Our losses in soldiers, military supplies, and financial resources would weaken the US’s ability to defend itself from other hostile nations. And the Republican Party would be tossed out of D.C., no matter how much Trump beats the drum for war as the only way to secure our safety.

The second reason is that after April 29, 2026, the War Powers Act’s 60-day threshold is triggered, requiring Trump to withdraw our armed forces from hostilities unless Congress authorizes the action or declares war. That’s why Trump kept referring to swiftly ending the conflict in 4 to 6 weeks. Supporting Trump’s war could openly rupture the Republican unity in Congress, giving the Democrats the ability to apply severe restraints on conducting the war as Trump wishes.

Trump could also seize Iran’s small but vital Kharg Island. While it covers only one-tenth the land area of Washington D.C., 90% of Iran’s oil exports go through Kharg. Our recently deployed force of 5,000 US Marines and 2,000 paratroopers could overpower their heavily armed garrison, though it would likely come with a high number of casualties for our invading troops.

Trump would be borrowing a page from Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Snake Island in the Black Sea. However, the Russians were driven off it by constant harassing fire from the Ukrainian mainland. Iranians would do the same, unless our troops entered Iran’s mainland, which would start an endless and futile war.

Will Tomorrow see the Final Solution?

Unless Trump agrees to Iran’s conditions, the war will go on, and Congress will then be forced to either approve it or publicly ignore it. If Trump gets frustrated by being stuck in Iran, he might resolve this dilemma by either walking away from the war to let his “allies” handle the fallout or by bombing major civilian infrastructure, such as key bridges, power plants, and desalination facilities. Iranian civilians will suffer directly and immediately, possibly feeling they are being sacrificed by either Iran’s authoritarian rulers or America’s authoritarian Trump.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, we may witness a major bombing of Iran since they rejected Trump’s deal. As a result, Trump might declare victory and walk away, or choose to continue negotiations while the fighting persists. This would allow Iran to restock its weapons supplies while still attacking neighboring countries. One possible and alarming scenario for the next phase of the war is Iran somehow launching an attack within the US through a sleeper cell or a lone terrorist linked to Iran in some way. Then, we would be truly opening the gates of hell.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

His website www.becomingacitizenactivist.org has over 200 searchable prior articles analyzing political and social change.

CP –Trump and the Roman Crassus share the same hubris in invading Iran.

Two thousand years separate the Roman Marcus Licinius Crassus in his failed attempt to invade Iran from President Donald J. Trump’s faltering current military effort. Nevertheless, they share the same character flaws that led them to make disastrous decisions. Crassus’s effort resulted in the Roman Army’s worst defeat since the Battle of Cannae against Hannibal. Trump has lost fewer than a dozen soldiers as of the end of the first month in the Iranian War, but if he continues to follow Crassus’s path, the outcome could be similar.

When comparing their rise in power and prestige, the most noticeable similarity between Crassus and Trump is how national leaders who find success in making money start to believe they are unbeatable in military pursuits. Crassus has been called a fool in history for literally losing his head by invading Iran, which was then known as Parthia. We need to wait and see how historians will view Trump’s invasion.

The flawed logic shared by Crassus and Trump does not come from Trump’s lack of military or government experience. Crassus had both. He had won several major military battles as a commander and held two of Rome’s highest political offices. Yet, both showed two serious flaws: jealousy of a rival’s undeserved honors—honors they should have received—and an inability to accept thoughtful advice that opposed their plans for a great victory.

In the case of jealousy, Pompey received public recognition for capturing a defeated Spartacus, even though Crassus was responsible for crushing Spartacus’s army of slaves revolting against Rome. Nonetheless, Pompey the Great, as he was often addressed, was awarded the highest honor Rome offers—a state-sanctioned parade honoring a victorious general—and Crassus received none.

Trump’s jealousy toward Barack Obama began a month after Obama announced his presidential run in 2012. Trump appeared on The View and other news platforms, expressing ‘real doubts’ about Obama’s birthplace, suggesting it was in Africa or elsewhere outside America and thus disqualifying him from being president. Previously, Trump had contemplated running in 2000 and 2011 but withdrew.

A significant injury to Trump’s ego was Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump has repeatedly claimed was undeserved, since “He did nothing. And they gave it to him.” Trump’s envy of Obama receiving the peace prize may have sparked his desire to overshadow Obama’s credit for peacefully achieving the 2015 agreement with Iran to limit their nuclear weapons threat. The deal required dismantling 13,000 centrifuges and storing them under the International Atomic Energy Agency’s constant monitoring.

Trump criticized Obama’s deal as a terrible agreement, which led the U.S. to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear accord in May 2018. Subsequently, Iranian leaders threatened to stop fulfilling some of Iran’s commitments under the deal. They followed through on January 5, 2020, and announced they would no longer adhere to any limits set by the 2015 nuclear agreement on centrifuge use or uranium enrichment.

Still, Trump, at the urging of Israel, attacked Iran, bombing the installations and facilities that he had allowed them to build when he killed their agreement, believing that they were building nuclear arms. That premise was only verified by Israel, which sees Iran as an existential threat. However, it was rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, finding no evidence or indication of a systematic, ongoing program to produce a nuclear weapon by Iran.

Joe Kent, appointed by Trump as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, concluded after reviewing data collected by his department that there was no imminent nuclear attack by Iran on America. Trump discounted his director’s information and initiated bombing Iran at the same time his administration was negotiating a ceasefire. He has hinted that he has won the war and that the conflict will end soon.

Consequently, Trump is claiming he has achieved more than Obama did in securing our safety from Iran. This is because President Obama had already accomplished what Trump now aims to do, except that now he faces Iran, which may have more nuclear capacity than it had before he withdrew from Obama’s agreement.

The Iranian conflict has been fueled by Trump’s arrogance, similar to how Crassus’s invasion of Parthia was driven by hubris. Both leaders aimed to prove they were more powerful than their adversaries — Obama for Trump and Pompey for Trump. Moreover, both ignored their advisors and allies’ advice, underestimating their enemies’ strength.

In preparing to invade Parthia, Crassus was strongly advised by his quartermaster, who was responsible for logistics and ensuring his troops had supplies and equipment, not to take the shortest route across the flat desert to engage the enemy. Confident in his superior numbers and better-equipped army, Crassus believed he could quickly deliver a crushing defeat to the Parthians, possibly in just a month of fighting.

He also declined the support offered by his ally, the King of Armenia, who would have sent more soldiers if Crassus had taken a different route through the mountains that would have provided safety from the Parthian cavalry. Crassus ignored both pieces of advice.

There is another factor that shows how overconfidence in their technology affects both wars. The Roman Army was the most powerful in the world, with highly trained soldiers protected by the strongest armor. What did the Parthians bring to the fight? Lots of horses, some camels, and bows and arrows. Still, only a few Romans escaped being slaughtered.

The Parthian bows were designed for high-volume firing and lighter shots, while Roman archery used stiffer, specialized bows meant for heavier, armor-piercing shots to combat armored enemies. Crassus’s arrogance led his army into terrain that favored the Parthians and was useless for the Romans, who were stuck on a flat plain under a continuous, day-long barrage of deadly arrows with nowhere to hide and nothing to drink.

Two thousand years later, Americans are using the world’s best military equipment, operated by the best-trained soldiers, led by a Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who told his top military commanders, “Your only mission is ‘warfighting, preparing for war, and preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising.‘” Like Crassus, he ignored the landscape, forgetting how to protect the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran blocked, causing a near-total halt in commercial shipping and 20% of the world’s oil supply.

He also failed to consider how asymmetric warfare with Iran would develop. They are using inexpensive drones to cause major disruptions to the world’s oil supply lines and damage to local countries hosting U.S. military bases, even though their top-tier weapons are largely destroyed. Our soldiers haven’t borne the full impact of these attacks, but like the Parthians of old, the Iranians can sustain the conflict much longer than Trump anticipated.

Hegseth likely believed that simply telling his commanders, “You kill people and break things for a living,” would be enough to win battles. There has been a lack of planning on a scale that is increasingly costing America financially, which can affect our lives. One small note: the supply of helium, which is essential for conducting MRIs for critical conditions, is being cut by 40% due to the war. As one doctor said, “Don’t plan on having an MRI soon.”

The real danger is that if Trump keeps escalating the conflict, such as sending ground troops into Iran, there will be human costs for our soldiers and possibly for American citizens facing deadly retaliation. If Trump and his Republican allies in Congress continue to pursue the war, Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has said the U.S. would “blow the hell out of these people,” are likely to push closer to using “weapons of mass destruction” on Iran. We can then expect Trump to mirror Crassus’s arrogance, inviting the war to end badly for America.

The Republican Party is to blame for not demanding that Trump act in the nation’s interest rather than his own. This is exactly what happened 2,000 years ago, when Rome’s highest authority, the Senate, was mute as Crassus invaded a country the Senate had not requested. In both situations, on paper, the final authority lay with the legislative body, not the executive branch.

History once again shows that when a nation’s leader is free to act erratically without restraints, the entire nation suffers from the partnership of an arrogant leader’s blind military ambition and the Senate’s loyalty to being deaf to reasoned objections to such folly.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

Trump Republicans are pushing to eliminate what the Democrats were pushing for five years ago.

Below is my 2021 piece: Democrats Say Eliminate the Filibuster - but they use it more than the Republicans, which urges progressives to be cautious about what they wish for. I’m reprinting this piece in light of the current debate in the Senate about eliminating it.

Jennifer Rubin has a thoughtful piece arguing that The Filibuster is No Virtue and that

Democrats must oppose the SAVE Act and the filibuster. She offers the option of making an exception to the filibuster for critical constitutional measures, which would not be subject to it.

However, that argument is similar to the one when the Democrats adjusted the filibuster to allow them to prevent the Republicans from blocking appointments to the lower federal courts. Once the Republicans gained control of the Senate, they extended it to include Supreme Court justices, and the result was disastrous for the Democrats and for our democracy.

Filibusters have blocked and supported progressive legislation

Independent and Democratic progressives are pushing to eliminate the Senate filibuster. They see how it has often succeeded in stopping legislation that protects citizens’ freedoms.

Filibustering against civil rights legislation in congress is an unfortunate tradition. It was repeatedly used by Southern Democratic senators to successfully block efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and ’30s. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became the iconic example of filibustering when he talked twenty-four hours straight to stop the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Blacks to vote. His effort failed, and the Act passed within two hours after he sat down. The filibuster was used again in another failed effort to stop the Senate from passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Less publicized is how the filibuster has been used to block workers’ rights legislation, such as the 1978 Labor Law Reform Act and, more recently, the Employee Free Choice Act, supported by the Obama administration. Republicans are threatening to filibuster to stop the Senate from passing HR1. This is a critical bill that would negate past state-mandated laws suppressing voter turnout and curtail the impact in the 47 state legislatures that have bills before them to restrict ballot access further. Many Democrats use these examples to demand an end to the filibuster.

Eliminating the filibuster would allow passing progressive legislation to protect civil, employee, and voter rights. That is true if a Democratic majority controlled the Senate. However, progressives should pause and consider that there will be different outcomes when the Republicans come to control the Senate. In exactly half of the congressional sessions since 1989 to the end of Donald Trump’s term, they were the majority party in the Senate.

President Donald Trump accused Senate Republicans, who were in the majority, to “look like fools and are wasting time” by preserving the filibuster. Without the Democrats being able to use the filibuster, Republicans would have passed legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and limit protections for undocumented immigrants. The Democrats were also able to deny the Republican Senate from banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans could not obtain the sixty votes to close the debate and allow the legislation to pass.

The filibuster was a relatively dormant tool until the Nixon Administration

The filibuster is more of a generic term than a legal one. It simply allows Senators of the minority party to delay a vote on legislation that the majority party would pass. The delay in effect becomes a veto if the talking or threat of a filibuster cannot be formally ended through a vote.

On a side note, the House does not have a filibuster. Back in 1806, when both chambers established their rules, the House retained the right to take a vote through a majority vote. The Senate, some historians say it was done by accident, dropped that requirement.

Up until 1917, there was no way to force a vote in the Senate if the minority party refused to give way. The compromise reached that year would allow a two-thirds vote of the Senate members to cease an endless debate from stopping legislation. Before 1917, no precise measurement of how often filibustering occurred existed other than combing through the historical debate records.

Since 1917, a record is kept every time there is a motion for cloture, i.e., ending a debate to take a vote. There is also a record of the number of votes are taken after the motion was made. And there is a record showing how many of those votes resulted in cloture being invoked.

Despite the ability to end a filibuster of the 21 congressional sessions from 1917 to the 1971-72 session, only six passed a cloture vote. In 11 of the 21 sessions, no vote was even taken. There is no formal record indicating when a filibuster occurred other than a vote being taken. There were undoubtedly delaying tactics used to delay or stop a vote, which might result in a motion to consider a cloture vote, but no such motions were made in 9 sessions. Even though filibusters were used to stop the adoption of lynching laws, as a rule, there is not a clear record of how they threatened to block similar legislation.

The record clearly shows that in the 1971-72 congressional session, which would have been the second half of Richard Nixon’s first term, filibusters did explode. They went from a high of seven votes for cloture in any single session to 20 votes in that session. From 1972 forward, the number of cloture votes per session dropped only once below 20 votes.

The trend began with the Democrats being the majority party in the Senate during Nixon’s second half of his first term. The Republicans used the filibuster to stop passing the U.S.-Soviet Arms Control Pact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Military Draft Extension but lost the cloture vote. That session saw a landmark of 4 cloture votes being invoked, and that session number rose steadily to the end of the Trump administration.

In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from 66 to 60. The Democrats had 61 members, so they avoided an effective filibuster from stopping their legislation by lowering the vote. However, following the end of the next congressional session, neither party reached a high of 61 members in the Senate. Consequently, the filibuster has become the weapon of choice for the minority Senate party. And it has been increasingly used by both the Republicans and the Democrats.

Tracking the Use of the Filibuster by Ds and Rs

The majority party makes the motion to ask for cloture because their agenda is being delayed. The minority party filibusters to stop the majority from passing legislation. The higher the number of motions, the more the minority party employs filibusters to prevent the majority’s legislation from passing.

From the first congressional session in the W. H. Bush administration (1989-1990) up to the third congressional term in W. Bush’s administration (2005-2007), there were 601 motions for closure during that 9-session period. An explosion followed this period in using the filibuster.

During the six congressional sessions before the Joe Biden administration began, there was a total of 1,161 motions for cloture by both parties covering the Obama and Trump’s terms. The Republicans made 153 more motions for cloture than the Democrats did during this period, even though both parties were the majority party in the Senate for three sessions each.

More importantly, the Republicans were forced to have a vote on cloture 207 more times than the Democrats pursued such a vote. Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University, argues that cloture votes, while imperfect, are a valid measurement of minority efforts to block the Senate. Consequently, the Democrats used the filibuster more often than the Republicans to stop the other party’s legislation from coming up for a vote.

This data runs counter to an article by Caroline Fredrickson for the Brennan Center for Justice. In her extensive documented “The Case Against the Filibuster”, she wrote, “During the Obama administration, Senate Republicans took obstruction to a new level, using the filibuster more than ever in history.” While that is technically correct, the record shows that Democrats then set a new historical record for “obstruction” when the Republicans became the majority party in the Senate.

It is challenging to figure how eliminating the filibuster, which the Democrats used more than the Republicans in the last 31 years, would benefit the Democrats.

Filibuster’s role in our Democracy

Fredrickson also makes an argument that the filibuster has clogged up the democratic process. She implies that the filibuster has contributed to the decline in congress’s productivity. The problem is that most of the time that filibustering has been available, there is no parallel between enacting cloture and the number of bills that the Senate passed. She notes that “In the 84th Congress (1955–1956), the Senate passed 2,410 bills, a high for the chamber.” However, from 1917 to 1956, cloture was only invoked four times, three of which were in one session. She further shows that “By the 92nd Congress (1971–1972), the number of bills passed dropped below 1,000 to 927.” During that period of eight sessions, cloture was only invoked eight times, half of which were in the last session. It is hard to make a creditable case that the filibuster is the cause for stifling the Senate’s productivity.

Congress has passed and introduced fewer bills, as she correctly notes. However, I believe it’s not because of the filibuster. It’s because ideology is taking the lead in shaping both political parties. The evidence is found in how the votes for invoking cloture have dramatically increased while productivity has shrunk.

Invoking cloture never exceeded 48% of the motions succeeding during the combined terms of H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, even with each party controlling the Senate for three sessions. In the collective terms of all the presidents that followed them, W. Bush, Obama, and Trump, each party controlled five sessions for a total of ten terms. Only once did invocation fall below 48%. It was during this period that passing legislation dramatically declined the most.

The increase in the invocation rate and the decrease in passing legislation can be traced to the parties marshaling greater discipline over their members and increasing ideological differences.

There are more significant practices than filibustering that have hindered our democracy from functioning correctly. They would be representing less populated states disproportionately in the Senate, gerrymandering of state legislative districts that draw the congressional districts, and enacting voter suppression measures that target the other party’s voters. These all should be corrected to secure a more responsive government to the majority of citizens.

The filibuster was not included in the constitution, which prescribes supermajority votes only for specific subjects, such as treaties. The implication being that a simple majority is an expectation for passing legislation.

Nevertheless, it is part of our political heritage that will be difficult to abandon, even for Democrats. Thirty of them, including now Vice President Kamala Harrison, joined an equal number of Senate Republicans signing a letter in April 2017 asking both Majority and Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer “to preserve the rules, practices, and traditions … to engage in extended debate.” Their message leaves the door open for adjusting the filibuster rules but not eliminating them.

Adjustments have been made to make the filibuster less disruptive. Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution has counted 161 exceptions to the filibuster’s supermajority requirement that the Senate or statute has created between 1969 and 2014. More have been made since then. For example, in 2017, the Senate reduced the number of votes needed to end debate on nominations.

Another needed change, led by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), is to require attendance in the chamber to physically participate in a filibuster. Allowing a filibuster to occur with just filling a notification is a significant flaw created when the senate rules lowered the number of votes needed to achieve cloture. Both parties have taken advantage of requiring little effort to begin and sustain a filibuster. And why not? If the other side is doing it? The result has been a race to strangle the other party’s prime legislative priorities with minimal visible effort.

What is most insidious is that filibustering can occur throughout moving a bill through the Senate. It is not just one filibuster to keep legislation away from a final floor vote. Instead, multiple filibusters stop or slow down the processing of a single bill along its way to a floor vote.

The wisest course of action in resolving the filibuster’s negative impact on our legislative process is to think through the consequences of any change and take intermediate steps to lessen unintended consequences. That approach is not compromising principles. It is pursuing the most effective alteration possible to keep our Senate as a functioning chamber for passing significant pieces of legislation.

The table below is a compilation of data collected from the following sources.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/25/control-house-and-senate-1900/

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm

https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/Presidents-Coinciding/

Table of Cloture Motions and Votes in every Congressional Session since 1991

The Featured Image is of The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts being unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Even during war, we must defend our democratic culture.

While Trump’s Iranian War may continue to capture our much-needed attention, it is essential that the public see this conflict as representative of our Trump era of rule – where rules are twisted far beyond their original intent.

Despite the Administration’s propaganda for starting a war with Iran, like many of his other actions, it is closely linked to Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). And this was also displayed in his hijacking of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Although this effort may seem minor compared to any war, it clearly shows how Trump tries to control any government institution that doesn’t fit with his agenda, including our nation’s top cultural and performance venue.

The Kennedy Center’s creation and mission was a bipartisan effort.

While sticking his name on the Center’s outside wall was largely seen as just another of his narcissistic outbursts, it goes much deeper. It symbolizes his hostility toward liberalism, which advocates for cooperation between rivals to achieve the greater good for everyone. This was the core principle behind President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signing of bipartisan legislation in 1958 to create a National Cultural Center in the nation’s capital.

Four years later, in 1962, President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy launched a $30 million fundraising campaign for the Center’s construction, which President Eisenhower and his wife Mamie contributed to.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the new National Cultural Center as a living memorial to Kennedy for his support of the performing arts by renaming it the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It passed by voice vote (also known as unanimous consent) in both chambers, which is common when both Republicans and Democrats agree on a bipartisan resolution.

Why the Kennedy Center can be seen as a threat to authoritarians.

Authoritarianism, which consolidates all power under a single leader, demands obedience to simple beliefs. Art, in all its forms, has traditionally been a source of independent thought that often challenges those beliefs. As a result, authoritarian governments aim to control the arts to restrict their free expression. This ongoing tension is recognized by both conservatives and liberals.

Elisabeth Braw, a former senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which focuses on free enterprise and limited government, compares Donald Trump’s control of the Kennedy Center to practices in authoritarian countries. Braw notes that in Stalin’s Soviet Union, composers knew what they could and could not write. Similarly, in the Third Reich, the Nazis tried to organize and control the arts under a government department.

More recently, in Venezuela, the Chavista government under Hugo Chavez and then Nicolás Maduro, the leaders of their country’s successful El Sistema youth orchestra program, understood that it could not criticize the regime. Braw concludes that when political leaders imprint their signature on cultural institutions, artistry finds a way to escape. And that’s what they did at the Kennedy Center when Trump took control.

The artisans walked out of the factory when the new boss arrived.

A total of 13 groups canceled performances with the Center after Trump removed all Center Board Trustees and replaced them with his business friends in February 2025. Although few had notable involvement with the arts, the new board immediately elected Trump as their chairman.

At the end of the year, White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt announced on Dec 18, 2025, “the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center has just voted to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center.” Consequently, another 20 groups cancelled their performances as Trump’s name was immediately posted on the building the next day.

For instance, musician Chuck Redd withdrew from his holiday “Jazz Jams” performance, which has been held at the venue for the past twenty years, the day he saw Trump’s name added to the exterior of the building and on its website. Historians argue that adding Trump’s name violates federal law and desecrates a living memorial for Kennedy by having Trump place his name in front of Kennedy’s on the building’s entrance and website. Trump’s handpicked new Center President Richard Grinell plans to seek $1 million in damages from Reed because he wouldn’t perform for Trump.

Less than two months after Leavitt’s announcement, Trump revealed plans to close the Kennedy Center for two years of renovations on February 1st, 2026. The next day, CNN reported that Trump’s new Center board was unable to sign enough acts to mount a 2026-27 season. Reed wasn’t alone in walking out of what had become a Trump factory.

Unlike JFK, Trump has no record of supporting the arts.

Trump isn’t a supporter of the arts! An AI search of available records and reports from the last ten years (2016–2026) reveals there is no evidence of significant, direct monetary contributions from Donald Trump to major art organizations. Additionally, an analysis of Trump’s charitable donations between 2015 and 2020 shows no major arts organizations among the recipients of his foundations’ gifts.

He appears to withhold financial support from cultural institutions that challenge his ethnocentric ideology, which discourages promoting or showcasing ethnic diversity positively. Trump issued an order titled Restoring Truth in March 2025 that aimed to prevent displays he believed “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies incompatible with Federal law and policy.” In effect, he was interpreting federal laws through this conservative, nationalistic worldview.

Therefore, Trump frequently attempted to cut or eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). To prevent criticism of his actions, he quickly shut down the Committee on Arts and Humanities on his first day in office for his second term.

After taking control of the Kennedy Center, Trump vowed to usher in a new “golden age” for the institution while promising it “is not going to be woke.” Consequently, he removed performances that did not align with his ethnocentrism philosophy. He canceled the upcoming tour of Finn, an acclaimed Kennedy Center-produced children’s musical, which the show’s creators described as having “at its heart a universal message of love and acceptance.” Why was it canceled? Is preaching love and acceptance “woke”?

When speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, Trump said that unlike Kirk, he did “hate” his enemies. Despite his newly appointed Kennedy Center President, Richard Grenell, being openly gay, Trump canceled the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington. Perhaps it was a favor to his conservative evangelist base, which condemns homosexuality.

How Trump took control of The Kennedy Center Board.

In taking control of the Kennedy Center’s policies, Trump follows the same strategy that his SAVE Act would use on elections. That legislation would define who can vote as a way to try to influence election outcomes. In the case of the Kennedy Center, he removed all trustees appointed by Biden. Although the law does not explicitly prohibit removing trustees, it had never been done before in the center’s nearly 70-year history. Legal experts said his action might violate the center’s charter.

All previous Kennedy Center boards have been bipartisan, spanning multiple administrations, with some members appointed to six-year terms. Trump broke the norms that society expects its leaders to follow just as much as they obey the laws they pass. Without norms, laws are simply inconveniences to work around.

And this is exactly what Trump did. He installed his current staff, like Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Dan Scavino, manager of Trump’s Truth Social account, and White House Personnel Office Director Sergio Gor. All others were allies, known for their loyalty to him; their lack of experience in artistic pursuits was not evident.

Once on the board, Trump’s supporters began to rewrite the Center’s rules, following the example set by the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a fable about how Joseph Stalin’s concentration of power betrayed the ideals of creating a Soviet utopia. The Orwellian pigs amended the rule that “All animals are equal” by adding the clause, “but some animals are more equal than others.”

Trump’s followers altered the rules so that board members appointed by Congress — known as ex officio members — could not vote or be included in a quorum. This allowed them to rename the Center as The Trump and Kennedy Center. Legal experts said the change might violate the center’s charter.

Nevertheless, in the Trump world, all rules, charters, and constitutions are just pesky minutiae. Reality is what Trump believes: on his Truth Social platform, he stated the name change was unanimous. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced that the board unanimously renamed the Center the Trump and Kennedy Center. Leavitt said Trump received this honor “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.” Although there is no public record of what he accomplished.

The vote was not unanimous because ex-official member Rep. Joyce Beatty attempted to object during the meeting when the name change was approved but was denied the ability to speak out. Federal law identifies ex officio members as some of the Center’s trustees, charged with maintaining it as a memorial to JFK, according to the Washington Post. Consequently, Beatty filed a lawsuit, arguing that the name change violated federal law and the Constitution.

Is the Center moving away from performing arts to appeal to Trump’s interests.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is an ex-officio member trustee and the Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, which has jurisdiction over public buildings. He is condemning Trump’s loyalists of closing the Center for two years to cover up their failures since taking control. Whitehouse, citing records his committee staff obtained about the center, accused them of rubber stamping “Trump’s power grab resulting in millions of lost revenue, luxury spending, and preferential treatment for Trump allies.”

Whitehouse had previously launched an investigation into the Center’s financial management and operations claiming that papers he obtained showed that there was “widespread cronyism, financial mismanagement and corruption.” Because Republicans control the EPW Committee, Whitehouse has neither subpoena authority nor the votes to launch a formal committee investigation. As a result, Whitehouse cannot compel Grenell to provide evidence to support the validity of Grenell’s seemingly reasonable objections to Whitehouse’s charges.

Grenell responded as a fiscal conservative trying to manage the Center. For instance, Grenell wrote that “There were 94 people employed in the Development Department (today, there are 16). we were paying a bloated staff with our future debt reserves account.” However, eliminating 83% of any department’s employees would need to be justified. Likewise, drawing down a debt reserve account to cover payroll is a serious situation if it is a regular practice. But Grenell provides no paper trail to validate his statements.

Whitehouse attributes two events that he believes turned the Kennedy center into serving Trump’s friends and political allies rather than the intended purpose of presenting art performances to the public.

The Senator said that Grenell gave the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) free to host its 2026 World Cup draw. It had exclusive access of the Kennedy Center campus at an estimated $5 million loss that forced other events to cancel. He didn’t mention how FIFA President Gianni Infantino invented a peace prize from the World Cup draw, four weeks after Trump was passed over by the Nobel Committee. Was that a typical Trump transaction victory?

Grenell, in response to Whitehall’s claims, said, “FIFA has given us several million dollars, in addition to paying all of the expenses for this event in lieu of a rental fee.” But no contract was provided showing that the exchange was genuine or legally binding, and it made no mention of Trump’s free “peace trophy.”

Whitehouse also objected to Grenell renting the Center’s national cultural stage for less than half its scheduled cost to allow American Conservative Union Foundation needed a venue for a summit on “ending Christian persecution.” Whitehouse did not ask whether this is the type of political gatherings that the Center should host or financially subsidize through discounting their fees to the Center.

Whitehouse’s questions raise the existential concern that the Center may be transitioning away from traditional performing arts to becoming a forum for political groups. If so, that is not why the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was established.

Bottom Line: Congress must protect the Kennedy Center to serve the public, not politicians.

Trump’s probably illegal and certainly unorthodox actions weaken the Kennedy Center’s mission to support the arts. By directly controlling and guiding the Center’s board to turn it into a platform for events with a specific political message, Trump has fostered three harmful trends.

First, it encourages future presidents to continue using the Center to promote their political agendas. Second, it allows unchecked spending that benefits those with political influence over the board. Lastly, it undermines Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower’s bipartisan legacy of supporting the arts to celebrate and showcase the culture of all our nation’s citizens.

The only way now to prevent these corrupt actions is for Congress to establish a bipartisan oversight committee to monitor and correct the Center’s expenditures and projects. Legislation, with Democratic and Republican sponsors, is needed to set guardrails so an authoritarian executive cannot repeat Trump’s practices.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

Citizenship Politics

Citizenship Politics encourages readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. Nations are not static societies.

By NICK LICATA

Image from FDR Presidential Library & Museum, Manuel G. Silberger, Lithograph 1936, Federal Art Project of WPA

If conservatives accept President Donald Trump’s agenda to dismantle our republic’s laws and principles, they could go down The Road to Serfdom, as Friedrich A. Hayek’s book title suggests.

Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and Nobel laureate, believed that “the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom.” Any constraints on the exchange of property in the marketplace lead to socialism, which he considered a form of totalitarianism. This logic leads many to adopt Hayek’s philosophy of libertarian conservatism, which links individualism, morality, and the free market as the unified force necessary to protect individual freedoms.

Trump’s attacks on Democrats flow from this philosophy as he attacks liberal planning, programs, and funding as radical socialist actions. These assumptions are central to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiatives, which he is implementing. Trump is determined to destroy the “deep state.”

Although he died in 1992, Hayek’s formulation of libertarian conservatism lives on, shaping conservatives’ and Republicans’ game plan to deconstruct our democratic republic’s core institutions, as Steve Bannon, Trump’s earliest White House advisor, boasted.

Think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Manhattan Institute align their efforts with libertarian conservatism. But they represent only the tip of a glacier of similar organizations within the State Policy Network (SPN), which has 162 members across all 50 states. Some work closely with ALEC; a gathering of conservative state legislators and private-sector representatives that drafts and passes approximately 200 model bills a year based on libertarian conservative principles.

ALEC works to repeal existing liberal programs at the state level. At the federal level, Trump protects his Executive Orders, which are designed to dismantle federal agencies he considers liberal, by appointing justices sympathetic to libertarian-conservative principles.

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In his first term, White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, said Trump was pairing the administration’s deregulation orders with judicial nominees opposed to the federal bureaucracy’s growing power. To aid in selecting jurists, Trump relied on Lee Liberman Otis, a founder of the libertarian conservative Federalist Society.

However, Trump’s Executive Orders and his Big Beautiful Bill sometimes significantly clash with Hayek’s politics. This becomes evident when he imposes high tariffs that severely restrict the free market, or when he requires citizens to carry I.D. cards to participate in elections, thereby infringing on individuals’ privacy rights.

Despite introducing policies that blatantly contravene Hayek’s principles, Trump amplifies Hayek’s prediction that socialism will inevitably lead to fascism. Nevertheless, if Trump’s agenda were adopted, his followers and enablers would go down the road that Hayek most feared, the loss of individual rights.

According to Hayek, the rise of fascism is not a reaction against government efforts to plan the economy but rather a necessary outcome of attempts to regulate the free market. In that process, it steals money from those who succeed in the marketplace. This is dramatized by Trump calling Democrats radicals and fascists when they try to push energy consumption toward sustainable energy resources, such as those provided by wind and solar energy, rather than coal.

Democrats regulate coal production to reduce airborne pollutants from coal, which increase the costs of illnesses arising from them. These costs are either paid out of individuals’ pockets or by the government to cover health care plans.

However, industrial regulations likely reduce short-term profits among coal producers. According to credible news reports, their executives, unlike most civilians, held a “dinner” meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in April 2024. There, he encouraged them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He described this exchange as a deal, saying they would see regulatory and tax benefits if he were re-elected.

This scenario underscores Hayek’s central weakness: ignoring that an unregulated market produces greater wealth, which gives the wealthiest greater leverage to protect their property interests than the average citizen. Wealth translates into political power, enabling it to shape the marketplace in its interests.

Hence, personal freedoms expand or contract depending on the amount of wealth one has. Hayek’s writings were framed on the authoritarian experience of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia’s planned economies and culture. He sees their authoritarian rule as an outgrowth of socialism, of any sort, even democratic socialism. Yet he does not consider prior non-socialist governments that controlled economic and cultural conditions, such as Russia’s Czarist Government, where 80% of the population were peasants, with half being effectively living as serfs.

By applying the terms “free market” to describe the ideal economic system for exercising freedom and “socialism” to describe a system that morally degrades individuals’ freedoms, Hayek constructs exaggerated models of reality, known as typologies. In his writings, Hayek drew on Max Weber’s work, which introduced typologies to understand social and economic phenomena through individual action.

Using typologies to draw generalizations can help explain social change, but they are not useful if treated as inflexible behavioral categories that predict the future. Using idealized behavioral types as an unquestioned predictor of historical change will project the future as either a utopia or a dystopia. Both the far right and the far left are guilty of this tendency.

Socialists who believe that socialism must be the path to a utopian worker-run state end up creating a state that concentrates political power in a single bureaucratic organization, smothering individual freedoms. Likewise, free-market capitalists, who believe that any regulation of an individual’s property is an infringement on their freedom, end up with concentrated wealth and power among an elite that can ignore the welfare and freedom of others.

Conservative free-marketer Walter E. Williams wrote the foreword to Road to Serfdom, stating that there cannot be personal liberty without free markets. There are no free markets in the world; all are regulated in some way. Those with the fewest regulations accumulate wealth, allowing a sliver of the total population to possess it. That wealth translates into political power to use national resources to their benefit at the expense of the rest of the population. In effect, the freedom to achieve a satisfactory standard of living for all is limited.

We can be experiencing a real road to modern-day serfdom, where most people work hard to sustain an affordable lifestyle as they compete for limited resources, be they jobs, shelter, food, education, or simply free time to smell the roses. But this is not a social caste system.

The market economy is based on competition, which creates opportunities for some to benefit from participating in the marketplace. Those opportunities may arise from a range of factors, including technological change, social networking, inherited wealth, and even political shifts in the power structure.

Conservatives point to examples of minorities who rise from lower-income backgrounds to succeed in the marketplace. Williams’ life is one. He overcame racist and economic barriers, but he did so with government financial assistance.

Williams grew up without a father, living with his mom and sister in a government-subsidized housing project. He attended a public community college for a semester, then became a cab driver before serving as a private in the army.

He successfully defended himself against courts-martial for challenging racially slurred orders given to him. He also wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy denouncing the pervasive racism in the American government and military. Later, he earned his PhD at publicly funded state universities and then taught at them.

Despite benefiting from public funds that provided him with access to housing, education, and employment, he became an advocate for free-market capitalism. This was due in part to the influence of the conservative economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, who shared a similar background of growing up as a poor, Black, fatherless child. Both became celebrated for their libertarian conservatism.

The life experiences of Williams and Sowell, who achieved success through public taxation, stand in stark contrast to their mission in life to oppose public taxation and business regulation, since they viewed them as oppressive to an individual’s freedom.

How can two Americans, who have experienced racial discrimination, are from the lower economic class, and have benefited from liberal economic policies, embrace the capitalist vision that a free-market society, unchained by government restrictions, can better provide for individuals?

Williams and Sowell, although a minority within the Black community, appear to hold beliefs that are accepted by the majority of those in the white community, who have consistently voted for conservative Republicans in Presidential elections. Regardless of their race, they all subscribe to the need to protect individual rights from big government.

Trump’s electoral and marketing achievements position him as a Moses-like figure for voters angry at big government. He blamed the Democrats for failing to deliver on their promise of a better life. Instead, Trump views himself as leading them to a promised land by making America great again. It will no longer waste public funds protecting the rights of individuals who are not committed to restoring America to what it was when whites were the majority population.

It’s a message that, as expected, resonated primarily with white voters. According to Pew Research, non-Hispanic white voters made up at least 84% of Trump’s support in the 2024 election. However, Pew also found that white voters make up 79% of Republicans and those leaning Republican. This means that Trump received enough votes from white Democratic-leaning voters to win the election.

Trump dismantled the Republican Party’s political establishment in 2016. Trump won the 2016 Republican Primary, the largest field of presidential candidates in American history, with 17 major candidates, 45% of the popular vote, and 59% of the pledged delegates.

He then went on to win a second term by dominating the party to the extent that Republicans in Congress feared his criticism. He issued clear warnings that they must endorse his agenda or else he’d call his followers to defeat that person in their Republican primary.

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With few Republicans willing to criticize Trump, he gained a free pass to do as he pleased. So he set aside the Reagan-era legacy as a doctrine and replaced it with his own brand of Republicanism, which leaned heavily toward libertarian conservatism, more than any previous Republican president.

Trump also reinvigorated his following by pushing Christianity. Just as importantly, ethnocentrism, which judges other cultures by their closeness to one’s own culture, and can exhibit a cultural bias, leading to stereotypes that discriminate. Nevertheless, for Trump’s core supporters, this matched their beliefs in a supreme Christian God and in White America as representing the best in America.

The overlap of libertarian conservatism, Christianity, and ethnocentrism forms a strong voter constituency that often aligns on issues as long as those issues don’t endanger the other’s special interests. The January 6 insurrection can be seen as a manifestation of this alignment, as it declared war on the “deep state” that stole the election from Trump. Of those charged in the Capitol insurrection, approximately 90% were white. Many carried crosses or signs referencing Christianity, and “Freedom” was the most common sign.

This coalition will continue to support Trump because he appears to be another outsider fighting against big government trampling of individual rights. However, his policies are beginning to challenge that image as federal agents demand IDs from citizens, break into people’s homes to arrest suspects without evidence, and expand the power of some of the largest corporations to the detriment of consumers.

Doubts about Trump’s role as an outsider were reinforced by the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump was a prominent member of Epstein’s immoral community of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America.

Hayek wrote in his Road to Serfdom that for a ruler, whether a person or a party, to achieve their ends, they must create a power of a magnitude not previously experienced in that country. This insight applies to Marxists and capitalists alike. Marx and Hayek both sought a better future for humanity by, directly or indirectly, establishing a central authority to reallocate material resources, money, and cultural values toward an ideal society.

Carried to its inevitable end, it results in authoritarian rule. That end can be achieved either through direct physical violence, as in Russia or China, or through the manipulation of institutions, as in Germany and Italy.

It is a fair question to ask whether Trump is following the same path, given that he is exercising immense executive authority not seen since the Civil War. He has ignored more than 200 court rulings against his actions, coddled the largest corporations with tax benefits, and relies on the very wealthiest to deliver his populist slogans to the public. Research by Thom Hartmann shows that Trump has received money from 150 billionaires, while his 2024 presidential opponent, Kamala Harris, has received money from only 3.

Most unsettling is Trump’s effort to change our diverse culture into the “right” one. It’s happening before our eyes today.

What happens to individual freedoms when Homeland Security Department Secretary Kristi Noem remarks on the need to elect the “right people” to get the “right leaders”? Or when the Department of Defense has a Christian Nationalist lead the Pentagon Prayer Service?

Who selects the “right leaders”? Who determines the “right” religion to promote on government property for government employees? Those with the political power to do as they please.

Aren’t these road signs that Trump is leading us to becoming a nation of normal, everyday citizens being bullied like modern-day serfs? Is this what conservatives voted for?

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

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Citizenship Politics

Citizenship Politics encourages readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. Nations are not static societies.

By NICK LICATA

N-DSC4432. 9/12/25. Tucson, AZ. Photo by Dyan Bone.

Overcoming opposition from right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats, the House reached a compromise to pass the budget bill and the Continuing Resolution (CR). The agreement funds all departments except the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). If the parties don’t reach a compromise on a funding bill for DHS, its funding will cease on Valentine’s Day, February 14th.

Still, ICE will receive an additional $20 billion per year for operations and detention costs under the previously approved Big Beautiful Bill. However, other DHS agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), will not be funded.

Democrats have outlined new rules governing immigration enforcement operations. The rules would apply to both ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection). Federal agents from ICE killed Renee Good, and CBP agents killed Alex Pretti.

Republicans are divided on how they should respond to the proposed changes. Some want federal agents to continue to wear masks. More of them have opposed using Judicial warrants because it would require agents to obtain a court’s approval to use various tactics, such as entering people’s homes or workplaces.

Democrats were able to secure this brief period to present their changes and force the Republicans to justify their opposition because President Trump pulled back from his usual attacks on protesters when he reluctantly recognized that ICE’s aggressive and likely illegal actions have sparked a tsunami of protests across the nation.

The day after Pretti was killed, YouGov conducted a poll and found that a majority (57%) of Americans somewhat or strongly disapproved of the way ICE handles its job. That finding aligned with a Fox News Poll taken around the time of Pretti’s death, which found that 59% of voters said ICE was too aggressive.

Although polls show that Trump’s MAGA base overwhelmingly supports ICE’s actions, a large share of independent voters does not. These are the folks who can swing November’s congressional elections toward Democratic victories – perhaps enough to capture control of the House. And ICE’s reputation is so poor that nearly half of Independents (47% vs. 35%) would support eliminating it, according to a YouGov poll.

With public opinion disapproving of ICE tactics, Democrats have broad support for their four modest demands that the two DHS agencies adopt procedures common in many police departments.

Citizenship Politics

Citizenship Politics encourages readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. Nations are not static societies.

By NICK LICATA

First, they must use judicial warrants, not administrative warrants. The latter are issued by personnel appointed as administrative judges, often with no prior experience in civil administration. The Department of Justice removed the requirement that such judges have specific, extensive experience in immigration law, allowing the Department of Defense to use its officers as judges. This practice allows DHS agents to bypass civil court to obtain approval to enter a home without the owner’s permission.

DOJ asked for 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges for six-month stints, which can be renewed. If it is argued that this practice was necessary because there are not enough immigration judges available, it must be noted that the Trump administration has fired dozens of immigration judges, even as the immigration courts face a backlog of nearly 3.5 million cases, according to data collected by a Syracuse University research center.

Second, the agencies must cease their roving patrols that search for anyone they believe might be an immigrant, and therefore possibly undocumented. Often, they base their stops on a person’s skin color. Consequently, American citizens have been detained without due process unless they can quickly prove they are citizens.

Critics of the DHS site argue that the extremely high number of immigrants Trump wants DHS to deport serves as an incentive to maximize detentions and arrests. Given numerous examples of citizens being pulled from their cars, workplaces, and homes without evidence that they pose a threat to public safety, the agencies need to maintain a public record of each incident.

Third, there must be a universal code of conduct to govern federal law enforcement officers’ use of force. In this demand, it’s unclear how this code would differ from the protocol that agents ignored when they shot and killed Pretti and Reed. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said the agents had not followed it. Did Miller assume there was one, or did he read it and know they had violated it? When the negotiations occur, Miller should be invited to share what he suggests for the code, since he believed their conduct was in violation of some kind of rules.

Fourth, federal officers should not wear masks and should be required to wear body cameras and proper identification. To be effective, these requirements must clearly specify the conditions under which they apply. Body cameras must be left on during any action that initiates a detention or arrest. Officers must wear visible, identifiable name tags on their vests. Many cities have adopted these practices for their police officers, subject to reasonable exceptions.

While these negotiations are essential to mitigate ICE practices, they will not address the dire conditions in privately operated detention centers. Over the past 13 months, 32 ICE detainees have died, most due to a failure to provide medical and mental health care. Of the 66,000 detainees, approximately three-quarters had no criminal convictions, and many who do are convicted of only minor offenses, such as traffic violations. The Cato Institute’s review of ICE bookings shows that only 5% of all detainees had a violent criminal conviction.

The problem the Democrats face is that while 57 percent of voters disapprove of how ICE enforces immigration laws, those voters are unlikely to be from the rural districts, which are the Republicans’ voter base. Additionally, no polls show that the majority of voters oppose enforcing immigration regulations, even though a bare majority recently would support eliminating ICE. Voters are outraged by ICE tactics, but it would be a stretch to believe they do not want some restrictions on immigration.

Democrats have recognized this distinction in Biden’s attempt to rationalize the immigration process, which Republicans opposed. Meanwhile, Republicans have shown that they feel comfortable breaking laws to advance mass deportations of immigrants.

There is an opportunity now for Democrats to be the reasonable party that offers workable, just solutions for integrating immigrants into America. Even if Democrats succeed in altering ICE practices, they need to continue challenging the assumptions and misinformation Trump uses to promote a narrow nationalist agenda that disregards basic American values.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials and a Seattle City Councilmember for 18 years.

Democrats and Republicans are negotiating over the next 24 hours to pass a funding bill by midnight Friday to avoid a government shutdown. However, even if an agreement is reached, the House will not be in session until Monday to approve the changes. There may be strong Republican opposition to an agreement.

Even if a bill without funding for DHS passes, other services besides ICE will be affected. Consequently, the latest apparent effort is to pass a bill that funds DHS but not ICE until a final agreement can be reached on changing their practices. Such a bill will be temporary, and the debate now may be about how long the temporary status will last.

Unlike the last shutdown, Trump is not promoting a shutdown, this time he told his Cabinet “we’ll work in a very bipartisan way, I believe, not to have a shutdown. We don’t want to shut down.”

As I describe below, DHS uses ICE necessitates Congressional oversight. Privately run prisons with no accountability are being operated, people’s homes are being entered without judicial warrants, detainees are denied their right of due process, and American citizens are harassed and detained if they are not carrying identification cards.

These are the practices of a private paramilitary force, not a publicly accountable enforcement agency. These practices must be addressed even after the proposed Democratic alterations are made, if we are to do something more than witness civilians being killed.

The details of my analysis of how ICE has adopted paramilitary tactics can be found below, which appeared before as my prior Citizen Politics analysis of ICE at

ICE agents’ aggressive tactics in arresting people in their homes, workplaces, and from their cars have sparked nationwide protests, as they appear to be acting as the president’s paramilitary police rather than as a publicly accountable government agency. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversees ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is conducting raids in Minneapolis and other Democratic cities to find aliens who have not become citizens and are believed to be dangerous.

A Quinnipiac University National Poll of registered voters found that 57% disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. As expected, the two parties are far apart, with Republicans at 12% and Democrats at 94% disapproving. But Republican candidates this fall should be concerned that 64% of Independents disapprove.

ICE, justifying the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, released a font of misinformation.

A national wave of them showed ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting three shots into a car driven by a white middle-aged woman, Renee Good, while she was slowly moving her car out of the way of Ross. He appears to be standing in front of or near the front of the vehicle.

Despite Noem immediately claiming after the incident that he was “run over,” all the videos posted on social media show Ross standing on his feet. He walked toward the car after it crashed, while Good apparently died at the steering wheel from his shots. The majority of those in the Quinnipiac poll who saw the video say the shots should not have been fired by the ICE agent, with 59% of independents agreeing that it was not justified.

Noem said that Ross was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding. That may be true, because if the side of Good’s car brushed him, even at a slow speed, the officer could have sustained bruises. By definition, bruises are minor, localized internal bleeding; the medical term is ecchymosis. The government has not released hospital information about Ross’s injury.

Noem labeled Good and other protestors as terrorists and said she would prosecute them as such. However, a judge threw out the government’s request to label her a terrorist suspect because it was too weak an accusation.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem regularly defends ICE’s arrests of immigrants as preventing potential violence from terrorists, not provoking violence from civilians monitoring or protesting ICE activities. Noem told reporters that “the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our country safer.”

However, just over two weeks after killing Good, ICE’s aggressive actions led to the killing of 37-year-old intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti. He was monitoring ICE’s actions toward immigrants and protestors by filming them on his phone. As before, the federal government expressed no remorse for killing a civilian and relied only on the version of events from the five federal agents involved. They maintained that he “violently resisted” and that he refused to give them a gun he was legally allowed to carry, until the officers fired “defensive shots.”

Wall Street Journal reporters reviewed videos of the killing and concluded that bystander videos contradict the agent’s account of what happened. Pretti had his phone in his right hand, and his left hand, empty, was raised above his head while he tried to protect the woman ICE had just pushed down, all while being pepper-sprayed. This visual evidence shows that the federal government didn’t even look at the videos before concocting a story that Pretti was shot after he approached officers with a handgun.

Ultimately, Noem is responsible for ICE’s actions. The Quinnipiac poll showed that the majority of registered voters disapprove of how she is managing ICE. Noem has the FBI conducting the investigation into the Goods’ killing, not local authorities, because the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension withdrew from the investigation after the FBI denied them access to evidence. It’s assumed that Noem will again deny local authorities access to the evidence they release to embellish their narrative.

ICE tactics for apprehending immigrants are based on Trump’s portrayal of immigrants as either criminals or potentially dangerous. This objective is so vague that it allows ICE to meet Trump’s high quota for arresting and deporting immigrants. Trump has effectively converted an institution that served to regulate and enforce orderly immigration into an aggressive police force to expel as many immigrants as ICE can identify as potentially dangerous.

Trump’s immigration agenda seems to reflect a nationalist philosophy that the “nativist” population needs protection from being subjugated by both legal and undocumented immigrants. But the reality is that immigrants commit fewer crimes and are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens. The Migration Policy Institute found that in 2020, immigrants were roughly 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born citizens.

While the deaths of Good and Pretti sparked national protests, they are not the only deaths attributed to ICE. The Trace,an American nonprofit journalism outlet, collected data from late 2025 and early 2026 showing at least 6 deaths attributed to ICE during the current Trump administration.

Have ICE Detention Centers purposefully become unsafe?

According to ICE detention data, 32 ICE detainees’ deaths have been recorded during this period. The majority of deaths were attributed to persistent failings in medical and mental care, including incorrect or incomplete diagnoses in 88% of reviewed cases. Is that cruel carelessness a strategy to scare immigrants into self-deporting from America in fear of being sent to such facilities? Perhaps. According to DSH, approximately 1.9 million people have voluntarily left the U.S. (“self-deported”) since January 20, 2025. But those numbers have not been independently verified.

The Trump administration pays private businesses to operate HDS detention facilities for those arrested by ICE police. Investigations found that these facilities often fail to provide timely emergency care. Even when problems are identified, the private operators rarely make changes, even when multiple violations are documented. This lack of public oversight is exemplified by attempts in 2025 by at least a dozen members of Congress to gain access to detention facilities, which were denied despite federal law prohibiting such denials for oversight.

At the end of November 2025, approximately three-quarters of the 66,000 detainees had no criminal convictions. Many of those convicted had only minor offenses, such as traffic violations, according to data collected by The Trace. ICE often classifies people with pending criminal charges as “criminal arrests.” This practice deprives these individuals of their due process rights by arresting them before a conviction. The Cato Institute’s review of ICE bookings shows that only 5% of all detainees had a violent criminal conviction.

Is ICE bolstering a nativist strategy to limit immigration?

ICE claims they employ targeted arrests when they apprehend a suspected immigrant for allegedly breaking the law or lacking proper immigration papers. In effect, a targeted arrest allows them to arrest individuals at the workplace, while attending school, or while in a courthouse for some matter.

ICE’s mission statement states that by targeting, they can identify aliens who may pose a threat to national security or public safety or otherwise undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws. The breadth of these three conditions has led to the arrest and potential deportation of people who pose no national security threat and rarely pose a physical threat to public safety.

In essence, Trump is using ICE to deport as many immigrants as possible because they somehow “undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.” Notice that it’s not that they have violated these laws, but that they have “undermined the integrity” of them. That is a value judgment that reflects a right-wing nationalist belief that it is necessary “to protect the homeland,” to use a phrase from ICE’s mission statement, before too many foreigners displace “native” Americans.

This strategy has led Americans with darker complexions to feel that they need to carry an I.D. that shows they are citizens. This is exactly what the MAGA movement opposes: the requirement that U.S. citizens be issued national identity cards to prove their citizenship. Since ICE arrests have not affected the white MAGA base, it may not stir their concern.

Here are a couple of examples of how ICE is protecting our nation from supposed criminals.

In the second week of January, ICE police arrested a family of legal asylum-seekers as they approached a Portland, OR, hospital to rush their 7-year-old daughter to emergency medical treatment. ICE police arrived in three unmarked vehicles and surrounded the family’s car in the hospital’s emergency room parking lot.

According to Oregon state Rep. Ricki Ruiz, “the parents pleaded to let their 7-year-old daughter... be released so she could receive urgently needed medical care. But that request was denied.” Instead, they were driven for over two hours to Tacoma, WA, and then flown to the ICE detention facility, the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, run by the private company CoreCivic near San Antonio, Texas. Like other privately run ICE facilities holding detainees, this one had been accused of providing inadequate medical care for children and poor sanitary and health conditions.

Neither parent has a known criminal record and had previously been assigned a 2028 immigration court date to plead their asylum cases. Two weeks earlier, another instance of young children being placed in out-of-state holding-tank facilities occurred. Common Dreams reported that federal agents seized at least four children from Minnesota public schools, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, who were sent to the same Dilley facility.

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, 6,000 family units are currently detained, and about 5,000 children who were separated from their parents or relatives during Trump’s first term remain un reunited with their families.

It’s not just children who are subjected to ICE’s paramilitary intrusion into school buildings; they are also invading people’s homes. ICE agents forced their way into ChongLy Scott Thao’s home without a warrant and held him at gunpoint while handcuffing him. Thao is a naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Nevertheless, they forced him outside in his underwear, with only a blanket covering his shoulders, in the freezing Minnesota cold.

According to Thao, he was driven to the “middle of nowhere” while being interrogated. The agents then realized they had the wrong man. They drove him back without apologizing or explaining why he was shoved outside without being allowed to dress.

Trump has created an unaccountable paramilitary agency.

Trump, through his appointed Secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, has converted ICE into a militarized agency that operates more like a private police force than a public one.

In fact, ICE agents are not trained to act as police because they cannot legally enforce local laws that police are trained to enforce. However, a federal statute (8 U.S.C. § 1357) allows them to arrest anyone who commits a federal offense in their presence or for whom there is probable cause to believe they have committed a federal felony. Neither condition concerns immigration status. This means that ICE could be effective in carrying out Trump’s agenda of sweeping anyone into custody who is suspected of being an immigrant or citizen who has broken a federal law, such as hindering ICE agents from barging into a home, school, or church to arrest suspected criminals.

In practice, Trump is using ICE rather than the U.S. military in Democratic cities to sweep people into detention facilities for extended periods. Consequently, Noeme, with DOJ Secretary Bondi’s approval, could determine that ICE was not breaching the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement. Those taken into custody may not be guilty, but the courts could decide their innocence. In the meantime, they are off the streets.

The clearest sign that ICE has become an unsupervised paramilitary force is that the DOJ has declared that its ICE agents are not subject to judicial review. Vice President J.D. Vance publicly said that ICE agents are immune from prosecution in the context of the killing of Renée Good. By extension, one can expect him to say the same about Pretti’s death.

In addition, to avoid obtaining a judicial warrant to enter a home, Secretary of Defense Kash Patel has assigned military lawyers to serve as administrative judges who then issue administrative warrants. This sleight of hand relieves ICE agents of the need to go to civil court to obtain permission to invade a home.

However, legal scholars say this move represents an unprecedented expansion of the executive branch’s authority. This arrangement could reach the Supreme Court. Will it align with Trump or with a judicial system, independent of the military, to dispense justice?

Because these shortcuts circumvent our nation’s customary practices that require police and military personnel to be accountable to the public, we have an organization accountable only to the person who controls it. That would be President Trump.

With his insatiable appetite for stamping his name on everything from golf courses to the Kennedy Center, will the public see TRUMP ICE created, as he did with the new Trump Kennedy Center? Democrats in Congress could introduce such a resolution. Would Republicans vote for it? Why not, if they support ICE actions?

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

An undated photograph from Epstein’s estate

Class conflict in America has been primarily framed either in economic terms favored by the left or in cultural terms favored by the right. The Epstein files could be presented from either perspective, but their most potent impact has been the cultural division they expose between an elite class and Trump’s populist base.

The Epstein Files describe a ring of men who exploited young women for sexual encounters. The media has focused on the struggle to fully release all the information about who was involved with the most-covered pedophile in American history, Jeffrey Epstein. He was found dead in 2019 in a New York jail cell while being held on charges that he operated a sex-trafficking ring that preyed on young women and underage girls.

Since then, the public’s curiosity has been piqued by revelations about celebrities in Epstein’s orbit, as they anxiously await further exposure. So far, those caught on camera with Epstein have included President Bill Clinton, President Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, and Trump’s former White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

Collectively, they represent a broad political spectrum. But they share one significant trait: they are the most visible of the rich and powerful men, who are statistically in the upper 1% in wealth and, literally, in political power. They are the personification of the Elite Class.

Trump, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced that image when he complained that releasing all the Epstein Files would expose, like “you know, highly respected bankers and lawyers and others.” Interesting note: both Epstein and Bannon were former investment bank officers at big-name New York firms.

One could respond, “So what? Every nation has an elite.” That is true. The global market research firm IPSOS reported in a February 2024 survey on how citizens in 28 countries viewed their elites. The elites were defined as the people who exercise power or influence in politics, business, the media, technology, science, and academia. The first question asked those surveyed whether such a group existed, to the extent that these elites were “a closely connected group of people.” The average country response was a notch above 60%, including America.

That belief doesn’t align with America as a land of equal opportunity in a unique democratic republic that offers an equal chance for all to succeed. To question this commonly held belief, propagated by public education, has been labeled by President Donald Trump as “hating America.” We probably have high expectations because of the individual freedoms we possess, but frustration with not experiencing equal opportunities may account for the IPSOS survey showing distrust of our country’s elite.

Americans believe that our political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people more than in most other surveyed countries and significantly more than our Canadian next-door neighbors believe about their government. But the most significant difference is that a higher percentage of our citizens believe that our “elite” make decisions based on their own interests rather than the needs of the rest of us. That is, they just don’t care about our needs or the laws that govern all of us.

Epstein files exposed this attitude by the apparent toleration of pedophilia among those in Epstein’s company. There is no greater infraction of our moral laws than pedophilia. No polls on public attitudes are needed to assess toleration of it. Pedophilia is fundamentally a cultural issue because it undermines the values that protect the sanctity of the family.

The Epstein files, aside from any illegal activities, record how this elite group repudiated the safety of childhood for its own gratification. That desecration goes beyond economic exploitation. It speaks directly to the reason MAGA and other Republicans have demanded the full release of all the Epstein files. It is a cultural war between their values and those of the elites.

In campaigning for president, Trump led a movement against a decadent elite that ran the government and harmed family values by tolerating deviant behavior. Surprise! The Epstein files revealed Donald Trump to be comfortably embedded in Epstein’s escapade of using very young or underage women to entertain the elite class of older men of power and prestige. That is, Trump is part of that decadent elite he promised to expel from government.

It was a powerful message that resonated with Republicans and still does. The PRRI, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization conducting independent research, found that Republicans prefer a candidate who can preserve American culture (58%) over one who can manage the economy (40%). Democrats and independents prefer a candidate who can manage the economy (57% and 53%, respectively).

The mindsets of Democrats and Republicans can be distinguished by how they perceive class. Democrats, inheriting the tradition of American social gospel preachers and European socialist philosophers, view class conflict in economic terms: it’s the rich class versus the rest of us, who are in the working class. Republicans see class conflict through a cultural prism, in which religious teachings and tight-knit family values oppose government officials who tolerate socially deviant behavior that can undermine those beliefs and family safety.

The administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump in handling the Epstein files exemplify these differences. They also illustrate why the Epstein files pose a greater danger to Trump than they ever did to Biden.

In Trump’s first presidential campaign, he supported right-wing conspiracies that Democrats and their liberal friends were tolerating deviant sexual behavior. Hillary Clinton and a number of Democrats were tied to the Pizza Shop pedophilia conspiracy advocated by QAnon. Trump gained their vocal support and presumably their votes to help him win his election.

Trump continued to promote the conspiracy theory that Democratic leaders were involved in sex trafficking when he left his first term in office. Liz Crokin, a prominent adherent of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, spoke at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser in support of a “documentary” on sex trafficking in 2022. The film included multiple falsehoods and claims of mass sex trafficking in Hollywood, and was “Banned by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and PayPal.” Crokin and Trump gave this effort a thumbs-up for a photo-op.

Trump was still highlighting a cultural divide between his conservative, religious, family-oriented MAGA followers and liberal Democrats as he ran for a second term in 2024. Since liberal icons Bill Clinton and Bill Gates had both been photographed with Epstein, Trump could push that narrative further by declaring that if he was elected in 2024, he would immediately release the Epstein files that his MAGA supporters had been demanding. He dismissed his appearance in photos with Epstein as nothing.

Trump even appointed Kash Patel as FBI director, who had pushed for the public release of Epstein’s client list. Before becoming director, Patel said the FBI controlled Epstein’s “black book” and that President Trump should make it public on “day one” of his administration.

However, his supporters seemed to have forgotten that during Trump’s first term, he did not disclose Epstein’s investigative records to the public after federal prosecutors revived the case against Epstein in 2019, leading to his arrest and subsequent suicide in jail that same year. The only information released came through court proceedings and Freedom of Information Act requests during that period.

After Trump won his reelection by stoking MAGA expectations that the liberals of the deep state would finally be exposed as child abusers through the full release of the Epstein files, he reneged on his promise. He simply declared that releasing all the files was a “distraction” and a “hoax” pushed by the Democrats to deflect from Republican successes.

Trump defended his failure to release the files by saying Biden, as president, didn’t. He ignored that Biden refused to do so because the Epstein investigation was active, and investigative materials are normally kept confidential under U.S. law unless a court orders disclosure. Trump used the same logic to withhold Epstein investigative reports during his first term. But that case ended with Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, being convicted and now serving time in jail, before Trump’s second term.

The unintended result of his refusal to release the files, initially unforeseen by Trump and the Democrats, was that the cultural war that MAGA had directed against the liberal establishment now included Trump and his administration for protecting this elite group of perverts.

Despite Trump finally releasing thousands of pages of files, most had already been made public, and others were heavily redacted. Consequently, the wave of protests continued, with major MAGA leader Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and a handful of other Republican Representatives uniting with Democrats to pass a discharge petition. That rule allowed a floor House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It could be devastating to Trump because it explicitly required the Department of Justice to publish all unclassified Epstein-related records. Green said, “He (Trump) called me a traitor for standing with these women (who claimed to be abused by Epstein’s practices) and refusing to take my name off this discharge petition.”

On the day of the discharge vote, Trump met at the White House with two Republicans to urge them not to sign the discharge paper. They refused. When it became clear the House was going to pass the Act, Trump folded and called for the Republicans to pass it without informing the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, beforehand. It passed with only one dissenting House vote, while it passed the Senate unanimously.

Trump knew then that he had not quelled the right wing of his party into submission. Their revolt against the elite will continue, with Trump now firmly identified with it. The folders released contain many tantalizing tidbits to fuel conspiracies and investigative reports on who was involved in Epstein’s circle of friends who exploited young women.

One of the first items of interest will be Epstein’s infamous black book, which lists his friends. Both Forbes and Mother Jones reported that Epstein’s “little black book” of 1,571 personal contacts spanned 97 pages of names, numbers, and addresses of Epstein’s associates. Thirty-eight high-powered figures, including Trump, had their names circled.

And then there is the issue of the FBI’s prosecutors during Trump’s first presidential term seeking to investigate and potentially charge upwards of 10 possible co-conspirators who helped Epstein in his deeds. It was dropped into a black box without any evidence that it was pursued. Biden’s DOJ and Democratic congressional members didn’t even follow up on it.

These and other Epstein discoveries could identify those in the elite class who considered themselves above the law. The challenge for Trump is to redirect the attention of his aggrieved MAGA supporters and the 67% of registered Republican voters who, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, supported releasing all Epstein documents.

That tactic involves distracting the public by engaging in one outrageous act after another. I described how his sending National Guard troops into Democratic-controlled cities helped him move the media away from fixating on the Epstein files before (The Art of Deflection, Look at Soldiers in Cities – Forget the Epstein Files). This time, he invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their corrupt leader, Nicolas Maduro, to bring him to America as a drug dealer. It worked. The media, Democrats, and Republicans began a frenzied debate over the legality, morality, and logic of Trump’s actions, obliterating coverage of the Epstein files.

However, Trump knows that a core of the MAGA movement is determined to uncover the truth about how members of the elite class have defiled our youth. They will not be deterred, even by the most imperial president we have had to date. Consequently, Trump will continue this tactic by threatening or actually invading Greenland or Iran in some manner.

In the meantime, Trump is trying to delay the release of the Epstein files. DOJ Secretary Pam Bondi is deliberately proceeding slowly in releasing all of the files. According to a court filing, Bondi had released less than 1% two weeks after the deadline required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

When they are released, entire pages have been redacted. Plus, he is employing a strategy of burying research in a mountain of minor or useless material to jam up the search for relevant findings. Hence, the DOJ now says it has over 2 million pages still to be released.

Trump is refusing to lose this cultural class war. He is probably confident that the Democrats will remain distracted by his actions because those actions pose serious threats to the stability of our nation. While the Democrats cannot ignore those threats, they must pursue their temporary alliance with MAGA and Republican leaders to release and analyze the Epstein files.

Democrats must not be concerned about who is named as an Epstein co-conspirator. If they are not committed to uncovering all the facts, they will be seen as just another enabler of an elitist class that ignores the law and our societal norms. That is a losing strategy politically for them, for our society’s well-being, and for our government’s accountability, which is already deeply discounted.

Fighting to release all the files is an opportunity for the Democrats to lead an authentic and principled cultural war.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter, Citizenship Politics.

The 2026 America the Beautiful pass features George Washington and President Donald Trump. (screenshot via Department of Interior)

When critics suggest potential illnesses President Donald Trump might have, they point to evidence of a possible ailment. They notice bruises on his hands, swollen joints, dozing off during televised meetings, and his rambling, disjointed speeches. However, they never identify the one hallmark of a serious illness that he had shown even before he became president.

It is a mental condition officially defined and diagnosed by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Research suggests that between 1.3 and 13 million American adults may have it, with most being male. The Cleveland Clinic’s study found that having NPD involves an excessive need to impress others or feel important, which can lead to harmful behaviors toward others.

A first response to this possibility might be, “So what? Past presidents have been narcissistic.” However, NPD goes beyond a few stereotypical behaviors or attitudes. As explained by Sandra Silva, senior editor at Health Line Media, it’s a matter of continually distorting reality that hinders making rational decisions. But it is never a personal choice; like other illnesses, it cripples one’s ability to function normally.

The most recent example of a president accused of being a narcissist was Richard Nixon, who exhibited at least two of the nine symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: a willingness to exploit others and fantasies about deserving success. Both symptoms are found in Trump’s behavior.

The first trait is seen when Nixon pressured Donald Alexander, the Republican he appointed as the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, to investigate those on Nixon’s notorious list of political enemies. Alexander refused, and although Nixon failed to get him fired, Nixon agreed to retain him when existing protocols did not allow it.

In comparison, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn that state’s voter results so he could win the 2020 election. Raffensperger refused because Trump’s claims of voter fraud were not found, even by Trump’s own campaign. In retaliation for non-compliance, Trump filed four lawsuits against Raffensperger but withdrew them after failing to provide evidence and refusing to testify under oath.

Nevertheless, Trump ignored all evidence and continued to state that he had “won by hundreds of thousands of votes.” Trump then endorsed Representative Jody Hice as a primary challenger to Raffensperger’s re-election, saying he had more integrity than Raffensperger. Hice tried to get the U.S. Senate to object to Georgia’s electoral votes, but no senator joined his objection, so Congress did not debate it.

In the second expression of an NPD trait, Nixon privately believed his loss to John F. Kenndy was a stolen election and quietly encouraged Republican efforts to investigate irregularities. Nevertheless, three days after the election, he declared he would not contest it, saying that he wanted our American tradition of holding elections shouldn’t be marred by “wrangling over the results” through court challenges.

In comparison, Trump and his allies filed 60 lawsuits challenging election processes, vote counting, and vote certification in 9 swing states that could have secured him the victory. About 80% of these were dropped or dismissed, with only one case ruled in favor of Trump, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned.

Donald Trump shows these same two symptoms, but unlike Nixon, Trump’s narcissism ignores the established norms and procedures of our republic. That’s because he has another of the nine key symptoms, which is a belief in superiority.

This is the most dangerous trait that the leader of a democratic republic could exhibit.

It portrays Trump as refusing to accept that he fairly lost the 2020 election and as seeing himself as superior to the nation’s governmental institutions. This includes ignoring his own Attorney General, William Barr, and the Department of Justice, by rejecting a letter from sixteen federal prosecutors monitoring the election, stating that there was no evidence of widespread irregularities. He also continues to position himself as superior to Congress, whose laws he ignores, and to the judicial system, such as the judges who rule against those he considers corrupt or radical leftists.

There are six other symptoms that help determine whether a person has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Keep in mind that most people with the condition aren’t even aware of their symptoms and how they may affect their relationships, no matter how intense and pervasive they may be.

This is an illness that one can’t hide because it manifests itself publicly, even though the person may not necessarily be conscious of having it. It’s not like measles or some disease that is visible as an illness. It can only be detected by behavior.

Although a study led by University of Chicago Medicine psychiatrist Royce Lee, MD, finds that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is marked by increased oxidative stress in the blood, there may be measurable physical changes down the road that could serve as markers for NPD. For now, we need to rely on what we observe.

Six other symptoms of NPD that characterize Trump’s repeated behavior.

Grandiose sense of self-importance - Exaggerating their achievements.

For any nation’s leader, there can be no more prestigious award than receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Over the last 120 years, only four presidents have received that award: Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Jimmy Carter (2002, post-presidency), and Barack Obama (2009).

Donald Trump believed he deserved one as early as the second year of his first term, saying he earned the honor for his efforts to avoid a war with North Korea. The following year, he said he “would get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things.” In June 2025, he again told reporters that he “should’ve gotten it four or five times” for his work on various peace deals, such as the Abraham Accords. He has repeatedly claimed that he deserves the prize, but they only give it to liberals, despite his unmatched achievements.

Frequent envy - Belittling or diminishing the achievements of others.

Trump has a record of diminishing the achievements of other presidents in comparison to his own accomplishments. He has repeatedly claimed that Barack Obama “got a prize for doing nothing,” most prominently just before the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize announcement. He also diminishes Abraham Lincoln and George Washington in comparison to himself.

Shortly after announcing his third run for the presidency, he released a video saying, “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington.” Harold Holzer, chairman of the Lincoln Forum, noted that “The trouble with Trump’s use of Lincoln is that it’s kind of malice toward some, and then malice toward many and ultimately, even malice toward Lincoln.”

Entitlement - Anger when people don’t cater to or appease them

Atlantic writer David A. Graham notes that Trump “has a record of repeatedly threatening and intimidating judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him.” And there is Trump’s response to his crowd of supporters chanting to lynch Pence while they stormed the Capitol. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, testified before Congress that Trump was indifferent to their chanting and thought that Mike “deserved it.” Adding, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.”

Lack of empathy - • Saying things that might hurt others

When Rob Reiner, the legendary Hollywood director, was stabbed to death in his home, along with his wife Michele, every commentator expressed unrestrained sympathy, except one – President Donald Trump. He did say that “A very sad thing happened,” and ended his comments with “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

Sandwiched between those two notes of modulated grief, the other 90% of the message was a tirade belittling Reiner, first as the “once very talented movie director.” He quickly launched into an accusation that Reiner was deranged and afflicted with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME (all caps by Trump). His paranoia was increasing “as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” This isn’t a thought-out political attack on a threatening enemy. This is an unmitigated outburst of anger that begins with unsympathetic insensitivity and roils into self-grandiosity.

Arrogance - Talking down or acting condescendingly.

Although there are many instances of Trump talking down to others, the most widely televised example of his arrogance and condescension was his meeting in the Oval Office with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After Trump firmly stated he would not offend Putin he attacked Zelensky as a person filled with hate, not reason. “He’s got tremendous hatred. You see, the hatred he’s [Zelensky] got for Putin, it’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.” Zelensky had not criticized Putin in the meeting before Trump made these accusations. Trump bluntly told Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. You people are dying.” Before having Zelensky unceremoniously ushered out of the room, he warned him that Ukraine had no option but to acknowledge America’s power.

Need for admiration – • Fishing for compliments.

Trump’s need for admiration is on display as he televises his cabinet meetings, where each member expresses their unrelenting, often insincere, adulation, some calling him the “peace president,” or asking all to view a a gigantic three-storey banner in front of the Department of Labor, of his “beautiful face” next to the American flag and President Teddy Roosevelt.

But that is not enough. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat details how Trump pushed aside roughly 7,000 amateur photographers, who competed to have their photo of nature featured on the national parks’ America the Beautiful access cards. Trump replaced the winning photo of Glacier National Park in Montana with his face, calling it more of a “bold, patriotic design.” Some would consider his glaring image as a tribute to Mother Nature ironic, given that Trump has slashed park staff and budgets, while also diminishing protections for wildlife and wilderness areas. Not to mention that Trump ignored the process Congress set up for thousands of citizens to participate in a fair contest to choose a winning photo.

Is this enough evidence that Trump is suffering from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

After reviewing this panoply of behaviors, you have to ask yourself: has there ever been a president who has exhibited such consistent behavior in line with these traits to this extent? It would take a dedicated scholar to find one who matches the magnitude of Trump’s achievement on the NPD scoreboard.

Nevertheless, if you don’t treat Trump’s behavior as an illness, you are inclined to ridicule, dislike, or admonish him. But you wouldn’t respond that way if someone were ill with COVID. You would be sympathetic and try to help that person heal. Here’s the problem: a narcissist refuses to be treated because they don’t believe they are ill. It is up to their friends to help them change their behavior.

Trump’s narcissism is sabotaging his own party.

The Republican Party is obliged to alter Trump’s behavior, or they will be accused of being sycophants to the narcissistic president. Since most Republican politicians have been cowed into silence, he continues to act as he pleases. Why not? As a narcissist, he interprets everything he does as a success. Anyone who is honest with him is cast aside or fired.

Republicans need to be honest with themselves and confront Trump. They may agree with his general policies, but his narcissism is beyond his control. It is a malady that is leading him to behave like an autocrat, undermining our republic’s institutions and the integrity of his party. So far, they have failed because they have no leader willing to challenge Trump.

Conservative pollster Mark Mitchell had a personal White House luncheon with Trump, arguing that his behavior may cause the Republican Party to face significant losses in the 2026 midterm elections. Trump preferred to discuss his golf game, despite Mitchell saying, “Building billionaire-funded ballrooms and jet-setting around the world and trillion-dollar investment deals looks a lot like oligarchy stuff.”

Are Republicans beginning to realize they have been following the whims of a single, narcissistic person who is more concerned with his own needs than with the public’s? If not, ordinary, non-political people are. They are abandoning the Republicans to vote for Democrats, as evidenced by Democrats doing very well in Congressional Districts that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.

The bottom line is that unless Republican politicians take steps to dramatically distance themselves from Trump, confront him, or remove him from office, there will be fewer Republicans in Congress after November and no Republican president winning in 2028.

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Citizenship Politics

Citizenship Politics encourages readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. Nations are not static societies.

By NICK LICATA

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter, Citizenship Politics.

Photo by Gerd Altmann of Freiburg/Deutschland

At the end of November 2025, President Donald Trump permanently paused migration from nations he described as ‘Third World Countries.’” Then he followed up by halting all asylum claims, pausing visa issuances for Afghan nationals, and in December, he began calling Somalis “garbage.” He particularly targeted Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago.

Trump’s negative attitude toward immigrants, especially Black immigrants, was openly evident during his first term, when he questioned why the U.S. would accept immigrants from Haiti and African countries, which he called ‘shithole countries,’ instead of from mainly white nations like Norway.

During his first full month of the second term, Trump used funds from the Department of Health and Human Services to airlift white Afrikaners, whom he claimed, without evidence, faced “genocide” in South Africa. Once they arrived, additional funds were allocated to them that had previously been designated for the world’s most vulnerable refugees.

Trump is restricting immigration from countries with predominantly Black populations. Meanwhile, white Afrikaners and Norwegians are seen as suitable candidates to become Americans. Trump justified his actions as protecting our national security. Was he viewing Black people from the poorest countries as threats to our safety?

Trumpian Republicans, if not openly supporting his restrictions, have not criticized them.

Who is a Trumpian Republican?

It’s more than just those who voted for Trump as president; it’s also those who have consistently defended him and his policies because they see themselves as part of the populist MAGA movement, to Make America Great Again, that Trump sparked through his 2016 presidential campaign slogan.

Liberals overlook MAGA’s historical significance. When was the last time a president began a populist movement that lasted more than a decade? As popular as John F. Kennedy was, he did not establish a new movement; he built upon the existing civil rights movement. FDR served four terms, yet he did not create a new movement. Even Teddy Roosevelt, who ran as the populist Progressive Party’s candidate, did not spark a completely new movement.

But there have been past movements that combine nationalism with racial identity, much like how they shaped the rise of the MAGA movement. The pre-Civil War Know-Nothing movement, officially known as the American Party, also promoted restricting immigration and naturalization laws. They targeted minorities such as the Irish and German Catholic immigrants for potentially undermining American institutions and taking jobs away from lower-income workers, just as the MAGA movement does with Mexican and African immigrants.

Although MAGA supporters come from diverse backgrounds, including evangelical Christians and free-market atheists, they share a common opposition to liberalism, which they view as a threat to traditional family values and a barrier to profitable investments. They seek to return to a past era free from the influx of current immigrants.

America promoted immigration through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Cellar Act), which abolished discriminatory national origins quotas. Twenty years later, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 offered amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants and strengthened enforcement of registration. These pro-immigration laws were passed under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, showing a bipartisan effort to open the door for immigrants from outside Europe.

As the MAGA movement enters its tenth year, the political elite debate whether it will remain a unified force beyond Trump’s final term as president. Although a Politico poll released on Nov 28 shows that only 55% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 see themselves as MAGA. Nevertheless, they are still pursued voters by Republican Party leaders, despite them favoring policies that have been labeled as White Nationalism by establishment media.

Republican Politicians Reject Being Tagged as a White Nationalist.

White Nationalism is a losing strategy at the polls. Republicans who have openly embraced white nationalism have found themselves shunned by their party. Sen. Tommy Tuberville had said he considered those calling themselves white nationalists as Republicans and “a good American,” and not racist. However, under political pressure, he later explained that he actually opposes a white supremacist ideology.

Similarly, Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene were both criticized by Republican leaders for attending an America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), hosted by known white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In late November, on CNN’s “NewsNight,” Kate Miller criticized her host, Abby Phillip, for having someone on her show who accused her husband of being a white nationalist. Her husband is Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and considered to be the architect of Trump’s immigration policies.

These and other Republicans closely linked to President Donald Trump do not want to be seen as white nationalists. However, when asked in 2018 about the meaning of white nationalism, he claimed he had never heard of that term. As the leader of the Republican Party, this is a surprising statement, considering more than two dozen Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee knew enough about white nationalism to refuse to join Democrats in signing a letter denouncing “white nationalism and white supremacy.” So, what exactly is a white nationalist?

Who are the White people?

On the most basic level, a white person is someone who appears white. A non-white person is someone with a different skin color. That’s the definition that led to the formation of the NAACP in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Although it was created in response to racial violence and discrimination against Black Americans, its founding mission was to fight racial prejudice by ensuring equal access to the democratic process for all non-white citizens.

Using skin color to assign people to a racial category raises issues about where to draw the line between color and race. Someone with a distant relative who was a Black American might still be considered Black even if their skin was light.

For instance, the well-known actresses Diana Shore and Carol Channing in the sixties were both considered Black, who “passed for white” by some because they looked white! But they had a black ancestor! Still, those believing that Black blood is different from White’s blood see them as Black, not as White. Seeing white was not enough.

The U.S. government grappled for years with its census forms trying to differentiate whites from those not quite as white. Before 1970, most Americans who weren’t “black” or “colored” were classified as “white” on the census. However, “Japanese” and “Chinese” were listed as ethnic categories. “Hispanic” was not an option until Mexican American activists requested that the term be added to the 1970 census as an ethnic group.

In the 2020 census, people could choose from six races: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and “Some Other Race.” Our culture and government categorize citizens by race, and the public generally does too. But here’s the truth: There are no separate races based on scientific evidence. We are all the same species, human beings, with different physical features inherited from various regional groups.

Over time, these features have blended as much of the world and America’s population have intermixed. Using skin color to determine race became too difficult, so the census department now relies on self-identification of race on its forms. By including more than one race as an option, 11% of the population now selects it.

Since 1950, when the U.S. population was 90% white according to the census, it is now rapidly approaching a point where whites will comprise less than 50%. During this period, racial restrictions were legally eliminated, while the white middle class faced increased economic instability. The hope for a return to better days for some whites is reflected in the idea of making America great again, which Trump used as a campaign slogan that evolved into a movement. Perhaps unintentionally, but the underlying message of the MAGA movement can be seen as an attempt to maintain America as a nation primarily of white people.

Could A Nativist America be a Colorblind Society?

In trying to prevent a country divided by skin color, writer Colman Hughes, in his book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, promotes a “colorblind” society that treats people equally regardless of race, both in personal interactions and public policy. Conservatives are drawn to this idea, possibly because it allows them to dismiss the need for DEI programs, which they claim amount to reverse racism by making white people atone for past wrongs. Liberals are often more cautious about building a colorblind

democracy since discrimination based on skin color has historically shaped laws that have restricted voting rights and economic opportunities.

While a colorblind society without racial bias is an admirable aim, it overlooks the cultural aspect that sustains a racial identity beyond skin color. This is reflected in the idea of “nativeness,” which throughout our history has been the belief that the founders of the U.S. were a homogeneous community of white Christians from Europe.

In fact, painted images of the Continental Army encamped at George Washington’s Valley Forge winter headquarters show that roughly 11% of his fighters were Black militias fighting for our freedoms. Additionally, thousands of American Indians fought in the Continental Army despite the Declaration of Independence calling them “merciless Indian Savages”.

Nativists, from the American Party to the Ku Klux Klan, have rejected the unique American idea of a nation built from a melting pot of races, ethnicities, and faiths. Instead, they prioritize the interests of native-born residents over those of immigrants, whom they see as disruptive to our perceived “native” culture and way of life.

In essence, nativeness is a mindset that defines a nation as the homeland of a tribe. Their goal is to protect it from others trying to enter and replace the native inhabitants, as the colonialists did with Native Americans. The dominant white tribe’s status is now more threatened than ever. Being colorblind would result in a more diverse population of ethnic groups and religions, which Trumpian Republicans would see as a threat to their homeland.

What is a Nationalist?

A self-proclaimed nationalist in America today can be seen as believing in the core principles of national conservatism that influence both foreign and domestic policies. In promoting his foreign policy, Trump supports a national conservative approach that puts our interests ahead of those of other countries and international law.

Trump claims that he is a “proud” nationalist, compared to previous presidents who did not place our interests above those of other nations regarding international laws and agreements. Attacking and sinking non-military civilian boats in open waters without warning, with the intent to kill their occupants, ignores international law but is justified as protecting America from drug smugglers.

On the domestic front, national conservatism is rooted in our country’s shared language and family-centered culture. The family is seen as a model for the state. Some MAGA supporters call Trump “daddy,” and he reinforces that image by saying, “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language” in reference to Israel and Iran as “two kids in a school yard.” Overall, as Austrian political scientist Sieglinde Rosenberger wrote, “national conservatism praises the family as a home and a center of identity, solidarity, and tradition.”

Academics describe National Conservatives as emphasizing the preservation of national and cultural identity. Trump’s immigration orders stem from that effort when he posted on social media, “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.”

In other words, immigrants have undermined our identity as a strong world leader by allowing the world’s undesirables and criminals to enter. This contradicts the successful effort of America’s colonial founders to unite the thirteen independent colonies into a government that acknowledged their religious and ethnic differences.

Trump is not the only one claiming that immigrants admitted through the Democrats have harmed our national culture. For example, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar suggested that Democrats were “changing our culture” with their open border policies.

The Way Forward

White nationalistic groups, causes, and laws have been around since the founding of America. They peak but then ebb as the public and politicians recognize that enacting their laws harms the nation’s ability to maintain a stable society. The narrowness of white nationalism’s objectives to limit cultural influence and political power to just one stratum of the population only spawns a dysfunctional government, because its popular support will shrink.

Until it is removed from controlling government policies, civil unrest will grow, and the country, as a whole, will suffer. The only solution is to educate the public and political leaders that embracing white nationalism will not achieve the perceived brightness of a past era. It will only lead to a darker future.

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By NICK LICATA

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials. And former Seattle City Council President.
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